The air smelled faintly of jungle. Seawater in an old tide pool. Fresh sweat on Janie’s arms on a sunny day. I could not identify all the odors rising from the tubs, but they scared me more than the mephitis of rotting corpses or the gravy-tang of spilled blood.
I watched for a lapse of attention and put on an act—not much acting needed, really—that would suggest a mark about to lose his cool. A mark is someone who is all too aware he will soon be meat. Lieutenant JG Mark Wasserman changed his name as we flew into Laos because that was how we used to designate those who would soon be dead. “Look at all those marks.”
“How old are you?” Rob asked the caretaker. “Why am I like you? Which receptors did I screw up?” Curious to the end. Like a young steer in the chute.
Stuart and Norton took their positions. I started taking off my clothes, but slowly. Prolong the inevitable.
The caretaker walked to one of the aerators and picked up a black wand with a brass nozzle. Two hoses hung from the wand, I saw, one going into the tub, the other snaking around to a row of brass nipples mounted in the back wall.
She inspected the nozzle. It resembled a showerhead and seemed to meet her approval. She turned the valve and a small dollop of goop smeared her palm. She approached Rob. Melon held his arms. Even with the difference in ages, it was no contest.
Rob drew his head back. Delicately, like a cosmetologist applying makeup, the caretaker dabbed her finger in the goop, then painted it beneath and around his eyes, under his lips. He jerked his head aside and Melon tugged at his elbows until he gasped. She applied greenish streaks to his gums, his cheeks, his temple, under his chin, with swiping jabs, her arms quick as wasp wings.
“Greed and stupidity,” she said. “It is old history.”
Melon let Rob go, leaving him to scrub at his face vigorously.
I had taken off my shirt.
The caretaker aimed the brass nozzle in my direction. “That is enough,” she said. She turned the valve all the way. The stuff stung as it hit, like paint out of a spray gun. I felt the tingle over my skin, involuntarily sucked some of it into my nose and mouth, choked and heaved, tried to spit it out. I fell on my back and wiped my eyes, flung strands of the slime against the floor, the side of a tub.
“I was Maxim Golokhov’s student and assistant in 1924. I became his wife in 1936. Beria and Stalin were at our wedding. We spent long years in Irkutsk and in Moscow, learning, always learning.”
Through the haze, watching for her next move, I saw that she could still cry. “I helped him build this facility after we were finished in Russia, after we fled. The Politburo wanted nothing to do with us, even though we had saved them. Maxim, he was the brave man, but he had other concerns than our marriage. He went to the islands in 1965 and left me here, and I became a caretaker. I earned my keep.”
The stinging subsided. I started to enjoy the sound of her voice. She checked my eyes and nose and lips, like a vet looking over a dog. “Your friend has treated you with something, an antidote maybe?” she said confidentially.
I nodded. The slime dripped off my chin.
“But not expertly. Do you like me?”
I did, actually.
“Rob Cousins is a dead man. Do you see this? Do you see and feel why?”
Her voice was really something. I felt like a tree about to topple from its stump, but somehow stayed on my feet.
“You are covered with Little Mothers making a palette of persuasive chemicals, all over your outside, soon inside, too. Insinuating. It’s not unpleasant, is it?”
It wasn’t. I was feeling pretty good now. Confident.
“Listen to me, Mr. Bridger. I tell you the truth, then I tell you what to do.”
“Let’s hurry it up,” Stuart said. “How do you know they’re under? Silk couldn’t work them.”
“I could teach my husband a few things,” the caretaker said. “But I don’t think Maxim’s heart is in it anymore. Maybe he’s learned all he wants to know.” I could have sworn that pruned, wrinkled face was sneering. She looked at me. “You are not a rich man, are you?”
I shook my head. “Far from it.”
“Rob Cousins asks the rich and powerful for money. He would make them immortal. But would you trust these plutocrats with your most precious things? Would you leave your children and grandchildren, for ten, a hundred generations, with them? Would you make that mistake again? These rich and greedy and ignorant people, tyrants, robbers of all the resources, all the money, for all time? Do you trust them with that power, for all time?”
As if for good measure, she sprayed Rob full in the face with the wand. He fell over on his hands, choking and gasping. She lifted the wand and turned. She stared at Stuart and Melon—Norton, I corrected myself. Best to be respectful.
They dropped back. They were distracted, their guard was down. But it was far too late to make my move. I was on the deck myself, writhing, feeling little orgasms work up my spine. The skin on my back sucked along the slick floor.
I wondered how Rob was doing. The caretaker leaned over him and showed him the back of her right hand, as if she might slap him.
“Do you know how old I am?” she asked in a shrill tenor. “I am 107. I will not age. I will be ugly forever and ever. Do you know how many years I was mad?”
I rolled over to see Rob’s reaction. I was starting to feel pissed off at him for causing all this trouble, and for going to all those rich people.
“Ten years. Maxim watched over me,” she said. “I was kept in a cage. He took notes and made improvements on the treatment. He wanted to live a long time so he could decipher the voice of all the Little Mothers, from the deeps and the salt seas, but Beria and Stalin were more practical. They insisted they be treated next or we would all be executed. They had killed so many and yet they were such cowards. They did not go quite so mad.” Another dead smile.
“Just shoot us!” I shouted at Stuart, with the last of my will to resist.
Stuart actually leveled his gun at me. There was a scrap of decency still in him.
“What can she learn from that?” Melon asked him. Stuart lowered the gun.
The caretaker turned one last time to Rob. “There is always your brother.”
Rob tried to grab her. Melon batted his arm down and kicked him in the stomach. He curled up, retching.
The caretaker leaned over me and pouched out her lips like a wizened little gibbon. “Here are some numbers,” she said, and pulled a small sheet of paper from the pocket of her overalls. “Tell me what they mean to you.”
PART FIVE
HAL COUSINS
