Count Geiger's Blues (27 page)
52
In the Cutting Room
Either because the TV types had not a clue
or were still struggling to shore up their evidence, WSSX did not break the story, on any weekend news program, that Xavier Thaxton and Count Geiger were the same human being. That honor belonged to Alex Meisel and the Salonika
Urbanite
.
Xavier’s newspaper ran the story on the front page of Monday morning’s first edition. Indeed, the entire front page was devoted to the identity and exploits of Count Geiger, for the other big headline trumpeted the sting in the Hemisphere. This operation had rounded up a total of 516 bad dudes and dudesses in a right-back-at-you con for which more than half those receiving “invitations” had fallen like chumps. On an interior page, Count Geiger received even more press, as if he needed it, in an interview that Xavier had given Metro/State reporter Alex Meisel. Xavier Thaxton was Count Geiger. Count Geiger was a hero. And from the premises of this strange syllogism, it followed that Xavier was a hero. To many of the
Urbanite
’s readers, this conclusion did not, however, seem to follow—not when you factored in the critic on bilious display in “Thus Saith Xavier Thaxton.” That
guy
wasn’t Count Geiger, but an opinionated Scrooge, his heart in a vise, his balls in an elastic sling.
Xavier stayed home Monday morning, for Grantham had fired—no, had
let him go
. Maybe he should have gone into hiding. On the other hand, The Mick was still in school, and he had stayed home to simulate an air of normalcy, insofar as anyone with a bad case of the Philistine Syndrome and a hero’s costume for underwear could do that. The kid deserved some consideration. Maybe, Xavier thought, I should’ve warned him that the top was about to blow off. . . .
The telephone rang.
Xavier let an answering machine take the call. The caller was Donel Lassiter, but Xavier was already too alienated from everyone at the
Urbanite
to pick up and talk to him. Unlike the stalwart who had masterminded and supervised yesterday’s massive sting, Xavier felt volitionless, empty, sere.
“Mr. Thaxton—Xavier—my God, you’re Count Geiger. It’s easier to believe you’re a stalwart than to accept the fact you’re not my boss anymore.” After a pause: “Are you there? I don’t blame you for letting the tape run. You’re probably busy leaping buildings and outrunning locomotives. It’s such a revelation, and such a loss, everything I’ve learned. It makes me reevaluate so much. The way, once upon a time, you saved Bryan at that ball game. Your fondness for Shaw’s
Man and Superman
. The way you survived the Bowman assault. Xavier, thanks for mentoring me. It’s a shame the Powers That Be’re axing you. ‘Thus Saith the Count’ would’ve looked good on the Op-Ed page. Goodbye. Stay super.”
There were other calls, including a message from Bari: “
Oh, Xave, I’m so sorry. If you want to talk, I’m here
.” Later, a proposition from a bodysuit fetishist, a come-on from a woman named Tiffany-Fawn, and some crank calls from teenagers. At noon, Xavier resignedly unplugged the phone.
On Tuesday, another article appeared in the
Urbanite
about Xavier’s startling double identity, an editorial praising him as culture critic and crimefighter, and a column by the
Urbanite
’s resident humorist, Red Neckerson, Jr., arguing that when Tim Bowman tried to shoot Xavier, he was committing, potentially, “brain childicide.” Bowman had created the character Count Geiger, Xavier had taken on that role, and Bowman had allegedly tried to undo his creation with a handgun. His trial for attempted murder was only days away. I became Count Geiger completely only
after
Bowman had shot me, Xavier thought. Neckerson’s an idiot.
The telephone, if plugged in, rang and rang.
So that evening, Xavier and The Mick each packed an overnight kit and a few changes of clothes and sneaked away to spend the next few nights in Bari’s atelier. Xavier wore his Suit again, as underwear, to protect against the Philistine Syndrome and to hedge any need to reassume his persona as Count Geiger. “I’m sorry your newspaper outed you, Xave,” Bari told him that evening in her central loft.
“Twice,” Xavier said, at last comprehending some of the anguish of the waiter from Zapotec’s and Zooey’s Place.
“Stay in the old cutting room off the main studio for as long as you like. It may be noisy some nights. Howie and I are working on our urban-camouflage ensembles for fall: brickwork, mirror-glass, smog-and-chrome, stucco-and-street-litter. It’s hard cutting on the bias and preserving the integrity of our camouflage patterns.”
“I’d guess so,” said Xavier, baffled.
The Mick stayed one night in Bari’s atelier, then moved back to Franklin Court to be closer to Ephebus. As for Bari, she took pains to show Xavier what she, Howie, and Marilyn Olvera were designing but also to keep her staff out of his hair. Xavier made that easy for her by holing up in the cutting room with his word processor, keyboarding rehabilitation plans and suggestions to all the seminar directors of Operation Uplift, which was trying to reshape the lives of hundreds of petty felons. The next step would be to take Operation Uplift to hard-core lawbreakers and heretofore incorrigible recidivists in Oconee’s state and federal prisons. After that, it would be a good idea to try to coopt the violence-mongering captains of the military-industrial complex.
One afternoon, Bari, Marilyn, and an army of support personnel took hundreds of finished garments and garments-in-progress to a Woman’s Wear International trade show in the convention center at Salonika Plaza. While they were gone, Xavier worked long and hard producing Operation Uplift materials. He did not hear footsteps in the main studio until the intruder laying them down stood in the doorway to the cutting room, a back-lit silhouette. Xavier leapt a foot. So much for stalwartly sensitivity and prescience.
“Sorry to frighten you,” the shadow said. It ghosted into the room, revealing itself as that retrohippie hunk, Howie Littleton. Clad in a brickwork tunic and wide ash-grey trousers, he was eating a floury chunk of bread. The bread reminded Xavier of a doorstop covered in a stucco-and-street-litter swatch. “I thought maybe we could parley.” Littleton stuck his bread chunk into a pocket and sat down cross-legged near the stepstool on which Xavier’s laptop rested. “Have you heard the news?”
“Which?”
“The city council has rewritten the law permitting ‘no one but the real living Count Geiger’ to wear Count Geiger’s trademarked UC clothes. The new law says ‘no one but the honorable Salonikan, Xavier Thaxton.’ You’re on the books, guy.”
“You came to tell me that?”
Littleton looked down. “Not exactly. I came to tell you that it’s killing me, your living here.”
Xavier listened as Littleton confessed the depth of his affection—no,
love
—for Bari. Today he had come to the demoralizing realization that if his foremost rival for Bari was a man recently disclosed as a living stalwart, he had no chance. What could even a talented human being—Littleton stammered “a m-mere m-mortal”—do to compete with a bona fide stalwart? Briefly, of course, Xavier had felt at a similar disadvantage, viewing himself as a poor specimen in comparison to the handsome, well-built, and youthful Littleton. It was hard not to guffaw—at Littleton, at himself. Littleton was jealous of him, terrified that Bari would never be either his wife or his lover.
“Have you declared yourself?” (Xavier understood that he had just shifted into abnegatory Cyrano de Bergerac mode.)
“No. For a long time, see, she thought I was gay. Goes with the t-territory.”
“Does she care about you? As her likely beloved, not just as a crackerjack fellow fashion designer?”
“Well, she no longer thinks I’m gay. I’ve got that far.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Littleton started. “I don’t know. I thought I should tell you. It’s so, well, hugely unfair, your new advantage.”
“How so?”
Again, Littleton seemed nonplussed. “Because I can’t h-hope to c-compete.”
Xavier shook his head. “Take a lovelorn header out a window, Mr. Littleton.”
“Wh-what?”
“Your own logic leaves you no other options. Adopting the same premises, I have none either.”
“That isn’t—”
“Go away, Howie.” Xavier returned his gaze to his laptop screen. “Now.”
It took a while, but finally Littleton arose and shuffled out of the cutting room.
About an hour later, Bari, Marilyn, and a loud army of cutters, needleworkers, models, dressers, camera men, and chichi hangers-on returned from the convention center. By the giddy talk audible to him in his cloister, Xavier could tell that Littleton, not too surprisingly, was among the celebrants.
53
On the Radiation Sickness Ward
“Come with me,” Dr. Di Pasqua said. “Now.”
Teri-Jo followed her boss. They rode an elevator to the basement, then walked through the tunnel linking the Miriam Finesse Cancer Clinic to the vertical labyrinth of Salonika General. They navigated the hospital—not their native territory—like country-club bluebloods caught out on foot on the commons of a city housing project. On the eleventh floor, Dr. Di Pasqua led her to a suite of examination rooms and treatment areas that signs and locked doors declared off-limits to visitors. He buzzed them through the first door and turned to face Teri-Jo when they were behind it.
“That room there”—he nodded toward a quarantined sick bay—“holds sixteen people, adults and children, suffering from acute radiation poisoning. It appears that—”
A gaunt young man with bony wrists and hands came out of a tiny office down the hall. “Nurse Roving,” he said, approaching them. “I’m Joe Lusk, from reacts, the Radiation Emergency Assistance Center in Oak Ridge. Dr. Di Pasqua’s told me about you.” (Dear God, thought Teri-Jo. It seemed unlikely that Di Pasqua had represented her favorably. He was as productive of compliments as a sycamore tree is of cherries.) “We’ve invited you over because working with radioactives is a specialty of yours,” Dr. Lusk said. “One of our patients said that the machine from which he took the source material responsible for this accident was a Therac 4-J.”
Teri-Jo’s heart did a startling double-clutch. “Yessir.”
“Would you like to see the patients?” Dr. Lusk asked.
“Yessir. Definitely.”
Dr. Di Pasqua told Teri-Jo to return to the clinic as soon as possible and left.
“We’ll wear masks and gowns, more for the patients’ protection than our own. There’s a minuscule degree of danger because these people are radioactive. They’re weak emitters of the radioactivity with which the cesium 137 in the Therac 4-J contaminated them. A bigger danger, by far, is that we’ll infect them.”
“I understand, Dr. Lusk.”
In an antechamber, they put on stiff white paper coats. They masked and gloved, and exchanged their shoes for plastic slippers. The sick bay beyond the quarantine markers was divided into several separate bed spaces by movable curtains. Whispering as they walked the corridor among these units, eight to a side, Dr. Lusk said, “The people you see here received as few as a hundred, to as many as six hundred, rads from the cesium-137 cake that Larry Glenn Wilkins shared out to their birthday guests. Mr. and Mrs. Wilkins and their daughter will die. Four or five more, including several little girls and Mr. Wilkins’s sister-in-law, Claudia Burrell, may be doomed too, but, for them, there’s some hope. The others, less badly exposed, will get out of Salonika General alive, but may develop cancer later on.
“This isn’t Three Mile Island, of course, or even another Plant VanMeter radiation release, but it’s a radiation-related disaster unlike any experienced in the United States to date. Its potential for inflicting death and contaminating the Oconee countryside is as great as anything to which Consolidated Tri-State has yet subjected our region. The only applicable precedents are accidents in Latin America, one in Juarez, Mexico, in 1984, and another in central Brazil in ’87. It doesn’t sit well with me that we’ve allowed the unthinkable to happen here.”
“I help with the treatment and diagnosis of cancer patients,” Teri-Jo said. “Our clinic has radiologic technologists, and we use radiation in one form or another on a daily basis, but here, sir, I’m at a complete loss.” She could see into the make-do cloisters that the staff on this special ward had rigged for their patients. In the bed in one of them lay a three- or four-year-old girl, a little blonde connected to an IV hookup. Her face was so blistered she looked like an overzealous sunbather.
“Please,” Dr. Lusk said. “Just talk to Larry Glenn Wilkins.”
“Of course. Why?”
“Dr. Di Pasqua says you once asked a firm to haul off an old Therac 4-J.”
“Yes, sir, that’s true.”
“Dr. Di Pasqua couldn’t remember the name of the firm. Do you?”
“Environomics Unlimited.”
“Good. Come on.” Dr. Lusk led Teri-Jo into the chamber where Larry Glenn Wilkins lay with an IV hookup like the little girl’s. His face wasn’t as badly blistered as hers, but his hands looked raw and greasy, like lightly barbecued pork. (Someone had applied a pain-killing salve to them.) His eyes were cloudy blue marbles. He had lost some hair, and the insides of his arms were discolored by arabesque bruises. Dr. Lusk did the introductions. Without meeting their eyes, Mr. Wilkins said “Hey,” and turned his head aside on the pillow. It had to be disturbing, Teri-Jo realized, to meet someone new who was masked like a common thief.
“Mr. Wilkins opened the source capsule,” Dr. Lusk said.
“I’m dead meat,” Mr. Wilkins said distinctly. “Dead meat.”
“The cesium 137 irradiated him directly for an extended period, but, even worse, he and some of the other victims ate birthday cake sliced by hands contaminated with the powder. They
ingested
the radioactivity.” Teri-Jo shuddered. Was it wise—or kind?—to talk so clinically in front of Mr. Wilkins. “Medical
glasnost
,” Dr. Lusk went on. “We’ve agreed to discuss this matter with utter frankness. Mr. Wilkins wants us neither to soft-pedal the prognosis nor to mollycoddle him.”
“I’ve kilt my family too,” Mr. Wilkins said. “My wife. My baby girl.”
Dr. Lusk turned to Teri-Jo. “We’ve given them all Prussian blue. Are you familiar with Prussian blue?”
“No, I’m not.”
“It’s an iron compound that binds cesium 137, capturing it from the bloodstream. Prussian blue facilitates cesium’s excretion, but we’ve got to get the cesium out before it moves too deeply into the tissues or irreversibly damages the blood marrow.’”
“Can’t you do a marrow transplant?”
“Too late,” Mr. Wilkins said. “Too freaking late.”
“Only if you’ve got a matched donor and the other organs aren’t too far gone,” Dr. Lusk said.
“Ha!” Seemingly drained, Mr. Wilkins closed his eyes.
“I’m trying to get an emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration so that Mr. Wilkins’s doctors can use an experimental recombinant growth factor made by Behring, a German pharmaceutical firm. The stuff’s called GM-CSF, or granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor. It’s a hormone that prompts the bone marrow to produce neutrophils and monocytes that wipe out hostile microbes.”
“Dead meat,” Mr. Wilkins mumbled. “Three goners.”
“In the meantime, his doctors are countering with antibiotics, cell infusions, and fresh blood. Listen, Mr. Wilkins, Nurse Roving wants to tell you something.” Dr. Rusk looked at her. “Describe the Therac 4-J to him. In detail.”
Teri-Jo described the Therac 4-J to Mr. Wilkins.
“That was it,” he said, opening his eyes. “That was it.”
“How did you get it?” Dr. Lusk asked Mr. Wilkins.
“Elrod bought it off two spades from Satan’s Cellar. Hard-assed dudes. I thought they was gonna kill me.” He looked at Teri-Jo. “Guess they did, huh?”
“Do you remember their names?” Dr. Lusk asked.
“
‘Say Yes to Droogs.’
They called themselves Droogs. Brother Droogs. I don’t remember the guys’ names—only that.”
“That’s a help,” Dr. Lusk said. “Thanks.”
Teri-Jo felt like a gate-crasher. “Can I do anything for you?” she asked. “Check your medication? Read to you?”
Mr. Wilkins regarded her speculatively. “Have ’em put me, Missy, and Carrie-Lisbeth in the same goddamn room.”
“That can probably be arranged,” Dr. Lusk told Teri-Jo. They left the treatment bay. Outside, Dr. Lusk told Teri-Jo that she had given him circumstantial proof that the Therac 4-J implicated in the Philippi accident was from her cancer clinic. Also, he now had three names to investigate: Environomics Unlimited, Elrod Juitt, and, strangest of all, Brother Droogs. “What else can you tell me about Environomics Unlimited?”
Teri-Jo summarized the radium-waste pickup and the more recent episode of the Therac 4-J’s removal. “I have a working phone number, and all the paperwork for both the state and the NRC is in our files somewhere, along with the clinic’s canceled checks.”
“Give me the number. There’s a criminal irregularity—maybe criminal intent—in the firm’s disposal methods. We need to reach them before the media alert them to the exact degree of the hot water they’re in.”
Teri-Jo returned to her office in the cancer clinic. Dr. Di Pasqua sat at her desk with his hands folded on her blotter like a pair of tarantulas frozen in flagrante delicto in an obscene act. Her squeamishness, she realized, probably had less to do with his hands than with his smug invasion of her space.
“Mrs. Gainsboro helped me remember the name of that disposal company,” he said. “I found their number in your Rolodex.”
“Good. I came to get it for Dr. Lusk.”
“I telephoned them,” Dr. Di Pasqua said. “I assured the young snot who answered that we’d never do business with them again, that we didn’t appreciate the disrepute into which their slipshod, even criminal, disposal methods were likely to plunge the premier cancer clinic in the Southeast. I gave him a piece of my mind.”
“Not really,” Teri-Jo said.
A questioning shadow swept over Dr. Di Pasqua’s smug face. “I could have left it to you to do, Nurse Roving, but I did it myself.”
“Well,” Teri-Jo said, “that was mighty thoughty.”
Aware of something ironic in her tone, Dr. Di Pasqua countermanded the smile he’d planned to give Nurse Roving. Women, he decided, were unfathomable creatures, fickle sphinxes in debilitating thrall to the moon and the tides. . . .