Next: A Novel (33 page)

“He needs a vet.”

“Can’t,” Gorevitch said. “He’s a protected animal, and we stole him, remember?”

“Youstole him,” Zanger said. “And if you’re not careful, you’ll kill him as well.”

“He’s young. He’ll recover.”

And, indeed, the following day, the ape was talking again, but coughing spasmodically and spitting up ugly, yellow-green gobs. Gorevitch decided he’d better film the animal now, so he went to get his equipment from the car, stumbled, and dropped the camera in a muddy ditch.

Cracked the case open. All this not ten feet from the warehouse door.

And of course in the entire city of Medan, they did not seem to be able to lay their hands on a decent video camera. So they had had to fly one in from Java. They were waiting for the camera now, while the ape swore and hacked and coughed and spat at them from inside his cage.

Zanger stood just out of range, shaking his head. “Christ, what a cock-up.”

And once again Gorevitch turned to the Malay kid and said, “How much longer?” The kid just shook his head and shrugged.

And inside the cage, the orang coughed and swore.

CH060

Georgia Bellarminoopened the door to her daughter’s bedroom and began a swift examination.

The room was a mess, of course. Crumbs in the creases of the rumpled bedcovers, scratched CDs on the floor, knocked-over Coke cans beneath the bed, along with a dirty hairbrush, a curling iron, and an empty tube of self-tanner. Georgia pulled open the drawers of the bedside table, revealing a clutter of chewing-gum wrappers, balled-up underwear, breath mints, mascara, photos from last year’s prom, matches, a calculator, dirty socks, old issues ofTeen Vogue andPeople. And a pack of cigarettes, which didn’t make her happy.

Then to the dresser drawers, riffling through them quickly, feeling all the way to the back; then the closet, which took her quite a while. A jumble of shoes and sneakers at the bottom. The cabinet under the bathroom sink, and even the dirty clothes hamper.

She found nothing to explain the bruises.

Of course, she thought, there was hardly any purpose to putting a hamper in the room, since Jennifer just dropped her clothes all over the bathroom floor. Georgia Bellarmino bent over and picked them up, not really thinking about it. That was when she noticed the streaks on the tile floor of the bathroom. Rubber streaks. Faint. In parallel.

She knew what had caused those streaks: a stepladder.

Looking up at the ceiling she saw a panel that provided an entrance to the attic. There were smudged fingerprints on that panel.

Georgia went to get a stepladder.

She pushed the panel aside, and needles and syringes tumbled out, clattering onto the floor.

Dear God,she thought. She reached up into the attic space, feeling around. Her hand touched a stack of cardboard tubes, like toothpaste. She brought them out; they all bore medical labels:LUPRON, GONAL-F, FOLLESTIM.

Fertility drugs.

What was her daughter doing?

She decided not to call her husband; he would get too upset. Instead, she took out her cell phone and dialed the school.

CH061

In theChicago offices of Dr. Martin Bennett, the intercom was buzzing, but Dr. Bennett paid no attention.

The biopsy report was worse than he had expected, much worse. He ran his fingers along the edge of the paper, wondering how he would tell his patient.

Martin Bennett was fifty-five; he had been a practicing internist for nearly a third of a century, and had delivered bad news to many patients in his day. But it never got easier. Especially if they were young, with young children. He glanced at the pictures of his sons on his desk. They were both in college now. Tad was a senior at Stanford; Bill was at Columbia. And Bill was premed.

A knock on the door and his nurse, Beverly, stuck her head in. “I’m sorry, Dr. Bennett, but you weren’t answering the intercom. And I thought it was important.”

“I know. I was just…trying to think how to put it.” He stood up behind the desk. “I’ll see Andrea now.”

Beverly shook her head. “Andrea hasn’t arrived,” she said. “I’m talking about the other woman.”

“What other woman?”

Beverly slipped into the office and closed the door behind her. She lowered her voice. “Your daughter,” she said.

“What are you talking about? I don’t have a daughter.”

“Well, there’s a young woman in the waiting room who says she’s your daughter.”

“That’s impossible,” Bennett said. “Who is she?”

Beverly glanced at a note card. “Her name is Murphy. She lives in Seattle. Her mother works at the university. She’s about twenty-eight and she has a toddler with her, maybe a year and a half.

Little girl.”

“Murphy? Seattle?” Bennett was thinking back. “Twenty-eight, you say? No, no. Impossible.”

He had had his share of affairs in college, and even in medical school. But he’d married Emily almost thirty years ago, and since then the only times he had been unfaithful had been at medical conferences. True, that was at least twice a year, in Cancún, in Switzerland, somewhere exotic.

But he’d only started that about ten, fifteen years ago. He just didn’t think it was possible he’d have a child that old.

Beverly said, “I guess you never know for sure…Will you see her?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell her,” Beverly said. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “But we don’t want her making a scene in front of the patients. She seems like she might be a little, uh, unstable. And if she’s not your daughter, maybe you should set her straight in private.”

Bennett nodded slowly. He dropped back into his chair. “Okay,” he said. “Show her in.”

“Big surprise, huh?”The woman standing in the doorway, bouncing a child in her arms, was an unattractive blonde of medium height, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, grunge clothes. Her baby’s face was dirty, dripping snot. “Sorry I didn’t dress for the occasion, but you know how it is.”

Bennett stood behind his desk. “Please come in, Miss, uh…”

“Murphy. Elizabeth Murphy.” She nodded to the baby. “This is Bess.”

“I’m Dr. Bennett.” He waved her to the seat on the other side of the desk. He looked at her closely as she sat down. He saw no resemblance at all, not the slightest. He, himself, was dark-haired, fair-skinned, slightly overweight. She was olive-complexioned, rail-thin, brittle, tense.

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “You’re thinking I don’t look anything like you. But with my natural hair color, and more weight, you can see the family thing.”

“I’m sorry,” Bennett said, sitting down, “but to be frank, I don’t see it.”

“That’s okay,” she said, shrugging. “I figure it must be a shock to you. My showing up at your office like this.”

“It’s certainly a surprise.”

“I wanted to call ahead and warn you, but then I decided I should just come. In case you refused to see me.”

“I see. Miss Murphy, what makes you believe you are my daughter?”

“Oh, I’m yours, all right. There’s no question about it.” She was speaking with an uncanny confidence.

Bennett said, “Your mother says she knows me?”

“No.”

“Ever met me?”

“God, no.”

He gave a sigh of relief. “Then I’m afraid I don’t understand—”

“I’ll come right to the point. You did your residency in Dallas. At Southern Memorial.”

He frowned. “Yes…”

“All the residents had their blood typed, in case they were needed as emergency blood donors.”

“That was a long time ago.” He was thinking back. About thirty years, now.

“Yeah, well. They kept the blood, Dad.”

Again, he heard that conviction in her voice. “Meaning what?”

She shifted in her seat. “You want to hold your granddaughter?”

“Not at the moment, thank you.”

She gave a crooked smile. “You’re not what I expected. I thought a doctor would be more…sympathetic. They’ve got more sympathetic people at the methadone clinic in Bellevue.”

“Miss Murphy,” he said, “let me—”

“But when I got off the drugs, and I had this beautiful daughter, I wanted to make sense of my life. I wanted my baby to know her grandparents. And I wanted to finally meet you.”

It was time, Bennett decided, to cut this short. He stood up. “Miss Murphy, you realize that I can have genetic testing done, and it will show—”

“Yes,” she said. “I realize that.” She tossed a folded sheet of paper onto his desk. He opened it slowly. It was a report from a genetic laboratory in Dallas. He scanned the paragraphs. He felt dizzy.

“It says you are definitely my father,” she said. “One chance in four billion that you are not.

They tested my genetic material against your stored blood.”

“This is crazy,” he said, dropping back in his chair.

“I thought you would congratulate me,” she said. “It wasn’t easy to figure it out. My mom was living in St. Louis twenty-eight years ago; she was married at the time…”

Bennett had gone to medical school in St. Louis. “But she doesn’t know me?”

“She had artificial insemination from an anonymous donor. Which was you.”

Bennett felt dizzy.

“I figured the donor must have been a medical student,” she continued, “because she went to the clinic at the medical school. And they had their own sperm bank. Medical students donated sperm for money back then, right?”

“Yes. Twenty-five dollars.”

“There you go. Good pocket money in those days. And you could do it, what, once a week? Go in there and pop off?”

“Something like that.”

“The clinic burned down fifteen years ago, and all the records were lost. But I got the student yearbooks and searched them. Each year the class was a hundred and twenty students, half female. That means sixty males. Eliminate Asians and other minorities, you have about thirty-five a year. Back then sperm didn’t keep for more than a year or so. I ended up with about a hundred and forty names to check. It went faster than I thought.”

Bennett slumped down in his chair.

“But you want to know the truth? When I saw your picture in the medical yearbook, I knew immediately. Something about your hair, your eyebrows…” She shrugged. “Anyway, here I am.”

“But this was never supposed to happen,” Bennett said. “We were all anonymous donors.

Untraceable. No one would ever know whether we had children or not. And back then, our anonymity was a given.”

“Yeah, well. Those days are over.”

“But I never agreed to be your parent. That’s my point.”

She shrugged. “What can I say?”

“I wasn’t having a child. I was helping infertile couples so they could have a child.”

“Well, I’m your child.”

“But you have parents…”

“I’m your child, Dr. Bennett. And I can prove it in court.”

There was a silence. They stared at each other. The baby drooled and squirmed. Finally, he said,

“Why did you come here?”

“I wanted to meet my biological father…”

“Well, you’ve met him.”

“And I wanted him to fulfill his duties and obligations. Because of what he did to me.”

So there it was. Finally out on the table.

“Miss Murphy,” he said slowly, “you’ll get nothing from me.”

He stood. She stood, too.

“The reason I’m an addict,” she said, “is because of your genes.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Your father was an alcoholic and you had drug troubles of your own. You carry the genes for addiction.”

“What genes?”

“AGS3. Heroin dependence. DAT 1. Cocaine addiction. You have those genes, and so do I. You gave me those genes. You never should have donated defective sperm in the first place.”

“What are you talking about?” he said, suddenly agitated. This woman was clearly following a memorized script. He felt danger. “I donated sperm thirty years ago. There were no tests back then…and there is no responsibility now…”

“You knew,” she snapped. “You knew you had a problem with cocaine. You knew it ran in your family. But you sold your sperm anyway. You put your damaged, dangerous sperm on the market. Not caring who you infected.”

“Infected?”

“You had no business doing what you did. You’re a disgrace to the medical profession.

Burdening other people with your genetic diseases. And not giving a damn.”

Through his agitation, he somehow found self-control. He reached for the door. “Miss Murphy,”

he said, “I have nothing more to say to you.”

“You’re throwing me out? You’ll regret this,” she said. “You’ll regret this very, very much.”

And she stormed out of the office.

Feeling suddenly drained, Bennett collapsed into the chair behind his desk. He was in a state of shock. He stared at his desk, at the files for his waiting patients. None of it seemed to matter, now. He dialed his attorney, and explained the situation quickly.

“Does she want money?” the attorney said.

“I assume so.”

“Did she tell you how much?”

“Jeff,” Bennett said, “you’re not taking this seriously?”

“Unfortunately, we have to,” the attorney said. “This happened in Missouri, and Missouri had no clear laws regarding paternity from artificial insemination back then. Cases like yours were never a problem until quite recently. But as a rule in paternity disputes, the court orders child support.”

“She’s twenty-eight.”

“Yes, and she has parents. Still, she can make an argument in court. Based on this gene thing, she can claim reckless endangerment, she can claim child abuse, and whatever else she can pull out of a hat. Maybe she’ll get something from a judge, maybe she won’t. Remember, paternity rulings are stacked against males. Say you get a woman pregnant and she decides to have an abortion. She can do that without consulting you. But if she decides to give birth, you’ll pay support, even though you never agreed to have a child with her. The court will say it’s your responsibility not to have gotten her pregnant in the first place. Or suppose you do genetic testing on your kids, and discover they’re not yours—your wife cheated on you. The court will still require you to pay support for kids that aren’t yours.”

“But she’s twenty-eight years old. She’s not a child—”

“The question is, does a prominent physician want to go to court on a case that involves not supporting his own daughter?”