Pressure Drop (15 page)

“But there must be more we can do.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know what. You're the cop. You tell me.”

Detective Delgado's eyes narrowed again. Then she said, “Aw, shit,” reached into her pocket, took out the cigarettes, lit one, sucked deeply and tossed the match on the floor. She blew a cloud of smoke luxuriously through her nostrils. “The Surgeon-General says I'm an addict, like a drug addict, you know? I know what an addict is. I bust them every goddamn day of my life.” She took another deep drag. “You got any money?”

“What kind of money?” Nina asked, wondering for a second if some sort of incentive beyond the detective's salary was being suggested.

“Reward money,” replied the detective. “For information leading to the recovery of. Don't say arrest or apprehension or any of that shit. In fact, say no questions asked.”

“How much?”

“Not too much. We don't want anyone to think you're rich. You're not, are you?”

“No. What about five thousand?”

“Make it ten if you can. People will do a lot for ten grand in this town, even something good.”

After Detective Delgado left, Nina lay down again. She had to get the reward set up. She thought about the best way to do that, wishing she had asked Detective Delgado. Then she tried to recall the clinical definition of “psychotic” from Psych 101, especially what it said about violence. Her eyes closed. She drifted toward a dream. It began with a genteel voice saying: “Candy, dear?” Then the telephone rang. Nina jerked up in the bed, grabbed the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Where the heck are you?” said a high-pitched voice. “It's nine twenty-three and I've been trying to reach you for hours.”

“Who is this?” said Nina, fighting to shake off her dream, and whatever drug they had her on.

“Who is this? Who is this? Is something wrong with you? We just talked yesterday and you said you'd get back to me.” It was the Birdman.

“Oh God.”

“Oh God? What do you mean, ‘Oh God'? I'm at Condé Nast right now and the most crucial meeting of my entire life starts in … four and a half minutes.”

“Postpone it till next week.”

“Postpone it? What do I tell them?”

“Tell them anything. Tell them your mother died.”

“My mother's been dead for ten years.”

“Then it won't be a lie.”

“Listen, god darn it. Is this some kind of what-do-you-call-it? Shakedown? Are you trying to get more money out of me? Because if that's the case, I think it's highly unethical, and what's more—”

Nina hung up. Now she was wide awake. She started to get out of bed. The door flew open and Jason rushed in.

“Oh, Nina,” he said, “I've just heard everything.” He hugged her. She began to cry. Jason cried too. She felt his tears falling on her shoulder. She stopped crying and patted him on the back.

“I want to get out of here,” she said.

“Then goddamn it, I'll get you out,” he said.

The hospital released Nina thirty minutes later. “Where do you want to go?” Jason asked.

“Home.”

In the taxi, Nina told Jason about the reward.

“Good idea,” Jason said. “I'll put ads in the papers, and maybe get some posters printed too. But we can do more than that.”

“Like what?”

“You've got some pull in this town, Nina. It's time to use it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the kind of psycho—the kind of unbalanced woman—who does a thing like this maybe doesn't read the papers, or look at posters. But she watches TV.”

“So?”

“So I'll call Hy Morris.”

The name sounded like one Nina should know, but for some reason her mind couldn't supply the details. Nina felt weak; the alertness stimulated by her conversation with the Birdman seeped away; what remained was a slow-growing ball of dread in her stomach, and the pain between her legs. “Who is Hy Morris?”

“The NBC guy,” replied Jason, sounding surprised.

“But he's in entertainment.”

“He'll be able to get you on the local news. That's what we want.”

“It is?” said Nina, picturing herself on television, another forty-five-second mom-face that might or might not crumple in tears before it was time to move on to a fire in the Bronx or Joe Isuzu.

“Of course,” said Jason.

Was there even the smallest chance that Jason was right? “Okay,” said Nina.

The taxi stopped outside Nina's building. “Hey,” said Jules as he opened the door. “Had the baby yet?”

Nina couldn't answer. “Everything's going to be all right,” Jason told him as they went past.

“Is something—” Jules clamped his mouth shut on the rest of the question.

In the apartment, Jason picked up the telephone in the hall and began making calls. Nina found herself being pulled toward the study, like a bit of space debris caught in the gravity of the sun. She went into the study. Of course it was no longer a study: in the past month she had changed it into a baby's bedroom. She had removed the Lifecycle, the desk, the PC, and replaced them with: a white crib, its headboard and footboard painted with apple trees heavy with big red apples; and a mobile of mirrors cut in different geometric shapes that hung between the rails.

And: a changing table, already stocked with a giant box of Pampers in the smallest size, and a giant box of Huggies in case the baby was allergic to Pampers, as well as powders, creams, lotions.

And: stuffed animals. A polar bear and a baby polar bear; a penguin; a goose with a gold-painted egg inside; a tiger; an elephant as tall as Nina; Winnie-the-Pooh. She was gazing at all of this when Jason came into the room.

“All set,” he said. “I've got ads in the
News
, the
Post
and the
Times
, and a film crew'll be here in an hour.”

Nina turned to him: her partner, a man she had worked with almost daily for five years, who laughed at her jokes and made her laugh at his; and she saw the determined optimism in his eyes and how hard he was trying to help.

But she said: “Where's Suze?”

Jason's eyes darkened a little. “I can't get in touch with her. She's in L.A.”

“L.A.?”

“Something about a performance artist. The woman at the gallery wasn't too clear.”

“Le Boucher,” Nina said.

“What?”

“Nothing. I'm going to lie down.”

Nina went into her bedroom and lay down. She closed her eyes and saw painted apple trees, gravid with big red apples, big and red as the apple the witch gave to Snow White. When she opened her eyes, Jason was sitting on the chair by the dressing table, watching her.

“Go back to the office, Jason. I'll be all right.”

“But ‘Live At Five' will be here any minute.”

“I can handle them.”

“You're sure?”

Nina nodded. “You've been great.”

Jason waved her remark away. He came to the bed, bent down, kissed her on the cheek and just managed to keep his voice from breaking when he said: “Don't worry, Nina. We'll get him back.”

Jason left. Nina rose and went to the dressing table. In the mirror she saw the face of a twin who had lived a different life from hers, a much harder one. She repaired it as well as she could, then put on a dark skirt and a blue sweater, the sort of blue that video people like.

“Live At Five” arrived. They filled the apartment: producer-director, reporter, camerawoman, soundman, lightingman, researcher, driver. They homed in on the nursery.

“It's terrible, terrible,” the producer-director said.

For an instant, Nina thought he was speaking to her, but then the lightingman said, “Not to worry. I'll throw a reflector up in the corner and use the four hundred. We'll be all right.”

“Live At Five” set up equipment. The reporter spent twenty minutes in the bathroom doing her face and her hair. “I look like absolute shit,” she said. In a low voice, the researcher tried to fill her in on the details of the story. “Just absolute shit,” the reporter said, running a brush through her hair one more time.

“Ready everybody?” said the producer-director.

First they shot the stand-up. Off camera, the researcher held up big cue cards. The reporter began. “I'm standing here in the brand new nursery in the Manhattan apartment of—hold it, hold it. Is that Neena or Nine-a?”

“Neena,” replied the researcher, adding quietly, “I told you before.”

“You did not,” snapped the reporter.

“Let's try it again,” said the producer-director.

“I'm standing here in the brand new nursery in the Manhattan apartment of Nina Kitchener. There should have been a brand new baby in this nursery right now, but as you can see”—the reporter swung around toward the crib—“the crib is empty. A first-time mother's worst nightmare has come true. Barely a day after the birth of …”

After the stand-up came the interview. The lightingman held his meter up to Nina's face. The soundman checked his levels. “Just talk,” he said. “Say anything.”

“I'm talking,” Nina said into the mike. “I'm saying anything.”

“You're being so brave,” the researcher said. She was a plain-looking girl with thick glasses and a soft voice.

“Where did you get that sweater?” the reporter asked Nina. Then she did the interview, her tone husky, her eyes sympathetic, her questions full of long pauses: doing her best to get Nina to cry on camera.

Nina didn't cry. She answered the questions in a quiet but clear voice and concentrated on getting her message across: there was a reward, no questions would be asked, here was her phone number. She gave the number twice.

The cameraman shot the reporter's reaction shots. She nodded, looked deeply concerned, nodded, looked deeply concerned. Then the producer-director's beeper went off. The researcher's beeper went off. The driver's beeper went off. “Live At Five” packed up.

“Thanks,” said the producer-director as they hurried out the door. “And good luck. Nine-hundred-and-thirty-thousand people are going to see this.”

At twenty minutes after five, Nina became one of them. She saw the face of Nina Kitchener's twin who had lived a harder life; it refused to crumple. She heard her voice giving out the phone number, but only once—the editor cut the rest of it. The reporter said, “Back to you, Jed.” Jed and the other anchorperson made worried faces at each other. Jed said, “Let's hope this comes to a happy and speedy resolution.” The other anchorperson ad-libbed, “Let's hope.” A man crashed through the wall of a muffler shop.

Nina switched off the TV, but continued to sit in front of it until Jules called up. “I'm very, very sorry to bother you,” he said. “But there's a messenger with a package for you.”

“What's written on it?”

“Your name. And it's from Kitchener and Best.”

“Send him up.”

The messenger arrived and delivered the package. Inside was an envelope. It contained a note from Jason saying, “I drew this from the current account,” and one hundred one-hundred-dollar bills.

Nina sat back down in front of the blank TV screen, the unwrapped package in her lap. Her breasts felt strange. She touched one of her nipples. It was damp. She had heard about expressing milk to keep it flowing during separations of mother and baby. She squeezed her breasts. Nothing came. She called the West Side Women's Reproductive Counseling Center and got no answer. She tried squeezing her breasts again, harder and harder. No milk came. Her face finally crumpled, much too late for the people at “Live At Five.”

But Nina hadn't been the only viewer. Not long after ten that night, while she was staring out the window and thinking about the bottle of Scotch in the liquor cabinet, her telephone rang. She picked it up.

“Yes?”

“Hello,” said a woman who sounded very young, more like a girl. “Are you the woman who was on TV about the baby?”

“I am,” Nina said, holding on to the phone with both hands.

“Is it true about the reward?”

“Yes, it's true.”

“Ten thousand dollars?”

“Yes, yes, do you have something to tell me?”

All at once the woman's voice was muffled, as though she had placed her hand over the mouthpiece.

“Hello, hello?” Nina said. “Are you still there?”

“I'm still here,” the woman said. “Is it in cash?”

“Yes.”

“And no questions?”

“No questions. What do you know about my baby?”

The voice was muffled again.

“Hello? Hello?” Nina said.

“I'm still here, okay?” said the woman, sounding harried. “Meet me at Lumumba's Pizzeria on East Fourteenth at eleven-fifteen tonight. Bring the money. And come alone. With nobody. Or there's no deal.”

“But what is it you—”

Click.

Nina's whole body began to tremble. She checked her watch: 10:23. She looked up Lumumba's Pizzeria in the phone book. From the address she guessed it would be somewhere between First and Second Avenue. There were more dangerous sections of town. “Compose yourself.” Nina spoke the words aloud. She called a cab, picked up the envelope that Jason had sent and went downstairs.

A silent taxi driver drove Nina downtown. At 11:13, he let her off two doors from the corner of First Avenue in front of a building with a blinking orange sign:
LUMUMBA
'
S PIZZERIA
. Only after the taxi left did Nina notice that although the Lumumba's Pizzeria sign seemed to be working perfectly, the restaurant itself was boarded up.

Nina looked around. She became aware for the first time how cold the night was. A strong wind, baffled by the tall buildings of the city, came in biting gusts from every direction. There was no one in sight and half the streetlights were broken. Nina walked under a functioning one and checked her watch: 11:17.