Pressure Drop (52 page)

Nina thought. There were things she should do. Stop at the office. Find a pediatrician. “Home,” she said.

“Your place?”

“Why not?”

“No problem,” Delgado said. “If that's your plan, we'll post a guard outside, that's all.”

Nina didn't want that. She wanted normality. “I've got the key to a friend's. We'll stay there.”

Delgado stopped at Nina's so she could pick up clothes for herself and the baby. Delgado came up with them and went in first. Nina packed two suitcases, one with clothes, the other with stuffed animals—the polar bear, the lion, Winnie-the-Pooh. She checked the answering machine. There was one message. Suze. “Are you still at my place? I've been trying to reach you. The Paramount project turned to shit. And Ernesto—never mind. I'll tell you all about it next week. I'm coming back.”

They went downstairs, got in the car. Delgado drove downtown. Matthias showed the baby how Winnie-the-Pooh could fly. As they passed a bookstore, Nina said, “Could you stop here for a second?”

“Certainly,” said Delgado, pulling over. She was on her best behavior.

Nina went into the store. They were advertising signed copies of
Living Without Men and Children … and Loving It
. Nina glanced at the jacket she and Jason had designed. It seemed like an unfamiliar object, strange and puzzling. The whole city seemed like that. She kept thinking of Zombie Bay.

Nina bought a book called
1001 Baby Names
and returned to the car. Delgado drove to the converted warehouse where Suze had her loft, parked, went up with them. “It's okay,” Nina said. “This is where I was staying before.”

Delgado went in first anyway. “Jesus Christ. Every goddamn Delgado who ever lived could fit in here.” She pointed past the couch, the chair and the desk, past the king-sized bed, the glass-walled shower stall and the Parisian pissoir, to Auschwitz Cadillac in the distance. “What the hell is that?”

“Art,” Nina told her.

Delgado left. Matthias had a closer look at the art. “I don't see the muffler,” he said. “It would have made a nice chimney.” Nina sat on the bed with the baby on her lap and opened the book of names.

“Lance?”

“Lance?”

“Ferguson?”

“Ferguson?”

“Rudy?”

“Rudy?”

“Then what?”

“Keep thinking.”

Nina closed the book. The baby was giving her his serious blue look. “What's your name, baby?” she said.

He started to cry.

Nina rocked him. He kept crying. Matthias sat on the bed, showed him again how Winnie-the-Pooh could fly. He was no longer interested. He kept crying.

“Maybe he's hungry,” Matthias said.

Nina opened her purse. She still had the bottle someone had given her at Zombie Bay, but there was no more formula.

“Where's the nearest store?” Matthias asked.

“Around the corner.”

Matthias left, locking the door behind him. Nina rocked the baby. He stopped crying. Perhaps he wasn't hungry. Nina reopened
1001 Baby Names
. She tried some names on him. “Remi. Richard. Roone. Randolph. Ramesh. Ri—”

Nina stopped. Had something moved beneath her, under the mattress? The next moment Nina was leaping off the bed and onto the floor, the baby in her arms. It was too late. A hand reached from under the bed and grabbed her ankle. She fell. Nina tried to turn as she went down, to protect the baby; that made her land on her back and crack her head on the bare pine.

And then he was standing over her, with his patrician face and clear blue eyes. Wilhelm von Trautschke. He held the knife from Suze's carving set in one of his enormous, liver-spotted hands. The baby started to cry.

“You concealed information,” von Trautschke said. His accent seemed stronger than she remembered. “The same as lying. That was a treacherous thing to do. Do you not understand?”

“I don't understand anything about you,” Nina said. And thought: he heard Suze on my answering machine. She slowly shifted her weight on the floor.

“That does not surprise me—nothing done by you or your kind would. You mongrelized my legacy, Miss Kapstein. My genetic legacy.” A thought made him wince. “It might have been my own seed!—would have been—but for the risk of mutation.” He looked down at her. “I suffered repeated exposure to radiation in my work, you see.” A blue vein pulsed in his forehead. “Now I must do what I can, as a scientist, to purify, to cleanse.”

“But it's not true,” Nina said. “I made it all up.”

“No!” The vein pulsed again. “It is all true. Yesterday municipal records were searched. I had to be certain, one hundred percent, having gone to so much trouble. Now give him to me, Miss Kapstein.”

Nina shifted her weight a little more and held on to her baby.

“Very well,” said von Trautschke. “Do not imagine I take the slightest pleasure in this.” He raised the knife, bent forward and stabbed down, not at her, but at the baby. Nina rolled away, at the same time kicking out as hard as she could. Her foot caught him on the knee. It buckled enough to spoil his aim. The knife struck the floor hard, snapping the blade off the handle. It spun across the room. Nina sprang up with the baby crying in her arms. But von Trautschke was up too, standing between her and the door. He looked at her with a new expression on his face. It was close to pleasure. Then he came toward her, raising his hands. Nina backed away, backing, backing until she touched barbed wire.

Von Trautschke paused, regarded Auschwitz Cadillac and frowned, the way a person frowns when a thought is just out of reach. With one hand, Nina felt behind her and grasped a strand of wire, between the barbs. He didn't appear to notice. His eyes were on the baby now. The vein in his forehead jumped again: and he was on her. They fell in a tangle of pink barbed wire. Von Trautschke got one of his huge hands on her son's face. The baby howled. Nina was trapped under von Trautschke's shoulder. With all her might, she twisted her arm free, jerked the strand of barbed wire around his neck and pulled. A barb sank into her palm; she kept pulling. Von Trautschke's hand let go of the baby, went to his own neck, scratched at the wire. His other hand struck at her with blows she didn't feel. Nina clutched the wire and pulled. His face, inches from hers, turned red. He made choking sounds, then gagging sounds. His blood dripped down on her. Nina just pulled, and kept pulling even after his sounds had ceased and his face had gone from red to purple. She didn't stop until Matthias appeared and gently unclenched her fist.

46

“Friggin' bugger,” said Chick.

The baby, strapped in a baby seat on the bar at Zombie Bay, gave the bird a serious blue look. Chick gave him a nasty yellow one in return.

Matthias came in. “Phone for you,” he said.

Nina, in bare feet—she hadn't worn shoes for days—walked across to the office and took the call. It was Percival.

“Ms. Kitchener,” he said in his thick-cream voice. “I'm so pleased everything has been resolved in such a satisfactory fashion.” Nina was silent. He continued: “I have some good news. We were finally able to locate some of those records from the Human Fertility Institute.”

“Were you?”

“Yes. Quite a job, I can tell you. And I'm happy to report that there is no doubt that Hiram Standish, Junior, was the father of your child.” Pause. “No doubt at all.” Longer pause. “Perhaps you don't appreciate the implications.”

“What implications?” Nina said. Through the window she saw the sun sparkling on Zombie Bay. A fish leaped out of the water, splashed back down.

“Why, this legally makes your son the sole heir to the Standish fortune, Ms. Kitchener. We're talking about a great deal of money.”

“What about the estate rider?” Nina said.

“The estate rider?”

“Neither I nor any resulting issue shall make any claim on the estate of the donor after his death.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Percival. “The estate rider. We have no record of you having signed it, Ms. Kitchener.”

Nina was silent.

“Millions and millions,” Percival went on, to make everything plainer. He cleared his throat. “It's this fortune, of course, that we at the firm have always worked so hard to serve, not so much its temporal controllers per se. As whatever sort of human beings they might have happened to be. Naturally we would have preferred that they had been different than they were, more like yourself, for example. If you take my meaning, Ms. Kitchener.”

“I don't think I do.”

Percival cleared his throat again, but he couldn't get rid of the creamy sound. “It's simply that we have always done our very best, using all the resources of what I think it fair to say is one of the most respected firms in the country, to preserve, protect and enhance the holdings which will now most probably come under your trusteeship,” Percival said. “And it's my fondest hope that you will permit us to continue to serve in that capacity.”

“How would I know I wasn't signing suicide notes?”

Pause. “I'm not sure I understand you, Ms. Kitchener.”

Nina hung up.

She went into the bar. Matthias was holding the baby. Danny had Chick on his arm, to give the baby a good close look. The baby made a gurgling sound and started drooling.

“He's drooling because he's the sole heir to the Standish fortune,” Nina said. It was all about breeding heirs. They couldn't let Happy be the end of the line. First they'd used Laura, then her; either because they wanted a boy, or wanted to increase the odds of a Standish surviving to propagating age.

“How much?” said Matthias.

“Millions and millions.”

“He's going to need something to sign on all those deposit slips.”

Nina sat at the bar. She stroked the baby's hair.

“What's wrong?” Matthias said.

“It's stolen money,” Nina answered. “At least part of it was. Maybe we should see about donating it. To a holocaust survivor fund or something. Certainly the Goldschmidts should get some.”

“You're right,” Matthias said. “Millions and millions. Who needs it?” He put his arm around her. The baby started to fuss. Nina held him, stroked his hair. For a while, she was aware of nothing but the feel of it. Then she remembered Dr. Berry's question:
How far are you prepared to go to have a baby
? Like him, she did not believe that human beings were merely manufacturers of sperm and eggs, but she had no precise answer. There was no rule of thumb. How far? Too far.

The baby's eyes closed. Nina looked up. Matthias was watching her. “How about ‘Felix'?” she said.

“Terrible.”

“Then what?”

“Give me a kiss,” said Chick.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Yara Cadwalader, Nika Sicotte Cohen, Dick Edwards, Herb Gilmore, Gisela Tillier and Peggy and Jeff for their help in answering various questions of fact. Any mistakes are mine.

About the Author

Peter Abrahams is the author of thirty-three novels. Among his acclaimed crime thrillers are
Hard Rain
,
Pressure Drop
,
The Fury of Rachel Monette
,
Tongues of Fire
, Edgar Award finalist
Lights Out
,
Oblivion
,
End of Story
, and
The Fan
, which was adapted into a film starring Robert De Niro and Wesley Snipes. Under the name Spencer Quinn, he writes the
New York Times
–bestselling Chet and Bernie Mystery series, which debuted with
Dog on It
. Abrahams's young adult novel
Reality Check
won the Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery in 2010, and
Down the Rabbit Hole
, the first novel in his Echo Falls Mystery series, won the Agatha Award for Best Children's/Young Adult Novel in 2005.

Abrahams lives on Cape Cod with his family. Visit his website:
www.spencequinn.com

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1989 by Peter Abrahams

Cover design by Barbara Brown

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1630-8

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com