The Last Manly Man (23 page)

“Blue Baker is coming by with some info. He travels all over the city and Long Island, so this map might make sense to him. He's going to drop me off, but you should stay with him. He'll take you to see Dr. Nukker.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have another meeting with the liberation specialist.”

“Once we find out where this place is, what's our next move?”

“Case the place, then plan the liberation,” Jason said. “In a nutshell.”

Jason's beeper went off.

“It's Blue. He's almost here. We should wait downstairs.”

We waited for Blue in the foyer of my apartment building. A black and silver car drove up, and the driver turned its interior light on and off quickly.

“That's Blue,” Jason said.

We ran out to the car. Jason hopped in the back and I hopped in the front with Blue.

“Hello, ladies,” Blue said, and laughed. “Dewey's talking again. I just left him. Nurse made some notes.”

“Thanks,” Jason said. “Drop me off at the Bog, okay?”

The Bog was an ecofriendly bar and music joint near the Chelsea Piers.

“Then Robin needs to go see a man,” Jason went on. “And we have a map we want you to look at.”

“Sure. Keep an eye out, make sure we're not being followed,” Blue said, checking his rearview mirror. He had some kind of acid jazz playing low on the CD system.

“What has Dewey said so far?” Jason asked.

“He had one coherent burst. Apparently, he went to meet with these two scientists …”

“Hufnagel and Bondir,” I said.

“Right. That was the day he got beaten up. He told them he was going to meet you next at some restaurant, to find out what you knew.…”

“How did he know where … wait,” I said. “I remember now. Someone called my office to find out where my dinner meeting was. I assumed it was Benny Winter.…”

“Must have been Dewey. Getting back to the story, one of the scientists was supposed to give Dewey the information on where the bonobos were. But they'd been followed, and they were jumped …”

“By the thugs,” I said.

“I assume they're the same thugs.”

“Did Dewey say who these scientists worked for?”

“He doesn't remember getting that information. He's had some memory loss.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. He kept saying ‘hat' and ‘women.' Mean anything to you?”

“The hat, yeah,” Jason said. “The map and the formula were in the hat.”

“You have the map?” Blue said. “We both have copies,” I said.

When we stopped at a red light, Blue looked at the map.

“It doesn't ring any bells. I got a cousin who's a building inspector. Maybe he can make some sense outta that map. Oh, I looked after that other matter.”

“What matter?” I asked.

“Steering your friends in Investigative Reports astray,” Jason said.

“Yeah? Cool. What did you do?”

“Doctored up a couple of old reports from my sanitation cop days, changed dates, made the officers' names unreadable. One of them was a report on illegal dumping of lab waste—threw in a couple mentions of nicotine by-products …”

“That was my idea,” Jason said.

“Yeah. The other is a report on a dead lab monkey we found in the Brooklyn dunes a few years back. So I took these reports and faxed them to the numbers you gave me, Jason. Speaking of monkeys and so on, you hear about those gorillas in equatorial Guinea?”

“Which ones?” Jason asked.

“Stormed a village to free a baby gorilla captured by a hunter. They succeeded.”

“Yeah, you heard about the elephant in India that was working on a road crew, moving logs? He escaped into the forest, took two female elephants with him.”

“Two females! My man!” Blue said.

“Did you hear about the guy in East Africa?” I said. “Went around shooting gorillas with tranquilizer darts and dressing them in clown clothes.”

“Those gorillas must have been pissed when they woke up,” Blue said.

“It's mean to do that to gorillas,” Jason said. “But I can think of some people I'd like to do that to.”

Blue pulled up in front of the Bog, a white plaster building, two stories, that stood out in a block of one-story buildings and parking lots.

“You'll be okay?” Blue said. “All tarted up like that, Jason, you be careful.”

“Yeah, yeah. Beep me when you know something,” Jason said, and hopped out of the car. We waited until he went inside before we drove off.

“Jason won't let me use my cell phone for Organization business,” Blue said. “Says the phones aren't safe …”

“Use this one. It belongs to my neighbor. I'm sure it's safe,” I said.

Blue dialed. “Malcolm, is your daddy home? It's Uncle Blue, baby. What? Where? Okay. You take care of yourself.”

“Well?”

“We have to go to Queens. It's his bowling night,” Blue said.

“We can head over there after Budd Nukker,” I said.

Having Nukker look over the formula required him stepping off his treadmill and away from his heart and lung monitors. He did so, but each moment away from his life-lengthening activities made him visibly more anxious, bringing him a moment closer to the “possibility” of eventual death.

“Androstenone is reported to make women sexually receptive. Copulin incites testosterone development in men,” Nukker said.

“Makes them horny?”

“Theoretically. Makes them more aggressive in general. This has been reengineered though. I don't know why, or what the effect would be. Perhaps to make it easier for men to absorb it.”

“What about this one, Osmone Two?”

“Well, Osmone One is an airborne tranquilizer,” Nukker said. “I've never heard of Osmone Two, but clearly it is some sort of adaptation of One.”

“Could it affect men and women differently? The way pheromones do?”

“Possibly. All the studies I've seen show women are far more sensitive to these things.”

“How so?”

“Well, women are a thousand times more sensitive than men to musk molecules. Women tend to respond more strongly to aromatherapy, and women's menstrual cycles are often aligned by pheromonal signals.”

“I've heard that. So this could be an airborne tranquilizer that operates on women only?”

“Could be,” he said. He was starting to sweat profusely and glanced at his treadmill. “I would have to run it through the computer, perhaps conduct lab tests to know more. That could take months.”

“Thanks anyway,” I said, not wanting to leave the formula with him, though he'd probably be too busy staying alive to rip it off. It had been risky showing it to him, but he was the only one of the eggheads to respond to my call.

“It confirms what Jason and I found,” I said to Blue after I left Nukker. “Adam is some sort of odorless, virtually undetectable, airborne substance designed to subconsciously alter the behavior of men and women.”

“No shit. Who do you think is behind it?”

“I was leaning toward Alana DeWitt. But why would Alana DeWitt want to make men more aggressive? Unless it is part of some long-range scheme to make men kill each other off while women sat by contentedly. She's mad enough to do it, but she doesn't seem patient enough to wait out the resulting wars. On the other hand, this would probably be faster than waiting for the Y chromosome to devolve.”

“Huh?” Blue said.

I brought him up to speed on Alana DeWitt's theory of male extinction.

We turned into the parking lot of a small mall in Bayside, Queens, dominated by a bowling alley with a vertical 1950s-drive-in-style cutout sign shaped like a large bowling pin that said “BowlMuch Lanes” in big black and red letters. The sun was finally setting, and the red neon outline of the bowling pin lit up as we were walking through the parking lot.

Inside, we were hit by bright lights and loud noises, balls rolling, pins falling down, and sixties rock on the sound system. It was league bowling, and people were in matching shirts. Blue found his cousin Ernie and pulled him aside to the bar, which was bright red and yellow. Everything in this place was 1950s Technicolor.

“Hiya, Blue,” Ernie said. “Still dating your ex-wife?”

“Yeah, am I a jerk or what? Hey, take a look at this map. Any way you can find out where this building is from this information? All we know is that it's on an island somewhere north of Montauk.”

“Is it important?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me ask Jackie. The plumbing specs might make some sense to him. Jackie,” Ernie called to another big black guy. “Come take a look at this.”

Before it was over, Ernie's whole team was huddled over the map, discussing the possibilities. One of the bowlers knew a plumber out on Long Island who worked near Montauk. He went to call him. Others on the team left to bowl their turns.

“See you Labor Day, for the picnic,” Ernie said to Blue.

“Yeah, thanks, Ernie.”

“You wanna beer or something, Robin?” Blue asked, reaching into a bowl of peanuts at the bar.

“Maybe a soda, a Coca-Cola.”

“Give us a coupla Cokes,” he said to the bartender, and popped more peanuts into his mouth. “You bowl, Robin?”

“Once in a while, on a lark. My average is about sixty-six, as I recall. You?”

Blue shook his head. “Tell me about this story you've been working on, the one that got you involved in this bonobo business,” he said.

“Man of the Future. How men might evolve, a lot of different visions of it. I've been trying to nail down something eternal about masculinity, beyond anatomy, of course. What do you think it means to be a man, Blue?”

Blue took a drink of his Coke, then wiped his mouth with his hand. “In twenty-five words or less?”

“Or more.”

“When my pop died a few years ago, my oldest sister, Ruby, found some letters he'd written as a kid to his ma, when he was away at this boarding school for poor boys, run by some church in Massachusetts. In one of the letters, he wrote that he was in the hospital. ‘Don't worry, Ma, it's nothing serious,' he wrote. ‘Just a touch of polio.'”

“Wow.”

“That just sums it up for me, my pop far from home, trying to better himself, getting polio, having to be strong, and yet sensitive to his ma's feelings. That's a man. He was only ten at the time.”

“He recovered from the polio though?”

“Yeah, but it stunted the toes on one foot and left him with a limp. Your dad alive?”

I shook my head. “I was only ten when he died. He was a math teacher and a weekend inventor. He died while trying to make the world safer for his womenfolk and everyone else.”

“How?”

“He was campaigning to get a streetlight on a bad corner. While he was measuring the street to get its specifications for his safety report, a truck barreled around the corner and mowed him down. You know how they say someone has to die before they'll put a streetlight at a bad corner? My dad was the guy who died. Shortly after, a traffic light was put up. When I was little, I liked to imagine my father was in the traffic light, a benign authority telling me when to stop, to go, or to slow down and use caution.”

“I understand,” Blue said.

The bowler who knew the Long Island plumber returned.

“I found Les. It's his poker night. He plays at the Surfside Bar in Coney Island. He's expecting you.”

“Thanks, bro,” Blue said. We paid for our Cokes and left.

“You think men will be stronger
and
more sensitive in the future, Blue?” I asked.

“I think so, I hope so. There are some bad young 'uns out there, but the good ones seem a lot better than the good ones in my day. Jason and Dewey are good guys. You like Jason?”

“Yeah, he's okay,” I said. “Young and idealistic. A firebrand.”

“Yeah, and Dewey is too. But it's nice to know there are still kids who care, you know what I'm sayin'? Our generation, they're facing ‘reality,' or what passes for it. You know things aren't the way they should be, but you go along to get along. You want to save the spotted owl, but you know how those loggers feel, being put out of their jobs. They got mouths to feed. Some of 'em, all they've known is logging. What are they going to do?”

“It's hard for men. Their self-esteem seems so much more tied up in their work than women's is, generally speaking.”

“That's a fact, even in these modern times. Dewey and Jason, they aren't practical, God bless 'em.”

“So how come a guy of your generation is involved?”

“Bottom line, I think they're right, those kids. Not practical. But right in the long run. Some people make practical choices, some take the high road, no matter the cost. Me, I gotta look after my karma. I was a bad guy when I was young. Mean. Had a lot to prove.”

“You were a bad guy, Blue? I have a hard time believing that.”

“I used to cheat on my wife, lie about everything, I was selfish.…”

“Well, that's human stuff a lot of people go through. It's not like you killed someone.…”

“Yeah, I did. Killed some men in Nam,” Blue said, and his dark skin took on a different kind of darkness, the kind that comes from within. For a moment, he glowered over the dashboard, the streetlights strobing his face.

“I didn't want to kill. I did it because my country told me to. That's when I stopped believing in countries, know what I'm sayin', Robin? There's just planet Earth, the Organism, a part of the Big Organism, no borders, no real estate. How can anyone own a piece of the planet? I've never understood that. Who gave them the right to buy it, or sell it?”

“That's what happened to change you from bad to good? Nam?”

“It happened later, after I got back. Long story. Like a miracle. I got high with an angel, and I got nice.”