The Sixth Commandment (13 page)

“Very nice,” I said, turning to Draper. “Where do we go now—the labs?”

“Fine,” he said. “They’re on the second floor. On each side of the corridor is a large general lab used by the researchers. And then a smaller private lab used by the supervising staffers.”

“How many supervisors do you have?”

“Well …” he said, blushing, “actually just Dr. Thorndecker and me. But when the grant—
if
the grant comes through, we hope to expand. We have the space and facilities to do it. Well, you’ll see. Let’s go up.”

Unlike nursing homes and hospitals, research laboratories don’t necessarily have to be sterile, efficient, and as cozy as a subway station. True, I’ve been in labs that look like operating rooms: all shiny white tile and equipment right out of
The Bride of Frankenstein.
I’ve also been in research labs not much larger than a walk-in closet and equipped with not much more than a stained sink and a Bunsen burner.

When it comes to scientific research, there’s no guarantee. A million dollars sunk into a palace of a lab with all the latest and most exotic stainless steel doodads can result in the earth-shaking discovery that when soft cheese is exposed to the open air, mold results. And from that little closet lab with roaches fornicating in unwashed flasks can come a discovery that remakes the world.

The second-floor working quarters of the Crittenden Research Laboratory fell about halfway between palace and closet. The space was ample enough; the entire floor was divided in two by a wide corridor, and on each side was a huge laboratory. Each had, at its end, a small, private laboratory enclosed by frosted glass panels. These two small supervisors’ labs had private entrances from the corridor, and also etched glass doors leading into the main labs. All these doors, I noted, could be locked.

The main laboratories were lighted with overhead fluorescent fixtures, plus high-intensity lamps mounted near microscopes. Workbenches ran around the walls, with additional work tables in the center areas. Plenty of sinks, garbage disposal units, lab stools, metal and glass welding torches and tanks—from which I guessed they had occasional need to fabricate their own equipment.

But it was the profusion of big, complex, obviously store-bought hardware that bewildered me.

“I can recognize an oscilloscope when I see one,” I told Draper. “And that thing’s a gas diffusion analyzer, and that’s a scanning electron microscope. But what’s all this other stuff?”

“Oh … various things,” he said vaguely. “The big control board is for an automated cell culture, blood and tissue analyzer. Very complete readings, in less time than it would take to do it by hand. Incidentally, in addition to our own work, we do all the tests needed by the nursing home. That includes blood, urine, sputum, stools, biopsies—whatever. We have pathologists on staff.”

There had been half a dozen researchers working in the first lab we visited, and I saw about the same number when we walked into the lab across the hall. A few of them looked up when we entered, but most didn’t give us a glance.

The second lab had workbenches along three walls. The fourth, a long one, was lined with stainless steel refrigerators and climate-controlled cabinets. Through the front glass panels I could see racks and racks of flasks and tubes of all sizes and shapes.

“Cell cultures?” I asked Dr. Draper.

“Mostly,” he nodded. “And some specimens. Organ and tumor slices. Things of that sort. We have some very old, very valuable cultures here. A few originals. We’re continually getting requests from all over the world.”

“You give the stuff away?”

“Sometimes, but we prefer to trade,” he said, laughing shortly. “‘Here’s what we’ve got; what have
you
got?’ Research laboratories do a lot of horse-trading like that.”

“You have bacteria?” I asked.

“Some.”

“Viruses?”

“Some.”

“Lethal?”

“Oh yes,” he nodded. “Including a few rare ones from Africa. They’re in those cabinets with the padlocks. Only Dr. Thorndecker and I have the key.”

“What are they all doing?” I said, motioning toward the researchers bent over their workbenches. “What’s your current project?”

“Well, ah,” he said, “I’d prefer you direct that question to Dr. Thorndecker. He specifically said he wished to brief you personally on our current activities. After we’ve finished up here.”

“Good enough,” I said. Just seeing the Crittenden Research Laboratory in action revealed nothing. If they were brewing up a bubonic plague and told me they were making chicken noodle Cup-a-Soup, I wouldn’t have known the difference.

“The only thing left to see is the basement,” Draper said.

“What’s down there?”

“Mostly our experimental animals. A dissection room. Mainly for animals,” he added hastily. “We don’t do any human PM’s unless it’s requested by relatives of the deceased.”

“Why would they request it?”

“For various reasons. Usually to determine the exact cause of death. We had a case last year in which a widow authorized an autopsy of her deceased husband, a mental who had been at Crittenden Hall for two years. She was afraid of a genetic brain disorder that might be inherited by their son.”

“Did you find it?”

“Yes,” he said. “And there have been some postmortems authorized by the subjects themselves, prior to their death. These were people who wished to donate organs: kidneys, corneas, hearts, and so forth. But these cases have been few, considering the advanced age of most of the patients in the nursing home. Their organs are rarely, ah, desirable.”

And on that cheery note, we descended the stairway to the basement of the Crittenden Research Laboratory. Dr. Kenneth Draper paused with his hand on the knob of a heavy, padded steel door. He turned to me.

He seemed suddenly overcome by embarrassment. Spots of color appeared high on his cheeks. His forehead was pearled with sweat. Wet teeth appeared in a hokey grin.

“We have mostly mice, dogs, cats, chimps, and guinea pigs,” he said.

“Yes?” I said encouragingly. “And …?”

“Well,” he said, tittering nervously, “you are not, by any chance, an anti-vivisectionist, are you, Mr. Todd?”

“Rather them than me,” I said, and looked at him. But he had turned away; I couldn’t see his face.

When we stepped inside, I heard immediately the reason for that outside door being padded. The big basement room was an audiophile’s nightmare: chirps, squeals, barks, hisses, honks, roars, howls. I looked around, dazed.

“You’ll get used to it,” Draper shouted in my ear.

“Never,” I shouted back.

We made a quick tour of the cages. I didn’t mind the smell so much as that cacophony. I really am a sentimental slob, and I kept thinking the imprisoned beasts were making all that racket because they were suffering and wanted out. Not a very objective reaction, I admit; most of them looked sleek and well-fed. It’s just that I hate to see an animal in a cage. I hate zoos. I see myself behind those bars, with a neat label: “Samuel Todd, Homus Americanus, habitat New York City. A rare species that feeds on vodka gimlets and celery stalks stuffed with anchovy paste.”

There were a few aproned attendants around who grinned at us. One of them was wearing a set of heavy earphones. Maybe he was just blocking out that noise, or maybe he was listening to Mahler’s Fifth.

After inspecting the spitting cats, howling dogs, barking chimps, and squealing mice, it was a relief to get into a smaller room closed off by another of those padded steel doors.

This one was also lined with cages. But the occupants were those animals being used in current experiments and were reasonably quiet. Some of them lay on their sides, in what appeared to be a comatose state. Some were bandaged. Some had sensors taped to heads and bodies, the wires leading out to a battery of recording machines.

And some of them—one young chimpanzee in particular—were covered with tumors. Great, monstrous growths. Blossoms of wild flesh. Red and blue and yellow. A flowering of raw tissue. The smell in there was something.

The young chimp was almost hidden by the deadly blooms. The eruptions covered his head, body, limbs. He lay on his back, spreadeagled, breathing shallowly. I could see his black, glittering eyes staring at the cage above him.

“Carcinosarcoma,” Dr. Draper said. “He’s lasted longer than any other in this particular series of tests.”

“You infected him?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Yes,” Draper said. “To test the efficacy of a drug we had high hopes for.”

“Your hopes aren’t so high now?”

“No,” he said, shrinking.

I felt like a shit.

“Forgive me, doctor,” I said. “I know in my mind this kind of thing has to be done. I know it’s valuable. I’d just prefer not to see it.”

“I understand,” he said. “Actually, we all try to be objective. I mean all of us—attendants, researchers. But sometimes we don’t succeed. We give them names. Al, Tony, Happy Boy, Sue. When they die, or have to be destroyed, we feel it, I assure you.”

“I believe you,” I said.

I took a quick look at the dissecting room. Just two stainless steel tables, sinks, pots and pans for excised organs. Choppers. Slicers. Shredders. Something like a kitchen in a gourmet restaurant.

We walked back through the animal room. I was happy to get out of there. The stairway up to the main floor was blessedly quiet.

“Thank you, Dr. Draper,” I said. “I’m sure you’re a busy man, and you’ll probably have to work late to catch up. But I appreciate your showing me around.”

“My pleasure,” he said.

Of course I didn’t believe him.

“And now,” I said, “I understand a meeting with Dr. Thorndecker is planned?”

“Correct,” he said, obviously pleased that everything had gone so well, and one of his wild, young researchers hadn’t dropped a diseased guinea pig’s spleen down my neck. “I’ll call Crittenden Hall from here. Then I’ll unlock the back door, and if you’ll just go back the way you came, someone will be at the Hall to let you in.”

“Thanks again,” I said, shaking his damp hand.

I figured him for a good second-level man: plenty of brains, but without the energy, ambition, and obsessive drive to make it to the top level. His attitude toward Thorndecker seemed ambivalent; I couldn’t figure it. But he seemed enthusiastic enough about his work and the Crittenden Research Laboratory.

He made his phone call and was unlocking the back door when suddenly, on impulse, I asked him, “Are you married, Dr. Draper?”

His reaction reminded me of that analyzing computer I had just seen. Lights flashing, bubbles bubbling, bleeps bleeping; I could almost
see
him computing, wondering how his answer might affect a grant from the Bingham Foundation to the Crittenden Research Laboratory. Finally …

“Why no,” he said. “I’m not.”

“I’m not either,” I said, hoping it might make him feel better. He might even get to like me, and start calling me Sam, or Happy Boy, like one of his experimental animals in that room of the doomed I had just seen.

Turned out into the cold, I trudged determinedly up the steps, back to Crittenden Hall. But then I realized how pleasant it was to be alone, even for a moment or two. It seemed to me I had been accompanied almost every minute I had been on the grounds. And it was possible I had been under observation for the few seconds I had been alone when Nurse Beecham went to fetch Dr. Draper.

I shook my head. Those paranoiac twinges again. But, looking around at the ruined day, the decayed fields of Crittenden, I figured they came with the territory.

A little, snub-nosed nurse’s aide had the back door of Crittenden Hall open for me when I arrived. She escorted me down the corridor and delivered me to the white-jacketed goon in the entrance hall. He told me Dr. Thorndecker was awaiting me in his second-floor study, and waved me up the wide staircase. I went about halfway up, raised my eyes, and saw an aproned maid waiting for me on the second-floor landing. I glanced down to see the goon still watching me from the main floor entrance hall.

Then I was certain; it wasn’t paranoia at all. They were keeping me in sight. Every minute. They didn’t want me wandering around by myself. Who knew what closed door I might open?

Dr. Thorndecker’s study was a rumpled warehouse of a room. It looked like an attic for furniture that wasn’t good enough for the other rooms in Crittenden Hall, but was too good to give to the Salvation Army. No two chairs, styles, or colors matched. The desk was a scarred and battered rolltop. The lamps had silk shades with beaded fringe. The couch was one big, lumpy stain, and books and periodicals were stacked higgledy-piggledy on the floor. Some of the stacks had collapsed; there were puddles of magazines, scientific papers, spiral-bound notebooks. I had to step over them to get in.

Thorndecker made no apology for this mess, for which I admired him. He got me seated in a cretonne-covered armchair that had stuffing coming out one arm. I wriggled around cautiously until I could sit comfortably without being goosed by a loose spring. The doctor slumped in a swivel chair swung around from his desk.

“Your wife decorate this room?” I asked politely.

He laughed. “To tell you the truth, I like it just the way it is. It’s my own private place. A hideaway. No one ever comes in here except the cleaning woman.”

“Once every five years?” I suggested. “Whether it needs it or not?”

He laughed again. He seemed to enjoy my chivying. He had whipped off his glasses the moment I entered, but not before I had noted they made him look older. Not older than his 54 years, but just as old. He certainly looked younger without them.

The tanned complexion helped. Perfect teeth that I guessed were capped, not store-bought. Thick billows of dark hair; not a smidgen of gray. No jowls. No sagging of neck flesh. The skin was ruddy and tight, eyes clear and alert. He moved lithely, with an energetic bounce. If he had told me he was 40 years old, I might have thought he was shaving five years. But 54? Imfuckingpossible.

The clothes helped. Beige doeskin slacks, sports jacket of yummy tweed, open-collar shirt with a paisley ascot. Glittering, tasseled moccasins on his small feet. A very spiffy gentleman. When he spoke in that rich, fruity baritone, I could understand how he could woo whiz-kids away from drug cartels at half the salary. He had charm, and even the realization that it was contrived was no defense against it.