Dr. Knox Page 12

  “Shit,” I said, reading.

  “Oh yeah. And, see, he also bankrolls that stupid whatever the hell it’s called—Fundamentalist Fuckheads Forum. You know, the assholes who want to rewind the country back to 1951.”

  “Fundamental Families something?”

  Sutter nodded. “That’s them. And he funds that other thing too—the American Penises Institute.”

  “American Pinnacle Institute? That’s a think tank.”

  “My version’s better. Anyway, this is the guy that employs Petro Risk—exclusively. So, if PRP’s looking for the kid, it means Bray wants him.”

  I shook my head and looked at the other booths, and the red candle flames flickering beneath laughing faces.

  “Why?”

  “You’re asking the wrong guy.”

  “And these Petro guys are badasses?”

  “I wouldn’t say badass so much as bad, and I don’t think it, brother, I know it. I know these douche bags.”

  “From where?”

  Sutter frowned. “Nigeria. A few years back—after I left the C.A.R. but before I quit private security altogether. I was babysitting these Brit engineers who were surveying pipeline routes. We were out of Warri, but we were always inland or upriver, which is where I ran across PRP. Bray Oil and Gas had a big thing going with Nigerian National Petroleum, developing new fields, and for about ten days me and the Brits were set up in a village where Bray was just finishing construction on a new facility. Their place had everything: barracks for the oil crews, an infirmary, mess hall, water treatment, movie theatre, even a brig and a helipad. It was twice the size of the village and ten times as nice.

  “PRP had a big footprint there—there were as many of them as there were construction guys—and they were a mixed bunch. Americans, Brits, Irish, Aussies, Kiwis, some Ivans, some Germans, even a few Albanians and Boers—all ex-military, and all white. I noticed that right away.

  “Still, they were friendly enough, and we were fresh blood for their card game. Pretty much every night, there was poker and the usual bullshit session—crappy ports I have known, most fucked-up ops, you think your army’s screwed, let me tell you ’bout mine—that kind of thing. After about a week, over a late-night hand, I mentioned that things seemed pretty calm in the neighborhood, security-wise. I brought it up because, until then, me and the Brits had had to look out for insurgent crews that were still kicking around the river delta, despite the amnesty deal the government signed. They liked to tap the pipelines and siphon off crude they could sell for guns, and they weren’t above snatching the odd Westerner for ransom, or just shooting some for laughs.

  “I asked the PRP guys what their secret was, and what I got back was weird silence—just snorts and glances, and finally somebody said something about day care, followed immediately by somebody else yelling, Shut the fuck up. I felt like there was a joke somewhere but I wasn’t in on it.

  “Couple days later, I brought it up again, with a kid from Abilene I’d gotten to know a little. He was a driver, not a shooter, and not one of the poker players. He had some drinks in him, but my questions sobered him up fast. He definitely didn’t like the subject, and he hemmed and hawed and kicked the dirt a lot. Then I mentioned day care, and he turned white and looked liked his grandma had just caught him tugging one off.

  “I pressed some more, and finally he grabs my arm and whispers: You want to know how we do it? You want to know about day care? Then he leads me to the far corner of the compound, to a Quonset hut I’d thought was just another barracks. There was a padlock on the door, but he points to a little window, and I look inside.”

  Sutter paused and looked at his bourbon. He shook his head. “The hut was filled with women and kids, probably twenty souls in all, ages forty down to four years.”

  A shiver went through me and I squinted at Sutter. “What the hell?”

  “That’s what I said. The guy told me that PRP had had big insurgent problems when they first came into the area—firefights every few days, sabotage, even IEDs. Lots of injuries, even more equipment damage, and no work getting done. The guerrillas wanted protection money to go away, but PRP didn’t want to pay. So instead they spent a few weeks gathering intel on them, and especially on the bosses—who they were, where they came from, where exactly they lived, that kind of thing. Then they took hostages.”

  “Hostages?”

  “The insurgents’ wives and kids—they went out and grabbed them up. They’d been holding them for the better part of a year. As long as the security situation stayed calm, the hostages would be taken care of; otherwise…”

  “Fuck,” I whispered.

  “For sure,” Sutter said. He ran his palm over his nearly shaven head, and looked at the ceiling.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  He sighed. “About the kids? Probably not enough. Two nights after I cleared my Brits out of the village, I went back to the Bray compound, quietly. I clipped the lock on the Quonset hut and opened a hole in the fence behind it. I told the women and kids who could speak English or French or Swahili to wait fifteen minutes and then take off. Then I crossed the compound and started a fire in a Dumpster—big and bright and smoky. Don’t know how many of ’em made it out, or if any did. The next day, I called a Times stringer I knew, but I never saw any news stories about it.”

  I nodded. “Hard to corroborate, I guess.”

  “And the Brays have a long reach.”

  “You come across PRP again?”

  “Anyplace there’s oil—in the Gulf, Africa, Lat Am. And they always operate on the bleeding edge. Torture, extortion, kidnap, bribery—they do it all. One of their guys in Nigeria—one of my poker pals—joked that their company motto should be The Balls to Cross the Line. It’s a point of pride with them.”

  I took a deep breath. I put my glass aside and signaled the waitress. When she came, I ordered a bourbon of my own. “So what the hell do these people want with Alex?” I asked again. “What is he to them—another hostage?”

  Sutter shook his head. “Between PRP looking for him, and Siggy after his mom, the kid’s in a world of shit.”

  My bourbon came, and the sip I took was a flame licking down my throat. I looked at Sutter. “We can’t let them have him.”

  He nodded, and bumped his glass against mine.

  CHAPTER 18

  Tuesday was hot and airless downtown, and the clinic was a blur of faces and symptoms, questions and equivocal answers, and diagnoses and treatments of varying degrees of certainty. In the pauses between patients I tried to think only of the next cup of coffee, the next appointment, of putting one foot in front of the other. And I emphatically did not think about Siggy Rostov, Harris Bray, or all that I hadn’t told Lydia and Lucho.

  I spoke to them only on medical matters that day, and was silent on the topic of Monday’s visitors, but the air was thick with the unsaid. The closest I came to any of it was to ask Lucho how Alex was doing. He looked at me for a long moment, and so did Lydia, and then he told me that Arthur had spoken to his sister late last night and that everything was fine.

  “He’s eating,” Lucho said, “he’s watching TV; he likes her dog.”

  I nodded, and they looked at me some more; I went back into the exam room.

  When we ran out of patients, I ran out too—upstairs, into the shower, and then into my car and west, to meet Nora Roby. She had plans to order in, and I was invited. The menus were fanned on her coffee table like a poker hand when I arrived.

  “I’m okay with any of those,” she said. “You pick, you order, you open the wine. I’m taking a shower.”

  I chose Chinese, from the Palace, and ordered dumplings, cold noodles, scallion pancakes, duck, and salt-and-pepper shrimp. Then I opened the bottle of Merlot Nora had left out, and poured two glasses. I was thinking about drinking one when she emerged from the bedroom in yoga pants and a loose-fitting tank top, and with her hair in a towel. Her skin was pink and she smelled of pears, but there were shadows beneath
her eyes, and lines around her mouth.

  “Long day?” I said.

  She picked up a glass, took a sip, and nodded. “One of my first-years—probably the smartest one—told me she doesn’t think she wants to do it anymore. One year out of med school and she’s fried—exhausted, disillusioned, depressed, anxious all the time. I didn’t know what to tell her.”

  “Tell her that in another fifteen or twenty years she won’t notice anymore.”

  Nora smiled thinly and shook her head. “And I had two referrals for oncology today—a boy and a girl, seven and ten. The parents were devastated, terrified….I don’t know—those words don’t begin to cover it.”

  “Is the outlook—”

  “Bad, for both of them.”

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “There was a really crappy moment talking to the boy’s parents when I found myself going through the motions of empathy—making the right faces and noises—and wondering if I had any actual empathy left, or if it was all just…performance.”

  “That’s a defense mechanism.”

  “Could be, or maybe my resident has a point.”

  She took another sip and paced the tile floor, to the desk, to stack some papers; to the French doors, to stare at the dark patio; and back to the sofa, where she sat, sighed, stretched her long legs, and put her feet in my lap.

  She squinted at me. “And you? You look worse than the last time I saw you, and you had a hangover then. You’re not hungover now, are you?”

  “Just a lot of mileage since the weekend,” I said. Then I gathered my breath and told her about my search for Elena, and about all my uninvited guests. I told it carefully, and paused only to refill our glasses, to pay the delivery guy, and to eat dumplings and scallion pancakes. When I finished, Nora was quiet and busied herself mixing the cold noodles. Then she looked at me and shook her head.

  “What are you into? Hookers, Russian pimps, thugs in back alleys and in your waiting room—with your patients, for chrissakes. And Harris Bray! You know how many things around town are named after him?”

  “Sutter read me the list.”

  “It’s a long one. One of these days they’ll add the whole Republican Party to it—brought to you by Harris Bray. The Russians sound bad enough, but Bray—he’s a different league of badness.”

  “I know.”

  “You know, and yet…” Nora sighed, and shook her head.

  “What?”

  “You’re not stupid, Adam. The risks you’re taking are more than plain. Why invite this kind of trouble?”

  I drank some wine. “I’m not inviting anything.”

  “Of course not. Why would you? It’s not as if running that clinic isn’t trouble enough. Who in their right mind would go looking for more with the authorities, or criminals, or a fucking oligarch?”

  I reached for a dumpling with my chopsticks. “I’m not.”

  “What you’re not doing is explaining.”

  I ate the dumpling and looked at her. “I’m not sure how to, not without sounding like a self-dramatizing ass.”

  Nora smiled and poked at the shrimp. “Take a chance.”

  “Okay. I guess it has to do with favoring the weak over the strong, kindness over cruelty, victims over bullies, the Golden Rule over zero-sum games. Whatever risk I’m taking, it’s because I think the boy and his mom need help that they won’t get from DCFS, and because I think it’s the right thing to do. How’s that?”

  “Heroic,” she said quietly.

  “Then I told it wrong, ’cause that’s not me.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “What—you don’t believe in heroics?”

  “I think few things are more reductive than rescue fantasies—or more dangerous. Not much in the real world boils down to black-hat versus white-hat. Actual people are complicated, and their motives and intentions are almost always tangled and obscure, even to themselves. Especially to themselves. I’m sure there are people—a few—whose noble impulses are just what they appear to be. For most people, though, it’s more…complex.”

  “Complex, as in crazy?”

  She shrugged. “You see it in our field: dysfunction channeled into heroic behavior. What looks like heroic behavior, anyway.”

  “You have someone in particular in mind?”

  She smiled and picked up a shrimp and licked the salt and pepper from it. “It must’ve been scary when those people came to the clinic.”

  I nodded. “The Russians were bad, but that happened fast. The corporate thugs—the guys from PRP—were worse, more threatening. That’s what they were trying for, and they succeeded.”

  “Lucho and Lydia must’ve been upset.”

  “The PRP guys didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about them, but, yeah, they were upset. They still are, and I haven’t even told them about the Russians yet, or about the Harris Bray connection.”

  She raised a dark eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you?”

  “I’m waiting for the right time.”

  “Which you’ll know how—by the pigs flying past your window?”

  “Funny.”

  Nora put down her chopsticks and picked up her wine. “The stuff they said about you, in Africa…I’ve seen the scars on your side and your leg, but you never say much about it. Who was the nurse they were talking about?”

  I sighed and filled my glass. “Merry. Her name was Marie-Josée, but she spoke so fast it sounded like Merry-Josée when she said it, so…Merry. She wasn’t much more than a kid when she came to the field station, and she had a little boy, Mathieu, who was maybe four. His father died before the kid was born, killed with most of Merry’s people in a militia attack on their village.

  “Her education was minimal, but she was a great nurse—tireless and careful, and she had that innate clinical radar some people just have. You know—someone who can tell at a glance who’s turning the corner, and who’s not going to make it till morning.” Nora nodded.

  “On top of which, patients loved her. She calmed them down, made them laugh, made even the ones who were circling the drain feel like it was all going to be okay. Especially them.” I took a deep and shaky breath. It’d been a long time since I’d talked about this, and it was no easier.

  “Our field station was small, and the village wasn’t much bigger—a crossroads, really—which was good and bad. It was accessible for patients, but also for assholes with guns, and there were a lot of those. A fluid security situation is how they put it in the head office. We’d get alerts all the time, and the security contractors DTR employed would sweep in and sweep us out for a while. Most of the time nothing came of it—an excess of caution. Until it wasn’t.

  “It was after the rainy season and the floods, and we were seeing all the things you’d see then, an uptick of vector-borne stuff: yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, and malaria, of course. We were full up, but DTR had made allowances for that—they’d arranged to relocate the patients too. The problem was, about two hours after the trucks left with the last patients aboard, five more people came in—four women and a teenage boy, all with high fevers, diarrhea, dehydrated, two of them hemorrhaging, one of them pregnant. It was amazing they’d made it to us, but there was no way they’d survive a four-hour ride in the back of a truck. And anyway, DTR was fresh out of trucks. So when our ride showed up—the transport for the rest of the staff and me—I made the call that I would stay behind with them. I put the pregnant woman in my seat.

  “It was against DTR protocol, I knew, but it seemed like the only thing to do—a risk, but a low one, given all the false alarms we’d had. And given the condition of the patients, I just didn’t see…” I swallowed hard and fought to get some air in my lungs.

  “In fact, it seemed like such a good idea that Merry insisted on staying too. I told her no way, and we argued and argued until the transport had to leave. She put Matty on board, with one of the other nurses, but said she wasn’t going anywhere until I did. So off they went, and there we were.�
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  Nora’s dark eyes were huge and gleaming and fixed on me. I fought for breath. “Of course it went south,” I said finally, “about an hour after dark. They came in numbers, and they were fucking crazy. Kids, most of them—teenagers, armed to the teeth. I don’t know what they wanted; I’m not sure they knew either. They took what little we had in the way of meds, and they started fucking with the patients—wanted to know where they’d come from, who their people were, their religion—the kinds of questions that never lead to anything good over there, or anywhere else. DTR protocols talk about minimal engagement, and no resistance, but I guess I didn’t do it right. I wasn’t…deferential enough. I don’t know. I thought we were home free when they got in their trucks and drove off, but I was wrong. They came back about an hour later and unloaded right into the field station. They must’ve emptied every magazine they had, and when that wasn’t enough they pulled out the RPGs.”

  Nora shook her head and sighed. “Jesus,” she whispered.

  “I woke up in a hospital in Bangui, but I didn’t stay there long. They shipped me to Lagos to remove the bullets and the shrapnel.”

  “And Merry? Did she—”

  I shook my head. “Besides me, only one of the patients made it. She had burns, but she survived.

  “When I was well enough, DTR flew me to the head office in Brussels and read me their report—the long and short of which was that it was on me, all of it. The breaches of protocol and misjudgments, the deaths—Merry, the patients—all on me.”

  “There’s no way you could’ve known.”

  “They disagreed.”

  Her cheeks colored and she shook her head. “And after Brussels?”

  “I came here. I was in the Brussels Airport with a ticket to New York, an empty head, and mostly empty pockets, and Sutter called me. He’d heard what had happened from friends of his over there, and he’d been trying to track me down. Said if I wanted to give L.A. a try he had a sofa I could crash on. It was the best offer I had. Also the only one.”