“Ah, you mean a head hunter.”
“Yes, for the high-tech industry.”
Malenko nodded in approval. “So he matches up eggheads with egghead companies.”
“Something like that.”
“Very good. Is it his own business?”
“Yes.”
“And business is good, no doubt?”
She nodded. She felt emotionally drained. “Mmmm.”
Malenko smiled, probably because it suggested that they could afford their pricey services. Then he picked up Dylan’s folder. “I will look these over more closely,” he said. “Let me suggest we meet next week, and with your husband. About the MRI, I will explain that you came in here on referral from a local friend, and we had a scan done as a matter of protocol.”
He was saying that she could lie, and he’d swear to it. “Thank you.”
“You can make an appointment with Marie. Good day.”
Rachel left the building, torn between renewed hope and the overpowering desire to drive home and fall into a long dreamless sleep.
Through the window, Lucius Malenko watched Mrs. Rachel Whitman cross the parking lot to her car, a gold Nissan Maxima. Not a Jaguar or BMW, but also not a Ford Escort. He watched her pull out to the road that would lead back to her perfect little seaview home on the perfect little hill surrounded by perfectly nurtured horticulture.
He had seen her likes by the dozens over the years: yuppies, suburbies, and middle-aged country-club parents of different ethnicities and races—all driven by guilt and vanity and all devotees of the new American religion of self-improvement. From birth and even before, they were obsessed with rearing the supertot. They put toy computers in their children’s cribs. They sent them to bed with Mozart and bilingual CDs. They muscled their way into the best preschools. Infertile couples advertised for egg donors in the Yale Daily News. Others doled out thousand of dollars for the sperm of Nobel laureates. Some had even consulted geneticists, hoping that they could locate a “smart” gene to be stimulated. There is none, of course, nor any known cluster or combination, but that didn’t prevent people from spending small fortunes. It was all so amazing and amusing.
“Nobody wants to be normal anymore,” he said aloud.
As Mrs. Rachel Whitman drove away, a new silver BMW 530 two-door pulled into the slot just vacated by her. It was Mrs. Vanessa Watts, coming in to consult about her Julian’s behavior problems. Years ago, she had come in just like this Rachel Whitman, gnarled with despair that her youngster was distracted all the time, unfocused, a slow learner, and that he had scored in the fortieth percentile on his math aptitude and fifty-five on the verbal. She was likewise desperate to know what could be done to boost his ranks, otherwise he would never get into Cornell where his father had gone or even into Littleton State where, after some unpleasantness regarding a paper on Jonathan Swift, she eventually earned a doctorate in English literature. And that just could not be—not her Julian. No way. It was unacceptable, and they would do anything, pay anything to make him a brighter bulb.
He watched Vanessa Watts cross the lot to the front entrance as she had on several occasions to come up and complain that they had succeeded too well—that her Julian was too absorbed in his studies, in his projects, that he had become antisociaclass="underline" that his filament was all too brilliant.
Never satisfied, these bastards. Especially this one—Professor Loose Cannon. And now she was here with her ultimatum. Fortunately, he had one of his own.
He picked up the phone and dialed Sheila MacPhearson.
28
Brendan found Nicole in her ballet class in a building off Bloomfield Prep’s central quad. She was with seven other girls and an instructor in a dance room with mirrors and bars.
Through the glass door, Nicole was dressed in white tights. Her shoulders were bare, giving her long-neck Modigliani proportions. She looked like a swan. They were going through motions called out by a woman instructor dressed in a jogging outfit.
Because it was the last day of classes, the place was empty, so Brendan watched without being discovered. Nicole was perched with one leg up on the bar in line with the other girls. In the reflecting mirror, they looked like twin rows of exotic roosting birds, their faces in a numbed tensity. Suddenly the instructor said something, and they went into leg-flashing exercises. Nicole was second in line at the mirror, her long legs kicking out with elegant precision as if spring-loaded. From a CD player flowed the sweet violin strains of Swan Lake. The instructor shouted something, and on cue Nicole broke into her solo, going through complex leaps and pirouettes across the room. Brendan was amazed to see how totally involved she was in the movement, and so precise and athletic. Her teeth were clenched, muscles bunched up for each vault, her shoulders and face aspic’d with sweat, those muscular semaphore legs moving with effortless grace as she flashed around the room. She was a diva in the making.
When the instructor turned off the music and announced class was over, Brendan left the building and waited for her behind some trees in the quadrangle.
Several minutes later, he saw her with two boys coming down the walk toward him. She had changed and was heading for the cafeteria.
“What are you doing here?” Nicole said when he stepped out from behind a tree.
“I have to t-talk to you.”
“How did you find me?”
“That’s n-n-not important.” He pretended the two boys weren’t there. “Look, we h-have to talk.” According to her schedule she had a forty-minute lunch break before her next class.
“I have a conference with one of my teachers. I can’t.” She made no effort to introduce Brendan to the others, and he was grateful.
“It’s very important,” Brendan insisted. He had not foreseen a conference lunch. Or maybe she was just making that up.
She looked at her watch. “I’ve gotta go. Call me later.”
He had promised Richard to take him for his doctor’s appointment in two hours. “I can’t. We have t-t-to talk now. Just two minutes.”
“Hey, man, she said she’s got a conference,” the taller boy said, trying to puff up. He was a smooth-faced kid who looked like the poster boy for Junior Brooks Brothers. He was dressed in beige chinos and a stiff blue oxford shirt. The other Nicole drone, a black kid with wireless glasses, had on the same chinos but a white golf shirt. “What part of no don’t you understand?”
“Now there’s an original expression,” Brendan said. “D-d-did you read that in A Hundred Best Comebacks?”
The kid looked baffled, but before he could respond, Nicole said, “Forget it, I know him.”
“You sure?” asked the taller boy, eyeing Brendan as if he were toxic waste.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
“Good luck,” the black kid said to her, probably referring to her conference. Then he glanced at Brendan’s baggy jeans and black T-shirt with the multicolored tie-dyed starburst on the front. “Nice threads,” he sneered.
“Up your J. Crew b-bunghole.” As soon as the words were out he felt a surprising flicker of pleasure.
“Cut the shit, both of you,” Nicole said.
As the boys moved away, one of them said, “Speaking of the devil.”
Coming down the path was an older man in a sport coat and tie and carrying a briefcase.
Nicole’s face went to autolight: “Hi, Mr. Kaminsky.” She beamed at him as he approached. “I’ll be right there.”
The man scowled at Nicole. “You know where I’ll be.” He did not look pleased. As he walked away, he glanced at Brendan, and recognition seemed to flit across his face, but he continued down the path toward the next building.