Leethe ignored the interruption. "— for the purpose of assuring themselves the subject will come to no harm as a result of their actions. In return, the institute requires the doctors, in writing, to hold the institute harmless in all matters both prior to and proceeding from this date, in connection with this flawed experiment."
"You want carte blanche," Bradley said.
"The institute does not intend to carry the can," Leethe said, and carried a pretty bad bag of garbage out.
"David and Peter could only sign such an agreement," Bradley said, "if the institute places them in charge of the search for the experimental subject—"
"Oh, come, now."
"— and places them in charge of the subject himself, once he has been located."
"I'm not sure the institute could—"
"The alternative is that Peter and David will go to the state medical association."
Leethe blinked. He gazed at David and Peter, who did their best to maintain poker faces. "Would you, indeed," he said.
"We need protection from somewhere," Peter said.
Leethe pondered, then shrugged and said, "We'll find common ground."
Bradley nodded. "I have no doubt."
Leethe dealt out his documents, saying, "Look these over, and tell me what you feel should be altered."
They all took copies — it was another two-pager — but Bradley said, "Before we do that, Mr. Leethe, I'd appreciate it if you'd bring us up to date on the search for . . ." He turned to David and Peter. "What is his name?"
"We're not sure," David said. "We think he lied on his medical form."
"Fredric Noon," Leethe said.
Bradley nodded at him. "Thank you. How goes the search for Fredric Noon?"
"It goes well, I think," Leethe said. His hands gathered a light blanket to his chest. "We have hired a New York City policeman, to conduct the—"
"Police?" David cried.
"Not officially," Leethe assured him, as his left hand, two fingers up, waved back and forth in benediction. "The gentleman is moonlighting for us."
"Moonlighting," Bradley echoed, and smiled. "What a lovely image."
"Oddly inapt, with this fellow, I think," Leethe said, as his hands lifted, tossing a little stardust into the air. "In any event," while both hands became play guns and shot David and Peter in their stomachs, "he's found Noon's girlfriend, the one he's been living with recently." While his left hand rested, palm down, on the table, his right, finger upraised, pointed out various constellations. "I hope to hear good news very shortly."
"When you find him," Peter said, "we want to be there."
"That's what we're here to iron out," Leethe told him, smoothing a bedspread. "When we do get our hands on friend Noon at last, I assure you, we'll be delighted to have you assist."
David and Peter might have nodded agreement with that, but Bradley said, "What you mean, I think, is that when you find Noon, you'll be delighted to have assisted David and Peter, and you'll want to go on assisting them."
"Semantics," Leethe said, and shrugged.
"Is my business," Bradley said, and picked up Leethe's document. "Shall we see what we have here?"
27
The thing about anger is, it tends to overcome one's sense of self-preservation, even if that one is such a one as Barney Beuler, whose sense of self-preservation had been honed for years on the whetstone of the New York Police Department. Coming off the Amtrak train from Rhinecliff into Penn Station at eight that night — after dark! — Barney was so enraged by life in general, Amtrak in particular, and Fredric Urban Goddam Noon in special particular, that he couldn't have cared less if shooflys had wired his wristwatch.
Fortunately for him, they hadn't. In fact, fortunately for Barney, all of his many enemies over there on the side of truth, justice, and the American way were otherwise engaged when he stomped up the filthy steps of Penn Station from the filthy platform, bulldozed his way through the filthy homeless living their half-speed half-lives in the terminal, found an exposed pay phone on a stick — not even an enclosed phone booth, for a modicum of privacy — and dialed Mordon Leethe at home. At this point, he didn't give much of a shit what happened, so long as revenge was a part of it.
"Hello?"
"Barney."
A second or two of baffled silence, and then, "Barney? Barney who?"
"Oh, fuck you, Leethe!"
"Oh, Barney! I'm sorry, I didn't recognize your voice, you sounded different."
Barney hardly recognized himself; fury had annealed him. "We have to meet," he snarled, while wide-eyed families from Iowa clutched one another close and moved in little clumps farther away across the terminal. "Now," Barney added, and his teeth clacked together.
"I'm engaged this evening."
"With me."
Leethe sighed, a dry and rasping sound. Barney almost expected dead leaves to drift out of the telephone. "I could see you at eleven," Leethe agreed at last, reluctance dragging out the words. "There's a bar near me."
Leethe lived, as Barney had made it his business to know, on the Upper East Side, Park Avenue in the nineties. It wasn't a neighborhood he thought of as being rich in bars. "Oh, yeah?"
"It's called Cheval. It's a bit of a bistro, really."
Sure it is, Barney thought. "I'll see you there at eleven," he snarled. "You and the rest of the Foreign Legion."
Derriйre du Cheval, if you asked Barney. As with most small side-street Manhattan restaurants, this one was built into the ground floor of a former private dwelling, which meant it was long and narrow, with a not very high ceiling. This particular example of the type was warmed with creamy paint and goldish fixtures and woodlike dark trim. The bar was a C-clamp near the front, against the right wall; beyond it, one would go to the dining area with its snowy tablecloths, most of them not in use at this hour.
In fact, aside from the Israeli owners and Hispanic employees, most of the people still here at 11 P.M. on a Friday night were the adulterers at the bar, hunched in murmuring guilty pairs on the padded high square stools with the low upholstered backs. Among these semilost souls, Mordon Leethe looked like Cotton Mather in a bad mood, nursing a Perrier and brooding at his own reflection in the gold-dappled mirror above the back bar, as though hoping to find somewhere on the map of his own glowering face the path that would lead him out of all this.
But no, not tonight. Sliding onto the stool to Leethe's right, Barney bobbed two fingers at the Perrier and said, "Letting it all hang out, eh, Counselor?"
Leethe glowered at Barney's reflection in the mirror, then turned his head just enough to give him the full treatment from those bleak eyes. "You wouldn't want me to let it all hang out, Barney," he said.
By God, and that was true, wasn't it? "Keep it buttoned, then," Barney advised, and turned his attention to the fourteen-year-old barman with the black pencil mustache. "Beer," he said.
"Yes, sir?"
"Imported. In a bottle."
"Any particular brand, sir?"
"What've you got that's from the farthest away?"
The barman had to think about that. He wrinkled his mustache briefly, then said, "That would be the one from China."
"Mainland China? Where they have the slave labor?"
"Yes, sir."
"I'll have that," Barney decided, and as the barman turned away he gave Leethe his own bleak look and explained, "I like the idea that a lot of people worked long and hard, just for me. Fifteen thousand miles to give me a beer."
"This isn't why you phoned me," Leethe said. "At home."
"No, it isn't." Barney looked at the hunched backs all around them. "Isn't this kind of public?"