The Syndrome Read online

  It always took a minute for the site to load. She watched the blue bar crawl across the page and then she was on:

  Hello, Nico

  The cursor blinked beneath the greeting, awaiting her instructions. Taking a deep breath, she touched Ctrl-F5, and—pictures and words and… something else, a sound she couldn’t quite hear, but felt. Pictures and words, scrolling and flipping, moving so fast you wouldn’t believe she could take it all in. But she did. She sat there in the room, unmoving, eyes bright with the turmoil on the monitor.

  She had been at the resort for three nights, and he still hadn’t shown. Each evening, she went down to the beach and waited for him, just to get a look—but he was never there. And the pills were beginning to get to her. If she took them for too many days running, she started to…

  What?

  Lose track of herself.

  That was the only way to put it. There were long periods of time when… there was nothing. And then, quite suddenly, she’d be herself again—except at a distance, always at a distance, as if her identity were a phantom limb. You wouldn’t think a little pill could grab you like that, but—

  Not to worry. They said he’d be here, and they were always right. It was just a matter of time.

  She glanced at her watch (it was 7:15), then looked out the window to where the sky had just begun to blush. Her fourth sunset.

  Grabbing a towel, she took the elevator to the ground floor, and walked through the pool area toward the little boardwalk that led to the beach.

  It wasn’t exactly the season yet, only the beginning of October, so there weren’t that many people around. A couple of kids in the pool, attacking each other with what looked like big, Styrofoam noodles. Mom on a chaise lounge, reading, and over there, two oiled, teenaged girls lying on their stomachs, bikini tops undone. Nico thought maybe they were asleep because, really, there wasn’t much sun left to bathe in. The area around the pool was already in shadow, the underwater lights glowing eerily. Lamps were beginning to flicker on the periphery of the terrace. The attendant who sold hats and sunglasses, sand toys and sunscreen was busy putting away things at his little stand, closing up for the night. As Nico walked past, a fiftyish woman in a purple bathing suit lowered herself carefully into the Jacuzzi beside the pool, her mouth releasing a soft Ooof of pleasure.

  The beach was even less crowded. Most people seemed to be at dinner, or dressing for dinner.

  And then she saw him—

  An old man, sitting in a wheelchair at the end of the boardwalk, where it broadened into a platform above a flight of steps leading down to the sand. He had a shawl over his shoulders, and his eyes were fixed on the reddening horizon. Nearby, the old man’s dreadlocked Jamaican caretaker leaned on a railing, listening raptly to the music blasting through the earphones of his Walkman. Reggae, Nico thought, catching the rhythm as she passed, the sound a remote, tinny whine.

  There was no one else, really. Apart from the Jamaican and the old man, the only other people in sight were a lone jogger, running in the wet sand along the surf line—and a couple, walking with their heads down, looking for shells.

  And that was it. Everybody else was… somewhere else. Which left Nico with Nico, one on one, watching her towel fall to the sand as she waded into the warm Gulf waters. In front of her, the sun seemed balanced on the horizon’s dark rim, turning the sky the color of a million postcards.

  She’s in heaven, Nico thought, watching herself move through the water. Which was shallow here, no more than knee-deep for upwards of a mile offshore. Wading farther and farther out to sea, she could see herself dwindling in the old man’s eyes. Finally, she slowed, stopped, and sank to her knees. Leaning back on her arms, she luxuriated in the warm bath of the Gulf, listening to the cry of gulls wheeling overhead. She remained this way for what seemed a long time, eyes shut, face turned toward the sky. Then she pivoted on her left arm, and spun to her feet in a single move that would have been startling if anyone other than she had seen it.

  Slogging back to the beach, she picked up her towel and climbed the steps to the little boardwalk. As she passed the old man, she gave him a shy smile and a meek “hello,” and kept on going. The Jamaican didn’t even notice. He was up to his ears in Bob Marley, eyes closed, shoulders swaying, quietly singing the words

  “No, woman, no cry”

  At the footbath inside the gate, Nico rinsed her feet, slipped on her flip-flops and crossed the terrace to the elevator.

  Back in her room, she removed the little bottle of champagne from the refrigerator, and opened it with a soft pop. Then she filled a flute from the kitchen cabinet, and took a single sip. It was nice, she thought, very nice.

  Moving to the couch, she set the champagne glass down on the glass-and-rattan coffee table, and got out her laptop. Connecting it to the phone, she waited for the CPU to boot up, then got out the plastic overlay, and went to the hidden URL she’d accessed the day before (and the day before that). She moved the cursor to today’s rectangle, and then to the one that represented her birthdate:

  Hello, Nico

  The cursor blinked silently.

  Resting her fingertips on the keyboard, she typed

  Picture, please

  Instantly, an hourglass appeared in the center of the screen, and hung there, like a bug in the air at the end of an invisible thread. After a while, an image began to form, one line after another until, in the end, there was a snapshot of an old man, the same old man who was sitting in the wheelchair eight floors below.

  Certain now that she had the right man, Nico went to the folding luggage rack that held her baggage. These were a battered leather pullman in which she kept her clothes, and a waterproofed case made of lime-green, high-impact plastic with a customized, foam interior. Turning the numbered wheels of the combination lock on the second bag, she sprung the catch, opened the case and checked her tools.

  These were nestled in a complex of foam compartments and, once assembled, constituted the finest sniping system money could buy. There was a bolt-action, M-24 barrel that coupled with a reassuring cliick to a Kevlar-reinforced, fiberglass stock with a matte-black finish. A Leupold scope was mounted to the barrel on steel rings and bases, in tandem with a B-Square Laser. Support came from a Harris bipod, and silence from a Belgian-made helical suppressor that threaded onto the maw of the rifle’s twenty-inch barrel.

  Nico assembled the weapon system with practiced ease, taking about thirty seconds, and tested the trigger’s three-pound pull. Then she inserted a single round of Teflon-coated, .308 ammunition, and rammed it home. With the silencer, scope, and laser, the rifle weighed almost eleven pounds—which made the bipod essential for accuracy.

  Walking out onto the balcony, she saw that the sun was almost underwater, the horizon hemorrhaging as the sky darkened to a blue-black bruise. Backlighted from below, a dozen palm trees trembled in the evening breeze.

  But the old man was right where he was supposed to be, sitting in the twilight, enjoying the day’s last gasp.

  Lying on her stomach, Nico slid the muzzle between the pink balustrades at the edge of the balcony, its barrel resting on the bipod, taking the weight off her arms. Then she looked through the scope, and flicked on the laser, which cast a wafer of bloodred light between the old man’s fourth and sixth vertebrae. From the end of the barrel to the edge of his skin was less than two hundred yards, an easy shot for her, even in the gloaming. Still, she could see the light tremble on her target’s back as her finger curled on the trigger, drawing it toward her for what seemed like forever. Then the rifle spasmed, and she heard a sound like a champagne cork going off in another room. The old man jerked upright and stiffened, as if an electric shock was moving through him. Then his body slumped, sinking into itself in such a way that she knew she’d cut his spine in two.

  There was no smoke, really, and no flash that anyone was likely to have seen. The cartridge she’d fired was subsonic, so the only sound that could have given things away was the noise o
f the slug as it slapped into the old man’s back.

  Not that it mattered. No one was paying attention—certainly not the Jamaican, who was lost to Bob Marley, and certainly not the children in the pool, whose laughter hung in the air like music.

  Nico sat up, and broke down the gun. No muss, no fuss.

  Then she got to her feet, and returned the rifle’s components to the Underwater Kinetics case in which they belonged. Finally, she spun the custom-fitted, little brass wheels that locked the suitcase, and topped off her champagne. Then she walked out onto the balcony with her glass, sat down and waited for all hell to break loose.

  There was still no reaction to what she’d done. The Jamaican was nodding in time to the Walkman’s lonely concert, eyes half-closed. The shell seekers and jogger were long gone, and the teenaged girls had packed it in. That left the woman who’d been in the Jacuzzi, who was shuffling toward the elevators, the kids and their mom. The kids were still there, splashing in the pool even as their mom stood over them, holding towels, pleading with them to get out. A minute went by. Then five. The sun was below the horizon now, so that there were only a few faint streaks of red left in the sky. Finally, as if he’d just realized that the night was almost upon them, the Jamaican removed the headphones from his ears, grasped the back of the wheelchair and, slowly, began to push the old man up the boardwalk, never noticing that his charge was dead.

  But when they reached the pool, the kids saw it. And Nico saw what they saw: the old man, lifeless beyond sleep, slumped in his chair with whitewashed eyes. And the bloom on his chest where the bullet had tumbled out into his lap, tearing a hole in his shawl.

  One of the little girls began to scream, and her mother admonished her, thinking the kids were fighting. Standing at the edge of the balcony, sipping her champagne, Nico could hear the woman, warning her daughter: “That’s it, Jessie, that’s really it, that’s the last time—”

  Then her voice evaporated, the wind died, and a frightened whoop cut through the air. Then a second whoop, as if someone were gathering the strength to scream. And, finally, the scream itself, cutting through the night.

  Leaving the balcony, Nico stepped inside and picked up the remote. Turning on the TV, she sat down on the couch and surfed among the channels until she found her favorite show. Channel 67. MTV. The Real World.

  An ambulance and three police cars arrived about ten minutes later, sirens blaring. A TV camera crew came soon after that, running through the lobby to the terrace, where they got some good shots of the bloodstained wheelchair, the old man being taken away on a gurney, and the Jamaican nursemaid, sitting in a deck chair with his face in his hands. Nearby, a dozen guests stood with tropical drinks in their hands, whispering among themselves and frowning.

  More than an hour went by before a policeman knocked on Nico’s door to ask if she’d seen or heard anything unusual. She told him that she hadn’t, and asked what the commotion was all about.

  “A man was shot,” the policeman told her. “Down on the boardwalk.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No.”

  “But I didn’t hear anything—I mean, not until the ambulance came.”

  “Nobody did,” the policeman said. “Not so far, anyway.”

  “But he’ll be all right, won’t he? The man who was shot?”

  The cop shook his head.

  “You mean, he’s dead?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” the policeman said. “Murdered. You might even say ‘gunned down.’”

  “Here? That’s horrible!”

  The policeman snorted, as if she’d told a joke. “‘Horrible’ ain’t the half of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The policeman looked embarrassed. “I shouldn’t say, but… it’s stupid.”

  “What is?”

  “Shooting that guy.”

  “Why?”

  “Guy’s name is Crane. He’s eighty-two years old. Cancer patient. Everybody knows him. Real prominent guy.”

  “So?”

  “So his nurse says, he’s got about six months to live when he’s shot. Maybe a year if he’s real lucky. I mean—” The cop shook his head with a rueful chuckle. “What’s the point?”

  Chapter 2

  Washington, D.C.

  Talk about “flying”—she had so much energy! And not just today. It was the same way as the day before, and the day before that. Basically, ever since she’d gotten back from—wherever.

  Florida! She’d been in Florida.

  This morning, she’d gotten up at five (it was impossible to sleep when she was like this), reorganized the kitchen cabinets and defrosted the refrigerator. She’d cleaned the oven after that, and washed and waxed the floors. Going into the bathroom, she’d emptied the medicine cabinet with a couple of sweeps of her hand, dumping its contents in a shopping bag. Then she’d cleaned the mirror and the shelves, thinking, I don’t need any of it, anymore. Not the Vicks, not the lithium, not the aspirin. This was the new Nico, clean and clear and energetic as an Evian waterfall.

  Today was her day to see Duran.

  His office was in Cleveland Park. To get there from Georgetown, she had to walk down M Street to the Key Bridge, cross the Potomac to Rosslyn, and take the Metro. It was a hike, but seeing Duran was about as optional as breathing. It wasn’t like the lithium. It was really important, so important that it never occurred to her not to go. Duran was her anchor, shrink and exorcist, all in one. He brought her face-to-face with the demons that bedeviled her and, with his help, she’d drive them out. He’d make her well. He’d promised.

  Entering the subway, she was struck by the smell that floated up the stairs, a mixture of the cave and the vacuum cleaner. This was the underground scent that darkness gave off, the perfume of hidden places. Subways, tunnels, basements. The root cellar in South Carolina. Shenandoah Caverns in Virginia—where the whole family went once on vacation, and Adrienne got yelled at for touching a stalagmite. She could still remember the guard’s snotty voice: It takes tens of thousands of years for a stalagmite to grow a quarter-inch and some selfish people just cannot keep their hands off. Please respect nature’s majesty! Thank you.

  That underground smell was the subway’s olfactory background, like the bass line in music or the set on a sitcom. But there were brighter aromas, too. Coffee, sweat, tobacco, dust. A whiff of urine, a flash of perfume—or was it hair spray?

  And the ride! The ride was a massage that left her almost dreamy. She liked the sound of it, the rush of air, the rhythmic sway of the segmented train hurtling through the tunnel. She liked the way her body felt as it made a series of intricate adjustments, compensating for every change in velocity and direction, reacting instantly to Newtonian forces that were as real as they were unseen.

  When the train got to Cleveland Park, she took the escalator up to the street, where the Juice Man was waiting, three doors down. As she always did, she bought a papaya smoothie and sucked it down so fast that it gave her an ice-cream headache. Even that was okay, though, because when her brain unclenched from the freeze, there was a moment—there was always a moment—when her mind felt so clean. It was worth the pain, almost, to feel it, that sweet blur of relief.

  Once, she’d asked Adrienne if she had the same reaction—if she knew what she meant, but… no. Of course she didn’t. Her sister just got this weird, worried look, and made a joke of it.

  Unlike Duran.

  Who understood her—

  To a T.

  His building was a block north of the Metro stop, on the east side of Connecticut. It was a nice neighborhood (if you didn’t mind the constant surf of traffic). Moms pushed strollers past the firehouse. Joggers zigzagged down the sidewalk, sidestepping businessmen on their way to lunch. Outside Starbucks, a young couple did their best to ignore a schizophrenic black man, wheedling for change.

  And then there were the old people.

  They sat on the benches in front of Ivy’s Indo-Thai place, feeding the pig
eons. One of them was there every week. She recognized him by the fisherman’s cap he wore, rain or shine. And by his hands, which were as big as dinner plates, but clumsy with arthritis, so that he fed the birds by tumbling popcorn at them from a brown paper bag.

  Duran’s building was an old one and, while everything worked, it worked on its own terms. Which meant, among other things, that when the intercom buzzed, it really buzzed—as if to announce that the apartment’s occupant had gotten an important question dead wrong. But since no question had been posed, the noise was always unexpected, and sometimes startling—especially when, as now, Duran was watching television.

  So when Nico buzzed, he jumped—and just as quickly, acted to compose himself. Took a deep breath, and blew it out. Then he pushed a button on the TV’s remote and watched the image in front of him implode in a swirl of sparks. (The sparks were what was left of Oprah, who’d been leaning forward to refine a question.)

  Closing the door to the bedroom, Duran walked toward the intercom, knowing it was Nico, but knowing also that formalities had to be observed. He spoke into the metal grid.

  “Yes?”

  The reply came back an instant later, light and musical. “It’s Nico—Nico, Nico, Nico!”

  He could tell by her voice that she hadn’t been taking her lithium. She was so full of herself, you could hear it in her tone. “You’re right on time,” Duran told her. “Come on up.”

  While he waited for her, he found himself wondering what Oprah had been about to ask when the intercom buzzed. The image of her face remained in his mind—lips pursed, head inclined, brow slightly furrowed. Eyes narrowed. The Look. The one she adopted when she was about to ask a really prying question. It was a look that combined mischief with apology, inviting the person before her to enter into a kind of conspiracy. These questions—your answers—our pact. If I dare to ask, will you dare to answer? It was a brilliant look, much better than Barbara Walters’s po-faced ooze of sympathetic understanding, or Diane Sawyer’s wincing compassion.