Rabid Read online

  Monday, February fifteenth, the Ides of February, almost a month hence. On his calendar, pencil ringed the date.

  But this renewal, these results and this particular grant, were problematic. His hesitant typing bounced staccato off the crammed-full bookshelves and cold windowpane.

  His office door was closed. A poster detailing cartooned cellular apoptosis pathways covered even the arrow-slit window.

  Apoptosis, that most orderly, regulated death, was Conroy’s secret interest, though he toed the party line that apoptosis in neurons was absent or aberrant. Even an infected brain cell is better than a dead brain cell.

  On the poster, cartoon arrows representing intracellular pathways bulged or diminished, and the whole poster suggested a global map of WWII armies surging, clashing, retreating, re-supplying, running amok, traveling on their bellies, flanking, fighting, and overrunning.

  Ah, crap. He had forgotten about Bev’s counseling appointment that night. He wrote Coun c Beverly @ OLPH on the month-at-a-glance calendar on his desk, then opened his office door and leaned out.

  Leila stood beyond Joe and Danna, the young grad student who bound her electrically frizzed hair in a ponytail. Danna sucked on the end of an eighteen-inch long pipette. Buffer, which is just lightly salted water, shot up the glass straw.

  Her undergrad PI had taught her to mouth-pipette and Conroy hadn’t broken her of the dangerous habit yet. Danna maintained that her mouth was cleaner than the gunk-filled pipette bulbs that littered the bench like beached pufferfish, so she got less contamination.

  Contamination of the samples wasn’t the reason that she shouldn’t be mouth-pipetting, of course.

  Conroy scowled at Danna sucking away on the pipette, and she goggled at him over the borosilicate tube as if she were sucking a thick milkshake up a straw.

  Conroy called “Leila?”

  Leila turned. A scratched Plexiglas shield reflected white lines of fluorescent light over her exotic face. She held a micropipetter in one blue-gloved hand and a tiny tube in the other. Her tie-died rainbow lab coat enveloped her slim, black clothes.

  “Do you have a moment? Computer problem.”

  She said, “I’m elbow-deep in ethidium. One minute?”

  Ethidium bromide is a DNA stain. The dye molecules slide between DNA bases. Things that intercalate into DNA are strong, strong mutagens.

  One sip, and you’ve got two years before your body dissolves in tumors.

  ~~~~~

  In the Sloan lab, Danna sidled up to Joe while he bent over, loading tiny drops of blue-dyed glycoprotein into a gelatinous slab. “O’Malley’s graduation party is tonight. You going?”

  O’Malley rode a black motorcycle, had a beer vending machine rigged to accept AA tokens, and thought he was the wildest player on the planet. Fate had granted him the name of a cartoon alley cat. Everyone talked about him.

  Danna’s father was the Lutheran minister in a small Iowa town and her mother was a teacher, and the gossip in the molecular biology department shocked her. The hardy stock of gossip grapevine tendrilled the university buildings in lieu of more prestigious ivy.

  Joe click-ejected a tip into the waste bucket. “Is Leila going?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know. Dr. S. just called her into his office again. Is she dating anyone?”

  Joe stabbed the tip box with the steak knife-sized micropipetter. After he and Leila had stopped sleeping together last year, he hadn’t seen her leave the bar with anyone, but Leila was secretive to the point of subterfuge. “I don’t know who she’s dating these days.”

  “Do you think she’ll go to O’Malley’s party?”

  “What, are you looking for herd immunity?” Joe filled a well with glycoprotein.

  “I don’t want to be there alone with O’Malley and his rugby friends.”

  “I’ll go. I’ll bet Leila will. She gets on well with O’Malley. Did you hear about that guy at Berkeley who got Herpes B?”

  She smoothed her hair. “Macaques are all latently infected with Herpes B, green monkeypox, and everything else. I’m grossed out that it peed in his eye. I’m glad we work with mice.”

  “He’s got to take four grams of acyclovir every day for the rest of his life, otherwise the encephalitis will kill him.” Joe shook his head. “Herpes encephalitis. That’s a bad way to go.”

  ~~~~~

  Leila de-gloved, pulled off her lab coat, and perfunctorily knocked on Conroy’s open office door while she walked in. Stripped down to street clothes, the air cooled her arms and hands.

  Conroy’s face was tight around his eyes, stricken. He said, “I have to cancel on dinner tonight.”

  She kicked the door closed. “We weren’t supposed to have dinner tonight. Are you all right, Conroy?”

  If anything, his eyes drooped further. “Yeah. Fine.”

  He was hiding something as obviously as the morning after she had first seduced him, when he had stuttered like Humbert Humbert confronted with a nymphet. This time, something had snakebitten him. She blurted, “Are you HIV-positive?”

  Conroy blinked and a small, dismissive smile curved his lip. “No.”

  Leila’s hand, clutching the front of Conroy’s desk, cramped. Everyone in the lab lurked just outside the door, and her voice dropped in case someone walked by. “So what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” His eyebrows clenched hard when he scowled.

  He was really upset about something.

  All this talk about dinners and emotional melodrama was ridiculous. She didn’t want to deal with it. “Fine, then. Let’s take a break from the fucking.”

  He slapped the desk. “Are you threatening me?”

  He was acting as if they had a relationship. Jesus, he might end up stalking her, and she might have to grab her gun and shoot him when he broke into her apartment in the dead of night and she woke up to him masturbating over her.

  She leaned on his desk. “Get a hold of yourself.”

  Conroy stared at his huge computer screen. “I don’t want to take a break.”

  “Then stop this crap.” Leila tapped his monitor. He looked up. His eyes were startlingly, vibrantly blue, like an empty cable television channel. “Do you actually need anything for the grant?”

  “It was a pretext.”

  “Fine, then.” Leila opened the office door. “I’ll email you that gel,” she said as she left.

  At her bench, Leila donned her tie-dyed lab coat and struggled into sticky nitrile gloves the color of Conroy’s bright blue eyes.

  O’Malley’s graduation party started at ten. She should toss her handcuffs into her purse. They had broken O’Malley’s pair.

  ~~~~~

  That evening, Dante paced.

  Books, magazines, and papers packed the mismatched library bookshelves: rococo teak, oak veneer, bowing metal, and raw lumber stacked with slump block.

  A knock creaked open the door.

  Mrs. Sloan called through the crack, “Father Dante?”

  “Si? Yes?” Mrs. Sloan walked in with a man. Moderate lines creased the man’s middle-fifties face. Dante ventured, “Mr. Sloan?”

  “Dr. Sloan,” the man said.

  His pompous attempt to establish authority annoyed Dante. He did not rise to it. “Father Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi. Pleased to meet you.” Dante opened his hand toward the two plush chairs. “Sit down, please?”

  Mrs. Sloan sat and stared at her clenched hands in her lap. Dante had thought that she might be smug because she had initiated the counseling, but she seemed despondent.

  Her husband crossed his legs and twitched his foot. “This’ll have to be short. I have some work to finish. I’m a doctor and a professor.” Sloan drew himself up in his chair. “I work on neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Synucleopathies.” Haughty chin juts punctuated his rehearsed speech.

  Oh, good Lord. This man was that C. Sloan, the American neurologist who dribbled trivial research into good but not first-rate journals. Neuroscience is a
large field, but everyone knows everyone at least by reputation.

  Dante settled himself in the chair opposite them and stretched his tired legs. “Alzheimer’s is an amyloidopathy and a tauopathy, not a synucleopathy.”

  Sloan’s head dropped and his jaw cracked. “You’re in neuroscience?”

  If Dante had been less enraged at the evil of the world or if he had eaten lunch, he might have been kinder, as befits a priest. “My research concerns molecular psychiatry. I have a paper in last month’s JAMA,” a better journal that Sloan published in. Dante did not need to mention his recent papers in Nature and Science. He left Sloan something to discover.

  Sloan’s fidgeting foot stopped twitching. “Wait, you’re D.M. Petrocchi-Bianchi?”

  Smoothly, from behind his steepled fingers, he said, “I prefer ‘Father Dante.’ It is nice to meet you, Mr. Sloan.” He stood and opened the door for them to leave. “You must be in a hurry to return to your lab. You are quite tardy, so we cannot speak today. However, please send Dinah and Christina in.”

  “Christine,” Mrs. Sloan said.

  “Yes, excuse me.” A headache was forming behind his left eye. Dante pinched the bridge of his nose. “Good night, Mr. Sloan.”

  ~~~~~

  Sister Mary Francis walked Dinah and Christine under the cathedral’s vulturing saints to the library. The girls’ ponytails twitched above their plaid jumpers.

  Earlier, Sister had tried to remove some books from the library, but Father Dante had raged that no one was to go in there.

  She complained to Father Samual about this new priest not knowing his place, but Sam had shushed her and told her that the new priest was from the Vatican and that he was God’s man. Sam wouldn’t even tell her what he meant or why he was suddenly nervous and pale.

  And now she was throwing two of her own little girls into the priest’s lair.

  At the door, she dropped to one knee.

  Their mother stood aside, struck mute.

  Sister said, “Just answer his questions. If you need anything, you call out, and I’ll be right outside the door.”

  They nodded.

  Father Dante opened the door. His curt chin jut suggested anger.

  She ushered the girls into the library. The wooden door closed, but stopped before the door hit the jamb. Father Dante’s handspan measured the distance the door remained open, about nine inches, and then withdrew.

  ~~~~~

  Conroy rocked on his feet. His wife sat in a pew and regarded the lurid, crucified Christ suspended above the altar.

  The Protestants were smart to remove Christ from the cross and contemplate the abstract form of the torture device. Not that he understood them, either.

  He leaned on the pew where Beverly was sitting and asked her, “Why is he talking to the kids?”

  “Something about the school.”

  “I don’t like it.” He didn’t like that priest or his long black cassock or his long, black hair. The guy looked like a hippie or a Renaissance relic. “You didn’t tell me he was a scientist.” He had looked like a fool all day, first with Leila threatening him, now this.

  Beverly shrugged and kept her eyes on Christ.

  “I’ll PubMed him, see if he’s really who he says he is.”

  His wife didn’t answer.

  “So what’s the matter with you? I thought you wanted counseling.”

  The overhead lights, dimmed to resemble candlelight, reflected off gold strands in her brown hair. She smoothed her beige skirt. “We’ll talk later.”

  “There’s something else?” There was always something fucking else. Maybe he could find Leila’s hidden stash of scotch at the lab.

  ~~~~~

  At choir practice that evening, Bev adjusted the piano bench and limbered up her fingers with a few scales. Minor keys suited her mood: dour, wintry music. The claxon fifth and descending minor scale were from Lieutenant Kije’s Suite, Prokofiev, snow falling on spilled Russian blood.

  Arriving choir members blew in, laughing in the January chill: happy, silly people who didn’t snoop where they shouldn’t. Bev stretched her lower back, which had tightened while she had crushed drives in the golf simulator at the pro shop that afternoon.

  Father Dante strode out of the library toward the piano.

  Bev gathered the sheet music she had been using, and the paper slipped sideways and fluttered. She snatched the sheaf and managed to catch half. The rest splashed on the floor.

  Father Dante was beside her, sweeping the pages together. He asked, “Could you choose the music for the Mass this week?”

  “But I wouldn’t know what to pick.” She took the pages from his hands. She might get the hymns wrong. She might ruin the Mass.

  “Afterwards, you can tell me what they are.” He sat beside her on the piano bench, which was far too small for two adults and her thigh rested against his black cossack over his legs. He handed her a list of names. “These people, are any of them in the choir?”

  “Well, it depends.” She pointed to the middle of the list. “White is probably Bill and Melanie. Melanie is a mezzo.” She pointed at a frosted-blonde woman in the third row. “These people,” she pointed to Lawrence, James, and Douglas, “only go to Mass and school events. Dietrich is Laura and Don. Laura is an alto. She’s wearing the red blouse and khaki slacks.”

  Bev waved to Laura, sitting between Lydia and Mary.

  ~~~~~

  Laura waved back to Bev and then whispered to Lydia and Mary. They had been discussing that Father Nicolai was AWOL and that no one had seen him for two weeks. Father Sam had only muttered “transferred” with tight lips, and he was never tight-lipped about anything.

  Laura said, “My, isn’t our Bev cozy with the new priest?”

  Mary, behind them, leaned in. “He’s so young. What is he, thirty-five? What a waste.”

  Lydia said, “Yeah, what a waist, and his ass is nice, too.”

  Laura smiled. “Oh, Liddy, you’re awful. How can you tell under that cassock?”

  Lydia flipped her bottle-blonde hair behind her shoulder. “Anyone with a face that gorgeous is morally bound to have a nice ass, too. Is it just me, or is there something especially sexy about a priest?”

  “Intrinsically playing hard to get.” Mary fluffed her naturally blonde hair, preening.

  “Forbidden fruit,” Laura countered.

  Lydia said, “He can take you to Heaven because he knows the way.”

  “Liddy! You are so going to Hell.” Laura examined one rough fingernail.

  “If that’s where all the fun people are,” Lydia said. “And he’s so cozy with our Bev.”

  Mary made a dismissive hmmf sound in her throat. “He should be up here flirting with us instead of wasting his time with our sweet little Bev.”

  The priest looked at them. He stood and walked up the risers toward them.

  Lydia said, “Quick, Mary, wish to win the lottery.”

  Laura said, “Oh, crap,” and her inner Catholic schoolgirl emerged and she flashed back to high school, when Father Joseph advanced to confiscate the note she had been passing, a parodied song titled, “Father Joseph and the Amazing Lipstick-Covered Dream Condom.”

  ~~~~~

  Four lady friends watched Father Dante stride up the stairs.

  One is oblivious and the most innocent, contrary to public opinion.

  One has committed adultery with another’s husband.

  One will break the priest’s vow of chastity.

  One is the mother of a raped child.

  ~~~~~

  The full choir surrounded Father Dante and Bev.

  During the trial, they took sides.

  Some blamed the wife because she was blind to what was happening in her own home.

  Some blamed the husband because his screwing around precipitated the whole thing.

  Some blamed the other woman, the only one who wasn’t breaking sacred vows, as they always do.

  Some blamed the priest because God should not le
t murder happen.

  Some sided with the priest, for surely he was the innocent one.

  Some supported the wronged wife for fear of being a victim like her.

  Some took the side of the husband, for they were not blameless themselves.

  A few sympathized with the other woman because they knew in their hearts that they were as much the very Devil as she.

  ~~~~~

  Bev was late getting home because she circled the block four times. The January stars revolved around the cold suburban rooftops as she cruised.

  She finally parked her car in the garage beside Conroy’s Porsche—should a family man own such a smug, sexual car?—and walked into the hot house. The smell of the girls’ no-tears shampoo drifted in the laundry room.

  “Beverly?” Conroy hollered from somewhere in the house.

  “Yes?” She set her purse on the washer, and her keychain jangled on the enameled metal.

  “I missed dinner,” he yelled.

  She considered picking up her purse and circling the block until Conroy figured out that his plate was in the refrigerator where it always was whenever he was late, but she sloughed off her coat, hung it in the closet, and meandered toward the kitchen, where she removed his plate from the fridge and microwaved it.

  The pork chop and corn soufflé rotated in the microwave. It would be easy to shake a little rat poison on it, but she didn’t have any rat poison.

  She sat with him in the dining room while he ate and said, “I hope counseling will be better tomorrow.”

  Conroy cut a slice away from the apple-glazed pork chop with a strong steak knife, then divvied that into pieces. “I didn’t like him talking to our girls, alone, with the door closed.”

  Bev couldn’t watch him tuck away that pork chop that she had spent an hour and a half perfecting. He didn’t even chew. “He said it was about the school.”

  “Still inappropriate. He could have been doing anything in there with that door closed.”

  “The door wasn’t closed. It was partway open.” Conroy could have been doing anything to that whore in the hotel room that he had booked in the names Conroy and Beverly Sloan. Or that whore could have been doing anything to him. “And Father Dante is a priest.”