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Authors: Gerrie Nelson

Lab Notes: a novel (9 page)

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μ CHAPTER ELEVEN μ

 

Diane slammed her phone onto the bed and stepped out on the balcony of her hotel suite. She breathed in the cool, dry air and tried to relax.

Her west-facing luxury suite overlooking Quito basin was one of the perks of being in the Carrera entourage. Earlier, she had watched the creeping shadows as the sun set behind volcanic peaks. Now it was dusk, and the city in the middle of the world twinkled to life under a deep lapis sky.

But being out of synch with Vincent—who was not answering his phone—she couldn’t fully enjoy the view, or even savor that day’s business successes.

Gabriel had arranged the daylong meeting with the Interior Secretary and the head of the Economic Development Council. The government officials listened attentively while Diane presented her plan to visit Ecuadorian tribes to study their native healing.

Late this afternoon they had signed a contract permitting BRI to collect plant specimens in the country’s jungles. In return, Ecuador would participate in any profits the venture brought in. Both sides felt they had reason to celebrate tonight.

Diane took a last look at the dimming sky and stepped back inside her suite. She grabbed her jacket, stuffed her phone into her purse and headed for the first-floor restaurant.

After a sumptuous meal and heavy dessert, the Ecuadorian officials graciously picked up the tab, then excused themselves saying they had an early morning meeting. Diane, Raymond and Gabriel lingered in the opulent dining room sipping coffee.

Diane regarded the men’s wine-glazed eyes and wondered why she hadn’t slipped under the table by then.

The evening had begun with numerous champagne toasts before dinner, then proceeded with a different shade of wine for every course thereafter. She should have been comatose. But the long-distance friction with Vincent had kept her edgy and sober. She dreaded another sleepless night.

Diane said, “Have you ever heard of the
Jivaro
ceremony of spiritual healing?”

Gabriel and Raymond twitched out of their stupors.

“No,” they murmured.

“The ritual is part of the culture of an Ecuadorian tribe called the
Jivaro.
I missed their ceremony the last time I was here. Would you like to attend one with me tonight?”

Raymond declined, looking annoyed at her liveliness.

Gabriel suppressed a yawn. “That sounds interesting.”

Diane, Gabriel and Gabriel’s bodyguard, Michael, took a taxi to the edge of the old city. The driver knew exactly where to drop them off—the foot of a steep, cobbled alleyway with dim intermittent lighting showing the way up.

They began their ascent—with Michael several discreet steps behind.

When Diane was first introduced to the diminutive, red-headed Michael a few months earlier, she questioned Gabriel’s choice of a bodyguard who had not only the hair but also the physique of “Carrot Top.”

Gabriel laughed and told her how he had met Michael a decade before on a trip to Venezuela.

He and a business associate were leaving a restaurant in Caracas when they were accosted by a man who aimed a pistol at them and demanded their watches and wallets. Michael, a complete stranger, seemed to descend from the sky, wrestling the man to the ground and divesting him of his weapon.

He refused payment for his trouble. But he gave Gabriel his business card which identified him as a “security consultant” in Miami. Gabriel hired him on the spot, and they’d been together ever since.

Gabriel explained: “Michael’s size is deceptive. People don’t see him as a threat. But he moves like a monkey; strikes like a snake.” It also helped that he was fluent in Spanish.

Tonight, Diane found the bodyguard’s presence reassuring.

Just then, a primal shout erupted from the top of the stairs. Gabriel looked at Diane. “Are you certain about what goes on up there?”

She gave him an impish grin. “If I were, there’d be little reason to go.”

Gabriel smirked and kept climbing. Whistles and chants grew louder with every step.

Gabriel turned to Diane. “You handled the negotiations well, as usual. I have watched you closely. If you can do business in Central and South America, you can do it anywhere.”

Diane felt grateful for the shadows that hid her blush. “Thank you.”

They reached the top where they found a round hut surrounded by torches. Peeking inside, they saw a large circle of fire on the dirt floor and an assortment of shrunken heads suspended from the ceiling.

Diane and Gabriel looked at each other, shrugged and stepped inside. In the center, a robed shaman sipped from a cup, then rolled his head and passed the drink into a small audience sitting on the dirt floor. Someone motioned for Diane and Gabriel to sit. The whistles and chants resumed.

Diane watched the healer and listened to his songs. She had seen many such rituals on her jungle treks. The cup of
natema
was passed to her. Without hesitation, she sipped, hoping it wasn’t made with saliva, as many primitive libations were. Gabriel bravely followed suit.

Almost immediately, the fire blurred, then broke up into small torches that floated about and whistled. Diane turned to Gabriel. He had morphed into a fanged creature with soft eyes. The surroundings became frenzied with rushing forms and circling chants, causing a sort of motion sickness. But, unaccountably, all the strangeness combined to make Diane feel quite happy. Gradually the merry-go-round came to a stop. But the happiness remained.

Diane and Gabriel looked at each other and laughed, almost hysterically.

“You were a loveable creature,” she said. “What was I?”

He looked at her, confused, as if seeing her for the first time. He seemed to grope for words. Then he said, “You had no form. You were a power that effected many outcomes.” Then he shook his head as if clearing it from an unpleasant vision.

Though most of the audience seemed to be staying for another round of happiness, Gabriel and Diane helped each other to stand up, and they staggered from the hut arm in arm. Giggling, they tripped down the alleyway.

Inhibitions submerged by the
natema,
Diane turned to Gabriel and said with a teasing tone, “I heard a rumor that you killed your wife. That can’t be true.”

Gabriel exploded with laughter. “I have never had a wife. But if I had, I might have killed her.”

Diane, confused but smiling, said, “But your son—I saw him at the BRI Christmas party.”

“He is my father’s son,” Gabriel’s voice remained pleasant.

“He’s your brother?”

Now Gabriel spoke slowly, as if explaining to a child, “Eduardo is my father’s son.”

Still not grasping the distinction, but not wanting the hilarity to go away, Diane said, “Oh, I see.”

Diane and Gabriel burst into the hotel lobby amid the stares of the few night owls still lounging there. Giggling their way to the elevator, they brushed off each other’s dirt-covered clothing.

Gabriel stepped off the elevator at Diane’s floor, insisting he deliver her safely to her suite only a few steps away. Arriving at her door, he looked down at the key in her hand. Then slowly his glance moved up to her face and remained fixed there. His eyes held an unmistakable question.

Diane was struck motionless, caught in the white heat of his gaze. For an eternal moment, her heartbeat was the only sound interrupting the silence. Then an elevator chimed its arrival at a lower floor, jolting her back to her senses. She turned away.

Gabriel leaned in, gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek and said softly, “Sleep tight, Diana.” Then he walked away.

Diane slept fitfully. Her dreams were a montage of herself and Olimpia running through mountainous jungles, of Gabriel Carrera’s intense glance and Vincent’s angry one, of Latin America’s marble corridors of power.

μ CHAPTER TWELVE μ

 

Gabriel Carrera’s private jet was on its final approach to Houston’s Hobby Airport. Diane tightened her seat belt and watched through the small window as the ground lights grew larger. They were not a welcome sight. When the wheels touched down, she would be thrust back into the tense reality of her personal life. And the Bellforts weren’t making things any easier.

To Diane’s dismay, when Charlotte Bellfort discovered Gabriel Carrera was accompanying them back to Houston, she planned a last minute dinner party “for the travelers.” She sent a message to Diane saying that she will be sure to call and invite Vincent also.

Diane wanted to see her husband alone. They needed to resolve their differences about
Peruvase,
and discuss his lunatic plan to sail off by himself. But now, with the dinner invitation, she and Vincent will be unhappily reunited at the Bellforts’ home. And their marital discord will loom as large over the diners as Charlotte’s crystal centerpiece, limiting eye contact and stilting the conversation.

On top of that (judging by the vibes at breakfast in Quito this morning), the dinner atmosphere will be charged with the current crackling between her and Gabriel Carrera, generated by their mutual awareness of his unspoken request last night and her silent rebuff.

She suspected that she had, quite literally, been saved by the bell. Sometime in the middle of the night (after the
Jivaro
state of happiness wore off) she had analyzed the situation and concluded that the
natema
was the culprit, and she was willing to put the incident behind her. But something in Gabriel’s manner told her that, as far as he was concerned, the matter had not yet been settled.

Returning from the Friday evening sailboat races, Vincent walked into the living room, peeked under the lid of the baby grand, then headed upstairs to his telescope with Huck at his heel. He climbed the spiral stairs to the cupola, flipped on the light and studied the room’s celestial wallpaper.

Dark blue stick figures, representing the galaxies, covered the light gray background above the windows and tumbled down into the spaces between them. Interspersed among the stars; astrolabes, telescopes and sextants floated through space.

Vincent ran his index finger past Perseus, then along the configuration of Andromeda to Pegasus. Down one leg of the winged horse, he found what he was looking for: Hidden in the busy wallpaper pattern was a series of faint numbers recorded by a careful hand.

Vincent had studied the copious jottings a few nights earlier. Checking them against his star chart, he discovered that some of them were dates and coordinates of right ascension and declination, representing the space addresses of celestial bodies. The numbers had obviously been placed there by Dr. Harry Lee.

At first, it seemed a bit macabre exploring the universe with a dead man as a guide. But Vincent soon developed a sense of astral kinship with the murdered scientist. After all, he occupied Harry Lee’s office and laboratory and lived in the house originally built for him.

Until now, Vincent had set his telescope to the hand-written
celestial
coordinates, but he had not yet tried the single numbers—obvious earth-bound compass headings—listed below them.

As for the strings of numbers and letters lightly penciled low on the wall, close to the baseboard, he had no clue. But their decoding would have to wait for another day. Tonight was the night for the compass headings.

Vincent stepped over the dozing dog and peered closely at the wallpaper. “Let’s see here: three hundred twenty degrees.” He swiveled the powerful telescope toward the far shore of the lake, then switched off the light. After giving his pupils time to dilate in the darkness, he looked through the eyepiece.

Ever-so-slowly he angled the lens downward, all the while reporting his progress to the dog lying at his feet. “Nothing, nothing…nothing…There!” he shouted. He had located the blurry horizon. Then after a series of infinitesimal moves, he picked up a nebulous cluster of ground lights. He reached for the focus knob and moved the lights in closer…closer…

At the far edge of his consciousness, a telephone rang. But the blurred lights out there commanded his attention.

Vincent played with the adjustments for several seconds before he realized he was holding his breath. He straightened up, exhaled and scratched his chin through his beard. “This is like asking an elephant to tiptoe,” he told Huck.

The phone stopped ringing.

After what seemed like hours of incremental adjustments to the telescope, a psychedelic array of lights appeared before him. On the other side of his lens, human arms and heads bobbed in and out of view in a frenzied environment of flashing colors.

Vincent pulled back his focus slightly to get the broader picture. Then he chuckled. “What do we have here?”

A distant ringing began again.

Vincent sharpened the focus. And before his amazed eyes appeared a lakefront two-story floating bar and dance floor called
The Pelican Club
—according to a red neon sign on the roof. The second-story writhed with hyper animated bodies. From Vincent’s vantage point, it appeared like a bacchanal of flexing Adonises and undulating Aphrodites moving to the rhythms of colored strobe lights. Vincent chuckled again. “You devil, Harry.” Obviously, Harry Lee had enjoyed observing terrestrial bodies as well as celestial ones.

The ringing stopped.

Vincent’s eyes watered and he realized he had forgotten to blink for some time. Stepping away from the telescope, he wiped his eyes and switched on the light.

Again he checked the numbers on the wall. “Two hundred twenty-five degrees.” Vincent swiveled the telescope toward the opposite side of the lake, then switched off the light. “Let’s see what else caught your eye, Harry.”

Almost immediately, Vincent observed a blue blur through the powerful optics. Slowly, slowly he brought the lights in closer, resisting the urge to make large corrections.

Even before he achieved perfect focus, he recognized the glowing blue “H” on the Hilton Hotel at the far end of the lake. After further adjustment to the angle and focus, he was amazed to see a man knotting his tie in one of the hotel rooms. Obviously, the man didn’t feel the need to close his drapes on the seventh or eighth floor overlooking the water.

“Looks like our friend Harry might have had some voyeuristic tendencies, Huck.”

Keeping the telescope at two hundred twenty-five degrees, Vincent angled it closer to ground level and pulled back the focus slightly. He hoped to find something else on that heading to squelch his suspicion that Harry Lee was peeping at hotel guests.

Suddenly, before his startled eyes, Diane’s face appeared. Transfixed, Vincent watched her brush back ringlets from her forehead and take a sip of champagne. Then she smiled.

In his haste to discover the beneficiary of that smile, Vincent pulled the focus back too far and blurred his view. He breathed deeply. Then, with great restraint, he made slow corrections.

The distant ringing began once again.

Vincent’s hand trembled, making incremental adjustments almost impossible. But he persisted. And finally, “There!” Then, dumfounded, he said, “Where is she?”

Even with the scene out of focus, he could make out two men. A tall, slender man was speaking to a thickset one who had his back to the telescope. Vincent sharpened the view. The men turned and sat down on the edge of an oblong planter.

Vincent carefully focused on their faces. He was looking at Raymond Bellfort and Gabriel Carrera. For several seconds Vincent stood immobilized, watching, controlling his breathing lest they hear him. Then, with a guilty shiver, he jumped back from the scope.

He paced and stroked his beard. Then curiosity defeated his conscience, and he went back to the eyepiece. The men were deep in conversation. How he wished he could read their lips.

Then a thought crept across his mind:
Could Harry Lee lip-read?
His body quivered at the implication.

Why was Harry Lee spying on Raymond Bellfort?

The ringing in the background stopped.

Abandoning hope of eavesdropping on the conversation, Vincent pulled back the focus
just one nerve impulse
to broaden his view.

The two men sat on a wide terrace illuminated by soft lights that glowed from the bases of curved stucco railings. Behind them a boat lift held Bellfort’s 30-foot runabout. Raymond reached over and patted Gabriel on the upper arm as if congratulating him.

Vincent recoiled, bitterly recalling the same glad-handed treatment he and Diane received on that very terrace. All the while, Bellfort was plotting to sell
Peruvase
out from under him.

He watched the men through vengeful eyes while he planned his next move.

Diane crawled into bed and slid close to her husband. She had missed him.

Vincent had welcomed her home warmly. He apologized that he was so involved with the telescope he didn’t hear the telephone ringing.

He was still edgy about BRI. Even so, Diane was glad to be home. She began drifting off to sleep when Vincent’s voice startled her.

“Has anyone ever told you that Harry Lee was hard of hearing?”

Diane’s heart sank. It seemed Vincent’s obsession with Dr. Lee had grown in her absence. “Was he?”

“I don’t know.”

The conversation was going nowhere. “What made you ask?”

“The telescope… It’s a long story.” He yawned and turned away from her.

Now Diane was wide awake. She rolled onto her back and stared into the darkness. When would the craziness end?

Vincent’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “I took
Woodwind
offshore overnight for a shakedown cruise while you were gone. This morning I registered for the Vera Cruz race. I’m going to single-hand it.”

BOOK: Lab Notes: a novel
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