The Last Goodbye (33 page)

I fell back on the pillow and closed my eyes. She climbed under my arm, laying her head on my shoulder. Sometime deep in the night—the dark outside was moonless and pitch—I awoke, and, finding her sleeping peacefully beside me, I pulled off the covers, leaving her body stark and beautiful on the white sheet. I watched her sleeping awhile, her chest moving rhythmically up and down.
Do you believe her?
The question came to me, a whisper in my mind. I watched her face, looking for traces of guilt. Somehow, she became aware of me, because after a few minutes her eyes fluttered open. She came to herself, looked at me, and smiled. “You look better,” she whispered. “I'm glad.”

“I am better,” I said. “Much better.” In that dark, moonless night, I let my fingertips answer my questions, tracing her stomach, moving up toward her breast. She moaned, letting herself fall under my control, giving in to the motion of my hands, my kiss.

What came next was an exquisite blur, a time out of time. Minutes passed, and when we finally joined our bodies she was transformed. She was strong—she demanded everything I had—and ravenous. Everything I had seen on stage—the complete abandon, the giving over to the moment—was present in her lovemaking. There was a wildness to her that night, a desperate, breathless passion. When her moment came, she raised her head, biting her lip, reveling in the pressure, the grip, the friction. I followed just after, and when I opened my eyes, she was looking up at me, smiling, driving her hips into me as hard as she could. And then it was over, and she pulled me down again, deep, into dark, dreamless sleep.

THE NEXT MORNING,
Friday, I rose to find Michele dressed again, just as the last time we had spent the night together. She was rumbling around in the kitchen, and I walked up behind her, my bathrobe open. She leaned back against me, letting me kiss her neck. “Hungry?” I asked. She didn't answer, and I turned her around to face me. “You okay?”

She looked down. “I have to go,” she said. “Charles has a speech at Georgia Tech. I have to be there.”

“He still insists you go through the charade?”

She nodded, clearly miserable. “I hate the thought of one more second with him. It's unspeakable.”

“I'm going, too.”

She turned to face me. “Jack, that's not a good idea. If he saw you, it could turn into a confrontation.”

“Nothing's going to happen. I'm going to see what I can find out.”

She looked at me a moment, but saw my resolve. “All right,” she said. “I have to go. The speech is at eleven, and it's already after eight. I have to change clothes, make myself presentable for the circus.” She sighed, anxiety etched into her face. “It doesn't matter,” she said. “We're all going to do what we do, now.” She looked up, kissed me quickly on the cheek, and turned to go. She stopped herself, looked back, and said, “I love you, you know that, right?” She smiled, but there was sadness in her expression. “Don't say it back,” she said. “It's easier.”

I walked to her, kissed her forehead, then on the mouth. “Be safe.” I picked up her purse, which she had left in my car when we went into the Glen together. “Your phone's in here,” I said. “Charge it up. I might need to find you.”

She accepted the bag, and kissed me on the mouth. “Don't let Charles see you, Jack.”

“Don't worry.”

Michele left, and I started to get ready. I gave Robinson a final call; once again, I got his cheery, unintentionally ironic message. I left another message, and hung up. A little after ten, the phone rang. I answered, hoping it was Robinson, and heard Blu's voice. “Jack? Where are you? Where have you been? Aren't you coming in?” Having so recently talked her out of resigning, I decided it wasn't the right time to tell Blu I had just escaped a kidnapping. “Yeah, I'm sorry.” I glanced over at my answering machine; its red light blinked insistently. “What have I missed?”

“Nicole Frost just called. She wants to make sure you're still going to meet her at Georgia Tech.”

“I'm going.”

“She wanted to remind you about meeting her out front ten minutes early.”

“No problem.”

“Are you sure you're all right?”

“I'm sure. Anything else?”

“I've got a list, actually. Oh, and Billy Little called. Twice.”

“What did Billy want?”

“Just for you to call back. He said it was important.”

“Look,” I said, “I've got to get moving. Call Nicole back and tell her I'm coming, okay?” It would be better to call Billy later. He would want to know everything, and I wasn't ready for him to weigh in. If he took things over—and he almost certainly would, given his penchant for doing things by the book—I would be knocked out of the loop. I had nothing against the police, but I'd already decided that if anybody was going to figure out what had happened to Doug and the others on the Lipitran test, it would take somebody under the radar, determined enough to break a few rules. I hung up and dressed, grateful for the time my body had to pull itself back together. Thanks to eighteen hours' rest and Michele's ministrations, I felt something like normal as I made the drive downtown to Tech.

Georgia Tech's campus is nobody's idea of an idyllic college campus. Distinctively urban, it crouches in the shadow of Atlanta's skyscrapers, symbolically dominated by the economic power that looms over it. The buildings are antiseptic, more like office parks than comfortable, ivy-covered bastions of learning. I wedged my car into three-quarters of a space and labored up a steep hill toward the Ferst Center, where Ralston was going to give his speech.

The usual collection of Tech students—the T-shirted, shorts-wearing future of America—was milling around between classes. The steps to the Ferst were alive with them, a mélange of denim, bare midriffs, and backpacks serving as background to a much smaller group of freshly scrubbed, impeccably dressed money managers, like Nicole. The brokers, smiling at each other with anxious, toothy grins, stood out among the students like architectural relief. Having themselves been recently released from the hallowed halls of learning, they already looked a million miles apart, from a different planet. They were still young—at least they clung to a healthy residue of youth—but unlike the students, the unwritten message tattooed across every forehead was this:
sleep later.
To the left of the hall, there was a collection of local news vans, satellite dishes perched on their roofs. The upcoming IPO for Horizn was attracting the business media like flies.

Nicole was on the stairs of the hall, chatting brightly to a handsome, prosperous-looking man in his late twenties. She was smiling, her shoulder-length black hair pulled back. She wore a pale blue dress, hemmed just above the knees, and matching, toeless heels. She had always been thin, but now, she was absolutely waifish. It made sense, considering she probably hadn't taken a lunch break in three years. But the glossy mouth and bright, intelligent eyes that had kept many an underclassman up at night dreaming were still intact. When she saw me, she brightened, if possible, a few more watts. She walked over, stopped, squinted at my face, then reached up to pluck off my sunglasses.

“Jack?” she asked. “My God, what happened to you?” I started to answer, but she waved me off. “You don't have to say a word, Jack. It's those clients of yours. They're horrible. Honestly, I don't see how you can do it.”

“Yeah, I guess thieving CEOs don't usually have much of a left hook.”

“Jack, how awful of you.” Carefully, she put my sunglasses back on my face. Then she straightened my collar with her free hand. The friction on my neck—still sore from the taping—wasn't pleasant. “Look at you, darling. Have you lost all your ties?”

“Burned them for fuel,” I said. Nicole and I went back a long ways, but I wasn't going to open up the last couple of days to her. “Let's go get some seats.”

Nicole grimaced. “You pain me, Jack. You really do.”

We climbed the stairs and entered the building, which was an angular redbrick affair with an Italian marble sculpture out front. A crowd was filing through the open atrium into the auditorium, and we followed in, taking seats two-thirds of the way back, stage left. Two video screens were integrated high up on the stage proscenium, one on each side. “Full house,” Nicole said. “And there are the cameras.” A gaggle of reporters were standing around just off stage at the front of the hall, their cameramen perching video equipment on their shoulders.

“There he is,” Nicole said, pointing to the front of the hall. There, stage right, was Ralston. He was standing with his back to the crowd, talking to a tall, gangly man in an ill-fitting suit. I watched Ralston for a while, thinking about being with his wife, quieting the pangs of guilt with the realization that their relationship had been a sham for a long time. The nature of their mismatch went deeper than the fact that she had lied about her background. They were from different eras as much as from different classes. Ralston might be chronologically older, but he was far more modern. Michele was emotionally a romantic, attached by her art to a time when love felt like destiny instead of Ralston's dry chemistry. Ralston was the new man, and so his brand of evil was new, far removed from the barbarism of Atlanta's mean streets. He didn't have the sullen, dispossessed anger of Folks Nation. He was simply tired of morality, as if, in his carefully and scientifically considered opinion, the whole idea of it had worn itself out and ceased to be relevant. His was a flat hate, without passionate chasms and valleys. Ghetto hate was alive, unpredictable, and, therefore, something that could be changed and healed. Ralston had become a simple machine for consumption, like the virus he had staked his fortune on treating. Sitting there surrounded by his ideological children, I felt distinctly out of place.
You believe in a certain kind of world, Jack. Good guys and bad guys.
Maybe that was it. Maybe there were no good guys and bad guys anymore. Maybe there was just deciding what you could tolerate in yourself, and then doing it. Maybe I was a dinosaur and the Nightmares and Ralstons and Stephenses and smart, attention-span-impaired kids from Georgia Tech were going to leave the rest of us in their hermetically clean, genetically engineered, dust.

“And there
she
is,” Nicole whispered. I turned my head, saw her, and was sucked back into the human. She was seated in the front row about fifty feet to my right, so I had an angle to see her profile. She wore simple gold earrings, and her hair was up, like it had been at the Four Seasons. She was so beautiful it hurt. The sight of her rocked me with lust, desire, passion, even love—antiquated ideas from another era, maybe, but still powerful enough to walk me into a beating by Folks Nation. Maybe we were both dinosaurs, both twisting in a new, brittle wind, uncomfortable as hell in the decade in which we found ourselves, and looking for comfort. Being the son of a beaten-down failure of a man who scratched dirt for a living in Dothan, Alabama, had taught me enough about desperation that her world wasn't as alien as it seemed. And there was the ineluctable chemistry of her messiness, the antiquarian character of how badly she needed saving that drew me to her. I wanted to be her knight in shining armor, and it was the wrong fucking century.

Nicole leaned toward me and whispered, “I wonder if he was rich when they got married.”

“Because?”

“Look
at her, darling. Women like that don't marry college professors.” She paused. “He must have been at least a little rich. Just not stinking rich, like he's going to be.”

“The IPO.”

Nicole nodded. “He's going to make a lot of people a lot of money, me included. So be nice.”

Ralston motioned to Michele, who stood and walked to her husband. He put his arm around her and they stood together, talking with the man wearing the bad suit. Ralston whispered something in Michele's ear, and she smiled wanly. It was hard to watch, knowing what even that moment of theater cost her. She hated him, but she feared him and Stephens more. But as long as they held in their hands the life of her daughter, she would do what they asked.

A couple of minutes later the lights dimmed, and the noisy hall quieted. Ralston took his seat beside his wife, but they didn't speak. I could just make them out in the half-light coming off the stage. Michele was staring straight ahead, a blank, dead stare on her face. The tall man Ralston had been speaking to appeared on stage to scattered, halfhearted applause. House lights from above lit the dais, leaving the crowd in relative darkness. “Good afternoon,” he said. “Welcome to the campus of Georgia Tech. I'm Dr. Barnard Taylor, Dean of the School of Biotechnology. This is a very exciting day for us.” As he spoke, a black-and-white image of a young Charles Ralston materialized on the video screens to each side of the stage. Nicole leaned over and whispered, “Show time.”

The picture showed a youthful, eager Ralston in a laboratory, wearing a white smock. For a simple photograph, it was remarkably communicative: Ralston's face was alive with ambition. He looked intense and happy, thoroughly in his element. “Charles Ralston began his career at something near and dear to our hearts,” the speaker said. “Doing research.” Scattered chuckles filtered upward from the crowd. “The work of Dr. Ralston has extended the lives of many thousands of people. Antiomyacin is, to this day, the only drug proven to manage the effects of hepatitis C, thus greatly diminishing the incidence of liver cancer for those infected. It has given hope to those who eagerly wait for the day of a cure.”

My conversation with Robinson flashed through my memory; Robinson had convinced Grayton to ante up millions to cure hepatitis C. There wasn't any question who had to lose if they were successful: Ralston, and Horizn. The picture on the screens changed to show an exterior of Horizn's current offices. “In the last fifteen years, Charles Ralston has taken Horizn into new areas of pharmacological research, making impressive gains in the treatment of nephritis and other renal diseases. In the process, he has become a fixture of Atlanta business, employing over fourteen hundred people.” Dr. Taylor smiled. “Some of them are even graduates of Georgia Tech.”