The Placebo Effect (32 page)

“No. It's only something for Yolles Pharmaceuticals to think about.”

Steve turned to Hialeah and said, “Yolles Pharma has always rejected the idea that our community has health issues that need to be addressed—at least researched.”

Decker looked at Hialeah but said nothing.

“It's just signs and stuff?” Steve asked Decker.

“Yes, Steve,” Decker said, “but there have to be enough people to make a statement.”

“You mean enough black people, don't you, Mr. Roberts?” Hialeah said, her voice tight, angry.

“Yes,” Decker said, “black people to picket Yolles Pharmaceuticals.”

Hialeah stared at her beautiful hands for a moment. Decker was sure she was going to tell him to get the fuck out of her life with this racial crap, but then she looked at Steve and said, “Do you really believe this could do our community some good?”

“It was you who brought up the problem with Yolles Pharma. It was years ago,” Steve said.

“On the anniversary of our first date.”

“Yeah, you complained a blue streak,” Steve replied, his smile widening.

Hialeah turned to Decker and said, “And when would you like this little protest to take place?”

“HE'S A RANK AMATEUR BUT WE CAN'T FIND HIM, IS THAT
what you're trying to tell me?” Yslan demanded.

Mr. T nodded and shrugged his enormous shoulders. Ted Knight said, “We've got people all over this town. We'll find him.”

Yslan pushed her coffee away. “I prefer the hot black crap they call coffee in New York.”

“This is Cincinnati, German coffee.”

“It's shitty coffee is what it is.” She got to her feet and stretched her back muscles. She was thinking,
What's Decker's nature? He's a special kind of synaesthete
, then she addressed the second part of Marcus Aurelius' famous question from
The Silence of the Lambs
—that damned film again! “What does he do?” She asked aloud.

The two men looked at each other, not knowing what she was asking.

“Look. He's not a cop or a PI with friends in a police department. He has to find support somewhere. Look what he's already managed. So who's helping him? So I repeat. What does Decker Roberts do?”

“He teaches acting,” Ted Knight said.

“He works on documentaries,” Mr. T added.

Yslan thought about that but it got her nowhere. Then she asked, “How did he manage to get things done in New York?”

“He contacted that actor Josh…”

“Near,” Yslan said, but she wasn't looking at him.

“Yeah. Then he hid at that green-haired freak's place in Queens,” added Mr. T.

“Yes, he did,” said Yslan. “One an actor and one on a production crew of a TV shoot.” Yslan turned back to the men. “What did he do before he was an acting teacher?”

“He directed theatre, didn't he?”

“Yes.” Suddenly Yslan was in motion. “There's a professional theatre in Cincinnati, isn't there? That's got to be his connection here.”

That evening's
Cincinnati Enquirer
carried a lead story in its real estate section—“Treloar Building Ready to be Sold to Mystery Buyer.” Decker read the article in Steve's tiny kitchen and went to high-five him when the younger man put forward his fist—pound. No more high-fives—now we pound.

Steve smiled, and before Decker could ask how he managed to get the article in the paper so fast said, “The editor owes me a favour.”

“Lots of people owe you favours, Steve?”

“You bet your white ass they do. So what else do we need to finish your business here, Mr. Roberts?”

Decker thought,
All the pieces are in place. Now I need somewhere to mount the event.
He said, “You know that weird building on Plum Street?”

“The synagogue?”

“Yeah, it looks more like a mosque.”

“It's a synagogue in the old Byzantine style. That was the way they made them in the nineteenth century. Used to be hundreds of them in the world. Now the only one outside of Cincy is in New York City. The rest, Mr. Hitler took care of.”

“Didn't care for the architecture?”

“Evidently hated it.”

“How do you know so much…”

“…about that synagogue?”

“Yeah.”

“My cousin's the Shabbos goy over there.”

Decker stared at Steve. “Is there anything in this town you don't know?”

“Nope,” said Steve, completely without arrogance. “If a black man's going to prosper in a place like this, you have to know everything you can—and I know a lot.”

“You do. So can your cousin, the Shabbos goy, get us into the synagogue?”

“Sure.”

“And do you have somewhere else to live for a while?”

“Why?”

“This could get a bit dicey.”

“Who all are looking for you, Mr. Roberts?”

“Folks.”

Suddenly Steve was stern, “What folks, Mr. Roberts?”

“Feds,” Decker said as simply as he could.

Steve suddenly smiled. “Whoosh—thought it was someone serious.” He went to a cupboard and pulled down a suitcase, and for the first time spoke in full ghetto patois. “Black gent always gots a packed suitcase and cribs throughout the metro-poh-littan area.”

A half hour later Yslan and Mr. T had the terrified artistic director of the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park virtually on his knees with fear. After an initial and pathetically weak attempt to force Yslan to get a warrant, he handed over the theatre's records, which went back almost forty-five years and were—naturally enough, being from a theatre—all stacked in boxes and not yet computerized.

In a box marked 1993 they found what they were looking for—the program for a production of
The Dwarf
both adapted from the Swedish novel and directed by Decker Roberts.

“Great, and what do we do with that?” Mr. T demanded.

“We search out every name in the entire thing—everyone from usher to star.”

Across town Henry-Clay held the Cincinnati
Enquirer
real estate section in one hand while he stared at the Treloar Building and shouted into the speakerphone. “Find out who the hell is going to buy the Treloar Building and offer him double what he's paying for it—and do it now.”

That night at the club Hialeah sang three songs, then stopped. The quiet in the room was palpable. They waited, literally on the edge of their chairs, for her next words. She allowed a long slow breath into the mic then said, “There's a drug company in this town that needs to be taught a lesson.”

As the sun rose, Yslan met with her team to compare notes. A startling percentage of the male actors from the production were dead. “AIDS,” Yslan said. “Antivirals weren't around in any number then. What else do we have?”

“The rest of the actors, well, they're not actors anymore. Only one is even involved in the entertainment business.”

“Who's that?”

“Guy named Steven Bradshaw. He works for a local TV station.”

“And he lives in Cincinnati?”

“Yep.”

“Where?”

Mr. T gave the address and Yslan ordered immediate surveillance.

“Anyone else?”

“Two of the ushers still work at the theatre. They're both pensioners now. One of the carpenters and one of the fly men on the show still live in Cincinnati.”

“Find them and I want them interrogated. Take Roberts' picture.”

Yslan looked down at the program. She quickly read the bios of the actors. Steven Bradshaw's bio claimed that this was his first
time on the main stage and he thanked Mr. Roberts for the opportunity.

She read the bio aloud.

“You want us to interrogate him?”

“Not yet. I don't want him scared away. But I want to know his every—and I mean every—move.”

At the table at the back of the copy shop Decker stared at his handiwork. The deed for a commercial property in his name looked a shitload like the real thing. The deed was for the Treloar Building.

Decker put it on the small desk, then moved it to a corner. He put his downloaded copy of Henry-Clay's MS thesis on the other corner, then moved it to the left. Beside it he placed Mike's placebo research for Yolles Pharmaceuticals. He took his design for the “Who's Jumping Now?” and put it dead centre—then flipped open the portable DVD player and punched play. Steve's mock newscast came up—Decker stepped back to see the mise-en-scène. The flicker from the DVD brought his little stage to life. He smiled at the semblant order there and said, “And now for a holy place for an unholy act.”

STEVE'S COUSIN, THE SYNAGOGUE'S SHABBOS GOY, A TERRIBLY
thin young black man, opened the back alley door to the synagogue and stepped aside for Decker to enter. Decker had always hated the term “goy.” It was as malicious as the slander “kike,” and too many Jews thought it was okay to use the term because they considered themselves victims—and victims always thought they had the right to strike back at their oppressors. Yeah, but how is the issue.

The Shabbos goy was an old tradition. Because Orthodox Jews—and often Conservative and now even some Reform Jewish Rabbis—will not do any work on the Sabbath, or Shabbos, they needed someone not of the faith to open and shut the synagogue and do basic things like turn on the lights. The relationship that ensued between the often extremely literate (and sometimes very wealthy) religious Jews and often semiliterate non-Jews who took on the role of the Shabbos goy interested Decker. Did the familiarity breed contempt or respect? Did Shabbos goys hide their Jewish employers from the Nazis or aid the Germans in rounding them up? What was the ratio of “good” Shabbos goys to “bad” Shabbos goys, Decker wondered.

The old building, like any large interior space, was completely unchanged by the arrival of three men. It simply included the new additions. The building was the given—a visitor was an afterthought. The height of the place surprised Decker, as did the two side galleries that looked more like they belonged in an Episcopalian house of worship. Then there was the ostentation. Even
when it was built in 1866 it invoked comments from the local press like, “Cincinnati never before had seen so much grandeur.” Of course just down the street was Saint Peter in Chains Cathedral, which just proved that religions of various denominations seemed to enjoy showing off their financial prowess as if their gods loved the pretension of wealth.

Decker allowed himself to slowly walk the long centre aisle of the place and feel what he thought of as the heft of the space around him—just as he used to do when he walked into a theatre that he had never directed in before. Buildings have their own rhythm and sense of self. To put a piece of art into a building without understanding how the building worked was just folly—like throwing a Rothko randomly into a space, ignoring the ratio of its dimensions. It may have been what caused Rothko to fire three architects and finally contributed to his suicide before the chapel that bears his name was completed in Houston. For a moment, Decker wanted to head to the airport and go there—to just sit in the silence and commune.

He shook off the impulse and stepped up on the bimah—the altar. He stared at the tabernacle that held the Torah scrolls. Did he want this behind him or behind his adversary—or did he want to ignore it altogether?

The natural thing was to make Henry-Clay Yolles enter down the centre aisle so that he looked up at Decker on the bimah—like Princess Di's funeral. Did the Brits know how to stage a pageant in a cathedral or what! When the coffin came all the way down the centre aisle, then turned to the right and the huge doors opened to allow the light in and her coffin out—Decker remembered wanting to cheer.

But what Decker was planning was not a religious event. It was a worldly negotiation that he wanted played out against a religious setting. The sugar tasting sweeter because of the salt. He didn't need or want the backup of some folks' holy books—just the sense of sacred space to set off these most assuredly profane business dealings.

He climbed to the left gallery and looked across the way—and knew this was the right way to work. He in one gallery, his enemy in the other—with a yawning space between them.

Steve entered the old synagogue and stood at his skinny cousin's side, awaiting instruction. “So?”

“Perfect,” Decker responded. “One here,' he pointed behind him. He then pointed across the way to the far wall of the other gallery and said, “One there and the last one by the front door below the rose window.” A rose window in a synagogue? Very odd. He made a mental note to check that out.

Steve followed Decker's directions and jotted a few specifics on a small pad. “Can you find an outlet up there?” he asked.

Decker did.

“Good,” Steve said, “and there's one by the front door. I'll check the other gallery.”

“There're lots of outlets up there,” Steve's cousin said.

“What about ways of hanging the screens?” Decker asked.

“No problem, we have lots of high-test cable to support huppahs and build sukkahs.”

Decker stared at him.

“Hey man, I'm the Shabbos goy. I work here, I know the ins and outs of this Jewish thing,” Steve's cousin said. He and Steve pounded fists.

“Good,” Decker said, then added, “I'll be right down.”

It took Yslan's guys only two runs with the metal battering ram to punch a hole in Steve's front door. And even less time to establish that he had packed up and run.

Decker sat in one of the side pews and looked at Steve. “I've gotten you in pretty deep. You can just walk away from all this. To this point you haven't done anything wrong or illegal.”