The Conspiracy Club

7

That night, Doresh sat in Jeremy’s dreams, a raincoated Buddha, and the taste of slightly off, greasy harbor shrimp bit his tongue. In the morning, he got up early and retrieved the newspaper. The headlines were soaked with economic woe and the felonies of politics, the Clarion’s histrionic journalists exulting about wars-to-be, injustice and indignity.

He found what he was looking for on page 18.

The woman’s name was Tyrene Mazursky. Polish surname notwithstanding, she’d been black, forty-five, a drug-addicted streetwalker with the extensive police record Doresh had cited.

Also a mother of five.

Iron Mount was a scrofulous warren of misshapen streets and afterthought alleys as narrow as they’d been since the city’s horse-and-carriage, slag-and-smelt origins. Jeremy had been there exactly once: a very long time ago, as an intern, doing a home visit on a kid everyone was sure was being abused.

Drunken mother, junkie father, the five-year-old boy barely in the first percentile of height and weight, speech and vocabulary testing out as that of a two-year-old. One happy family plus some unnamed addict pals, living in a railroad flat above an auto body shop, far from the waterfront but close enough to where the Kauwagaheel River cut inland from the lake and swamp stench permeated the rotting plaster walls.

Jeremy did his thing, wrote it up. So did a terrified social work intern, but it turned out that despite their character flaws and bad habits, the boy’s parents were doing a pretty good job of tending for the kid, who had picked up a viral liver infection with ensuing bowel blockage that choked off his nutrients and retarded his growth.

Surgery and IV antibiotics worked wonders. Counseling for the parents proved a good deal less miraculous, and three weeks after the kid’s last surgical follow-up, the family cut town.

Iron Mount. Due east from The Shallows, a place that made The Shallows look like horse country.

He put down the paper, forced coffee down his throat, and thought about Tyrene Mazursky, savaged.

The wounds.

Five orphans.

He wondered how a black woman ended up with a Polish name, felt an inexorable sadness at the mysteries of Tyrene Mazursky’s life.

All the mysteries of Jocelyn he’d never unravel. The thought of her- the gone-ness. The day had barely broken, but he had.

When he walked to his car, the neighbor two doors down- the Romanian woman with the victimized eyes, the one who rarely left her own place and couldn’t see Jeremy’s house for the hedges- was standing by her front window watching.

Had Doresh been by, asking questions?

Mrs. Bekanescu was one of the few on the block who owned and didn’t rent. He waved at her, and her curtains snapped shut.

His ability to unsettle someone this early felt perversely gratifying, and he drove faster than usual, switched on bright music. When he got to his desk, he threw off his coat, organized some papers, booted up his computer, and spent the morning punching buttons and rechecking data tables and constructing pretty charts for his book. He gave a try at the introduction but his mind impacted and the words crumbled. He switched topics, began an outline for the chapter he’d have to write: Time/Space Disorientation Secondary to Pediatric Gnotobiotic Isolation.

The only analogues in the literature were studies of scientists stranded in the Antarctic or some such hellhole.

Jeremy’s mind wandered from bottomless glacial rifts to blue ice that could kill you if you kissed it, to the hackneyed horror of falling endlessly, a million ice violins scratching out a tundra symphony. A hard, confident knock on his door shook him upright, and Arthur Chess stepped in, beaming.