“Is that what this is all about?” she snapped. “The secretary told me you wanted to repeat some tests. What was wrong with them?”
“Nothing. We just wanted to do some follow-up. Tell me about your health.”
“Jesus Christ! You drag me down here, scaring the hell out of me, making me miss two important presentations, just to have a conversation. Couldn’t this have been done on the phone?”
“Well, since you’re here, why don’t you tell me how you’ve been feeling.”
“Tired.”
“Anything else?”
“Just generally lousy. I haven’t been able to sleep. My appetite’s been poor. Nothing specific… well, that’s not true. My eyes have been bothering me. I’ve had to wear sunglasses a lot, even in the office.”
“Anything else?” Jason asked, feeling an uncomfortable prickle of fear.
Holly shrugged. “For some goddamn reason my hair’s been thinning.”
As carefully as possible, Jason examined the woman. Her pulse and blood pressure were up, although that could have been due to stress. Her skin was dry, particularly on her extremities. When he repeated her EKG, he thought there might have been some very mild ST changes suggesting reduced oxygen to her heart. When he suggested they do another stress test, she declined.
“Can I come back for that?”
“I’d rather do it now,” Jason said. “In fact, would you consider staying in the hospital for a couple of days?”
“Are you kidding? I don’t have time. Besides, I don’t feel that bad. Why do you even suggest it?”
“Just to get everything done. I’d like you to see a cardiologist and an ophthalmologist as well.”
“Next week. Monday or Tuesday. But I’ve got some big deadlines.”
Reluctantly, Jason let Holly go after drawing some blood. There was no way he could force her to stay, and he had nothing specific enough to convince her she was in trouble. It was just a feeling: a bad feeling.
Following his usual routine after returning home, Jason jogged, stopped into De Luca’s Market where he got a Perdue chicken, put his meal in the oven, showered and retreated to his den with an ice-cold beer. Making himself comfortable, he continued his reading on DNA. He began to understand how Hayes could isolate specific genes. That was what Helene Brennquivist had probably been doing that morning. Once an appropriate bacterial colony was found, it was cultivated to produce trillions of bacteria. Then, using enzymes, the bacteria DNA was separated, fragmented, and the desired gene was isolated and purified. Later, it could be spliced back into different bacteria into regions of the DNA that could be “switched on” by the researcher. In that form, the recombinant strain of bacteria acted like miniature factories to produce the protein the gene was coded for. It had been this method that Hayes had used to produce his human growth hormone. He had started with a piece of human DNA, the gene that made growth hormone, cloned it by the help of bacteria, then spliced it into bacteria DNA in an area controlled by a gene responsible for digesting lactose. By adding lactose to the culture, Hayes’s recombinant strain of bacteria had been “turned on” to produce human growth hormone.
Jason drained his beer and went into the kitchen and popped another. He was overwhelmed by what he’d learned. No wonder scientists like Hayes were strange. They knew they had the power to manipulate life. This comprehension thrilled Jason and disturbed him at the same time. The DNA technology had awesome potential to do good and harm. The direction, he thought, was a toss-up.
Armed with this information, Jason was even more inclined to believe that Hayes, though under general stress, had been telling the truth — at least about the scientific breakthrough. Jason was not so sure about Hayes’s statement that someone wanted him dead. He wished he’d spent more time with the man over the last months. He wished he knew more about him.
Opening the oven, Jason checked his chicken. It was browning nicely and looked delicious. He put water on to boil for rice, then went back to the den. Lifting his legs onto the desktop and tilting back his chair, he started the next chapter on the laboratory techniques of genetic engineering. The first part dealt with the methods by which DNA molecules were fragmented with enzymes called restriction endonucleases. Jason had to read the section several times. It was difficult material.
The shrill whine of the smoke detector startled Jason. Leaping up from the desk where he’d fallen fast asleep, he dashed into the kitchen. The water for the rice had boiled away, and the Teflon lining was smoking, filling the kitchen with acrid vapors. Jason shoved it under running water, where it spattered and hissed. Turning on the exhaust fan and opening one of the living room windows slowly emptied the kitchen of smoke, and finally the smoke detector fell silent. Jason was glad the landlord was out of town as usual.
When his dinner was finally prepared, without rice, Jason carried it to his desk in the den, pushing papers and books aside. As he started eating he found himself looking at the front of the Boston Globe with the article “Doctor, Drugs and Dancer” staring him in the face. Picking the paper up in his left hand, he looked at Carol Donner again. The idea that Hayes would have been living with the woman confounded him. Jason wondered if Hayes had fallen prey to the age-old male fantasy of rescuing the prostitute who, despite her work, had a heart of gold. Thinking of Hayes as a colleague with similar background including the same medical school, Jason found the idea of him falling for such a cliché farfetched. But as Curran had said, facts were facts. Obviously Hayes had been living with the girl. Jason tossed the paper aside.
After reading what he could find about dry skin, which wasn’t much, Jason carried his soiled dishes to the kitchen and rinsed them. The image of Carol Donner with her hand in front of her face kept popping up in his mind. He looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty. “Why not,” he said aloud. After all, if Hayes had been living with the woman, maybe she knew something that could give Jason a clue about Hayes’s breakthrough. At any rate, he had nothing to lose. Donning a sweater and a tweed jacket, Jason left the apartment.
From Beacon Hill it was only a fifteen-minute walk to the Combat Zone. But fifteen minutes took Jason an enormous social distance. Beacon Hill was the epitome of comfortable wealth and propriety, with its cobblestone streets and gas lamps. The Combat Zone was the sordid opposite. To get there, Jason skirted the edge of the Boston Common, reaching Washington Street with its row of bottomless bars by way of Boylston Street. There were roaming packs of street people mixing uneasily with groups of boisterous students and leather-jacketed blue-collar workers from Dorchester. The Club Cabaret was in the middle of the block, nestled between an X-rated cinema and an adult bookstore with a variety of supposed sexual aids on display in its window. The TOPLESS COLLEGE GIRLS sign glowed with fluorescent paint.
Jason walked up to the door and went inside. He found himself in the bar, a long, dark room illuminated in the center to spotlight a wooden runway. The bar itself was U-shaped and surrounded the runway. Behind there were small booths, and rock music thudded into the room from large speakers. flanking the stairs that led to the runway from the floor above.
The air was foul with cigarette smoke and that peculiar chemical odor which smells like cheap room-deodorant. The place was almost filled with men hunched over drinks at the bar. It was difficult to see into the booths, but as Jason passed, he glimpsed numerous women in low-cut spaghetti-strap dresses. He found a stool at the bar. A waitress wearing a white shirt and tight black shorts took his order almost instantly.
As she brought his beer and a glass, a seminude dancer came down the stairs and pranced along the runway. Jason gazed up at her, catching her eye for a brief instant. She looked bored. Her face was heavily made up, and her bleached hair had the consistency of straw. Jason guessed her age to be over thirty, certainly no coed.