Interesting too to discover the contrasts between their various offices. Forbes’s had been awesomely neat with no room for plush furniture or wall hangings; books and papers everywhere, even the floor. Finch went in for potted plants and actually had a stunning orchid in bloom; his walls cascaded ferns. Chandra preferred the leather Chesterfield look, with leaded glass-paned book cabinets and a few exquisite Indian artworks. And Dr. Charles Ponsonby lived tidily among gruesome artifacts like shrunken heads and death masks of people like Beethoven and Wagner; he also had four reproductions of famous paintings on his walls – Goya’s Cronus eating a child, two sections of Bosch’s Hell, and Munch’s screaming face.
“Do you like surrealist art?” Ponsonby asked with animation.
“I’m into Oriental art myself, Doctor.”
“I’ve often thought, Lieutenant, that I mischose my calling. Psychiatry fascinates me, particularly psychopathia. Look at that shrunken head – what beliefs can provoke that? Or what visions my paintings?”
Carmine grinned. “No use asking me. I’m just a cop.” And you, he ended in a silent comment, are not my man. Too obvious.
Up here, he saw as Ponsonby conducted him through the labs, the equipment was more familiar: an atomic absorption unit, a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph, centrifuges large and small – the kind of apparatus Patrick had in his forensic lab, just newer and grander. Patrick had to scrape; here, they spent and spent.
From Ponsonby he learned more about the cat brains that were made into what Ponsonby called “brain soup” so naturally that it had no element of jocularity about it. They used rat brain soup too. And Dr. Polonowski was conducting some experiments on the giant axon of a lobster leg – not the big claws, the little legs. Those axons were huge! Polonowski’s technician, Marian, often had to call into the fish shop on her way to work to buy the four biggest lobsters in the tank.
“What happens to the lobsters afterward?”
“They are rostered between those who like lobster,” Ponsonby said, as if the question had no merit whatsoever when the answer was so patently clear. “Dr. Polonowski doesn’t do anything to the rest of the beast. It is very kind of him to rotate them, actually. They are his experimental animals, he could eat them all himself. But he takes his turn with the rest of us. Except for Dr. Forbes, who has gone vegetarian, and Dr. Finch, who is too orthodox to eat crustacea.”
“Tell me, Dr. Ponsonby, do people notice bags of dead animals? If you saw a big dead animal bag stuffed full and you did notice it, what would you think about it?”
Ponsonby’s face registered mild surprise. “I doubt I would think about it, Lieutenant, because I doubt I would notice it.”
Miraculously, Ponsonby wasn’t agog to go into detail about his work, which he simply said had to do with the chemistry of a brain cell involved in the epileptic process.
“So far everybody seems to be into epilepsy. Is anyone into mental retardation? I thought the Hug was for both.”
“Unfortunately we lost our geneticist several years ago, and Professor Smith hasn’t found a suitable man to replace him. The DNA business is attracting them, you see. More exciting.” He giggled. “Their soup is made out of E. coli.”
And thus to Dr. Walter Polonowski, who had a big chip on his shoulder having nothing to do with his Polish ancestry: that, like Ponsonby’s art, would have been too simple.
“It isn’t fair,” he said to Carmine.
“What isn’t fair, Doctor?”
“The division of labor here. If you have a medical degree, like me, Ponsonby, Finch and Forbes, you have to see patients at the Holloman Hospital, and seeing patients eats into research time. Whereas Ph.D.s like Chandra and Satsuma do research all the time. Is it any wonder that they’re way ahead of the rest of us? When I agreed to come here, the understanding was that I’d see idiopathic retards as patients. And what happens? I inherit the patients with malabsorption syndromes!” Polonowski said angrily.
Oh, Jesus, here we go again! “Aren’t they retarded, Doctor?”
“Yes, of course they are, but secondary to their malabsorption! They are not idiopathic!”
“What does idiopathic mean, sir?”
“A disorder of unknown etiology – no known cause.”
“Uh-huh.”
Walt Polonowski was a very presentable man, tall, well built, his dark gold hair and eyes blending into a dark gold skin. The kind of man, Carmine judged, who wasn’t really griping about his patient load because that was what bothered him; what bothered him were core emotions like love and hate. The guy was miserable all the time, it was there in the set of his face.
But, like all the others, he never noticed anything as mundane as a dead animal bag, let alone noticed how big a dead animal bag was. And why am I fixated on dead animal bags anyway? Carmine asked himself. Because someone very clever took advantage of the dead animal refrigerator knowing that the Hug personnel never ever noticed dead animal bags. That’s why, yet – by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. It isn’t over. Yeah, I know it, I know it!
Polonowski’s technician, Marian, was a pretty girl who told Carmine that she took Dr. Polonowski’s bags downstairs herself. Her manner was wary and defensive, but not about dead animal bags was his guess. This was an unhappy girl, and unhappy girls were usually unhappy over personal problems, not their workplace. Jobs were easy to find for these young people, all science graduates, some with little projects on the side that would count toward a master’s or a Ph.D. Marian, Carmine was willing to bet, sometimes came into the Hug wearing dark glasses to hide the fact that she’d been crying half the night.
After the others, Dr. Hideki Satsuma was great. His English was perfect and American; his father, he explained, had been at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., from the time diplomatic relations had been reopened after the war. Satsuma’s schooling had finished in America, and his degrees came from Georgetown.
“I’m working on the neurochemistry of the rhinencephalon,” he said, caught the blank look on Carmine’s face, and laughed. “What is sometimes called the ‘smell brain’ – the most primitive of human grey matter. It’s very involved in the epileptic process.”
Satsuma was another looker; the Hug sure had its share of them among the men! His features were patrician too, and he had undergone surgery to retract the epicanthal folds of his upper eyelids, thus liberating a pair of twinkling black eyes. Quite tall for a Japanese. He moved with the grace of Rudolf Nureyev, had that same slightly Tartar look. Carmine summed him up as an unerring kind of person who would never fumble a catch or drop a beaker. Likeable too, which troubled Carmine, who had spent his war years in the Pacific, and had no love for the Japs.
“You must understand, Lieutenant,” Satsuma said earnestly, “that we who work in a place like the Hug are not the noticing kind unless it involves our actual work, when we become endowed with X-ray vision better than Superman’s. A brown paper dead animal bag might intrude as an offense, but otherwise would not intrude at all. As the Hug technicians are very good, dead animal bags do not lie around intruding. I never carry them downstairs. My technician does that.”
“He’s Japanese too, I see.”
“Yes. Eido is my assistant in every way. He and his wife live on the tenth floor of the Nutmeg Insurance building, where I have the penthouse. As you well know, since you live in the Nutmeg building yourself.”