"Pretty farfetched, isn't it?"
"Read the papers. They do it all the time in Massachusetts and New York. All the time."
"Yeah, I was at a debate up in Boston last night about it."
O'Brien withdrew a little. "Debate?"
"Yeah. That's what they were talking about. This doctor, Eisenberg, I think it was, and – "
"Eisenberg! One of the worst."
"How do you mean?"
"Come on. He's supposed to be this big-time defender of the right to life? Writes books and papers and gives these courses in the med school and speeches all over. But he's in with them."
"With the atheists."
A vigorous nod. "I went to see him a couple of times. At these speeches. And I hung around afterward, to talk to him. I thought, after what his people had been through, over in Germany with Hitler and all, Eisenberg would understand. He'd see what's happening in this country."
"But he didn't."
"He's in bed with them! He gets up and talks about this stuff on the same stage with these people, even has dinner with them. For him it's like this intellectual exercise, like he's just talking about something that's not real instead of fighting something that is real, that's horrible and threatening us all."
"Eisenberg's not fighting like you are."
"Of course not! The things he writes, he told me himself, they get edited by the people at the magazines – or journals, whatever they call them – that print his stuff. And who do you think the editors are?"
"More atheists."
"Finally. They're everywhere, like I said."
"Another speaker at this debate last night. Ever heard of Maisy Andrus?"
"That slut! She killed her own husband! I don't even mean pulling the plug and just letting him die. She took a needle and shot him up with poison. It was all over the papers. She's this big-time law professor, marries a tennis player, thinks people forget. Well, I saved every article about her. She thinks people forget? I'll never forget."
"You feel this strongly, how come you weren't at the debate too?"
O'Brien hunkered down. "I was thinking about it, but I couldn't. Had to work. Our fiscal year ends in a couple of weeks. They need me to check things. All kinds of things."
"Who at work can I call about that?"
His head whipped up. "Why?"
"Because I'm asking you politely, that's why."
"I mean, what does this have to do with my letters to the bishop?"
"Maybe I can just call the personnel manager."
O'Brien cowered. "No. No, call… call Carla Curzone. She's my… our head bookkeeper."
"Give me the number I should use."
He rattled it off, adding the extension as I wrote it down.
"Only…"
I said, "Only what?"
"Do me a favor, okay?"
"What?"
"Don't tell Carla you're from the po1ice."
"Don't worry. I won't."
"Bad pizza?"
Nancy watched me carefully from across the glass coffee table in her apartment. On her haunches, she wore a New England School of Law sweatshirt over denim shorts and grasped a beer mug by its handle. Renfield, Nancy's cat, watched me expectantly from under the table as I picked at the slice on my plate.
I said, "No, the pizza's fine. Just a lousy day."
"How so?"
I summarized it for her, starring Louis Doleman and Steven O'Brien.
Nancy said, "It's no fun to be that close to crazies."
It bothered me that I was probably bumming her out, since she had to deal with crazies a lot more often than I did.
"John?"
"Yes?"
"I found a surefire way to get over that."
"Over what'?"
"Over being around crazies too much." Nancy took a mouthful of beer.
"What is it?"
"You seek out a no-nonsense, normal person and get deeply involved in an absolutely rational discussion."
"The cure sounds worse than the disease."
"No, really. Logic, deduction, P implies Q. It's the secret." I tossed a piece of sausage to Renfield, who played croquet with it until he realized the ball was edible. "Okay. How do we start?"
Nancy set down the mug and made her eyelids flutter. "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours."
17
"NOW, JOHN, THE RACE ITSELF IS TWENTY-SIX MILES, THREE hundred eighty-five yards. You can't think of her as one distance, though. Nobody can really handle that. You got to break the course down into chunks. Think of her as four six-mile runs with kind of a victory lap at the end. That should be manageable.
“ Another thing. Talk to yourself when you train, eh? Tell yourself what you want to do and why it's important for you to do it. Concentrate and reinforce those goals and reasons. During the race you're going to be doing the same thing. Don't worry about what people think. Sometimes talking to yourself is the best conversation around.
“ One more thing for today. You're aiming at your first marathon, lots of people'll say, 'Don't make it Boston. Because it's in April, you'll have to train all winter, and the course isn't flat enough.' Well, I say bullshit to that. The beauty of Boston is the crowd. All along the route you've got folks two, even three deep, clapping and cheering. Little kids with card tables, handing out cups of water and orange sections. No, Boston's as good a first marathon as any, and better than most. Drink it all in, John. Remember, you'll never run your first marathon again."
Directory assistance had a phone number for Ray Cuervo in Marblehead, a harbor town about twelve miles north of Boston. Trying it, I got Cuervo's tape message. A silky, sales-pitch voice, the Spanish accent coming across only on certain words, the English idioms perfect. It told me that if I needed to reach him, he'd be at the Sarrey Co-op plant, giving a 603 area code. I took out a map of New Hampshire and found Sarrey just about where I remembered it, a little north of the Massachusetts border. It turned out to be only an hour and ten minutes from Boston up Interstate 93 and a couple of scenic country roads that hadn't yet yielded to suburbia's manifest destiny.
The plant itself was three stories high and roughly square. The tall windows were recessed into an old facade of gray brick, giving the impression of a structure that had been built for one purpose and converted to another. I drove a circuit around the plant. On one side was a receiving dock, a Mack tractor-trailer just pulling away. On the second side, facing west, the windows were boarded up. On the third side of the building was another dock, this one with men loading boxes into the back of another trailer. The fourth side fronted a parking lot for a hundred cars, maybe fifty vehicles in it on a Wednesday morning. I left the Prelude next to a large sign saying SARREY CO-OP PACKING – BEST VEAL IN THE EAST.
Inside the main door was a staircase and a blank concrete block wall. The stairs seemed more inviting. At the top was a door standing ajar and a catwalk. The catwalk curved out of sight toward sounds like a carpentry shop in high gear.
The doorway led to a minimalist office, a young woman in a lumberjack shirt and jeans behind an old partners' desk. She was drowning in a sea of multipart invoices and order forms. As the
woman flailed through the paperwork, the bangs of her hair fell to her eyes.
I said, "Excuse me?"
She looked up through the bangs like a sheepdog. "Help you?"
"I'm looking for Ray Cuervo."
"He's down on the kill floor with the rabbi."
"How can I find it?"
"If you're not in the business, mister, maybe you don't want to know."
"Please?"
The woman blew out a breath, more to clear her hair than to show exasperation, I thought. "You're not dressed for it." She pointed to the catwalk and said, "Follow the walk around. You'll know it when you see it. Might want to stay on the walk for a while, get used to things."