The spleen behind the remark held out a slender reed of hope — maybe the rewrite man knew the assignment and was simply envious — but it was dashed by one look at the city editor, Ted Bolevil. His brow was creased, a sign that he had succumbed to shallow guilt. Bolevil was a short, ruddy-faced Australian who was regarded as little more than an errand boy for Tibbett and was consequently detested throughout the news room. His nickname — not always out of earshot — was, naturally, "boll weevil." In preferred short form, it was "the weevil" — preferred because it was close to weasel.
"Harley. I want you to do a sidebar. Identical twins. What makes them and why."
"What?" Jude knew it was a hack assignment. The paper was trying to string out the story of the mix-up of the homicidal twin and his upstanding brother; today's headline, over the revelation that one of them raised race horses on the side, was: WHICH TWIN HAS THE PONY? The story was running out of gas, and they wanted to pump it up with a bunch of sidebars. Jude didn't care to waste time on a sidebar. He wanted to follow the New Paltz murder.
"You heard me. People want to know. Identical twins. Maybe separated at birth. You ever see that feature? Two photos of people who look alike. You know — like Tony Blair and the mule boy from Pinocchio."
Jude just looked at the man. Bolevil got flustered.
"But this should be serious. Scientific. What happens to them? Why do they both end up doing the same dead-end job? Or marrying blondes — that kind of thing. You know — get the point?"
Jude was afraid he did.
"Throw in new research," Bolevil added. "Scientific types up in arms. New breakthroughs. Why is one good and one evil? How to tell which one's the bad seed? You know, that kind of thing."
His tendency to speak in sentence fragments was only one of his annoying habits, and by no means the most.
"Make for good pictures," he said. "We get only one twin, we can shoot him twice — ha ha."
Bolevil turned his back to Jude and dug into his in-basket, with a small sigh intended to suggest the burdens of newspaper leadership. End of discussion.
Mule boy in Pinocchio!
Jude found the address he was looking for, 1230 York, the gated entrance to Rockefeller University. He walked up a hill, past men mowing a patch of lawn on tractors, and entered ivy-covered Founders Hall. A bust of John D. greeted him. He leaned upon the reception desk, fished out a piece of paper and read the name he had found in the Mirror's electronic morgue.
"Dr. Tierney, Research," he told a uniformed guard. He anticipated his question and cut him off open-mouthed: "She's expecting me."
He was told to take a seat. After the appropriate New York waiting time of ten minutes — not enough to be impolite but sufficient to establish that the visit was an intrusion — he was escorted to the fourth floor. He sat in another chair, across from a secretary who was pecking at a keyboard. She eyed him up and down and lifted a phone receiver languidly.
"The gentleman from the Mirror," she said, lacing ironic spaces between the words.
The door opened, and through it walked a young woman in a blue skirt with a white lab coat, a pair of glasses tucked into the vest pocket. She had long dark hair that fell upon her shoulders and interesting-looking hollows under her eyes.
"I'm Dr. Tierney," she said, looking at him closely as she extended her hand, which felt strong and warm. "Elizabeth Tierney," she amended.
"Jude Harley."
"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting. I wasn't told you were here."
The secretary lifted one eyebrow.
Jude liked the apology — she was clearly from out of town, and in fact her speech hinted at the broad vowels of the Midwest. She was about thirty, he thought, his age.
They stood in silence for a moment, until she turned slightly and said: "Won't you come in?"
Her office was a mix of the official and the friendly, bound medical volumes next to books of poetry. Jude spotted Yeats, Blake and Baudelaire, for openers. There were stacks of computer printouts and personal clutter — mail, a model sports car made from wire hangers, a bulging Filofax and photographs on a windowsill. On the wall were a dartboard with Freud's face, a Kandinsky print, a large poster of a single human cell, framed degrees and a bulletin board pinned with postcards, many of tropical settings. Above her desk were two African carvings.
"Would you like some coffee?" she asked, motioning him to a couch.
He nodded yes, told her he took milk and sugar, and was pleased to note that she fetched it herself, from some sort of adjoining pantry. Two points.
He was also pleased, when she returned, that she did not take up a position behind her desk, but sat on a chair beside the couch, angled toward him, her knees pointing up. Proximity always helps an interview, he thought as he pulled out a tiny tape recorder from his pocket and propped the half-inch mike onto a metal clip facing her.
"Just for insurance," he said. "I thought you might get scientific and technical. But I won't use it if it bothers you."
"Not at all," she said, and her tone suggested she meant it. She was nothing if not confident. She crossed her legs, and with her knees at an incline, he could see several inches under her skirt, a disturbing patch of white thigh disappearing into darkness.
"I suppose you're here because of that murder case — the two lawyers," she said. "Horrible business."
"That's right. For our paper, the more horrible, the better."
She nodded knowingly. "For all of them, I'm afraid. Still, I like your sports section."
Now he was really impressed. Three points.
He looked at the pair of African carvings mounted on thick white blocks on the wall, resplendent in beams of light from the ceiling lights. The statuettes were about eight inches tall, worn smooth and dark as ebony. At first they looked identicaclass="underline" disproportionately large heads with wide-open oval eyes, bulging cheeks marked by slanting scars, and elaborately carved little caps painted blue. Each was adorned with a beaded waistband, a brass ringlet around the left wrist and a small shoulder cape of cowry shells. But from the exaggerated genitalia it could be seen that one was a man and the other a woman.
Dr. Tierney followed his gaze.
"Ibeji," she said. "They come from Nigeria, Yorubaland in the south. The Yoruba carve them whenever they have twins."
He was taken by the carvings, and it occurred to him that he might somehow work them into his story. She read his curiosity and continued.
"The parents commission them from master carvers, and they pay a great deal, the more ornate the better. Each statue represents one of the twins. They are kept carefully stowed away, and if the twins achieve adulthood, well and good, the ibeji are meaningless objects to be tossed out — or these days more likely sold for a pittance to a trader who gets a hefty markup when he sells them to foreigners.
"But if one of the twins should die — which happens more often than not — the statue representing that twin takes on enormous spiritual value. It is dressed like the child, it is given food and put to sleep at night and takes its rightful place at all birthdays and ceremonies. The idea is that this is the only way to appease the missing twin. Otherwise, it will become jealous and angry and come up to claim the living twin and drag him down into the netherworld."
She smiled. "That's because the two twins have only one soul between them. At least, that's the theory."
Jude looked at them more closely — at the gently curving bellies, the serene smiles, the slitted oval eyes. They were eerie and majestic-looking, existing in another, timeless world. They reminded him, strangely, of fetuses.