I shook my head and wondered if I was missing something here. "John," I said, "if you fly to Mexico today, you'll really be wasting everybody's time. All the rest of it aside, insurance fraud is considered a serious matter in police and judicial circles.
You're going to be extradited and tried and convicted and imprisoned for many, many years."
He looked suddenly somber. "Not if you don't tell them where I am," he said.
The chutzpah. "But why wouldn't I?" I said. "Of course I'm going to tell them, you twit! I'll probably phone Bub Bailey from here, in fact, and get him to have the plane held up, and have airport security hold you until the police arrive. Of course I'm going to tell them! Especially after the way you used me, how the hell do you think I'm going to react to this latest of your outrages?
Huh?"
He said, "No, you won't. I knew enough about you, Strachey, to be sure that even if you caught up with me this soon, you'd let me go once I told you a couple of things there's no way you could have known up to now."
"What do you mean? What don't I know?"
"My T-cell count. It's about two. All but nonexistent."
"Shit," I said, and looked at the other two. They nodded.
Rutka said grimly, "I probably have a few months, maybe weeks, before I have my first infection. Eddie and I are both HIV-positive, but for some reason his count is normal and he's perfectly healthy, and I'm not. We're giving the money to a clinic some friends of ours started in Merida where they're developing alternative treat-ments the system here is too slow or too corrupt to let people try. We're going there to stay until we're cured or until we die.
Either way, we'll pay our own way and also help a lot of other people the system has given up on."
"By alternative, you mean crackpot, quack-unscientific New Age bullshit. It's a joke."
"A treatment is only a quack treatment if it doesn't work. The forty-two men at the Valladolid Clinic have faith. So do I. So does Eddie."
"Has the system here given up on you? You haven't given it a chance. You're nuts, Rutka. You're wackier than I ever imagined."
"No," he said, "the system here hasn't given up on me. I've given up on it. It's all profits and egos and bureaucrats and politicians and bullshit, and I've had enough of it, that's all. Right now I have the strength to deal with it, but sometime soon I won't. I have to start thinking of myself, protecting myself. So I'm out of here."
We glared at each other, hard. I said, "How do I know this isn't just more of your bullshit-another one of your scams? I've heard all about you in Handbag. You lie as naturally as you eat candy. You're a pathological liar and have been for most of your life. I don't believe a word you say, Rutka."
His eyes were cold now, and he said, "I didn't always lie. I learned to lie. Do you know who I learned it from?"
"I know."
"The man is devilish."
"I think you're right about that."
"And I've had him exorcised."
"I saw on TV that it's still done."
"I heard he woke up from his coma," Rutka said.
"Oh, yes."
He was radiant. "Now he'll pay. He's damned."
"I think so."
"So let me go. You know you want to, and you know it's right. If you had eight hundred fifty thousand dollars you didn't need, wouldn't you give it to AIDS research and treatment?"
"Actually, I did make a sizeable donation to AIDS care one time when some ill-gotten cash fell my way. But I gave it to Gay Men's Health Crisis, a fine organization whose work is demonstrably excellent. Can you say the same about this Valladolid Clinic?"
"I know the people who set it up and I know they are honest and sincere and they care more about their patients than their own egos. Anyway, since it's my T-cell count that's involved here, and Eddie's in the future, don't you think we should be allowed to choose where our money goes?"
The Mexicana lobby was growing increasingly crowded and I tried to keep my voice low enough not to be overheard but loud enough to be understood by Rutka. I said, "But it is not your money."
"Look," he said, almost serenely, "aren't the insurance companies spending millions of dollars on lawyers and lobbyists trying to weasel out of insuring people with HIV? They'd refuse to insure gay people at all if they could get away with it. They'd fuck us over completely. What I'm doing is not a rip-off, it's just me doing those corporate assholes' job for them. Anyway, what's eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars to an insurance company that spends ten times that much on lobbyists and campaign contributions trying to get the legislature to let the company piss on gay people and abandon us at exactly the time we need the insurance companies the most? You asked me to be fair. Now that's what I'm asking you to be."
I shook my head in wonder.
"Go back and tell them you found evidence that I'm not really dead and get Father Morgan off, but let us go and do this socially useful thing we want to do. Just say you followed Eddie, but you lost him and you don't know what became of him. That's all you have to do. It's that simple."
I said, "How can I be sure you're not making this all up? That it's not part of another devious scam?"
He shrugged and gave me a little crooked smile. "I guess you can't."
Back on Crow Street, I told Timmy, "I lost them. I lost them in the traffic on the Major Deegan."
"No, you didn't," he said. "But I don't want to hear about the con Rutka ran on you this time. And I don't think Bub Bailey does either."
"Good," I said. "I heard it on the car radio. Father Morgan is out?"
"Insufficient evidence. Plus, his hospital-visit-and-shopping alibi for Wednesday night holds up. Lots of people saw him in the bishop's room-I think I might have seen him there myself-and at the Colonie Mall and four or five other places."
"What about McFee? Is he still sentient but incommunicado?"
"He's under guard, but his reputation in the diocese has fallen even further."
"That's an accomplishment. How did he manage that?"
"There was a lot of irrational concern growing around town about how the bishop might have spread AIDS-at church suppers he ate at and so on."
"That's dumb."
"But Ronnie Linkletter heard about it and knew that a lot of people were taking it very seriously and were scared, and he did what he perceived to be his duty as a member of the Hometown Folks news team."
"What was that?"
"Ronnie came forward and told a group of reporters that nobody had to worry, because the bishop was always careful and he-he always wore a condom."
I said, "No, he didn't."
And Timmy said, "Yes, he did."
And I knew I was back in Albany.