The clinic was closed down temporarily. Vartan Toth remained on the estate, a recluse who spent his hours reading the Bible in his shanty home, tending to a garden, lighting icons to his lost but still-beloved Cissy. One rumor proposed that the glue baron himself had been subjected to a few of the doctor’s less than delicate treatments. But it was more likely plain grief and regret that did in the Turk. When he eventually lost all his business interests in the crash of ’29, he either didn’t care or didn’t understand the consequences. The city ended up burdened with the estate-cum-asylum and Toth died a few years later, living in a storefront mission, brokenhearted and unhinged right to the end. They say his last words were “My darling, the beasts have finally turned on me.”
When a private medical co-op from Toronto purchased and reopened the clinic many years later, they decided, for some determinedly wrongheaded reason, to retain the original name. But the Toth facility has, of late, built a fairly respectable reputation as a rehabilitation center for most of the common modern addictions. Another few years of vacation stays by rock stars and movie princesses and the board of directors is convinced they’ll have erased all memory of the hospital’s unfortunate history. And if alumni donations keep rolling in at the current rate, the place may throw itself up on the big board, go public, and break ground for a new wing. Every new jones to hit the street is money in the Keogh plan. As Dr. Raglan said at the most recent management team meeting, “Rest easy, kids. There’s no shortage of monkeys on this horizon.”
But if the compulsive self-destructiveness of the pampered end of the societal spectrum is the mainstay of Toth, the clinic continues to handle a smattering of more complex and severe pathologies, if only to maintain a standing in the field and earn an infrequent mention in the academic journals. Still, as Gilrein parks the Checker in the visitors’ lot and walks the hill to the main hall, he tries to imagine how the Toth’s regime of ardent group therapy sessions and mandatory janitorial service could possibly help Otto Langer.
The reception area of the main hall is a showpiece of Victorian gentility. Gilrein finds the front desk and wastes close to ten minutes arguing with a preppy and arrogant intern who continues to repeat that the patient is under sedation and receiving no visitors. Gilrein brooks the refusal politely but when he realizes the futility of manners in this instance, he turns on his cop demeanor, gives a flash of gun, and asks the kid if he’d like to wake Dr. Raglan and inquire if the boss could join them at the pharmacy where a small army of narcotics officers would like to compare the stockroom supply with the dispensing logs.
The intern asks a floor-mopping orderly to watch the front desk, grabs a huge set of keys from a drawer and leads the way to the stairwell. When it becomes apparent that they’re headed for the cellar, Gilrein says, “I thought they didn’t use this part of the hospital anymore.”
“Restraint cases,” the intern explains, opening and then resecuring a series of steel fire doors that segment a long, dim corridor permeated with the alcohol stink of some harsh, overused disinfectant. “We try to keep the shriekers here until we can quiet them down. It’s very disturbing to the other guests.”
“Guests,” Gilrein repeats.
The intern ignores him and they turn down a hallway, open another door, and come to a square foyer of concrete walls where an enormous black man in a brown security outfit is sitting at a desk reading a tabloid, engrossed in a cover story whose title informs FLESH-EATING ALIEN MICROBES INFECT ASIA.
“Larry,” the intern says to the guard who continues to read, “give this man clearance to room D.”
Larry nods, takes one hand from the paper to reveal a subhead — VIRUS HEADED FOR AMERICA — and presses a lock-release under the lip of the desk. A buzzing noise fills the room. The intern turns and exits the foyer without a word. Gilrein grabs the inner door and pulls it open, surprised by its weight. He steps inside and lets the door swing closed behind him. The sound outside is instantly muffled but the buzzing continues for several seconds.
He’s at the end of another corridor, this one much narrower and maybe only thirty feet long. One wall is a series of limestone blocks that give off a faint sparkle from the overhead cone lamps. The interior, facing wall is a series of four identical, consecutive cells — simple, tiny squares of limestone enclosed by an iron-bar wall. They look almost identical to pictures Gilrein has seen of the cell rooms in Alcatraz. They’re outfitted with gray metal cots topped by thin, roll-out mattresses. In the right-hand corner of each cell is a seatless toilet. If anything, the disinfectant smell is even stronger in here, harsh enough to burn your eyes or make you gag. The first three cells are empty. They’re distinguished by the letters A, B, and C stencil-painted on the floor in front of their doors.
Gilrein walks the length of the corridor until he gets to cell D and he looks in on a diorama that could rival anything Dr. Hulbert created almost a century ago. Otto Langer is naked, his shoulders covered by a filthy woolen blanket. He’s huddled on the floor in the center of the cell, emitting a kind of whimpering sound, a noise the runt puppy might make when separated from its mother for the first time. Langer’s face is an abstract expressionist canvas of blue welts and dried blood and fresh blood and matted hair and maybe even some fecal matter spread across a cheek. The cot is turned on its side. The mattress is half-shredded. On the rear wall of the cell, staring out at Gilrein like a minimalist billboard, is a four-letter graffito, painted in what may or may not be Langer’s own blood. It’s a message that appears to be a word, but is not—METH.
And in a rear corner of the cell, suspended in midair, hanging by the neck from a belt secured to a rusted, dripping water pipe, is the ventriloquial dummy, Zwack the golem.
Gilrein goes down on one knee and positions himself in line with Langer’s face.
“Otto,” he calls out, his voice an intrusion into the rhythm of his friend’s keening.
Langer looks up at him, but the eyes seem unfocused, as if he had heard his own name but can’t locate the source of the noise.
“It’s Gilrein,” he says.
Langer lifts his head, cranes it out on the neck, peers out of the cell, suspicious but cut by a drug glaze.
“What the hell happened, Otto?” Gilrein asks. “Where’s Jocasta?”
Langer just shakes his head, but then he gets down on all fours and crawls over to the bars. He brings his mouth to an opening, signals with his fingers for Gilrein to come closer. Gilrein leans in and hears Langer whisper, “Go away,” then notices the fingers are covered with tiny crisscrossing cuts and scrapes, as if Langer had punched his hands through a window or had them attacked by small kittens or birds.
Gilrein stands up and says, “I’m going to get you out of here.”
And immediately, Langer is on his feet as well, screaming, “No, get out, go away, get out,” hysterical, clutching at the bars and ramming his forehead into them as he yells.
Gilrein is close to panicking. He doesn’t know whether he wants or fears the arrival of Larry the security guard. He steps back from the cell and holds his hands up in a placating gesture, saying, “Okay, all right, I’m going, I’m leaving.” He shakes his head at Langer, turns, and starts to move for the exit.