Mickey went to the window and looked down onto the convoy of satellite trucks partially blocking the street.
“They need treatment. I’ll be damned if it’s going to be here.”
“Lumaga tells me there’s a world-class children’s hospital in Rome they can go to.”
Mickey turned to face him again. He looked like a very old man.
“Write down its name. I’ll make some calls. I’ll fly my own people over if I need to.”
“You’re making the right decision,” Marcus said. “Ready for the next subject?”
“Go on.”
“Why am I here? What do you want me for?”
“You’re here because Victoria and Elizabeth are here. I imagined you’d want to see this through. You were involved at the beginning. It’s logical you’d want to be involved at the end.”
“So, this is for my benefit?”
“Partly, yes.”
“Tell me about the other part?”
“All right, Marcus, partly for me. Is that what you want to hear? You want me to grovel? Still steamed that I fired you? Well, here’s a newsflash: I’d fire you again for the same reason. I lost Jesper and the kids. There was no progress. Goddamn it, I believe in accountability and I fired you. Now, I need you. I need someone I can trust over here. I need someone to have a seat at the table, shadowing the Italians. For the first time in years, I have hope about Jesper. I need you to find Jesper. And Elena. You know the case. You know Lumaga. If I bring in a new man he’ll have to start from scratch and he might never get to your level of knowledge and access. Don’t tell me you’re not interested. And don’t tell me you don’t need the job.”
“What, you’ve been snooping around my finances?”
“I was curious. I had someone make some checks, maybe a year ago. You live in a shitty apartment in a relatively shitty neighborhood of Manhattan. You’re still gambling. You’re up to your eyeballs in debt.”
“Eyeballs, no. My debts have never gotten higher than my waist. But here’s my biggest problem, Mickey. If I stay here, I’m going to have a bunch of overdue library books.”
“Yes, I can see that. Maybe this will help defray your fines.”
Mickey reached into his jacket pocket for an envelope. Marcus took it and had a look inside. It was an Andreason Engineering contract with enough digits that it took a second look to register, and a check for a ten percent advance on it. He smirked.
“What’s the matter?” Mickey said. “Not enough?”
It was a great deal of money, money he needed. What made him laugh was this: the guy was a billionaire and he still wanted to run the payment as a corporate expense.
“The money’s fine.”
“Then, do we have a deal?”
It was Marcus’s turn to look out the window. He made Mickey wait a bit for his answer. He didn’t want to seem too eager, but he was eager. The money was a factor, but not the deciding one. He wanted to use his mind again. He wanted to be relevant. There were two sick girls on the other side of the wall who were four years’ younger than they should have been and he had a chance to be the guy to figure out why.
A photographer with a long lens spotted him at the window, pointed, and began shooting.
“Yeah, Mickey, we have a deal.”
8
Lumaga peeled off his black jacket to make himself less threatening and positioned a chair between each of their beds. Although Marcus sat behind him, he was the one the girls mainly looked at, and he rewarded each reply they gave Lumaga with a small nod of encouragement. They didn’t pay attention to the video camera on a tripod.
It was Elizabeth who gave the most substantive answers, but Lumaga frequently turned to the younger girl for confirmation. Following their blood transfusions, they had more energy and they were more animated.
“This white room,” Lumaga said. “Was this the first place you were taken to?”
They both said they thought so, but neither exactly remembered.
“Did you stay anywhere else or was this the only place?”
“Just the white room,” Elizabeth said.
“What was in the room?”
“We each had a bed. We each had a chair. We each had a chest of drawers.”
“What was in the drawers?”
“Our clothes.”
“What kind of clothes?”
“Shorts, tees, underpants, socks.”
“All white?”
“Yes!” an exasperated Victoria said.
“So, everything was white,” Lumaga said. “The walls, the floor, the bed covers.”
“Not everything,” Victoria said, continuing her impatience. “Our toys and our books were different colors.”
“Ah, toys! What kinds of toys?”
There were board games, and puzzles, and Legos, and picture books for Victoria, chapter books for Elizabeth.
Lumaga posed the question that Marcus almost called out despite his promise to observe only. How did the spacemen have games from Earth?
“I asked,” Elizabeth said proudly. “They said that they could make anything that we wanted from our planet.”
“Did you have television? Videos? Video games?”
“We had videos and video games from Earth. They got those for us.”
“And what about food? Did you have Earth food?”
“Yes, silly,” Victoria said. “We weren’t going to eat space food, were we?”
“I’m sorry. I was being silly, wasn’t I?” Lumaga said. “So, you had chicken and fish and eggs and hamburgers and pasta and ice cream?”
They both nodded and Elizabeth said, “I know what you’re going to ask next. You’re going to ask if they had farm animals in space.”
“That’s precisely what I was going to ask.”
“They said they didn’t need animals. They had machines that could make any food we liked.”
“Was the food good?”
“It was yummy,” Victoria said.
“Now what about toilets? Where were your toilets?”
“In a bathroom, silly,” Victoria said.
“In the same white room?”
“Through a door,” Elizabeth said.
He asked if the bathroom was the same as on Earth. They were. Did the spacemen ever use the bathroom? The girls thought the question was hilarious.
