True Evil

ostensibly a dog-breeding facility, selling beagles, mice, and fruit flies to research institutions around the country. Because 'Dr. Traver' accepted no federal funds, he was not subject to many of the oversight regulations that caused other breeding facilities such inconvenience. This was a necessity since the dog-breeding operations were merely a cover for what really took place inside the old bakery.

Dr. Tarver had not chosen the old bakery for its location. He had chosen it because beneath the factory floor lay one of the most extensive bomb shelters he had ever seen. The owner of the bakery, a right-wing zealot named Farmer, had feared the Soviet Union as much as he hated it. Consequently, he had constructed an elaborate shelter capable of protecting not only his family from a nuclear attack, but also selected members of his workforce. While Eldon believed that the bomb shelter might well save his life in the next ten or fifteen years, his primary reason for purchasing it was as a clandestine primate research facility.

He unlocked the front door and walked quickly through the large holding area in the front of the building. Two hundred beagles began barking wildly in their cages. Dr. Tarver had grown inured to the racket, and indeed was thankful for it, as it masked the more curious noises that sometimes emerged from the bowels of the old bakery. He had passed into the breeding area and was searching for his adoptive brother when the blare of a horn penetrated the walls of the building.

Cursing, he turned on his heel and hurried back outside. A refrigerated panel truck with ice cream sundaes painted on its side was rumbling up to the front door. Dr. Tarver waved his arm, indicating that the truck should drive around to the delivery entrance. The truck swerved accordingly, and Eldon jogged along in the foul wake of its exhaust. He was eager to see what the Mexicans had brought him this time.

Luis Almedovar jumped down from the cab and nodded excitedly to the doctor. A heavyset man with a black mustache, Luis wore an almost perpetual smile, but today Dr. Tarver saw anxiety in the taut flesh around his black eyes.

'Did you just get here?' Dr. Tarver asked.

'No, no. We've been here for hours. Javier wanted a hamburger.'

'How many do you have for me?'

'Two, senor. This is what you asked for, no?'

'Yes. Open the truck.'

Again the shadow of anxiety crossed Luis's face. He unlocked the door at the rear of the truck, and Dr. Tarver stepped up onto the bumper. The stench hit him in a solid wave that would have incapacitated anyone but a pathologist.

'What the fuck happened?' he asked.

Luis was wringing his hands in obvious terror. 'The refrigerator, senor. He broke.'

'Jesus.' Dr. Tarver pressed his shirt over his nose and mouth. 'How long ago?'

'At Matamoros, senor.'

Dr. Tarver shook his head in disgust and marched into the truck. It was filled with animals of various species, with at least a dozen NHPs, or nonhuman primates, locked in cages against the front bulkhead. The smell of excrement was almost suffocating in the heat, which had probably built to above 160 degrees under the Mississippi sun. Flies had gotten into the truck, and their buzzing droned at an intensity that would drive a human mad were one confined in the truck with it.

Walking forward, Eldon saw that two Indian-origin rhesus monkeys had died in their cages. That would cost the Mexican traders dearly, but the loss to his research was what concerned him. Indian-origin macaques were the best animals for HIV research, and he had made good use of them in his own studies. But Eldon's prize cargo lay against the front bulkhead. In a single large cage sat two lethargic chimpanzees, their eyes gazing up at him with exhausted reproach. The cheeks of one chimp were covered with mucosal drainage, and the coat of the other had several bald patches that might indicate any number of diseases. It was obvious that the chimps had not eaten for days, and possibly weeks.

'Goddamn idiots,' he muttered. 'Fucking Mexican morons!' He turned in the darkness and roared at the squat shape silhouetted in the door. 'Get these cages out of here!'

Luis nodded again and again, then forced his way past Dr. Tarver in the narrow aisle between the cages.

'You stupid bastard,' Eldon said to Luis's back. 'Do you know what kind of delay this causes? I have to get them back to normal weight before I can run any tests. And I can't begin to measure the effects of the stress you put them through. Stress directly impacts the primate's immune system.'

'Senor-'

'If you were delivering a sixty-thousand-dollar car in your fucking truck, you'd take care of that, wouldn't you?'

'Si, senor!' Luis grunted as he struggled to lift the cage. 'But these monkeys-'

'Chimpanzees. Where's your retarded partner?'

'Senor, these are vicious animals.'

'They're wild animals, Luis.'

'Si, but they're smart. Like people smart.'

Probably smarter than you are, Eldon thought.

'They fake you out, make you think they're sleeping, or that they've given in, and then, Dios mio! — they rip your head off and try to make a break for it.'

'Wouldn't you do the same if you were being starved?'

'Si, but…I am human. Javier nearly lost his eye after one of these chimps went at him. That eye was hanging out of Javier's head. I do not lie, senor.'

Tarver smiled at this image.

'What do you do with these monkeys, anyway?'

'I make them sick,' said the doctor.

'Senor?'

'Then I make them well again. The work I do here could save your life one day, Luis. It's worth losing an eye over.'

Luis nodded, but it was clear that he questioned this assertion.

Unable to remove the cage on his own, Luis finally coaxed Javier Sanchez from the cab of the truck. It took a $100 bill from Dr. Tarver's pocket to get Javier to enter the trailer, but together the two Mexicans finally manhandled the cage out of the truck and into the bakery. Dr. Tarver resented having to bribe his drivers, but after paying $30,000 apiece for the black-market chimps, what did a hundred bucks matter?

He escorted the Mexicans outside and sent them on their way. No deliveryman had ever penetrated deeper into the bakery than the shipping area just inside the door. When Eldon walked back in, his adoptive brother Judah had loaded the cage onto a piano dolly and was moving it toward the lift platform that led to the bomb shelter. One of four brothers in the family that had adopted Eldon as a boy, Judah could easily have carried the cage downstairs. At fifty-five, he was still as wide and hard as a tree trunk, with a shock of black hair and pale eyes beneath his low forehead. He had been a willful child until his father decided to break him. Since then, Judah had not spoken much, but he was devoted to his adoptive brother, who had always taken care of him in the 'outside world,' which was so unlike the one they had known as children in Tennessee. As the lift groaned downward, Eldon instructed Judah to delouse and bathe the chimps, then sedate them for a complete physical examination. Judah nodded silently.

When the lift hit bottom, Eldon turned the wheel that opened the air-lock door and walked into the primate lab. No one driving on the surface streets above could have guessed that such a facility existed beneath them. An obsessive-compulsive with a cleanliness fetish could happily eat dinner off of any surface in the lab; Judah cleaned it daily with ritualistic attention to detail. Sterility was essential when one considered the opportunities for cross- contamination in a lab like this. Dr. Robert Gallo had learned as much in his AIDS lab; and only two years ago, half the nation's flu vaccine had to be destroyed because of such a mistake.

The west wall of the lab held the primate cages, luxurious custom-built affairs designed by Dr. Tarver and welded together by Judah. At the moment, they held four chimpanzees, two dozen macaques, four marmosets, two baboons, and a cottontop tamarin. All the primates, even those suffering from terminal diseases, rested in obvious