Syndrome - Thomas Hoover (best summer books .TXT) 📗

Sunday, April 5

11:43 P.M.

Winston Bartlett put the newly glazed creme brulee, still warm from his preparation in the kitchen below stairs, on the bed tray in front of Kristen, next to her untouched champagne flute. She used to love it and he was trying everything he knew to jog her memory. He’d cooked her favorite supper, eggs Florentine, with barely wilted spinach topped by prosciutto, had taken her to bed and now there was champagne and her favorite dessert.

But she still seemed distracted and distant. Yes, it was a good idea to get her away from the institute, but that was merely relocating the problem, not fixing it. If it could be fixed. In the meantime, she had to be kept here, out of the public eye.

“Thank you,” she said and gingerly took a small bite. She had been almost lucid earlier this evening and was leaning against the antique headboard wearing a soft blue nightgown. Her long blond hair was tousled and down over her breasts. Her memory might now be a sometime thing, but her libido was still going strong.

“Do you remember how much you used to like that?” he asked, trying to make eye contact.

She nodded her head dumbly. Did she actually remember? Increasingly, he had no idea.

He had brought her here to stay in this five-story nineteenth-century mansion on Park Avenue. He’d purchased it a year and a half earlier for 23 million and he was intending to have it renovated and converted into a museum. That renovation, however, had been put on hold awaiting a decision by the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Museum. He wanted the building to be a Park Avenue adjunct to the Met, and he also wanted his definitive assemblage of Japanese implements of war to be known as the Bartlett Collection.

The tax write-off would be monumental, but that was not nearly so important as the prestige.

It was clear now that this project would not have any momentum until he first got himself appointed to the board of the Met. Unfortunately, money alone wasn’t adequate. Major-league politics was involved.

He was working on it, with a lot of Upper East Side lunches and targeted charity events. He was also taking his time and getting designs and estimates for the renovation. The way things were at the moment, he didn’t have the cash to actually start construction anyway.

For the moment, the place was furnished but unoccupied except for a security guard, a part of Bartlett’s personal staff. Now, with Kristen here, discretion was his uppermost concern.

He had sent the security guy home this evening, so he and Kristen could have privacy. In the morning two nurses would come on duty, one to look after her and another to cook.

Over the past year he’d brought her here most weekends. It was like having their own Shangri-la. Best of all, unlike his official residence on Gramercy Park, he didn’t have a wife upstairs, like some mad (in every sense of the word) aunt in the attic.

He had hoped that bringing Kristen back here might do something for her memory. He still hoped, but he wasn’t sure. In bed tonight she had been as lithe and enthusiastic as ever. Possibly even more so. Did she know who he was? He couldn’t really tell. But he still loved being with her. The soft skin and the voluptuous curves of her breasts and thighs: it made him feel young again.

Since she had been out at the Dorian Institute and away from him, he had begun to feel older and older.

Winston Bartlett was sixty-seven and-increasingly-felt it. To begin with, his prostate was enlarging itself, in spite of all the special, expensive medicines he used Surgery was increasingly looking like a possibility. And his memory was nowhere near what it once was. He wolfed down ginkgo and ginseng capsules by the handful but was finding it harder and harder to remember people’s names, particularly the new wave of donation-hungry politicians who fawned over him.

And then there was the matter of teeth. He’d just gone through major periodontal surgery, a sign of aging gums. How long before his ivories would be replaced by ceramic choppers? Oh, and the heart. His cardiologist was talking more and more about stents to alleviate the two constricted arteries in the left ventricle. They were already down to 40 percent. Face it, his whole damned body was falling apart.

Probably worst of all, the Johnson was far from what it used to be; not long back, it was a daily triple threat. Soon he might be resorting to Viagra as more than a discretionary recreational drug, something he was still joking about less than a year ago.

The dirty secret about living this long is, after you’ve seen everything you ever wanted to see, done everything you ever wanted to do, bought everything you ever wanted to buy, you gradually lose the only thing really worth having.

Youth.

To try to hang on to it, he had been through clinics as far-flung as Phoenix and Lucerne. He had undergone regimens of antioxidants and injections of human growth hormone. He’d tried testosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone, better know as DHEA. Maybe it had made a difference, maybe not. Sometimes he thought he had more libido and energy, but other times he wasn’t sure. Maybe it was just that he’d begun working out even harder, playing handball an extra half hour every other day. He did know his body was continuing to deteriorate.

Shit, the Beta had to be made to work “I don’t want to stay here alone,” Kristen said, putting down her spoon. “I want to go back to work.”

“Honey, I can’t be here all the time, and you’re really not well enough to go to work. There’ll be someone here with you. It’s just till you get better.” He studied her, the face that was so young, and felt the full weight of the tragedy sinking in. “Do you remember what it was you used to do?”

“I don’t remember right now. I mean exactly. I used to talk to people. I was in this room with lots of bright lights.”

She didn’t actually remember, he thought. Her former producer at E!, along with everybody else (including her harridan of a mother, Katherine), had been told she was at a private health spa in New Mexico. It had to be kept that way.

No one must know she was here. All the phones had been removed before the ambulance brought her. Starting at six in the morning, there would be a nurse and a nurse/cook downstairs on a twenty-four-hour basis. Under no conditions could she be allowed to leave, not the way her mind was now.

“Kristy, it wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. I’m so sorry. But Karl is doing all he can. We’re… He has a new idea that he’s about to explore. He’s going to…” His voice trailed off as he stared at her unblinking eyes. “You don’t remember what happened, do you?”

But how she looked. My God. The youth. How could a true miracle have such a tragic downside?

That was when the cell phone on the stand beside him chirped. It was the only phone in the place, and tomorrow it would be gone. No way could she be allowed to have a phone.

The caller ID advised that it was Grant Hampton.

“Kristy, I’ve got a feeling this could take a while.” He was reaching for his silk robe. “I’ll be downstairs on the first floor if you need anything, okay?”

She just stared at him mutely. He shook his head sadly. There wasn’t much time left to mend her. How in God’s name had it come to this?

As he moved down the spiraling grand staircase, he clicked on the phone.

“Yeah.”

“I was just at her place, W.B. I actually got in, which is more than has happened in over four years. I think she’s on board but I’m still not entirely sure. So, just to be safe, I told her you wanted to see her tomorrow.”

“Are you saying you couldn’t make this happen? With your own fucking sister?”

“It’s… We’re not exactly on the greatest of terms, Ally and me.” There was an awkward tone in his voice. “It’s hard to explain. Like I told you, I confirmed her blood type on Saturday. It’s AB, like I thought. And I played the mother angle. At the very least, I think she’s willing to drive the old bird out to the institute and meet Karl. That’s a start, at least.”

“And what about her medical… Karl wanted to see—”

“I’m working on it. I remembered something about her. I’ve got a guy. He’s going to check on it tonight.”

“Good” Bartlett growled. “There’s no time to screw around on this.”

“I’ve set it up for you to meet her tomorrow, the way you wanted. I think she’ll show. I told—”

“The one who really should talk to her is Karl.” Bartlett sighed. “He knows how to handle patients.”

“Then he could call her tomorrow. After she’s talked to you. If we all pull together on this, W.B., I’m sure we can get her out there by day after tomorrow, Tuesday.”

Winston Bartlett looked at his watch. It had just turned Monday, one less day to find something that would stop the Syndrome in its tracks.

“We’d better.”

He was clicking off the phone when he heard a wail of despair from the bedroom upstairs and the sound of a champagne flute being thrown against a wall.

Kristen was losing it rapidly now. Was she still conscious enough to know what was happening to her?