The Baby Merchant Page 15

  He goes to the mirror, sticks out his tongue. What was that?

  When there’s something wrong with you, it’s supposed to show in your face: veins bulging, transparent skin with the blood running green underneath. Starbird looks obscenely healthy. Fine.

  What was it anyway? He isn’t sure. So, what. If there was a sickness, if he’s getting over it and it isn’t his body, is it something with the business? He doesn’t think so. That’s just something he did. Underscore the past tense. Did. He took pride in the work. He did a lot of good. It made him rich. No matter how well you do at something, sooner or later you hit the wall and it’s time to move on.

  If it was just himself he had to think about, Starbird could walk out on Zorn, the needy Conscience of Boston, and disappear. He could leave tonight. He could exit without a trace. But at their face-off in the Boston studio, Zorn dropped a central piece of Starbird’s life into the room. It plunged to the bottom of his heart like a little anchor, tearing a hole. Forget the first class seat and the limo waiting. Starbird’s thought balloon had the Air France 777 with feathered wings on it, flying away.

  You think your life has flowed past all the old shit and then Zorn tells you, “My interviewers did preliminaries on all the other people Daria tried to hand you off to when you were a baby, so be warned.”

  And you understand that like it or not, stuff you thought you’d outrun is part of your life. Others? “Explain warned.”

  Zorn popped a Pez out of a plastic Goofy’s mouth. “If we have to, we can go live with this story next week. Want one?”

  “No thanks.”

  “So are we going to do this or what?”

  The anchor dug into Starbird’s soft tissue but he didn’t scream. He went back to the table. He sat down and pulled out his PDA. Like any vendor, he said flatly, “Tell me what you want.”

  “A boy.” Zorn had a checklist. “Naturally, our demographic. Coloring like mine, so he looks like mine.”

  “You understand this is going to take time.”

  Zorn rolled over him like a tank. “Within the month. Oh. One more thing I need. The birth parents should be arties. Actors, sculptors, some kind of talent that will show up in the kid.”

  “That’s cutting it kind of fine.”

  “I don’t have to pay you at all, you know.”

  “I don’t care about the fucking money.”

  Zorn whipped his head around so fast that his face blurred. He hit the remote. The tape rolled.

  “Turn it off!” The more he saw of this macho performance artist the more he knew he was wired to ride a son hard: something about the pearly fingernails with the cuticles gnawed down to raw flesh. He temporized. “How would you be with a little girl?”

  “This isn’t a negotiation, Starbird. A son. Within the month.”

  “These things generally start with the home visit. Your wife.”

  “That won’t do.”

  “It’s important. I need to know if …” if you’re fit to be parents. Zorn cut him off.

  “No way. I won’t put her through that.” Then the Conscience of Boston faltered. The voice rattled downhill over bad memories and cracked on the truth. “She’s been through too much.”

  His mutter of sympathy popped out in spite of him. “I’m sorry.”

  “I want it to be a surprise.”

  “I don’t do placements sight unseen.”

  “Your mother thinks she’s coming into the studio to talk about Save the Children,” Zorn said. Push making things clear to Shove.

  Now he is here. If he walks out on Zorn, if he turns his back on this job, Starbird will look up at the screen in his empty room one day and see his mother being eviscerated for the studio audience and millions at home, with tie-ins: unauthorized biography rushed into paperback, with outtakes bannered on the covers of every supermarket rag followed by the Lifetime MOW, aired endlessly on cable and burned into a DVD in case he wants to replay his mother’s humiliation without commercial breaks. Shit, he thinks, tote bags and T-shirts. The woman who dropped him into the world and tried so hard to walk away will be made to suffer which, when you come right down to it, would serve her right.

  It would serve her right, but here he is. He is here on behalf of Daria Starbird who for better or worse he loves, but does not like.

  Funny, he thinks, getting hung up on this, especially when he knows Daria doesn’t much like him, either.

  Once you have been made for who you used to be, the pressure is intense. He despises Zorn for sending all this old kludge rolling into his pristine, newly emptied life. Bad memory is like a tapeworm. You don’t know you have it until you yack it up. He doesn’t like Daria, he understands now, because she doesn’t like him, a fact he doesn’t often think about. He supposes she never did. The woman is all surface, closely contained: don’t touch. He spent his childhood trying to make a dent in that facade. He didn’t exactly love her when he was little, although at the time he thought he did. He can admit it now that he’s outgrown the child’s sense of the way things are supposed to be. What he felt was more like awe, the stillness that takes you when you see your first Grecian marble up close: look on my works ye mighty and despair. His mother carries herself with that stern, beautiful lift of the head: leave me alone, but he knows better now. She is vulnerable too.

  The poems make clear that there’s all this stuff going on underneath, want compounded by the knowledge that as poets go, Daria is good, but she’ll never be brilliant. Which she takes to be Starbird’s fault, viz. her poem called, “If It Wasn’t for You.” She was so proud that it was in Ploughshares that she signed a copy for him. What was she thinking? Did she forget? There was worse news encoded in the unpublished poems he found in the attic of that narrow house in Jamaica Plain. The carton was marked: TO BE PUBLISHED AFTER MY DEATH. By now Zorn’s investigators have probably scanned the things and put them back exactly where Starbird dropped them when he was twelve.

  She thought of herself as an artist first, so what do you expect? The baby was her “mistake,” she said to friends, not caring that he understood. Is he something she did wrong or something she did accidentally? He doesn’t know. She was decent to him but grudging; she still is. He supposes when Daria looks at him she sees lost chances, books she never wrote, the job she took when she should have been living single at Yaddo or some damn place with box lunches and rustic studios and arty dinners where she could read her stuff aloud and have people go, ooooh. She talked about poetry the way other people talk about sex. In that narrow house with him she was only going through the motions (“If It Wasn’t for You”).

  She’s grudging every time they meet, so they just don’t.

  And he’s hanging in here for this woman’s sake because? It’s odd. Why does he always have to prove himself to her? Maybe he just wants to put this in her lap and say, I told you I was worth it. See? Look what I just did for you. He can’t be free until he makes this huge sacrifice and Daria recognizes it for what it is. Whatever losses she blames him for, he’ll redeem himself by making this save. OK, she wasn’t the warmest. She wasn’t even particularly nice. Listen, she fed him and kept his clothes clean and took him to the pediatrician and got his teeth straightened, isn’t that enough? In grade school Daria touched all the bases. She shoehorned him into Boston Latin and fronted for a good college and if she didn’t call or write or come to his commencement, so what? They don’t need to talk or see each other to know the other is still there.

  In its own way it’s been a motivational experience; when nobody wants you, you have to prove yourself. You run faster and jump higher. Isn’t he always the best at what he does?

  With the brute logic of an artist’s self-destructing machine, the phone shatters his solitude. His time alone here is done. The carefully constructed life is gone for good. Heedless Starbird. When he moved into this place where people he know can’t find him, he never thought to unplug the phone. Unless he was asking for it. “Shut up,” he yells, close to losing it. �
��Just shut up.”

  He tells himself you don’t have to answer, but he does. “Hello, Zorn.”

  “Where the fuck is your cell phone?”

  “Whatever happened to hello?”

  “We left hello behind the day you took that meeting.”

  “How did you get this number?”

  “If you picked up your messages, you’d know.”

  “I don’t get messages.”

  “You’d better get this one.” At his end of the line, Zorn is eating. Starbird hears the tiny crackle of fractured M&Ms. “I’ve lined up some amazing witnesses for this show we’re doing. Your father in particular.”

  “I don’t have a father, Zorn.”

  “Tell that to the kid who taped his statement. Now what have you got for me?”

  “I told you, these things take time.”

  “You’ve had time.”

  The old anger flickers. Rich, heedless clients. Fucking consumers. “You can’t always have what you want the minute you want it, Zorn.”

  “By the way, I’ve got your mother’s psychiatric records, for when I talk to your dad.”

  A father. Has Zorn really unearthed the guy who sends the post cards? Surprise, he doesn’t want to know. End this conversation, just do it. He lies. “Hold your water. I’ve found a subject.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t divulge.”

  “I think you’d better put your mouth where my money is. Details, Starbird.”

  “Sorry. Security.”

  “If not who, at least tell me when.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Ballpark.”

  “Trust me, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “OK, last warning. In two weeks this puppy’s set to air.”

  Starbird does what you do. Crackles paper. “You’re breaking up!”

  “Don’t pull that shit on me.”

  “Can’t hear you. Gotta go.”

  Only one way out of this that he can see. Do the job.

  As the sun comes up, he sits down to the search he’s been avoiding so conscientiously. He has to score a kid for a guy who hasn’t been tested and a woman he’s never met and isn’t sure he can trust to take good care of it. He’s going to find a baby for Zorn.

  This is all wrong. Everything about it is wrong.

  First he will do something he’s never done in his life in the business. He’s going to poach. Definitely not done, and never by Starbird, but he has to work fast. He opens his laptop and begins an advanced search. It’s time to raid private agency files. The search engine dishes up a list. He sorts them and settles on the best three.

  This particular pool of subjects comes pre-vetted. The information he needs is in the agency database: demographics, health records. Due dates and birth dates. The mothers have signed releases handing their babies off, which means he has a fresh pool of subjects waiting for nice new parents. Nice new parents— what, hair-trigger Zorn and the wife he hasn’t met? Don’t go there, Starbird. This is bad enough. He doesn’t have weeks to spend negotiating with a mother-to-be. Zorn won’t let him wait.

  He needs a baby that’s already on the ground.

  Starbird had to put thoughts of hell behind him when he agreed to this deal with Zorn. Then he decided to poach. Now he has to do something obviously wrong. Once you do something that’s just not done, you will do anything.

  Good as he is at this, he’s taking a risk. State agencies are big and understaffed. Personnel get careless and if they do catch you prowling, nobody cares enough to follow up. This is different. It’s almost like pinging the personal computer of some nice girl you thought you loved. Broaching any private server is risky, he knows, because even the most subtle and accomplished hackers leave tracks. Fine, he thinks. By the time they subpoena the agency’s hard drives, I’ll be gone.

  An advanced search of the first two agencies yields nothing. The third server is harder to break into but when he does, he finds something likely, and if it isn’t? So what if he can’t bring Zorn the match he wants? Then he finds exactly the right one. Male. Name of the father not recorded, in Starbird’s book A Good Thing, no collision over parental rights. No birth date registered but if he reads the file correctly, it should be on the ground any minute now. According to the file, the mother’s some kind of artist. Coloring … who gives a shit about the coloring? Looks good, he thinks. Looks good to me.

  What he can’t know is that this particular file is still in the agency database only because the records clerk is out sick and hasn’t updated the files. Crazy hoping-against-hope man that he is, Starbird pays cash for a cell phone and makes exactly one call. The street’s noisy so he goes into a booth in the Soho Grand. Pretends to be the supplier’s anxious brother, congenital illness in the family, treatment urgently needed, family’s worried about her and worse yet, her newborn will need immediate special care. A blood exchange, or it will die.

  “I wish we could help you,” the administrator says, “but the patient isn’t with us any more.”

  “And this is because …”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Oh, so the adoption’s been finalized.”

  “No, she’s. Um …”

  He feints. “Tell me where she went and the family won’t sue.”

  “She left on her own recognizance.”

  His mind closes on this like a bear trap. “So she ran away.”

  “No she didn’t, she …” Did she hear the steel in his voice? She freezes. “Perhaps you’d better take this up with our lawyers.”

  “Did she leave an address?”

  “The bitch ran off. Who is this anyway?”

  Starbird clicks the woman into oblivion and grinds the phone to rubble under his heel. He heads back to his place, running scenarios. It isn’t that hard to trace a hugely pregnant woman when you know what you’re doing. When a woman is close to term airlines refuse to take her, which means she can’t go far. It’s even easier to find one who’s just given birth. First he’ll go down, win them over with some story, and then? He doesn’t know what comes after then. Once he gets to the place in Florida he’ll have to wing it. Study the situation, play it by ear. There will be plenty of time to write his lines and lay out alternative scenarios once he’s on the plane. Then he can study downloads of the tri-state area map. He can hack into the likeliest hospital databases as soon as the NO SMOKING light goes off.

  Starbird is in it now. Whatever was the matter here, stasis or sickness, if that’s what it was— when he fills this last order, he is over it. He will be goddamn cured. He is well and truly done.

  First, he has certain arrangements to make. Plane tickets. The car. Do this, Starbird, save your mother’s bacon before it shrivels on the plate and she is wrecked and you are permanently wrecked. Do whatever you have to, to bring this off, and do it fast. Job to be done here, not much time left to do it, get in and get it done and get it over with. Get it over with so you can get out.

  Pack quickly, you don’t have much, leave nothing of yourself behind. Sweep the place clean of fingerprints, try not to agonize over DNA samples trapped in the sheets and in the shag rug, you’re so good at what you do that it won’t come to that. And if it does, by the time they come looking you’ll be in Hong Kong or Marrakesh and another dozen tenants will have moved in on top of any traces you left. Wipe the doorknob after you step out into the hall. When you shut the door behind you, try to pretend that you feel five hundred pounds lighter. Psych yourself as you get in the cab.

  You can do this, no problem. You can.

  Once he’s headed for the airport, Starbird gets busy with his PDA, running ahead of the sick feeling that has grabbed him by the balls and begun to spread, crawling up his loins and into the great gut. Humming along at high speeds, preparing for a job he does not want, Tom Starbird knows in the part of him that he thought he had slammed shut and turned the lock on years ago that this last job is going to ruin him. He isn’t sure how or why, but it will ruin him; he knows it and
he has to do it anyway.

  16.

  On her second day at the DelMar Sasha goes to the public library to research local obstetricians on the Web. She narrows her choices on the basis of genteel Southern names, adding some plucked out of local history, Doctors Weed, Ribault, Oglethorpe, Calhoun. Then she starts phoning offices, shmoozing receptionists: how long had the doctor been here, oh, he’s from here? Wonderful. Smart woman, Sasha found out enough about old Savannah society to know which names to drop, and thanks to the private school, she knows exactly what to say to get the receptionist to put her through. In an alternative universe, Sasha might have been a writer; once she has the doctor on the line she knows exactly what story to tell— college friend of Miranda Upchurch, in Savannah for the big wedding, Doctor. Friend of Sally Yerkes, from Jacksonville? Beattie Pinckney from Beaufort gave me your name, baby isn’t due for weeks and weeks, but just in case I get caught short …

  He sees her the next day. Charming Southerner. “Of course I’ll take care of you if the baby comes early.” The doctor has Muzak in his examining room and a repro of Monet’s Water Lilies posted on the ceiling, so the patients immobilized on his table can lie there thinking serene thoughts while he looks into their deep places and judges. What he has to say is somewhat more disturbing. “But you might as well know, your due date is sooner than you thought.”

  “I’ll get my doctor to send my records,” Sasha tells him with a saccharine, good-girl smile. “Just in case.”

  When she comes home to the DelMar there are pregnant-woman offerings from Marilyn laid out on the bed: two vast, hideous print blouses. Flowered. So much like Marilyn that she doesn’t want to touch them; she drops them in the Dumpster but the bed still smells of Trailing Arbutus perfume. There is a note:

  SO YOU’LL LOOK PRETTY FOR HIM.

  Don’t even think about it, Marilyn. Got to put her off but do it nicely, remember, she’s only trying to be nice. Unless this is a hostile act. Sasha picks up the house phone and then rethinks. Go on up to the office. Do this in person. Make it stick.