The Baby Merchant Page 6

  She purred, “Our hero,” with a grin that made me wonder if she was getting cranked up to hit on me. Then she moved in and I knew she was; in her careless need to touch me she slid one warm, soft hand down my jaw, turning my head and leaning in close. Her lips made contact with my ear and she whispered, “It’s this fucking will. Not one fucking penny unless we have kid!”

  It cost me to get out of that one. We’d all signed. I’d made promises. Cheap at the price. Bastards.

  The Pottingers, talented, nice sculptors from Chicago, were an easier shot to call. It just took a little bit longer. They tested fine, right up to the transfer of property. They made the mistake of bringing the live-in nanny they’d just engaged to fly back with the kid while they stayed in New York and took in a couple of shows. I pointed them to the escape clause I’d had written in especially for such cases, but by that time I was … What. I’m not sure, exactly. Just uneasy.

  Then I got a call from Sterling Enterprises and I thought: fine. This is a meeting worth going to. Funding for my secret project, if it works out. Everybody knows Morgan Sterling, high-voltage Manhattan corporate exec, she’s on everybody’s A list and trustee on a dozen boards. Odd, the way in some circles, looks and power make you a celebrity. In all the print journals and videos I studied after her assistant phoned, Sterling comes off as smart, beautiful, powerful— a noted philanthropist. She’s that chic, salty, fabulous-looking woman who shows up on magazine covers and red carpets and sits front and center on the sofa on all the best talk shows. The woman is an opinion-maker, and I needed her help.

  The bait: an offer from the Morgan Sterling Foundation to support my secret dream. Remember, I didn’t call her. They called me.

  The switch? So what if I didn’t see it coming? Isn’t life a transaction?

  She sent a car, which meant she valued my time. Bozos in black met me at the curb and took me up to an oval office at the top of a Manhattan building you probably know on sight. The bozos who saw me into the building and up to the penthouse office were replaced by bozos in soft gray suits that weren’t quite uniforms, who settled me in the boardroom with coffee and the Financial Times. There was a lot of money here: gray velvet walls, gray ceiling, deep gray carpeting, oval glass table with what looked like brushed steel Brancusi knockoff as a base. Indirect lighting rimmed the oval ceiling, deflected by a mirrored band: two-way glass. If they wanted to observe this meeting, fine. I wasn’t here on business.

  I was here to get her to do something I can’t do. I’m looking for ways to help all the babies nobody bothers to chip. Franchising the disenfranchised, I suppose. In this paranoid society a baby without a chip is an uncitizen, shut out of everything a kid has a right to expect in this and every other country.

  In a country in high bunker mode— right, Homeland Security!—it was easy to sell the public on tiny tracking devices so no child gets lost. Embedded in the fontanelle. Once the skull closes, they can’t be removed. If anybody snatches your treasure the signal leads cops straight to the perp before she can put the baby down.

  Of course they were playing on other fears, as in, No Child Left Behind. That was the second prong of the campaign for the legislation: tracking intelligence so your child gets into the right preschool and grade school, the right high school, a college that will make you proud and shoehorn your young graduate into a paying job and success in life. All those couples who stayed up nights getting pregnant and all the climbers and overachievers crazy to see their kids score big bought in and started lobbying. Microchipping is written into the law.

  Now I have to wonder if it’s so no child can hide.

  You, who were so afraid of losing your children, you voted for chipping without looking ahead, but I work with the babies nobody cared enough to chip.

  Understand, the chips can’t be counterfeited and each device is numbered. Usually they pop them into the soft spot before your baby leaves the hospital, but the window of opportunity is open for several months. And you pay a handsome price for it, after which your child’s name is officially entered into the system. Once the fontanelle closes, the baby’s future is pretty much carved in stone.

  Sure they sold you on a chip that would keep your treasure safe. They soft-pedaled the fact that every one of these chips stores data as well as transmits and you have no control over what goes in. The thing will keep storing and transmitting for the rest of your child’s life. Never mind how much data or what kind of privileged information gets input before the implant goes into your baby’s head or which details are entered every time that baby goes to the pediatrician for its shots, goes into daycare, starts school. Never mind the routine scanning every time your growing child walks into a bank or a computer store or goes through airport security or registers for its SATs …

  Security. Sure, no outsiders in our fine country, but:

  The bottom line?

  The screening technology is in the early stages so results are not yet obvious to you, the public, but the implications are clear.

  Without that numbered chip, a kid is a cipher. Bottom-tier schooling at best, and you can forget college. When security technology catches up with the chip, doors all over the country will slam shut. The unchipped child will never be able to walk into a bank or through an airport without setting off alarms. May not be able to get a driver’s license, go into or out of a supermarket, get on or off a subway or a metropolitan bus. Will have a hard time getting a job. The kid may end up at one of the juvenile centers. In jail.

  The implantation tax is already in place, and it’s stiff. Not everybody wants to pay. Some people can’t pay.

  There are so many unchipped babies that I could work all day every day for the rest of my life and never place them all, never get them chipped, never make them entitled U.S. citizens. There are too many for me to help.

  I can’t help them but I can’t just walk away.

  Saving these kids won’t just take a village. It’ll take a foundation. I need millions to do the job and an organizing genius to set it up and get the word out. A charismatic figure to win nationwide support. Me, I fly under the radar. I couldn’t do the job even if it was safe for me to show my face. Morgan Sterling is C.E.O. of a major conglomerate and the kind of celebrity audiences love on sight.

  I came to this meeting because I thought she wanted to help. Why else did she track me down and set it up?

  God only knows what I was expecting.

  I never expected to see her flounce in like a Rockette with her arms spread and a phony, incandescent smile crossing her face like the display on a Times Square LCD, and I never expected her to say what she said to me instead of Thank you for coming, or Hello.

  “Mr. Starbird, I want a baby.”

  I never expected her to be so old. “Ma’am?”

  “You heard me, I want a baby. And don’t call me Ma’am.” Even the voice was old.

  It made me wonder who did her up for TV and photo shoots. How many face lifts there had been, and what acting coach taught her to project eternal youth. But you don’t say that to a billionaire with her own private foundation. You get out as best you can. I should have been pissed at the deceit but I was just depressed. “I thought you wanted to talk about my project.”

  “Afterward. When can you deliver?”

  “I can’t.”

  “It’s your business, right?”

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  Her face shrank into an ugly squint. “But you do steal babies.”

  A match flared inside me. What?

  “I need one …” She looked at her watch. “Nine months from yesterday. My boyfriend thinks I’m pregnant.”

  “I can’t do that.” We both knew I meant I wouldn’t.

  She didn’t care. She just went on. “This is a picture of Trey. Get me a baby who looks like him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m good for it. All Trey’s friends have children now. I could do it, but I’m too busy. After all,”
she said with the ease of an expert at self-delusion, “I’m still ovulating. I can certainly get pregnant, I just don’t have the time.” She went on carefully, making clear that this was transactional. “And you need something from me. Something about a foundation. Now, where’s the paperwork?” She tightened her grip and I winced as her nails dug in. “Let’s do this!”

  I couldn’t just walk away from her billions. I fell back on boilerplate. Starbird’s first question. “Tell me why you think you want a baby.”

  That big head lifted and she threw back her hair in an odd, showy gesture lifted from some vintage movie I was too young to recognize. “Doesn’t every girl want a child?”

  So that was it. Up front and stark naked. Richest woman in New York, needs more than anything to think she is still young. She thinks a baby will prove it. I got up to go. “I’m sorry.”

  The girl in Morgan Sterling vanished. The executive turned to steel. “Get me this baby.”

  A spark kindled inside me. “No.”

  OK, forgive me, all you unwanted, unchipped, disenfranchised babies that I will never help. I walked out on her. Behind me she thundered, if a woman sobbing with rage can thunder, “You’ll never do business in this town again!”

  The fuse ignited. Right.

  I don’t want to do business in this town again. Not really. Not ever. I knew that even before Morgan Sterling knew that she and I were done.

  Instead of going back to the office to sign off on all the cases on my wait list and return the stack of petitions laid out for my consideration, I went to one of my garages and took out the rusting Hyundai I keep for low profile followups. I needed to remind myself why I’d gotten into this business in the first place so I left the city by the Lincoln Tunnel and drove for days.

  I needed to make sure my people were OK.

  I went to every New England town where I had placed children and I went to their houses, every one I could find. Some were shuttered against night. Others had new tenants or For Sale signs on the lawn, and that gave me the creeps. Where had they gone? Why did they go? Had something happened to the baby I had found for them? Was it something they’d done that they didn’t want me to know about? I didn’t know. I made wider circles, jittering with anxiety until I located a few of my first clients, still settled in the houses they’d been so anxious for me to inspect. I spied on some of them at the playground and at the supermarket. I don’t know what I was expecting but they looked ordinary to me. When people are going about their daily business they aren’t necessarily focused on their children and there’s only so much you can tell, so I followed them home and drove around until nightfall, when I doubled back. When I reached their houses I cut the motor and watched for a while. Then I got out and went on foot. I wanted to see all the families I’d made, laughing together. I wanted there to be hugging, signs of joy. I didn’t want them to thank me, I just wanted to know. In a dozen places I circled their houses, craning to see into their living rooms, and when they drew the curtains I prowled around the back, staring into lighted kitchen windows and for all the babies I saw waving in their high chairs, babies tucked in bouncy chairs and toddlers paddling around on screen porches I saw only the ordinary.

  What was I looking for, what did I expect really? I just wanted to know I’d done some good. I needed to see them laughing and content, but for all the time I spent watching the children I’d worked so hard to help, I couldn’t tell if they were happy.

  I couldn’t tell!

  Interesting, how you can start out thinking you are doing one thing and end up doing another, how you break your heart trying to help and end up shooting yourself in the foot. Interesting and terrible.

  All that and I still didn’t know whether I’d done even one good thing. It might be time to quit.

  6.

  The glories of pregnancy are a myth dreamed up by women who forgot. In the final stages, it’s hard to sleep. When your body’s been carjacked, it’s impossible. You’re no longer a person, you are a vehicle, with an unwanted passenger driving you God knows where. Pregnancy jerks you into a new trajectory and sends you speeding along toward a destination you don’t want and can’t escape. At the end there will be pain and blood, and in Sasha Egan’s case, grief and responsibility to a baby she never asked for and can’t keep.

  How would she take care of it? Worry alone keeps her tossing and turning, but with this new belly, turning won’t work. Can’t sleep on her front, can’t sleep on her back either, can’t roll over without groaning; in the night her feral passenger’s elbows jab into her soft places, stirring up bad dreams. Anxieties roll in like waves, eroding sleep.

  Tonight, it’s worse. With Gary Cargill stalking the Pilcher grounds, she’ll be awake until the night goes away— or Gary does. Dry-mouthed and taut with worry, she heaves herself out of bed and pads out to the hall window to check. There’s always the possibility that she’ll look out and catch him leaving, or that the still air, the bleached sand outside will tell her he’s gone.

  Instead she sees a smear of darkness rushing past. Hurrying down the long hallway she sees it from the next window and the next: Gary Cargill’s moving shadow, leaving its track like a snail.

  He’s been out there for hours. When she ran inside yesterday he phoned and phoned. He hit redial on his cell before the door slammed behind her. He called the office and kept calling until Lights Out, but in spite of Viola’s sudden concern (what is it, Viola, did he offer you money?) Sasha refused his calls.

  Now he is out there in broad moonlight, shaking his fist at the building while she watches from the darkened solarium. Let him yell, his threats won’t make it through the Thermopane. Pilcher’s sealed tight. Still it makes her uneasy, having him so close.

  Shaking, she goes back to her room. He can’t get me here, she tells herself, but no place is safe. Gary looked like such a nice guy the night she fucked him, sweet-faced and easygoing with a goofy, slightly hammered smile and flakes of glitter caught in his fair, curly hair. Now he is someone else. It won’t matter what she does or what she tells him, he isn’t giving up and he won’t go away. He didn’t track her down and come all this way just to let it go. Every time she gets up to look she sees that same shadow like a running smudge: her one-night stand Gary Cargill on a loop. One slip, and now they are eternally linked.

  What does Gary really want from this?

  He doesn’t want a baby of his own to take care of, not Gary, not at his age. That was a lie. So, what? Did Grandmother make him an offer he can’t refuse or is he planning to sell this baby to somebody else?

  She has to plan but plans elude her. Everywhere her mind runs, Gary is.

  Her first instinct is to leave, but the risks are too great. If she stays put he’ll make a scene in the office and get her kicked out of here or else he’ll go to court to take her baby away. If she calls the police he’ll turn them on her, charging God knows what. It will get into the newspapers and Grandmother will find out.

  If she walks out any door, he’ll pounce. He could blindside her and throw her into his car before she got the breath to scream. He could tie her down and drive without stopping until they were a thousand miles from here, keep her locked up in a shack or trapped in a motel until she goes into labor, and then what would Gary do? Follow her into the delivery room and stay until the baby comes out— happy father, Nurse, let me hold him for a minute. There. He could tuck the baby under his arm and make a run for it as soon as their backs were turned. If she lets him get his hands on it, he can do whatever he wants.

  If Gary’s that crazy, would he bother with the hospital at all? Or would he keep her locked up after the contractions start? My God, imagine having this baby without help, stranded somewhere, squirming on a dirty mattress while Gary hangs over her with that blind, possessive smile. Imagine being trapped miles from the hospital, fighting contractions until she is torn wide open and the baby slips out into Gary’s hands.

  Shaking, she backs into the bed and sits down hard. Get ove
r yourself, Sasha. Get a grip.

  She’s— God, does Gary already know where she is in the building, or is he on a surveillance run, checking all the windows, waiting for her to flip on a light and show herself? If she does show herself will he lie to fat Viola in the morning, or will he bribe his way in? For all she knows, he’s down there prying open one of the sealed windows right now. Or he’s found an unlocked door or an open window and has slipped inside. Is he on the ground floor yet, is he upstairs, creeping this way? What if he corners her in her room? She doesn’t know.

  Gary is a complete stranger. She has no idea what he will do.

  For all she knows he’s waiting for her to come out and apologize— after all, it’s his baby too. Or he thinks she’s secretly in love with him. You know you’re asking for it. No! Unless he expects her to rush into his arms and beg him to marry her so this baby will have a father. Or he thinks she’s so stupid that by morning, she’ll forget and wander out. As if she’d sit up and stretch, yawning, and blunder outside in her bathrobe to enjoy the pink morning light. Surprised: Oh, Gary. What are you doing here? Unless he’s trying to flush her out so he can spring like a panther and bring her down. She isn’t safe anywhere.

  She can’t go out. Not now and not tomorrow, either. Not without a plan. She can’t go on the way she is, frantic and vulnerable. She has to do something, but what?

  Just when she ought to be deciding, Sasha is torn. She has everything she needs here at Pilcher: bright, sunny room for the duration, comprehensive prenatal care. Case workers eager to place this baby when it comes. To her surprise she has friends, a handful of sweet, uncomplicated pregnant girls who never heard of Donovan Development and could care less who her grandfather is. She has responsibilities— grinning, needy little Luellen Squiers. She has excellent doctors and experienced labor coaches, three squares and no responsibilities, and right now she has autonomy: no craggy grandmother reminding her that she’s just like her mother, bad fruit always lands under the tree. She can’t do that to a kid.