The room was very well lit by banks of fluorescent tubes under diffusers in the ceiling; Bach was playing from another shelf, where a cheap tape recorder cum radio sat. Everything was as neat as a pin, Abe thought as his eyes roamed around; his tidy soul applauded the kind of person who could fit so much into so little. This room’s owner was one highly organized and obsessive person. It took one to know one.
“I wish I could say it’s great to see you, Abe,” Millie said, perching on the room’s only chair, a high stool with a padded seat that revolved.
Abe stood in a vacant space, elbows tucked in. “I know, Millie, and I echo that. Can’t they find you a bigger lab? This is more overcrowded than a Sing Sing cell.”
“Not an important enough fish,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll never win the Nobel Prize, but I will contribute some tiny scrap of knowledge about the functioning of the central nervous system, kind of like a missing piece of blue sky in a jigsaw of blue sky. It’s Jim’s work is ground-breaking, which is why he has a whole floor of the Burke to himself these days.”
“Well, I think you’re wonderful to cope with this.”
“And I think you’re wonderful to say that.” Her lovely face sobered. “What can I do you for, Abe?”
He produced a box and unearthed the ampoule. “Did you make this, Millie? No, it’s not dangerous. It held flea powder.”
She took the ampoule curiously, shaking her head even as she did so. “No, this isn’t my work. Too crappy, and I’d go farther by saying it wasn’t made by anyone who can heat glass well under lab conditions. I mean, we’re always heating and bending glass. Whoever made this sawed two standard test tubes in half, put his — flea powder? — oh, I like that! — in the bottom one, held it upright in a clamp, heated the top rim, heated the rim of the other one, and just fused them together while they were gloppy. There’s no way he aspirated the air to get a vacuum inside. I made mine from two different sizes of thin-walled glass tubing, and by the time I finished with them, I had something that looked pretty professional,” said Millie.
“If he heated the top rim with the powder in the tube’s bottom, wouldn’t the powder be affected?”
“No. Glass is a very poor conductor of heat.”
“Any idea who made this one?”
“No idea at all, except it wasn’t a lab technician. I’d fire anyone who couldn’t do better than this a month into the job training.”
“Any idea why he picked flea powder?”
“I’d say it means he’s seen tetrodotoxin. The color and the consistency are closer than, say, talcum or icing sugar.”
“Thanks, Millie.” Abe took the ampoule from her, put it back in its box and slipped the box in his pocket. “What time do you go home, honey?”
“I’m closing down here right now, as a matter of fact, but then I’ll go up to Jim’s floor and see if he needs help.”
Abe walked back to his car through the cold dark evening, aware of a lump in his throat. Were Jim and Millie ever going to make a home? Or perhaps, he thought, fair man that he was, they already have all the home they want or need — a laboratory. But that’s poor comfort in old age.
An unhappy day for Delia, who, upon arriving home, ran a bath and stayed in it until she was as wrinkled as any prune. No scrap of make-up or mascara was left on her face, her wet hair was slicked against her skull, and she lay understanding the bliss of being rocked in a cradle of amniotic fluid. One of those lucky creatures with positive buoyancy who couldn’t sink, toward the end of her immersion she dozed, and the sleep did its healing thing. When she awoke she was able to get out of her bath, wrap herself in an old checkered dressing gown and fluffy slippers, and actually think of food. The sight of Emily Tunbull had been buried in her cerebral sludge, to reappear only in death that came in the same guise — and in nightmares.
She unearthed four proper British bangers from her freezer and put them in her warming oven to thaw: no hurry. If there were (few) things about England she missed, a British banger was top of her list. For reasons that entirely escaped her, the Americans had no idea how to make a decent sausage; all they produced were those tough, horrible little things they ate for breakfast smothered in syrup! But Delia knew a butcher up the other side of Utica who made proper British bangers, and every six months, armed with a polystyrene laboratory chest and a sack of dry ice, she made a banger run to stock up her freezer.
Tonight she would have bangers and mash with mushy peas — but not until she’d had several sherries. She lit her imitation fire, found the excellent thriller she was halfway through, and moved with a glass, the sherry bottle and her book to the window. The most comforting buffer in the back of her mind was that Uncle John, Carmine and Mrs. Tesoriero were all lighting candles. She was definitely safe.