Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [90]
How could his father have been so wrong?
FROG CYCLE
BY BEN NEIHART
Inner Harbor
Cell Scope is a science education park that sits like some new blown-up nanotech herpes sore on the lip of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. It’s a massive glass-and-steel base topped with a billowing white roof. Tonight it’s all lit up: holograms, fireworks, lasers, an immense smoke-pot that puffs DNA helixes into the air. Just off Pratt, on the torch-lit front esplanade, a four-girl Cirque du Soleil spinoff band plays whale-call jazz, and it actually sounds haunting, not phony. CEOs from New York and California, Maryland biotech investors, Japanese boys, a couple dozen news cameras, and, lucky me, fifty or sixty print reporters swarm through the mammoth glass doors for tonight’s big opening of Frog Cycle, the demented new exhibit I’m supposed to be promoting.
Or, I should say, Frog Cycle in the Kel-Shor Virtual Pond. Seriously, if Kel-Shor’s paying $4.5 million, I can spew the full name.
And to be truthful, I should state for the record that I am promoting the frogs, no mordant “supposed to be” bullshit.
But you know what? Pushing through the crowd, angling my way inside the main hall, circulating, I’m a redundant publicist. The frogs sell themselves. They’re not just a perfect example of Cell Scope’s mission, the translation of bone-dry sci-tech jargon into lip-smacking juicy lovely-bones show biz; no, they’re wicked, they’re wrong, they’re the end of the world as far as I’m concerned. And this morning, on the test run, they malfunctioned.
The problem is the virtual frogs, the ones featured on the poster. They’re big, they’re ugly, they’re mean. And they slobber. There are a half-dozen of them; they’ve been re-engineered by geneticists who’ve broken off from UMBC. They look fine, just like Florida gopher frogs, except they’re three times as big. Part of Frog Cycle’s appeal is designed to be the interaction between the virtual frogs and Florida tree frogs and green tree frogs and several other scarce tropical frogs and toads. The virtual frogs are supposed to be dominant, but in the misfire this morning the virtuals attacked the naturals, killed them all, ate most of them.
The Kel-Shor people have no idea.
I pop a mint into my mouth and smile past the badges and lapels. There’s a lot of dialogue in the air, a lot of bragging and favor-making. I snag a cup of white wine from a waiter, slurp it in two swallows, and duck into the alcove where a smallish crowd ponders a glass-encased model of Frog Cycle that sits on a silver pedestal. I stand on tiptoe and look over the shoulders of some gruff Japanese guys; it’s a bit Disney, the model, and before I know it I say, “Ah, kawai!” That means super-cute.
The taller of the Japanese guys looks sideways at me and nods grimly. “Very very kawai.”
Laurie Hauver’s the money girl. She’s my boss. I usually have a problem with all three categories—girls, money, and bosses—so it’s a pleasure to report that I’m a slave for Laurie, and when I see her disentangle herself from a dilapidated, rouge-unto-death Gilman girl, circa 1990, I kind of plow through the atrium, dodging a Sony robot, an ax-man from used-to-be-Legg-Mason, and a martinet from the Sun’s biz page. I almost bounce against Laurie, but her force field does its work, and I stand a few inches back, giving her the once over. She looks like someone who is written into a number of substantial wills. A couple of them death-bed, chickenscratch revisions, screw the notary. She’s just had her hair cut short and dyed goldenrod; she’s wearing a black backless slip dress, black Laboutin stiletto provocations.
“You don’t look too bad,” I tell her, almost taking her arm. “How was it—Lovely Lane? How was the funeral?”
“It’s something else,” she whispers. “It’s the first time I’ve heard the minister refer to the subsequent amputation of the widow’s arms during a proper kind of ceremony. I mean, I know the story, but I don’t care. It made the minister seem a little bit inside Like he had his own blog or whatever. I took two propranolol—I’m not coming across