She laughed. "Frantic. Tar-baby, I love it. You'd better go, or you'll really see frantic. I'm due on my rounds."
Valentine slapped her thin-robed bottom as he headed for the door. She stopped him with a whistle and passed him a yellow piece of plastic. "Here. Elevator won't work without this. Just slide it into the slot above the buttons. There's a diagram."
"Thanks."
He winked as he closed the door behind him and walked down the hallway. The lighting had been altered; it was brighter and cheerier this morning. He went to the elevator, feeling like a male black widow spider who's crossed the female's web and inexplicably lived.
He swiped the card in the reader according to directions. As an experiment, he hit the button for the sixth floor, but the elevator took him to the ground floor.
Valentine exited at a high-ceilinged lobby. Cheerful, primary-colored murals of square-jawed agricultural workers, steel-rimmed medical men, and aquiline mothers told him that those who passed through this lobby were
CREATING A BETTER TOMORROW
and that
PROGRESS COMES WITH EACH GENERATION
A rounded, raised platform held a few of the security staff. Two women in blue scrubs, one holding a plastic water bottle, the other a Styrofoam coffee cup, chatted near a bank of wide-doored elevators that evidently didn't go all the way to the top floor. Valentine walked toward the doors leading to the patio and pool area.
"Hey, hand!" one of the security men called.
He couldn't pretend not to have heard. He turned. "I'm sorry?"
"Your yellow building card. Turn it in."
Valentine fished it out of his pocket, reached up to place it on the desk. "Here you go."
He went back toward the doors, pretending not to see the other exits.
"Am I getting smarter or are they getting dumber?" the security desk said to his friend. "Hand!"
But Valentine was already passing out the doors.
He headed across the slate bricks. The intertower area smelled like flowers and cedar chips, which were spread liberally around the landscaping. Two women in pink, both copiously pregnant, nibbled at ceramic bowls, eating some kind of breakfast mix with beat-up spoons. Valentine's nose detected yogurt. Both were rather pallid and looked as though they needed the morning sun.
Another group of four, no visible swelling inside the loose pink outfits, kept company by one in blue, worked on each other's hair and a pitcher of tomato juice. Valentine passed through the greenhouse doors and down a short ramp to the swimming pool deck. Chlorine burned his nostrils. Two dozen heads bobbed in the wide lap lanes. Others were lined up at one end of the pool, talking, waiting their turn.
No two swimming suits were alike; there were hot pink bikinis and big black one-pieces. Maybe the pool was the one place the women got to express themselves with clothing.
"Come on, ladies," a man in shorts with a coach's whistle exhorted from a short diving board. "Keep swimming. Gets the blood flowing. Gets the bowels moving. I want to see healthy pink cheeks-yo, can I help you?"
The last came when he spied Valentine.
But the words barely registered.
Gail Foster, formerly Gail Post, waited at one side of the pool with the next group.
Her hair and cheeks were thinner, but the big green eyes and delicate, upturned nose were unmistakable. With her hair wet and flat, idly kicking the water as she talked to the woman next to her, she appeared childlike, so unlike the ID photo from Post's flyer where she stared into the camera as though challenging the lens to capture her. She didn't even look up as the man with the whistle hopped off the board to approach Valentine.
"Just taking a shortcut," Valentine said, tearing himself away from Gail's face.
"Don't disturb the expectants. Turn right around and-"
"Right. I'm going." Valentine retreated back up the ramp.
He walked around the greenhouse to the east side of the patio, looking for a hose, a rake, anything. But there were no groundskeepers or tools in sight. He removed his work boot and went to work on the leather tongue with his pocketknife, tearing it. If questioned, he could say that he was trying to get rid of an irritating flange.
He managed to idle away a half hour. A new group of women marched out of the south tower in single file, white robes held tight even in the warm morning air. Valentine looked at the knobby knees and thin legs, and wondered what kind of diet the women were on. They looked like gulag chars who hadn't been on full rations of beans for weeks. Once they passed in another group walked two-by-two back into the tower, led by one of the medical staff in blue scrubs.