Then she saw him.
Thirty yards away, down in the dip. A tall man with long hair. She called out his name, again and again, running even faster, telling him she was coming, waiting for a break in the bushes before she could start to make her way down the slope to him.
But then someone stepped out from behind a tree right in front of her. It was a woman. Tall, painfully thin, with terribly red hair.
She started to smile, some dry, stretched movement of her lips away from dark teeth, and then she disappeared.
Talia screamed and lost her footing and started to slip, and when one leg got caught behind the remnants of an old tree stump, she lost her balance altogether and there was nothing to do except fall.
She fell nothing like a star.
Part Three
Dreams are real as long as they last.
Can we say more of life?
Havelock Ellis
Chapter 46
“I’m fine,” I said.
“John, you are so not fine.”
I repeated that I was fine. I was aware I was saying it for something like the fourth or fifth time, and groggily, and that neither was helping my case. Being able to make this simple opinion understood seemed very important, however.
“John … oh Jesus. Look at you.”
“I’m fine,” I said. Then I passed out.
When I opened my eyes again Kristina was still sitting by the bed. A nurse—the same one who’d been there all along, I believed, though the room was pretty dark and I wasn’t entirely sure—was standing to one side.
“And … he’s back,” the nurse said cheerfully, checking her watch. “Barely five minutes that time. Your boy ain’t one to take shit lying down, huh?”
“Hey,” I said thickly.
“Tell me one more time that you’re fine,” Kris said in a low, sincere tone, “and I’ll punch you myself.”
“Okay,” I said. “To be honest, it kind of hurts.”
“What does?” asked the nurse.
“Pretty much everything.”
“That’s good.”
She gave me a looking over and got me to follow her finger while she moved it across various planes in front of my eyes and then marched out into the corridor to go about her business, evidently satisfied I was no closer to death than I deserved.
The last thing I remembered before waking up in the hospital was seeing—from my floor-level perspective—Reinhart leaving the restaurant. He had not stabbed a warning finger in my face or delivered gritty parting shots. The guys who do that learned their violence from television and their threats are like muscles acquired from the gym—they look good but lack the steel that comes from being tempered by real life. I was now ruefully convinced Reinhart had served his apprenticeship at the knee of people who were not interested in how things looked, but concerned rather with putting their enemies on the ground hard and fast. On it, or underneath. I knew he would have relented only because that kind of man has the sense to stop short of committing actual murder in front of fifty civilian witnesses—and that he would want very much to finish what he’d started, in private.
Mario’s sister hadn’t waited for an ambulance but drove me the twenty blocks up to Bellevue herself, once Jimmy and Paulo had dragged me out through tables of fascinated diners and laid me across the backseat of her car. She told me this when I woke, briefly, the first time. She also said she’d called Kris and that the nurse believed I wasn’t going to die, probably, so she had to get back to work; it was a busy night and now they were down a waiter, for God’s sake, and when it came to paying the hospital bills I was on my own, of course.
Kris was there when next I surfaced. And, thankfully, still here this third time.
I pushed myself up in bed. “Where were you?”
“I’ll tell you later,” she said. “There’s … there’s a guy who wants to talk to you.”
From my newly elevated position I could see a man in the doorway. I thought for a moment there was someone else out in the dimly lit corridor beyond, but I didn’t get a good look.
“Who are you?” I asked.
The man came and stood at the end of the bed. He pulled out a wallet and showed NYPD ID that said his name was Detective Raul Brooke.
“Okay,” I said. “So what do you want?”
“For you to tell me what happened.”
“I got beat up.”
“That’d be obvious from about thirty feet away, sir. I was hoping for more in the way of detail.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Uh-huh. A witness gave us a name, so I don’t need you to volunteer that. I’d simply like you to explain the nature of your encounter with Mr. Reinhart.”
“Personal.”
“Uh-huh,” he said again. “Your assailant is known to us, Mr. Henderson. You are not the first person to undergo an entanglement with him, though actually you came out of it better than some.”
“I got in his face over something. He came to the place where I work and got the jump on me. That’s all.”
“If you know his name,” Kristina said, “why can’t you just arrest him?”
“Experience has shown that casual witnesses have a pattern of losing their memory when it comes to this man,” Brooke said. “I’m wondering whether your boyfriend might be made of stronger stuff.”
“It was a private disagreement,” I said.
The cop smiled tightly and put his notebook away. “Right,” he said. “That’s similar to what the other three said, the people we know had ‘private disagreements’ with him. One has disappeared. The other is in a wheelchair. He lives in a facility in Queens. His son visits him every week, but his dad has no clue who he is.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Right,” the detective said again. He seemed like a man who’d boiled his vocal responses down to simple units, which he could deploy as and when necessary. He put something on the arm of Kristina’s chair and walked toward the door, but stopped as he reached the corridor.
“The third person died. Hard. Of course, we can’t tie that to Reinhart, or I wouldn’t be here trying to get sense out of the next asshole in line.”
I didn’t say anything.
“This person was a woman,” the cop added, more wearily. “And your friend was smart enough to cut away the parts of her that might have held traces of his DNA. So the bottom line is, we got three people who can’t help get this guy what he deserves … and one who can. You.”
He flicked his thumb at Kristina. “Your friend has my card. She’s probably got the smarts to be able to read the words on it, too. If you grow a brain anytime soon, Mr. Henderson, give me a call.”
He left.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“No, you’re not.”
I pulled the sheet off the lower half of my body. This triggered ricochets of pains across my chest and back. My first attempt to swing my legs off the bed did not go smoothly and made me feel nauseous. “Yeah, I am.”
“Stay there.”
“Kris, you heard the guy.”
“Yes, I did. I was worried you hadn’t. I was wondering if maybe you’d got hit in the head so often that you lost all ability to hear what the hell people are saying to you, you asshole.”
Then she had her hands on my shoulder and was either shaking me or trying to push me back down. It wasn’t easy to tell which, but I held her until the first rage or fear was spent and eventually got my arms around her back and pulled her in to me. That hurt too, but it was a different kind of pain, and I held her as long as she’d let me, until she’d stopped trying to shout in my ear and was letting me kiss her on the cheek, and then doing the same thing back, reluctantly, and still angrily, but hard.
Finally she pulled away, and I was shocked to see her eyes were wet. I have never seen Kris cry.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“Pushing Reinhart’s buttons today was dumb. But that cop
sounded serious and that’s why I’m out of here. It won’t be hard for Reinhart to find out where I am and right now I’m not in a position to—”
“John, you haven’t seen what you look like. You haven’t talked to the nurse. You’re concussed.”
“All the more reason to get home.”
“He’s right,” said a voice.
I looked at the door to discover a tall girl in a black coat standing out in the dark corridor, the girl who seemed to have been the catalyst to pull us into all of this, whatever “this” was.
Kristina looked as guilty as hell and I guessed I knew where she’d been that evening. “Lizzie—what are you doing here?”
“I followed you,” the woman said. “It’s what we do.”
“John should stay here. And talk to that policeman.”
Lizzie shook her head. “Those would be mistakes.”
Kristina went out into the corridor. They went back and forth for a while, which gave me the opportunity to slide awkwardly out of bed, wrench myself out of the gown, find my clothes, and get dressed. Getting out of the gown revealed how bruised and scuffed my chest was. Climbing into my clothes suggested that in my current state I could probably be knocked over by a toddler, or a boisterous mouse. I stuck to the task, however, moving like a puppet with tangled strings. I picked up the cop’s business card and stuffed that in my pocket, too.
“So,” I said when I was done and had lurched out into the corridor to join them. “How do we get out of this place? I’m afraid I have no idea.”
“John, for God’s sake …”
“I’m dressed and it hurt and I’m not getting undressed again.” I meant to say more but got light-headed and had to lean against the wall.
“Christ,” she said. “Okay, let’s go.”
The corridor was in night mode, periodically lit by dim lights. There was no sign of the nurse. Lizzie held up a hand to tell us to stay where we were. She hurried to the intersection and looked both ways, then gestured for us to follow. I wasn’t sure why I was taking direction from her, but if it meant I could get out of the hospital I was prepared to go along with it for now.
At the intersection we found a nurse’s station, empty, and a sign pointing down a long corridor toward the elevators. The longest of the corridors, of course.
We started along it, but then Lizzie slowed, twisting her head around in short, abrupt movements, as if listening for something. Whatever it was, she eventually seemed to catch it.
She bit her lip. “Go,” she said.
Kris hesitated, caught between wanting to get me out and wanting to know what was going on. “What is it?”
“It’s … just go,” Lizzie muttered, setting off down the side corridor. “Go somewhere safe.”
But Kristina followed the girl as she hurried away, and I limped after her. Every three yards along this corridor was a door to an individual room. All had been left slightly ajar, presumably to allow monitoring staff to poke their heads in during the night. For no obvious reason, Lizzie approached the door about halfway along and then froze outside, hand held up toward the door as if about to push it open.
She was so unnaturally still that for a moment it seemed as if she could never have moved at all, but was something seen as a layer over the world, like a particular vivid memory or daydream. Then she was in movement again, gently pushing.
We reached the doorway as she stepped in. It was dark inside, with only a low glow from a short fluorescent tube halfway up the far wall.
On the left was a bed. In it lay a man, propped up. He was asleep, breathing raggedly. He was pale and bloated and had plastic tubes going into one wrist and one nostril and it did not seem likely that he was in the hospital for something minor. This was a man whose body was at war against him. His body, and time.
I turned to go, feeling bad for intruding on his sickness and while he was asleep, but realized there was someone else in the room. There was a chair in the corner, pointed toward the bed. Another man, younger than the other or in better health and shape, was sitting there. He had his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped tightly together, intently watching the man in the bed. He was rocking back and forth.
“Oh, Billy,” Lizzie said.
He didn’t answer. Lizzie put her hand on his shoulder. “How long have you been here?”
He licked his lips. “Two days.”
“What happened?”
“Heart attack.”
“But he’s only …”
“I know. I know. But it’s been coming. I realize that now. I hadn’t seen him in years. I didn’t understand how he’d become. I thought it was me losing faith, slowly going hollow. But it was him all along.”
The figure in the bed pulled in a rasping breath. “No,” Billy said, leaning forward. “No …”
After a few seconds the man in the bed breathed out again, and the rhythm of his chest’s rise and fall seemed to settle. Lizzie stood by the bed, looking down. “Why isn’t anybody here with him?”
“They were. I’ve been standing at the end of the bed all day, out of their way. The doctors say he’s stable, so they’ve gone home to get some rest and change their clothes and, I don’t know, that kind of thing.”
“Well, if the doctor says that then … it could all be okay.”
The man shook his head. In the weak light his face looked pinched, almost translucent. I don’t think he had any idea that Kristina and I were even in the room.
“I felt it. I didn’t realize it, but I felt it. That’s why … that’s why. It wasn’t my fault.”
Lizzie looked at us. “Go,” she said. She no longer looked elfin, or distant. She looked like if we didn’t go then bad things would happen to us.
“Kris,” I said … but then the man on the bed made a quiet, terrible sound, as if he’d tried to pull in another breath and found the world withholding it.
He tried again, and this time it sounded like he’d succeeded but the air had gone the wrong way inside his body, as if there was no longer any proper place in there for it. His eyes opened, staring up at the ceiling, and in them was all possible knowledge of what was happening to him. He knew, and because he knew it was impossible for the rest of us not to know too.
“Get a nurse,” Kristina said. “John, get a—”
A final exhale, an out breath that seemed to last far longer than it should for a pair of lungs to void themselves of air—as if instead it was clearing out the stale remains of every single inhale, back through thirty years of in-and-outs and sneezes, to childhood breaths in fields and classrooms, breaths sucked in to blow out birthday candles, back even to the first breath scrabbled out of a cold new world, to give the power to wail.
The man on the chair—Billy—was standing now, coming closer to the bed, arms held down and rigid by his sides. He closed his eyes.
“Goodbye, my friend.”
The breath finished, or came to a point where it was no longer going on. In the life of the person in the bed, nothing ever happened again.
The man standing next to him seemed to condense. It was as if something had shifted in the lighting, making a shape that had been so inconsequential when we entered that I hadn’t even noticed him, into something more substantial. Not bigger, exactly, but much more there.
He was motionless for a moment, then took in a huge jagged breath, his eyes flying open. “Ha,” he said.
He breathed out massively, then back in again. “Ha!” He started walking around the room, faster and faster, arms and legs jerking robotically. “Oh, yes,” he said, starting to laugh. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
He pulled another monstrous breath in through mouth and nose, and held it down, as if savoring it.
“Billy,” Lizzie said. “Billy, slow down.”
He paid no attention to her. He completed one more chaotic circuit of the room and nearly knocked me down as he went striding out the door, arms thrashing.
Lizzie ran after him, leaving us in a hospital ro
om with a cooling body and no clue what was going on.
“What the hell just happened?”
“Let’s get you home,” Kristina said, with a final glance at the dead man in the bed. “There’s … stuff we need to talk about.”
Chapter 47
We didn’t go home, however. In the cab we realized that if Reinhart did decide to come back and finish the discussion tonight, then directly after the hospital he’d come hunting where we lived. Both of us believed he’d already have that information or be able to obtain it, and that being trapped up at the top of a five-story building was a bad defensive position.
I hated the feeling of hiding from him, but on the other hand—and perhaps contrary to appearances—I’m not a total fool. If we were going to meet again, it needed to be in circumstances of my choosing, or at least at a time when I could straighten my back and move my limbs without feeling like I was going to pass out. Merely lolling in the back of a yellow cab felt like someone was still hitting me, and my brain was so washy and vague that I wasn’t completely convinced of what I thought I’d seen in the private room in the hospital.
Trying to work out where to hide in the middle of the night is a good way to focus the mind on the relationships in your life. The news that came back was not good. The restaurant made no sense and neither did the apartments of any staff members. Even if we’d been close enough to impose upon them, their connection to the Adriatico would rule them out. I’d traced Reinhart to his lunch via this kind of link and I had no doubt he’d be able to do the same in reverse. The only other person we could think of was Catherine, which clearly wasn’t an option either. Once we’d run out of ideas and sat in silence for a few minutes, Kristina took my hand.
“We don’t really live here, do we?”
“No,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should move. Live in a neighborhood. Try to hang with some real people for a change.”
We Are Here Page 27