Lindsay didn’t look at her father. Suddenly she looked very old and immeasurably tired. To Galvain’s surprise, she said in a very calm voice, “If I press charges, Inspector, what exactly would happen?”
He waved his hand to keep her father silent and said gently, “I am proud that you don’t immediately dismiss the idea of bringing this man to justice. You are a smart girl.”
“I would like to press charges against him. He hurt me badly. He raped me. He isn’t normal. I wish I could be sure that other girls who are fool enough to fall for his charm and good looks won’t be hurt. He should be forced, at the very least, to have treatment.”
“Excellent, mademoiselle. I applaud what you say. It is exactly right.”
“It makes no difference,” Royce yelled. “She won’t press charges, damn you.”
Galvain ignored Royce Foxe. “As I said, mademoiselle, you are a smart girl. You show courage.” He hadn’t expected this much from her, he really hadn’t. But now he had to put a stop to it. He couldn’t let her go through with it. Perhaps, just perhaps, her bastard of a father had learned something about his daughter. But he doubted it. He said to her, his voice very gentle, “You wanted to know exactly what would happen. I will tell you the truth that is unvarnished. A trial would mean an international scandal. Your family is well-known in America and the prince’s family is equally well-known in Europe. You would be butchered by the press and in the courtroom. Your family would be harassed and hounded to a most painful extent. Your sister would possibly be charged with attempted murder if the rape charge failed to stand in court. Do you understand me, mademoiselle?”
She stared at him. He hated to see the brief flash of spirit disappear from her face. He hated to see the dullness return to her eyes.
“Please don’t misunderstand me. It would be right to press charges. I am very pleased that you want to consider it. But I also must be very honest with you. By the end of it, you would be destroyed. Your sister would be destroyed. I am truly sorry, but I cannot lie to you. It is what would happen. There is no mercy for a young girl who is unfortunate enough to find herself raped, particularly by a member of her family. Justice doesn’t serve us in these cases, unfortunately. I am very sorry for it.”
“I would have told her all that.”
Lindsay said nothing for a very long time. She looked at the floor at her feet. Finally, her face and voice expressionless, she said, “Thank you, Inspector. You’ve been kind to me. You told me the truth. I guess I should also thank you for making me face up to what he did to me even though I know if I hadn’t been so silly about him it never would have happened. I had thought only I would be attacked if I pressed charges against him, not my entire family. I had thought about it, before you came, because the prince is a horrible man, but now, now that I understand—” She stopped, shaking her head.
She walked slowly from the room, her last words hanging sadly in the air, the belt of her robe dragging on the floor. Galvain stared after her, feeling such pain he doubted he would ever forget.
Royce was pleased. He smiled after his daughter, then turned to smile his triumph at the inspector. “Are you now quite through with us?”
“Oh, yes, quite. But the paparazzi will be very busy. They are like the rutting little pigs, are they not? You have already read the papers and seen the television. I would recommend that you take your daughters and leave Paris as soon as possible. Flee the arena, as it were.”
“I would agree. However, the prince’s family is here, in seclusion now, of course. They’ve had the prince moved to a private hospital outside Paris, and the place is guarded like a fort. But I can’t be sure they’ll keep their mouths closed. His mother has informed me, the patronizing bitch, that she is displeased with Sydney. Imagine, she’s blaming Sydney! I must remain and guard my daughter’s reputation, her interests, see that they don’t try to harm her through the press.” Royce raked his fingers through his hair, and for a moment he looked vulnerable and overwhelmed. “Tell me, Inspector, what am I to do about the damned bastard?”
“You ask me, monsieur? Well, then, I will tell you. I would secure another gun and shoot his balls off.”
Galvain gave Royce a small salute and left the suite.
5
PRESENT: New York City
Taylor
Taylor ran into the emergency room, pale and looking more terrified than a man should ever look.
The head emergency room nurse, Ann Hollis, was sixty, tough, and more seasoned than a four-star general. She saw the man coming toward her, saw his fear, and readied herself for the outbreak. Screaming, raw and impotent anger, outward fury, the rage brought on by the helplessness of it all. To her utter surprise, when he spoke, his voice was calm and low.
“I would appreciate your help—” He looked at her name tag. “Yes, Ms. Hollis. Lindsay or Eden is her name. I understand there was some sort of accident and she was hurt and now she’s here, being treated. I’m her fiancé. Please tell me what’s going on. This is very difficult.”
And Ann Hollis responded to him with the truth. “I will tell you what I know. First of all, stop worrying. You stay here and I’ll go check and find out exactly what’s happening. All right?”
Taylor nodded and she left him. He didn’t move. He waited, knowing that everything that mattered to him, everything that was deeply inside of him, deeply a part of him, hung in the balance.
Nurse Hollis touched his arm. “Two broken ribs, a collapsed left lung, which they’re reinflating.”
“How’s that done?”
“A small incision between two ribs and a tube is inserted that’s in turn connected to a lung machine. It makes breathing easier for her.”
“Thank you.”
“Contusions and lacerations, but those aren’t all that bad.” Ann Hollis paused, then drew a deep breath. “Then there’s her face.” Again she touched her hand to his arm. “It’s impossible to say right now because Dr. Perry has just gotten to her. He’s got examinations to make. He’s got to get CT scans before he can make a determination.”
“What exactly happened to her face?”
“It was badly smashed.”
He flinched from the baldness of the image that word brought to his mind, but nonetheless he was grateful to her.
“However, Dr. Perry is one of the best reconstructive surgeons in New York City. He probably won’t wait to operate. There’s the problem of swelling, you know.”
Taylor didn’t say anything. He was trying not to shake. Nurse Hollis patted his arm again. Touch was very important, she knew that, it comforted, it reassured, it gave human connection and warmth. With a touch, the other person was no longer alone.
“As soon as I can find out any more, I’ll call you. Please go sit down. I know it’s hard, but you must try to stay calm. She won’t die. Her face will heal. As I said, Dr. Perry is one of the best in facial reconstruction.”
“Thank you, Ms. Hollis.”
She watched him walk slowly away from her. She’d seen the young woman’s face. They hadn’t cleaned it yet, and there was nothing but dried blood and bits of bone and matted blood-dried hair. Yes, it would be difficult to be beautiful when your face was smashed.
Taylor felt the weight of helplessness. And suddenly he remembered how he’d failed her in Paris, the crying young girl who didn’t understand what was happening to her, the young girl who’d been raped so brutally, struck repeatedly, and yet she was at a hospital but the hurt was continuing and she was unable to grasp any of it. And he’d been unable to help her. Just as he’d not helped her this time either.
Her face was smashed. Dear God, what had happened? But all he could think of was the eighteen-year-old Lindsay in Paris, hurt and scared and beaten. And none of it her fault. Just as none of it this time was her fault. And he’d been unable to help her this time, just as he’d been unable then. . . .
6
Taylor
He heard her screams and reacted immediately because he was
a cop. He tried to get up, tried his damnedest to go to her and help her, but he couldn’t. He staggered to his feet, then fell back against the examining table, clutching his broken left arm. He felt nauseous and dizzy from the concussion, and the pain in his arm was becoming more than he could handle.
He was in the emergency-room cubicle next to hers and he’d seen a policeman carry her in a few minutes before, a young girl wrapped in a blanket, her hair disheveled, her face terribly bruised, her eyes wild and vague. She was deeply in shock. He recognized it for what it was. She’d been raped, he’d heard them saying.
Okay, so she’d been raped. Why was she screaming now? What were they doing to her? He gleaned quickly enough that she was American and didn’t speak French or understand it. Taylor spoke French fluently. He was a Francophile; he had flown to France at least twice a year since he’d turned eighteen. This time he’d spent two weeks riding his motorcycle through the Loire Valley, then back to Paris for three days. And now this. What the hell were they doing to her?
She screamed again and again, deep tearing cries that were liquid with pain and fear and hopelessness, and he could hear the doctors clearly now because they had to talk over her. They were pissed that she couldn’t understand them, pissed that she was giving them trouble, pissed that she was fighting them and the girl was so strong to boot and they couldn’t hold her down. They were impatient and hassled and they wanted her to shut up so they could get it over with. He should go in there and help her, he thought again, at least translate for her, but he knew that if he moved he would fall on his face. He listened now, for they were speaking even more loudly over her cries.
“. . . raped by her brother-in-law, the cop said. Look at her face—the man’s an animal.”
“Help me get this blanket off her. No, stop fighting. Damnation, she can’t understand a word. Hold her, Giselle! Jacques, would you look at the mess here. She was a virgin, just look at all that blood. The guy reamed her good. Dammit, hold her still!”
“Get her legs wider, I’ve got to get my fingers in there. That’s it, press her legs back to her chest. Stop it, no, hold her! Damn, she can’t understand me! Ow! Jesus!”
She’d struck the doctor. Hard, from the sound of it. Taylor could hear him lurching around, heard an instrument tray fall to the linoleum floor. He smiled. Good for her. He saw another doctor run into the cubicle. The girl had been raped and they were stripping her and prodding her about like she was a slab of meat. She was quite probably terrified, hysterical, and in pain. There’d been a three-car pileup, he’d heard, which was why he was lying here unattended. At least they were seeing to her.
But couldn’t they go a bit easier with her?
He could hear her crying, gasping for breath. He heard the nurse, Giselle, tell the doctors to stop being pigs, she was just a young girl and afraid of them because they were men and she’d just been raped, for God’s sake. And one of the doctors said, “Not all that little, Giselle. Hold her down, will you?”
“Yeah,” another one of the doctors said, “not little at all, and her body doesn’t look all that young either.”
The third doctor didn’t say anything, he was breathing too hard to catch his breath.
Taylor wished he could hit the bastards. But he just lay there listening to the doctors talk about her, listening to them curse because she wasn’t cooperating with them. He listened to the girl’s cries, his own pain washing over him. He closed his eyes, but it didn’t really help, and he knew he wouldn’t forget her screams for a very long time.
“. . . Two fingers, dammit, you’ve got to go deeper and clean her out good. The cops want all the guy’s sperm and you need to feel for torn tissue. She’s probably torn inside.”
She was crying helplessly now. He saw the third man finally emerge from the cubicle, wipe his hands on his pants, and come into Taylor’s small enclosure. He nodded to him, then asked him a question in French, speaking very, very slowly. Like Americans did, to make themselves understood to stupid foreigners. Taylor answered him quickly in French, fluently and with no accent, saying without preamble, “The girl who was raped, how is she? Will she be all right?”
The doctor muttered something about Americans minding their own business, to which Taylor looked hard at him and repeated his question. The doctor shrugged as he bent over Taylor’s arm. “She’s eighteen, an American, and her brother-in-law, a damned Italian prince of all things, split her up really good. He bashed up her face, tore her a bit internally, and she’s bleeding like there’s no tomorrow. But she’ll be all right, at least her body will heal in time. I heard the girl’s sister shot him and he’s upstairs in surgery. Jesus, what a mess.” Then he shrugged, a typical French reaction, as if to say: What do you expect from foreigners except endless stupidities?
Then the doctor was talking about his broken arm, Taylor realized, clucking, turning it and making him grit his teeth, punishment, Taylor assumed, for being pushy. Taylor said in a stony voice that did little to mask his pain, “I’m a cop with the NYPD. How long will it take to heal? I’ve got to get home and back to work.”
The doctor raised his head and smiled, and shot off in his fastest French, “Give it six weeks and stay off your motorcycle. As for your head, you’re lucky you were wearing a helmet. Damned machines will kill you.”
“Not a scrap of luck to it,” Taylor said easily. “I’m not stupid.”
The doctor did a sudden about-face. “Say, you’re French, aren’t you? You just moved to the United States?”
“Nary a bit,” Taylor said with a big smile. “Born and bred in Pennsylvania.” He paused and added, “I’m just good at languages and, truth be told, French is pretty easy.”
He wished he hadn’t said anything, because in the next instant he sucked in his breath.
“Sorry. I’m sending you to be X-rayed now. No drugs yet, not with that concussion. Wait here a minute and I’ll send someone for you. Oh, yeah, I could tell you weren’t really French.”
Taylor sighed, closed his eyes, and heard the girl sobbing low now. Her throat must hurt badly, for the cries were hoarse and raw. He waited another five minutes. He was still there when she was wheeled out on a gurney. He saw her briefly again—hair in thick tangles around her face, and God, her face, all bruised, one eye puffed shut, her upper lip swelled and bleeding, a lot worse now than when she’d been brought in. She was unconscious, probably drugged. She looked very young. She looked helpless, utterly vulnerable. At least her sister had shot the bastard.
He didn’t understand what would make a man do such a thing, but the good Lord knew he’d seen enough of it his past two years on the force, at his home in the Twelfth Precinct.
A bloody Italian prince. Nothing figured anymore. Taylor sighed again, wishing someone would come and just get all the pain over with.
He was discharged two days later, his arm in a cast. He still suffered nagging headaches. He’d paid out eight hundred dollars in cash for all the hospital services. He had just enough to go home to New York. As for his motorcycle, he’d insured the Harley since he’d rented it here in Paris, so he was only out a hundred bucks for the deductible.
He was tired and felt sorry for himself, even though he knew, objectively, that he was lucky to be alive. The guy had gunned his white Peugeot from a narrow side street and smacked him hard, sending him flying, not onto the pavement, thank God, but into a stand of thick bushes. Those bushes had saved his life. The guy had driven away, leaving him there to curse and hold his arm and wait for the cops to come. And they had. They’d brought him to St. Catherine’s Hospital and he’d lain there listening to that poor girl screaming and screaming. He was a cop; he should have just endured it with a shrug. But he couldn’t, somehow.
In another day, Taylor was at Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for his Pan Am flight to be called when he saw one of the Parisian dailies screaming headlines about a Prince Alessandro di Contini having survived the two bullets shot into him by his wife. Taylor’s flight was calle
d. He left the small kiosk, aware of the beginnings of yet another headache. He read a bit more, then left the newspaper on the counter. He accepted two aspirin from a flight attendant, leaned back, and closed his eyes, saying his usual prayer that the plane would make it into the air.
He thought of Diane, his fiancée of four months, wondering yet again if it was smart for them to get married. They’d lived together in Diane’s spacious East Side apartment for the past six months. She was rich and he wasn’t. He was a cop and she was trying to talk him off the force, but he was young and arrogant and confident and he didn’t buy it. She’d come around. It was her responsibility. They were good in bed together. His trip to France was his bachelor’s last fling the way he saw it. Diane thought he was nuts because he wanted to vacation by himself, riding a motorcycle all over a foreign country, but she’d only bitched a little bit, content to warn him a good three times not to catch anything with French girls. Everyone knew how promiscuous they were. Taylor didn’t, but he didn’t bother to correct her. He’d tried to explain that it was the country itself that drew him, that he really couldn’t explain it, but when he’d hitchhiked there when he was eighteen, he knew, simply knew that at one time or another he’d lived here, been part of the land, part of the culture. A previous life? He didn’t know, but he did know that he felt wonderful when he was riding a motorcycle beside the Loire River, smelling the ripening grapes in Bordeaux, gazing in awe at the ancient Roman ruins scattered throughout Provence.
He’d be home soon, a couple days early. He wondered when he’d be able to go to France again. There was already the longing for it growing in his gut. He would be twenty-five in two weeks and married in three.
Beyond Eden Page 7