If I Should Die

by Hilary Norman

  A little later, having disposed of it, he lay down again and closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift back. Past his mother’s death, past the anguish and humiliation, back to the days and nights of pleasure and sweet pain, at her hands and in her arms, in her big bed at home, and in her own special place.

  Waiting for the deaths to begin had been hard, but oh, it had been so thrilling. Like all the childhood treats Mother had made him wait for. Like the times when she’d baked his favourite spiced cookies into letter shapes, but her rule had been that he had to spell out two names from The Ring of the Nibelung with the cookies before he was allowed to put the first one in his mouth, and it had always been worthwhile for the deliciousness, but oh, the waiting had been so tantalizing.

  Mother had made him wait for other delights, too. Like letting him stay up late at night till she got home from her special place, or allowing him to brush her hair – so soft and silky and golden – or sharing her bed with him. And once she had allowed him in, then she had made him wait an eternity before she had begun to caress his back and rub his shoulders, and stroke his chest and stomach, and then – the thing he loved most of all – to tell him stories about Father, his favourite heroic stories about the old days.

  She hadn’t always been gentle with him. Her work had wearied her, and often, when she’d come home bone-tired, her temper had flared, and she’d had to punish him with her cigarettes or with her hands, but that harshness had only made the tender moments more precious to him. He had never been able to resist asking her about her work, and often his questions had elicited a slapping or worse, but sometimes, lying in bed with him, she’d given in and told him about it, and shown him, too, and then the room in which they’d lain had seemed almost to disappear as brand new, fascinating mysteries unfolded and became exquisitely clear to him.

  Mother had taken him, once, to her special place, and he’d been awed by its magnificence. By the crystal chandeliers and red velvet drapes, tied in flounces with thick, braided ropes, by the bedrooms with their canopies and ceiling mirrors, and by the strange, haunting paintings and tapestries that had depicted the ancient German myths and legends that Mother had made so much a part of their lives. One painting in particular, called Siegfried, the Dragon Slayer, had been his favourite, and after his mother had died and her special place had closed its doors for ever, he had gone there before the auction and had arranged for one of the chandeliers and that painting to be set aside for him.

  Now that he had time on his hands, the man permitted himself to dwell in the past for more hours each day than he had allowed himself in years. There was too much time, in a way. It made the waiting harder, made the need for self-control even greater. He found that he had revelled in his acting ability, in the factory and at the apartment. The lieutenant had left on Sunday morning without a shred of doubt that he was a sick man. It hadn’t been too hard feigning the flu, not nearly so taxing as the role he’d been playing for so many years, and if he was honest with himself, this past two weeks had been the most fun he’d ever had. Watching them all squirm and thrash around, the way the little gecko had before it had died. It was almost a pity to be out of the centre of things, away from the focus of the investigation. Safer of course, but less absorbing.

  He came to the room twice daily now and stayed for longer than he had in the past, sometimes watching his little captive dragons, sometimes reading his logs, the records of his work, other times just resting or thinking or remembering. The cops weren’t likely to return too quickly, not without calling first, and he kept his answering machine switched on most of the time, the way a sick man might, and even if the good lieutenant did grow suspicious, as he surely must, given enough time, he was ready for him.

  This was a new phase of waiting, perhaps the hardest and the most tantalizing yet. Waiting to be caught. To play a different kind of game with them. Face to face.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Wednesday, January 20th

  Lally and Hugo had spent Tuesday night on Key Largo, the first and largest of the islands strung together by Route 1, the great Overseas Highway. Any ideas that Lally might have had about camping, canoeing or hiking in any of the Everglades wilderness areas, had been firmly stamped on by Hugo before and during their flight to Miami.

  “We’ll go camping, we’ll hire a boat, we can swim or snorkel or walk or fish, or do whatever you damn well please,” he’d told her on the plane, “but wading around in a swamp with a bunch of mosquitoes and alligators is just plain unhealthy.”

  “It’s winter,” Lally said. “You don’t get many mosquitoes.”

  “You always get mosquitoes in that kind of climate.”

  “You get jelly fish in the ocean too,” she taunted him.

  “Then you’ll swim and snorkel alone.”

  “You’d leave a sick woman to snorkel alone?”

  “You’re healthy as a horse, you told me so.”

  “I’m still a little fragile.”

  “Then you can lie under a parasol and sip exotic drinks.”

  “For one day,” Lally consented.

  “How about five?” Hugo had never been an outdoorsman.

  “One. Then we go snorkelling.”

  “Anything to please a sick woman.”

  “And camping?”

  “Whatever.” Hugo settled back in his seat and shut his eyes.

  “Hugo?”

  “What?”

  “How do you feel about bats?”

  He didn’t open his eyes. “I hear they only go for women’s hair.”

  The Keys were a subtropical necklace of islands off the southernmost tip of Florida, marking a narrow dividing point between the Atlantic Ocean to the south and east and the Gulf of Mexico to the west. Their history was full of tales of piracy and shipwrecks, but even today, in spite of modern communication and the inevitable fast-food and motel chains along Route 1, the Keys still smacked of freedom and romance, and Key Largo was its gateway. Parking the rental car they’d picked up at Miami airport and heading for the stores in town, Lally and Hugo had found everything they’d forgotten to pack in their haste to leave the New England snow – insect repellent, sunblock, film and sandals – and then they’d checked into a modern hotel overlooking the bay, partly because Hugo wanted to be sure of at least one night with a comfortable bed and bathroom, and partly because it was the only hotel they could find with two vacant rooms.

  They’d eaten well that night at a place called Sundowner’s, dining on yellowtail stuffed with crabmeat and drinking Chardonnay, and then they’d wandered through town again, more leisurely now, people-watching and listening to the gaggle of the tourists’ languages, before returning to their hotel and lazing about for a while on the terrace with a nightcap, enjoying the peaceful, evocative sounds and smells of the ocean.

  “This is heaven,” Lally said, quietly.

  “I can’t believe we’re really here,” Hugo agreed.

  “It’s so warm, and so – ” Lally fumbled gently for the word.

  “Soft,” Hugo finished.

  “Yeah,” Lally murmured. “Soft is right.”

  “Lally?”

  “Mm?”

  “Are you sure you want to go camping?”

  She smiled. “I want to do everything. I want to lie under the stars and swim with dolphins and watch otters and turtles – and I don’t care if I don’t get to see alligators, but I do want to see eagles, and I want to fish for those crabs you can throw back in the water – you know, the ones who grow back their claws?”

  “Stone crabs,” Hugo said.

  “So clever of them.”

  It was a balmy night, with a sweetly cooling breeze coming off Florida Bay. Lally stretched out her long legs in their white cotton jeans, and rested her drink on her lap, and closed her eyes for a few minutes and Hugo, studying her, thought, as he almost always did, how incredibly beautiful she was, and how little she realized it, and how much he loved her, and how much it still hurt to know that her love
for him was such a lesser creature than his own.

  They slept soundly and started out easy on Wednesday morning, with breakfast in the hotel garden and then a ride in a glass-bottomed boat over at the John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. A little later, Lally persuaded Hugo to try his hand at snorkelling, floating on the surface in the shallow, spectacularly brilliant areas, and after a while it was hard to persuade him out of the water, and the famous laid-back atmosphere of the Keys that they’d heard about was already having its effect, and time had begun to lose its meaning. And by three o’clock, back on the highway heading south past Tavernier towards Islamorada after their first tastes of conch chowder and Key lime pie, they were both singing old Dylan songs and gazing to left and right at the stunning greens and blues of the ocean and Gulf with wide eyes and mostly wordless pleasure.

  They would camp that night near the Atlantic, shaded by tall Australian pine trees, and Lally would see gumbo-limbos, and Jamaican dogwoods, and mangrove swamps, and she would lie beneath the stars and be more grateful than she had ever been for her life. And already memories of sickness and doctors and hospitals, and thoughts about troubled families and alcoholic mothers and unhappy little girls, and men with dark blue eyes, seemed light years away in another, alien world.

  Chapter Twenty

  Thursday, January 21st

  Joe’s day had begun badly, and grown steadily worse.

  He’d been relieved to hear Lally’s message in the early hours of Tuesday morning, but by the time he’d gotten around to calling her back later that day, her own machine had been switched on, and he supposed she and Hugo had left for their vacation. For a while, he’d put her firmly out of his mind, but then that odd, gnawing sense of discomfort about her had returned, and the knowledge that there was no sound reason for it and nothing he could do about it, hadn’t helped at all.

  Today had begun with a face-to-face confrontation with Marie Howe Ferguson’s grieving husband, Sean, and Dr John Morrissey, her close friend, cardiologist and partner. Given the commander’s blessing to do and say anything within reason that would hold the two men in check at least a while longer, Joe had met with them shortly after eight in the drawing room of the Fergusons’ town house on North Lincoln Square. It was a room that had made even Al Hagen’s apartment look almost cheap. Fine art, antiques, Georgian silver, a glistening piano topped with a mass of framed photographs, a handsome fireplace with logs blazing, every last detail exquisitely understated. It was old money, and none of it anything much to do with Sean Ferguson, who looked as if he might have been more at ease in a converted loft but who also, it was plain to see, had adored his wife passionately, and was ready to go into battle with everyone from Lieutenant Joseph Duval through the President of Hagen Industries up to the Director of the FBI, if necessary.

  “My wife is still in the morgue, Lieutenant,” Ferguson had told Joe, his dark wounded eyes full of fiery anguish. “I want to bury her, but they put me off and off. I know what I saw, and I know what killed her, and now I want to know how and why and who – ”

  “Mr Ferguson – ”

  “And we’ve both had a bellyful of reassuring noises, Lieutenant,” Ferguson rode over Joe’s words, “and the reason you’re here is because we want to know everything, and we want to know it right now.”

  “And we’d be sitting with the Superintendent himself,” John Morrissey, a distinguished, silver-haired man had said, very quietly, “if Chief Hankin hadn’t sworn that you know more about the investigation than anyone else in the country.”

  “And if we don’t get chapter and verse now, this morning,” Ferguson had added, “we’re going to go public, whatever the consequences.”

  Joe had watched them, and listened carefully, and looked at the photographs of the late Marie Ferguson, a pretty lady with honey-coloured hair and green eyes and an expression that reminded him of Jess, and he’d gone with his instincts and told them every single thing he could. And although it was a still-miserable tale of fruitless searching and sniffing around, Morrissey and Ferguson had seemed to accept his honesty and integrity, and that though things had started too damned slowly, all that could be done was now being done; and the practical physician in Morrissey couldn’t help but agree with the consensus that mass explanation, without more information, was still a nightmare scenario.

  At eleven o’clock, Joe had attended his second and infinitely more gruelling meeting of the day, held in the far less congenial surroundings of a conference room at City Hall. Also present had been Chief Hankin, Commander Jackson, and the Regional Director of the FBI along with two special agents, the Director of News Affairs for the Chicago Police Department, the Commissioners of Public Safety from Chicago, Boston and San Francisco, the press secretaries from the mayors’ offices of each of those cities, and an emissary from the Surgeon General of the United States Government. The agenda was a pooling of information and an analysis of the current situation; the formulation of a joint decision with regard to the level of confidentiality that could reasonably be demanded from chiefs of surgery around the country once contingency plans and lists of patients at risk were shared with them; and finally, their approach to the media.

  Jackson had presented his report on the investigation to date, and no criticism of Joe’s heading of the pacemaker task force had been voiced during the meeting, though Joe felt that the coolness of the eyes surveying him had spoken volumes. Time, it was generally accepted, was running out. With so many people in three states in possession of a dangerously minimal amount of information – if all hell was not to break loose some time during the next few days – it was agreed that meetings would have to be held with all the news agencies and broadcasting companies without further delay to try to agree a temporary news blackout.

  It was after two in the afternoon when Joe returned to Hagen Pacing and found Cohen waiting for him in the lobby, his face wrinkled with anxiety.

  “It’s okay,” Joe reassured him. “They didn’t fire me yet.”

  “I need a minute, Joe.”

  “Sure.” Relief at having escaped the heavy artillery had buoyed him up a little. “What’s up?”

  “In private.”

  Joe glanced at him quizzically. “What’s happened?”

  “There’s something you have to see.”

  “What is it?”

  “In the office.”

  Since the expansion of the task force, another desk and two more filing cabinets had been squeezed into their allotted office. A heap of computer printouts lay on the desk closest to the window. No one else was in the room.

  “I was looking over the patients’ names,” Cohen said. He sounded nervous. “Maybe it’s because of my own pacemaker, but I really feel for all those people – I mean, thank God they don’t know yet, but – ” He stopped.

  “And?” Joe was being patient. “Sol, what’s wrong with you?”

  “One of the names.”

  “Someone you know?” Concern began to rise. “Who is it?”

  “I think you should take a look.”

  Joe picked up the concertina of computer sheets.

  “And I think you should sit down.”

  Joe remained standing. He saw the pencil mark Cohen had made to the left of the name, and the blood drained out of his face.

  Hélène Duval, Lenox Road, W. Stockbridge, Mass.

  He sat down, trembling.

  “It can’t be. It’s a mistake.”

  “I don’t think so.” Cohen’s face was wreathed in sympathy. “Joe, I’m sorry. I kept looking, and I couldn’t seem to take it in.”

  Joe still stared at the computer sheets. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “Didn’t you even know she was sick?”

  Joe shook his head, too dazed to speak.

  “You told me you talked to her the other day,” Cohen said, gently. “You said she was taking a vacation.”

  “We didn’t speak. She left a message.” Joe’s voice was hardly more tha
n a whisper. “I’ve been thinking about her so much, worrying – I didn’t know why, it made no sense – but things were so crazy here, and then when I heard her voice, she sounded so normal.” He shook his head again. “So well.”

  Cohen pulled up one of the other chairs, a typist’s upright, on rollers. He sat astride it, facing the back. “We have to find her, Joe. Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know.” The daze began to dissipate. Panic swelled in its place. “Sol, I don’t know, she didn’t tell me.”

  “So we’ll call her friend Hugo.”

  “They went together.”

  “Who else would know?” Joe didn’t answer. “Who else, Joe?”

  “Toni Petrillo, her neighbour.”

  “Good. You have his number?”

  “Her number. No, I don’t.”

  “No problem.” Cohen picked up the phone. “I’ll get it.”

  Joe stared at the computer printout. He remembered wondering, when he’d heard Lally’s voice on Tuesday, where they’d gone. Skiing, he’d guessed. An image had flashed across his mind then, of Lally the last time he’d seen her on the slopes at Bousquet, wearing a crimson one-piece suit, long dark hair flying, waving a ski pole at him and laughing. The image had made him smile. Lally almost always did.