If I Should Die

by Hilary Norman

  “Is he sick?” Lally wanted to know. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “That’s a long story,” Joe said.

  “Maybe now’s the perfect time,” Morrissey said.

  “I don’t agree,” Joe argued.

  “You said yourself he’s weakening.” Morrissey spoke reasonably. “Whatever he said to Kaminsky, he’s human, and no one really wants to die, not when there’s a chance.”

  “Who’s Kaminsky?” Lally asked Morrissey.

  “The doctor treating Schwartz,” he replied.

  Lally turned back to her brother. “Joe, let me see him.” She felt stronger and more positive. “He’s never met any of his victims, has he? Like the doctor said, he’s human. Maybe seeing me might turn him around.”

  “The man’s a mass murderer, Lally,” Joe said. “He’s no different to a serial killer. Most killers get a kick out of seeing their victims suffer.”

  Lally was immovable.

  “What are you trying to get him to tell you?” she asked.

  Joe looked at Morrissey. “What do you think?”

  “I think you should tell Lally what we need. It can’t do any harm.”

  Lally waited. “Joe?”

  For several seconds, Joe said nothing. Then he shook his head. “Ah, what the hell,” he said.

  They insisted she sit in a wheelchair, partly, Morrissey said, because it was the policy of the clinic, but mostly, Joe said, because Lally was entering that room as a victim making a plea. Standing over him, she was a potential threat; in the chair, she was vulnerable.

  Joe wheeled her in at one thirty-five. Lally had been warned about the heat and stuffiness in Schwartz’s room, and that it was vital she appear unaffected by it, but still the discomfort startled her, made it all the harder to keep calm.

  Schwartz was still awake.

  “Lieutenant,” he said.

  “Sir,” Joe said.

  “Busy night. I thought I was the only one awake.”

  “We’re all pretty much awake,” Joe said. His hands on the back of Lally’s chair were clenched too tightly, and he made himself relax them. “This is the patient I told you about earlier. You remember you expressed a wish to meet her.”

  “I remember.” Schwartz was clearly in physical distress, but he seemed in perfect control as he looked at Lally. “How do you do?”

  Lally met his eyes. “Not bad, considering.”

  “I thought perhaps the lieutenant had invented you.”

  “I’m real enough,” Lally answered, steadily. “As you see.”

  “Do you have a name?” His voice came with an effort.

  Lally hesitated.

  “We won’t bother with names, if you don’t mind,” Joe said.

  “And if I do?”

  Joe said nothing.

  For a brief moment, Schwartz closed his eyes, as if he was in pain. Then he opened them again. “I’d like you to leave us alone.”

  “No,” Joe said.

  Lally looked at the man in the bed, and then up at her brother.

  “Please,” she said, softly. “I’ll be fine.”

  “It’s out of the question.” Joe was adamant.

  Lally looked back at Schwartz. His skin was pasty white, with patches of hot colour on both cheeks. His upper lip was beaded with sweat, and his eyes, it seemed to her, were suffering. His breath sounded wheezy.

  “Please,” she said again.

  Schwartz’s eyes flickered.

  “I believe you still need my help, Lieutenant Duval,” he said, looking straight at Lally.

  “We do,” Joe said.

  “Then please leave us alone.”

  Joe looked long and hard at Schwartz.

  “I’ll be right outside the door.”

  Lally took a few moments to steady herself. She looked around the room, noting the masculine touches that replaced the feminine pastels of her own bedroom on the floor above; the dark woods, softened by cream paintwork and beige curtains, the Turner print on the wall facing the bed. She let her eyes wander over the surfaces, across the fabrics, felt as if she were earthing herself before touching something that might give her an electric shock. And then she forced herself to look directly at Schwartz.

  “There isn’t too much time,” she said.

  “Maybe not.”

  “For either of us.” She paused. “I’m not here just for myself.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you want to live,” Schwartz said.

  “Of course I do. But I want those other people to have the same chance.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” The words were dismissive, mocking.

  The heat in the room made it hard for Lally to breathe easily, but she knew she had to conceal her discomfort from him.

  “They told me what happened to your mother,” she said. “I’m sorry. It must have been devastating for you.”

  “Devastating is a good word.”

  Lally swallowed. “But I find it hard to believe that your mother would have wanted innocent people to suffer.”

  “Do you?”

  “I do.”

  “I assure you my mother would have expected me to avenge her death.”

  “And you have,” Lally said. “Four people have already died. Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s very hot in here,” Schwartz said. “You find it warm, too, don’t you?”

  “Not particularly,” Lally said.

  “You look warm.”

  “Maybe I’m not very comfortable being with you.”

  The EKG monitor beeped erratically for a moment, unnerving her. Schwartz’s breathing seemed to become more of an effort, the wheeze grew louder. Dr Morrissey had told her that the overheating was not harming him, but Lally found that hard to believe. She felt perspiration starting to form on her back, and she knew that her cheeks were flushed.

  “Nothing more to say?” Schwartz asked.

  She shook her head. “Except to ask you to help me. And to help yourself. Tell them which document is real. And let them give you the treatment you need.”

  “That they say I need.”

  “I believe them.”

  “That’s your prerogative.”

  “They wouldn’t lie to you, not about something like that.”

  “They lied to my mother,” Schwartz said.

  For a moment, Lally’s hands tightened on the arms of the wheelchair. “I’m a dancer, you know. I teach ballet to small children, and I bake for a café in a village in New England.” She paused. “I’m not married, and I have no children of my own, but I hope to some day. And I love my life.”

  Schwartz’s smile was cold. “What a lucky girl you’ve been.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And yet you still want more?”

  “Yes,” Lally said again. “And so do all those other people.”

  Schwartz said nothing, just kept watching her. Lally looked at his face and at his eyes, and she no longer saw suffering. On the contrary, she thought she almost detected a kind of pleasure. The eyes were very hard now, almost clinical, and she realized, with a fresh shock, that he was looking at her the way a biologist might regard a specimen prior to dissecting it.

  “You’re not going to help, are you?” she said, softly.

  “I think not,” he answered.

  And Lally knew then that Joe had been right, that Frederick Schwartz didn’t care about her, and that there was not one single part of him that felt guilt for the deaths that had already occurred.

  She knew now that there was no escaping the fact that there might be a tiny bomb lying just under her skin. That she was going to have to endure the uncertainty of the second operation. That unless someone was able to establish precisely what this man had done, any number of people might, at any time, die.

  And that Schwartz didn’t give a damn.

  “Ash wants to operate now,” Valdez told Joe thirty minutes later, in the third-floor corridor not far from Lally’s room. “He says he can’t see the sense in waiting any l
onger. He wants Lally as calm as possible, and that’s going to get tougher the longer she has to wait.”

  “She’s resting right now,” Joe said. He kept his voice low, though there was no one in earshot. “Al Hagen just called – someone else who can’t sleep. He discharged himself from Memorial a couple of hours ago, and he’s on his way over here now. He says he wants to talk to Schwartz, says he’s known him for ten years, and he thinks there’s a chance he might be able to get through to him.”

  “If Schwartz has been planning his revenge for the whole ten years,” Valdez said, “Hagen can’t have known him all that well.”

  “I told him he can have ten minutes,” Joe said, grimly. “I need more time anyway – I’m not finished planning yet.” He paused. “Tell Ash that if there’s a chance – any chance at all – of finding out for sure what’s inside my sister’s pacemaker, I intend to grab it before he starts taking unnecessary risks with her life.”

  “He’s afraid we may be running out of time,” Valdez said. “I’m not sure I don’t agree with him.”

  Joe’s stomach was clenched tighter than a fighter’s fist. “The shortest period so far between implantation and detonation was Marie Ferguson’s at three weeks. Lally’s had hers for just sixteen days.”

  “That guarantees nothing except hope,” Valdez said, gently, “and you know it. And now that we could be talking about a different kind of detonation, it means even less.”

  “Which makes it all the more vital that we get the information out of Schwartz.” Joe felt another of those out-of-control surges of panic and rage, and struggled to master it with a deep breath. “Aside from the fact,” he went on, gritting his teeth, “that Lally’s my sister, this is the first of these things we’ve had that’s still intact. It’s in everyone’s interest to keep it that way.”

  Valdez didn’t argue. “So you want me to tell Ash and his team to get some sleep?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Don’t you want to ask Lally what she thinks about it?”

  “No way,” Joe said, almost violently. “It’s two-fifteen, I hope to hell she’s asleep, and she may know about the documents, but she doesn’t know anything about the detonation, and I want to keep it that way.”

  “Okay.” Valdez held up his hands. “You’re the boss.”

  When Al Hagen entered the stiflingly hot room on the second floor, Schwartz was sleeping restlessly, moaning a little, very softly. His forehead, illuminated by the night light, was damp with perspiration, and there were two little oxygen tubes in his nostrils. His left arm, with its IV attached, lay still on top of the covers, while the fingers of his right hand strayed across the sheet like a blind creature seeking some lost prey.

  For several moments, Hagen stared down at the man in the bed, trying to reconcile what he now knew about him with what he had believed for the past decade. His misconceptions overwhelmed him. For all the combined gifts and knowledge that Howard Leary and Olivia Ashcroft had brought to Hagen Pacing, it had, for a long time, been Fred Schwartz that Hagen had depended upon to keep things running smoothly, reliably. Safely.

  Hagen thought back to the hours and days after the first deaths in Boston and Chicago, to the shattered reaction this man had presented to them all. Schwartz had seemed more stunned than any of them, more guilt-wracked, but even the guilt – more than anything, the guilt – had been a staggeringly fine acting performance.

  “Man and metal,” Schwartz muttered.

  Startled, Hagen scrutinized him. He was still asleep, and dreaming, his eyelids moving rapidly, his mouth contorting as if in pain.

  “Fred,” Hagen said.

  Schwartz went on sleeping.

  “Fred,” he said again, a little louder.

  “Man and metal.” Schwartz’s dreaming voice was slurred, like a drunk’s.

  “Fred.”

  Schwartz opened his eyes and stared up at Hagen.

  “Hello, Fred.”

  “You.” Schwartz’s pupils were dilated.

  “That’s right,” Hagen said, warmly, gently. “I’ve come to see you, to talk to you. To ask you for your help.”

  “Help.”

  Hagen was uncertain if the word was mocking or wary. He moved in closer to the bed.

  “Keep away,” Schwartz said.

  It was fear, no doubt about it.

  “Come on, Fred,” Hagen said, soothingly. “We all know the truth now, and I think I can maybe begin to understand why you did it, but it’s over now, and this is your chance to put things right – ”

  “Go away.” The pupils were so black now, so dilated with fear that they seemed almost to overwhelm the irises. “Get away from me.

  “You have to think of all the good work, great work, you’ve done over the years,” Hagen persisted. “This isn’t what you want to be remembered for, Fred, for pity’s sake.”

  “My name is not Fred.”

  Hagen stared at him. The man seemed almost terrified, and maybe he was in some kind of delirium, but in spite of the fear, in spite of the still slurred voice, Schwartz was looking right into his face, and Hagen felt that the terror and hatred in that gaze was directed at him, was for him.

  He kept his own tone gentle. “What do you mean, Fred?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “You know who I am. I know who you are.”

  Hagen felt his stomach turn over.

  “Who am I, Fred?”

  “You’re Hagen.” He pronounced the name oddly, differently, the German way. Hahgen.

  “And you?” Hagen’s voice was very hushed. “Who are you?”

  The pupils sharpened a little, the whole suffering, sagging face seemed to tauten, to grow prouder.

  “I’m Siegfried,” Schwartz said. “And I know why you’re here.”

  “Why am I here, Siegfried?”

  “To kill me.” Schwartz seemed to summon all his strength. “But I’m going to fight you, Hagen, all the way.”

  For another moment, confusion swamped Al Hagen. And then, abruptly, something clicked into place in his mind, and he realized without a doubt that Frederick Schwartz was beyond reason, that whether or not he had been rational ten years ago when he had been hired to work at Hagen Pacing, he was now certifiably insane.

  “He’s gone mad,” Hagen told Joe, in Morrissey’s office.

  “What happened?” Joe asked.

  “He was out of it when I went in, talking in his sleep. ‘Man and metal.’ He kept saying that – ‘Man and metal’. And then, when I woke him up, he took one look at me and his eyes almost popped out of his head, and he started telling me to get away from him – he was terrified, I mean, really terrified.”

  “It’s probably the heat and his condition taking their toll,” Morrissey said.

  “No,” Hagen disagreed. “Oh, I’m not saying they haven’t tipped the balance, but I’m telling you it was me he was scared of.” He shook his grey head. “And believe it or not, I think this all has something to do with opera.”

  “Opera?” Morrissey queried.

  “Go on.” Joe’s tone was sharp.

  Morrissey was sitting behind his desk, while Joe paced. Hagen sat down in one of the visitor’s chairs, facing the doctor.

  “Are either of you familiar with the works of Richard Wagner?”

  “To a degree,” Morrissey answered.

  “Lieutenant?”

  Joe recalled Cynthia Alesso, Hagen’s assistant, telling him and Lipman on their first morning at Hagen Pacing that her boss was crazy about Wagner. He went on pacing. “Just go ahead, please.”

  Hagen shook his head. “I don’t know if this is relevant, or any help to you, but for the first time ever, Schwartz used the German pronunciation of my name – Hahgen instead of Hagen.” He paused. “And when I kept calling him Fred, he said – and he was way out of it, as I told you – but he said that that wasn’t his name, that his name was Siegfried.”

  “Siegfried the
dragon slayer,” Morrissey said.

  “Exactly.”

  Joe stopped pacing. “Could one of you explain that to me?”

  “Richard Wagner wrote a fifteen-hour operatic cycle,” Hagen told him, “that was divided up into four separate operas, and the whole thing was called The Ring of the Nibelung. It’s wonderful stuff, pretty heavy in its way – too long for many people – and it’s loaded with symbolism and mythology.”

  “The great hero’s name,” Morrissey took it up, “is Siegfried, and he’s sometimes known as the dragon slayer because he kills the dragon guarding the Nibelung gold.”

  “And in Götterdämmerung – ‘Twilight of the Gods’,” Hagen went on, “which is the final opera in the cycle, a character with my name kills Siegfried the hero.”

  “Though what all that has to do with Schwartz and what he’s done,” Morrissey said, “beats the hell out of me.”

  Joe thought about the bizarre paintings and drawings and tapestries on the walls in apartment 1510 – the samplers signed with an elaborate ‘E’, his mother’s signature. “It could have a lot to do with Schwartz,” he said slowly. “He has an obsession with dragons.”

  “Really?” Hagen looked confused.

  “You said he was talking about man and metal?” Joe asked.

  “That was what he kept muttering in his sleep. Does it mean anything to you, Lieutenant?”

  “It certainly means something to him.” Briefly, Joe shut his eyes, trying to recall the words on one of the samplers. “Something to do with one of the ways dragons are born – some really off-the-wall myth about mixing metal with flesh and blood and coming up with monsters.”

  “Do you know,” Morrissey asked Hagen, “if Schwartz is an opera fan?”

  “He’s a Wagner fan, like you, sir,” Joe answered, looking at Hagen. “His place is jammed with discs and tapes – and he had a CD of Twilight of the Gods. I thought, for a while, that Schwartz might be trying to emulate your lifestyle, that it was a sign of admiration, a kind of hero-worship.”

  They all fell silent for a long moment.

  “So what are we saying here?” Hagen asked, slowly. “We already know Schwartz blamed his mother’s pacemaker for failing to save her life.” He paused. “I bought the company in the mid-seventies, years after her death, of course, but if Schwartz was already fixated by the Siegfried and Hagen myth, I suppose pinning the blame on a company called Hagen Pacing was just a hop and a skip away.” He shook his head. “But that only adds to his motivation, doesn’t it? I don’t see it helping to get anything more out of him.”