by Allan Folsom
Joanna smiled. “Thank you very much.” Looking toward the crowd, she saw that someone had brought up a wheelchair and two of the chauffeurs were helping Lybarger into it. “I should say something to Mr. Lybarger.”
“He’ll understand, I’m sure,” Von Holden said pleasantly. “Besides, you’ll be joining him for dinner. Now, if you will—this way, please.”
Taking Joanna’s luggage, Von Holden led the way through a side door to a waiting elevator. Five minutes later they were in the backseat of a Mercedes limousine driving along highway N1B heading toward Zurich.
Joanna had never seen such green before. Trees and meadows everywhere were rich emerald. And beyond them, like ghosts on the horizon, were the Alps, even this early in the season capped with snow. Her New Mexico was a desert land that, despite high-rise cities and shopping malls, was still new and raw, and boiling with the restlessness of the frontier. Coyote, mountain lion and rattlesnake owned the land, and its deserts and canyons still housed men who chose to live alone. Its mountains and high meadows, lush with wildflowers at spring runoff, were, at this time of year, brown and dusty and dry as tinder.
Switzerland was entirely different. Joanna had seen it out the window as they’d flown in and could feel it all the more now as the limousine brought them into Zurich through the Old Town. Here was a place rich with the history of the Romans and Hapsburgs. A world of medieval alleys towered over by gray stone buildings of pre-Gothic architecture that had existed centuries before a single coal oil lamp shone in a New Mexico shanty.
In her mind Joanna had projected what it would be like When she got here. A small but compassionate and loving family waiting to greet Elton Lybarger. A hug goodbye from him, maybe even a kiss on the cheek. Then a pleasant room in a Holiday Inn-like place. And maybe a sight seeing tour of the city before her return trip the following day. The time would be short, but she’d do the best with it she could. And mustn’t forget souvenirs! For her friends in Taos and for David, the speech therapist from Santa Fe she’d been seeing for two years but with whom she had never slept.
“You’ve never been to our country.” Von Holden was looking at her, smiling.
“No, never.”
“After you are checked into your hotel room, if you will permit me, I will show you some little of our country before dinner,” Von Holden said, graciously. “Unless of course, you prefer not.”
“No. Please. That would be terrific. I mean, I’d love to.”
“Good.”
The limousine turned left, down Bahnhofstrasse, and they passed block after block of elegant shops and exclusive cafés that increasingly broadcast an atmosphere of great and understated wealth. At the far end of Bahnhofstrasse glimmered a vast turquoise waterway—”The Zurichsee,” Von Holden said—churning with lake steamers that left long ribbons of sunlit white foam in their wake.
Magic settled over Joanna like pixie dust. Switzerland, she could tell everyone, was lush and genteel and permanent. Everything about it felt warm and hospitable and very, very safe. Besides, it reeked of money.
Abruptly she turned to Von Holden. “Do you have a first name?”
“Pascal.”
“Pascal?” She’d never heard the name. “Is it Spanish or Italian?”
Shrugging, Von Holden grinned. “Both, either, neither,” he said. “I was born in Argentina.”
41
* * *
OSBORN STARED at the telephone and wondered if he had the strength to try it again. He’d already made three attempts without success. He doubted he could make three more.
Coming out of the woods at dawn he’d found himself in what he thought, in the early light, to be farmland. Nearby was a small shack that was locked but had a water connection outside. Turning the spigot, he drank deeply. Then, tearing back his trousers, he washed as much of the wound as he could. Most of the external bleeding had stopped and he’d been able to release the tourniquet without its starting again.
After that he must have passed out, because the next he knew two young men carrying golf clubs were looking down at him, asking him in French if he was all right. What he’d thought was farmland turned out to be a golf course.
Now he sat in the clubhouse, staring at the telephone of the wall. Vera was all he could think about. Where was she? In the shower? No, not for so long. At work? Maybe He wasn’t sure. He’d lost track of her schedule, the days she was on and off.
The manager of the clubhouse, a small, pencil-thin man named Levigne, had wanted to call the police, but Osborn had convinced him he’d only had an accident and that someone would come to pick him up. He was afraid of the tall man. But he was also afraid of the police. Most likely they’d already found Kanarack’s car. It would have been impounded, listed as stolen or abandoned. But when his body floated up someplace downriver, they’d have gone over it with a toothbrush and magnifying glass. Osborn’s fingerprints were all over it and they had his fingerprints. Barras himself had taken them that first night when they’d picked him up for attacking Kanarack in the café and then jumping the Métro turnstile in pursuit of him.
When had that been?
Osborn glanced at his watch. Today was Saturday. It had been Monday when he’d first seen Kanarack. Six days. That was all? After almost thirty years? And now Kanarack was dead. And after everything, his intricate plans, the police, Jean Packard . . . After everything, still he had no answer. His father’s death was as much of a mystery now as it had been before.
There was a sound and he looked up. A heavy-set man was using the phone. Outside, golfers were moving toward the first tee. The early haze had become bright sun. The first day without overcast since he’d come to France. The golf course was near Vernon, twenty or more highway miles from Paris. The Seine, as it snaked back and forth through the countryside, had to have taken him at least twice that far. How long he’d been in the water, or how far he’d walked in the darkness, he didn’t know.
On the table in front of him Osborn saw the dregs of the strong coffee the manager, Levigne, had brought him without charge. Fingering the cup, he picked it up and drained what was left, then set it back down. Just that, the effort of lifting a small cup and drinking, had tired him.
Across the room, the man hung up the phone and went outside. What if the tall man suddenly came in? He still had Kanarack’s pistol in his jacket pocket. Did he have the strength to take it out, aim and fire? He’d practiced with a handgun for years and was good at it. Target ranges in Santa Monica and in the San Fernando and Conejo valieys. Why he’d done it, he didn’t know. As an act of working out aggression? As a sport? As a defense against ever-increasing city crime? Or had it been something else? Something leading him toward a day when he would need it.
He looked back at the phone. Try. Once more. You have to!
By now his leg had stiffened and he was afraid movement would start the bleeding again. Further, the shock of his ordeal was wearing off and with it the protection of its natural anesthesia, causing the leg to throb with such ferocity he didn’t know how much longer he could bear the pain without medication.
Putting his hands flat on the table, Osborn pushed himself up. The sudden movement made him lightheaded and for a moment he could do nothing but stand there and hold on, praying he wouldn’t fall.
Several golfers just coming in saw him and stepped away. He could see one of them speak to Levigne, and gesture toward him. What did he expect, looking like he did? Glassy-eyed, barely able to stand, wearing torn, soggy clothes that stunk of the river, he looked like a derelict from hell.
But he couldn’t worry about them. Couldn’t think about them.
He looked back to the telephone. It was less than ten paces from where he stood but it might as well have been in California. Picking up the tree-branch cane that had brought him this far, he set it in front of him, putting his weight on it and moved forward. Right hand places the cane, right foot follows. Bring the left foot up. Right hand, right foot. Bring the left foot alongside. Stop.
Deep breath.
The phone is a little closer now.
Ready? Again. Right hand, right foot. Left foot up. Though his focus was entirely on his movement and the goal toward which he was going, Osborn was acutely aware of people in the room watching him. Their faces blurred.
Then he heard a voice. His voice! It was talking to him. Clearly and succinctly.
“The bullet is lodged somewhere in the hamstring muscle. Not sure just where. But it has to come out.”
Right hand, right foot. Left foot up. Right hand, right foot.
“Make a vertical incision along the middle of the back of the thigh from the lower fold of the nates.” Suddenly he was back in medical school quoting from Gray’s Anatomy. How could he remember it verbatim?
Right hand, right foot. Left foot. Stop and rest. Across the room, faces still watching. Right hand, right foot. Left foot up.
The telephone is right in front of you.
Exhausted, Osborn slowly reached for the receiver and took it off the hook.
“Paul, there is a bullet lodged in your hamstring muscle. It has to come out, now.”
“I know dammit. I know. Take it out!”
* * *
“It is out. Just lie still.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Of course.”
“What day is it?”
“I—” Osborn hesitated. “Saturday.”
“You missed your plane.” Vera pulled off her surgical gloves, then turned and walked out of the room.
Osborn relaxed and looked around. He was in her apartment and naked, lying facedown on the bed in her guest room. A moment later she came back. A hypodermic syringe was in her hand.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I might tell you it’s succinylcholine,” she said, sarcastically. “But that wouldn’t be true.” Walking behind him, she wiped a spot on his upper buttock with a piece of alcohol-soaked cotton, then slid the needle in and gave him the shot.
“It’s an antibiotic. You probably ought to have a tetanus shot, too. God knows what was in that river besides Henri Kanarack.”
“How do you know about that?” Suddenly everything that had happened flashed across his mind.
Vera reached down and gently pulled a blanket Up over him. All the way up over his shoulders so that he was warm. Then she went over and sat down on the ottoman of a leather reading chair across from him.
“You passed out in the clubhouse of a golf course about forty kilometers from here. You came back long enough to give them my number. I borrowed a friend’s car. The people at the golf course were very nice. They helped me get you in the car. All I had were a few tranquilizers. I gave you all of them.”
“All?”
Vera smiled. “You talk a lot when you’re fucked up. Mostly about men. Henri Kanarack. Jean Packard. Your father.”
In the distance they heard the singsong siren of an emergency vehicle and her smile faded.
“I’ve been to the police,” she said,
“The police?”
“Last night. I was worried. They searched your hotel room and found the succinylcholine. They don’t know what it is or what it was for.”
“But you do—”
“Now I do, yes.”
“I couldn’t very well tell you, could I?”
Osborn’s eyes were heavy, and he was beginning to drift off. “The police?” he said, weakly.
Getting up, Vera crossed the room and turned on a small lamp in the corner, then shut off the overhead light. “They don’t know you’re here. At least I don’t think they do. When they find Kanarack’s body and his car with your fingerprints in it they’ll come here asking if I’ve seen you or heard from you.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
Vera could see him trying to put everything together, trying to tell if he’d made a mistake calling her, if he could really trust her. But he was too weary. The lids came down over his eyes and he sank slowly back into the pillow.
Bending down, she brushed her lips over his forehead. “Nobody will know. I promise,” she whispered.
Osborn didn’t hear her. He was falling, tumbling. He was not whole. The truth had never been as stark or as fearfully ugly. He had made himself a doctor because he had wanted to take away hurt and pain, all the while knowing he could never take away his own. What people saw was the image of a doctor. To them, helpful and caring. They never saw the rest of his personality because it didn’t exist. There was nothing there and never would be until the demons inside him were dead. What Henri Kanarack knew could have killed them, but it was not to be. Finding him had been a tease that made it worse than before. Suddenly his falling stopped and he opened his eyes. It was autumn in New Hampshire and he was in the woods with his father. They were laughing and skipping stones across a pond. The sky was blue, the leaves were bright and the air was crisp.
He was eight years old.
42
* * *
“OY, MCVEY!” Benny Grossman said, then as quickly asked if he could call him right back and hung up. It was Saturday morning in New York, midafternoon in London.
McVey, back in the pocket-size room in the hotel on Half Moon Street Interpol had so generously provided for him, swirled two fingers of Famous Grouse in a glass with no ice—because the hotel had none—and waited for Benny to call back.
He’d spent the morning in the company of Ian Noble, the young Home Office pathologist, Dr. Michaels, and Dr. Stephen Richman, the specialist in micropathology who’d discovered the extreme cold to which the severed head of their John Doe had been subjected.
After careful inventory taken at behest of Scotland Yard, neither of the two cryonic suspension companies licensed in Great Britain, Cryonetic Sepulture of Edinburgh or Cryo-Mastaba of Camberwell, London, reported a head—or entire body, for that matter—of a stored “guest” missing. So, unless someone was running an unlicensed cryonic suspension company or had a portable cryocapsule he was hauling around London with bodies or pieces of bodies frozen to more than minus four hundred degrees Fahrenheit, they had to rule out the possibility that Mr. John Doe’s head had been voluntarily frozen.
By the time McVey, Noble, and Dr. Michaels had had breakfast and arrived at Richman’s office/laboratory on Gower Mews, Richman had already examined the body of John Cordell, the headless corpse found in a small apartment across the playing field from Salisbury Cathedral. X rays of Cordell’s body revealed two screws securing a hairline crack in his lower pelvis. Screws that probably would have been removed once the fissure had properly healed had the subject lived that long.
Metallurgical tests Richman had had done on the screws revealed microscopic cobweb-like fractures throughout, proving conclusively that Cordell’s body had undergone the same extreme freezing—to temperatures nearing absolute zero—as had John Doe’s head.
“Why?” McVey asked.
“That’s certainly part of the question, isn’t it?” Dr. Richman replied as he opened the door from the cramped laboratory where they had gathered to view the comparative slides of the failed screws taken from Cordell’s body and the failed metal that had been the plate in John Doe’s head, and led them down a narrow, yellow-green hallway toward his office.
Stephen Richman was in his early sixties, stout but fit with the kind of solidity that comes from hard physical labor in youth. “You’ll excuse the mess,” he said, opening the door to his office. “I wasn’t prepared for a poker crowd.”
His working area was little more than a closet, half the size of McVey’s minuscule hotel room. Heaped helter-skelter among books, journals, correspondence, cardboard boxes and stacks of technical videos were dozens of vessels containing preserved organs from God knew how many species, some three or four to the jar. Somewhere among the clutter was a window and Richman’s desk and his desk chair. Two other chairs were piled high with books and file folders, which he immediately cleared off for his visitors. McVey volunteered to stand, but Richman wouldn’t he
ar of it and disappeared in search of a third chair. An exasperating fifteen minutes later, he reappeared, lugging a secretary’s chair with one caster missing, which he’d located in a basement storeroom.
“The question, Detective McVey,” Richman said as they all finally sat down, picking up McVey’s query asked nearly a half hour earlier as if he’d just now posed it—”is not so much ‘why?’ but ‘how?’”
“What do you mean?” McVey said.
“He means we’re talking about human tissues,” Michaels said, flatly. “Experiments with temperatures approaching absolute zero have been conducted primarily with salts and some metals, like copper.” Abruptly, Michaels realized he was overstepping courtesy. “Excuse me, Doctor Richman,” he said apologetically. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s quite all right, Doctor.” Richman smiled, then looked to McVey and Commander Noble. “What you have to realize is this all gets very muddied in scientific mumbo-jumbo. But the nut of it is the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which basically says science can never reach absolute zero because, among other things, it would then mean a state of perfect orderliness. Atomic orderliness.”
Noble’s face was blank. So was McVey’s.
“Every atom consists of electrons orbiting around a nucleus, which is made of protons and neutrons. What happens as substances get colder is that the normal movement of these atoms and their parts becomes reduced, slowed, if you will. The colder the temperature, the slower their movements.
“Now, if we took an external magnet and focused it critically on these slowly moving atoms, we would create a magnetic field where we could manipulate the atoms and their parts, and make them do pretty much what we wanted. Theoretically if we could reach absolute zero, we could do more than pretty much, we could do exactly as we wanted because all activity would be stopped.”