Deadline (15 page)

‘What's going on, Jerry? You don't have a moment for your old professor, your friend and your former tormentor? May I remind you that without me – ach, where and what would you be? A GP in Bakersville? Bandaids for little boys? Flu shots and nosebleeds?'

‘Probably,' I said. When Harry drank brandy, he liked to take credit for whatever success I'd achieved. Usually I didn't mind. But today was different.

‘You look half-dead,' he said, and punched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘What's the trouble? Are you ill?'

‘Later, Harry. I'll call you when I have a minute, I promise.'

‘What? I should sit by the phone and wait?'

‘That's not what I'm saying.'

‘Now I'm deaf. I'm not hearing things properly.' He placed his hands on my shoulders and gazed into my eyes. ‘I'm worried with you.'

‘
About
me.'

‘Whatever. Stupid sonovabitch prepositions. I never mastered them, all the years I been here.'

I had the urge to tell him about the sudden fissures in my life. I wanted to put my arms around him and hold him as if he were the only reality in the world; an anchor, a safe harbor.

‘You need to slow down and smell the brandy.' He nudged me with his elbow and winked. His mouth opened in a sly expression. I noticed he'd lost one of his bottom teeth since I'd last seen him. ‘Promise me for later, OK?'

‘I promise you,' I said. ‘We'll open a fresh bottle and we'll get sloshed.'

‘I like sloshed. Sloshed sets the mind free. I'll hold you to that promise,' he said. ‘I go home now, and you call me.'

We embraced again.

‘I need to piss,' he said.

‘Over there. The men's room.' I pointed across the lobby.

‘Old men need to piss all the goddam time, Jerry. The bladder becomes like a colander.'

I watched him walk slowly away from me. I couldn't let him go like this, I couldn't leave him without a word of explanation, even if I couldn't tell him the whole truth; if he knew too much, he might be endangered. I followed him into the men's room. He stood with his back to me, unzipping his fly.

‘OK,' he said. ‘Whatever's on your mind, get rid of it. You'll feel better.'

I didn't know what to tell him, how much to leave out. He urinated, walked to the sink, soaped his hands and ran them under the faucet. A tuft of his shirt protruded through his zipper.

He glanced at himself in the mirror. ‘I look at my face for some sign of recognition, Jerry. Who is this old geezer I see every day in the mirror? What has become of the bold young man who treated all the bourgeois neurotic families of Budapest? Gone, gone, gone.' He looked at me. ‘So, speak.'

So, speak.
I remembered my student days. I remembered Harry's lectures. When a student had a question and raised a hand, Harry always said the same thing. ‘So, speak.'

I saw a certain loneliness in his face, a quality that had become the condition of his life since his retirement, and the death of his wife Hattie, whom he'd met during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. They'd been devoted to each other for more than forty years of squabbling and making up. Sometimes they'd seemed to me like a double act throwing pies in each other's faces. Three years ago Hattie had died of a heart attack, and Harry had never really recovered. It struck me that I was perhaps the human being closest to him since Hattie had gone.

‘It's an ethical matter,' I said.

‘Ethical? Ah. How serious you sound. Tell me more.'

‘I may have to provide a list of my patients to a certain party.'

‘A certain party? Do you mean the law? Is that what you mean by this coy expression? The police want your patient list?'

I didn't answer his question about the police.

‘You have made a decision already?' he asked.

‘I think so.'

‘And now you have the armed peasants of conscience swarming your castle, is that so?'

‘Yes.'

‘With musket and cannon-fire,' he said. ‘And what is it you wish? Advice from me?'

‘Maybe. Maybe I just wanted to run it past you.'

‘How can I advise you if I don't know the details, the circumstances? You believe there is some general principle involved here?' He stared at me hard. ‘OK. You asked. I will answer. Nothing, absolutely
nothing
, would make me give up my clients and the details of their sicknesses and treatment.'

‘If it was a matter of life and death, Harry?'

‘Pah' – he waved a hand vigorously. ‘A man or woman comes to you and asks you to explore the sickness in their soul. They confide in you. They lay their heart open for you. And you probe, you explore, you go gently. You make them better if you can. The last thing you do is betray this man or woman.'

‘If you could have saved Hattie's life, if somebody had said to you that he'd spare your wife's life in return for the secrets of your patients – would you have let Hattie die?'

‘That is the worst question I have ever been asked.' He looked crushed, as if his face were a creased old flower that had just been flattened. ‘How do you expect me to answer it? It's hypothetical. It's unreal. Hattie is dead. I cannot travel back down time to make bargains with the devil. You don't make sense, Jerry.' He stepped closer to me and laid a hand on my arm. ‘Is this about your wife? Is this something to do with Sondra?'

‘Perhaps,' I said.

‘She's in danger, is that it?'

‘I can't tell you any more, Harry.' I turned away from him. ‘I'll call you later. I promise.'

‘Wait,' he said.

‘I can't wait,' I said.

‘Let us discuss some more, Jerry.'

‘I don't know what else there is to discuss,' I said.

‘Then why waste an old man's time asking advice?'

I stepped out of the men's room into the lobby. Harry came after me. ‘We should talk some more,' he said. ‘We've barely scratched the surface.'

I looked back at him. He had his hands held out towards me in an imploring gesture. ‘Do the right thing,' he said.

6.10 p.m.

I left the building by the back door. I knew Jane parked her bottle-green Honda in the same place every day. I hesitated before I moved towards it, scanning the lot, looking for a sign of the Pontiac, but I didn't see it. I walked quickly to the Honda, unlocked it, and drove into the traffic on Wilshire. Harry's words echoed in my head:
Nothing, absolutely nothing, would make me give up my clients and the details of their sicknesses and treatment.

I thought:
It's less complicated for you, Harry, it's an abstraction, a philosophical game.
But I was dealing with flesh and blood. My wife was alive. The child inside her was a living thing.

I took out my cellphone, intending to call Emily Ford to tell her I was on my way. I raised the instrument to my ear, but before I had time to punch in the number, the phone rang.

It was Sondra. I fumbled the handset in surprise, and it slid into my lap. I picked it up and spoke her name, hoping that in the few seconds it took me to recover the phone she hadn't been disconnected. She was still there.

‘Hi, Jerry, talk to me, tell me stuff.' Her voice was distant and strange, a dreamer's voice. I remembered how she'd spoken in a similar way, twelve hours ago when she'd been asleep: twelve hours, a lifetime. ‘My love,' she'd said in her sleep.
My love.

‘Where are you? Are you free to speak?' It was a dumb question, born out of hope. Her captors wouldn't allow her unsupervised access to a phone.

‘Jerry, Jerry,' she said. ‘I feel so damn good.'

‘
Good?
What is there to feel good about? I don't understand –'

‘I'm just floating, Jerry. I'm totally mellow. Mellow yellow. Wasn't that an old song? How do the lyrics go, Jerry? Do you remember? It was way before my time.'

Floating. Mellow. The draggy tone of voice. Somebody had given her drugs. Downers, I wasn't sure what. And her abductors had allowed her this call as part of their strategy.
Turn up the heat under Lomax, fill his head with more and more static, cram his mind until there's nothing but a universe of white noise. Let him hear his wife's drugged-out voice.

‘Concentrate,' I told her. ‘Give me a little hint. A clue. Anything that'll help me find you. Try. For me. Try.'

She was singing that dumb old song in a husky voice. I wanted to reach down through the mysterious avenue of power that connected us, through the invisible signals that bounced around in the ether, and grab her by the hand and drag her back to me. I felt as if she was lost in space. She was circling the planet, only I couldn't see her.

And then she was quiet.

‘Sondra?
Sondra?
Are you still there?'

‘Yeah, I'm here, Jer. I'm here.'

‘And where is here? Tell me, Sondra.'

‘We'll sing lullabies, Jerry. We'll sing “Hush Little Baby.”' That little-girl voice: it was breaking my heart.

‘And we'll take the baby to the ocean. Oh-oh. Here comes the man and he wants my arm and –'

I thought I heard a man say, ‘Come to Daddy for goodies, sweetie.' It sounded like that.

And then the line was killed and she was gone again. Her captors were playing games with her, a little pain, a little pleasure. I clenched the hand holding the phone. I saw my knuckles change to the color of bone, as if the flesh were peeling back, layer by layer. I stared through the traffic.
Here comes the man and he wants my arm.
I imagined a needle sliding into a vein, her flesh punctured. ‘Talk to me, Sondra.' I spoke into the phone, although I knew there was nobody at the other end of the line. I uttered the same sentence again. ‘Talk to me.' I shut off the phone: madness lay that way.

I stopped at a red light. A middle-aged woman with heavy makeup and dyed blond hair walked in front of my car. She looked at me. What did she see? Some pathetic bastard talking to himself? Just another LA breakdown? It seemed that the gods that had pampered me for years, that had supported and advanced my career and brought me here from drab old Buffalo, had abdicated the heavens. The skies were empty and I was alone. I'd had my share of good fortune. Now it was over. I'd been ostracized by the gods, just as Joe Allardyce had been exiled from Hollywood.

What fucking sin or crime had I committed?

Maybe it was all random. You had good luck sometimes. Then you had bad. And there was no rationale, no logic. The driving force that shaped our lives was Whim.

The phone rang again.

I answered, expecting Sondra.

But it wasn't her.

‘This is what comes of trying to con me, Lomax,' he said.

I loathed the self-assurance in that voice. The smugness. The murderous weight of his authority. ‘What are you doing to her? What kind of dope are you giving her?'

‘That's beside the point. The only important thing for you to keep in mind is what I want from you. I'm tired of reminding you, Lomax. Weary, weary to the bone.'

I pictured again a needle going into a vein, and I wondered what drug they were using on Sondra. Maybe it was one of the benzodiazepines, or Thorazine, possibly even heroin – and then the idea of an overdose ran through my mind. I could see Sondra, stretched out and pale, in a morgue; her eyes were shut and a man in a white coat was exploring her flesh for puncture marks.

‘She's pregnant, for God's sake,' I said.

‘I know, I know. Congratulations.'

‘Please don't shovel any more dope into her system,' I said. ‘That's all I ask.'

‘Coochy-coo,' he said, his voice flat and bored.

‘Jesus Christ, you can't keep pumping dope into her –'

He ignored me. ‘You're obviously having some difficulty in bringing me what I need. I wonder about this. Does the good psychiatrist think he can buy a little time and use it to save his wife? Is he a brave man? Does he want to fight? Does he want to outsmart me? Is he just plain goddam stubborn? Or does he perhaps worry needlessly about giving away his patient's secrets? Or could it be some other reason I haven't yet fathomed? Whatever. I reached a conclusion, Lomax. You know what it is?'

‘Tell me,' I said.

‘This is the thing: I don't give a
damn
about your reasons. They don't interest me. I just don't
care.
I'm single-minded, I'm highly motivated, I'm a missile zoning in on its target, and your wife is an innocent bystander. If she gets in the way of the missile, too bad. It's now six-fifteen, Lomax.'

I looked at my watch.

‘I'm going to give you a gift. I'm going to give you a little time to produce. Let's say you have until nine o'clock … no, wait, make that ten, which is about three hours and forty-five minutes away. That's getting on for four hours, which ought to be more than enough time for you to sort out whatever delicate problems you're having concerning the material I need. In fact, even if I say so myself, I think that's a truly
generous
wad of time. I'm an understanding guy when you get to know me. But remember this. I don't want any half-assed documents. I don't want any undergraduate nonsense. I don't want an introduction to psychoanalysis for dummies. I want the prime cut. The genuine article … I used the word “soul” before, didn't I?'

‘Yes, you did,' I said.

‘Then deliver that soul unto me at the appointed hour,' he said. ‘I want it for my collection.'

‘What happens if …' I let the question fade.

He jumped on it. ‘What happens if you don't or won't or can't deliver? Oh, bad stuff, Lomax. Stuff you don't want to hear about. Obviously, I'd prefer if you produced the material within the next ten minutes or so, and then we'd put all this unpleasantness behind us quickly – but I'm being munificent, Lomax. After all, I hold the better cards. I'm also being patient. You should be thankful.'