Dreams Are Not Enough (56 page)

Taking out a sheet of stationery, she wrote: Quadruple what I sent to the Zaire center last year.

Staring at her heavily underlined writing, she thought of Art Kleefeld. Ivanovich’s report that Kleefeld hadn’t been totally candid about Hap’s funeral was a constant hangnail irritation. For some incomprehensible reason nothing fretted her as much as those mismatched stories about the burial time. And now, for the first time, it occurred to her that Kleefeld, like the Cordiner cousins, had been frightened off by Lang.

Taking out another folded note card she wrote. Lake Como is very lovely, Art, and it would be super if you would visit—the ticket is on me.

She determined not to invest overmuch emotional capital in his response. Despite her resolution, the next week she threw herself sobbing on the mattress she once had shared with Hap an inordinate number of times.

Rain threatened that morning. At the villa, she always breakfasted in bed: she had finished her first cup of coffee and was nibbling the buttered crust of a roll that had emerged from the baker’s oven less than an hour earlier.

The door opened and Juanita said, “Telegram.”

Shoving aside the tray, Alyssia jumped from the bed to snatch the yellow envelope. One glance at its window and her animation faded.

“It’s for you.”

“I know my own name,” Juanita said.

“It’s just I don’t have my specs with me.”

Alyssia, long accustomed to this sadly transparent deception, slit the envelope to read the contents to her sister.

“Alice, you’re white as a sheet. What does it say?”

“It’s from Zaire,” Alyssia said, reading in a hollow whisper.

‘“Chateau Neuchatel stop Proximity of Davos.” ” ” That’s all? No name, no nothing? “

“It’s signed Peter Mzelie, but it’s got to be from Art. He’s being super-cautious.” Alyssia snatched up the phone. Dialing, she asked a question in rapid Italian, nodding at the reply. Hanging up, she cried, “I’ll have to rush!” I must be in Como by noon—the Milan Zurich Express stops there at twelve eleven. If I can make the train, I’ll be in Davos by six thirty-eight. “

“Alice, say Art did send the telegram, he sent it from Africa. There’s no way in the world he can be in Switzerland already.”

“You’re right!” Alyssia Hung open the elaborately carved doors of the armoire.

“I better pack a few things.”

“I’ll get my stuff.”

“No!” Alyssia tugged at a sweater with such vehemence that two others toppled from the shelf.

“I have to go alone.”

“That’s silly, Alice.”

“If Art sees you he might never open up.”

It made no sense to juanita but her sister, after all this time, again had that lively stubborn look, so instead of arguing, she picked up the sweaters, asking, “Which ones do you want?”

Ten minutes later they were pulling out of the garage—Juanita insisted on seeing Alyssia off at the Como station. The cook’s husband, delighted to at last have an opportunity to display his driving expertise, swerved them maniacally around hairpin turns. They reached the depot on time. The Express, though, had as usual departed late from Milan. The sisters sat in the barnlike ristorante drinking caffelatte for a half hour before the engine chugged into the open terminal.

As they hurried through the rain to the platform, Juanita said, “Don’t go getting your hopes up, baby. Art’s not going to say one more word than he done before in Nairobi.”

The steepness of the path forced him to traverse, so he was making slow progress up the hill.

Concentrating on his maneuvers back and forth over the configuration of ruts and puddles, he had no opportunity to notice the majestic conifers, the quaint Alpine village nestled into the opposing mountain, the jagged peaks covered with snow—yesterday’s autumnal rain had melted the snow at this lower altitude. His world was filled with his own harsh breathing, the slithering sound his white and silver nylon ski jacket made against his crutches, the clink of the tips hitting small stones.

Halting, resting the crutch handles under his armpits, he took out a handkerchief, wiping the sweat from his forehead, dabbing his neck below the beard. As his breathing slowed, he could hear the cow bells each cow with her own individual musical note.

About a quarter of a mile above him loomed Chateau Neuchatel. The smaller buildings appeared to be paying fealty to the massive ugliness of the sanitorium proper. The verandas that encircled each of its four stories were railed with battleship-gray wood, and at precisely every twelve feet the mustard-colored walls extruded outward. Each room, as the colored brochure promised, came with its own private sun porch. On this gloomy afternoon, less than a dozen of these were occupied. Like the porches, the solitary figures bundled in their heavy gray blankets were indistinguishable.

The block of penitentiary architecture pointed up the postcard charms of the surrounding chalets, which had whitewashed walls, steep gables and red shutters with cutout patterns. The sanitorium’s venerable chief of staff lived in the chalet with garlands of onions looped below the peaked rooftop.

As he watched, its red-painted door opened and a scar fed woman in a green loden cape emerged, stepping with slow care down the steps. Her head was bent and her shoulders were pulled inward. Correct posture or any new inmate who isn’t wheeled into Magic Mountain, he thought.

In the early part of the century, when it was built, the sanitorium had served only tuberculars, and for this reason he called it Magic Mountain, although he was well aware that the current patient roster included no TH cases. Sufferers from cancer and degenerative diseases came for cures that sometimes resulted in remission, and the remainder of the rooms were kept continuously occupied by those desirous of either the socalled sleep treatment for obesity or the rejuvenation process that involved both cosmetic surgery and injections made from the ovaries of newborn lambs.

The faraway woman, however, was not fat, and though she moved slowly, she did not appear old. He therefore placed her in the same category as himself. The walking dead.

He shook his head as if warding off conjectures. Thinking about people carried him dangerously close to memories of his parents, of his brother, of her. Shoving the handkerchief back in his parka, he started his laborious climbing. After several teeth-jarring hops, his view of Chateau Neuchatel was hidden by a clump of firs.

The following morning more rain fell in sparse, cold drops from the thick clouds that shrouded the peaks. Jamming on a knit cap and shrugging on his ski jacket, he swung past the floor desk. The beet faced German orderly shook his head.

“Nein, nein, Herr Stevens. Not in this rain. It is difficult enough, the crutches. Last week is your first time on them. If you slip, who will find you?”

He shrugged, continuing to the elevator, which was deep enough to accommodate a stretcher and wide enough for two wheelchairs.

Emerging on the desolate terrace, where a few weeks ago other snot he—had sipped coffee or tea and eaten whipped-cream pastries, he shivered. In weather like this even the cows had enough sense to huddle near the barn.

A large black Mercedes was winding cautiously down the road from Davos. If he hung around, he risked having to greet whoever was in it.

He could not face strangers. Any conversational exchange, even one as minor as with the red-faced German, cost him unbelievable psychic energy.

He made as rapidly as possible for the path. On the steep incline, he welcomed the slippery navigations downward.

Within five minutes his knit hat, beard and Levi’s were drenched, and the freezing rain had penetrated beneath the collar of his waterproof parka.

One of his crutches hit a pebble, which skittered. He lost control.

He fell forward heavily, sprawling on his stomach.

The light aluminum crutch bounced down the incline, coming to a halt five yards away in the tall, drenched grass. For a minute he lay unmoving, staring at the half-hidden metal. It’s only fifteen lousy feet, he told himself. Crawl there, buddy. Stripping off his muddy leather gloves, he folded them into his pockets, then reached for the nearby crutch, pressing it between his right bicep and rib cage. He began crawling. His hands were anesthetized by cold, yet jabs of discomfort told him the skin of the palms was torn. His dragging left leg shot with pain from his toes to his hip socket. Christ, two episodes of pricey surgical work shot to hell!

Completely absorbed in the pain, his crawl, his grip on his remaining crutch, he didn’t realize anyone was on the path behind him until he had nearly attained his goal.

Then he saw the Hash of high-heeled boots and a flurry of loden cloth.

A woman retrieved his crutch.

His breath exploded in a gasp as he looked up at her.

A strand of soaking black hair poked out of the loden hood to rest like a pen mark against her cheek; a trickle of rain was running between her nostrils, like snot. His soppy daydreams, his erotic night dreams, could not have invented those details.

She was real. She was here.

As they stared at each other, the color drained from her wet face and she swayed. Fearing she was about to collapse, he unthinkingly tried to catch her. Pressing both hands flat against the muddy path, he rose up on his knees. The bad one, the left, gave way. He felt and heard the tendons snap like too tightly pulled rubber bands. The agony he experienced was disassociated from the joy jumping around inside him.

“You aren’t dead,” she whispered.

“It is you.”

Then he was flooded with the realization that he was steeped in mud, crawling like a crippled beggar, an object for either scorn or the profoundest pity. Hot embarrassment swept him. What right did she have to come here like this? For a moment he considered denying his old identity, telling her she had the wrong guy.

“I’m called Adam Stevens now,” he said with the coolest politeness he could muster. Immediately he saw that he’d taken the only possible tack. During his escape from the socalled accident he had heard the name Lang repeated several times in urgent fear, so he accepted that Robert Lang had carried a vendetta to its ultimate conclusion. If the assassins hadn’t been more afraid of the night-shrouded forest than of their remote American employer, he wouldn’t be alive and sprawled in the mud this morning. He emphatically must not involve her in the danger.

“Adam Stevens,” she murmured. They were so close he could see the tiny freckle to the left of her soft, full mouth, feel the warmth of her breath on his wet skin.

“Yes. Now will you please give me my crutch?”

“Here, let me help you.”

He took the crutch.

“Thank you, but that’s not necessary.”

“But your leg—didn’t something just happen to your leg? You can’t stand by yourself, Hap.”

“Adam,” he corrected.

“And though you’ve been very kind, I manage best on my own.”

“Use me to brace yourself” — “I’d appreciate it if you’d leave.” This time his voice was deliberately damaging.

A gust of wind shook the branches above them, and enormous drops pelted down. One fell on her hood, creeping onto her ashen face.

But she was, of course, an actress. With a faint smile, she said, “Sorry to have intruded on you.”

She stepped around him. He didn’t turn to watch her, but he knew from the slushy crunch of her boots that she was returning up the path.

When the sound faded he began to cry in big, rasping sobs and the hot tears mingled with icy rain. After a couple of minutes he attempted to stand, but his left leg, which was at a peculiar angle, refused to cooperate, and he sank backward whimpering.

Two orderlies came running down the path.

Old Hans was waving his arms and moving his red face agitatedly.

“Herr Stevens! Herr Stevens! It is not good to move!” he shouted.

The tall Italian boy, who was new, darted back to the sanitorium for a stretcher.

After the surgery he slept until nearly midnight. When he awoke, a linen hand towel was safety-pinned around his bedside lamp. The impenetrable black shadows at the end of the narrow room reminded him of the rain forest on the night of his official death. He looked away.

A strong smell of antiseptic ointment came from his hands, which were swathed in gauze bandaging. His leg, in a plaster cast that reached his hip and bared only his toes, hung suspended by a traction device.

The delicate surgery on his hamstrung left knee, performed by the same Davos surgical team that had operated on him twice before, had lasted four and three quarter hours, and long before the final suturing his spine had ached intolerably in spite of the mixture of anesthetics dripping into the veins of his arm.

Though he didn’t realize it, he was still stoned.

A mind in its normal state recollects myriad impressions. His brain lagged over one detail at a time. Alyssia’s sudden appearance on the path. Her beauty. Her pallor—why that ashen pallor? He did not consider that she, believing him dead, might be shocked to find him alive. Instead, he decided it was his mud-soaked crawl that had shocked her.

He was too drugged for his leg to hurt, but the suspension bothered him, and he decided a change of position might help. Raising his bandaged hands to the metal bar above his chest, he shifted his torso.

The shadows surrounding the window came alive.

“You’re awake,” Alyssia said, coming to lean over the railed bed. The dimmed light sparked gold in her eyes.

Her presence soothed him and he smiled up at her.

“Uncomfortable?” she asked.

His mind lurched. It’s dangerous or her to be here, he informed himself. Get rid of her.

“I need the orderly.”

“Tell me where to find whatever you need.”

“Thank you, but it’s the bedpan,” he lied, taking a melancholy pride that his words, though weak and faraway, were clipped in a manner that sounded vaguely British.

She left to get the night orderly. Long before help came, he was sleeping. He stirred restlessly, trapped in nightmares. They were amputating his leg—no, he was at Mount Sinai Hospital and it was Alyssia’s leg they were sawing off.