My Brother's Keeper (7 page)

The left-hand side of the street was lined with small shops. I moved to stand in one of the doorways—not to hide there, because that was impossible; I wanted to protect my back and sides. The man standing on the corner had started towards me now, and the tan-coated figures were converging. They halted side by side, facing the doorway.

"All right, better make it easy for yourself," said the shorter man. In the shop window on my left was an illuminated advertisement for State Express, and the blinking light from it showed his face as a pale, asymmetrical oblong, changing from green to yellow to red. He lifted his hand and motioned to me, "Get in the car, an' we can all go nice an' easy."

He carried a dark truncheon in his left hand, and there was a flash of bright metal on his companion's closed fists.

"Come on," he repeated, when I didn't move. "If you want to stay in one piece. We ain't got all night."

There didn't seem to be much choice. I was unarmed, and still weak from my accident. The Mercedes had halted behind them, and I shrugged and stepped forward between the two of them to get to it.

I had given up—fighting never was my forte. Leo must have had other ideas. As I came level with the shorter man, my left arm jerked sideways and thrust stiff-fingered into his midriff. As he spasmed forward, my hand flickered upwards and stabbed hard for his eyes. The fingers went fast and deep into the soft cavities, turning as they thrust. The sensation was sickening, but before I could fully respond I was pivoting hard on my left leg, spinning to the right. My closed left fist went into the tall man's larynx, then as his hand went to his throat I had seized his thumb, twisted, and jerked. I felt the bone snap and grate. My left knee came up hard into his crotch.

One second more, and I was doing my best to run down the street. It was farcical, more like a stuttering hop than a sprint. But it
was
my best. My nerves were vibrating and uncontrollable, but somewhere underneath I felt a dancing anger, a black rage that drove me along much faster than I had reason to expect or hope.

At the street corner I looked back. One man was reeling in circles, his hands to his eyes, and the other was crouched over, one hand to his throat and the other to his testicles. The only sound was the purr of the Mercedes' engine, but the car was not following me. It remained, lights off, in the road. Throughout the whole violent encounter there had been silence, nothing but the gasp for air or the snap of breaking bone.

I turned into Tottenham Court Road, then took the next left turn, and on randomly through the rainy streets of Soho. It was half an hour before my trembling subsided enough to let me venture onto the Underground, and then I sat slumped in my seat in the corner, clasping my trembling hands tightly together.

By midnight I was back at the hospital. An hour later I was shaking all over and had a fever of a hundred and three. Tess Thomson looked in on me about three o'clock—thank heaven it was her week for night shift—and had needles into me two minutes later.

It was four days before I felt back to normal. Long before that I had decided to tell the whole truth, so far as I knew it, to Sir Westcott.

I did it when I was in physiotherapy, and he had come along to see how the exercises to strengthen the left side of my body were coming along. He was particularly interested in watching movements that called for integration between right and left. I swung Indian clubs for a while, then passed a rubber ball rapidly from hand to hand, behind my back. Sir Westcott looked quite pleased—until I started to tell him about what had happened at the Zoo, and about my experience in Soho.

When I got to the end of it (even I thought it came out sounding very odd) he walked out of the room without speaking. I went on with the exercises, and in a quarter of an hour he was back.

"Pack that in for a minute," he said. "Come and sit your backside on the bench here."

I followed him to the side of the gymnasium. It was filled with the products of Sir Westcott's unique ideas for rapid physical recovery from nervous system injuries. The walls and floor were an obstacle course of mats, rubber tires, ropes, trestles, hoops, and bars, across and through which we unfortunate patients were supposed to hop, crawl, roll, swing, and stagger, under his unflinching eye.

He looked at me moodily as we sat down, rubbing at his fat jowls. It was late afternoon, and the gymnasium was deserted except for the two of us.

"I had three calls made down to Soho." He sniffed. "There was no report of a fight there on Tuesday night—nobody saw or heard a scuffle near Charlotte Street—no reports from any hospital of two men coming in with hand and eye injuries like the ones you described. All right? I'll take your word for it you had jugged hare at Bertorellis, we didn't check that. But we did call the American Embassy. There's no report of anybody called Valnora Warren in the U.S. State Department. No visitor with that name here on any sort of U.S. Government business, an' nothing on the Passport List."

"But suppose she was with one of the intelligence services?" My suspicions had blossomed further.

"Suppose she wasn't there at all?"

"She was."

"You
think
she was. I'll admit that all right, but it's not the same thing."

He lifted one fat paw, a hand with manual skills that put mine to shame. "Hold on, before you start getting excited again. We've got to face something unpleasant, Lionel, an' it's something I've been putting off, and hoping would never come up."

"She was
there
, and so were the men." Despite his good advice, I could feel my pulse pumping harder. "I'm not inventing any of this."

"Listen for a minute, then think again. Let's have a go with Occam's razor. You've had one hell of an operation, an' there's things going on inside your head that we can't even guess at. The CAT scans look pretty good, but they don't tell us anything about your thinking. Einstein has a brain that looks no different from your Aunt Matilda's when it comes to X-rays and physiological tests."

"I know all that. But don't forget I'm looking at this from the inside—I
know
what I'm thinking."

"You don't—any more than the rest of us know what we're thinking." He snorted. "You're underestimating the human brain, my lad. The only thing we know for certain is that you've got Madrill's technique to stimulate nerve cell regeneration going on inside your head. There's an electrical storm brewing when all those little cross-connections cuddle up to each other. It's more than we can comprehend. You're going to experience perceptual anomalies, sure as I'm sitting here."

I stood up. "You've told me all that. I'm going to have synesthesia—"

"That's an easy one." He picked up an Indian club and sighted along it. "There's things a lot harder to pick up. It's easy to know there's something off when you play Mozart and get rows of green beetles crawling up your nose. But what happens when you `see' people"—his voice put quotes around the verb—"that Leo knew? Imagining a woman that he was fond of, or people he didn't like—that'd be normal enough. But it's hard to tell a data-sorting function like that from the real thing.
That's
why I want you to take things easy. We don't want to confuse internal and external realities."

"Look, I saw a van. A grey van, with painted windows and rear doors with a black line along them. That's not part of Leo's past. I bet somebody saw it at the Zoo—it had to get into and out of the car park."

"Fine. Feel free to go and look for it, if you want to." He clumped the Indian club back hard on the floor. "If you can come back here with witnesses, and a license plate for that van, I'll eat my Sunday boots with Branston Pickle. Haven't you noticed that everything that happened to you was with no witnesses? An' a broken thumb hurts like hell, but your man didn't let out a peep. Yer see, you've no idea how cunning the human brain can be at protecting its constructs. If you talk to a man who thinks the earth is flat, or that he's Napoleon or Hitler, he'll give you a hundred good reasons why he has to be right."

He shook his head sadly and stood up. "I was hoping we could move you to outpatient status, but I think we should wait a bit longer. Let me know if anything else happens. I've got to go an' scrub."

He was a hard man to argue with, yet I still felt like Galileo as he stood down from the witness box after facing the questioning. Subdued, but unpersuaded.

" . . . but she
was
there."

Proving it might be another matter.

There had to be one more go-around with Sir Westcott before I could get out of Queen's Hospital Annex. The day before my release I hung about the top floor all morning with Tess Thomson, waiting until there was a gap in his schedule. It took a long time and by eleven-thirty I was feeling more and more impatient.

Tess did her best to calm me down. "Remember that blood pressure. Keep it low, or he'll want you to stay another month."

"I'll go mad first." Apart from passes at Tess, my only satisfaction came from the daily sessions on the old piano down in the basement. I had tuned it myself and ground my way through hour after hour of left-hand exercises. The dexterity was coming back—but it was slow. And I had the terrible feeling that my playing had been drained of all its emotional content.

Tess was fidgeting by the door, trying to see through the frosted glass that led to Sir Westcott Shaw's reception area.

"You'd get used to being here after a while," she said. "Look at me, I've been in the place for four years. And I don't get to use the fancy equipment, it's the same old round of emptying bedpans."

I went over to stand next to her, and put my hand on her arm. "Tess, be serious for a minute. You've done a fantastic job looking after me, bedpans and all. How about dinner tonight? I owe you at least that, as a farewell thank-you for everything. Look." I held up my left hand and wiggled it. "See, it moves. If you hadn't made me exercise, I'd be all lopsided."

She turned around, smiling. I was always delighted when I could make her lose those frown lines on her forehead.

"Never give up, do you? What do you think my boyfriend would say?"

"Why tell him?" I had decided a month earlier that he didn't exist—he was a useful invention to keep the patients in their places.

"I don't keep secrets from him. Women are different from men; we don't like to live a double life."

"You know all my secrets—you've seen bits of me that I didn't know I had. What do you say? Dinner and dalliance?"

She stuck her tongue out at me. "I'll let you know. Later. All right?"

"When?"

"By three o'clock. I've got work to do on some of the records."

I nodded. Before I could talk restaurants the door to the reception area opened. Sir Westcott's secretary, a plump, middle-aged woman who was rumored to also be his mistress, appeared. As she gestured me in I heard a bellow from the inner office.

"Bad mood?" I said to her.

She nodded. There was a shout from inside: "When I say the records have to be looked at, I bloody well mean it. We're a hospital, not a knacker's yard. Do you understand?"

His secretary bit her lip. The door to the inner office opened and two men in white coats came out. One of them was sweating heavily and his face was as white and shiny as bone china. His companion steered him out. Neither of them even looked at us. The secretary took a deep breath.

"We lost two patients during the night," she said softly, her hand on my arm. "He thinks it was our fault—we didn't pay enough attention to the X-rays and the drug tolerances."

"Is he right?" I automatically lowered my voice to a whisper.

"Probably not. But it always upsets him. Try not to excite him."

He seemed to me to be excited enough already. "I thought doctors didn't get emotionally involved?" I whispered to her. "They can't afford to be too subjective if a patient dies."

She managed the trace of a smile. "Not the really good ones—they're involved. HE"—you could hear the capital letters in her voice—"takes it as a personal insult from Nature when he loses a patient. Come on, let's go in. Don't mind if he's hard to deal with."

Sir Westcott was sitting at the big desk, staring blindly at a folder in front of him. His fringe of hair was sticking up wildly, and his jowls looked fatter and looser than ever. I sat down uninvited in the chair opposite and waited. Finally he grunted, closed the folder, and looked up at me.

"I know, you want to get out of here. It's too soon, and you're being a bloody fool, but that's your option."

"I'm feeling good. I'm taking up a room somebody else might need."

"That's for me to worry about." He tapped the folder. "Take a look in there if you think you're in great shape. This past week you've had fevers twice, and your blood pressure's been up and down faster than a whore's knickers. You should be taking things real easy. It's daft buggers like you that keep the undertakers in business."

As he spoke he was watching me closely, but his eyes would flicker now and again to a glass ornament on the top of the desk. Tess had told me all about it. The chair I was sitting on had sensors for pulse and blood pressure, with a display built into the far side of the paperweight. He was deliberately trying to excite me and watching for the reaction.

I sat quite still. "I'll be taking things easy. And I won't go far away. From Shepherds Bush I can be here in an hour and a half, and I'm not planning on leaving my flat much."

He took a last look at the paperweight, then nodded. "You'll do. Bugger off then, before I change my mind. And here, take this with you." He picked up a flat plastic pillbox about as big across as a ten-penny piece. "You've been moaning to Nurse Thomson about you being an experimental animal with your operation—don't deny it, I know more than you think. Well, this makes you a real experiment. The fellows over at Guy's have come up with a new drug, a synthetic neurotransmitter, right out of the lab. It still has to go through controlled tests, but they think it may damp the unstable feedback situations that we've sometimes had with Madrill's nerve regeneration treatment."