Night Must Wait (41 page)

She could not afford to make mistakes. She glanced at the blinds drawn so securely over the window and drew one deep breath. Oroko would have a fit to think she'd been in this room with Voindagbo without a bodyguard. But no one with Voinadagbo's rank would kill her with his own hands. She wouldn't tell on David or Regulus for permitting Voindagbo a private audience.

There had been a time, Lindsey remembered, when perhaps she could have married, with all the messy details it entailed. So entrapping. Binding, blinding. Now she felt old and tired beyond anything she'd imagined. Should go and see the doctor, maybe she had a touch of malaria. Too much effort. All she waited for now was Gilman. She had a plan for her old friend. A long slow plan.

That extraordinary partnership with Sandy was the closest she had come to a mate. But Sandy had always left Lindsey to possess herself, never asking for anything but the right to hunt together. No physical greed, no appetite of low and selfish needs. No trade or commerce, no crippling parasitism. Perfect in all its parts. Kipling's thousandth man—that was what she had lost.

That was what Gilman had broken.

Chapter 93: Gilman

January 1971

New York, USA

"Don't leave me," he slurred.

Gilman looked at his smudged face with its bristling four-day growth of beard, and for a moment she saw a different man, one dirty from combat instead of the streets of New York. There are so many flavors of delusional.

"I won't." She took a folding chair from against the wall of the hospital room. She looked around at the four beds, only one other filled tonight with its curtains drawn. That man would never rise again, he simply waited for his heart to stop.

"They threw me in the tank last time. This isn't the tank is it?" her patient said. The whites of his eyes showed. "There are things there. I can't tell you, it'd scare you, miss. It's snakes, stuff with more eyes than you want to think on and them things keep reaching."

"I worked here at Bellevue years ago, Joe," she said in that low tone she'd mastered in a remote past, reading his name off the chart. "Old Gus taught me some things when I was a student here. Used to see a lot of you guys. Used to see snakes upon a time."

Most of the interns thought it a waste of time or even quackery, but Gus, a Bellevue staffer from before World War II, taught Gilman decades ago how to talk some of the Bowery boys out of the DTs. This man wasn't bad off, and the Librium should be enough. What did Gilman have to go back home to anyhow? She put the chart back.

"Do you know where I worked?" she said.

She sat there and talked about Nigeria and step-by-step she softened her talk, making pictures of massive trees and wide rivers, shoals of butterflies and the endless waves of grass. The man settled, his eyes glazed with darkness, dozing, his face relaxing as she spoke. Her attention was a thread to which he clung.

This wasn't like snapping a man out of a nightmare into cold reality, but changing the quality of his dreams without abruptly waking him. Like speaking to a dog growling and twitching in a bad dream until he sighs and quiets and thumps his tail in his sleep.

"I talk to my delirious fever patients the same way now, since the time I spent half a night listening to bits of Tom's malaria dreams and thought of trying old Gus's technique. It works best on people one has a feeling for."

He roused.

"But you don't know me, miss."

"You remind me of my Tom."

She watched the man's eyelids tremble.

"Joe, instinct knows when to trust. It's reason that confuses us, keeps us from knowing, makes us suspicious. Lindsey would disagree with me, but she wasn't right about everything."

She felt her words falter. She hadn't expected Lindsey's name to come out. Sometimes talking like this brought up things she didn't mean to say. But this man wouldn't remember. Her patients never did.

"Impossible to guess your nightmare from the sleeping sounds you make, impossible to know with what dream I surround and replace it. We both keep our secrets. My nearest approach to shamanism."

Shamanism made her think of Wilton, and how Lowenstein searched for Wilton. Wilton, the friend she missed on nights like this.

"I'll have to explain Wilton," she told the man. Joe turned his head on the flat pillow, his eyes closed but still seeking her voice. "I know Lowenstein's going to ask me. It's hard. She had the power of tampering with dreams when we were awake—not sick or drugged or drunk or delirious, but awake—or at least believing we were. Wilton taught me that 'awake' is a relative state. She was a psychological third-story man. You know about that?"

No, Joe probably didn't. She thought he must have drifted off by now, the IV draining its fluids slowly into his arm. Gilman stood and rechecked the meds and the labels on the bag. But she kept on talking, seeing her patient twitch as though at the shadow of a fearful dream.

"Yes, Joe, while I was slamming and locking doors on the ground floor, she came in through the upstairs window. To keep her from getting smug, I opened doors with a fanfare while she was picking their locks, or looked the other way while she bagged some memory I knew was worthless, and waited to mock her when she tried to pawn it."

Joe stirred again and his face changed with the soothing wash of the drugs and voice.

"I was like you," she said. "Never tracking. I never knew whether I'd won or lost. Wilton stayed silent about her victories, and I never lost the feeling that I might be locking the door of a house whose walls and roof had long since fallen away. Folly to underestimate her. Lindsey's folly too. Wilton hunted down our ambitions, our dreams, our talents and weaknesses one by one. We were content to surrender them, if only she'd admire them. And so, finally, she was able to work us to her will and fill us with visions."

God, she sounded mental, telling a drunk about Wilton. But what if Wilton were lost on the streets, stumbling about in the company of men like him? She shivered.

"Be kind to her if you meet her on the street someday. She's a little thing and she'll be cold, so cold. She ought to be in Africa. That's the place she loved, the land where she lived. She shouldn't be here."

Gilman folded the chair before putting it away against the wall. She turned to the doorway and saw a man brilliantly outlined by the corridor fluorescents slip fast away. Flicker out of sight, as if he fled. She hurried two steps and leaned out the door staring wildly at the swinging doors midway down the hall. He'd been black. Wearing scrubs. Was it only her imagination that said he didn't move like an American? How could she be sure or had she gone crazy too?

Chapter 94: Gilman

February 1971

New York, USA

Even in New York City with its barrage of sounds, colors, and light, Gilman found herself thinking of Nigeria. Not the miserable enclave of desperate refugees she'd fled, but the cockeyed marvel of a new nation that she'd known in the beginning. Rocking with music and quick laughter, the upraised welcoming hands that reached for miracles.

Biafra too, was like that when newborn and brave. Now and again the memories savaged her, all the more cruel for their innocence and beauty. No one to share them. The rare letter from Sister Catherine only hurt. She even missed Allingham.

Once she was looking through a book of poetry in a store, more out of idleness than out of any desire to read. She happened upon Kipling.

I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty paving stones

An' the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;

Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,

An' they talks a lot of lovin', but wot do they understand?

Beefy face and grubby 'and—

Law! Wot do they understand?...

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst..."

It didn't matter that he spoke of the East—she understood too well, and a crowd of memories swung into momentary focus before her eyes. She smelled the intoxicating musk of ivory papaya flowers and saw the sky yawn orange overhead. She saw Jantor's face, creased in a grin of relaxed delight. She slapped the book shut, shoved it back on the shelf and felt her legs tremble under her. She dusted her fingers on her pants legs as if she could brush away the clinging memories.

There were other times when the horror rose again to shake her. Like the recurrent tide of malarial fever in the blood. Nightmares as unrelenting as delirium.

Gilman heard nothing from Allingham. No letter, no call. But she wasn't going to go looking and asking, whining like a beggar. She managed to stay off the cigarettes. After all, they reminded her too much of Jantor and Sister Catherine and Biafra. She worked at Bellevue in the emergency room most nights—it was as close as she could come to war and tried to make frenetic hours of work her sleeping pill.

Chapter 95: Lindsey

March 1971

Lagos, Western Region, Nigeria

"Allow transfer of patient," Lindsey wrote and initialed it. Precise, legible beyond doubt.

When the secretary arrived in response to her bell, Lindsey handed the message to him.

"Send this to Lawrence Sullivan," she said, "via telegram. Affix customary code for authorization."

When the man was gone and the door closed behind him, Lindsey allowed herself a smile. Let Gilman believe she was safe from her past. Yes, she'd permit Gilman and this doctor Lowenstein to have Wilton. They couldn't help poor Wilton much anyway, but if they did and any secrets were told, by this time Lindsey's position couldn't be shaken by rumors from a madwoman.

Lindsey felt herself come alive at the sound of Oroko's voice. She straightened, tightened her face into order. Anything but that. No replacements for Sandy. She wouldn't drink with him or talk with him. Nor anyone except for those societal niceties that her plans required. Everything must focus on the one purpose, the one payback for which she worked with such care.

She imagined Gilman eating a grease-dripping hamburger back in New York in some dive. Gilman always had bohemian affectations. Always the one to assert that lack of hygiene accompanied superior and dramatic tastes. Vulgar prerequisites. A hot dog from the right vendor equaled haute cuisine. Probably a reaction with Freudian implications about Gilman's relationship with her father. Gilman with her messy hair and overcoat stuffing down a burger in a linoleum-floored place shaped like a boxcar, and never knowing, never sensing that just around the corner, someone was watching, noting how she slathered ketchup before the first bite.

She felt herself smile.

"Good afternoon, Oroko," she said. "What's the latest?"

Chapter 96: Gilman

March 1971

Boston, MA, USA

Gilman came in through the doorway and declined Lowenstein's offer of a seat, standing to one side of his desk. He glanced up, and she noted the brilliance of excitement in his eyes. Anticipation and worry. The worry irritated her, though she knew she should expect it after their many meetings. Gilman clenched her hands behind her back.

"You've found her?" In that instant she realized how much she feared knowing. But she could never show Lowenstein weakness. Sometimes she suspected he considered her one of his patients. Irritating man.

"A lead. I think a good one," he said. "Do take a seat, Doctor. I should think you could relax with me by now."

"I'm comfortable," she lied, but she sat. Maybe he was testing her. "Have you found her?"

"The patient in question is female, approximate age between thirty-five and forty, black hair, brown eyes, weight ninety-odd pounds." His tone belied the impersonal words he chose. "She might be of mixed parentage. Both hands bear consequential scarring, possibly the result of an accident. X-rays reveal a previous broken ulna and radius, left side, broken carpals and several fractured ribs, all well healed. Some indications of poor nutrition in childhood. Her name is down as L. K. Wilson. I'm assuming she was entered under a pseudonym but close enough to 'Wilton' that she might respond to it if she improved. Admit date is within your suggested search parameters. The reason that I..."

"Where?"

When Lowenstein blinked Gilman realized how sharp her tone sounded. She resisted an impulse to shake the information out of him.

"Gilman," he said. "Whoever this woman is, she's in poor shape. Underweight, unresponsive,
astasia abasia
—you know the drill. It may not be the woman you know, but meeting this patient will be a shock for you."

"It has to be Wilton."

"That's not what I meant."

"Then what? You think I'm nuts? Loony? Crackers?"

"Gilman, it's up to you. We need your verification of identity. I'll just remind you again that this person is tended by professionals, her basic needs met and there's no great urgency."

"Lowenstein, how could I wait? And how can you say tended. Ninety-odd pounds is neglect. Abuse."

"She'll be under sedation," he said.

"Yeah, I know that's what passes for tending in those places."

He cleared his throat and Gilman knew exactly what was coming next.

"Katherine, I feel strongly that it would be helpful for you to talk about your experiences in Africa. I suspect that's one of your motives in seeking out your old friend. If you ever choose to talk, I would be honored to listen. And if you'd feel more comfortable with some other professional, I'd be glad to make recommendations. As for confidentiality—you know the ethics of a doctor extend even into my maligned branch of the profession."

Lowenstein would never understand. No one would understand. She took that thought and shielded herself behind it. There were times the urge to spill out the past in words nearly overwhelmed her, but what if the past never went back under cover? What if she couldn't control it any more? Besides, she'd be more likely to choose a Bowery bum for her confidante than a fellow professional.