Strangers (17 page)

Thinking about the situation, Jack invariably became angry that no place in the city provided fine custodial care for the catastrophically brain-injured or mentally ill at a reasonable price. In spite of huge expenditures of tax money, New York’s institutions, like public institutions everywhere, were a grim joke that the average citizen had to accept for a lack of alternatives.

If he had not been a skilled and highly successful thief, he would not have been able to pay the sanitarium’s exorbitant monthly charges. Fortunately, he had a talent for larceny.

Carrying his visitor’s pass, he went to another elevator and rode up to the fourth of six floors. The hallways in the upper levels were more reminiscent of a hospital than the lobby had been. Fluorescent lights. White walls. The clean, crisp, minty smell of disinfectant.

At the far end of the fourth-floor hall, in the last room on the right, lived the dead woman who still breathed. Jack hesitated with his hand on the push-plate of the heavy swinging door, swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and finally went inside.

The room was not as sumptuous as the lobby, and it was not Art Deco, either, but it was very nice, resembling a medium-priced room at the Plaza: a high ceiling and white molding; a fireplace with a white mantel; a deep hunter-green carpet; pale green drapes; a green leaf-patterned sofa and a pair of chairs. The theory was that a patient would be happier in a room like this than in a clinical room. Although many patients were oblivious of their surroundings, the cozier atmosphere at least made visiting friends and relatives feel less bleak.

The hospital bed was the only concession to utilitarian design, a dramatic contrast to everything else. But even that was dressed up with green-patterned designer sheets.

Only the patient spoiled the lovely mood of the chamber.

Jack lowered the safety railing on the bed, leaned over, and kissed his wife’s cheek. She did not stir. He took one of her hands and held it in both of his. Her hand did not grip him in return, did not flex, remained slack, limp, senseless, but at least it was warm.

“Jenny? It’s me, Jenny. How are you feeling today? Hmmmmm? You look good. You look lovely. You always look lovely.”

In fact, for someone who had spent eight years in a coma, for someone
who had not taken a single step and had not felt sunshine or fresh air upon her face in all that time, she looked quite good indeed. Perhaps only Jack could say that she was still lovely—and mean it. She was not the beauty she had once been, but she certainly did not look as if she had spent almost a decade in solemn flirtation with death.

Her hair was not glossy anymore, though still thick and the same rich chestnut shade as when he had first seen her at her job, behind the men’s cologne counter in Bloomingdale’s, fourteen years ago. The attendants washed her hair twice a week here and brushed it every day.

He could have moved his hand under her hair, along the left side of her skull, to the unnatural depression, the sickening concavity. He could have touched it without disturbing her, for nothing disturbed her anymore, but he did not. Because touching it would have disturbed
him.

Her brow was uncreased, her face unlined even at the corners of her eyes, which were closed. She was gaunt though not shockingly so. Motionless upon those green designer sheets, she seemed ageless, as if she were an enchanted princess awaiting the kiss that would wake her from a century of slumber.

The only signs of life were the vague, rhythmic rise and fall of her breast as she breathed, and the soft movement of her throat as she occasionally swallowed saliva. The swallowing was an automatic, involuntary action and not a sign of awareness on any level whatsoever.

The brain damage was extensive and irreparable. The movements she made here and now were virtually the only movements she would ever make until, at last, she gave a dying shudder. There was no hope. He knew there was no hope, and he accepted the permanence of her condition.

She would have looked much worse if she had not received such conscientious care. A team of physical therapists came to her room every day and put her through passive exercise routines. Her muscle tone was not the best, but at least she
had
muscle tone.

Jack held her hand and stared down at her for a long time. For seven years, he had been coming to see her two nights a week and for five or six hours every Sunday afternoon, sometimes on other afternoons as well. But in spite of the frequency of his visits and in spite of her unchanging condition, he never tired of looking at her.

He pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed, still holding her hand, staring at her face, and for more than an hour he talked to her. He told her about a movie that he had seen since his previous visit, about two books he had read. He spoke of the weather, described the force and bite of the winter wind. He painted colorful word pictures of the prettiest Christmas displays he had seen in shop windows.

She did not reward him with even a sigh or a twitch. She lay as always, unmoving and unmoved.

Nevertheless, he talked to her, for he worried that a fragment of awareness might survive, a gleam of comprehension down in the black well of the coma. Maybe she
could
hear and understand, in which case the worst thing for her was being trapped in an unresponsive body, desperate even for one-way communication, but receiving none because they thought she could not hear. The doctors assured him that these worries were groundless; she heard nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing, they said, except what images and fantasies might sputter across short-circuiting synapses of her shattered brain. But if they were wrong—if there was only one chance in a million that they were wrong—he could not leave her in that perfect and terrible isolation. So he talked to her as the winter day beyond the window changed from one shade of gray to another.

At five-fifteen, he went into the adjoining bathroom and washed his face. He dried off and blinked at his reflection in the mirror. As on countless other occasions, he wondered what Jenny had ever seen in him.

Not one feature or aspect of his face could be called handsome. His forehead was too broad, ears too big. Although he had 20–20 vision, his left eye had a leftward cast, and most people could not talk to him without nervously shifting their attention from one eye to the other, wondering which was looking at them when, in fact,
both
were. When he smiled he looked clownish, and when he frowned he looked sufficiently threatening to send Jack the Ripper scurrying for home and hearth.

But Jenny had seen something in him. She had wanted, needed, and loved him. In spite of her own good looks, she had not cared about appearances. That was one of the reasons he had loved her so much. One of the reasons he missed her so much. One of a thousand reasons.

He looked away from the mirror. If it was possible to be lonelier than he was now, he hoped to God that he never slipped down that far.

He returned to the other room, said goodbye to his unheeding wife, kissed her, smelled her hair once more, and got out of there at five-thirty.

In the street, behind the wheel of his Camaro, Jack looked at passing pedestrians and other motorists with loathing. His fellow men. The good, kind, gentle, righteous people of the straight world would regard him with disdain and possibly even disgust if they knew he was a professional thief, though it was what they had done to him and to Jenny that had driven him to crime.

He knew anger and bitterness solved nothing, changed nothing, and hurt no one but himself. Bitterness was corrosive. He did not want to be bitter, but there were times when he could not help it.

•

Later, after dinner alone at a Chinese restaurant, he returned to his apartment. He had a spacious one-bedroom co-op in a first-class building on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. Officially, it was owned by a Liechtenstein-based corporation, which had purchased it with a check written on a Swiss bank account, and each month the utilities and the association fees were paid by the Bank of America out of a trust account. Jack Twist lived there under the name “Philippe Delon.” To the doormen and other building employees, to the few neighbors with whom he spoke, he was known as the odd and slightly disreputable scion of a wealthy French family who had sent him to America ostensibly to scout investments but actually just to get him out of their hair. He spoke French fluently and could speak English with a convincing French accent for hours without slipping up and revealing his deception. Of course, there was no French family, and both the corporation in Liechtenstein and the Swiss bank account were his, and the only wealth he had to invest was that which he had stolen from others. He was not an
ordinary
thief.

In his apartment, he went directly to the walk-in closet in the bedroom and removed the false partition at the rear of it. He pulled two bags from the secret, three-foot-deep storage space and took them into the dark living room, not bothering to turn on lights. He piled the bags beside his favorite armchair, which stood by a large window.

He got a bottle of Beck’s from the refrigerator, opened it, and returned to the living room. He sat in the darkness for a while, by the window, looking down on the park, where lights reflected off the snow-covered ground and made strange shadows in the bare-limbed trees.

He was stalling, and he knew it. Finally he switched on the reading lamp beside the chair. He pulled the smallest of the two bags in front of him, opened it, and began to scoop out the contents.

Jewels. Diamond pendants, diamond necklaces, glittering diamond chokers. A diamond and emerald bracelet. Three diamond and sapphire bracelets. Rings, brooches, barrettes, stickpins, jeweled hat pins.

These were the proceeds of a heist that he had pulled off single-handedly six weeks ago. It should have been a two-man job, but with extensive and imaginative planning, he had found a way to handle it himself, and it had gone smoothly.

The only problem was that he had gotten no kick whatsoever from that heist. When a job had been successfully concluded, Jack was usually in a grand mood for days after. From his point of view, these were not simply crimes but also acts of retribution against the straight world, payment for what it had done to him and to Jenny. Until the age of twenty-nine,
he had given much to society, to his country, but as a reward he had wound up in a Central American hellhole, in a dictator’s prison, where he had been left to rot. And Jenny…He could not bear to think about the condition in which he had found her when, at last, he had escaped and come home. Now, he no longer gave to society but
took
from it, and with intense pleasure. His greatest satisfaction was breaking the rules, taking what he wanted, getting away with it—until the jewelry heist six weeks ago. At the end of that operation, he had felt no triumph, no sense of retribution. That lack of excitement scared him. It was, after all, what he lived for.

Sitting in the armchair by the window, he piled the jewelry in his lap, held selected pieces up to the light, and tried once more to gain a feeling of accomplishment and revenge.

He should have disposed of the jewelry in the days immediately following the burglary. But he was reluctant to part with it until he had squeezed at least a small measure of satisfaction from it.

Troubled by his continued lack of feeling, he put the jewels back into the sack from which he had taken them.

The other sack contained his share of the proceeds from the robbery at the
fratellanza
warehouse five days ago. They had been able to open only one of the two safes, but that had contained over $3,100,000—more than a million apiece, in untraceable twenties, fifties, and hundreds.

By now he should have begun to convert the cash into cashier’s checks and other negotiable instruments for deposit, by mail, in his Swiss accounts. However, he held on to it because, as with the jewelry, the possession of it had not yet given him a sense of triumph.

He removed thick stacks of tightly banded currency from the bag and held them, turned them over in his hands. He brought them to his face and smelled them. That singular scent of money was usually exciting in itself—but not this time. But he did not feel triumphant, clever, lawless, or in any way superior to the obedient mice who scurried through society’s maze exactly as they were taught. He just felt empty.

If this change in him had occurred with the warehouse job, he would have attributed it to having stolen from other thieves, rather than from the straight world. But his reaction subsequent to the jewelry heist had been the same, and that victim had been a legitimate business. It was his ennui following the jewelry store action that caused him to move on to another job sooner than he should have. Usually he pulled off one job every three or four months, but only five weeks had elapsed between his most recent operations.

All right, so maybe the usual thrill eluded him on both these recent jobs because the money was no longer important to him. He had set aside
enough to support himself in style for as long as he lived and to take care of Jenny even if she endured a normal lifespan in her coma, which was unlikely. Perhaps, all along, the most important thing about his work had not been the rebellion and defiance of it, as he had thought; perhaps, instead, he had done it all just for the money, and the rest of it had been merely cheap rationalization and self-delusion.

But he could not believe that. He knew what he had felt, and he knew how much he missed those feelings now.

Something was happening to him, an inner shifting, a sea-change. He felt empty, adrift, without purpose. He dared not lose his love of larceny. It was the only reason he had for living.

He put the money back into the bag. He turned out the light and sat in the darkness, sipping Beck’s and staring down at Central Park.

In addition to his recent inability to find joy in his work, he had been plagued by a recurring nightmare more intense than any dream he had ever known. It had begun six weeks ago, before the jewelry store job, and he’d had it eight or ten times since. In the dream, he was fleeing from a man in a motorcycle helmet with a darkly tinted visor. At least he thought it was a motorcycle helmet, although he could not see many details of it or anything else of the man who wore it. The faceless stranger pursued him on foot through unknown rooms and along amorphous corridors and, most vividly, along a deserted highway that cut through an empty moon-washed landscape. On every occasion, Jack’s panic built like steam pressure in a boiler, until it exploded and blew him awake.