The Lower Deep (28 page)

Henninger seemed cheerful enough. "Hello, Dr. Clermont! Come to look me over?"

"Not if I don't have to. How you feeling?"

"Much better."

"Glad to see you out of bed. How are the headaches?"

Henninger looked down at his collection of books, picked one up, and held it so his callers could read its title. The title was
The Strength of the Mind.
"Do you know you can think a headache away?" he said with conviction. "It's actually possible. I've been doing it!"

"Good for you." Clermont smiled. "When you get the technique down pat, you can teach us."

"No, really, I—"

"Okay, friend. Steve has been telling me he's getting his headaches because someone is using ESP on him. You say you can apply your mental powers to get rid of them. Confusing but fascinating. How about Morrison and Wynn? Can they think their problems away, too?"

Henninger actually chuckled. "All right, Doctor."

"See you later."

"Thanks for stopping by."

Clermont would have followed Steve Spence from the room, but as he neared the door, the man in the chair called after him. "Dr. Clermont, hold on a second, can you? Just a word, please?" It was obviously a calculated move to get the head of the Azagon out of the way for a moment. Hesitating, Clermont sent a glance at Steve, who must have heard.

Steve only shrugged.

The Dame Marie doctor went back to Henninger, and Steve continued on down the hall to his office, giving the matter no thought. After all, the former soccer player was Clermont's patient and certainly entitled to talk privately with his physician if he wished to.

In the office Steve sat to wait, aware that he was getting another of his headaches. They were coming more and more frequently now. He had talked to Tom Driscoll about them. And to Nadine. In fact, he had spent a lot of time lately discussing all the Azagon's problems with those two. But though they had saved his life at the Brightman, after his blackout at the voodoo service, his headaches still continued.

Fifteen minutes passed.

Hearing footsteps in the hall then, Steve looked up, and suddenly the office doorway became a frame for a life-size portrait of America's Civil War president. It was a little startling. More so was the expression on Clermont's face. Steve had never seen such a look before and wondered how to label it. Disbelief? Bewilderment? Shock? Then in the few seconds before the older man spoke, the look disappeared behind a mask.

"Paul wants permission to go out, Steve."

"Out?"

"For a walk now and then is the way he put it. For the fresh air and exercise."

Certain that something more had been discussed, Steve said with a frown, "Should he, do you think?"

"You
mean is there a chance he'll disappear again? Well, yes, there probably is. But I don't think it's likely. Anyway, we can't keep him confined forever, can we?"

"I guess I agree."

But Steve was still puzzled. Surely such a simple request from Henninger would not have produced that baffling expression on Clermont's face. And why, on realizing there was a telltale look in evidence, had Clermont so swiftly drawn a curtain over it?

For some reason the good doctor was being less than forthright.

"Well, I'll be running along," Clermont said. "See you, Steve." Flapping a hand in farewell, he departed.

As he did so, Steve saw something. Part of a folded newspaper protruded from the man's hip pocket where none had been before.

It was the paper from the manager's room. The one that contained the story of the
Ti Maman.

Steve Spence was a busy man that week. With Tom Driscoll, he kept an eagle eye on the Azagon's problem patients. With Clermont he visited the hospital in Cap Matelot where Ginny Jourdan was a patient. He treated himself—with no significant effect—for his own increasingly severe headaches. He tried to spend a few hours each night with Nadine Palmer, talking about the past and what he hoped would be their future.

He had come to accept the fact that she would not discuss what he now referred to always as his five lost days. "Steve, this isn't the time for it," she had said. "Not while we have so much else to contend with. When the right time comes . . ."

The right time would come when they were man and wife, he told himself. There could be no withholding anything then.

At the Cap Matelot hospital no progress had been made with Ginny Jourdan. Despite all the hours Louis Clermont spent at her bedside, she continued to fail.

He and the hospital doctors agreed on one thing: Ginny no longer cared about living. The defiance encountered by Lieutenant Etienne was gone now. Ginny no longer declared a determination not to talk, or even claimed not to remember what had happened to her; she simply had nothing to say at all. Yet the sophisticated testing she underwent disclosed nothing.

Well, nearly nothing. The hospital head, Dr. Edouard Beliard, walked into her room one day to find Louis Clermont at her bedside. The girl appeared to be asleep, and Clermont's face was fixed in a frown as he moved a stethoscope over the lower part of her body.

The Abe Lincoln face was a deeply puzzled one now, and remained so for several minutes as the probing continued. Finally Clermont leaned back, removed the tubes from his ears, and gave the hospital head a long, hard look.

"Ed, I swear to God I heard something in there. I know it's impossible, but . . . Here, you try."

Even when normal, the face of the Cap Matelot medic was that of a pit bulldog. A foot shorter than Clermont, he stepped forward with a scowl and leaned over the bed. But after using the instrument carefully, without haste, he straightened up and shook his head. "Nothing, Louis."

"I heard something. Faint, but I heard it."

"Heartbeat, you mean? She isn't pregnant, Louis. It would have shown up in some of the tests—"

"Not a heartbeat, Ed. Much too slow for that. But something."

"I almost wish it were true," the bulldog said.

"Anything would be better than the blank we've been drawing, wouldn't it? Is she asleep, or have you got her under something?"

"Asleep. I don't think she wants to wake up."

Beliard leaned forward again and peered into Ginny Jourdan's ash-gray face, while Louis Clermont watched him and recalled the whole history of her trouble. The change of attitude as she dropped her old friends, even her boyfriend, and became a loner. The growing fondness for Anse Douce, and Etienne's finding her naked there—twice. The anguish of her parents as she shut them out of her life more and more.

It was hard to believe that this sad, silent creature, mysteriously dying, had been the brightest and most popular girl at the Dame Marie School.

A few days later when Clermont went alone to Ginny’s room to check on her condition, he found her lying there with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Pulling up a chair, he sat close to her and reached for her hand. She tried to draw the hand from his but was too weak, even though he barely held it.

"Ginny," he said, "remember me? Louis Clermont? We used to be pals."

She turned her head ever so slightly on the pillow to look at him, but though her gaze focused on his face, the lost look on her own face did not change.

"Want to help you, girl, but I don't know how. You know how I can help you?" Clermont murmured.

He watched her lips, but she made no effort to move them.

"If you could just tell me what happened, Ginny. I swear it won't go beyond this room if you don't want it to. I won't even tell your folks."

She continued to gaze at him, but that was all.

"Look, pal." He was desperate now. "You were gone a week. Eight days, actually. When you left, you were okay—a little hard to get along with in your new notion of independence, but nothing really wrong. Something must have happened, don't you see? A healthy gal like you wouldn't just get sick like this. You tell me about it and I'll know how to handle it, or I'll get someone who can. I'm not psychic, pal. I'm not able to read your mind."

Her eyes closed. She not only wouldn't answer, she was even tired of listening to him, it seemed. Heaving a sigh of defeat, Clermont struggled up from his chair like a very tired old man and walked slowly from the room.

On his way to Dame Marie that day in his battered old car, he stopped at the Azagon, thinking he would like to talk with Steve Spence and look in on Paul Henninger again. He had been keeping Steve up-to-date on Ginny Jourdan's condition and almost felt as though the American doctor were a colleague on her case now. As for Henninger, the Belgian had been going for long walks the past few days and appeared to be almost his old self again. Thank the Lord for small favors.

But as he trudged up the Azagon's front steps, the door opened and Henninger came striding out. They nearly collided.

"Ah, Dr. Clermont," the manager said.

"Paul. How you feeling?" He was improving, Clermont thought. Those walks were doing him a lot of good.

"Better, better. Have you—ah--have you had a chance to read that newspaper story I gave you?"

Clermont hesitated. The article Henninger referred to was the one about the disappearance of George Benson's boat, and he had not read it, no. On thinking over what the Belgian had told him in strictest confidence that day, with Steve Spence out of the room, he had made up his mind to keep out of those murky waters. They could be ugly and dangerous.

"To tell the truth, Paul," he said evasively, "I've been busy with this Ginny Jourdan thing. I just haven't—"

"You don't believe me, do you?" Henninger said sadly. "I was afraid you wouldn't."

Clermont touched him on the arm. "Paul, I don't know my own name these days."

Apparently mollified, Henninger nodded. "But you will read the story, won't you? And think about what I told you?"

"Of course," Clermont promised, glad to conclude the conversation and wishing he hadn't stopped in the first place.

A
t three-fifteen the following afternoon in the door of Louis Clermont's inner office opened and his receptionist said to him, "You have patients waiting out here, Doctor, but there is a Commander Norman Morris here to see you. Says he would like to talk to you for just a few minutes about Paul Henninger."

Clermont had just dismissed a patient and was stretched back in his chair, gazing at the wall map of the Caribbean painted for him by the girl in the Cap Matelot hospital. His thoughts were not on his job at the moment, but on the newspaper story he had promised Paul Henninger he would read. That had a Caribbean connection, he knew from having glanced at it—and not just because George Benson's boat had gone down in St. Joseph waters.

"Commander?" he said to Simone. "A navy man?"

"It would seem so."

"No patients in real trouble?"

"No, Doctor."

"Send him in, then. Let's find out what he wants."

The man Simone ushered into the office appeared to be in his late thirties and was good-looking in a freckled, red-faced way. Despite his title he was not in uniform but wore a Hawaiian-type sport shirt of many colors and pale gray slacks.

They shook hands, and Clermont motioned his caller to the chair his patients used when describing their ailments: the chair in which George Benson had spent so much time lately. "What can I do for you?" he asked with genuine curiosity.

There was, of course, a U.S. naval base in Cuba, not far away. But this was the first time an American navy man had set foot in the office of Dr. Louis Clermont.

Commander Morris sat and studied him for a few seconds before speaking. Then he said, "I'm not exactly sure I should be taking up your time, Doctor. I'm here because you're Paul Henninger's doctor—at least, he says you are—and after two long-distance phone calls from him in the past four days, I've just had a face-to-face talk with him."

"You're based at Guantanamo?"

Morris nodded. "I'm a pilot. Had to fly to St. Joe
City, and there's a field in Cap Matelot, so I detoured a bit to see Paul in person. I'm married to his sister."

"I see."

"I guess you know Paul is, or was, a pretty remarkable guy. Used to be a World Cup soccer player, one of the best."

"Yes, I know."

"He wasn't so out of shape then, of course. Now, so help me, I don't know what to make of him. He's been telling me a most incredible story and urging me to—"