The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [102]
“The cane he uses.” Salettl cut her off, made a note, then looked back at her. “Is it possible for him to stand and walk without it?”
“He’s used to having it.”
“Please answer the question. Can he walk without it?”
“Yes, but—”
“But, what?”
“Not very far and not very confidently.”
“He dresses himself. Shaves himself. Uses the toilet without aid, does he not?”
“Yes.” Joanna was beginning to wish she had declined Von Holden’s offer and gone home today as planned.
“Can he pick up a pen, write his name clearly?”
“Pretty clearly.” She forced a smile.
“What about his other functions?”
Joanna knotted her brow. “I don’t know what you mean by other functions.”
“Is he able to have an erection? Partake in sexual intercourse?”
“I—I—don’t know,” she stammered. She was embarrassed. She’d never been asked that kind of a question about one of her patients before. “I should think that’s more of a medical question.”
Salettl stared at her for a moment, then continued. “From your point of view, when would you say he will regain all of his physical abilities and be wholly functional, as if the Stroke never occurred?”
“If—If we are talking about his basic motor functions. Standing, walking, talking, without tiring and that’s all— the other things, as I said, are not my department—”
“Just motor functions. How much longer do you think it will take?”
“I—I’m not sure exactly.”
“Estimate it, please.”
“—I—really can’t.”
“That’s not an answer.” Salettl was glaring at her as if she were a misbehaved child instead of his patient’s professional therapist.
“If—I work with him a lot and he responds like he has. I’d like to guess, maybe another month. . . . But you have to understand it’s only a guess. It all depends on how he—”
“I’m going to give you a goal. By the end of the week, I want to see him walking without a cane.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible.”
Salettl touched a button at his sleeve and spoke into an intercom. “Miss Marsh is ready to work with Mr. Lybarger.”
54
* * *
MCVEY STARED out Lebrun’s office window. Five floors below he could see the Place du Parvis, the open plaza across from Notre Dame, crowded with tourists. At eleven thirty it was beginning to warm into an Indian summer day.
“Eight dead. Five of them children. Each shot once in the head with a .22. Nobody sees or hears a thing. Not the next-door neighbors, not the people in the market.” Lebrun dropped the faxed report from the Marseilles police on his desk and reached for a chrome thermos on a table behind him.
“Professional with a silencer,” McVey said, with no attempt to hide his anger. “Eight more on the tall man’s list.”
“If it was the tall man.”
McVey looked up hard. “Merriman’s widow? What do you think?”
“I think you are probably right, mon ami,” Lebrun said quietly.
McVey had returned to his hotel from the park by the river a little before eight and immediately called Lebrun at home. In response, Lebrun had put out a countrywide alert to local police agencies warning of the life threat to Michele Kanarack. The obvious problem, of course, was that she had yet to be found. And with little more than a description of her—given, finally, to Inspectors Maitrot and Barras by residents in her apartment building—Lebrun’s alarm was a warning in the wind. Ghosts were very difficult to protect.
“My friend, how could we know? My men were out there by the river a full day before you and found nothing to indicate a third man.”
Lebrun was trying to help, but it didn’t lift the bitterness or the feelings of guilt and helplessness that were churning McVey’s stomach. Eight people were dead who might still be alive if somehow he and the French police had been just a little bit better at what they did. Michele Kanarack had been shot only a few moments after McVey had called Lebrun to alert him she was in danger.