The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [106]
Five and a half floors up from the basement where Bernhard Oven stood, Paul Osborn hunched over the small table under his window and stared out across the roofline, watching the afternoon shadows slide over Notre Dame’s Gothic towers.
The hours he hadn’t been sleeping, he’d been alternately pacing the tiny room for the exercise he knew he must have, or blankly staring out the window as he was now, trying to collect his thoughts.
There were certain obvious truths, he had concluded, there was no way around.
First: the police were still looking for him in connection with the death of Albert Merriman. Through Vera he knew they had found the remaining succinylcholine and taken it from his hotel room. If—when—they discovered its purpose, there was every chance they would reexamine—he still wanted to call him Kanarack—Merriman’s body. If they did, they would find the puncture wounds, And if they hadn’t already, McVey would make them. It wouldn’t matter that he hadn’t actually killed Merriman. They would still charge him with attempted homicide. And if they proved it, which they would, he’d not only spend God knew how many years in a French jail, he’d lose his medical license in the United States as well.
Second: he hadn’t come out of the river unnoticed, and sooner or later the tall man, whoever he was, would learn he was still alive and come looking to kill him.
Third: even if he could somehow get out of Paris, the police still had his passport. So, for all intents, he was trapped in France because he could go to no other country without it, not even his own.
Fourth—and perhaps the cruelest and most painful of all, the thing he’d played over and over in his mind—was the clear and undeniable realization that the death of Albert Merriman had changed nothing. The demon haunting him had only become more complex and elusive. As if, after all his years of horror, such a thing were possible.
His insides screamed NO! in a hundred languages. Do not begin the pursuit again. Because this next door emblazoned with the name Erwin Scholl can only lead to what? Another door still! And by then, if you live that long, it can only open onto madness. Recognize instead, Paul Osborn, there will never be an answer. That this is your karma, to learn in this life that what you seek answers to, there may not be answers that are acceptable to you. It is only by understanding this that you will have peace and tranquility in the next life. Accept this truth and change.
But he knew that argument was nothing but avoidance and therefore not true. He could not change today any more than he had been able to change since he was ten. Kanarack/Merriman’s death had been a terrible, emotional, blow. But what it had done was clarify and simplify the future. Before, he’d had only a face. Now he had a name. If this Erwin Scholl, if he found him, led to someone else, so be it. No matter the cost, he would go on and on until he knew the truth behind his father’s death. Because if he did not, there would be no Vera, no life worth living. As there had been none since he was a boy. Peace and tranquility would come in this lifetime or not at all. That was his karma and his truth.
Outside, he could see the Notre Dame towers in full shadow. Soon the city lights would come on. It was time to pull the blackout curtain over his window and turn on his lamp. Having done that, he hobbled to his bed, and lay back. As he did, his resolve of the moment before faded and the pain flooded back, as raw as it had ever been.
“Why did this happen to my family—and to me?” he said out loud. He’d said it as a boy, as an adolescent, as a grown man and a successful surgeon. He’d said it a thousand times.