The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [13]
Closing his eyes, picturing him, Osborn carefully went over Henri Kanarack’s physical description, as he had seen him here, just hours ago, in Paris, and as he remembered him from that moment, years before, in Boston. Through it all Jean Packard said little, a question here, to repeat a detail there. Nor did he take notes, he simply listened. The session ended with Osborn giving Packard a drawing of Henri Kanarack he’d made from memory on hotel stationery. The deep-set eyes, the square jaw, the jagged scar under the left eye that worked its way sharply down across the cheekbone toward the upper lip, the ears that stuck out almost at right angles. The sketch was crude, as if drawn by a ten-year-old boy.
Jean Packard folded it in half and put it in his jacket pocket. “In two days you will hear from me,” he said. Then, finishing his water, he stood and walked out.
For a long moment Paul Osborn stared after him. He didn’t know how to feel or what to think. By a single circumstance of serendipity, the random choosing of a place to have a cup of coffee in a city he knew nothing of, everything had changed and a day he was certain would never come, had. Suddenly there was hope. Not just for retribution but for redemption from the long and terrible bondage to which this murderer had sentenced him. For nearly three decades, from adolescence to adulthood, his life had been a lonely torment of horror and nightmares. The incident unwillingly played over and over in his mind. Propelled mercilessly by the gnawing guilt that somehow his father’s death had been his fault, that somehow it could have been prevented had he been a better son, been more vigilant, seen the knife in time to shout a warning, even stepped in front of it himself. But that was only part of it. The rest was darker and even more debilitating. From boyhood to manhood, through any number of counselors, therapists and into the apparently safe hiding place of professional accomplishment, he had unsuccessfully fought another, even more tragic demon: the numbing, emasculating, terror of abandonment, begun by the killer’s definitive demonstration of how quickly love could be ended.
It had proven true at that moment and held true ever since. At first by circumstance, with his mother and his aunt, and later, as he got older, with lovers and close friends. The fault in his adult life was his. Though he understood the cause of it, the emotion was still impossible for him to control. The moment real love or real friendship was near, the sheer terror that it might again be so brutally taken from him rose from nowhere to engulf him like a raging tide. And with it came a mistrust and jealousy he was powerless to do anything about. Out of nothing more than sheer self protection, whatever joy and love and trust there had been, he would erase in no time at all.
But now, after nearly thirty years, the cause of his sickness had been isolated. It was here, in Paris. And once found there would be no notifying of police, no attempt at extradition, no seeking of civil justice. Once found, this man would be confronted and then, like a disease itself, swiftly eradicated. The only difference was that this time the victim would know his killer.
7
* * *
THE DAY after his father’s funeral, Paul Osborn’s mother moved them out of their house and in with her sister in a small two-story home on Cape Cod.
His mother’s name had been Becky. He assumed it was short for Elizabeth or Rebecca but he’d never asked and never heard her referred to as anything but Becky. She’d married Paul’s father when she was only twenty and still in nursing school.
George David Osborn was handsome, but quiet and introverted. He’d come from Chicago to Boston to attend M.I.T. and immediately following graduation had gone to work for Raytheon and then later for Microtab, a small engineering