The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [179]
Cadoux left and Lebrun relaxed. McVey had to have been wrong. A moment later, one of the Metropolitan policemen outside his room entered.
“Everything all right, sir?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Chap here to change your bed.” The policeman stood aside as a large man in the dress of a hospital orderly came in with fresh linens.
“Good day, sir,” the man said with a Cockney accent, setting the linens down on a chair next to the bed. The policeman went back into the hallway.
“We’ll have a little privacy, eh, sir?” he said and, taking two steps, closed the door.
Lebrun’s danger alarm went off. “Why are you closing the door?” he cried out in French. The man turned and smiled. Then suddenly reached across and jerked the tubes from Lebrun’s nose. A split second later, a pillow was shoved over his face and the man’s full weight came down on it.
Lebrun struggled frantically, his right hand digging for the automatic. But the large man’s weight, combined with his own weakness, made it a battle out of Lebrun’s favor. Finally his hand closed around the gun and he fought to bring it up so he could fire into the man’s belly. Abruptly the man’s weight shifted and the gun barrel caught in the sheets. Lebrun grunted, feverishly trying to jerk the pistol free. His lungs screamed for air but there was none. And in that single moment he realized he was going to die, as quickly everything faded to gray, then to an even darker gray that was almost black but wasn’t. He thought he felt someone take the gun from his hand, but he couldn’t be certain. Then he heard a muffled pop and saw the brightest light he’d ever seen.
It would have been impossible for Lebrun to see the orderly tug back the sheets, rip the automatic from his hand and put it to his ear beneath the pillow. In the same way, it would have been as impossible for him to see the bloody rush of his brains and pieces of his skull splatter off the wall next to his bed and cling to the white-painted plaster like so much flecked crimson Jell-O.
Five seconds later, the door opened. Startled, the orderly swung the gun toward it. Cadoux, entering, put up a hand and calmly closed the door behind him. Easing off, the orderly lowered the gun and nodded in the direction of Lebrun. As he did, he glimpsed the revolver as it cleared Cadoux’s service holster.
“What’s that?” he yelled. His cry was drowned out by a thundering explosion.
The Metropolitan police running in from the hallway heard two more shots and found Cadoux standing over the dead man. Lebrun’s .25 automatic still in the orderly’s hand. “This man just shot Inspector Lebrun,” he said.
89
* * *
Brandenburg, Germany.
“THIS CHARLOTTENBURG Palace, where Scholl’s attending this shindig. What is it?” McVey was leaning forward from the backseat as Remmer followed the lead car down a boulevard of magnificent autumn yellow trees and past the burgher houses of the fifteenth-century town of Brandenburg, heading east in bright sunshine toward Berlin.
“What is it?” Remmer glanced up at McVey in the mirror. “A treasure of baroque art. A museum, a mausoleum, a house of a thousand riches particularly dear to the German heart. The summer residence of almost every Prussian king from Friedrich the First to Friedrich Wilhelm the Fourth. If the chancellor lived there now, it would be like the White House and all the great museums of America rolled into one.”
Osborn looked off. The morning sun was working its way higher, lifting a cluster of lakes from dark purple to a brilliant blue. The consummation of all that had happened in the last ten days—so quickly, so brutally, and after so many years—was numbing. The idea of what would unfold in Berlin was even more so. In one way he felt as if he’d been swept up in a surging tide over which he had no control. Yet, at the same time, he had the singular and calming sense that he’d been brought to this point because some unknown hand had guided him, and that whatever lay ahead, however obscure or dangerous or horrifying, would be there for a reason, and that instead