The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [25]
“I think, Doctor Osborn, that what was promised has been delivered. Billing will be completed through the company. It was a pleasure to meet you and I wish you every good luck.”
Putting down a twenty-franc note for the drinks, Jean Packard stood. “Au revoir,” he said, then, stepping around a young man at the next table, he left.
Paul Osborn watched him go out, saw him pass in front of the large windows overlooking the sidewalk and disappear in the early evening crowd. Absently he ran a hand through his hair. He’d just asked one man to murder another and had been turned down. What was he doing, what had he done? For an instant he wished he’d never come to Paris, never seen the man he now knew as Henri Kanarack.
Closing his eyes he tried to think of something else, to blot it all out. Instead he saw his father’s grave alongside that of his mother. In the same vision he saw himself standing in the window of the headmaster’s office at Hartwick, watching as his aunt Dorothy, an old raccoon coat pulled around her, got into a taxi and drove away in a blinding snowstorm. The awful aloneness was unbearable. Was still unbearable. The jagged pain as brutal now as it had been then.
Pulling himself out of it, he looked up. All around him people were laughing and drinking, relaxing after work or before dinner. Across from him a handsome woman in a maroon business suit had her hand on a gentleman’s knee and was looking into his eyes as she talked. A clamor of laughter from another table caused him to turn his head. Immediately there was knocking at the window in front of him. He looked and saw a young woman standing on the sidewalk, peering in, smiling. For a moment Osborn thought she was looking at him, then a young man at the next table jumped up, waved and ran outside to meet her.
When he was ten a man had cut out his heart. Now he knew who that man was and where he lived. There would be no turning back. Not now, not ever.
It was for his father, for his mother, for himself.
15
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SUCCINYLCHOLINE: AN ultrashort-acting depolarizing muscle relaxant. Neuromuscular transmission is inhibited so long as an adequate concentration of succinylcholine remains at the receptor site. Paralysis following an intra-muscular injection may vary from seventy-five seconds to three minutes, with general relaxation occurring within one minute.
A kind of synthetic curare, succinylcholine has no effect on consciousness or pain threshold. It works as a simple muscle relaxant beginning with the levator muscles of the eyelids, muscles of the jaw, limb muscles, abdominal muscles, muscles of the diaphragm, other skeletal muscles, and those controlling the lungs.
It is used during operations to relax the skeletal muscles, making it possible to administer lighter doses of more sensitive anesthetics.
A continuous IV drip of succinylcholine keeps the level of paralysis constant over the duration of an operation. A Single injection of .03 to 1.1 milligrams (dosage variety among individuals), while having the same effect, last only four to six minutes. Immediately afterward the drug breaks down in the body without causing harm or being pathologically apparent because succinylcholine’s break down products—succinic acid and choline—are normally present in the body.
Hence, a carefully measured dose of succinylcholine administered by injection would cause temporary paralysis—just long enough, say, for the subject to drown—and then fade, undetected, into the body’s own system.
And a medical examiner, unless he went over the entire body of the deceased with a magnifying glass, hoping to find a minute puncture wound caused by a syringe, would have little choice but to rule the drowning accidental.
From the beginning, in his first year of residency when he’d seen the drug used and had observed its effects in the operating room, Osborn’s fantasy of what to do should the day ever come and the murderer, by some