The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [52]
The truth was he loved her and cared for her in a way he’d never experienced. It made sense only if you came at it from far inside, filled with the want and hunger and sense of wonder that the ultimate love between two people can really be. And he knew beyond doubt that were they both to die that moment, that in the same instant they would be reunited in the vastness of space, and taking on whatever form or shape required, they would continue on intertwined, forever.
If that vision was romantic or childlike or even spiritual, it made no difference, because it was what Paul Osborn believed was true. And he knew that in her own way Vera felt the same. She had proved it earlier that day when she had taken him to her apartment. And that in itself had clarified the next. And that was that if he and Vera were to go on, he could not allow the demon inside him to do what it had done to every other caring relationship he’d had since he was a boy. Destroy it. This time it i was the demon that must be destroyed. Inexorably and forever. No matter how difficult, how dangerous or at what risk.
Finally, as the pills at last played their game and sleep began to overtake him, Paul Osborn’s demon materialized before him. It was hunched over and menacing and wore a dusty coat. Though it was dark, he saw it raise its head. Its eyes were deep-set and staring, and its ears stuck out at sharp angles. The head was turned and he could not see the face clearly, yet he knew instinctively that the jaw was square and that a scar ran across the cheekbone and down toward the upper lip.
And there was no doubt. None at all.
The thing he saw was Henri Kanarack.
28
* * *
Click.
McVey knew it was 3:17 A.M. without looking because the last time he’d looked at the clock it was 3:11. Digital clocks were not supposed to make noise, but they did if you were listening. And McVey had been listening, and counting the clicks, while he thought.
He’d come back to his hotel, following his visit with Osborn and his frolic in the rain in front of the Eiffel Tower, at ten minutes to eleven. The hotel’s tiny restaurant was closed and room service wasn’t available because there wasn’t any. It was the kind of all-expense trip Interpol funded. A barely livable hotel, with faded carpets, a lumpy bed and food, if you could make it between six and nine in the morning and six and nine at night.
What was left was either to go back out in the rain to find a restaurant that was open, or to use the “honor bar,” the tiny little refrigerated cabinet tucked between what served as a closet and the bathroom that flooded every time you used the shower.
McVey wasn’t going back out in the rain, so it was the honor bar or nothing. Opening it with a tiny key attached to the ring on his room key, he found some cheese and crackers and a triangle of Swiss chocolate. Poking around, he also found a half bottle of a white wine that turned out to be a very nice Sancerre. Afterward, when he casually opened the desk drawer to check the honor bar price list, he found out why the Sancerre had been so agreeable. The half bottle cost 150 French francs, somewhere around thirty dollars U.S. A pittance to a connoisseur, a fortune to a cop.
By eleven thirty he’d stopped fuming and taken his clothes off and was about to step into the shower when the phone rang. Commander Noble of Scotland Yard was calling from his home in Chelsea.
“Hold on, McVey, will you?” Noble had said. “I’ve got Michaels, the Home Office pathologist, on the other line and I’ve got to figure out how to make this into a conference call without disconnecting everyone.”
Wrapping