The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [98]
Vera had come up sometime during the night and changed his bandages. She’d tried to tell him something but he’d been too groggy to understand, and had gone back to sleep. Later, when he awoke and his senses began to come back, he’d focused on the tall man and the police and what to do about them. But now it was Erwin Scholl who was in the front of his mind. The man Henri Kanarack swore, under the terror of the succinylcholine, was the person who’d hired him to murder his father. That had happened, he recalled, at almost the same moment the tall man had appeared out of the darkness and shot them both.
Erwin Scholl. From where? Kanarack had told him that, too.
Turning from the window, Osborn limped back to his bed, smoothed out the blanket a little, then turned around and eased himself down. The walk from his bed to the bathroom and back again had wearied him more than he liked. Now he sat there, on the edge of the bed, able to do little more than breathe in and out.
Who was Erwin Scholl? And why had he wanted his father dead?
Suddenly he shut his eyes. It was the same question he’d been asking for almost thirty years. The pain in his leg was nothing compared to what he felt in his soul. He remembered the feeling that had seared through his gut the moment Kanarack had told him he’d been paid to do it. In an instant the whole thing had gone from a lifetime of loneliness and pain and anger to something beyond comprehension. In stumbling upon Henri Kanarack, in finding where he lived and where he worked, he thought God had at last acknowledged him and that, at last, the suffering inside him would be ended. But it hadn’t. It had only been handed off. Cruelly. Neatly. Like a football to another player in a game of keepaway. And he was the one they were keeping if from, as they had for so many years.
The river, at least, had carried him somewhere conclusive. Had that place been death it would have been preferable to the one to which he’d been returned; the one that allowed him no rest, that kept him forever enraged, that made it impossible for him to love or be loved without the awful fear he would destroy it. The monkey had not gone away at all. Only changed form. Henri Kanarack had become Erwin Scholl. This time with no face, just a name. What would it take to find him—another thirty years? And if he did have the courage and strength to do it and finally, after everything, found him, what then?
—another door leading somewhere else?
A sound on the far side of the wall snatched Osborn from his reverie. Someone was coming. Quickly he glanced around for a place to hide. There was none. Where was Kanarack’s gun? What had Vera done with it? He looked back at the door. The knob was turning. The only weapon he had was the cane next to him. His hand closed around it and the door swung open.
Vera was dressed in white for work.
“Good morning,” she said, entering. Once again she carried the tray, this time with hot coffee and croissants, and a plastic refrigerator box with fruit, cheese and a small loaf of bread. “How are you feeling?”
Osborn let out a sigh and set the cane on the bed. “Fine,” he said. “Especially now that I know who was coming to visit.”
Vera set the tray on the small table under the window and turned to look at him. “The police came back last night. An American policeman was with them, he seemed to know you quite well.”
Osborn started. “McVey!” My God, he was still in Paris.
“You seem to know him too . . . .” Vera’s smile was thin, almost dangerous, as if in some crazy way she liked all this.
“What did they want?” he said quickly.
“They found out I picked you up at the golf course. I admitted I’d taken a bullet out of you. They wanted to know where you were. I said I left you off at the railway station,