Turning round, Marc bumped into an empty wheelchair left there by a young male nurse, who was chatting with the commissionaire. He only saved himself from falling over by grabbing the reception desk.
‘Where is he?’ he shouted, brandishing the automatic. The nurse turned pale and shrank back, hugging his clipboard. A commotion broke out behind Marc. He heard shouts, hurried footsteps, raised voices. Doors banged and cold air streamed in from outside, but none of this was happening in his world.
‘Constantin Senner – where’s he hiding?’
The commissionaire, a thickset man with bloodshot eyes and a triple chin, threw up his arms and trundled his swivel chair swiftly backwards as if he could lessen the impact of a bullet if only he put enough distance between himself and this demented gunman. He opened his mouth, trembling, but couldn’t get a word out. He was as silent as the hospital’s endless-loop publicity film, which was running ad infinitum on a plasma screen just above their heads.
‘Where?!’
‘In theatre,’ the commissionaire croaked eventually. He mopped his moist forehead with the sleeve of his cheap blue uniform. ‘Number 3, third floor.’
‘Okay, now call the police, understand? Until then, I won’t. . . Hey, what’s that?’
Marc broke off and looked up – at his father-in-law. The promotional video depicted Constantin showing a prospective patient’s family around the hospital. He was convincing the happy group – and, by proxy, the viewer – of the advantages of private treatment.
Marc blinked nervously.
The young wife and laughing child were complete strangers to him. Not so the actors playing the husband and grandfather. The latter, who was just admiring an operating theatre, had introduced himself to Marc as Professor Bleibtreu, and the former liked to be shackled to iron bedsteads in cellars. The video suddenly showed a sturdy male orderly pushing a grey-haired patient into the cafeteria in a wheelchair. It wasn’t the first time Marc had seen either man. The one in the wheelchair had passed him a message from his late wife in the guise of a tramp. As for the lanky orderly, his face had seemed familiar to Marc last night, when he refused to let him into ‘The Beach’. He probably knew the actor from other television commercials.
‘It isn’t what you think.’
Marc spun round and looked into his brother’s face. Benny was cautiously approaching him, favouring his left leg.
‘Beat it!’ The automatic swung in his direction.
‘Put that gun down and let me explain.’
‘No, get lost!’
They were now on their own in the lobby. Anxious faces were pressed against the glass doors flanking the reception area and several people were jabbering excitedly into their mobile phones.
‘Please. I’ll take you to Sandra.’ Benny hobbled towards him with his arms outstretched. ‘Please,’ he implored again, in a voice drained of emotion.
Marc gulped and ran a hand over his face. His legs started to tremble and he felt sick. He was so exhausted he could hardly hold the pistol straight.
‘You’re lying,’ he said, in tears now.
‘No,’ said Benny. ‘Come on, there’s still time.’
66
Glaucoma surgery, coloproctology, minimally invasive surgery, gastroenterology, oncology – Constantin had considerably expanded the spectrum of treatments available at his hospital in recent years. Originally designed as a facility for specialized surgical operations, it now housed a rheumatology department, a plastic-surgery department, and the obstetric wards to which Marc’s brother was now conducting him.
It took them a long time to climb the three flights of stairs. Benny seemed to be suffering from concussion as well as dragging his right leg, but Marc kept the pistol jammed into his back. His brother had deceived him long enough. First rejection, then his offer of assistance and reconciliation, and now, perhaps, he might be faking his injuries.
They reached the top floor of the flat-roofed building and opened the glass door leading to the wards.
A blue notice board said ‘Perinatal Centre’ in white lettering. The arrow pointed to the right.
‘Where are we?’ Marc asked as they set off along the corridor. The walls of the children’s ward he’d once inspected with Sandra had been hung with colourful pictures including photos of happy babies in the arms of even happier parents expressing their thanks to doctors and nurses. Wherever possible, an attempt had been made to mitigate the typical characteristics of a hospital, for instance with orange walls, hospital gowns adorned with appliquéd Disney motifs and soothing classical muzak in the passages.
Childbirth isn’t a disease, Constantin had always said, but his motto didn’t appear to extend to this part of the hospital.
‘This isn’t the delivery room,’ said Benny.
‘No?’
Marc looked at another sign: ‘OP III/Neonatal Intensive Care Ward.’
‘This is where the problem cases come.’
‘Good God, he doesn’t even know there are complications. . .’
‘What sort of problem cases?’
Marc’s question went unanswered, because at that moment a door straight ahead of them swung open and a hospital bed was wheeled through. And, on it, his wife.
67
Sandra.
She was deathly pale. Her eyelids were half closed, her hands folded as if in prayer on her mountainous belly. Tubes led from her arms to some medical apparatus attached to the bed frame. The nurse wheeled her on down the corridor.
‘Wait!’ Marc called. He hurried after the bed to make sure, but she was no more of a hallucination than she had been when she opened the door to him yesterday.
Sandra.
He recognized the lips he had so often kissed and the curve of the eyebrows he had so often traced with his finger that the time he’d spent doing so could have been measured in hours.
‘Who are you?’ the nurse demanded, alarmed by the sight of the gun in his hand. She reached for her bleeper.
‘It’s me, Marc,’ was all he said, gazing fixedly at Sandra.
Is it really me? Am I standing here, looking into the eyes of my late wife, or don’t I exist at all? Am I living in a horrific world of illusion?
He started to sob. Putting out his hand, he parted her lips with his forefinger as if trying to help her to speak, because she seemed to find it a superhuman effort to open her mouth. At last, after what seemed like an eternity, he heard the words he longed to hear.
‘I love you, Luke.’
Boundless relief surged through him.
‘I love you so much.’ Her speech was slurred and her gaze glassy. She smiled like someone on drugs.
Tears sprang to his eyes. He raised his arms in a helpless gesture and turned to Benny, who had been watching them both in silence. Then he dropped the gun unheeding and gripped the metal frame of the bed, which the nurse was now wheeling further along the corridor. He was incapable of articulating even one of the countless questions that were striving to cascade from his lips all at once. Why are you still alive? What have you all been doing to me? What’s wrong with our baby?
‘Why?’ was all he managed to say.
‘Please leave her alone. She’s already been given her pre-meds. I must get her to the theatre.’
Marc scarcely heard what the nurse was saying, but he made no further attempt to delay her. He walked alongside and bent over Sandra, whose lips were moving silently.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘What did you say?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘For what?’
They were now only a few metres from the glass doors beyond which the sterile area began.
‘We went too far.’
‘Too far in what way? What did you do?’
The drugs inside her body were numbing her from within, bearing her away from him and into oblivion. Her tremulous voice sank to a whisper. ‘But we had no choice, understand? We couldn’t let you remember.’
She made a last effort to sit up, bu
t the nurse gently forced her back on the bed. Marc felt a hand on his shoulder pulling him backwards – backwards and away from his wife, whose bed was being wheeled through the airlock and into the theatre.
‘We couldn’t let you remember,’ Sandra repeated despairingly before she disappeared from view.
For ever.
As the double doors closed behind her, Marc felt that he had lost his wife for good.
‘Come,’ said the voice belonging to the hand that was holding his arm in a vicelike grip. ‘It’s time. I’ll explain everything.’
Turning round, Marc gazed into his father-in-law’s drawn, weary face. Constantin Senner had never looked so old.
68
‘She’s alive!’
‘Yes.’
‘So there never was an accident?’
Constantin had ushered Marc and Benny into a spacious consulting room. Standing as far apart as possible, they formed the extremities of an invisible right-angled triangle.
‘Yes, but it wasn’t fatal. Sandra escaped with superficial injuries. Your airbag, on the other hand. . .’ Constantin was breathing heavily. He pursed his lips before going on. ‘. . .your airbag failed to inflate. You hit your head and passed out instantly.’
Benny pulled up a swivel chair and sat down with his back to a full-length glass door. Beyond it lay a spacious terrace running the full width of the new hospital block.
‘We brought you here to the clinic,’ said Constantin, who had remained standing in front of the desk with Marc facing him across it. ‘When you recovered consciousness you couldn’t remember the last few hours before the accident. That was our chance.’
‘What on earth are you talking about? What chance?’ Marc was overcome with ice-cold rage.
‘We had to make every effort to maintain your partial amnesia until today, but we realized that the trauma you sustained in the accident wasn’t severe enough to suppress your memory long-term. So we decided to give your brain something else to occupy it.’
‘You faked Sandra’s death?’
‘It wasn’t easy for us, believe me. We wanted to discontinue the process more than once. My daughter most of all.’
Marc recalled the photo of the yellow Volvo that Emma had taken outside the police station and shown to him.
They were arguing, the two of them, that’s the only reason I took the picture.
‘What about the Bleibtreu Clinic? Does it even exist?’
‘Oh yes. Patrick is a good friend of mine – he often treats my in-patients. He examined you after you regained consciousness here. Your amnesia would probably not be of long duration, he told us, but he didn’t want to include you in his programme, not officially. I can well understand that. After all, he really does carry out serious research, whereas what we were doing was highly unethical. Still, he did at least place one floor of his clinic at our disposal.’
Then Emma really is just a patient!
Marc didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. His closest confidante, the person who had helped him most, was a paranoid refugee from a hospital. Perhaps she really had overheard a conversation between Constantin and the genuine Professor Bleibtreu and jumped to certain conclusions. She’d escaped from the clinic to warn him and worked herself up into a paranoid psychosis at the same time.
‘I still don’t understand,’ Marc said with a catch in his voice. He pressed both hands to his burning cheeks. ‘Why go to such incredible lengths?’
‘Because it’s a matter of life and death, Marc. We never wanted to hurt you, believe me. Your grief was simply meant to delay the process of recollection, and it worked really well for the first few weeks. However, then you began to dream of the moments immediately preceding the accident, and we knew it would be only a matter of time before you caught on and put two and two together. So we placed the magazine containing that bogus advertisement in my waiting room.’
Learn to forget.
‘In the end we needed only one more day. Just another twenty-four hours in which you couldn’t be allowed to remember. We couldn’t set up the operation before, and it would have been too risky to deliver the baby earlier.’
Marc hesitated one last moment. Then he couldn’t restrain himself any longer: he vaulted over the desk that separated him from his father-in-law.
‘What was I meant to forget?!’ he yelled, and punched him in the face. Constantin staggered backwards with Marc’s hands around his throat.
‘Tell me!’ he cried, squeezing hard.
‘Marc,’ Benny called in the background. ‘Let go of him.’
Constantin’s eyes bulged, and his cheeks turned puce, but he made no attempt to defend himself.
‘You’ll never find out that way.’ Benny sounded calm, almost detached, and it might have been his oddly dispassionate tone of voice that brought Marc to his senses. He gave one final squeeze, then let go.
Constantin fought for breath, clasping his blotchy throat, and started to retch.
‘Hurry up and give me some answers or I swear I’ll kill you!’
His father-in-law stood there with his head bowed, coughing. Then he straightened up, took a folder from the desk and went over to a metal-framed light box on the wall. He turned on the halogen light behind the frosted-glass screen, removed a photograph from the folder and clipped it to the screen.
‘This is a greatly enlarged ultrasound picture.’
All Marc could see were black and white splotches. He didn’t know whether they were benign or malignant, yet he recognized the photograph.
The last time he’d seen it was a few seconds before the crash – in Sandra’s hand.
That was why she undid her seatbelt, to get this ultrasound picture from the back of the car! But why?
‘We’re looking at your unborn son’s abdominal region. And this. . .’ Coughing, Constantin cautiously tapped a shadowy area on the photograph ‘. . .is his liver. The problem is quite apparent.’
He gazed at Marc with a sorrowful expression. ‘The baby’s bile ducts are missing.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘He suffers from the illness that killed your father, Marc, only far more severely. The bile cannot drain away. The baby will be born without a functioning liver.’
‘What. . . what can be done?’
‘Nothing. A human being without a liver isn’t viable.’
Marc felt he was rotating on the spot, not that he’d budged a millimetre. ‘You’re saying my son is bound to die?’
Constantin nodded.
But why all this? Why deliver him by Caesarian section ten days earlier than planned?
An actor had gone through the motions of examining him at the Bleibtreu Clinic. The hours of tests, the blood samples, the pointless psychological questionnaires he’d had to complete – these were just a way of gaining time while they set up the ensuing charade, which involved wiping his mobile phone and changing the lock and name card on the door of his flat. But why? So that other amateur actors could pass themselves off as the manager of his office, a handcuffed attorney, and even himself? The bogus film script, the answerphone recording of Sandra’s voice, the forged bank statement, the video at Constantin’s house that looked like a news magazine’s report but was really a fabrication – all these things had been intended to nudge his memory in the wrong direction and, at the same time, get him to this hospital at this particular juncture. Why?
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Constantin said in an attempt to get through to Marc, who was staring at the illuminated photograph like a man in a stupor. ‘How could we have done this to you? How could I have lied to you? How could I have treated you for an imaginary splinter so you had to take pills that reinforced the suppressive process? It was a matter of life and death, my boy, don’t you see? You think I enjoyed swapping your SIM card or turning on that confounded dolphin lamp just to bemuse you, then hiding behind your lavatory door and shutting myself up in the bathroom while you combed the rest of the flat for me? I didn’t concoct al
l this myself, believe me. I employed a company that specializes in role play – it usually arranges murder mystery weekends. They didn’t know what was actually at stake, so they probably went too far. The film script you found at Eichkamp, the attorney in your cellar, my wrecked study and, last but not least, the furniture in your house – that was wrong beyond a doubt, but in the last analysis we had no choice. You do understand, don’t you? Good God, he’s your son! My grandson!’
Marc had only taken in snatches of Constantin’s outburst. His thoughts had drowned out one word in three.
No, it still doesn’t make sense. Why should they have wanted me to forget about my son’s terminal condition if he’s doomed in any case?
Unless. . . The truth hit him like a blow in the face. ‘You need a donor!’
Constantin stared at him blankly. ‘Yes, of course. I thought. . .’ He turned to Benny. ‘Didn’t you explain it to him?’
Benny shook his head. There was a look of infinite sadness in his eyes. ‘I leave the talking to you. I just do the dirty work.’
‘You intend to carry out a transplant?’ Marc broke in.
‘Yes, though an infant’s chances of surviving a liver transplant aren’t a hundred per cent, as you know.’
‘So you need someone with the same DNA as my son?’
Constantin nodded warily. ‘A donor with a compatible blood group is sufficient.’
‘Someone whose liver can be surgically tailored to fit into the body of a newborn baby?’
‘Yes.’
Click! The first truth was like the bead of an abacus sliding into place. ‘How soon after the birth do you need the organ?’
‘Immediately.’
‘And how long after the death of the donor can you transplant it?’
Constantin glanced nervously at his watch. ‘Only a few hours.’
Click! Click! Two more beads, two more truths. Only one question remained.
‘Would I survive the operation?’
‘No, I’m sorry. That’s why we had no choice – that’s why we couldn’t let you remember.’