The sun oppressed him, the glare of windshields, the heat rising from parked cars, the scent of tar wafting up from the hot blacktop, and he wanted to be home in the cool of the solarium.
“Hello,” said a voice behind him. “Hello, hello.”
He turned to discover the Asian woman with the bouquet of pale-pink lilies. She was in her twenties, petite, strikingly pretty, with long glossy black hair, not fully Asian but Eurasian, with celadon eyes.
“You know her, you know the author,” she said, her English without accent.
If he was too short with her, his rudeness would reflect on Sam, so he said, “Yes. I know her. Used to know her.”
“She is a very good writer, so talented.”
“Yes, she certainly is. I wish I had her talent.”
“So compassionate,” the woman said, stepping closer and with her glance indicating the book he carried.
“I’m sorry,” Ryan said, “but I’m afraid I have to be somewhere, I’m late.”
“A remarkable book, full of such insights.”
“Yes, it is, but I’m late.”
Holding the lilies with both hands, she thrust them toward him. “Here. I can see the sorrow between you and her, you need these more than I do.”
Startled, he said, “Oh, no, I can’t take them.”
“Please do, you must,” she said, pushing them against his chest with such insistence that one heavy bloom broke off its stem and fell to the blacktop.
With pungent pollen from the stamens abrasive in his nostrils, nonplussed, Ryan said, “No, see, I’m not going anywhere that I’ll be able to put them in water.”
“Here, here, you must,” she said, and if he had not taken the crackling cellophane cone in his free hand, she would have let the flowers fall to the ground.
Although he had accepted the lilies, he tried to pass them back to her.
He felt suddenly that he had been scorched, a line of fire searing along his left side. An instant later a sharper pain followed the hot shock of laceration—and only then he saw the switchblade knife.
As the lilies and the book dropped from Ryan’s hands, the woman said, “I can kill you any time I want.”
Stunned, clutching at his wound, Ryan collapsed back against a Ford Explorer.
She turned and walked away at a brisk pace toward the parallel row of cars, but she did not run.
The blade had been so sharp, it slit his shirt without pulling the threads, as cleanly as a straight razor slashing through one sheet of newspaper.
Reaching cross-body, right hand slick with blood, he frantically traced the wound. It was not ragged enough to be a laceration, more like an incision, about four inches long, too shallow to require stitches, not mortal, just a warning cut, but deep enough to have discernible lips.
He looked up and saw that, as petite as she was, she would swiftly disappear through the crowded rows of cars, perhaps in one of which she would escape.
Shock had silenced him. Now that he thought to shout for help, he could summon only a wheeze.
Looking for someone to call to his aid, Ryan surveyed the surrounding lot. In the distance, two cars moved away along the trunk road from which the rows of parking spaces branched. He saw three people on foot, but none nearby.
The woman with the knife vanished among the vehicles, as if she liquefied into the glass glare, into the heat rising off blacktop.
Ryan possessed his full voice now, but only cursed quietly, having had time for second thoughts about making a public spectacle of himself. Anyway, she was gone, beyond finding.
He crushed a few lilies underfoot, without intention, as he made his way to the dropped book, which he plucked off the pavement with his clean hand.
At his ’32 Ford coupe, perspiration dripped off his brow onto the trunk lid as he fumbled in a pants pocket for his keys. He had broken out in a sweat that had nothing to do with the warm day.
In the trunk he kept a tool kit for road repairs. With it were a moving blanket, a few clean chamois cloths, a roll of paper towels, and bottled water, among other items.
He stuffed a chamois through the tear in his shirt and pressed it to the wound, clutching his arm to his side to hold the cloth in place.
After he washed his bloody hand with bottled water, he half opened the folded moving blanket and draped it over the driver’s seat.
A Chevy Tahoe cruised along the parking lane, but Ryan didn’t hail the driver. He wanted only to get out of there and home.
He heard her voice in memory: I can kill you any time I want.
Having been excited by the drawing of his blood, maybe she would decide she needed to come back and kill him now.
The Ford single overhead cam 427, built solely for racing, had enough torque to rock the car as it idled. Behind the engine was a Ford C-6 transmission with 2,500-rpm stall converter.
Leaving the parking lot, Ryan was tempted to take the streets as if they were the race lanes of a Grand Prix, but he stayed at the posted speed limits, loath to be pulled over by the police.
The car was not a classic but a hot rod, totally customized, and Ryan had hands-free phone technology aboard. His cell rang, and even in his current state of mind, he automatically accepted the call. “Hello.”
The woman who had slashed him said, “How is the pain?”
“What do you want?”
“Do you never listen?”
“What do you want?”
“How could I make it any clearer?”
“Who are you?”
“I am the voice of the lilies.”
Angrily, he said, “Make sense.”
“They toil not, neither do they spin.”
“I said sense, not nonsense. Is Lee there? Is Kay?”
“The Tings?” She laughed softly. “Do you think this is about them?”
“You know them, huh? Yeah, you know them.”
“I know everything about you, who you fire and who you use.”
“I gave them two years’ severance. I treated them well.”
“You think this has to do with the Tings because my eyes are slanted like theirs? It has nothing to do with them.”
“Then tell me what this is about.”
“You know what it’s about. You know.”
“If I knew, you wouldn’t have gotten close enough to cut me.”
A red traffic light forced him to stop. The car rocked, and under the blood-soaked chamois, the stinging incision pulsed in time with the idling engine.
“Are you really so stupid?” she asked.
“I have a right to know.”
“You have a right to die,” she said.
He thought at once of Spencer Barghest in Las Vegas and the collection of preserved cadavers. But he had never found a connection between Dr. Death and anything that happened sixteen months previous.
“I’m not stupid,” he said. “I know you want something. Everyone wants something. I have money, a lot of it. I can give you anything you want.”
“If not stupid,” she said, “then grotesquely ignorant. At best, grotesquely ignorant.”
“Tell me what you want,” he insisted.
“Your heart belongs to me. I want it back.”
The irrationality of her demand left Ryan unable to respond.
“Your heart. Your heart belongs to me,” the woman repeated, and she began to cry.
As he listened to her weeping, Ryan suspected that reason would not save him from her, that she was insane and driven by an obsession that he could never understand.
“Your heart belongs to me.”
“All right,” he replied softly, wanting to calm her.
“To me, to me. It is my heart, my precious heart, and I want it back.”
She hung up.
A horn sounded behind him. The traffic light had changed from red to green.
Instead of pressing on, Ryan pulled to the side of the road and put the car in park.
Using the *69 function, he tried to ring back the w
eeping woman. Eventually the attempted call brought only a recorded phone-company message requesting that he either hang up or key in a number.
When he had a break in traffic, Ryan drove back into the street.
The sky was high and clear, an inverted empty bowl, but the forecast called for rain late Sunday morning, continuing until at least Monday afternoon. When the bowl was full and spilling, she would come. In the dark and rain, hooded, she would come, and like a ghost, she would not be kept out by locks.
FORTY
Ryan parked the deuce coupe and got out, relieved to find the garage deserted. Standing at the open car door, he withdrew the blood-soaked chamois from inside his shirt, dropped it on the quilted blanket that protected the driver’s seat, and pressed a clean cloth over the wound.
Quickly, he folded the bloody chamois into the blanket, held the blanket under his left arm, against his side, and went into the house. He rode the elevator to the top floor and reached the refuge of the master suite without encountering anyone.
He put the blanket aside, intending to bag it later and throw it in the trash.
In the bathroom, he washed the wound with alcohol. Subsequently he applied iodine.
He almost relished the stinging. The pain cleared his head.
Because the cut was shallow, a thick styptic cream stopped the bleeding. After a while, he gently wiped the excess cream away and spread on Neosporin.
The rote task of dressing the wound both focused him on his peril and freed his mind to think through what must happen next.
To the Neosporin, he stuck thin gauze pads. Once he had applied adhesive tape at right angles to the incision, to help keep the lips of it together, he ran longer strips parallel to the wound, to secure the shorter lengths of tape.
The pain had diminished to a faint throbbing.
He changed into soft black jeans and a black sweater-shirt with a spread collar.
The master-retreat bar included a little wine storage. He opened a ten-year-old bottle of Opus One and filled a Riedel glass almost to the brim.
Employing the intercom, he informed Mrs. Amory that he would turn down the bed himself this evening and that he would take dinner in the master suite. He wanted steak, and he asked that the food-service cart be left on the penthouse landing at seven o’clock.
At a quarter till five, he called his best number for Dr. Dougal Hobb in Beverly Hills. On a weekend, he expected to get a physicians’ service, which he did. He left his name and number and stressed that he was a transplant patient with an emergency situation.
Sitting at the amboina-wood desk, he switched on the plasma TV in the entertainment center and muted the sound, staring at 1930s gangsters firing noiseless machine guns from silent black cars that glided around sharp corners without the bark of brakes or rubber.
Having drunk a third of the wine in the glass, he held his right hand in front of his face. It hardly trembled anymore.
He changed channels and watched an uncharacteristically taci-turn Russell Crowe captain a soundless sailing ship through a furious but silent storm.
Eleven minutes after Ryan had spoken to the physicians’ service, Dr. Hobb returned his call.
“I’m sorry if I alarmed you, Doctor. There’s no physical crisis. But it’s no less important that you help me with something.”
As concerned as ever, with no indication of ill temper, Hobb said, “I’m always on call, Ryan. Never hesitate if you need me. As I warned you, no matter how well the recovery goes, emotional problems can develop suddenly.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“The phone numbers of the therapists I gave you a year ago are still current, but if you’ve misplaced them—”
“This isn’t an emotional problem, Doctor. This is…I don’t know what to call it.”
“Then explain it to me.”
“I’d rather not right now. But here’s the thing—I’ve got to know who was the donor of my heart.”
“But you do know, Ryan. A schoolteacher who suffered massive head trauma in an accident.”
“Yeah, I know that much. She was twenty-six, would be twenty-seven now, going on twenty-eight. But I need a good photograph of her.”
For a beat, Hobb was as silent as Russell Crowe’s ship when it plowed through hushed seas so terrible that sailors were lashed to their duty stations to avoid being washed overboard.
Then the surgeon said, “Ryan, the best man on that list of therapists is Sidney—”
“No therapist, Dr. Hobb. A photo.”
“But really—”
“A photo and a name, Dr. Hobb. Please. This is so important.”
“Ryan, some families prefer the recipients of their loved one’s organs to know who gave them the gift of life.”
“That’s all I want.”
“But many other families prefer that they—and the donor—remain anonymous. They want no thanks, and their grief is private.”
“I understand, Doctor. And in most cases I would respect that position. But this is an extraordinary situation.”
“With all due respect, it’s unreasonable to—”
“I’m in a position where I can’t take no for an answer. I really can’t. I just can’t.”
“Ryan, I’m the surgeon who removed her heart and transplanted it to you, and even I’m not privy to her name. The family wants its privacy.”
“Somebody in the medical system knows her name and can find her next of kin. I just want a chance to ask the family to change their minds.”
“Perhaps it was the donor’s explicit condition that her name not be revealed. The family may feel morally powerless to override the wishes of the deceased.”
Ryan took a deep breath. “Not to be indelicate, Doctor, but with the jet fees and medical expenses, I’ve spent a million six hundred thousand, and I’ll need expensive follow-up care all my life.”
“Ryan, this is awkward. And not like you.”
“No, wait. Please understand. Every penny this cost me was well spent, no charge was excessive. I’m alive, after all. I’m just trying to put this in perspective. With all the costs, no insurance, I’d still like to offer five hundred thousand to her family if they’ll provide her photo and her name.”
“My God,” Hobb said.
“They may be offended,” Ryan said. “I think you are. They may tell me to go to hell. Or you will. But it’s not that I think I can buy anything I want. It’s just…I’m in a corner. I’ll be grateful to anyone who can help me, who has the decency and mercy to help me.”
Dougal Hobb, the storm-tossed sailing ship, and Ryan shared a long silence, as if the surgeon were mentally cutting open the situation to explore it further.
Then Hobb said, “I could try to help you, Ryan. But I can’t fly blind. If I knew at least something about your problem…”
Ryan reached for an explanation with which the physician might not be able to sympathize but to which he might accord a higher value than the absolute privacy of the donor’s family.
“Call it a spiritual crisis, Doctor. That she died and I lived, though she was certainly a better person than I am. I know myself well enough to be sure of that. And so it haunts me. I’m not able to sleep. I’m exhausted. I need to…to be able to properly honor her.”
After another incisive silence, the surgeon said, “You don’t mean to honor her in a public way.”
“No, sir. I don’t. The media never got wind of my illness, the transplant. I don’t want my health problems to be public knowledge.”
“You mean honor her…say, as a Catholic might honor someone by having a Mass said for her.”
“Yes. That’s what I mean.”
“Are you a Catholic, Ryan?”
“No, Doctor. But that’s the kind of thing I mean.”
“There’s someone I could talk to,” Hobb acknowledged. “He has the full file on the donor. He could put the question before them. Before the family.”
“I would be grateful. You can’t know how gr
ateful.”
“They might be willing to provide a photograph. Even a first name. But if the family doesn’t want you to have her last name or contact information for them, would you be satisfied?”
“The photo would be enormously…comforting. Anything they can do for me. I’d be grateful for anything.”
“This is highly unusual,” Hobb said. “But I must admit it’s happened before. And we resolved it that time. It all depends on the family.”
The woman with the lilies wanted to torment Ryan, to carve his nerves to ribbons before she put a sharp blade through his heart. Before further violence, she would most likely give him at least a day to consider the shallow incision in his side, to anticipate his next wound.
Night and rain were her allies. Twenty-four hours from now, she would have the collaboration of both.
“One more thing, Doctor. The photo and whatever else the family will share—I need it as soon as possible. Twelve hours or sooner would be ideal.”
If Dougal Hobb whetted his scalpel on those words, he decided not to cut with it. After a silence, he said only, “Spiritual crises often last years, even a lifetime. There’s usually not an urgency about them.”
“This one is different,” Ryan said. “Thank you for your help and your thoughtfulness, Doctor.”
FORTY-ONE
The filet mignon cut like butter.
As he ate, Ryan wondered about the woman’s expertise with the switchblade. She maneuvered him with the lilies, inflicting precisely the wound she intended.
Had she cut deeper, he would have needed medical assistance. She sliced shallow enough to leave him with the option of treating the wound himself—and evidently expected that he would.
Although she might prove herself a killer when the time came, she remained for now a death tease. She wanted this game to last, inflicting the maximum psychological torture before gutting him—if gutting was the only thing she had in mind.
The confidence and delicacy with which she wielded the knife might have been learned on the street, but Ryan suspected she was not anything as common as a gang girl. The bloody business in the shopping-mall parking lot had been not butchery but switchblade ballet.
Unsettling as the encounter had been, he was glad for it.