Hanley realized he had already abandoned Devereaux. He looked across the desk and saw that the doctor realized it as well.
“Well?”
Hanley said, “No more injections. No more induced hallucinogens or whatever it is that you give him.”
“My treatment methods are conservative, are recognized as—”
“No more talk of restraints,” Hanley bargained.
“All right,” Dr. Krueger conceded.
“He’s not an animal,” Hanley said.
“No one said he was. He’s in a dangerous state. If I had intended him harm, would I be working so hard to save him?”
“So much bad is done for the good of others,” Hanley said. He realized it was something that Devereaux might have said. Yes, he had looked right through Devereaux for a moment and seen the frame of the man’s life in his bones.
“All right. I won’t prescribe further… medications. He’s in pain but that’s his decision. I want to observe his physical progress a few days longer.”
Hanley said, “Is this really necessary?”
“For the sake of Miss Macklin,” Dr. Krueger said. “I’ll release him on… Friday. You can tell him that, that I’ll release him on Friday if his progress is such that I think it’s safe.”
“Why couldn’t it be now?” Hanley said.
But Dr. Krueger was already thinking he had three days to remove Rita Macklin from her hospital and from the way of potential harm from Devereaux. Three days to secure her in a place of safety where he could minister to her and show her that she could learn to rely upon him.
13
Marie made the call from a telephone booth on O’Connell Street. It was raining and the streets were shrouded in the usual mists made of fog and soot pollution. Dublin was full of din, full of rain and gloom, and she heard all this as the telephone rang and rang. Finally, the connection was made but there was no sound at the other end. She began: “He said he wanted the money right away.”
“I figured that.”
“I said he would want to meet me in the bar of the hotel on Thursday.”
“Good girl. Did he like you?”
“I think he was afraid of me.”
Henry chuckled. “He was right about that. I figured on some snag so I’ll make this quick. You just stick close to the Buswell and wait for my call. Tonight. I should be set up by then.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Do you really want to know?”
Marie thought about it. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
“I believe that, honey, but there’s really nothing to tell you.”
She let it go. She hung up and opened the door of the old-fashioned booth and stepped into the rain. The streets were full of people in wet wools hurrying along the walks, splashed by passing cars. Buses roared along narrow ways. The world was close and damp and Marie smiled at it, knowing a secret that no one else knew at that moment in that city.
14
Rita Macklin fitted herself into the soft leather passenger seat. She looked across at Dr. Krueger behind the wheel and smiled. He was a comfort and she so wanted comfort. There was pain but he could ease it for her. Even the other pain of being abandoned by Devereaux. In these weeks, he hadn’t called, he hadn’t answered her heart.
They were in the countryside. Washington spilled out of its girdle into the suburbs but now the suburban tract town houses were hidden more and more by the ancient southern trees. The sky was very blue and the long, languid autumn of Maryland filled the ravines with colors.
She sighed at the sadness of the colors, the sad scarlets and yellows kept alive by the warmth of the season long past the time they might have properly died. She remembered autumns in Wisconsin when she was a girl and the colors had burst briefly in October, bombarding the hills and forests with explosions of color for only a moment before the sudden death that came in the first snows. Those autumns had been glorious, full of celebration and sacrifice. This Maryland autumn was only elegiac, a sad and lovely poem uttered in a whisper from a pale young woman in a long white gown who lies dying on a chaise propped at a tall window. She sighed again, so overwhelmed by thoughts of death.
She was crying again and he saw this. He accepted her tears. He said nothing and he held her hand when she cried.
She cried so often.
His hand found her hand on her lap. She was thinner now, even though she had never been overweight, but the wounds had drained her. Her cheeks were full of blushes that had the unhealthy hue of the tubercular, though she did not have tuberculosis. She suffered pain but mostly she suffered from melancholy. Why couldn’t she end the melancholy?
Devereaux.
She blinked against the tears.
He pulled off the road into a path between the trees that led into a deep forest in a narrow ravine.
“The place is down here,” he said to her. But he had stopped the car.
He still held her hand.
His eyes were kind, gentle; they saw through her pain and sadness.
He kissed her.
He had kissed her before, in the hospital. She felt so grateful to him for his patience and kindnesses. She was still weeping while he kissed her and there was something urgent in the way he kissed her that had not been apparent before. She felt his body strain against her body and she felt her body opening. She was a woman and this is what she was made for, wasn’t it?
No.
She turned away from him. He still held her. His face was flushed. She looked out the side window at the trees that pressed all around.
“Don’t you want me to kiss you, Rita?”
“Oh. I can’t think now.”
“Are you in pain?”
“A little.”
“I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me.”
“I’m sorry anyway.”
She looked at him. He was a man with a tender heart. If he wanted a kiss from her, what did it matter?
“But will you still come to the sanitarium?”
“Every other day, I’ll arrange to be here every other day. I wish I were able to be here every day. They’re good people, they’ll help you overcome… your sadness.”
“I think it just overwhelms me.”
“Don’t worry, Rita. It’s something that will pass. We can both overcome it.”
“Thank you,” she said. And she kissed him. She kissed him the way he had kissed her, the way that would please him. She felt his hands on her body and it reminded her and that caused another fit of melancholy so that she kissed him all the harder to stop the pain or to make the pain worse, she couldn’t tell what she wanted. My God, my God. So lost in the world, so pressed in by the colors of sad trees and times past. She was falling through the world and she could never reach the ground because she had so far to fall.
15
The first was Brian Parnell.
Parnell was from Belfast and was wanted for murder and other acts of terror, including the bombing of a public house the previous summer.
He was sixteen years old and far too young for the job Henry McGee had in mind. Therefore, he wasn’t needed.
Henry approached him outside the public house on the Galway road. They had walked to the back where the urinals were in an open courtyard. The sweet smell of urine rendered sour in the ancient slate of the walls made the boy say “phew.” He meant it as a pleasantry, a manly bit of male bonding between two gentlemen such as themselves found in the awkward position of relieving themselves at the same time in the same place.
Henry McGee grinned and unzipped his trousers.
Brian did the same and stared at the wall in the accustomed way. Men did not watch each other in such naked moments unless they were intending to send out the wrong signal. Brian was a manly young fellow with a slightly pretty face but he had bucked the mare Maureen Kilkenny more than a few times when Old Man O’Day was away.