He decided to ignore her and concentrate on what was on his mind.
“Where’s Alix?” he croaked.
Nurse Juneau put the tray down across his bed and shrugged.
“I don’t know, Samuel.”
“Where has she gone?”
“I don’t know. Samuel,” Juneau repeated, with a little more emphasis, holding out a little paper cup in which sat three brightly colored capsules. “She’s just not here.”
She meant nothing by the remark. Nurse Juneau couldn’t see anything wrong with Alix giving herself a break. The poor girl deserved it, the amount of time she spent in this room.
But her words hit Samuel Carver like a shock from the belt that had tortured him. He gasped. His eyes widened in shock. He gripped his sheets. Then he flung his arms upward, throwing off his bed linens and sending the tray flying as plates, glasses, and cutlery clattered down onto the floor.
Nurse Juneau was used to Carver’s tantrums, his infantile fear of abandonment. But this time, she suddenly realized, his reaction to Alix’s absence had a whole new intensity.
As she screamed in alarm, Carver got out of bed, with an energy she had never seen in him before, his eyes blazing, his face twisted with a primal, unfettered rage. She backed away, but he came after her. He wrapped his fists around her upper arms, gripping them so hard she winced in pain, then he stuck his face right up close to hers and hissed, “Where is she?”
His voice had lost any trace of childlike innocence. It carried the threat of real fury, ready to tip into violence.
Nurse Juneau shook her head. “I don’t know,” she pleaded. “I promise I’m telling the truth. I don’t know where Alix has gone. But don’t get upset-you know she always comes back. Always.”
Carver threw her away from him, across the room. She crashed into the door frame, crying out with the pain of the impact.
“Alix!” shouted Carver, standing beside his bed. “Al-i-i-i-x!”
He stumbled across the room, almost tripping on the nurse’s dazed body, and headed out into the hallway.
Stabbing bolts of pain cut through Carver’s skull. His heart was palpitating. Images from his dreams were flashing before his eyes. But now, in this waking nightmare, everything was different. He knew where and when he had fought in that desert: a mission deep into Iraq in the midst of the Desert Storm campaign in 1991. He knew that he and his men had blown the cables and returned safely to base. And the woman in the dream was Alix. She’d been there, in that chalet outside Gstaad. But what else had happened there?
The memory would not come. Just another stab behind his eyes.
He made his way down the hall in his T-shirt and pajama pants, crashing into a cart laden with patients’ medications, barging past the nurse who was pushing it from one room to the next, shoving a patient out of the way as he tried to get to the stairs that led to the exit and the outside world. The dream visions had gone now and he realized he was seeing everything around him with a new clarity, born of comprehension. It was as if there had been a thick glass wall between him and the world-a wall that had suddenly been shattered. He understood his surroundings, appreciated the function and significance of things and people that had been meaningless to him for months. Above all, he understood who and what Samuel Carver really was.
From behind, he heard hurried footsteps, scurrying down the hall. He turned and saw two of the clinic’s male orderlies, men chosen as much for their physical strength as their caring natures, charging toward him. He tried to fend them off, but they ignored his flailing fists and charged right into him, knocking him over and pinning him to the ground.
A few seconds later, Dr. Geisel was kneeling beside him, holding a syringe.
“This is for your own good,” he said, sticking the needle into Carver’s upper arm.
Before the sedative hit him, Carver looked Geisel right in the eye.
“I know,” he hissed. “I know.”
Then the drugs hit his system and oblivion overcame him.
A minute later, as the orderlies were dumping Carver’s inert body back onto his bed, Nurse Juneau approached Dr. Geisel. She was rubbing the back of her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed and welling with tears.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think so,” she said, wincing. “It is Samuel I am worried about. He seemed so shocked to be alone. I have never known him this bad before.”
“You think so?” Geisel replied. “It seems as though the opposite is true, in fact. One shock has reversed another. The trauma may be his catharsis. Now, at last, he has started to get better.”
25
The bierkeller’s dressing room reeked of stale smoke, hairspray, and cheap perfume. Alix stubbed out a cigarette and steeled herself to go back to work. She tugged at her short white stockings, snapping the elastic just above her knees. The waitresses all wore tarted-up Heidi costumes: a short red skirt with a petticoat frill at the bottom; a lace-up black bodice, and a skimpy, low-cut white blouse. She pulled the laces tight, tying the ends in a bow beneath her breasts. Then she put her wig back on. It was bright blond, with pigtails, tied at the end with little red bows. She took a deep breath and stepped out into the bar.
Alix scanned the room, apparently greeting the customers with a smile or a flirtatiously blown kiss, but in actual fact examining each of them, watching for any indications of those who were likely to be particularly drunk or obnoxious. On the far side of the room she saw a woman sitting by herself at a table for two, next door to the banker and his clients.
The woman was small and wiry. Her pantsuit-plain, but perfectly tailored-was as black as the hair that framed her face in a severe, geometric bob. The dim light of the bierkeller had turned her thickly painted lips from vivid crimson to the dark, rich purple of a ripe eggplant. For a moment, as she looked at Alix, her face was utterly expressionless-until their eyes locked and the woman smiled back at Alix and kissed the air, mimicking her gestures with a sort of contemptuous mockery.
Alix stopped dead in her tracks. She seemed unable to process the information her eyes were supplying. Then she gasped, darted her eyes around the room, turned on her heel, and fled back to the dressing room.
As Alix turned and fled, the woman in black caught the eye of two men sitting at a nearby table and nodded in the direction of the dressing room. They got up and started walking toward the door through which Alix had just disappeared. The woman left thirty francs on her table and strolled to the main exit.
Alix hurried through the dressing room, barely breaking her stride as she grabbed her coat and handbag. She was pushing a fist through the arm of the coat as she burst through a second door at the back of the room and ran down a short corridor toward the staff exit. By the time she stepped out onto the street, she had pulled the coat tight around her and was huddling against the sharp winter wind, just like the other pedestrians scattered up and down the street, her collar up, one hand clutching the coat lapels tight around her neck.
Every nerve in her body was screaming at her to run, but she forced herself to walk at a normal pace. She had no hope of escaping her pursuers if it came to a foot race. Her only hope was to look inconspicuous.
She was about twenty yards down the road before she realized she was still wearing her wig. It wasn’t such a big deal. The pigtails were tucked away out of sight. In the sulfuric glow of the street lamps, one blond head would look pretty much like another. But Alix was too tired, too stressed to make such dispassionate calculations on the run. She panicked and tore the wig from her head. She threw it into a public garbage can, then pulled away the nylon stocking cap from her hair, letting it fall to the pavement.
The sudden movement gave her away. Alix immediately heard the sound of quick, heavy footsteps behind her. She turned her head and saw two men striding toward her. One of them was speaking into a wrist mike. Desperately, she started to run, her ankles twisting every time her high-heeled shoes hit the ground. She stopped for a second to kick off the shoes, helpless as her pursuers drew closer, still marching, inexorably, as though they knew they did not need to break a sweat. Then she set off again in her stockinged feet.