No no, thought Grofield, and the doctor’s voice echoed his sentiment, saying, “No, no. There is a certain urgency in cases like this.”
You betcha, thought Grofield, and with a final scraping heave they at last got him into the car, where he felt himself sprawled across the rear set. His legs were bundled in after him, like piles of laundry, and the door slammed.
After that it was all very fast. Car doors opened, and Grofield heard the doctor saying, apparently to the bystanders, “I’ll go along to the hospital.” There were murmurs of approval, and then the car jounced as people got into it, and then doors slammed. Grofield heard the engine start, felt the car back up, go forward, back up again, and at last begin to move steadily forward.
Grofield’s one still-open eye could see two round vague shapes, the heads of the driver and the doctor. Good Samaritans. Maybe Canadians were friendlier than people in the States.
The driver said, “How is he?”
The doctor said, “He’s all right. The overcoat gave you no difficulty?”
“None. It went right through the sleeve, just as you said.”
“You see? Sometimes I do know what I’m talking about.”
Grofield’s open eye was burning for lack of moisture. He hadn’t been blinking, it seemed as though he couldn’t blink, and it was beginning to get painful, distracting him from thinking about what they were saying up front. What would happen if his eye dried out completely?
Through the sleeve?
The driver was the one who’d poisoned him!
The doctor’s head turned and he grunted, saying, “Um. That’s no good.” Something like a cloud came at Grofield’s face, a thumb touched his eyelid, closed it down over his eye, left him alone with his thoughts.
They weren’t happy thoughts. The fact that he had given up the warmth and security of a long prison sentence for all this was particularly displeasing. He could be in prison right now, reading a magazine, smoking a cigarette, idly wondering what movie he would be shown tonight, instead of lying poisoned in the back of some stranger’s car, probably on his way to a shallow grave somewhere.
He couldn’t move. He strained and strained, but he couldn’t so much as flex a muscle. The car jounced along, and he felt himself flopping on the back seat like a Raggedy Andy doll, and he didn’t know whether he wanted most to be terrified or enraged, so he was both.
It was frightening to die, and more so to die in darkness, among strangers, and foolishly. And it was infuriating to die foolishly, needlessly, caught up in other people’s intrigues.
Still, terror is stronger than fury, and by the time the car came to a stop at last Grofield was in near-panic. If he could have run, he would have run. If he could have begged, he would have begged. If he could have wept, he would have wept.
Hands touched him. He could feel, his senses were all in perfect working order, it was only somehow the chain of command from his mind to his body that had been broken down. He was helpless, but aware, the worst possible state.
He was dragged from the car, not very gently. Were they going to bury him alive? The fright that gave him was enough to drag from him a small moan, so small and high-pitched as to redouble his terror. Had that been his voice?
He was carried somewhere, jounced along uneven ground, then indoors. The pacing of his carriers was smoother, and he could hear the sound of their feet on the wooden floor.
He was dropped on something, something soft and scratchy, like an old sofa. He wished he could see, he wished he could open his eyes, and in straining to open them it seemed as though he did crack the lids just a little. A line of light seeped in, but not enough for him to really see anything.
A new voice said, “So you got him.”
“No trouble at all.” That was the doctor.
“How long before we can question him?”
“Not long. Perhaps ten minutes. He’s started to come around already.”
The thumb abruptly slid up his eyelid again, and Grofield could see. A face was leaning over him, studying him. Grofield could focus better now, could see that the face was middle-aged and heavy-jowled, with a bushy black mustache. The face said, “Yes. Maybe sooner.” It was the doctor.
The new voice said, “You weren’t followed?” Unlike the doctor and the driver, he didn’t have a French-Canadian accent, though his words were accented. A harsher echo than French, though. German? Not exactly.
The doctor’s thumb slid Grofield’s eyelid closed again, and from the sound of his voice he had turned and was walking away. “Of course we weren’t followed. Albert knows how to do those things.” He pronounced the name the French way, Al Bear, a character in a book for children.
Grofield could have kissed them all, Al Bear and the doctor and the new voice, kissed them and hugged them and handed out cigars. He wasn’t going to die! They weren’t going to kill him! It was only a temporary paralysis, only a thing they’d done to bring him here without a lot of fuss so they could ask him questions.
Ask away! Such inane gratitude did he feel, he would tell them anything. He was alive, they could ask whatever they wanted. What business was all this of his anyway? Ask, ask! He was impatient for the effects of the drug to wear off, so he could start answering questions.
In the meantime, the voices had moved farther away and he could no longer make out what they were saying. They were still in the same room, but a distance away and speaking softly. They undoubtedly understood that he could hear them, that he was conscious, and they probably had private things they wanted to say to one another. That was all right, that was understandable, he wasn’t offended by anything like that. He was alive, wasn’t he?
He certainly was, and his body was beginning to tell him so. His joints had started to tingle, the way frostbitten fingers do when they’re starting to warm up. But the tingle now wasn’t in his fingertips, it was in his elbows and knees and shoulders and ankles and wrists, in his knuckles and neck and crotch, in all the joints of his body, a tingling that was getting worse and worse. Life was coming back, all right, with a vengeance.
He moaned. It wasn’t planned, he would have preferred to stay quiet, but instead he moaned. And from across the room heard the doctor say, “Ah, here he comes now.” The sound increasing as though he was walking this way. “Are you back with us, Mr. Grofield?”
There were three shots. Somebody yelled. Somebody else cursed. A crashing sound might have been a door giving way. More shots. Something puffed into the sofa cushion near his left ear. There were screams and shouts and shots and running feet. A high-pitched yell was followed by a ba-dump, as though someone had fallen, heavily.
There was nothing Grofield could do but lie there. He swore an oath to himself that if ever he got the control of his body back he would punch the mouths of the first ten men he saw. Enough was enough, dammit!
His eyes opened. The lids lifted slowly, reluctantly, but they did lift, and he saw a large rustic room full of moose heads and fireplaces and scratchy-looking furniture. There was a smell of gunpowder in the air. The room, so far as he could see, was vacant, the shooting and shouting having moved somewhere into the distance. Far away, doors slammed, people yelled. An automobile raced away, squealing rubber.
Grofield moved his hands, small vague movements that went nowhere and did no one any good. He struggled to re-establish contact with his legs, and was finally rewarded with an increase in the tingling pain in his knees. Everything was stinging as though he’d been bitten all over by a million bees.
But the legs were moving. Slowly, very slowly, but moving. He slid them leftward, away from the sofa back, toward the floor, and was rewarded at last with a thump as his left foot dropped off the edge and hit the floor. The right leg moved more slowly, but at last it too cleared the edge and drooped floorward, though his position didn’t let it reach all the way.