Slowly, grudgingly, the pain of each stitch diminished ever so slightly with each new observation. During Jason’s special Delta Force training, a psychiatrist or psychologist, some brand of head shrinker, had lectured on the subject of meditation as a tool for pain control. At the time, Jason had accepted the message as so much psychobabble. Subsequently, he found there was some truth to what he had been told. Meditation was not an opiate to pain, more like aspirin. But better than no relief at all.
There had been some respite from the pain certainly, for Jason was surprised when he noticed the doctor was no longer stitching but almost finished bandaging.
She motioned, and he gingerly climbed down from the table. He tested his left leg by putting weight on it. It hurt, but that was hardly news. He could flex the calf, though, an indication the muscle had not been severed.
The physician handed him a bottle of pills with one hand, a syringe in the other. “Pills three times a day,” she ordered, holding up three fingers as though she doubted he was bright enough to understand and motioning for his arm.
He guessed the injection was a tetanus shot, the pills an antibiotic. Whatever, it had to be more beneficial than the one he had averted at Heathrow.
She put the empty syringe into a tin tray. “Two hundred.”
This time, she was holding up two fingers with one hand, pointing to his hip pocket with the other. Jason counted out 200 kuna, marveling that medical services anywhere could be priced at the equivalent of, what, ten bucks?
Mustache stubbed out a third cigarette into a small ceramic bowl and offered his shoulder.
Jason took it and started out.
“Sir?” The doctor asked in clear English. “Next time you fall on train, try not to land on only door that has a knife edge.”
She was chuckling to herself as he and Mustache left.
After a meal in the hotel’s starkly modern restaurant—odojak, pork roasted over an open fire, washed down with stoino vino, table wine recommended by the chef himself — Jason felt pleasantly drowsy. His leg throbbed with a pain that was easily bearable. The doctor had given him no pain pills, nor would he have taken any. The slothfulness induced by painkillers was something he didn’t want. If he needed to wake suddenly, act quickly, or make a decision in an instant, drugs were not for him.
He shoved one of the chairs under the doorknob of his room, stripped, and lingered under the shower for the four or five minutes it took for the hot water to run out. He was drying himself when there was a knock at his door. Wrapping the towel around his waist, he slipped the Glock from its holster lying on the dresser and went to the door.
“Yeah?”
“Mr. Simmons?”
English was not the speaker’s first language.
“What is it?”
“A Mr. Džaja wants to know if you will need him tomorrow.”
Jason knew no one named Džaja. Could be the police? Or whoever sent Natalia. Had they had identified him from the train and tracked him to this hotel? That would have required neither Sherlock Holmes nor bloodhounds. There were few hotels in the area.
“Just a minute,” he called.
Crossing the room, he looked at the window. The old-fashioned kind that still opened, probably because air-conditioning in summer was used as sparingly as heat in winter. Jason had requested and gotten a room on the second, top, floor. Ground-floor rooms made for poor security. It was only twenty feet or less down to the snow-soaked lawn below, a relatively safe drop Jason could reduce considerably by hanging from the sill before letting go.
He opened the window.
“I’m coming!” he called in response to another knock as he slipped into a pair of jeans and his feet into shoes.
He was contemplating departing the room without further conversation when it occurred to him: “Need him tomorrow”?
Going back to the door, he asked. “Who is Džaja?”
“The man driving you here,” the desk clerk’s voice answered.
A quick glance confirmed what Jason already knew: There was no phone in the room. His driver could not simply have the clerk call up.
Jason chuckled, both at his own overreaction and the relief there was no danger. But paranoia trumped foolish risks. “Tell him I’ll see him right after breakfast.”
As footsteps receded, Jason risked cracking the door. Even from the back, he recognized the fur parka of the desk clerk and that old army jacket Mustache wore. He shut the door quietly, locked it, and shoved the chair back under the knob. Only then did he realize how much colder the room had become.
Small wonder. The window was still open, snow blowing in onto the threadbare carpet. Jason was glad he wasn’t going to be going out.
For the first time in many years, Jason had difficulty in falling asleep, a problem he attributed to the throbbing pain in his leg, not allowing himself to consider the possibility the cause might lay elsewhere. The fact he had been forced to kill someone had never kept him awake before. But then, none of his victims had been a woman, albeit a deadly one.
When sleep finally came, it was thin and troubled. More than once, Jason awoke after his dreams replayed that figure falling, falling…
26
Džaja shared the front seat with Jason. The hotel’s desk clerk, Aleksandar, now off-duty, had eagerly accepted Jason’s offer to come along and act as interpreter should one be needed. His enthusiasm at the prospect of extra cash was undiminished by being stuffed into a space that was a backseat in name only. He and Džaja chattered away with only an occasional translation.
The house was on the edge of town, a single-story clapboard a few kilometers past the rail station and the cobblestone square with its circular fountain. As the houses became farther apart, the spaces were frequently filled with crude roadside shrines, some still bearing the dried flowers of summer. Beyond the house lay the high, flat, mountain-rimmed plateau above the Novčića River, land that reminded Jason of the high plains of the United States.
Džaja pointed at the street number and swerved across the road to park the little Zastava in the otherwise barren yard where patches of winter-yellowed grass were islands in the sea of snow. The house’s occupant must have seen them coming, for she opened the door just as Jason was getting ready to knock.
At least seventy, the woman’s face was road map of furrows. Wisps of gray hair had escaped the bun at the back of her head, and blue veins were the only color in the white hands that held the door. But there was nothing old or decrepit about the sky blue eyes that peered out from the drooping lids that gave the face a sleepy look.
“Herka Kerjck?” Jason asked.
She nodded as her eyes went to the two men behind him. “Da.”
“I’m George Simmons. Someone told you I was coming I believe.”
She started at him blankly until the hotel clerk translated. She stepped aside, opened the door wider. “Dobro jutro. Uci.”
The three men entered a room that reminded Jason of his grandmother’s house. Knitted doilies occupied every horizontal space above floor level. A sofa and two chairs were covered in a cabbage-rose pattern through which stuffing escaped along seams long parted. The halo of the crucified plaster Christ gleamed from the far wall just above the rabbit ears of a small-screen television. What was really reminiscent for Jason was the sterile cleanliness. Not a mote of dust dared to be seen. The glass of the room’s two windows showed recent attention and even the faded patterned rug, though showing threads, was without stain. The room smelled vaguely of lye soap and stale tobacco.