He relaxes his grip, then tentatively releases me from the pillow’s embrace. He pulls the pillow entirely away and stands there, looking down at me, glancing with a curious, concerned, but not especially worried expression at the monitoring machines on the far side of the bed. He looks back at me, a tiny frown on his face.
Perhaps his eyes have adjusted a little better to the gloom now, or perhaps he is looking for something to explain the lack of an alarm. At last he notices the tiny, transparent, and – in this light – near-invisible tube that leads from the oxygen cylinder standing amongst the other equipment to my nose. (I see this; my eyes are even better adjusted to the darkness than his and are cracked open just enough to see his eyes suddenly widen.)
My right arm slides free of the bedclothes. I had felt for the paring knife hidden behind my bedside cabinet as soon as I’d heard the unusual noise in the corridor outside. I’d switched the heart monitor off too. I bring the hand with the knife sweeping out and round and up, catching the pillow as he tries to parry the blow. I feel the knife connect with something hard, jarring my hand. The pillow rips apart in a flurry of tiny pieces of white foam; they billow and scatter and start to fall as he stumbles to the door, holding one hand with the other. I am falling, already exhausted, to the floor, trailing bedclothes, legs still half trapped by the constricting sheets. My lunge has snapped or disconnected leads and cables and so finally produces some alarm noises from the nearby machines.
If he was thinking straight, and was not injured and shocked by what has just happened, my assailant might stay and finish the job, taking advantage of my weakness, but he stumbles crashing against the door, whirls it open and runs out, still holding his hand. Blood, dark as ink, spots on the floor as, finally, I slide out of the bed’s torque of sheets, released from its confinement as though being birthed. I lie gasping on the blood-slicked floor, surrounded by tiny soft particles of foam, still falling like snow.
Nobody comes, and eventually it is I who have to stagger along the corridor and cut the duty nurse free from his chair so he can call the police.
I sit back, exhausted, on the floor.
They find my attacker in his crashed car, dead, early the following morning. The car is wrapped around a tree on a quiet road a few kilometres away from the clinic. His hand wound was not life-threatening, but it bled copiously and he did not stop to staunch the bleeding properly. The police think that probably some animal – deer or fox, most likely – made him swerve, and his hand, blood-slicked, slipped on the wheel. It didn’t help that he hadn’t put his seat belt on.
I recover gradually over the next two months and leave without ceremony nearly a year and a half after first arriving at the clinic.
And? And I accept that all that happened happened, and I accept my part in it. I accept, too, that it is over, and that still the most rational explanation is that none of it happened, that I made it all up; I was never a man called Temudjin Oh.
Of course, that still leaves open the question of why somebody entered the hospital, tied up the nurse and tried to smother me in my bed, but no matter how I look at all this and try to explain it there is always at least one loose end, and looking at it this way, with that particular explanation resulting in that particular loose end, produces the most comprehensive of the former and the least troubling of the latter.
Whatever; I am resigned to living a quiet and normal life henceforth and will be content with that. I shall find a place to live and some honest, constructive work to do, if I can. I shall put my dreams of the Concern, Mrs Mulverhill and Madame d’Ortolan – and of having been Mr Oh – behind me.
We’ll see. I suppose I could be wrong about any of this, including the sensible stuff.
I have much to think about, I think.
When Mr Kleist wakes up he is in some pain. His head hurts a lot. He feels drunk or hungover or both. He has a raging thirst. He can’t breathe very well. This is because he is gagged, with tape. Starting to panic, he looks round. He is in a cellar that he remembers from long ago. He is tied tightly to a central-heating unit.
A youthful figure in a woollen ski mask comes carefully down the stairs, holding a steaming kettle.
Mr Kleist starts trying to scream.
Madame d’Ortolan – forcibly removed, much reduced, quite marooned – on her way to watch the eclipse in Lhasa, on what she is sure will turn out to be another complete waste of time, looks out of the window to watch the crumpled grey, brown and green lands of Tibet slide by. She misses Mr Kleist. Though there was never anything sexual between them, still she misses him.
Her current assistant and bodyguard is asleep on the seat across from her, snoring. He is extremely well built and fit, but quite without an original thought or even observation in his pretty, thick-necked head.
She misses Christophe, the chauffeur, from the other Paris. That was entirely sexual. She breathes deeply, sucking oxygen from the little mask attached to the train’s supply.
She is still thinking of Christophe when the door suddenly flies open. The man is in the compartment and swinging round to face them – arms triangled out, fists closed round a long handgun – before her eyes have had time to fully widen or her mouth can fully open.
The sleeping bodyguard never even wakes up. The closest he gets is that his snoring stops. The last expression on his face is a mild frown. Then his brains are blown across his burly shoulder and onto the carriage window in a grey-red fan, the impact of his head breaking the internal pane of the double-glazed window, spreading cracks like shattered ice.
Madame d’Ortolan flinches back, horrified, screaming, as some of the blood and brains spatters over her. The gunman kicks the door shut, glances round the compartment.
Madame d’Ortolan cuts the scream off, turns to face him. She holds up one hand.
“Now just wait! Temudjin, if that’s you, I still have considerable resources, much to offer. I-”
He doesn’t say anything. He was only waiting for her to confirm who she was, and she’s done that now.
In the last second before she dies, Madame d’Ortolan realises what is about to happen and stops saying what she was starting to say, instead carefully pronouncing just the one word: “Traitor.”
“Only to you, Theodora,” the gunman murmurs to herself, between the first and second head shots.
Mike Esteros is sitting at the bar of the Commodore Hotel, Venice Beach, after yet another unsuccessful pitch. Technically he doesn’t know it’s unsuccessful yet, but he’s developing a nose for these things and he’d put money on another rejection. It’s starting to get him down. He still believes in the idea and he’s still sure it’ll get made one day, plus he knows that attitude is everything in this business, he must remain positive – if he doesn’t believe in himself, why should anybody else? – but, well, all the same.
The bar is quiet. He wouldn’t normally drink at this time of day. Maybe he needs to adjust the plot, make it more family-oriented. Focus on the boy, on the father – son thing. Cute it up a little. A dusting of schmaltz. Never did any harm. Well, no real harm. Maybe he’s been believing too much in the basic idea, assuming that because it’s so obvious to him what a beautiful, elegant thing it is, it’ll be obvious to everybody else and they’ll be falling over themselves to green-light it and give him lots of money.
And don’t forget Goldman’s Law: nobody knows anything. Nobody knows what will work. That’s why they make so many remakes and Part Twos; what looks like lack of imagination is really down to too much, as paranoid execs visualise all the things that could go wrong with a brand new, untested idea. Going with something containing elements that definitely worked in the past removes some of the terrifying uncertainty.