Central Park

by Guillaume Musso

  “In the middle of the night? What the hell time is it, anyway?”

  “Nearly five o’clock, sir. He told me it was very urgent.”

  “Okay, put him through.”

  Gabriel pushed himself up on the pillow, then sat on the edge of the bed. The room was in darkness, but the light from the radio alarm clock gave a vague impression of the chaos within it. The carpet was strewn with clothes and small, empty bottles. The woman sleeping next to him had not woken up. It took him a few seconds to remember her name: Elena Sabatini, from Florida, whom he had met the previous evening in the hotel lounge. After a few martinis, he had persuaded her to go up to his room and they had gotten to know each other much better while raiding the minibar.

  Gabriel rubbed his eyes and sighed. He hated what he had become since his wife left him—a lost soul drifting in a downward spiral, a ghost. There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth. Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote came to mind immediately. It fit him like a glove.

  “Gabriel? Hey, are you there?” yelled the voice at the other end of the line.

  Receiver pressed to his ear, Keyne got off his bed and closed the sliding door that separated the bedroom from the little living room next to it. “Hello, Thomas.”

  “I tried calling you on your landline in Astoria, then on your cell phone, but you weren’t answering.”

  “The battery must be dead. How did you find me?”

  “I remembered it was the week of the American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference. I called their main office and they told me they’d booked you a room at the Greenwich.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I heard you got a great response yesterday for your speech on the psychiatric aspects of Alzheimer’s.”

  “Spare me the flattery, would you?”

  “You’re right; I’ll get straight to the point. I want your opinion on a patient.”

  “At five in the morning? Thomas, can I remind you that we’re no longer partners?”

  “Yeah, and that’s too bad. We made a good team, the two of us. We complement each other perfectly, the psychiatrist and the neurologist.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but it’s over. I sold you my share in the practice, remember?”

  “The biggest mistake of your life.”

  Gabriel lost his temper. “We’re not going to have this discussion again! You know perfectly well why I did it!”

  “Yes—moving to London so you could get joint custody of your son. And what did you get out of it? A restraining order that forced you to come back to the States.”

  Gabriel felt his eyes tearing up. He rubbed his temples while his friend kept talking.

  “Could you take a look at my case file? Please. It’s an early-onset Alzheimer’s. I think you’ll find it fascinating. I’ll e-mail it to you now and call you back in twenty minutes.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding! I’m going back to bed. And please don’t call me again,” he said firmly before hanging up.

  The window reflected the image of a tired, unshaven, and depressed-looking man. He found his cell phone—battery dead—on the carpet next to the couch. He plugged it in, walked to the bathroom, and spent ten minutes in the shower to wake himself from his lethargy. Wearing a bathrobe, he went back to the living room. Using the pod machine on top of a chest of drawers, he made himself a double espresso and drank it while watching the Hudson shine in the first glimmers of daylight. After that, he made himself another coffee and turned on his laptop. As promised, Thomas’s e-mail was waiting in his in-box.

  Christ, that guy never gives up!

  The neurologist had sent him his patient’s case file. Krieg knew that Gabriel would not be able to resist taking a look at it.

  Gabriel opened the PDF and skimmed through the first few pages. The patient’s unusual profile caught his attention: Alice Schafer, thirty-eight, a pretty Frenchwoman with regular features and an open face framed by blond hair tied back in a ponytail. He lingered for a few seconds on her photograph, on her eyes in particular. Pale irises, with an expression that was both intense and fragile. There was something mysterious, indecipherable about her. He sighed. This damn disease had always wrecked lives, but now it was hitting people younger than ever before.

  Gabriel scrolled down in the file. There were dozens of pages of test results and medical images—MRI, PET scan, spinal tap—culminating in a definitive diagnosis by Professor Evariste Clouseau. Though he had never met him, Gabriel knew all about this French neurologist’s reputation. He was one of the best in his field.

  The second part of the file began with Alice Schafer’s admission form for Sebago Hospital, the clinic specializing in memory problems that he had founded with Thomas and two other partners. It was a cutting-edge research facility for Alzheimer’s. The young woman had been admitted six days earlier, on October 9, to undergo treatment through deep-brain stimulation, the clinic’s specialty. On the eleventh, a tiny neurostimulator—known to the patients as a “brain pacemaker”—had been implanted under her skin to provide constant electrical impulses to her brain. After that, there were no more notes.

  Strange.

  Under normal circumstances, the implantation of the three electrodes in her brain would have taken place the next day. Without them, the pacemaker was useless. Gabriel was swallowing his last mouthful of coffee when his cell phone vibrated on the desk.

  “Have you read the file?” Thomas asked.

  “Reading it now. What do you expect from me, exactly?”

  “Any help you can give me. I’m in deep shit, Gabriel. That girl, Alice Schafer, she escaped from the clinic last night.”

  “Escaped?”

  “She’s a cop. She knows what she’s doing. She left her room without telling anyone. She fooled the nurses and even injured Caleb Dunn, who was trying to stop her.”

  “Dunn? The security guard?”

  “Yeah. The idiot pulled a gun on her. He got into a fight with the girl while he was trying to handcuff her, and she came out on top. Apparently, the gun went off by accident, but she ran away, taking the gun and the handcuffs with her.”

  “Is he seriously hurt?”

  “No, the bullet went into the flesh of his thigh. He’s being cared for here, and he says he won’t involve the cops on the condition that we pay him a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Are you telling me one of your patients has wounded a security guard and is now on the run, carrying a weapon, and you haven’t informed the police? That’s just irresponsible, Thomas. You could go to jail for this!”

  “If we tell the cops, we’ll have the law and the press all over us. We could lose our accreditation for something like this. It could put us out of business. I’m not going to give up my life’s work just because of that stupid security guard. That’s why I need your help, Gabriel. I want you to bring her back to me.”

  “Why me? And how am I supposed to do it?”

  “I’ve carried out my own investigation. Alice Schafer is in New York, and so are you. She went to Portland by taxi at nine last night. From there, she took a bus to Boston, then a train to Manhattan. She arrived there this morning at five twenty.”

  “If you know where she is, why don’t you come here and get her yourself?”

  “I can’t leave the hospital in the middle of a crisis. Agatha, my assistant, is on a plane now. She’ll be in Manhattan in two hours, but I really want you to take care of this. You have a gift for reasoning with people. You have something special, an empathy, like one of those actors who—”

  “Okay, okay, don’t start on the flattery again. How can you be sure she’s still in New York?”

  “Because of the GPS tracker we implant in our patients’ shoes. She’s in the middle of Central Park, in a wooded area called the Ramble. According to the tracker, she hasn’t moved in the past half hour, so she’s either dead or asleep, or maybe she dumped her shoes. Please, Gabriel, just go over there and look
for her—I’m asking you as a friend. We have to find her before the police do.”

  Keyne took a few seconds to think about this.

  “Gabriel? Are you still there?”

  “Tell me more about her. I saw that you implanted the stimulator four days ago.”

  “Yes,” Krieg confirmed. “The latest model, completely miniaturized, hardly any bigger than a SIM card. You should see it, it’s impressive.”

  “So why didn’t you move on to the next stage and install the electrodes?”

  “Because overnight, she went completely crazy! She was in total denial. Add that to the amnesia and—”

  “Amnesia?”

  “Schafer is suffering from a sort of anterograde amnesia based on her denial of her condition. Her brain has been blocking everything that’s happened to her since her Alzheimer’s was diagnosed.”

  “She’s not storing any new memories?”

  “Not since a drunken night a week ago, just after Clouseau gave her the diagnosis. Every morning when she wakes up, her memory resets. She doesn’t know she has Alzheimer’s and she thinks that she was partying on the Champs-Élysées just the night before. She has also forgotten that she’s been on medical leave from the police department for the past three months.”

  Gabriel tried to put things in perspective. “Well, we know that denial and the disappearance of past memories are symptoms of the disease…”

  “Yes, but this girl doesn’t appear sick at all. She’s intellectually agile and quite a character.”

  Gabriel gave a long sigh of resignation. Krieg knew better than anyone how to pique his curiosity. And this girl’s case was clearly very mysterious.

  “All right, I’ll go see if I can find her.”

  “Thanks, Gabe! You’re a lifesaver!”

  “I’m not making any promises, though,” Keyne said.

  “You’ll manage, I’m sure you will. I’ll text you her exact location. Call me as soon as you have any news.”

  Gabriel hung up with the disagreeable sensation of having been duped. Since his return to New York, he had created his own medical business in Astoria, specializing in emergency psychiatric house calls. He sent his secretary a text telling her he’d be out of the office this morning and asking her to get someone to cover for him.

  He quickly got dressed in his previous day’s clothes—dark jeans, pale blue shirt, dark jacket, putty-colored trench coat, Converse sneakers—then opened the door of the closet where he had left his medical kit. He put a syringe filled with a powerful sedative inside a small leather toiletries case. After all, this woman was armed and potentially dangerous. He put the travel case in his briefcase and left the room.

  Downstairs, he asked the doorman to call him a taxi, then realized he had left his remote control for the briefcase in his hotel room. If he went more than fifty yards from the receiver, an alarm and an electrical charge would go off automatically.

  His cab was on its way, so he decided not to waste time by going back up to his room; instead, he left the briefcase in the hotel cloakroom.

  In return, the employee handed him a claim ticket bearing the number 127.

  A watermark of the intertwined letters G and H formed a discreet logo behind it.

  25

  Just Before

  Manhattan

  7:15 a.m.

  Forty-five minutes before Alice first meets Gabriel

  NOTES FROM A jazz number crackled inside the cab.

  It took Gabriel only a few seconds to recognize the legendary recording: Bill Evans playing “All of You” by Cole Porter at the Village Vanguard in 1961. Although he had no talent as a musician, the psychiatrist loved jazz and often went to bars and concert halls in search of new sounds or—the very opposite—in an attempt to rekindle the emotions he had felt as a college student when he first discovered the music in the clubs of Chicago.

  There was roadwork on Harrison, so the taxi took a roundabout route to get on Hudson Street. In the back seat of the cab, Gabriel continued reading Alice Schafer’s file on his cell phone screen. The final part of the document, written by a psychologist at the clinic, consisted of a long biographical note supported by articles taken from French newspapers, each with a brief translated summary. All these articles mentioned the serial killer Erik Vaughn, who had terrorized the French capital two years earlier. Gabriel had never heard of the case. It wasn’t easy to read on such a small screen and with the taxi lurching from side to side. At first, skimming through the early press reports, Gabriel thought it was an investigation that Alice was working on, and he felt as if he were living inside one of those thrillers that he often devoured on train or plane trips.

  Then he came to the four-page article from Paris Match that described the tragedy in Alice’s life: The young cop had found the killer, but she too had become one of his victims. What he read chilled him—Vaughn had stabbed her in the abdomen, killing the baby inside her womb and leaving her for dead in a pool of blood. And then the bitter coda: her husband dying in a car accident as he drove to the hospital to be with her.

  The shock of this made Gabriel feel sick, and for a minute he thought he was going to throw up the two cups of coffee he’d drunk earlier that morning. While the car rushed along Eighth Avenue, he pressed his face to the window for several minutes, keeping himself very still. How could fate have been so cruel to this woman? After she’d endured such tragedy, how could fate strike her down with Alzheimer’s at only thirty-eight years old?

  The sun was rising now, its first rays piercing the forest of skyscrapers. The taxi moved up Central Park West and dropped Gabriel at the intersection of Seventy-Second Street, near the park’s western entrance.

  The psychiatrist handed the driver a bill and closed the door behind him. The air was cool, but the cloudless sky gave him hope that this would turn out to be a beautiful day. He looked around him. Traffic was growing dense. On the sidewalk, pretzel and hot-dog carts were already open for business. Opposite the Dakota, a street vendor was laying out his posters, T-shirts, and gadgets bearing the image of John Lennon.

  Gabriel entered the park. The atmosphere was bucolic. He passed the triangle garden of Strawberry Fields and walked down the path that ran alongside the lake until he reached the Cherry Hill Fountain. The sunlight was beautiful, the air fresh and dry, and already the area was bustling with life—joggers, skaters, cyclists, and dog walkers all passing by in a sort of improvised but harmonious ballet.

  Gabriel felt his phone vibrate in the pocket of his trench coat. Thomas had sent him a text containing a screenshot of a map showing Alice Schafer’s precise location. The young woman was still somewhere on the other side of the bridge that went over the lake.

  Gabriel had no trouble orienting himself. The towers of the San Remo were behind him; farther up ahead were the Bethesda Terrace and Fountain; to his left was Bow Bridge, with its delicate arabesque decorations. He crossed this long, cream-colored bridge and went into the Ramble.

  The psychiatrist had never been here, in the wildest part of Central Park. Little by little, the copses and bushes gave way to real woods: elms, oaks, a carpet of moss and dry leaves, boulders. He kept walking, eyes fixed on the screen of his phone so he wouldn’t get lost. It was hard to believe that a dense forest could exist so close to such a busy area. The thicker the vegetation grew, the quieter the sounds of the city became, and finally they disappeared altogether. Soon, all he could hear was birdsong and the rustle of leaves.

  Gabriel blew on his hands to warm them up and looked at his screen again. He was beginning to think he must have gone the wrong way, when he came to a clearing in the woods.

  It was a place removed from time, protected from everything around it by the golden dome formed by the foliage of a giant elm tree. There was something unreal about the light here, as if butterflies with luminous wings were fluttering in the sky. Swept by a gentle breeze, red leaves fluttered through the air. An odor of damp earth and rotting leaves permeated the atmosphere.

>   In the center of the clearing, a woman was lying on a bench, asleep.

  Gabriel carefully approached her. Yes, it was Alice Schafer, curled up in a fetal position, wearing a leather jacket and jeans. A bloodstained blouse was visible below her jacket. Gabriel was alarmed, thinking that she must be injured. After examining the blouse, however, he realized the blood must be that of the hospital security guard, Caleb Dunn. He leaned over until he was almost touching the young woman’s hair, listening to her breathe. He stayed in that position for a moment, watching the thousand shades of gold reflected in her ponytail, looking at her fragile face, her pale skin, and her dry pink lips, feeling the warm air that blew out from between them.

  He felt unexpectedly stirred by this. A fire lit up his entire being. This woman’s fragility, the solitude that seemed to emanate from her body, echoed painfully within him. All it took was a few seconds, a single look, and he felt destiny knocking on the door of his life. Seized by some irrational force, he suddenly knew that he would do everything he could to help Alice Schafer.

  Time was short. As gently as possible, he searched through the young woman’s jacket pockets and found her wallet, a pair of handcuffs, and Caleb Dunn’s gun. He left the pistol where it was but took the wallet and the handcuffs. Inside the wallet was Schafer’s police ID card, a photograph of a blond, curly-haired man, and an ultrasound image.

  So, what now?

  His brain buzzed. The glimmers of a crazy scenario began to form inside his mind. The outline had come to him during the taxi ride as he listened to the jazz pianist on the radio, read the articles about Vaughn, the serial killer, and thought over what Thomas had said about Alice’s anterograde amnesia and her denial of the disease: Every morning when she wakes up, her memory resets. She doesn’t know she has Alzheimer’s and she thinks that she was partying on the Champs-Élysées just the night before.

  He emptied his own pockets and made an inventory of everything he had with him: his wallet, his cell phone, a shiny ballpoint pen, his Swiss Army knife, the claim ticket for his briefcase.