Central Park

by Guillaume Musso

  He had to improvise with that. Time was running out. The pieces of the puzzle came together in his head with stunning speed. Inspired, he put together his plan in only a few seconds.

  He checked the number of the Greenwich Hotel on his cell phone, then used his pen to write it on Alice’s palm, praying that she wouldn’t wake up.

  Then he left the clearing for a few minutes. About fifty yards north, he found a little pond crossed by a tiny rustic wooden bridge and surrounded by weeping willows and low bushes. To judge from the number of bird feeders attached to tree branches, this place—calm and silent at this time of day—must be a sort of observation point created by the park’s bird-watchers.

  Gabriel took off his trench coat and cut a long, thin band from the lining that looked like a pale-colored strip of gauze. He removed his jacket, rolled up the sleeve of his shirt, and, with the blade of his knife, carved six numbers into his forearm: 141197, the combination for the lock on his briefcase. He grimaced with pain as he felt the blade dig into his skin. If a park ranger were to come upon him now, he would struggle to explain what he was doing.

  He wrapped up his bleeding arm with the makeshift bandage, then lowered his shirtsleeve, put his jacket back on, and bundled up his and Alice’s wallets, his Swiss army knife, his watch, and his pen in his raincoat.

  Then he decided to call Thomas.

  “Tell me you’ve found her and she’s alive!” his friend pleaded.

  “Yeah, she’s asleep on a bench in the middle of the woods here.”

  “Have you tried waking her?”

  “Not yet. But I need to do it before someone shows up.”

  “Have you taken Dunn’s gun off her?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “Listen, I’m going to try to bring her back to the clinic, but I want to do it my way.”

  “Okay, whatever you think is best,” Krieg said.

  Frowning, Gabriel scratched the back of his head. “Who do you think she’ll try to call when she wakes up?”

  “Probably Seymour Lombart. He’s her best friend and her colleague. He was the one who recommended our clinic to her and paid for her treatment.”

  “You have to call that guy. Whatever she says to him, ask him not to mention her disease. Tell him to play for time and follow her instructions as she gives them.”

  “Are you sure about this? Because—”

  “I’m not sure of anything. But if you don’t like it, you can always come here and get her yourself.”

  Krieg simply sighed.

  “One other thing. Is Agatha in New York yet?” Gabriel asked.

  “She called me two minutes ago. She just landed at JFK.”

  “Tell her to come to Central Park right away. To the north of the Ramble, she’ll find a little pond surrounded by azaleas. There’s a wooden bridge and some trees with bird feeders in the branches. I’m going to leave all my things along with Schafer’s personal belongings in the biggest of those bird feeders. Ask Agatha to pick them up before anyone else finds them. And tell her to be ready to help me if I call her.”

  “I’ll do that right now,” Krieg replied. “When will you call again?”

  “Whenever I can. There’s no point trying to reach me on my cell phone, because I need to get rid of it.”

  “All right. Well, good luck.”

  “One last question: Does Alice Schafer have a boyfriend?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “What about that Seymour guy?”

  “I think he’s gay. Why?”

  “No reason.”

  Gabriel hung up and slid the cell phone into the bundle he’d made with his trench coat, then pushed this as deeply as possible into the biggest bird feeder he could find.

  Back in the clearing, he saw with relief that Alice had not moved.

  There, he dealt with the final details. He took the claim ticket for his briefcase and pushed it into the small pocket of Alice’s jeans. Then he leaned over her forearm and, very gently, played with the push button of the man’s watch she was wearing, changing the date to exactly one week before. On the face of the Patek, the perpetual calendar now said that today was Tuesday, October 8, instead of October 15.

  Last, he slipped one of the handcuff bracelets around Alice’s right wrist and fastened the other one to his own left wrist.

  Now they were inseparable. Chained together for better or worse.

  He threw the key to the handcuffs as far as he could into the undergrowth.

  Then he curled up on the bench, closed his eyes, and leaned softly against the young woman.

  The weight of his body seemed to pull Alice from the depths of sleep.

  It was eight a.m.

  The adventure could begin.

  26

  The Mirrors

  I OPEN MY EYES.

  I recognize the room—white, antiseptic, timeless. Tile floor, immaculate walls, a wardrobe, and a small wooden desk. Wide window blinds filter the slanting light. A décor more in keeping with the comfort of a hotel than the asceticism of a hospital.

  I know exactly where I am: Room 6 in Sebago Hospital, near Portland, Maine. And I know why I am here.

  I sit up against the pillow. I feel as if I am in a sensory no-man’s-land, like a dead star extinguished a long time ago. Little by little, however, I regain full awareness. My body is rested, my mind relieved of a great weight, as if I have just emerged from a long, nightmarish journey that has taken me through the palaces of Night, Dreams, and Sleep, has seen me fight Cerberus and defeat the Furies.

  I stand up and walk, barefoot, to the sliding glass door. I open it, and the blast of icy air that blows through the room revives me. The view below me is breathtaking. Surrounded by a steeply sloping pine forest, Sebago Lake is a cobalt mirror that stretches out for miles like an azure jewel. There is a huge rock in the shape of a castle and a wooden dock extending over the water.

  “Hello, Ms. Schafer.”

  Surprised, I turn around. Sitting in a corner of the room, an Asian-American nurse has been watching me silently for several minutes without my noticing.

  “I hope you are feeling well. Dr. Keyne is waiting for you near the lake.”

  “Dr. Keyne?”

  “He asked me to tell you he was there as soon as you woke up.” She walks to the window and points to a spot in the distance. I squint and see Gabriel, hands inside the open hood of the Shelby. He waves, signals me to join him. Inside the closet, I find the suitcase I brought with me. I put on a pair of jeans, a sweater, a jacket, and shoes, and I exit through the sliding glass door.

  I walk toward him, mesmerized by the deep blue surface of the lake.

  Everything is clear in my mind now. My memories are neatly ordered in the filing cabinet of my brain. Clouseau’s alarming diagnosis, Seymour’s mentioning Sebago Hospital, his efforts to have me admitted here, my flight to the United States, my first days in the clinic, the cerebral stimulator implanted in my chest and the panic attack that followed, my forceful denial of the disease, my escape from the hospital, my fight with the security guard, my running away to New York, falling asleep on that bench in Central Park…

  And then the bizarre encounter with that strange guy, Gabriel Keyne, who accompanied me on the winding path of that crazy day. A treasure hunt during which my deepest terrors rose to the surface: The specter of Erik Vaughn, the loss of my baby, the trauma of Paul’s death, my doubts about the loyalty of my father and Seymour. And my continuing refusal to accept the state of my health, to the extent that I persuaded myself that I was waking up on the morning of October 8 when it was actually one week later.

  “Hello, Alice. I hope you’ve slept well,” Keyne says, closing the hood of the car.

  He is wearing cargo pants, a wide leather belt, a ribbed-knit sweater. His beard is thick, his hair a mess, his eyes dark-ringed and shining. The grease marks on his cheeks make him look more like a mechanic than a doctor.

  I say nothing.
He tries to start a conversation.

  “I’m sorry about the syringe I stuck in your neck. But sedating you was the only way to get you to sleep.”

  He grabs the cigarette tucked behind his ear and lights it with an old Zippo lighter. I now know that this man is not Vaughn. But who is he? As if reading my thoughts, he holds out a hand shiny with oil and grease.

  “Gabriel Keyne, psychiatrist,” he says, introducing himself formally.

  I refuse to shake his hand. “Jazz pianist, magician, FBI special agent, psychiatrist…you really are a chameleon.”

  He gives a sort of embarrassed grimace. “I understand why you’re mad at me, Alice, and I’m sorry to have deceived you. But this time, I swear I’m telling you the truth.”

  As often happens, the cop inside me gets the upper hand and I bombard him with questions. I discover that it was his former partner Thomas Krieg, the clinic director, who asked him to find me in New York and bring me here.

  “But why did you claim to be a pianist? Why Dublin? Why the handcuffs, the cloakroom ticket, and the numbers on my hand? What the hell was all that about?”

  He exhales a long plume of smoke. “It was all part of a script that I wrote at the last minute.”

  “A script?”

  “The staging of a role-play psychiatric game, if you prefer.”

  Seeing my incredulous expression, Gabriel realizes he needs to tell me more.

  “We had to find a way to stop you from denying your condition. To make you confront the ghosts of your past in order to free you from them. This is my job: rebuilding people, trying to help them reorder their minds.”

  “And you came up with this ‘script’ just like that?”

  “I tried to enter into your logic, your way of thinking. It’s the most effective way of establishing contact. I improvised as I went along based on what you told me and the decisions you made.”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t believe a word of this. It’s impossible.”

  He looks at me. “Why?”

  In my head, the events of the previous day are replaying on fast-forward. And then the images freeze as they are succeeded by questions. “The numbers in blood on your arm?”

  “I scratched them there myself with a Swiss Army knife.”

  I have trouble believing what I’m hearing. “The claim ticket from the Greenwich Hotel?”

  “That’s where I spent the previous night, after a conference.”

  “The electrified briefcase?”

  “Mine. The alarm and the electric shock are set off automatically as soon as the briefcase is taken more than fifty yards from the remote control.”

  “The GPS in my shoe?”

  “All the patients in the clinic have a GPS in one of their shoes. It’s common practice for hospitals dealing with patients suffering from memory problems.”

  “But you had one too…” I play the scene over in my head, me standing in front of the thrift store as Gabriel throws his sneaker into a trash can.

  “No, I told you I’d found one. You didn’t see it. You believed me without checking.”

  He walks around the car, opens the trunk, and takes out a jack and a tire iron to change the Shelby’s blown tire. I still can’t believe how easily he tricked me.

  “But…what about the whole thing with Vaughn?”

  “I wanted a way to get us out of New York,” he explains, squatting down to remove the hubcap. “I’d read in your case file about what Vaughn did to you. I knew I could get you to do anything if I dangled him in front of you.”

  I feel the anger rising within me. I am capable of beating the shit out of him, but first I want to make sure I understand.

  “The fingerprints on the syringe…they were yours, of course? Vaughn is dead.”

  “Yes. If your father says he killed him, there’s no reason not to believe him. I’ll keep your secret. I’m not normally in favor of vigilantism, but in this case, who could blame him?”

  “And Seymour?”

  “Krieg called him and asked him to cooperate with us. Later on, I called him myself to ask him to give you false clues and direct you toward the hospital.”

  “When? We were together the whole time.”

  He looks at me and shakes his head, his lips pursed. “Not all the time, Alice. In Chinatown, I waited for you to leave the pawnbroker’s and then asked the guy to let me make a call. And later, by the community garden in Hell’s Kitchen, you stayed in the car while you thought I was calling my friend Kenny from a pay phone.”

  Using the tire iron, he starts unscrewing the wheel nuts while continuing his story.

  “In the train station, while I was buying our subway tickets, a very sweet grandmother let me use her cell phone to make a call. In Astoria, while you were taking your bath, I had time to use the phone in the hookah bar. And when we were driving north, I left you with Barbie for a good ten minutes while I was supposedly buying cigarettes.”

  “And all those times, you were actually talking to Seymour?”

  “He was the one who helped me play that FBI special agent role with some degree of credibility. I must admit he was a bigger help than I could have hoped. That thing with the corpse in the sugar factory—where he never set foot, of course—that was his idea.”

  “The bastard…”

  “He loves you very much, you know. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a friend like him.”

  He sets up the jack and begins levering the car a few inches from the ground. Seeing him grimace with pain, I remember stabbing him the night before. It must have given him quite a deep muscular wound. I’m not in the mood to get softhearted, though.

  “What about my father?”

  “Ah, he was the one I worried about. I really wasn’t sure that the great Alain Schafer would agree to play along. Thankfully, Seymour was able to steal his phone.”

  I take all these blows like a boxer caught in the corner of the ring. But I want to know. To know everything.

  “The apartment in Astoria? Your friend Kenny Forrest?”

  “Kenny doesn’t exist. I invented that story of the jazz pianist because I love jazz. As for the apartment, it’s mine. And by the way, you owe me a bottle of La Tâche 1999. I was keeping that for a special occasion.”

  As usual, he thinks that humor will undercut my anger. Or he is provoking me, trying to make me fly off the handle.

  “You know where you can stick your bottle! So what about Madame Chaouch, the building owner? How come she didn’t recognize you?”

  “I called her from the station and asked her not to give me away.”

  Having unscrewed the nuts, he removes the blown tire, then finishes his explanation.

  “Agatha, Krieg’s assistant, went to the apartment a few minutes before we got there to get rid of anything that might have identified me: photographs, files, bills…my shoulder really hurts. Could you pass me the spare tire?”

  “Go fuck yourself! What about the log cabin?”

  Gabriel takes a step away from me and checks the bandages under his sweater and shirt. The strain of removing the wheel must have made his wound bleed again, but he grits his teeth and grabs the spare tire.

  “The cabin belongs to the real Caleb Dunn. And I asked Agatha to pin those three pictures to the door after I found them in your wallet.”

  “The Shelby is yours too, I imagine?”

  “I won it in a poker game when I was living in Chicago,” the psychiatrist says, standing up and wiping his hands.

  Listening to him is unbearable. I feel belittled, humiliated. In tricking me this way, Gabriel has taken the last thing that remained to me: my certainty that I was still a good cop.

  “I have to admit, I got lucky,” he says. “You nearly found me out twice. First, when you insisted on going with me to the hematology lab to leave the blood sample.”

  I’m not sure I understand what he means. I let him continue.

  “I do know Eliane; the clinic has worked with her lab for a long time. I didn�
�t have time to warn her, but thankfully she never called me ‘Doctor’ in front of you.” He smiles.

  I do not see much humor in this story.

  “And the second time?”

  “Your colleague Franck Maréchal. We really came close to disaster there. To begin with, I was lucky that he didn’t know about your medical leave. And then, when he made his request to the parking garage, he just checked the records for your license plate. If he’d mentioned in his e-mail to you that the images were a week old, I would have been screwed!”

  I nod. I am so angry, filled with a rage I cannot channel. A torrent of disgust and indignation takes possession of my body. I bend down, grab the tire iron, stand up, move toward Gabriel, and, with all my strength, smash him in the stomach with it.

  27

  White Shadows

  I HIT HIM AGAIN and Gabriel crumples into the dust, winded and bent double.

  “I hate you, you bastard!”

  He wraps his hands over his abdomen. I continue to pour out my rage.

  “All that crap you told me about your son, about the death of your wife’s sister…inventing lies like that, it’s disgusting!”

  He tries to stand up, holding his arms crossed in front of him to fend off another blow.

  “Alice, that’s all true! I swear, that part is all true. The only part I invented was the bit about being a cop in Chicago—I was actually a volunteer psychiatrist in a charity that helped prostitutes.”

  I drop the tire iron and let him stand up.

  “My wife really did go to London with our son,” he explains as he gets his breath back. “I quit my job here at the clinic so I could move closer to her.”

  In spite of this admission, I can’t stop the torrent of anger that is flowing through me. “I bet you had fun with your little masquerade, didn’t you? But what good did it do me?”

  I throw myself at him, punching him in the chest and screaming: “Tell me! What good did it do me?”