A Tangled Web

by Judith Michael

  “You need one now. We’ll forget Marseilles for today; it can wait—”

  “It can’t wait. Another half hour, Robert, that’s all. Do you know a doctor in Marseilles?”

  “Of course. But, Max, this is not wise; we don’t know how badly she—” He saw Max’s face darken. “Well, then, to Marseilles. Gently, my friends!” he said as the men in the boat lifted Stephanie’s inert form and laid her on the dock. The gash on her head was bleeding again, her sodden hair dripped water mixed with blood, and bruises and small cuts covered her swollen face and arms. “Into the car. Max, you first, the back seat, and hold her when we put her in . . . Now, my friends, lift her gently but speedily; the helicopter is waiting.”

  Stephanie lay against Max, her head rolling from side to side as Robert careened around corners until Max held her tightly to his chest. He watched the buildings that seemed to race past on both sides, the palm trees and flower gardens and policemen directing traffic, but his eyes were dulled by exhaustion and a low, throbbing anger that held him in its grip. Fool, fool, to let them get ahead of me.

  They had never been able to do it before; they’d never been able to touch him. I got lazy, he thought, stupid, let down my guard; didn’t give a damn about anything but—he looked at the woman in his arms—about anything but Sabrina.

  It wasn’t quite true: he had conducted his business and made careful plans to wind up his activities in England and disappear when the time was right, but for the past few weeks he had let himself be distracted from business and the survival and prosperity of Max Stuyvesant; he had been absorbed by thoughts of this woman, so different from the Sabrina he had known years before, when she was married to Denton.

  As if she mesmerized me, he thought: Max Stuyvesant so mesmerized by Sabrina Longworth that I forgot to keep looking over my shoulder, forgot to watch and wait and listen . . . and so the bastards almost killed me. Almost killed both of us.

  He tightened his hold. She was alive. He let himself recapture the joy he had felt on the ship when her pulse had fluttered beneath his fingers. She was alive and she was his. And he knew he was more than mesmerized. He was fiercely, possessively in love with her.

  “All right, Max,” said Robert, and they pulled up beside the helicopter. Two men were waiting; they helped Max and Robert bring Stephanie inside, and in a moment the blades were spinning in the muggy air, singing a high, sustained pitch and lifting the helicopter from the ground.

  They flew low, over the hotels and villas of the Côte d’Azur, one of the great playgrounds of the world, to the dense, industrialized sprawl of Marseilles and, directed by Robert, to the roof of a hospital built in the shape of a cross. The helicopter door was opened and a team of men and women in white coats took Stephanie from Max, lifting her onto a stretcher. He did not see her again until the next day.

  She lay in a narrow bed in a narrow whitewashed room, with the morning sun streaming in. She wore a white gown beneath a white coverlet; a wide white bandage was wound around her forehead; a clear, shiny ointment and small white patches were on the cuts and bruises all over her face and arms. Her eyes were closed, the eyelids quivering as she slept. Her magnificent hair had been cut short; it was a curly halo, chestnut gleaming red and gold in the sun, the only color in the room.

  Max sat in a hard metal chair beside the bed. He took her hand from beneath the coverlet and held it between his. Tubes ran from her other hand to three clear plastic bags hanging from a metal stand at the foot of the bed. Max could see the slow drip of fluid from the bags into the tubes, and he thought of the other time he had seen that, when he was nine years old, sitting beside his mother’s hospital bed in London. He had not thought of his mother for years; he had not thought of himself as a boy since his father had disappeared when he was twelve. Max had been a man all his life.

  But the clutch of fear he felt as he watched the fluid drip into the plastic tubes brought back the child he had been, and he had to wrench his thoughts away from that terrified boy and away from his mother. She had died; this woman would live. He sat in the metal chair as the hours passed and the nurses replaced the empty bags with full ones, and the drops moved slowly down their channels, agonizingly slowly, into the veins of the pale hand lying motionless on the bed, and he held the other hand, moving away only when the doctor made his twice daily examination. Each time, as soon as he was gone, Max moved back to the hard chair and again took that unresponsive hand in his.

  He was willing her to live and recover, even as he spent the hours trying to figure out what to tell her if she did. They had to go into hiding and change their names; he had already used her new name when he filled out the forms admitting her to the hospital. They had to go into hiding and stay there until he found a way to eliminate those who had set the bomb. Until he knew they were safe.

  He had made plans for hiding. He had known for some time that he would have to leave England and change his operations. When newspaper stories began appearing on the smuggling of antiquities, he had known it would have to be soon. At the same time, he was being pressured by Denton to expand their operations just when he knew he had to cut back or stop altogether, at least for a while. And then, because the damn fools who worked for him had started a little sideline of selling forged art to galleries, and the reporters were after that story, too, he knew another spotlight could be turned on him. Every week he moved up the date for disappearing. He had made plans and everything was in place . . . but the plans were for one person, not for a couple.

  Now he had to rethink all of it. He could handle their living arrangements: Robert would help him find a larger place for them to live than the small apartment he had rented for himself in Aix-en-Provence. But to keep her with him, to persuade her to give up her life in London, her antique shop, her friends, her very identity, required either that she loved him so passionately that nothing else mattered—loved him as he knew now he loved her—or that she was afraid.

  She did not love him. He knew that. But he was sure she would, if they had time. And so he would have to convince her that she was in danger, and that safety lay only in staying with him.

  His thoughts raced, then settled on this solution while he sat beside her and watched her as the hours passed. He ate, dully and automatically, the food the nurses’ aides brought him, and answered their questions in his fluent but oddly accented French that made them look at him curiously, wondering where he came from; and he dozed through the nights on a cot they put beside the bed. And then, on the third day, Stephanie opened her eyes.

  Max felt again that leap of joy and he leaned over her, his hands clasping hers, and started to say her name. But then he stopped. She was staring straight up, at the ceiling, not moving, and something about that blank stare and the stillness of her body made him fearful and kept him silent. He tightened his grip on her hand, and waited.

  The minutes stretched out. Finally, very slowly, she turned her head. Their eyes met in a long look, and Max knew that she had no idea who he was.

  In an instant, everything changed. It might be only temporary—a few days, perhaps only a few hours—but if it was not, if she really had lost her memory and it held, it would be as if he had been given a gift. Max had lived a lifetime on his wits, on the ability to incorporate new information instantly and adapt it to that moment’s situation. Now, meeting Stephanie’s blank stare, he knew that this was far better than his other solution. He would not know for sure for a while yet, but he had an alternative now, and if it worked out, he could not have planned events more perfectly. “Sabrina,.” he said, and watched her face.

  She frowned and echoed it, her voice thin and tentative. “Sabrina . . .”

  “You don’t remember?” He spoke in French, silently willing her to reply in French. Her command of the language was as good as his and her accent was better, and he assumed that if, indeed, she had no memory, she would follow what she heard and saw. He would make sure that she followed him in everything, and clung to him, and belong
ed to him. “Well, if you don’t remember, we won’t worry about it now; we’ll deal with it later. You’ve had a shock, you’ve been hurt.” He bent down and kissed her cheek, then kissed her lightly on the lips. “You’ll be all right, Sabrina; you’ll be fine.”

  “Sabrina.” She tested it on her tongue, then shook her head. “Je ne comprends pas . . .” Max let out his breath. Perfect. Stephanie’s eyes widened as the enormity of it struck her—I don’t understand—and she began to cry. “I don’t understand. I don’t know anything. Why don’t I know?”

  “If you please, monsieur.” The doctor was behind Max. “If you will wait outside . . .”

  Max did not look at him. “I’m staying with my wife.”

  Stephanie’s eyes widened. She stared at him.

  “This is my patient, monsieur; I intend to examine her.”

  After a moment, Max relinquished Stephanie’s hand and backed away from the bed. He leaned against the wall, making it clear, by his folded arms and unwavering stare, that that was as far as he would go.

  The doctor fastened a blood pressure cuff around Stephanie’s arm. “You do not know your name, madame?”

  “Go away.” Still crying, Stephanie rolled her head back and forth, as if trapped, then looked away, through the narrow window at the blue-white sky. “Go away, go away, I don’t want you here. I don’t want anybody here.”

  “Madame has had an accident,” the doctor said calmly. “It is necessary that we discover the extent of the damage, physically and mentally.” He bent over Stephanie, holding her eyes open to shine a tiny flashlight into them. He took her pulse, pulled out his stethoscope to listen to her heart, thumped her chest. He pulled back the coverlet and struck her knees and Achilles tendon with a tiny hammer. He raised and lowered her arms and legs, examining her bruises, then covered her again, neatly, laying her hand gently at her side on top of the coverlet.

  Stephanie lay still, unresponsive, almost unaware, staring at the ceiling past the doctor’s fringe of gray hair. She winced when he began to unwrap the bandage around her head. “Ah, très bien, this will heal,” he murmured, and rewrapped the wound with fresh gauze.

  He gazed at Stephanie’s profile. He could not place her nationality. She spoke perfect French, but with a faint, unidentifiable accent that made him sure she was not French. The man most assuredly was not French; he spoke fluently but with an accent that was vaguely German. Two people who probably have spent their lives in many places, the doctor mused; intelligent people who are quick with languages. The world has more of them every day: sophisticated chameleons. The woman, even bruised and injured, was extraordinarily beautiful, and her beauty and fearfulness drew him, but he knew he could help her only as much as the husband permitted.

  “So, madame.” He spoke to Stephanie’s profile, aware of Max’s unwavering stare on his back. “Physically, you improve. You are a fortunate woman; your wound will heal, your hair will grow and cover the scar, your bruises will disappear. We have superb plastic surgeons who can repair the damage to your face. But now we must talk about the other injury, to your memory. There are many things you do not remember?”

  Stephanie did not reply.

  “Your name, madame. Tell me your first name. And your maiden name.”

  She stared at the ceiling.

  “Or any name that comes to you, madame, a friend’s name, perhaps, an acquaintance, someone who works for you; it might lead you closer to your own. Madame, I cannot help you unless I know the extent of the problem. Can you tell me your name? Or anything else about yourself, your friends, your life in . . . where is it you come from, madame?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!” Stephanie held up her hands, one of them trailing the plastic tubes, and turned the palms toward her, then away, then toward her again. “Hands,” she said. “My hands.” Her gaze raced around the room. “Wall. Window. Sky. Bed. Hands. Is that right? Doctor,” she said, and pointed at him. She pointed. “Left. Right. Up. Down. Is that right? Was everything right?”

  “Yes, madame, yes, yes,” the doctor said. “What else do you know?”

  “Ceiling,” Stephanie said. “Door. Sheets. Pillow.”

  “And your name is Madame . . .” The doctor let the word dangle. “Quickly, madame. Your name is Madame . . .”

  Stephanie shook her head. “I don’t know. I know things. Why is that? Why don’t I know anything else? What am I going to do?”

  “You’ll get well,” Max said. “You’ll be with me and you’ll get well.” He came to the bedside and spoke to the doctor. “How soon can you arrange for the plastic surgeon? Everything else I can take care of.”

  The doctor ignored him. “Something has made you forget many things, madame. Perhaps not for long, and perhaps not everything; I would like to help you find out. It may have been the blow to your head or the trauma of the accident—”

  “What accident? Nobody said anything about an accident.”

  The doctor looked at her closely. “A few minutes ago I said madame had had an accident. You do not remember that?”

  “No. You said an accident? I don’t remember. What accident?”

  “Your husband said your motorboat rammed the end of a dock and there was a fire . . .” He turned to Max. “You’re sure that was what happened, monsieur? A ship exploded off Monaco last week; you were not involved in that?”

  “I told you what happened. I didn’t hear about a ship exploding; when was it?”

  “Oh, Monday or Tuesday, I don’t remember. It must have been about the time of your accident. But of course you could not have been in that other one; I understand there were no survivors. A terrible thing.” He turned back to Stephanie. “You remember nothing about a motorboat?”

  “No.” Stephanie turned her head to look at Max. “My husband.” She held up her hands again, spreading the fingers wide, looking at the bare third finger on her left hand.

  Max moved in, bringing Stephanie’s hands down to the bed, holding her free one between his. He had had time, standing there, to think everything through, and now it was all in place; everything that he had planned for the past year reformulated to a new life not just for Max Stuyvesant but for Sabrina Longworth as well. He spoke to Stephanie, but his words were for the doctor, too. “We met five days ago, at a party in Cap-Ferrat; we were married the next day, and we went for the boat ride that afternoon. You’ve been unconscious for three days. We didn’t take the time to buy a ring; we planned to wait until we found the perfect one. We planned a honeymoon, too, and we’ll have it, and you’ll have your ring, but first we’ll get you well and take you home.”

  Stephanie was watching him through the tears still welling in her eyes. “I don’t know who you are.”

  “Max Lacoste.”

  “And I—?”

  “Sabrina Lacoste.”

  “What was madame’s name before she was married?” the doctor asked.

  “Robion,” Max said promptly.

  The doctor sighed. “There must be half a million Robions in France. But you, monsieur, you can tell madame who she is, where she comes from, who is her family . . .”

  Max was shaking his head, still looking at Stephanie. “We didn’t talk about our past; we thought there was plenty of time for that. We talked about the future. We had so many ideas about what we would do together, so many hopes and dreams . . . and all of them can still come true.”

  “Sa-bri-na.” She said it as she had before, testing it. “Sabrina. Sabrina. Sabrina.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t seem right.”

  “Where do you live?” the doctor asked Max.

  “Not far. I asked you about a plastic surgeon for madame; I’m anxious to get her home.”

  “I want to give her a week to get her strength back; then we’ll have the plastic surgeon come in. But I also urge you to let me bring in a psychologist for counseling. She should be evaluated—”

  “If we’re married,” Stephanie said, “what was my name before?”

>   “I told you,” Max said. “Robion.”

  “You did? Robion? That was my name?” Her eyes widened. “When did you tell me?”

  “A few minutes ago; it isn’t important.”

  “It is, it is.” Her voice rose. “I can’t remember anything?”

  “You must not be alarmed,” the doctor said quickly. “This is not unusual, this form of amnesia; it often occurs after a trauma. It is called anterograde amnesia and it almost always disappears within a few days. But, madame, you also have a kind of amnesia known as retrograde amnesia, which can be more persistent. I think you should be fully evaluated by skilled professionals who can diagnose the particular form your amnesia has taken and help you with the trauma you have undergone, perhaps help you find ways to jar loose your memories.’ ”

  “My wife and I will deal with her trauma,” Max said.

  “But there are those, monsieur, who are so familiar with cases like this . . .”

  Leave me alone! The thought was in English, not French, and as she realized it Stephanie was engulfed in a wave of terror. She jerked her hand from Max’s grip and slid it beneath the coverlet; she closed her eyes and shut both men out. Their voices rumbled above her, deep and antagonistic, but it was like trains going by—trains, Stephanie thought; was I on a train? Where did I go?—a rush, a roar, with no meaning, and she lay stiffly beneath the sound, her hands clenched, afraid to move. She was alone in emptiness—-a fog, a cloud, the sky, all of space, infinity—with nothing to gaze upon or touch or grasp. She tried to think of a place where she belonged—a house, a room, a chair, a bed—but there was nothing. She tried to picture a town, a neighborhood, a street, but there was only emptiness: no scenery, no roadway, no guideposts. Only a muffling, terrifying emptiness.

  Sabrina. Sabrina . . . what? What did he say my last name was? He told me, didn’t he? Oh, God, I cant . . . She began to shiver. The name Sabrina meant nothing to her, and she could not remember her last name.