Cautiously I approached the main square, a gloomy concrete plaza surrounded by a semicircular colonnade with Greco-Roman decorations. Two long stony benches faced an altar under an awning that provided no protection from the oblique drizzle. The façade was almost empty.
Joseph-Arthur’s funeral service boasted a modest attendance; I was surprised by the number of people brave enough to show up despite the imminent storm. At first, I didn’t recognize any familiar faces. Mrs. Hertz hadn’t attended, but one of the night shift nurses did—a young lady with a short dark bob. A large bouquet from Blue Meadows was leaning against the wall behind her.
Three women sat on the lateral stone bench. Grandma wasn’t among them; clearly, Hertz had decided not to risk another attempted escape. I neared the gathering, taking care to stay in the dark part of the structure. Halfway to the awning I recognized the knitting lady from the terrace. She was deeply immersed in conversation and didn’t notice me skirting by. Before slipping out through the exit, I glanced back to make sure no one was following me.
The wind howled between the concrete posts but, when the roar died occasionally, I could distinguish fragments of conversation. The voice of the knitting lady was high-pitched and squeaky. She was concerned about the future of their Tuesday bridge meetings.
Five minutes to six. There was little time left.
The casket was awaiting the ceremony in a laying-out room behind a fountain facing the main square. It forced me to circle an open space and hop above a row of dense bushes outlining the gravel path. A Herman & Sons hearse was parked in front of the horseshoe access and I hoped they were not inside. Their car was empty, but I saw them standing outside, under a covered alcove, one of them holding a fancy bouquet of gladiolas. I used the hearse as a shield and snuck into the Purification or ‘Tahara’ Room, where the body is cleansed before burial. “As we come forth, so we shall return.”
The room was dark, but I found the body immediately, lying on a large wooden beam right next to the wall. Behind the wall I overheard the night-shift nurse telling someone, probably the rabbi, that the cleansing was already done at the facility at Blue Meadows and there was no one to pray the Kaddish for Joseph-Arthur. I glanced at my watch. The Kentucky funerals I had attended—not many, thank God—usually started on time.
Two more minutes, maybe less.
I summoned all my courage and moved closer to the shrouded body. I did not want to turn the lights on. I pulled up the white cover and it cast an oblique shadow over the face of the dead man. It seemed to slice him with a razor from his left ear to the middle of his right jawbone. Most of the nose and cheeks were left in the dark. The cream applied to his skin glowed like wax but failed to conceal his post-mortem stubble.
As I leaned forward, my nostrils picked up the smell of fresh varnish and cologne. Joseph-Arthur Ginzburg lay supine on the cherry plate, cleansed and polished, awaiting his final journey.
I had to switch sides in order to get closer to his eyes. The eyelids were shut, but I could see tiny crescents of white underneath.
I parted the eyelids with two fingers. The whites were not of eyeballs, but of the two sclera shells that popped out as I found myself gazing into two empty sockets.
Joseph-Arthur’s eyes had been enucleated.
51
During the night she transferred the two eyes in Styrofoam containers to Gabriel. He promised to keep them until midnight in a separate tissue refrigerator.
From afar, the devoted and loving Bastian had taken care of her second wish, too. A replacement car was waiting for her on the other side of the park.
Johanna finished her night shift at the nursing home, stretched and yawned, and stripped off her white coat. The chief physician, Dr. Gerald Winthrop, was grateful she was willing to return at seven p.m. for another night. He couldn’t have known it would be her last.
She had twelve hours to pass and was delighted to think back in time to her student days, when she had driven an old gearshift vehicle. The squeaks of the clutch reminded her of the first car she’d received from her father—a cute red Seat Ibiza.
Ever since then she’d been obsessed with red cars—she always had to have a red car. Her father had given her the car the same week she’d passed her final anatomy exam. Later, when she completed her studies, he had taken her to a Volkswagen-Audi-Seat dealership, and they came out with a new model. Red, of course.
Before the dealer handed her the keys, her father had insisted she pop open the bottle of champagne that awaited her, fastened to the front glass by the windshield wiper. From nowhere her father had pulled a pair of fluted goblets, and she did as she was told and poured for them both. But she noticed the tremor as he raised the sparkling wine to his lips. He tried to conceal it from her, unsuccessfully.
The champagne glass slipped and broke into splinters. Her father hissed a curse. It was the first time in her life she’d heard him utter a dirty word. Leopold Berger, the pharmacist who had inherited a chain of drugstores and fathered his only child very late in life, was known for his mild manners and permanent smile.
That night, in that enchanted moment that was supposed to mark the fulfillment of a dream, hers and his—hers, graduating medical school; his, having a beautiful and talented daughter who bested him—his smile had disappeared forever.
She was the joy of his life, and after her mother passed away, she was the only thing left for him in the whole universe.
Over the years he had gradually entrusted his senior employees with the management of the pharmacy chain and devoted time to his ancient passion—academic research. Due to his immaculate reputation, magister Leopold Berger waded his way to the top and became the chief examiner of new clinical trials for the EMA—the European Medicines Agency.
The last year had brought dire news. His devoted private physician concluded that the symptoms he’d experienced in recent weeks fit only one disease, Lou Gehrig’s, with incurable progressive muscle degeneration. Leopold Berger had listened as if taken by surprise, though he had already diagnosed the illness based on his own medical knowledge. He had only one request—to keep the news from Johanna. He alone would elect the appropriate time and place to break the news to her.
But his terrible secret had been revealed sooner than he’d intended.
In the weeks that followed, she would drive him in her red car to neurological evaluations, to CT scans, to wasted hours in strange waiting rooms of the best specialists on the continent. All of them repeated the same diagnosis.
The disease consumed him rapidly. When the time came that he had lost control over his sphincters, he summoned her to his room and made clear that he would never sit in a wheelchair.
He asked for her help. His time had come.
At first, she refused vehemently, claiming that life was sacred. “What life?” he had whispered with feeble lips, on one of the occasions he had choked while swallowing his medication due to his paralyzed tongue muscles. A trickle of water had dripped into his bronchi, and he coughed until his face turned cyanotic.
They sat at the kitchen table. After his wife’s death he had not bothered to replace one of the burned-out bulbs, so the corner facing the oven was left in a gloomy darkness. Since last spring, his gait had become unsteady. The cane did not provide enough support, and he had stumbled twice in the stairwell, lucky not to fracture his femur. Not long after, he secluded himself in his apartment.
“There are only the two of us left in the world,” he said during a Friday night meal. “Just you and me. We both read the same medical books. We both know what awaits me. Mother was lucky; the cancer took her in no time, without the excruciating pain, without the shortness of breath, without the urine in the underwear.”
Johanna fled from the room. She could not bear to hear the rest. Crying half the night, she refused to open the locked door, even as he threatened in his frail voice to stand there behind the doo
r, with his last effort, for as long as it would take for her to open up.
Hours later she had stepped out and found him on the floor of the corridor, slumped against the wall, his neck propped up by the doorframe. He was exhausted from bad sleep, and half his body had collapsed in a spasm, but his pelvic muscles were flaccid and there was a dark spot on his pants.
She was amazed how easily she picked him up and carried him to his room. Featherweight. Close up, as he stood naked and humiliated under the shower, she noticed with horror how his flesh sagged. His stomach had become flat, his ribcage striated with sockets, the skin over his limbs taut and waxy. She could see the appendectomy scar above his diminished pubic hair. The line of his hipbones became prominent in the absence of fat cover.
But worst of all was the look in his eyes.
That look did not relent even as she laid him on the bed of soft pillows. It followed her as she shut the blinds, released the curtain ties, and served to his lips the cup of brandy he loved so much.
But he spat the liquid and did not blink. His lungs wheezed. Although he diverted his face from her, she saw that he was crying—a soft wail and a delicate tremor, his traitorous body capable of nothing more.
She knelt and wiped his tears with a handkerchief. Before she rose, he reached out and grabbed her hand with an intensity that took her by surprise.
Johanna looked straight at him and nodded.
I’ll help you, Dad, she said wordlessly. Tonight I’m going to fulfill your last wish. She followed his nod to the bathroom cabinet drawer. She realized that for a long time he’d been collecting barbiturates in small bottles. But now, as his pharyngeal muscles betrayed him, they were useless. Behind the pills she found a plastic wrap.
A month ago, when he was still capable, he had brought from the pharmacy some crystalline powder and a syringe.
Like everything else in his life, Leopold Berger had carefully planned his own death. That night, in her father’s bedroom, as she watched his breath dwindling before he departed on his final journey, she vowed she’d be there for him, as she would for all her patients. She would assist anyone who chose to die. She would alleviate their suffering and fulfill the desire of those whose bodies withered, whose brains betrayed them and whose last hopes had extinguished.
That would be her mission as a doctor.
***
She wandered on the roads, casually reading signposts of suburbs and streets—Indian names of tribes she had read about in childhood books. Tears welled in her eyes.
She continued to wander aimlessly, crying and wiping her tears. The car heater was not functioning and fanned out freezing air.
Fortunately, she came upon a shopping mall with attached parking. The rain resumed and she replaced her hat, tucking in the blond waves, and hurried inside.
It was well after closing time so only the café shops were open, but even they were mostly empty. The stormy weather made most people think twice about leaving home. The few who hazarded the weather were gathered in closed spaces, near the decorative lamp posts with gas heaters.
For the first few minutes, she walked up and down the main avenue, finally taking the escalator to the second floor where most of the fashion shops were located, one beside the other. She frequently looked back but saw nothing other than random travelers, like herself, idly moseying around. There was no sign of the Irish madman.
Milbert looked at her from multiple flat screen TVs in the window of an electronic appliances store that occupied a huge space in the mall. She blew him a kiss as the smell of fresh coffee penetrated her nose.
Johanna inspected the café before going inside. It wasn’t like Vienna, but nevertheless was equipped with an espresso machine. And most importantly, there were only about a dozen people, none of them Gibbons.
There was an unoccupied table in the second row, overlooking the parking lot and the main entrance. From that spot she could see her rental car. She collapsed into a chair with a groan but did not remove her gloves.
The air was saturated with the scent of warmed pastries. Red and black cups hung on two parallel lines, lit up by tiny spots like the Milky Way. The café was papered with caricatures of famous Hollywood stars—Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, and Brad Pitt, and back in time to James Dean, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn Monroe.
Johanna slipped her gloved finger into her coat and palpated the tube, buried safely in an inside pocket. She smiled with satisfaction and indulged herself with a double espresso and hot apple strudel with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
Almost like in Vienna.
52
It was already late, but Dr. Gerald Winthrop, the chief physician of Blue Meadows, hadn’t left the premises.
Indeed, he had intended to join the Midwestern Psycho-Geriatric Conference scheduled over the weekend in Indianapolis and to stay overnight with his daughter, but emergency dictated otherwise.
The elderly physician was losing interest in his patients; he was professionally drained, burned out, and he answered the nurse’s call listlessly. The night shift would officially begin at seven o’clock in the evening and last until seven the next morning, but routine allowed him to prepare for leaving before the arrival of the next duty doctor.
In the interval between the end of his duty and the beginning of the night shift, he retreated to his office and summarized medical records that began with an endless list of diseases and concluded with a single word at the bottom. EXITUS. An exit from this world. Reams of pages described human suffering, blood tests, urinalyses, roentgen photographs, palliative procedures, operations, and multiple chronic treatments—which always led to the same end result.
Lately, the elderly had become a growing nuisance. Their lifespans had stretched to an extent that five patients were about to celebrate their hundredth birthday next month, and another dozen were but five years younger. With two exceptions, they were all bedridden, dependent on artificial support, and in various degrees of disorientation. The constant staffing shortage forced Dr. Winthrop to share the burden and return to night shifts, although no more than twice monthly.
He refused to take more. Luckily, his three subordinates, Drs. Roberts, Nguyen, and Goyal, needed to supplement their income, but even with Dr. Heilliger from Baptist Rehab and some locum tenens they could not sustain the burden of seven to eight night shifts per month each—inhuman for professionals, grandparents by their own account.
When Mrs. Hertz had announced the new—although temporary—addition to night shifts, their joy had been boundless. Since then, Dr. Winthrop had not been called upon to fill in the gaps, and each of the veterans had done no more than five calls each, letting them rediscover their family and grandchildren.
Dr. Winthrop’s nights were once again his own.
At the end of his round, the doctor replaced the last file in the trolley that stood in the middle of the hallway. Shortly before seven p.m., he hung up his coat and left the nursing home.
The lights in his office remained on, but an observer from the outside would not know whether the doctor was still in his room or had already left. The neon above the examining table was never turned off, like an eternal candle.
Lately, the light in the back-treatment room had been left on longer than usual.
***
When Johanna arrived, she had ample time to see Dr. Winthrop’s car sliding over the rails of the electric gate, disappearing around the corner.
The field of view between the distant park bench and the electric gate was completely exposed. Momentarily it was empty. The solitude of Blue Meadows was a plus. She would be able to get in and out undetected.
From the corner of her eye she noticed a trampled pass between the bougainvillea. The ambulance awning dripped raindrop residues. When in closed position, the electric gate was not completely locked, and even a heavyset person could slide in through the gap.
Joha
nna listened to The Magic Flute, her favorite opera, on her earphones, humming passages she knew by heart.
Darkness engulfed the city, and it spread sooner yet over that forsaken forest corner. She could not remember when she had last seen a pedestrian in the area.
She rose from the bench, fixed the lattice hat over her head, and stretched. Soon she would cross the street, on her way, for the last time, to Blue Meadows.
***
The patient in Room 22 began to show her first symptoms of distress exactly thirty minutes after the doctor came on duty.
It happened to every patient who reached the final stage of the eyedrop experiment, known as the Preparation Phase. At that stage of the clinical trial, following a drug cocktail mixed into the evening’s dessert by the attending physician, cardiac arrhythmias began to appear, along with mild respiratory distress. Increased bowl movements were also observed among all the participants.
Since being returned to the nursing home by the police late last night, Bertha Zucker had been a wreck—probably the result of exhaustion and the tranquilizer circulating in her blood. Uncharacteristically, at nine thirty the following morning she was still in bed snoring, her facial muscles in a state of laxity she hadn’t experienced for a long time.
Bertha finally awoke a little past ten, her body limp, her legs disobedient. Someone opened her window, moved aside the giant philodendron, tied the curtains back, and allowed in a flow of fresh air.
Following a week of morbid gray there was something exhilarating in the solar presence above. Bertha tried to reach out to the clock on the nightstand, but even that minimal effort was beyond her ability.
An Eye For Murder: A Medical Thriller Page 26
