Point of Balance

by J. G. Jurado

  I thought back for a moment, racking my brains.

  “About a couple of weeks ago, I woke up one morning and my phone would not switch on. I called Apple and they sent me a new one that day. I restored it from backup and thought no more of it.”

  “They didn’t tamper with your phone, then. You remember the messenger?”

  “No, because . . .” I slapped my thigh in frustration when I realized I’d been duped. “It was Svetlana who signed for the package.”

  “Cool it, David.”

  “What do you mean, cool it? I gave that woman a home! I left my daughter in her care, for God’s sake!”

  “It’s not as if you ever paid much attention to what went on in your own home, did you?” she said, unable to hold back.

  The gibe jolted me. There, it was out. The conversation we had never had but was always brewing between us. All she had wanted to say—and I had ducked—floated in the five feet of dingy passageway in which we were ensconced, a slashing and forbidding, black-winged bird. It preyed on the underbelly of the words, and gorged on my guilt and remorse. We had to face up to it, sooner or later. But this was not the time.

  “Go on, blame me for that too, why don’t you, if it makes you feel better? But sarcasm won’t bring your sister back. Or Svetlana. They killed one of their own, needlessly. Ruthlessly. What won’t they do to my daughter, who’s in their way?”

  Kate huffed and turned aside. Finally she opted to change the subject.

  “This morning, when you woke up . . . Did you go down to the basement?”

  I shook my head. “To see if the body was still there? No, I didn’t have the balls,” I admitted, ashamed.

  “There’s no way they’ll have left the corpse down there. If they took that much trouble to clean her room, it was for a reason.”

  “The nanny’s the one link to White.”

  “Exactly. So they weren’t about to gift us a whole body. By trying so hard to eliminate clues, they’ve marked out the trail for us.”

  “Via Svetlana?”

  “I need to follow her tracks. At some stage they’ll lead us to White or his mob.”

  “How will you go about that?”

  “I have to go to your house, David.”

  My heart leaped when I heard that. The almost sleepless night I had spent agonizing over what my next move would be, how to get Julia back without committing murder, had left its mark. After I got White’s text in which he made it plain he’d heard me whisper, I was scared of my own shadow at home. I was sure they had planted cameras and God knows what else in there, and that way they could tell if I so much as farted.

  “Kate, there are cameras in my house. White made me double sure of that when he called this morning. He could see me, and if you walk in he’ll know we’ve spoken. And Julia will be dead.”

  “Think about it, David. We have exactly two leads that can take us to White. The phone’s too risky. All we have left is to ferret out some clue about Svetlana in your house.”

  “It’s very dicey,” I said, refusing to yield, although I knew she was right.

  “It’s the only way. I’ll have to get in somehow. But you’re right about one thing: we can’t see each other again until this is over.”

  “And how do we keep in touch?”

  “Not by using that disposable cell you pilfered from the gangbanger, no way. You’ll have to take my personal one,” she said, fiddling with a somewhat outdated BlackBerry. “I’ve muted it and disabled the vibration, although the screen still lights up when somebody calls. You’ll have to take good care with this so White doesn’t catch wind of it. Hide it well and check it now and then.”

  “What’ll you use to call me?”

  “I’ll buy another cell this evening,” she said, and handed me the BlackBerry. When I took it, she clamped her hand on my wrist and burrowed her eyes into me.

  “One more thing, David. Out of respect for my sister’s memory and because I love Julia heart and soul, I’ll help you bring her home again. But let me make something very clear. I don’t know what’ll go down between now and Friday, but one thing’s for sure. Come what may, I won’t let White blackmail you. If we don’t have Julia back by the deadline, I’ll make a call and they’ll pull you from the operation. Got that?”

  Her voice was cold, glassy and as sharp as an icy dagger in the ribs. I wanted to argue, appeal to kin and our shared responsibility for my daughter. But I knew I had already asked her to go way beyond the call of duty. And right then I needed to gain time, above all. So all I said was:

  “Roger.”

  Then she relaxed her grip and I felt terribly uneasy, because at last I had pinpointed the change I had seen in Kate’s eyes.

  I was no longer a relative who had let her down.

  Now I was a suspect.

  16

  Kate decamped down the passageway. I gave her a three-minute start, to avoid anyone seeing and linking her to me. When I climbed the flight of stairs, something caught my attention at the other end of the hospital entrance hall. A short, stocky man was standing by the doorway. Big hands, shiny shaven skull, big loose jacket. One with bags of space so they can’t tell you’re packing heat.

  I quickly hid behind a corner of the newsstand. It was silly, a gut reaction. I couldn’t be sure. I had seen him only by night, out of the corner of my eye. But I knew. Somehow I knew.

  It was the gunman with the foreign accent who’d pinned me against the wall outside the Marblestone Diner the night before. And now there he was, with one eye on the deserted snack bar and the other on the entrance, blocking my way to the elevators. He had a bunch of flowers for camouflage, as if he were visiting a patient. But his attitude told a different story.

  You’ve taken too long, numbnuts, I thought. And White has sent him to keep tabs on you. Did you really think he’d be content to watch you with the camera phone alone, with all that’s at stake?

  I thrust myself against the glass shelving beside the newsstand, trying to blend in with the covers of the Globe, People and the National Enquirer, not knowing my picture would be splashed on all of them in a week. The glass afforded scant cover. If the hoodlum took so much as two steps toward me, he’d see me and my demeanor would give the game away. I couldn’t even fall back on pretending I’d found a quiet corner to make a call, because my cell was supposed to be on my desk.

  Will he have seen Kate? Will he know who she is? They have to know. If they’ve been spying on me for a while, they’ve simply got to know. They must have seen photos of her. If they know she’s here, it’s all over for Julia. If they suspect I haven’t gone out to eat . . .

  He turned his head my way and I slipped away from the corner, scared stiff, feeling small and ridiculous, hiding in my own hospital. Suddenly, I was not a neurosurgeon, I was not six foot three. I was eight years old again, and was cowering in a kitchen cabinet, waiting for the urchins with whom I shared my umpteenth foster home to find something better to do than beat on the new kid. Three decades have gone by and I can still recall the rough and worn touch of that cabinet bought at a garage sale, the smell of varnish slapped on by the owners, the sound of my pullover snagging on the wood while the bullies heaved at my foot to drag me out of my hidey-hole.

  That old fear and the emotion I was feeling behind the newsstand were basically the same. Yet the cause was entirely different, because I was no longer afraid for myself, but for Julia. In time, parenthood means transforming fear for yourself into dread of losing someone you love. And for that reason I could not fail.

  Think, think, think!

  Then one of the cleaners came along and I had an idea.

  She was five or six yards away from me. She might as well have been in Texas. Impossible to approach without giving myself away. I tried to wave at her, but she didn’t see me, wrapped up as she was in rearranging the dust with her broom.
r />   “Psst, here!” I whispered, to no avail.

  I’ve seen her before, she’s been at the hospital for years. I’ve bumped into her a thousand times. What’s her name? What in hell is her name? I couldn’t read her ID tag from where I was. But I’d heard her talk to her workmates in the elevator. Marcela, or Laura, a Hispanic name . . .

  “Amalia,” I said, remembering in a flash. “Amalia!”

  She turned around and came up to me, wheeling her cleaning trolley. A big one with a trash barrel in the middle.

  “It’s Amelia, doctor. How can I help?” she said with a friendly smile.

  “I have a problem I can’t explain,” I said as I dipped my hand in my pocket for the money left over from lunch. One of the twenties and a couple of singles. I put them in her hand, all scrunched up, but did not move away from the glass shelves. She looked at me askance. “Listen, Amelia, I am about to do something that’ll seem real weird. I’m merely asking you to please forget everything you see, okay?”

  Amelia shrugged but put the money in her pocket.

  “You’d be surprised at the things I’ve seen here, doctor.”

  I stuck my head out enough to check the thug wasn’t looking our way, and only then did I dare to step toward Amelia. To her consternation I bent over and began to ransack the garbage bag.

  “I take that back. I ain’t never seen this before.”

  I took no notice, as I was too busy delving into the contents of the hospital’s ground-floor wastepaper baskets. I pushed aside copies of the Post, oozing cans and sticky wrappers until I found what I was looking for.

  A Starbucks takeout bag.

  It was all creased and one side of it was wet with what I trusted was coffee, but if I held it next to me it wouldn’t show. I went back to the newsstand and opened it. There was an empty cup and a half-chewed doughnut. I took out the doughnut and placed it in my mouth, holding it between my teeth without actually biting it.

  “Good Lord, baby. They pay you that bad these days? I’ll give you back your twenty bucks, if you like.”

  I shook my head and winked at her. I tried to appear cute, but with someone else’s doughnut in my mouth it was more the leer of a man unhinged. Amelia rolled her eyes and pushed her trolley away.

  I crept to the middle of the hallway and tried to keep to the edge of the bandit’s peripheral vision. From where he stood, he could keep a perfect eye on the entrance, so he would not think I’d come in off the street. But it was a big hospital. He might think I’d used the emergency room exit, although nobody who worked there would go right around the building to leave. But he couldn’t know that, unless they had somebody else on watch, or at least that is what I hoped.

  It was then he saw me.

  I feigned aplomb. I toddled toward the elevators and held the bag with the green mermaid pointing his way, a protective shield. Then I realized what a stupid figure I cut with the doughnut between my teeth, so I was forced to take a good bite. The edge I bit still had some saliva on it from its previous owner. There was something stuck underneath it, maybe a piece of napkin or the receipt.

  I repeated to myself what I had learned at medical school about stomach acids and how good they were at destroying germs, while I glossed over all I knew about herpes, mononucleosis and meningitis. I forced myself to swallow the mouthful while I slipped into the elevator with my back to the goon.

  “Hey, David,” Sharon Kendall, one of the anesthesiologists I usually operated with, greeted me. She was heading the same way, reading a case sheet. “You in surgery today? I haven’t seen you on the list.”

  “Nope, not till Friday. Boss is giving me a break.”

  “Lucky you. I’ve got three today, but luckily they’re no sweat. And my day off is tomorrow. I’ll take the kids to the movies.”

  “On a Thursday?”

  “I don’t care if they sleep a couple of hours less. If they don’t stop giving me shit over taking them to see the new Pixar flick, I’ll kill myself.” Then she realized what she’d said and lifted her hand to her mouth. “Oh, I’m so sorry, David, I didn’t mean . . .”

  “That’s okay.”

  “It’s simply a figure of speech.”

  “No worries.”

  The elevator came, ejected a dozen people, and we both went into it. I turned around, more worried about the bonehead in the leather jacket than Dr. Kendall’s faux pas. I realized she had taken my curt answers as proof that I was offended, but I could do little about that. I was too busy trying to make out that chrome dome between the shoulders of everyone who had gotten out of the elevator. I kept looking while the doors closed, but it was no use.

  He had bolted.

  17

  When I got back, all hell broke loose.

  First the chief nurse burst into my office in righteous indignation, wielding her precious clipboard. She meant business. She tore off the top sheet and dunked it on my desk in revenge before she ambled out, real uppity. It was a copy of the bit in hospital regs about pagers, with a couple of lines highlighted. The ones that stipulated senior medical staff—me, in other words—had “the duty to have the pager on their person at all times during working hours,” and logically, “to reply to all beeps.”

  Then it dawned on me that I’d left the pager in my locker, something that had never transpired in all my years at the hospital. With all the hoopla over Kate’s call and the trip to see the Patient, I had made a stupid mistake.

  I went for my cell. There were no missed calls, but when I held it, it began to ring. There was no caller ID, which told me who I had the dubious pleasure of talking to. The same sense of foreboding engulfed me whenever I spoke to him, but it was now multiplied by the uncertainty over my meeting with Kate.

  I picked up.

  “Hello, Dave. Were the doughnuts good?”

  “What do you want, White?”

  “I want to know if the doughnuts were good, Dave. Answer me.”

  There was a pause.

  “Yes, they were good.”

  “They must be really great doughnuts, Dave. And the coffee must be magic. What’s your Starbucks favorite, Dave?”

  I really hate Starbucks coffee, but Rachel loved it, so I mentioned hers.

  “Mocha Frappuccino, double double.”

  “Not a bad call, not bad at all, Dave. Want to know what is a bad call?”

  His voice had turned into a cold, steely hiss that made my hair stand on end.

  “Go on,” I forced myself to say.

  “A bad call is to vacate the hospital while leaving your cell on your desk. It could have been stolen, and that would have been most inconvenient.”

  “Listen, I needed some air, I’m—”

  “You’re a smart guy, Dave. Right?”

  “I don’t know what this has to do with—”

  “You’re somebody who can put two and two together.”

  There was another pause. I decided to quit trying to explain. The more I explained, the phonier I would sound.

  “I guess.”

  “So you know something’s up with your phone. That’s normal, Dave. I can’t blame you for being a smart guy. But if you got too smart, then I could blame you. Only you wouldn’t be the one to pay. You do understand, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. Now I want you to answer a question. I want you to answer it truthfully. If you lie to me, I’ll know right away. Okay?”

  Deep inside, in some corner of me, something snapped. The sound was almost imperceptible, a glass wrapped in cloth and stamped on. That phrase, exactly that phrase, was the one I said to Julia when she had been naughty. A juice carton spilled in the playroom; an Angry Birds doll smuggled inside her backpack when toys aren’t allowed in school; dirty socks under the bed. Small stuff, all for the greater good of building trust and bonding when she’d ’fessed up. />
  You manipulative son of a bitch, I thought, but said:

  “You’re the main man around here, White.”

  “Have you spoken to anybody, Dave? About your, er, situation?”

  My daughter’s a terrible liar. She gets it from me. Whenever you confront her with the truth, her lips unfailingly stretch into a smile, which turns into a kicking fit when she knows she’s been caught out. Rachel always got me. When she asked whether I’d taken out the trash, or paid the gas bill, or bought another of those stupid scratch cards in which I sometimes indulged myself at the 7-Eleven. She looked into my eyes with a half-smile that invariably made me smile, too. She was so good at it that she made me laugh even when I was innocent, something which infuriated me.

  “No, I have not.”

  “Dave, it would be so understandable. Seriously. You walk to the snack bar to get some air. On the way you meet a buddy who’s happy to lend his cell for you to make a quick call. Or maybe it was in the line for coffee, a soccer mom making eyes at your doctor’s coat. Maybe, just maybe, you were tempted to call the police. But that would be stupid; you don’t know anybody and you know that if you involved the police, they’d show up in their oh-so-subtle ties, like masters of disguise. So no, you wouldn’t do that.”

  “I spoke to an underpaid and very ill-mannered barista when I ordered coffee and doughnuts, and spent a while thinking things over, White. No more.”

  My voice sounded firm, although I felt my left hand tremble when I spoke. He couldn’t see me, I knew he couldn’t see me, but even so I stuck my hand in my coat pocket and grabbed my thigh until it steadied.

  “No, you wouldn’t call the police. But maybe, just maybe, you’d be tempted to call your sister-in-law. To tip her off. That would be stupid. Because if something were to crop up, something last-­minute . . . Well, that would be bad. And we don’t want that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But sure, I could forgive you if you told me the truth. We have time to work it out, I promise. So, one last time, Dave. Have you spoken to Agent Robson?”