Paradime

by Alan Glynn

  But . . .

  Backing up a little here, what did I think was going to happen? That I’d finally become Teddy Trager? That I’d take his place? That I’d get to live his life? That I’d get to spend his money? That if there weren’t going to be two Teddy Tragers in the world, couldn’t there at least be one? Even if only for a short while? The level of this delusion is breathtaking and certainly not anything I can subject Kate to – not any more, she’s already put up with enough shit from me as it is. But at the same time, there’s really no reversing this. It’s not as if I can decide to go for option two instead and drag the body back up to the car. I wouldn’t be able to. I’m in too much pain. And, let’s face it, I wouldn’t want to. I’ve set this little exchange programme in motion, so whatever the fallout from that turns out to be – and however fast and relentlessly that rains down on me – I’m going to have to take responsibility . . . for everything.

  Which I guess means I’m on my own.

  After a moment, I turn around and toss the phone – my phone – back in the direction of Trager’s partially covered body. I do the same with my wallet and my keys. It’s a vain gesture, I know, an impotent protest, little more than a cheap piece of misdirection that won’t fool anyone for very long.

  But I don’t care. I limp back towards the mangled car. I take a deep breath and climb in – this time into the driver’s seat. I look at my face in the rear-view mirror, at the smears of blood and the bruising. I lean back in the seat and exhale, trembling – first a bit, then a lot, then shuddering. Soon this will be uncontrollable, and as the pain intensifies, as the general trauma overwhelms my stress response, pummels it and then smothers it, I may go all the way and lose consciousness. In fact, I can already feel this beginning to happen, but before it does, I reach into my jacket pocket and take out Trager’s cellphone.

  I fumble with it for a few seconds, then lift it to my ear. I wait, but not for long.

  ‘911, what is your emergency?’

  9

  Before I open my eyes, I know I’m in a hospital room. There are telltale sounds – beeping monitors, ventilators, pagers, trolleys. At first, these seem abstract to me, more like faint rumbles and pulses, signals from somewhere deep in my unconscious, but they soon coalesce into the comprehensible and the familiar. I also feel an uptick in pain awareness. This is nothing alarming, a fact that I’m sure can be explained by the woolly blanket of medication – morphine, probably – that I seem to be wrapped in.

  Although it’s easier not to, I do eventually open my eyes, and what strikes me at once is that no healthcare plan I’ve ever been on would provide a hospital room even remotely as luxurious as this one. It’s an entire suite, with a comfortable seating area, a coffee table, and what from here looks like . . . a wet bar? That’s not right. I squint and do my best to stay focused, but I can’t make out what it is. Probably some kind of medical unit.

  But that raises a more important question. What am I doing here in the first place? I clearly need to be in the hospital, because there’s a ton of shit wrong with me that I’m only now becoming aware of – these tubes attached to my right arm, for instance, the bandages around my skull, the swelling I can feel in my face.

  But what happened? And where’s Kate?

  Faint memories rise to the surface . . . a rotating blue light, the intermittent crackle of a dispatcher’s radio, urgent voices all talking at once – but after that, there’s nothing.

  Before it, though, if I concentrate . . .

  Fuck.

  Of course.

  Everything comes back to me in a rush. Panicking, I look around the room again. What time is it? I can’t see any windows. How long have I been here? Without thinking, I move forward suddenly in the bed, and feel a jolt of pain. It starts in my chest and extends across my right shoulder. I lean back on the pillow, and, as the pain recedes, I take a long, deep breath and release it very slowly.

  So . . .

  Hospital, yes, okay, but why this one? I don’t even have a healthcare plan.

  There’s only one explanation.

  My cheap piece of misdirection is still working. Is that possible?

  I look around the room again, this time for clues. There’s a bedside table to my left with nothing on it apart from a reading lamp and a glass of water – but it does have a drawer, which is partially open. With great care, I ease the drawer all the way out. There’s something inside it, I’m not sure what, but it looks like a see-through evidence bag. I fish it out and hold it up. Inside it, there’s a cellphone, a set of keys, and a wallet.

  The wallet isn’t mine – it’s too big, too thick with credit cards. They’re not my keys, either. And it’s not my phone. These items are Teddy Trager’s, but taken from the pockets of the suit I was wearing.

  How long can this go on? Is it now a race between someone finding the body by the river and a doctor realising that my lab results don’t square up with Trager’s medical records? It has to be one or the other.

  I look over at the door and get the feeling that someone is about to walk through it. I replace the bag in the drawer and gently close it. A couple of seconds later, a young nurse breezes in, consulting a chart as she moves. When she looks up and sees me, she stops. ‘Oh, Mr Trager, you’re awake . . .’

  *

  The next few hours sees a steady stream of nurses, doctors, consultants and therapists into the room, a level of attention you’d imagine maybe the President getting, after a heart attack or an assassination attempt. I have multiple opportunities to call a halt to it, to look some highly qualified trauma specialist in the eye and tell him to stop, that I’m a fraud. But why would I? He’s a trauma specialist, and someone just pushed me out of a speeding car. It also seems to me that if I’m headed for prison, which has to be a real possibility now, I need to be in better shape than I’m in. Apparently, I have a couple of broken ribs, some other minor fractures, severe facial bruising, a concussion and possible abdominal injuries, so . . . what, I’m going to refuse this treatment?

  Anyway, it’s easy enough to take. I don’t have to say much, apart from answering simple questions about whether a specific part of me hurts or not – which is something I can answer without having to pretend I’m someone else. Also, the pain medication provides me with a cloak of passivity, of anonymity almost, as does – I find, to my shock, when I get to look in a mirror – the extensive bruising on my face. Apart from the medical staff, no one else comes into the room (at least not as far as I’m aware), but at a certain point during the course of the day I do notice that in the hallway outside there appears to be some kind of a security presence. Is this more of the executive-branch standard of treatment I’m getting here or should I be worried?

  I go with worried.

  There are too many reasons not to. A guard outside my door? No visitors? The high probability that Trager’s body has been discovered by now? Plus, there’s the fact that to any trained specialist worth their salt my injuries would surely be inconsistent with the physics of the accident I’m supposed to have had. Because wouldn’t a collision like that – at high speed, with no airbag deployed – have killed me outright? As it actually did kill Teddy Trager? And wouldn’t some of these specific injuries I do have, in their assumed context, make no medical sense whatsoever?

  If I’m right about this stuff, I don’t get any indication of the fact from a single doctor or nurse.

  What I do get, early in the afternoon, is a visitor.

  Doug Shaw comes into the room followed by one of the consulting physicians, a lean guy in his sixties with a salt-and-pepper beard, and the two of them stand by the door for a few minutes talking. I don’t hear what they’re saying. The doctor leaves, and then Shaw walks over to the foot of the bed. He doesn’t speak. He just looks at me, examining my injuries, tilting his head this way, then that, as though he were a doctor.

  I’m awake, and my eyes are open, but I sort of play up how spaced out I am by staring at a fixed point on the wall be
hind where Shaw is standing.

  ‘How are you, Teddy?’ he says eventually.

  I don’t react, don’t even look at him.

  ‘A lot of people are asking about you.’

  After a moment, Shaw sighs loudly, then gets his glasses and cellphone out and starts texting. He paces the room as he does this, stopping every couple of seconds to check what he’s just keyed in. When he’s finished, he looks over at me again.

  ‘Who?’ I say.

  ‘Who what, Teddy?’

  ‘Who’s asking about me?’

  ‘Everybody. Holy shit.’ He whips his glasses off and comes over to the side of the bed. ‘I mean, yeah . . . and look, the story got out, I tried to keep a lid on it, but you know how it is.’ He seems kind of agitated, like he’s coked up, or just had a drink and needs to know where the next one is coming from. ‘Anyway, Jesus. So how are you?’

  ‘I could be better.’

  I then stare at him, in silence, and for maybe ten seconds straight.

  Does he know?

  I’m sure he must, and I’m on the point of being reckless, of telling him to cut the bullshit, to drop the act, when something gives me pause, some instinct for self-preservation. Because what if it isn’t an act? What would that mean? And more to the point maybe, what if it is?

  ‘So tell me,’ I say instead, drawing in a deep and obviously painful breath. ‘What about Nina? Is she asking about me?’

  ‘Of course. Yeah. She was in here all of last night. She sat there.’ Shaw points at a comfortable-looking but empty chair next to my BP monitor. ‘But she had to leave early this morning for some thing, some event, in . . . where is it, Phoenix?’

  I nod, implying that I know what he’s talking about.

  But really – I think – Phoenix? The other side of the country? I have to ask myself what Nina saw or maybe heard last night, sitting in that chair, looking at me.

  ‘And your sister called from Paris,’ Shaw says, ‘a couple of times, but we’ve reassured her – I’ve reassured her – that you’re going to be fine.’

  I nod again.

  I have a sister? How did I not know that? Trager, of course, is what I mean. How did I not know that Trager has a sister.

  Had a sister.

  ‘Anyone else?’ I ask, after a moment.

  ‘Yeah, there have been a lot of calls, messages, people wanting to drop by, but . . . you know, let’s give it a little time. You’re not ready yet.’ He pauses. ‘That’s what the doctors are saying.’

  I look at him for a moment.

  Sure they are.

  Then I close my eyes.

  And they’re right, of course. I’m not. They just don’t know how right.

  *

  Over the next few hours, whenever I open my eyes, Shaw is there in the room, or just outside it in the hallway. He spends a lot of this time on the phone, and every now and again his PA shows up with some document to be looked at or a paper to be signed. I want to tell him that he doesn’t need to stick around like this, that I’m fine (that I’d actually prefer him to leave), but I never feel quite up to it. I’m still on a morphine drip for the pain, so my response times are slow, and whenever an opportunity arises I either miss it or deliberately let it slide.

  But this is also, in part, because I’m confused about what’s going on. Why hasn’t Trager’s body been found yet? Why haven’t the cops shown up? It’s been more than eighteen hours. And if Shaw doesn’t know what’s really going on here – and let’s just say for argument’s sake that he doesn’t – why is he the one in charge? Where are Trager’s people? His PA? His staffers?

  The screw on my paranoia tightens when I tell Shaw that I want my laptop brought in – or at least access to a device, an iPad, something, so I can catch up.

  ‘Uh-uh,’ he says, shaking his head, ‘not such a good idea.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That doctor? The one I talked to earlier? He said screens are out of the question, it’s not safe apparently, not even TV . . . at least until they’ve done an EEG or an MRI or whatever it is they have to do. I guess it’s the concussion, something to do with brainwave activity?’

  I look around. There’s a TV on the wall, turned off, but no remote anywhere. I don’t buy this brainwave-activity shit for one second, but I’m not going to argue with Shaw about it. When he’s out of the room for a few minutes I open the drawer of the bedside table and take Trager’s phone out of the evidence bag. I try to activate it, but nothing happens. It’s dead. The battery must have run down, and, of course, there’s no charger.

  Later on, after Shaw has left for the night, I go through Trager’s wallet. There’s five hundred dollars in cash in it and about fifteen different pieces of plastic – credit and charge, as well as various security and membership cards.

  Maybe I should just slip out of the hospital with it and take my chances.

  But then . . .

  Using any of these cards would be asking for trouble, and how long would a lousy five hundred bucks last? There’s also the matter of this guy out in the hallway, my security detail. I don’t know what his instructions are exactly, but in my current condition – two broken ribs and high as a fucking kite on painkillers – do I really want to risk finding out? Besides, given the level of medical attention I’m getting, and which I actually need, it’d be pretty stupid of me to go anywhere right now.

  What I do instead is ask one of the nurses on the night shift if she can hook me up with a laptop or an iPad . . . ten, twenty minutes is all I need, a little session, I tell her, with Dr Google. When she hesitates, I spot her one of the fifties from Trager’s wallet, and that does the trick. A while later she returns with a colleague’s iPad, and I launch into a quick trawl through the past twenty-four hours . . .

  No body by the river, that’s the first thing – the NYT, the Post, the Daily News, a couple of smaller local papers, a site that tracks police reports even – nothing. How could that be? Then there are these: ‘VC Maven in Single-Car Collision’ and ‘Wall Street Car Crash’. In the financial sections, it’s a little less lurid: ‘Paradime Partner in Auto Accident’ and ‘Teddy Trager Injured’. But that’s it – short reports, light on detail, no photos . . . Trager’s car hit a tree on a quiet road, he’s in the hospital, his injuries aren’t life-threatening.

  Nothing to see here . . .

  I check Nina’s Twitter feed. Her last tweet was that one about the event at the gallery. I also check a few blogs and come across several brief references to the accident, but it soon dawns on me that these, along with the newspaper reports, can all be traced back to what must have been a press statement released early yesterday by Paradime’s head office, a statement that was probably drafted – or at least approved – right here in this very room.

  After I give the iPad back to the nurse, I fall asleep and have a dream about the other night – I’m in Trager’s car, but with Doug Shaw . . . one minute he’s driving, then I am, then we’re in a Humvee . . . or is it a . . .

  Whatever.

  It’s a fucking dream, it doesn’t have to make sense.

  But when I wake the next morning, it seems clear to me that I’ve been in thrall to the dream aspect of this whole thing for far too long. Yesterday, for example, I was asking myself if Shaw knows. Today that seems like a ridiculous question. Of course he knows. He must know. Trager knew, and, as he said in the car, I made it pretty easy for him. So either Trager shared his discovery with Shaw or Shaw found out for himself. It would go some way towards explaining how weird he seemed over lunch at Barcadero that time and then later on up in Trager’s office. But why is he acting like he doesn’t know? What is he up to? Other questions naturally flow from this – like, for instance . . . does it have anything to do with PromTech? Why did Nina feel compelled to put over two thousand miles between herself and this hospital room? And what happened to Trager’s body? But a wave of exhaustion hits me and my mind fogs over. Soon, it’s as much as I can do to submit to having my dr
essings changed.

  A bit later, Shaw reappears and announces that I’m going to have a few visitors this morning – it’ll be quick, five minutes each, no more, and all I have to do is attempt a brave smile, nod wearily, and listen. This is one of those weird moments when I feel like Shaw isn’t even pretending. He’s just telling me what to do. But how would that go down if I were the real Teddy Trager? Not too well, is my guess, and I’m on the point of calling Shaw out on this – because I am weary – when his cellphone goes off. He answers it, listens for a moment, then looks at me. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘we’re up.’

  We?

  He turns to face the door, and waits.

  Both of us now waiting.

  But for what? The Homicide Division? The Fraud Squad? A couple of psychiatric orderlies, one with a hypodermic syringe in his hand and the other with a straightjacket?

  *

  The man who walks through the door is familiar-looking, but it takes my brain more than a beat to pull up his name – which is a little worrying, given how famous he is.

  George Clooney greets Shaw with a quick handshake and then approaches the bed. When he sees my facial bruising up close, he puts on a pained expression. ‘Oh man, that’s rough.’

  I look at him. This is a tanned, suave Hollywood A-lister standing in front of me. If it weren’t for the morphine, I’d probably be a little flustered right now. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘you should see the tree.’

  Clooney laughs.

  I shoot a glance at Shaw, who’s over in the corner, smiling nervously.

  ‘So. Are they treating you okay?’

  ‘Take a look,’ I say, making a sweeping gesture with my arm, indicating the room, how nice it is, how spacious, but the sudden movement hurts, and I wince.

  ‘Whoa . . .’ Clooney winces too, in sympathy. ‘Take it easy there, Teddy.’

  I roll my hooded, morphine eyes at him. ‘It . . .’s fine.’

  Me and George.