As he shook their hands, the man, almost as tall as Jordan, with longish chestnut hair and a brisk air, introduced himself.
‘Welcome. I’m Colin Norwich, Director of The Oaks. We spoke on the phone.’
‘Thank you for agreeing to see us and let us meet with your patient.’
As they walked towards the large building, Norwich said, ‘You told me this is a very important matter. I don’t know what you’re expecting from Mrs Ross, but I fear she’s unlikely to be of much help to you.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Two main reasons. The first is that, because of the trauma she suffered, Thelma – to put it in layman’s terms – has created a barrier around herself beyond which she almost never goes. We had to work long and hard to help her find some kind of balance. Now she alternates agitated periods with whole days when she doesn’t speak. When she first came here, all she could do was scream.’
‘And the second reason?’
Dr Norwich stopped and looked gravely, first at Jordan and then at Maureen. ‘Although it may not seem like it at first glance, this is a hospital. I’m a doctor and Mrs Ross is my patient. I’m responsible for her. If your being here upsets her in any way, I’ll have to ask you to cut short your visit immediately.’
While speaking, they had reached the semicircular forecourt in front of the building. Norwich pointed to an extremely well-tended garden beyond a low redbrick perimeter wall. A few women were strolling freely along the paths, alone or in groups. Others were being pushed in wheelchairs by nurses in white uniforms.
‘Those are some of our patients. As you can see, this is a women-only institution.’
Jordan made a gesture with his arm, taking in everything around them. ‘Dr Norwich, I get the impression this place is reserved for people able to afford some rather high fees.’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite so crudely, but yes, you’re right.’
‘Mrs Ross was a nurse. How can she possibly afford to stay in a place like this?’
‘From what I understand, she had a personal fortune of almost a million and a half dollars. I know it’s managed by a bank and yields enough to cover her expenses.’
‘Doesn’t it strike you as strange that a simple nurse should have so much money?’
‘Mr Marsalis, I’m a psychiatrist, I don’t work for the IRS. What I find strange is what’s in my patients’ heads, not in their bank accounts.’
The arrival of a somewhat overweight but pretty blond nurse saved Jordan from the embarrassment of finding an appropriate reply to this. The woman stopped beside them, irreproachable in her white uniform but looking at Jordan with eyes that expressed pure gluttony. Maureen smiled to herself: she could well imagine the nurse looking in the same way at a double portion of strawberries and cream.
Norwich explained to her the reason for the presence of these two strangers at The Oaks. ‘Carolyn, take Mr Marsalis and Miss Martini to Thelma. Make sure everything goes OK.’
It didn’t escape Jordan’s notice that Norwich had slightly lowered his voice for these last words. The nurse finally took her eyes off Jordan.
‘Yes, Doctor.’
‘You can go with Carolyn. If you’ll excuse me, someone’s waiting for me in my office. I’ll come and see you before you leave.’
Norwich turned and walked resolutely towards the entrance to the building. Maureen and Jordan followed the nurse, who moved in a surprisingly agile way in spite of her far from sylphlike figure. Carolyn led them along the paths of a garden full of colours so unusual that Maureen felt as if she had entered a Monet painting. The patients they passed all had the gentle, surprised air of people living in worlds of their own.
Thelma Ross was sitting motionless on a stone bench in a gazebo completely covered in climbing roses. She was wearing a grey skirt and a somewhat old-fashioned pink twinset that made a pleasant contrast with her dark skin. She was older than her photograph in the newspaper but her skin was smooth and unlined. She was still a beautiful woman, as if fate, content with having affected her mind, had decided to show mercy to her body.
Alerted by the sound of their arrival, she looked up. Maureen gave a slight shudder, despite the heat. The woman’s eyes were black and tranquil, but it was obvious that reason had long since fled from them.
It was the first time that Maureen had found herself in close contact with a person she had seen in one of her hallucinations. If any doubt still remained, she only had to reach out her hand and touch Thelma Ross’s shoulder to know that those images were real enough.
The nurse approached the woman. ‘Thelma,’ she said gently, ‘we have a little surprise for you. These people have come to see you.’
The woman looked first at her and then at Jordan as if they did not exist. Finally her eyes came to rest on Maureen. ‘Are you a friend of Lewis?’ She had an incredibly soft voice and gave a strong aura of innocence.
Maureen crouched in front of her. ‘Yes, I’m a friend of Lewis.’
Thelma lifted a hand and touched her hair. Maureen again saw her gagged, her eyes wide with terror, as a stupid girl wearing a Lucy mask tied her to a chair.
The woman gave a big smile. ‘You’re so good looking. My Lewis is good looking too. He’s at school now. He’s going to be a vet one day. I’d have preferred him to choose medicine, but he just loves animals.’
Maureen lifted her head and met Jordan’s eyes. They were both almost certain by now that they had made a pointless journey. Nevertheless she gently took the hands the woman held in her lap.
‘Mrs Ross, do you remember what happened to Lewis when he was stung by hornets?’
The question did not reach the place where the woman’s mind had taken refuge. ‘Lewis is very good at basketball. He’s the best in the team and runs very fast. The coach says he’ll become a great playmaker.’
Jordan took the photographs of Julius Wong and his victims from his pocket and handed them to Maureen.
‘Thelma, do you know any of these people?’
Maureen showed her the photographs one by one. Her expression did not change as she looked at the faces of the people who had forced her to sit on that stone bench and build in her head a future for a child who would never grow old.
Jordan put his hand in the inside pocket of his jacket and took out some folded sheets of paper. When he opened them and passed them to her, Maureen saw that the figure of Snoopy was drawn on the first of them.
Maureen placed the first sheet on Thelma’s lap. ‘Mrs Ross, have you ever seen this character?’
Thelma Ross took the page in her hand and looked at it with the same absent eyes with which she had greeted their questions and examined the previous photographs.
Then, all at once, her breathing grew more rapid.
As Maureen held out the images of Linus, Lucy and Pig Pen, Thelma Ross’s eyes gradually opened wider while she shook her head with brief hysterical movements, breathing in through her open mouth all the air she could get. For a moment everything remained motionless – and then from her throat came such a piercing scream that Maureen instinctively stood up.
The nurse moved quickly. She took a pager from her pocket and pressed a button. Then she pushed aside Maureen and Jordan and approached the woman, who was still screaming.
‘Thelma, calm down, everything’s fine.’
She put her arms around the woman’s shoulders in an attempt to immobilize her. Thelma, meanwhile, was grabbing and tugging at her cardigan, trying to pull it off herself as if it had suddenly become scorching hot.
‘Get away from here, you two.’
Jordan and Maureen left the gazebo just in time to see Dr Norwich come running, followed by two nurses, also fairly hefty. One of the two was holding a syringe. Norwich rushed over to the bench and, helped by the nurses, rolled up the sleeve of the cardigan and plunged the needle into Thelma Ross’s arm.
Then Norwich took Jordan by the elbow and spun him around. He was furious. ‘And to think I gave you permission to see her! I assume you’re prou
d of what you’ve done. As far as I’m concerned, you’re no longer welcome here. You’ve already done enough damage for today.’
Turning his back on them, he rejoined the nurses. Thanks to the injection, Thelma was starting to calm down.
Jordan and Maureen walked back to the landing-strip without having the courage to look each other in the face.
Sitting side by side, in silence, in the helicopter taking them back to New York, Jordan couldn’t stop thinking about what had just happened, the look of horror on Thelma Ross’s face and that scream which would echo in his ears for a long, long time to come.
The woman’s reaction to the Peanuts characters was clear confirmation that the newspaper article had not told the whole story, and that there was a connection between what had happened all those years ago and what Maureen had seen.
He wondered why, when confronted with two people who wanted to communicate with her, Thelma had instinctively chosen to speak to Maureen.
He turned his head for a moment to look at her profile against the light from the window and remembered what he had thought the day before, during the brief cab journey to Gracie Mansion.
Maybe that was the reason.
For Thelma, as for Maureen, nothing around her was true except what her own eyes had seen.
CHAPTER 44
When the door of the room opened, Lysa had her eyes closed but she was awake.
Her brown hair, pulled back and tied in a ponytail, brought out the perfection of her features. Her eyes opened as softly as the door through which Jordan had come. She still had a drip attached to her vein but the monitor next to the bed had been switched off.
‘Hello, Jordan.’
‘Hello, Lysa.’
This was a moment they had both waited for and feared at the same time. Lysa was beautiful and pale, and Jordan felt awkward and self-conscious.
‘Are you all right here? Do you have everything you need?’
He made a gesture to indicate the room, which was so comfortable, it did not even seem like a hospital room. The bed was facing the door and on the left was a large window with the curtains open, through which the sun drew a rectangle on the floor, like a little carpet of light.
‘Oh yes. The staff are fantastic. That woman, Annette, came and brought me my things. She’s a very good person.’
Jordan nodded. It was yet another favour he had asked of his friend: to go to the apartment and choose all the things a woman might need in a situation like that. He felt less embarrassed asking her to do it than to do it himself.
‘I’m sorry. I know it isn’t pleasant having strangers going through your things, but I had no idea what . . .’
‘You had one idea. A very good one, I’d say.’
Lysa pointed to the table by the window, on which stood a big bunch of flowers, arranged by the nurses in a vase. When Jordan had sent them from a shop on the Hudson, he had thought for a long time about what to write on the accompanying card. Whatever came into his mind had seemed inappropriate or childish. In the end he had made up his mind and put a simple J in the middle of the card, hoping Lysa might guess from that everything he was unable to say.
‘They’re lovely and they gave me a great deal of pleasure. I’m very grateful.’
‘That’s all right. But how are you feeling?’
Lysa gave a wan smile. ‘I don’t know. They say I’m fine. I haven’t taken many bullets in my life though, so I have nothing to compare it with.’
‘You don’t know how sorry I am, Lysa.’
‘Why? You saved my life.’
‘If it wasn’t for me, your life would never have been in danger in the first place. That bullet you took was meant for me.’
He told Lysa all about his previous history with Lord, the man he had once arrested and who had tried to take his revenge. He didn’t tell her the two men were dead, let alone about the half-cheque he had found in a pocket when he had searched Lord’s body, or the cheques he had found in her apartment.
Lysa interrupted him, surprising him by completely changing the subject, as if her mind had been elsewhere.
‘She’s beautiful.’
‘Who?’
‘The girl I saw you with the other night. She’s beautiful and I’m sure she’s what she seems. A woman.’
‘Lysa, Maureen’s just—’
‘It doesn’t matter, Jordan, believe me.’ She gave a drawn smile, then turned towards the window. ‘The problem isn’t who I saw you with, but where I saw you.’
Lysa indicated an aluminium chair against the wall to the left of the bed, facing the window.
‘Sit down, Jordan. I need to tell you why I called you the other night. Sit down and listen, and please don’t look at me as I speak, or I won’t have the courage to do it.’
As Jordan sat down, his gaze fell on the bouquet of flowers, and he remembered the words his mother used to recite while they tended the little flowerbeds together outside their house.
. . . a scarlet rose for passion . . .
‘What I’m about to tell you isn’t a justification, but only an explanation. You see, I didn’t come to New York by chance, but for a specific purpose. All my life I’d tried to be a normal person, with a normal life, who didn’t feel like a freak of Nature every time she looked in a mirror. I only wanted the same things everyone has. I wanted to belong, to wake up in the morning and go to bed at night after a day filled with ordinary things, just like the previous one. That may sound like a boring life, but I envied the women who had it. Instead of which, I was surrounded by men who avoided me by day and who I had to avoid at night. Maybe my father was right when he said that my beauty was a gift from Satan. Then one day, in the place where I used to live before I moved here, that damned letter came . . .
. . . a yellow tulip for jealousy . . .
‘It was a message asking me if I would like to earn a hundred thousand dollars. I threw it in the garbage, thinking it was a sick joke. The day after, another one came, and the next day, yet another. Every single one assured me that this wasn’t a joke and, if I agreed to do what they wanted, I was to put an ad in the New York Times saying simply LG OK. Well, I did it. Two days after the ad went in, I got another letter, containing four cheques of twenty-five thousand dollars each, issued by the Chase Manhattan Bank and made out to me, or rather, four half-cheques, because they’d been cut in half with scissors. Together with the cheques there were instructions about what I had to do in order to receive the other halves. That put paid to any scruples I might still have had.’
Lysa paused. Jordan realized she was crying but continued to keep his eyes fixed on the flowers.
. . . a ring of daisies for love . . .
‘When I realized what was involved, I said to myself: why not? After all, that was all the world seemed to want from me – a body and a bit of time. A hundred thousand dollars seemed a good reward for throwing all my scruples away.
. . . a white anemone for pain . . .
‘I arrived in New York determined that from that moment on, I would be what I was asked to be. A well-paid toy. I carried out my mission, put what I had to hand over into a Post Office Box in Pennsylvania Station, and two days later found in the letter box of your apartment a white envelope with the other halves of the cheques inside. My mysterious benefactor had kept his word. In all this there were two things I hadn’t reckoned on. The first was that, wherever you go, your conscience always follows you.
. . . and a violet for treachery . . .
‘The second is that I would meet you. I tried to ignore you, I kept on with what I had to do, thinking you would be only the latest illusion and the latest disappointment. But that didn’t happen. Every day, as I discovered the person you are, and also the person you don’t know you are, I realized I couldn’t do without either. I was in love with you, but unfortunately by this time I was no longer the same person you caught naked in the bathroom. Through my own actions, I’d become someone else, someone who’d never feel clean again, no matt
er how many showers she took. That was why I threw you out when I realized you were getting closer to me.’
Jordan knew how much these words were costing her. He knew it from her tone of voice, and the tears that ran from her eyes. And at the same time he was terrified, because he did not know how much it would cost him.
‘When I saw that item on TV about your nephew’s murder and the DNA test that nailed Julius Wong, I understood just what I had done, and in what kind of madness I’d become involved. I’d taken a hundred thousand dollars to have sex with a man and then hand over a condom containing his semen. And that man was Julius Wong.’
Jordan was rooted to the spot, so spellbound by that stupid bunch of flowers
. . . and a violet for treachery
that he almost did not hear Lysa’s final words.
‘Now please, just get up out of that chair and go. Go to do whatever you have to do, but go without looking at me, please.’
Jordan stood up and walked to the door without turning around. He opened the door and closed it again gently behind him. As soon as he was away from the hypnotic influence that Lysa, for good or ill, exerted over him, his mind formulated a thought.
He immediately took the cellphone from his pocket, but realizing that there was no network on this floor, he went to the elevator and, as he pressed the button, continued to turn over that thought, like a nail piercing his brain.
No sooner did he leave the elevator than he dialled Burroni’s number.
‘James, it’s Jordan again.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘I wanted to know if you had any news about that search I asked you for the other day.’
‘Oh, yes. Hold on a moment.’
Jordan heard the sound of paper rustling, as if Burroni was looking for a note lost somewhere amid the jumble of his desk.
‘Here we go. The cheque was issued by the branch of Chase Manhattan Bank on the corner of Broadway and Spring. The request wasn’t made on a current account. The amount of the cheque was paid in cash.’
‘Did you manage to find out the name of the person?’