Faces in the Rain (17 page)

‘Il y a un hôpital?'
I asked.

‘Je ne connais pas, Monsieur.'

‘No hospital?' He threw up his hands and shook his head.

‘Vous êtes sûr?'
I enquired.

‘Oui, monsieur.'

He drove on and I walked in his trail. Instead of going
up to the front entrance I followed the truck round to the rear and watched it disappear through automatic doors in the building's basement. I headed for a track which began in the set of villas and went into the Forest. The sun had broken through the cloud to create a dappled effect, which completed a quiet, idyllic scene amongst the thin pine and poplar trees.

I couldn't resist strolling down the track. Ahead of me a man was pushing a pram, while the woman with him was mustering two young children, who were running in and out of the forest. They made me think of Alistair and Sam. By now they would be considering the idea that their father might be a killer. I hoped they would keep faith in me.

Apart from the chirp of sparrows, and the muffled growl of a truck nudging through the gears up Rue Des Gardes, I could hear a woodsman somewhere in the forest. It was the tap of an experienced chopper, with the cuts coming in speedy bursts. The sound was emanating from somewhere between me and the Vital building.

I wandered off the track and it took a few minutes to find a clearing where there was a tiny cemetery next to a bluestone church. There were about forty or so tombstones in one section and a cremation area marked by a rosebush for each plot. A priest – I assumed he was a priest from the huge cross and chain around his neck – looked my way. His dark round face looked apprehensive. He signalled for the chopper – a black woods-woman – to stop. She had arms and almost everything else like a Sumo wrestler. At first the priest seemed like a black from an African colony, but when he came close, I saw I had the right coloniser but was geographically adrift. His rugged features were Polynesian, probably Tahitian.

‘Je cherche l'hôpital,'
I said.

The priest came up close. His eyes scanned me so closely you would swear he was searching for blemishes. He had dark, very curly hair with patches of grey. It could have been a kindly face if he had been carrying a Bible instead of a mallet and a couple of stakes for his grave sites.

‘Vital?' he said.

‘Oui.'

He pointed at the Vital building.

‘It has a hospital on the second floor,' he said in English. So much for my French accent.

‘Merci beaucoup,'
I said, anxious to vacate the area in case Madame Sumo wanted leg-twisting practice on a white boy. I made my way back through the forest to the slope leading down to the garage where the truck had gone and found that the automatic door was up. I sidled inside and took stairs next to a lift to the second level.

I tried the doors to rooms until one opened.

A young male nurse was operating a computer which controlled a radiotherapy machine. He was so engrossed he didn't notice me. A female patient, half-encased in a polystyrene mould, could be seen through the window to an adjoining chamber. She was undergoing treatment. The machine's moveable head of about half a metre square was cartwheeling automatically. There was method in its gyrations and in a few seconds it was positioned to shoot radiation into the woman's brain.

I left more silently than I had entered only to hear the nurse call out
‘Monsieur!'

I walked at the double down the corridor to a second door and opened it.

There was a strong antiseptic smell in a long ward air-conditioned by three roof fans. Twenty patients were
variously propped or lying in their beds with the forlorn look of the sick. At least half of the patients were Polynesian like the priest. One Tahitian girl of about seventeen was sitting up reading. Her raven hair was dreadlocked and she had large, dark-brown eyes.

She smiled at me.

‘Monsieur?'
she said.

‘I must be at the wrong place,' I said. ‘What sort of hospital is it?'

‘Cancer,' she said softly. Another Tahitian woman of about forty in the next bed turned her head towards me.

‘All cancer patients?' I asked the girl.

‘Oui,'
she said. I sat on a chair next to her bed.

‘What do you have?' I said.

‘Vous êtes un docteur?'

‘No.
Un visiteur
.'

‘English?'

‘Australian.'

She reverted to English.

‘I would like to go there,' she said.

I didn't know what to say.

‘I have a tumour,' she said, ‘in my stomach.'

At the other end of the ward, a glass door to a balcony slid open. Two young female nurses were sitting on deck chairs with their white dresses tucked into their panties for maximum sun on their legs. One of them had pushed the door aside with her foot. She sat up and pointed at me. I wished the young patient luck and opened another door marked
‘Pathologie'.
It had air-conditioning for three desktop computers. A short, chubby young man wearing a white coat challenged me. I shoved my way passed him back to the ward of patients and along the corridor. The male nurse waddled after me. He didn't seem fit or brave enough to do much more.

‘Qui êtes vous?!!'
he shrieked in a high-pitched voice,
‘Arrêtez! Arrêtez!!'

I began to run and the male nurse stopped and scurried the other way, shouting the alarm.

I charged down the two flights of steps to the corridor leading to the loading bay.

The door was shut and the truck had gone.

I pressed a button on the wall. The automatic door began to slide up. I ran for the daylight, but had only gone a few metres when two men appeared from beyond the door. They were the same peasant roughheads who had given me directions from the bar. This time they said nothing, which told me a lot more.

I turned to see another man coming from behind me. He was silhouetted in the light from the corridor and he held a metre-long pipe. He gripped it like a man used to using it, and that was intimidating.

I decided to crash through the two heavies in front of me and make for the cover of the forest. I dashed and baulked like a footballer, only to be rugby-tackled so well that it took the wind out of me. It seemed as if my chest and stomach had been ripped out of me, but I fought on the ground with the two attackers and was aware of the third man trying to line me up for a home run with his pipe. My elbows, feet and fists were battling the odds and I might have broken free if it hadn't been for that pipe. I had just struggled to my feet when it hit me on the base of the skull. I went down on my knees and think I collected another whack. I heard the sound of a chainsaw in the forest and my face hit the dirt.

I regained consciousness, almost. People in white coats had their backs to me. Every part of my body felt like it was a dead weight and impossible to lift. I tried
each limb in turn and my torso, but failed each time. A white-coated woman turned towards me holding a syringe. I shut my eyes.

‘Combien?'
the nurse said.

A deep male voice from another corner replied,
‘Un autre cinq, peut-etre.'

What had they done to me? I took consolation that I was alive. My head felt like a truck had run over it. Maybe it had.

Some of my senses were still in play, more or less. Like smell. It confused me. I could pick up chloroform. I was sure there was eucalyptus oil too. But that seemed impossible. Then other odours floated round me. Cloves. Bacon. Cooked chicken.

Some culinary clown, in the forest perhaps, was wading into something like coq au vin. The thought was exhausting, because I wasn't hungry. Far from it. I was nauseated.

Taste. I had taste. Was I eating something? I had had it before. My mind struggled to recall the experience. I would know if I could compare it.

It was similar to the time you woke up in a daze in a New York hotel room. You thought you had been mugged, but you hadn't. You woke up with that taste in your mouth and staring unfocused at a dark patch laid against a gaudy pattern. The dark patch was your blood on the carpet. In a freak accident you had slipped getting out of the shower and cut your head open on a door knob. That same flavour was in your mouth and throat now. Iron and salt. Bleeding again.

‘He's breathing,' a voice I knew but couldn't place said in English. It had a frightened quiver to it.

‘Bien sûr, idiot!,'
a stronger French voice said. I didn't know that tone at all. Or maybe it was because it was
said in French. It was befuddling. Hadn't I hit my head on a doorknob in New York?

But that was another time wasn't it? No. Maybe I was in a Manhattan hospital, and these people were pretending to speak French.

I wanted to sleep. I wanted to sleep for a long time. I didn't need any asanas or mundis to float me away either. I was there and I wasn't.

I felt a needle going in. Hey! The uncrushed part of my brain protested. But nothing came out my mouth.

Hope they used a new syringe.

‘I think he should be killed,' a third voice said. That person was familiar too and he spoke with an accent. I didn't like his tone, not because he wanted some poor individual put to the sword, whoever he or she was, but because it gave me bad vibes.

It was like an impression you get about a kid you knew when you were a young child. You either liked him or you didn't and thirty years later when you met him again you remembered the feeling. The impression stuck and never changed. So with this deeper-than-deep voice. It spelt danger.

The owner of the voice was walking when he spoke because I heard him come closer and the food whiffs were stronger. He carried them. Monsieur Coq au Vin. Le Chef. He repeated his destructive thought in French and with some vigour. But the dominant voice was against killing the poor so-and-so, whoever he might be, just yet.

‘You are going to take him to the Bois de Boulogne for a rendezvous with Christine,' the dominant voice said.

‘Christine?' Coq au Vin said incredulously.

‘
Oui.
That way there is no connection to us.'

‘
Merde!
That's crazy!'

So the victim was going to be taken to the Bois de Boulogne where the transsexuals and hookers hang out and he was going to be introduced to Christine. It sounded odd, but far better than Coq au Vin's suggestion.

‘I don't understand,' Coq au Vin complained.

‘You're not paid to understand,' the Dominator said.

‘But what use is he alive?'

‘Plenty. The Australian police think he murdered Martine. They know he killed Maniguet.'

‘That's why I want him dead!' Coq au Vin complained. I heard a spit and a splat of saliva hit my cheek. It was warm then cold. I felt something wet – a flannel – brush my face and a nurse growled something inaudible. It then struck me that the one they wanted eliminated was me. Now I was more emotionally involved.

‘No, Richard,' the Dominator insisted, ‘if the murders are pinned on him then we can return to Australia without hindrance. The police must find him, charge him and take him to Melbourne. We have to go back there. We must get the files.'

‘Mais . . .'

‘Don't contradict me!!' the Dominator yelled. ‘You failed me once. Do I have to do everything?!!'

Coq au Vin seemed defeated.

‘What about May?' Coq au Vin enquired.

‘That's a different matter.'

‘Do we need him?'

‘Not really.'

‘Then let me finish him.'

‘He has no idea who I am?'

‘How could he?'

‘I want to be sure.'

There was a brief pause.

‘He might know who you are, actually,' Coq au Vin said, without much reflection. He was changing his position quickly. Too quickly. The Dominator was right onto him.

‘You're saying that because you're frustrated,' the Dominator remarked, ‘that's the trouble with psychopaths. They've got to kill to relieve frustrations.'

‘I'm not a psychopath!'

‘OK. You're not a psychopath. But you give a very good impression of one.'

There was a brooding silence.

Knives rattled in metal trays. The chainsaw had stopped in the forest and the drone of insects had taken over.

The Dominator asked the nurse to put the light on. It was getting dark. That meant it was about nine p.m. I had lost nearly half a day, and I hoped I could get it back crossing the international date line.

‘Richard,' the Dominator said, ‘what makes you think May might know who I am?'

‘He spent a lot of time with Martine.'

‘She didn't know. I'm sure of that.'

‘She may have guessed,' Coq au Vin said.

‘No. Not even at the end.'

‘But May asked me if I knew who you were,' Coq au Vin said.

‘And?'

‘I said I didn't know, but he said he knew Michel had had plastic surgery in Australia.'

‘Why was this discussed?' the Dominator asked. He was in a fury again. ‘And when?'

‘It just came up in discussion – last night at La Coupole when he came there in a panic.'

‘You'd better disabuse him of that idea,' the Dominator said, ‘but first we may be able to use him to deal with
Christine and also to show the Australian police where Hamilton is.'

‘OK,' Coq au Vin said reluctantly. I sensed he would like to handle it and remove one of my arms as a souvenir.

There was another pause. People went out of the room and returned.

‘It's time to go,' the Dominator said to Coq au Vin, who my dulled brain was telling me had to be Richard Cochard. God! I was going to be left alone with that monster after all, and in this enfeebled state!

‘Give him another five,' the Dominator said. I felt a nurse's hands. They were rougher than before. There was the jab of another needle. This time in the derriere. I was being drugged to the eyeballs.