My Brother's Keeper (6 page)

"All right. What do you want to know?"

"For a start, what's
that
thing?"

I pointed at the cylinder like a flashlight that was sitting on the rugs beside her.

"It's an ultraviolet lamp." She picked it up. "Leo had a small tattoo on his left wrist—invisible in ordinary light, but it would fluoresce in ultraviolet light. That's how I knew—" She paused, and looked down.

"Is that usual for people who work for the U.S. State Department?"

She hesitated again, and leaned back against the metal panel of the van. "I can't answer that. At least, I may be able to, but I'll have to call and get permission. I felt so sure that you were Leo, I didn't . . ." She seemed all set to disappear again in her trance of grief. "When you last saw him, did he tell you—"

"You find out if you can tell me what you know, then I'll tell you what I know. I don't care for all this mystery."

"I'll know what I can tell you by tomorrow." She tried to force a smile. "Could we have dinner then? If you'll do it, I promise that I'll be able to give you answers—more than I can now."

"Tomorrow?" The idea would make Sir Westcott choke on his apple, for me to be out two days in a row, but what the hell, he wasn't my keeper. "Where and when?"

"In London? Can you meet me, at, say, eight o'clock?"

"I hope so. Whereabouts?"

"How about Bertorellis, in Charlotte Street?"

"I know it. I'll meet you there, if you'll answer me one more question now."

She looked uneasy. "If I can."

"Was Leo's job a dangerous one?"

She made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "You've been leading me on. He told you, didn't he? I thought he might have, even though he wasn't supposed to. Would you answer one question for me, before you go?"

"I had my turn. What do you want to know?"

"Did he ever mention to you somebody with the initials T.P.?"

"What do they stand for?"

"I don't know—that's what I hoped you'd be able to tell me. It was somebody that I'm sure was trying to hurt him. Someone he'd heard of and I'm sure he knew rather well. But he was afraid of them. In his last message to me the tape was hard to hear, but he said that the thing he was scared of most was that T.P. would get him."

"Sorry." I shook my head and raised myself higher on my knees in the van. "I can't help you there. He never mentioned anything to me."

"Well, never mind." She gave a shaky little sort of laugh. She had come up on her knees too, as I started to open the door, and she was almost in an attitude of prayer. "It's astonishing, you look so like him. . . . Be careful when you leave here. I'll see you tomorrow night, right?" She gave another little groan when the light from outside the van fell on my face. "You look so like him . . ."

I closed the van door quietly on her misery and limped away into the late afternoon sunshine. I was sorry for her, but there wasn't a thing I could do about it. And the inside of my head was beginning to hurt badly, buzzing and whirring as though somebody had taken a power saw and was busy trimming off the rear of my skull case. Memory and speculation clashed and fought for my attention. Before Leo met me and we took our fatal ride together, he had come from Zurich. And before that, he had been doing—what? and where?

I felt terrible, dry-mouthed and panting as I reached the subway. And when I got back to the hospital, I caught hell from Tess, and then a second hell from Sir Westcott. I had arrived two hours later than I said I would. Didn't I realize that I was still a very sick man, far to sick to overtax myself like this? And didn't I know how important it was to avoid too much mental stimulation? Well, thank Heaven that the Zoo was a nice, restful place for me to visit. Tess made me a glass of warm milk.

But I ought to concentrate on quiet, peaceful activities for the next two weeks, and not let anyone disturb me. They both insisted on it.

When I woke the next morning I was tempted to tell Sir Westcott Shaw the whole thing. After all, how could he decide how to treat me if he didn't know what had been happening to me?

The thing that kept me silent was fear. Not the fear that he would disbelieve me and dismiss the whole thing as more mental tricks coming from my tattered brain. No, what I was afraid was that he
would
believe me, and forbid me to attend the meeting with Valnora Warren because it would overexcite me. It would, too. Every time I thought about the evening my left hand got the jitters and I had trouble swallowing. But I had to know what had been going on—and I don't just mean I
wanted
to know. I
had
to know.

The whole day would have been impossibly long but for one new factor that was added to the equation. On my morning constitutional, limping along through the interior of the hospital, I worked my way down to a basement corridor where I had never been before. Even though it was new to me, it held no particular promise or interest, and I followed it only because any change to the usual route back to my room was preferable to the same old beige corridors. The new area (I should more accurately call it the old area) was more like a junk yard than part of a hospital. I went past rooms full of old chairs, cans of paint, trolleys, gurneys, stretchers, and battered and ancient beds. There was even an old model X-ray machine in one room, crouched in the corner like a metal Cyclops, dusty and neglected. I spent five minutes fiddling with the buttons and settings on it after I had plugged it into a wall socket, but it was too seized up and arthritic in the joints even to move the position of the shielding plates.

I became bored with it after a while, and almost went on down the corridor without even looking into the next room along. But when I cracked the door open a few inches for a quick and casual glance inside, a thrill of excitement—and fear—shot through my whole body. Standing against the far wall was an old, upright piano.

The question had been staring me in the face for months, but I had managed to look the other way. There had been no piano—so far as I knew—available in the hospital. It had been possible to avoid the central issue: how much had I lost in the crash, and how much more had gone because of lack of practice?

I opened the lid, pulled over a chair, and sat at the keyboard. It was thirty seconds before I could bring myself to touch a key, and when I did my mouth was dry and my tongue felt two sizes too big.

I hit two or three timid notes. The instrument was badly out of tune, and the keys didn't strike evenly—damp had done its work. Well, so what? I took a deep breath, just like a diver standing on the high board, lifted both hands high, and plunged into the final Allegro of Schubert's Sonata in C Minor.

It was horrendous, with fistfuls of wrong notes all over the place. My left hand jumped and twitched over the bass like a demented grasshopper. I didn't care. I plowed on through every discord, and I enjoyed every note. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was getting more than a simple musical response to my playing. During every left hand run in the bass, patterns of smoke blossoms appeared as images in my left eye. They meandered up the field of view, thinning to blue and purple as they rose. If I closed my left eye they disappeared.

I switched to some of the old Czerny velocity exercises, up and down the keyboard with all the grace and elegance of a three-legged racehorse, then jumped straight into the Brahms D Minor Concerto, attacking the octave trills. While I played, regular columns of green insects came into view over the top of the piano, marching steadily to the right until they disappeared from view past the end of my nose. As I stared, the last of the moving bugs changed color, and became an unmistakable exact copy of the gold tie clip that Leo had worn in the helicopter.

Perspiration was running down my forehead and into my eyes, but I wasn't quite ready to quit.

My last effort was probably a mistake. I wanted to get a feeling for just how much coordination I could summon between my left and right hands. The C Minor Fugue, Number 4 from the
Well-Tempered Clavier
, would normally have been a fair test, but I was in poor condition and easily tired. To do Bach justice called for much more finger control and mental equilibrium than I could muster. It was a total loss. I didn't get a single visual image as I hacked and threshed my way through to the conclusion of a travesty of a performance.

When I was done, I discovered that I had wet my pants.

That ended the first Lionel Salkind post-operative recital. I slunk back to my room, thoroughly disgusted with myself and wondering if I had accidentally created a twenty-first century art form to surpass punk rock. Sonata for piano and incontinent. Serenade for tenor, flatulent, and strings. Concerto molto grosso.

I told Sir Westcott about the whole thing when he came on his rounds, and he nodded cheerfully.

"Synesthesia. Perfectly natural. Until you get some decent regeneration in the corpus callosum, there'll be referred signals like this. Look on it the way that I do—positively. The main thing is that you're beginning to get signals in from that left eye. They're bogus ones, generated on the right side and cross-switching in somehow to the left, but that's just the beginning. As I said, give it time."

"But why did I lose bladder control? That's not synesthesia, surely."

He stood up from the chair—I had progressed to the point where I had a room with normal furniture, rather than standard hospital fixtures—and went over to the window. "You'll see a variety of physical effects before you settle down. Never mind about peeing yourself—you were doing that all the time in the first few weeks. You keep your eyes open for any kind of seizure. If you ever feel something like an epileptic fit, get to bed at once. And send for me."

Good advice, but it made certain assumptions. It's not easy to pop into bed when you're running for your life, even if there's a bed handy. Other factors loom rather larger in the list of priorities.

I felt a bit guilty when Sir Westcott left. Here was he, trying to make a whole man out of the bits and pieces that had been left over from the accident, and here was I, holding back some of the vital facts.

Rather than asking for approval to leave the hospital two days in a row, I took the coward's way out. In this case that happened to be through the kitchens, and on down the long alley known as Kitchen Lane where food delivery trucks came to drop off supplies to the hospital. I sneaked away at five o'clock, when everything was quiet, and by six I was on the train and on my way to London.

I could have saved myself all the trouble of that deception. She never came. From seven-thirty to eight-thirty I stood outside Bertorellis in a thin, summer drizzle. I didn't get particularly wet, the rain wasn't hard enough for that, but I did get slowly madder and madder. Deception at the hospital was bad enough. Wasted deception was much worse. All my sneaky behavior had been pointless.

Finally I gave up. The rain was setting in harder and the evening turning colder. I went inside, sat down at a table for one, and indulged myself. The jugged hare was excellent, and the house wine made me contemplative. I was beginning to put many things together. Leo's mood, that final afternoon. The sudden and inexplicable failure of the helicopter, listed in the accident report as "pilot error," when I knew damned well it was nothing of the sort. Valnora Warren's admission that Leo's job was not what it was portrayed to be, and, worst of all, the knowledge that Leo and I had been less close than I liked to imagine. He had his secrets.

It all made sense. From the day of our first teenage reunion, Leo had acted as the one in charge. I don't know how much was that California upbringing, and how much that tiny few minutes of seniority, but the reason didn't matter. He would see nothing unusual in having a life I knew nothing about.

There was other evidence. A week before, I had received the final probate of Leo's estate, for which I was the sole heir. That was no real surprise, with Tom and Ellen dead. But the amount he had left staggered me. Even allowing for the luck that he claimed for his stock market investments, could he have amassed such wealth as a simple government employee?

I sat there in the restaurant for three-quarters of an hour, musing over a couple of glasses of Courvoisier. When I paid the bill and left I found that the weather had turned even nastier. It was one of those drenching summer downpours that I remembered from childhood holidays in Scarborough, when the clouds swooped in low off the sea, the temperature dropped into the forties, and the whole town seemed to lock itself up for the night about eight o'clock.

Naturally, there wasn't a taxi to be seen, and the pavements were deserted. Thank goodness I had come with a hat and a raincoat.

I ducked my head low and set off at a fast walk through the slick streets, heading south before cutting through to Tottenham Court Road. I was wearing rubber-soled shoes, waterproof but treacherously slippery on the wet pavement. But it made me tread lightly and carefully, and allowed me to catch the sound of heavier footsteps behind me.

I took a quick look over my shoulder. A tall man in a tan raincoat was pacing steadily after me. The area was usually well-populated and quite safe, but the bad weather had driven everyone off the streets. With my imagination inflamed from my after-dinner speculations, I walked a little faster. I'm big enough and hefty enough to scare away most people looking for an easy mugging, but like any pianist or violinist—or anyone else who relies on uninjured hands for his living—my natural instinct was to run rather than fight. I cut east at a faster walk, heading for a busier street where people should offer some insurance. Then, at the corner, I stopped.

In the narrow street that led through to Tottenham Court Road stood a second tan-coated figure. It could have been any casual local, waiting for his girlfriend, but somehow I knew better—or perhaps Leo did. My left arm was making agitated jerking motions, and my left leg acted as though it would like to run away down the street all by itself.

I swivelled, looking for some way out. The man behind me was closer, and turning the corner after him came a blue Mercedes 450SL, gliding along at walking pace.