Out of the Sun (18 page)

"Never to return," murmured Harry, half to himself.

"I don't know about never. While there's '

"How far is the hospital from here?"

"Oh, about fifteen miles."

"Take me there, Woodrow. Please."

Hackensack grimaced. "No can do. I've got to put you on a train at Albany."

"When does it leave?"

"Twenty after ten."

"And how long will it take us to get to Albany?"

"Hour, maybe. Hour and a half."

Harry glanced at his watch. "There's time, then."

"Not enough. Besides, it's too risky."

"You said yourself there was nothing to worry about."

"There isn't. So long as we don't take any senseless detours."

This isn't senseless. I just want to talk to Dobermann. To ask him what he told David."

"He'll clam up. You may as well talk to the wall."

"I just want to try."

"Sorry, Harry, but I can't do it. Donna told me to be careful. I aim to oblige her."

"Fine. I understand." Harry grinned. "I'd better call a cab, hadn't I?" Hackensack flung up his hands in a gesture of pleading. "Unless you think that's even riskier."

"I guess I do." Hackensack pulled a grubby white handkerchief from his pocket and flapped it in front of him. "You win, Harry. We'll go pay Mr. Dobermann a visit."

TWENTY-FIVE

Did the Hudson Valley Psychiatric Center admit visitors after seven o'clock on a Sunday evening? This was the kind of practical question Harry did not pause to consider until he and Hackensack were standing in the lofty foyer of the establishment, waiting for the man behind the counter to drag his attention away from a televised football game. But the glossy brochures on display and the coming and going of people who certainly looked as if they had a stake in the outside world encouraged him to be optimistic, as did Hackensack's confidence that he could talk their way past any number of bureaucratic obstacles.

"You want to see whol'

"Carl Dobermann. We're friends of his."

"That so?"

"Yuh. But we're not often in the neighbourhood, so we'd sure appreciate it if .. ."

"Wait over there. I'll see what I can do."

They sat down on a couch, where Hackensack muttered contemptuously at the assorted ineptitudes of the televised foot ballers while Harry studied an artist's impression of the hospital's picturesque setting on the banks of the Hudson, something he would have to take on trust, having seen nothing beyond the floodlit car park. Then the man returned and announced somebody would be out to have a word with them shortly. A few minutes later, somebody arrived. A small spring-heeled slick-haired fellow in a far smarter suit than Harry would have supposed the night-shift at Hudson Valley really warranted. He did not actually have Public Relations Officer stamped on his forehead, but his sparkling smile signalled a certain expertise in that direction.

"Would you two gentlemen care to step along to my office?"

"No problem," said Hackensack. "But we only called by to see a friend. Don't want to cause any trouble."

"It's just there are one or two points about after-hours visiting I need to clear."

Hackensack glanced round at Harry, giving him the chance to pull out there and then. But Harry was not about to give up so easily. "I'm sure it won't take long. Let's go."

It was a short walk along blank peach-walled corridors to their smiling host's office. He introduced himself en route as Glendon Pouchera member of the hospital's administrative staff. His manner was brisk but accommodating. There seemed no reason to think trouble was his middle name. Or to suppose that closing his door behind them signified anything beyond habitual politeness.

"Gather you want to see Carl Dobermann."

"Yuh," said Hackensack. "But, look, it's no big deal. Just a .. ."

"A whim," said Harry.

Poucher frowned. "You're friends of his?"

That's right," said Hackensack. "From way back."

"How far back?"

"Pardon me?"

"I ask because Carl was admitted to this hospital thirty-six years ago. Since his parents died, he's received very few visits and the only friends he's made have been among his fellow residents. You're not former patients, are you?"

"No, sir, we're not."

"But you are friends of his?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Would you mind telling me when you last visited him?"

"Well, I don't rightly ... I'm not exactly .. ."

"September third, perhaps?"

"Oh no. Not as recent as that."

"Definitely not," put in Harry.

Two gentlemen came to see Carl that day," Poucher continued. "We don't know their names and we wouldn't ordinarily be interested. It wouldn't be significant. Except for the fact that, two days later, Carl Dobermann absconded from this hospital."

"He did what?"

"He ran away. Something he hadn't tried to do in all those thirty-six years. He went over the wall. And he hasn't come back."

TWENTY-SIX

Harry's expectations of America, he was coming to realize, were largely shaped by film and television. He had unconsciously assumed the train he was to join at Albany would resemble the one Gary Grant had seduced Eve Marie Saint on in North by Northwest. But just as Harry was no longer the Brylcreemed buck who had taken Doris Crowdy to the cinema one Saturday night long ago to see the latest Hitchcock, so the Twentieth Century Limited was no longer a stylish conveyance laden with romantic possibilities. If anything, it had aged less gracefully than Harry: a fact which gave him no comfort whatever.

Nor, come to that, did the diabolically sprung seat he was currently slumped in. Sleep would have been a risky enterprise for those with stronger backs than his. Fortunately, sleep was not on his agenda. There were too many mysteries piling up in his path for rest to be a serious option. And one of them was why he had allowed himself to become involved in all the other mysteries in the first place.

He knew the reason well enough, though. On the other side of the aisle, a boy of eight or so had fallen asleep on the elbow of his father, who glanced down fondly at him from time to time through heavy lids, but refrained from moving for fear of waking the boy. This unremarkable piece of paternal generosity symbolized for Harry all the things he could and would and should have done for the son he had never known he had. Fatherhood as an idea had never interested him. His estate was not the kind that required a will, let alone an heir. As for parental bonding and other such notions trumpeted on the covers of glossy magazines he had often glimpsed arrayed by the supermarket check-out while doing service as Mrs. Tandy's bag-carrier, he was frankly contemptuous. Or had been. Till the physical and factual reality of his son's existence burst into his life. It could not be ignored. It could not be shrugged off or disowned. It was a piece of truth he would carry with him to the end of his days.

But what was the truth about David John Yenning? He had alienated his wife and probably his lover too. He had betrayed his friends and their principles. He had set a murderous conspiracy in motion. And all to serve his obsession with a scientific puzzle he could never hope to solve. So much was undeniable. But he had been Woodrow Hackensack's saviour. And maybe in a sense he was Harry's too. Only somebody as helpless as David now was could accept whatever was done for him so unconditionally. He could not walk away from Harry, as he had done once before. And Harry was not about to walk away from him.

Precisely what he was going to do instead remained unclear. His visit to the Hudson Valley Psychiatric Center had only served to complicate an already confusing situation. Carl Dobermann's unknown whereabouts and unguessable motives had been added to an insoluble equation. Why did David go to see him? What did they talk about? And where, two days late rafter thirty-six years of placid immobility, did Dobermann go?

His flight had clearly surprised the hospital authorities, as Glendon Poucher had freely admitted. "It's unusual, if not unprecedented, for a long-stay patient like Mr. Dobermann to decamp. His was a carefully planned covert departure, taking advantage of reduced staffing levels and high visitor density during the Labor Day holiday. There's been no trace of him since. I should add that he was not a voluntary patient, so any light you gentlemen can shed on his probable movements would be greatly valued." But light they could not have shed even had they wanted to. Their hastily assembled story might only have helped cover Dobermann's tracks. No, they definitely were not the pair who had visited him on 3 September. Their connection with him dated from using the same Upper West Side bar back in the fifties. Poucher was welcome to their names and telephone numbers at any rate the false ones they supplied. They would certainly be in touch if anything else occurred to them.

"Do you think he believed us?" Harry had asked once they were safely back in the car, driving towards the main gate.

"Maybe. He's not exactly likely to guess the truth, is he? Just as well we both look as if we could have been propping up bars since .. . when the hell was it?"

"Some time in 1958. Dobermann was here right through the sixties, the seventies and the eighties. He never showed any signs of even wanting to leave."

"Until two days after David hauled me up here. Jeez, I thought at any moment some orderly was gonna come in and say, "Yup, this is one of the guys who came to see Mad Dog Carl all right.""

But was Dobermann mad? And, if so, what form did his madness take? Poucher had been cagey on the point when Harry mentioned the strange rumours surrounding his fugitive patient. "I've heard no rumours. As far as I'm aware, Mr. Dobermann's dementia has remained intractable since his admission. His condition certainly hasn't altered of late. As to why he was admitted in the first place, that is naturally confidential. We are presently concerned with locating him, not re-examining his diagnosis. Insanity frightens many people, gentlemen. You would be surprised what outlandish explanations they devise for its symptoms."

From the computerized security of Poucher's office, that no doubt seemed as sensible a view as it was convenient. But to Harry, turning occasionally to stare at himself in the night-blanked window of the train, Dobermann was more than an errant madman. He was one with the blurred presence Harry had glimpsed at his shoulder in Copenhagen, the figure on the bridge, the shape beneath the sheets, the fading pitter-patter of following footsteps. He was the shadow of whatever had reached out from the darkness to overwhelm Hammelgaard and might reach out again.

"Would you do me a favour when you get back to New York, Woodrow?" Harry had asked when they were about halfway between Poughkeepsie and Albany.

"Depends."

"Try and find out what happened to Dobermann in 1958. Why he was locked up in that hospital."

"How the hell am I supposed to do that?"

"I don't know. Sweet talk your opposite number at Columbia. Caretakers go back longer than professors. Check the local papers for that year. See if something .. . unusual .. . occurred at the university."

"Students going cuckoo ain't exactly unusual."

This must have been different. It has to be what led David to him."

"Nah. I told you. That was the scraps of Dobermann's thesis. Plus the rumours, o'course."

"Ah yes, the rumours. You've heard them yourself, have you?"

"No. But '

"Nor had Poucher. So he claimed, anyway. Maybe David invented them for your benefit."

"What are you getting at?"

An alternative explanation for the crop of deaths among former Globescope staff. That was where Harry's fears were beginning to drag his thoughts. Did it start in Lazenby's office on 29 August? Or at the Hudson Valley Psychiatric Center on 3 September? If the latter, then hunting down incriminating tape recordings was a pointless diversion. But no. That made no sense. The future would not matter to a man who did not even have a past. And yet .. . He looked round at the empty seat beside him and shivered. "He was close? Hammelgaard had said. "He was nearly there. He was on the brink of history' Where was Dobermann? Far away? Or close by, all too close, all the time?

"I'll see what I can dig up about the guy," Hackensack had reluctantly agreed. "I'll ask a few discreet questions."

Thanks."

"But don't complain if I come up with damn all. We're talking about the fifties. To most people today, that's as remote as the Ice Age."

"It seems clear enough in my mind."

That's because you're not most people."

"What do I do when I get to Chicago?"

"I'll tell you at Albany."

Tell me now."

"Donna said '

"Just tell me, Woodrow. It's my neck, remember."

But was it? Gazing from the train as it drew slowly out of Albany-Rensselaer Station to see Hackensack standing by his Cadillac in the car park, Harry had wondered if carrying a message to Donna Trangam was actually any riskier than asking questions about Carl Dobermann. He had wished for a moment that Hackensack had refused to do him such a favour, a wish not far short of a premonition. Well, perhaps he would phone him from Chicago and tell him not to bother. There would be time enough for that once his appointment with Donna had been kept.

"OK, Harry. Have it your way. The train gets into Chicago at one o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Take a cab to the John Hancock Center. Ride the elevator to the top floor. There's a restaurant up there, and a bar. Should be pretty busy around lunchtime. Buy yourself a drink, take a seat and admire the view of Lake Michigan. Donna will contact you there."

"How will she identify me?"

"She's gonna call me in the morning. I'll describe you to her. But I doubt I'll need to."

"Why not?" "Cos, like I told you, you're not most people."

He was not most people. How Harry wished he could be at this low midnight ebb of his confidence. He struggled out of his seat and made his way to the vestibule, where he broached his last pack of Karelia Sertika and smoked one slowly through with the window pulled open to admit a freezing gale of air. He took David's snapshot from his wallet and stared at his son's smiling face in the sickly yellow lamplight. All he had learnt about this distant stranger-child was contained in the knowing warmth of his photographed gaze. An untold joke; an unshared secret; an unsolved mystery. They were waiting for Harry, somewhere out there. They were beckoning him on. They had neither time nor place in any printed schedule. But already they were fixed points in his future.