Styx & Stone (31 page)

“Miss Stone,” said Bruchner in his stiff tones. No good evening, no how are you; just the statement: Miss Stone.

“Professor Bruchner,” I answered, then waited for a reaction to the man standing next me.

“Please come in,” he said, opening the door wide. I stepped inside, and Karen Bruchner followed.

“I forgot to introduce you to my friend,” I said with relish. “Gualtieri Bruchner meet Gualtieri Bruchner.”

The professor’s jaw dropped. His eyes grew large, and I thought I saw the hair rising on his neck.

“You’ll agree it’s a singular coincidence,” I said, perhaps a bit too blithely.

“What is this new charade, Miss Stone?”

He knew the jig was up, but the habits of fifteen years don’t go without a fight.

“This man’s name is Gualtieri Bruchner,” I repeated.

“Then who am I?” he asked.

“Jakob Maschiewicz,” I said, my heart pumping furiously.

“But Miss Stone,” interrupted Karen Bruchner. “This is not the man. This is not Maschiewicz.”

The professor drew strength from Karen’s denial. “What is going on here?” he demanded.

I paused, considering where my logic had failed. If all had gone according to script, the professor would have been the student from Bremen. He would have taken Bruchner’s name for some unknown reason, perhaps because he’d lost his own papers.

“Let’s get this straight,” I began tentatively. “When were you born, Professor Bruchner?”

“December 21, 1908.”

“And you, Mr. Bruchner?”

“The same,” he said, throat dry.

“And where?” I asked, this time giving Karen the chance to answer first.

“Merano, Italy,” he proclaimed, voice stronger. “In Trentino-Alto Adige.”

“Professor?”

“The same,” he blushed.

“What is the number on your arm, Professor?”

He looked flustered, but he rolled up his sleeve and recited the number without looking. “194274,” he said in English, then repeated it in German. “We had to memorize it. I have never forgotten. I cannot forget.”

“
Dio mio
,” whispered Karen Bruchner. “
È uguale.
Mine is the same.”

The two men stared at each other. Karen Bruchner’s eyes peered from beneath his furrowed brow, studying the man standing before him. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, whether he recognized him or not. Then he spoke to Bruchner in Italian, and I was unable to follow their words.

“I am the real Gualtieri Bruchner,” said Karen, turning to me. “You believe me, don’t you?”

“This is ridiculous,” answered the professor. “I have a passport, papers, any proof you could want. This man is a liar!”

“It’s true, I have no passport,” said Karen meekly. “Because I was a displaced person.”

“You see? I can prove who I am,” said the professor. “He cannot.”

“
Sono Gualtieri Bruchner!
” He turned to me, his dark eyes trembling in their deep sockets. “Miss Stone, I am Gualtieri Bruchner. I have little of my own. But I have my name and I want it!”

“How is this your business?” the professor asked me. “This is between me and him,” he said, pointing to Karen Bruchner.

“It became my business when someone hit my father over the head,” I said. “And I intend to find out which of you is the fake.”

“How can I assure you I had nothing to do with the attack on your father?”

“You can start by telling me who the other man was at lunch last Friday. You saw him, and you know who he was.”

He shook his head violently. “I saw no one.”

I offered to pay Karen Bruchner’s carfare to Brooklyn, but he refused, opting for the subway instead.

“Why has he taken my name, Miss Stone?” he asked, poised to descend into the hole at Grand Central Station.

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Mr. Bruchner.”

He twisted his tweed cap in his broad hands, searching for words. “Will you . . . Can you find out for me?”

I felt overwhelmed. “I’ll try.”

My next stop was Saint Vincent’s to relieve Sean McDunnough at my father’s bedside. I arrived late and apologized, but he shrugged it off.

“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I get time and a half for overtime. See you tomorrow.”

“What about church?” I asked.

“I’ve spent three days in a hospital named Saint Vincent’s,” he said, securing the
Racing Form
under his right arm. “That ought to hold me till next week. Besides, Sundays I get double time.”

Charleen Lionel, the nurse who’d been called away by the anonymous phone call the night my father’s respirator was disconnected, gave me some encouraging news on his prognosis. His blood pressure had risen, and his pulse was stronger. He was still on the respirator, though, as he had bucked and fought hard when they tried to remove it from the tracheostoma they’d cut into his throat. His heart began to race, and they had to leave the respirator in and sedate him to calm him down. Nurse Lionel said he had even mumbled a few incoherent words that afternoon.

“Dr. Mortonson is optimistic he’ll come out of the coma soon, and then we’ll get him off the breathing apparatus,” she said.

“Did the doctor mention anything about brain damage?”

“No,” she frowned. “He still doesn’t know about that.

Nurse Lionel found me two foam pillows that I stuffed between the back and seat of the chair Sean McDunnough had been breaking in all day. I kicked off my heels and put my feet up. The result was that I could now sleep poorly in a softer uncomfortable position.

Noise travels far in a hospital once the lights go out. You can hear the humming of machines, beeps and ticks, and the groans and snoring of patients. And the nurses, with their hushed conversations, should know to keep their voices down.

“He hasn’t called me since,” whispered one. “I knew I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help it.”

“What did he say afterward?” asked the other.

“Not much. He seemed fine, nice, you know.”

“Well, maybe he’ll call. Maybe he’s been busy.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I really shouldn’t have.”

The whispering was interrupted by a moan across the ward. One nurse investigated while the other manned the fortress. A few minutes later, the nurse returned, and the muted conversation resumed:

“Did I tell you about my mother?”

“No.”

“She wants to move from Jersey to New York.”

“That’s a little too close for comfort.”

“Too close? She wants to move in with me!”

The elevator doors opened down the hall, and an orderly pushed a gurney along the tiles. He stopped to flirt with the two nurses.

“Come on, the broom closet’s safe.”

“Oh, Tony, you’re so bad!” Giggles. “Get out of here before Sister comes.”

“She can come along too,” he said, turning the gurney around, pushing it down the hallway, and back into the elevator.

“What do you think of Tony?” asked one nurse after he’d gone.

“He’s funny, but he’s such a pervert. Sex on the brain, all the time.”

“I heard he’s really big. You know, big.”

“No!”

Giggles again. “Have you ever seen a really big one?”

“I’m a nurse, aren’t I?”

The elevator doors slid open again, and a portly nun scooted up the hall to the nurses’ station. She spoke in a stern whisper.

“Have you seen Anthony?”

“I saw him get out of the elevator a while ago.”

“No-good, lazy . . . How’re things going here, girls?”

“Fine.”

The nun headed back to the elevator, which pinged as the car arrived on the floor, and she disappeared inside.

“Sister looks like one of those troll dolls, don’t you think?” said one nurse. “The kind with the pink hair.”

“Maybe she wants to see Tony’s thing,” said the other, and they both laughed, a little too loud for the hour.

When their whispering subsided around one o’clock, I fell asleep on my lumpy cushions.

A noise woke me from my tenuous sleep sometime later. I sat up in the chair to listen, but the only sound I heard was my back cracking. Standing up to stretch, I paced up and down the ICU in my stockings, to the nurses’ station and back to my father’s bed.

The white sheets of the ward bore a ghostly gray cast in the dark, painting an eerie landscape, and the hissing machinery kept time. Every now and then, a patient would emerge from a drug-induced stupor long enough to moan for a nurse or a loved one. I tried to ignore them, their thin voices and shadowy figures. Death was hovering over the ward, waiting for an opportune moment to snatch one of the vulnerable souls from this world. I felt a draft, and returned to my father’s bedside.

Resting my feet on the corner of the bed, I threw back my head and tried to sleep. The pump-pump-blip-hiss in the background played a rondo, with a different machine, attached to a different patient, taking turns leading off each round. I closed my eyes and began to doze off, lulled by the humming equipment. Then a shriek tore through the night: a hellish wail of lament and suffering. I fell from my makeshift bed to the hard floor, landing on my behind. The two nurses scrambled out of their fortress across the floor like roaches surprised by light in the night. I pushed myself to my feet, rubbing my lower back, and watched the scene unfold. Another scream blared across the floor, like a foghorn at close range. It didn’t sound human, and I couldn’t even guess its gender.

“Get the doctor on duty!” one nurse called to the other. “Tell him we need morphine.”

The other nurse sprinted away, just past my father’s bed. The little nun returned, scooting (nuns don’t run) through the darkness. She joined the attending nurse at the bedside of the agonizing patient.

“Hold him down!” she shouted, trying to make herself heard over the howling. “Hold him down while I strap him in!”

They struggled, two shadows wrestling with a bed, until the other nurse returned with an orderly and doctor.

“Tie him down,” the doctor said to the orderly, who practically threw himself onto the thrashing sheets. Moments later the patient was secured, but the screaming whirled around the room like a wind blowing ever stronger. I covered my ears as the attendants pumped the patient full of morphine. A minute later he was quiet, but the air still vibrated with the echoes of the shrieking.

“Man, that’s strong stuff,” said the orderly. “Quieted him right down.”