The Beggar's Garden (20 page)

“Enjoy it,” Dan said, returning to his bedroom to let them alone, shutting the door as gently as he was able.

A
s he ate his lunch, Saul watched the stout Assassin feed Georgina—a stunted, moaning woman to whom God had accidentally issued a mollusk instead of a brain—guiding a plastic spoon of wobbling pudding into her mouth, with a little flick over her lower lip to catch what didn't make it in. The Assassin was a short, rotund Latino, and his presence rang Saul with alarm as he pulped the crusts of his tuna melt.

Saul had recognized the Assassin because he was a self-taught detective, which meant he knew what to look for. He'd seen men like this night after night on the news: inflamed guerrillas and private militiamen, nationless killers and hooded butchers, all either shooting into the air or wailing mournfully, draped across the body of a fallen brother. Saul shifted a table closer and his suspicions were strengthened by a deep scar that tunnelled the length of the Assassin's left cheek, the shape of a minnow, clean enough to be the work of a scalpel. A box-cutter duel in the steaming slums of Nicaragua, Saul suspected. Or perhaps he'd been a child
soldier, his soul now turned mercenary and septic with hatred. All seemed equally possible.

He saw the man unlace Georgina's bib and lift it from her limp neck. Had he come for her? But Georgina couldn't even speak—not entirely true, she knew two words: one that sounded like
bah,
which meant “bad,” “hungry,” “bathroom” and “angry,” and the other
roob,
which was used for every other linguistic purpose. Saul's thoughts were interrupted when suddenly she gurgled and whacked her plastic bowl from the table with a sharp pink elbow, slopping ivory pudding on the right tire of her wheelchair while she brayed with delight. The Assassin went scrambling for a mop, desperate not to publicize his incompetence on his first day.

Saul decided to launch an investigation. In the smoking room, he found Drew, who was relishing his 1:15 after-lunch smoke. At Riverview, all aspects of existence were subject to a schedule, an iron framework of meds, meals, sleep, bathing and activities over which the staff attempted to stretch the battered material of their ruined beings like the fabric of a tent. Staff controlled the smokes because patients like Drew would torch an entire carton in a day if given the chance. Not that he ever had.

“Who's the new staff? And what does he want with Georgina?” Saul said.

“You mean the Latino guy wire tap water wings?” Drew said, blurting the words as a prefabricated unit. Drew's mind had been shredded by wagonloads of methamphetamines and radio waves sent especially to him by his great-uncle's ham radio. At some point he'd correlated the entire inventory of his brain into a useless fizzling web. Saul didn't care to fraternize with Drew—
one got tired panning everything he said for nuggets of sense—but he often divined things that others couldn't. “Yes, the Latino guy.”

Drew shrugged and exhaled a globe of smoke. “Not sure footed the bill Cosby kids are all right now.” Then he scoured his face vigorously with his palm as if it were a blackboard and he couldn't stand what was written there.

“He's new,” said Kim later at the craft table, unfurling a battalion of paper angels she'd spent the last five minutes cutting, working her jaw unconsciously in time with her pink safety scissors.

“I'm aware of his newness,” Saul said, careful to control the annoyance he found scurrying in his voice, a displeasure that had in the past sent Kim wheeling into another of her depressive cycles. “But
why
is he here?”

“Oh, I dunno, the same as the rest of them, I guess … to help?” Kim set the scissors back in the craft box. “Here, I'll call him over … Luis!”

“No that's—” Saul said, too late.

The Assassin hurried over from his organization of the board-game cupboard, his hands stashed behind his back. Saul panicked and looked to the reflective glass of the nurses' station for anything weapon-like in the Assassin's grip.

“What's up, guys?” Luis said in the simultaneously droning and cheerful way that Saul figured they must spend small fortunes on training these people to employ, and then to Kim, “Oh, I like your angels,” and then to Saul, “Are you helping Kim with her angels? That's nice of you.”

“No,” Saul said, reeling from the Assassin's attempted butchery of his self-respect. “We are—no, pardon me,
were
—conversing.”

Luis's good nature was unflagging. “Okay, well, looks like fish burgers tonight, and maybe I'll ask the duty nurse if we could watch some tube after dinner? You're a real TV buff, aren't you, Saul?”

Saul displayed the type of facial friendliness that was used as a currency on the ward, just to be rid of him. He watched Luis return to the board games and clumsily topple a whole stack to the floor. As Luis pressed his cheek to the tile in search of scattered game pieces, Saul realized his heart was galloping on the narrow plain of his chest. He'd been rattled by the Assassin's knowledge of his TV habits. How could he have known this? Had he been studying him? Gathering intelligence? For what purpose? It seemed so absurd. No one on the outside even knows I'm here, he thought. Well, his parents, and one other person, an unmentionable woman whom he'd long ago scoured from his memory. Then came the dull thud of Luis's head against the underside of the games table. The Assassin groaned, slowly, like he'd just heard crushing news. If someone really does want me dead, Saul thought, why send this amateur? A man so evidently a card-carrying fool? He's no more an assassin than any other of the psych nurses, Saul concluded, then passed the remains of the afternoon on a puzzle that depicted a windblown Spanish castle dangling gloriously over a turbulent sea.

The next day, just to be sure, Saul requested a meeting with Dr. Darko Kraepevic, his personal psychiatrist of the past thirty-six years. Kraepevic was a fine man and brilliant doctor whom Saul admired deeply. A hawkish Slovak with a sharp goatee
and cloudlike puffs of white hair that encircled an expanse of flawless, gleaming scalp. A man who, as if to manually punctuate his sentences, liked to double-click the gold pen that, as he'd once confided to Saul, his daughter had bought him for his fiftieth birthday. Saul shut the door.

“What's this issue, Saul? You seem troubled,” Kraepevic said. The leather of his chair bleated and the doctor interlocked his fingers.

“It's this Luis. Who sent him? I mean, where is he from? What are his credentials?”

“You are well aware, Saul, that I'm not about to discuss the personal histories of new employees,” Kraepevic said, no doubt quoting verbatim from a policy manual.

“Just curious,” Saul said. “I feel like I've seen him before.” He slackened his face and feigned nonchalance.

“Impossible. Luis is new to us here at Riverview. Look, we don't want to have you getting overly interested in a staff member again, Saul. You've been doing so well since the Janet situation. All settled.” Kraepevic was referring to a former psych nurse who'd made inappropriate advances toward Saul, and against whom Saul had lodged a formal complaint. Rather than face disgrace, she'd relocated to another province, after which Saul had spent a week in the Quiet Room collecting himself and mitigating the stress of the whole ordeal.

Kraepevic could see Saul's doubts still working away in his face.

“Without divulging specific information, let me assure you Luis has not been sent by anyone, and is qualified in every possible way for this position. He's taking Margo's shift while she's on mat
leave, and, like Margo, his job is to assist the psychosocial rehabilitation of you and the other patients here. Must I remind you, Saul, there
are
other patients here?” he said, clicking his pen. “And speaking of you, how are you doing? Because you seem a touch pale. Sleeping? Any intrusive thoughts? How's the medication?”

Though Saul respected Kraepevic immensely, he sometimes pictured him as a skittish islander with a bone-skewered septum, scampering up a volcano in full ceremonial regalia with a small payload of psychotropic medication the doctor and the other villagers had prepared in large steaming cauldrons, which Kraepevic then shovelled into the great smoking orifice to sate the bloodlust of an angry volcano god.

“All thoughts are intrusive, Darko,” Saul said, rising from his chair. Dr. Kraepevic, he realized, might have had more to do with Luis's appearance than he'd suspected.

Saul Columbo, Compliant and Concerned Patient/Detective, Riverview Hospital, BC

Saul pitched a bolus of house laundry into the dryer, pressed Start, then filled the mop bucket and rolled it sloshing into the Dayroom to perform his next chore. Apart from TV and bingo, chores were his favourite pastime. They ignited in him a faint yet pleasurable feeling of competence that made his thoughts fall quiet as clouds. Chores also earned him the snatches of freedom called two-hour passes, which he spent walking the oak-strewn hospital grounds.

Sending the letter to Martin Shenck had put the Luis affair out of his hands and Saul had officially closed his investigation. Though Saul disliked going over Kraepevic's head, even if the doctor was in on it, once Martin Shenck intervened and Luis was exposed and all was returned to normal, Kraepevic would offer an apology, which Saul would generously accept.

After a few swipes under the couch that yielded a dusty domino and a bendy straw, Saul saw he'd neglected to add soap to the water. The laundry-room door had locked automatically and only staff could open it. He knuckle-rapped at the nurses' station window and mouthed
laundry room
to the duty nurse, Roberta, who sat with a cellphone clamped between cheek and shoulder. She put a hand over the phone and called out.

The Assassin emerged like a lion from the medication room. Saul hadn't seen him in days and was suddenly concerned he'd somehow intercepted the letter. Luis stepped into the hall, his freshly cut keys sparkly in his hands.

“I'll let you in, Saul, no problem,” he said.

“I'd rather Roberta did,” Saul said, knocking at the window again. Roberta didn't stir.

The Assassin's eyebrows vaulted. He shook his head and expelled a short burst through his nose. “Okay,” he said and reentered
the nurses' station. While he spoke with Roberta, Saul noticed all the binders labelled with patient names and file numbers crammed together on a high shelf. His eyes landed on the binder bearing his own name and he saw that it was much thicker than the others. Saul took comfort in the knowledge that his file was mostly well-crafted cover stories he'd been feeding them for years. Even so, he detested the idea of Luis's unlimited access to any of it.

“Well, Saul, Roberta's busy at the moment,” the Assassin said when he returned. “Looks like it's you and me.”

Saul trailed the Assassin by a good four paces, listening to his brand-new nurse shoes grunt on the linoleum in the wide, echoic hallway. The sound brought to mind Georgina's repulsive habit of scratching her throat with the base of her tongue. Like a tree trunk come to life, Luis was at least a foot shorter than Saul, who was a gangly six-two, and moved with the wobbly power of an upright bear. Saul would have to use his reach advantage; the Assassin would crush him like a lamb if it ever came to grappling. Saul doused his fear with an image of Martin Shenck keying in a background check at that very moment, turning up all those poor souls Luis had tossed from the doors of unmarked helicopters.

The Assassin stopped at the door. There was more jingling as he sought the correct key. Saul feared he was stalling.

“There you go,” he said, jamming the door open with his left foot.

“After you,” Saul said.

“I've got to go get the medications ready,” he said, unflinching. There was no choice. Saul took a few steps. The Assassin did not move. Saul took a few more, shuffling his way through
the doorway, his hands guarding his face, keeping perpendicular to the Assassin, just as he'd seen in the martial arts programs. But Saul did not want to fight; he'd always hated when the nurses had touched him in the past, forced him to do things, their unbreakable wills and their questions, their hundreds of latexed hands.

“Sore back?” Luis said as Saul passed safely into the room.