Strangers

Page 10

“You should be,” George said. "You started at seventhirty, and it's past the lunch hour. An aortal graft is damned debilitating."
“You feel this way when you've done one?”
“Of course.”
"But it hit me so suddenly. In there, I felt great. I felt I could go on for hours yet."
“In there,” George said with evident affection and amusement, "you were godlike, dueling with death and winning, and no god ever grows weary. Godwork is too much fun to ever get weary of it."
At the sinks, they turned on the water, took off the surgical gowns they'd worn over their hospital greens, and broke open packets of soap.
As Ginger began to wash her hands, she leaned wearily against the sink and bent forward a bit, so she was looking straight down at the drain, at the water swirling around the stainlesssteel basin, at the bubbles of soap whirling with the water, all of it funneling into the drain, around and around and down into the drain, around and down, down and down. . . . This time, the irrational fear struck and overwhelmed her with even less warning than at Bernstein's Deli or in George's office last Wednesday. In an instant her at-' tention had become entirely focused upon the drain. which appeared to throb and grow wider as if it were suddenly possessed of malignant life.
She dropped the soap and, with a bleat of terror, jumped back from the sink, collided with Agatha Tandy, cried out again. She vaguely heard George calling her name. But he was fading away in the manner of an image on a motion picture screen, retreating into a mist, as if he were
part of a scene that was dissolving to a full-lens shot...
clouds or fog, and he no longer seemed real. Agatha Tandy and the hallway and the doors to the surgery were fading, too. Everything was fading but the sink, which appeared to grow larger and more solid, superreal. A sense of mortal danger settled over her. But it was just an ordinary scrub sink, for God's sake, and she had to hold on to that truth, clutch at the cliff of reality and resist the forces pulling her over the edge. Just a sink. Just an ordinary drain. Just She ran. From every side, the mist closed around her, and she lost all conscious awareness of her actions.
The first thing she became aware of was the snow. Large white flakes sifted past her face, gently turning, lazily eddying toward the ground in the manner of fluffy airborne dandelion seeds, for there was no wind to drive them. She raised her head, looked up beyond the towering walls of the old highrise buildings that shouldered in around her, and saw a rectangular patch of low gray sky, from which the snow descended. As she stared into the winter heavens, momentarily confused as to her whereabouts and condition, her hair and eyebrows grew white. Flakes melted on her face, but she slowly realized that her cheeks were already wet with tears and that she was still weeping quietly.
Gradually, the cold impinged upon her. In spite of the absence of wind, the air was sharptoothed; it bit her cheeks, nipped her chin, and her hands were numb from the cold venom of countless bites. The chill penetrated her hospital greens, and she was shivering uncontrollably.
Next she became aware of the freezing concrete beneath her and the icecold brick wall against her back. She was squeezed into a corner, facing out, knees drawn up to her chin, arms locked around her legsa posture of defense and terror. Her body heat was being leeched away through every contact point with pavement and masonry, but she did not have the strength or will to get to her feet and go inside.
She remembered fixating upon the drain of the scrub sink. With unmitigated despair, she recalled the mindless panic, her collision with Agatha Tandy, the startled look on George Hannaby's face as he had reacted to her screams. Although the rest was a blank, she supposed she had then taken flight from imaginary dangers, like some madwoman, to the shock of her colleaguesand to the certain destruction of her career.
She pressed harder against the brick wall, wishing that it would suck away her body heat even faster.
She was sitting at the end of a wide alley, a blind serviceway that led into the core of the hospital complex. To her left, double metal doors led into the furnace room, and beyond those was the exit from the emergency stairs.
Inevitably, she was reminded of her encounter with a mugger during her internship at Columbia Presbyterian in New York. That night, he had dragged her into an alleyway much like this. However, in the New York alleyway, she had been in command, victoriouswhile here she was a loser, descendant rather than ascendant, weak and lost. She perceived a bleak irony and a frightening symmetry in having been brought to the lowest point of her life in such a place as this.
Premed, medical school, the long hours and hardships of her intern year, all the work and sacrifices, all the hopes and dreams had been for nothing. At the last minute, with a surgical career almost within her grasp, she had failed George, Anna, Jacob, and herself. She could no longer deny the truth or ignore the obvious: Something was wrong with her, something so desperately wrong that it would surely preclude the resumption of a life in medicine. Psychosis? A brain tumor?
Perhaps an aneurysm in the brain?
The door to the emergency stairs was flung open with a rattle and a screech of unoiled hinges, and George Hannaby came out into the snow, breathing hard. He took several quick steps into the alley, heedless of the risk posed by the quarterinch skin of slippery new snow. The sight of her was sufficiently shocking to bring him to a lurching halt. A ghastly expression lined his face, and Ginger supposed he was regretting the extra time and attention and special guidance that he had given her. He had thought she was especially bright and good and worthy, but now she had proved him wrong. He had been so kind to her and so supportive that her betrayal of his trust, although beyond her control, filled her with selfloathing and brought more hot tears to her eyes.
“Ginger?” he said shakily. “Ginger, what's wrong?”
She was able to respond only with a wretched, involuntary sob.
Seen through her tears, he shimmered, blurred. She wished he'd go away and leave her to stew in humiliation. Didn't he know how much worse it was to have him staring at her while she was in this condition?
The snow was falling harder. Other people appeared in the doorway through which he had come, but she could not identify them.
“Ginger, please talk to me,” George said as he drew near. "What's wrong? Tell me what's wrong. Tell me what I can do."
She bit her lip, tried to repress her tears, but instead she began to sob harder than ever. In a thin, blubbery voice that sickened her with proof of her own weakness, she said, “SSomething's wrong with me.”
George stooped down in front of her. “What? What's wrong?”
“don't know.”
She had always been able to handle any trouble that came her way, unassisted. She was Ginger Weiss. She was different. She was a golden girl. She didn't know how to ask for help of this kind, of this degree.
Still stooping in front of her, George said, "Whatever it is, we can work it out. I know you're fiercely proud of your selfreliance. You listening, kid? I've always stepped carefully when I'm with you because I know you resent being helped along too much. You want to do it all yourself. But this time you simply can't handle it alone, and you don't have to. I'm here, and by God you're going to lean on me whether you like it or not. You hear?"
“I ... I've ruined everything. I've (Idisappointed you.”
He found a small smile. "Not you, dear girl. Not ever. Rita and I have had all sons, but if we could've had a daughter, we would've hoped for one like you. Exactly like you. You're a special woman, Dr. Weiss, a dear and special woman. Disappoint me? Impossible. I would consider it an honor and a pleasure if you would lean on me now, just as if you were my daughter, and let me help you through this as if I were the father you've lost."
He held out a hand to her.
She grasped it and held on tightly.
It was Monday, December 2.
Many weeks would pass before she learned that other people in other placesall strangers to herwere living through eerie variations of her own nightmare.
2.
Trenton, New Jersey
A few minutes before midnight, Jack Twist opened the door and left the warehouse, stepping into the wind and sleet, and some guy was just getting out of a gray Ford van at the foot of the nearest loading ramp. The van's arrival had been masked by the rumble of a passing freight train. The night was deep around the warehouse, except for four meager patches of murky yellow light from poorly maintained, grimedimmed security lamps. Unfortunately, one of those lights was directly over the door through which Jack had exited, and its sickly glow reached precisely far enough to include the passenger's door of the van, out of which the unexpected visitor had appeared.
The guy had a face made for police mug books: heavy jaw, a mouth that was hardly more than a slash, a nose that had been broken a couple of times, and hard little pig eyes. He was one of those obedient but pitiless sadists that the mob employed as enforcers, a man who, in other times, might have been a rape and pillage specialist in the armies of Genghis Khan, a grinning Nazi thug, a torture master in one of Stalin's death camps, or a Morlock from the future as imagined by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine. To Jack, the guy looked like serious trouble.
They startled each other, and Jack did not immediately raise his .38 and put a bullet in the bastard, which is what he should have done.
“Who the hell are you?” the Morlock asked. Then he saw the canvas bag that Jack was dragging with his left hand and the lowered pistol in Jack's right hand. His eyebrows shot up, and he shouted, "Max!,,
Max was probably the driver of the van, but Jack did not wait around for formal introductions. He did a quick reverse into the warehouse, slammed the door shut, and stepped to the side of it in case someone out there started using it for target practice.
The only light inside the warehouse came from the brightly lit office far at the back of the building and from an overhead bank of widely spaced, lowwattage bulbs set in tin shades, which were allowed to burn all night. But there was sufficient illumination for Jack to see the faces of his two companionsMort Gersh and Tommy Sungwho had been following him. They did not look as happy as they had been only a couple of minutes ago.
They had been happy because they had successfully hit a major way station on the route of the mafia cash train, a collection point for narcotics money from half the state of New Jersey. Suitcases and flight bags and cardboard boxes and Styrofoam coolers full of cash arrived at the warehouse from a score of couriers, most of it on Sunday and Monday. Tuesdays, mob accountants in Pierre Cardin suits arrived to calculate the week's profits from the pharmaceutical division. Every Wednesday, suitcases full of tightly banded sacks of greenbacks went out to Miami, Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, and other centers of high finance, where investment advisers with Harvard or Columbia MBAS, on retainer to the mafiaor fratellanza, as the underworld referred to itselfwisely put it to work. Jack, Mort, and Tommy had simply stepped in between the accountants and the investment advisers, and had taken four heavy bags full of cash for themselves. "Just think of us as one more layer of middlemen," Jack had told the three glowering thugs who were, even now, tied up in the warehouse office, and Mort and Tommy had laughed.
Mort was not laughing now. He was fifty years old, potbellied, slumpshouldered, baking. He wore a dark suit, porkpie hat, and gray overcoat. He always wore a dark suit and porkpie hat, though not always the overcoat. Jack had never seen him in anything else. Tonight, Jack and Tommy were wearing jeans and quilted vinyl jackets, but there was Mort looking like one of the guys in the background of an old Edward G. Robinson movie. The snapbrim of his hat had lost its sharp edge and gone slightly soft, rather like Mort himself, and the suit was rumpled. His voice was weary and dour. He said, “Who's out there?” as Jack slammed the door and stepped hastily away from it.
"At least two guys in a Ford van Jack said.
“Mob?”
“I only saw one of them,” Jack said, "but he looked like one of Dr. Frankenstein's experiments that didn't work out."
“At least all the doors are locked.”
“They'll have keys.”
The three of them moved quickly away from the exit, back into the deep shadows in an aisle between piles of wooden crates and cardboard cartons that were stacked on pallets. The merchandise formed twentyfoothigh walls. The warehouse was immense, with a wide array of goods stored under its vaulted ceiling: hundreds of TV sets, microwave ovens, blenders, and toasters by the thousands, tractor parts, plumbing supplies, Cuisinarts, and more. It was a clean, wellrun establishment, but as with any giant industrial building at night, the place was eerie when all the workers were gone. Strange, whispery echoes floated along the maze of aisles. Outside, the sleet fell harder than before, rustling and ticking and tapping and hissing on the slate roof, as if a multitude of unknown creatures moved through the rafters and inside the walls.
“I told you it was a mistake to hit the mob,” Tommy Sung said. He was a ChineseAmerican, about thirty, which made him seven years younger than Jack. "Jewelry stores, armored cars, even banks, okay, but not the mob, for God's sake. It's stupid to hit the mob. Might as well walk into a bar full of Marines and spit on the flag."
“You're here,” Jack said.
“Yeah, well,” Tommy said, “I don't always show good judgment.”
In a voice of doom and despair, Mort said, "A van shows up at this hour, it means one thing. They're delivering one kind of shit or another, probably coke or horse. Which means there won't be just the driver and the ape you saw. There'll be two other guys in the back of the van with the merchandise, carrying converted Uzis or worse."
Tommy said, “Why aren't they already shooting their way in?”
“As far as they know,” Jack said, "there's ten of us, and we have bazookas. They'll move cautiously."
“A truck used on dope runs is sure to have radio communications,” Mort said. “They'll have already called for backup.”
Tommy said, "You telling me the mafia has a fleet of radio vans like the goddamned phone company or something?"
“These days, they're as organized as any business,” Mort said.
They listened for sounds of purposeful human movement in farther reaches of the building, but all they heard was sleet hitting the roof.
The .38 in Jack's hand suddenly felt like a toy. Mort was carrying a Smith & Wesson M39 9mm pistol, and Tommy had a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnum that he had tucked inside his insulated jacket after the men in the office had been securely tied up, when it had seemed that the dangerous part of the job had been completed. They were well armed, but they were not ready to face down Uzis. Jack remembered old documentaries of hopelessly outclassed Hungarians trying to turn back invading Russian tanks with rocks and sticks. In times of trouble, Jack Twist had a tendency to melodramatize his plight and, regardless of the situation, to cast himself in the role of the noble underdog battling the forces of evil. He was aware of this tendency, and he thought it was one of his most endearing qualities. At the moment, however, their position was so tenuous that there was no way to melodramatize it.