Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

High Anxiety

The view out the spotless window glass was spectacular.

He leaned closer to see more of the snow-topped mountain peaks. They ringed a valley that plunged into the lush green slopes of early spring, wildflowers scattered everywhere like confetti. It was almost like looking out on a painting. Unreal.

He leaned even closer to the glass, as close as the wheelchair would permit. His head twisted left, then right, then up. Ah, huge eaves above. To take the snow in the winter. The building must be set into a hillside. The outside wall of his room was almost all glass. Supernaturally clean glass. That took money, that took pride, that took a certain fussy perfectionism that he understood, that pleased him.

The door to his room whooshed open. All the doors here were on air hinges so they wouldn’t shatter anyone’s nerves with an ill-timed bang. Or so they wouldn’t alert those inside who was coming and going.

A lot of people had been coming and going in his room, but he knew he’d been drugged and out of it probably for days or weeks, he could hardly remember any of it. Still, he was conscious now and was a quick study. Pain was throbbing in his legs and head, but no pain medication was fogging his brain. He’d palmed the pills once he’d become conscious for longer periods. He could let them think he was woozy, and he was, for purely natural reasons. He preferred pain to ignorance any day.

He turned the chair wheels toward the latest person who had whooshed into his territory. They never knocked around here. Medical personnel were like that.

He cocked his head at the visitor. Someone new. Someone not all in white scrubs. (He thought hospital personnel wore figured scrubs now, whimsically colorful, to put patients at ease, but in this place both doctors and nurses wore wedding-gown white.)

Having the light from the huge window at his back was an advantage. He could assess his latest visitor.

Tallish. Female. Wearing a pale green silk runway suit worth a couple thousand with a Hermes scarf as carelessly arranged as her tawny blond hair. A professional, surely. But what kind? Chorus girl legs and knows it. Skirt hem just at the knee. Clipboard? Short, polished nails. Not a nurse, for sure. Doctor? Too upscale. Too silent. No “Good morning, how are you today?”

He could play that game. He observed her taking him in. He had no idea what he looked like. Felt like hell, but he wasn’t going to cop to a weakness.

“May I sit?” she asked.

He nodded. What the hell—? The accent was slight, but European. He’d overheard a babel of languages since he’d been brought here, barely conscious. English. French. German. Some others. . . .

“My name is Schneider,” she said, leaning forward to reveal a tantalizing glimpse of cleavage where the suit lapels met, holding out one hand.

Nobody medical shook hands in a hospital. Her hand was warm where his was cold, and her grip was solid. He returned it, even though that sent a spasm down his shoulder to his spine to his damned useless legs.

“Doctor?” he asked.

“In a sense.” Like a doctor, she studied his chart on the clipboard, putting him in uneasy suspension. “Your case is most interesting.”

“Tell me about it. Nobody’s thought to mention how interesting I was to me.”

She chuckled. “Americans. So direct.”

“Since I’m direct you might as well tell me who and what you are and what right you have to read up on my blood pressure and bowel movements.”

“Challenging, not direct,” she corrected herself. “All right, Mr. Randolph, I’ll tell you what you ask and then you can answer some questions for me.”

Randolph. That wasn’t his name. He knew that. When you’re at a disadvantage and don’t know what’s going on, act as if you do. Let them tell you, when they think all along that they’re conducting an interrogation.

“No one quite knows what happened to you, Mr. Randolph. Do you?”

He shrugged. Ouch. Apparently he couldn’t move much of anything.

“Obviously,” she went on, “a climbing accident, but what kind? Were you alone on the mountain? Was it equipment failure? An avalanche? Carelessness?”

He felt the wince cross his features before he could stop it.

She caught it and threw it back at him. “You resent the implication that you could have been careless. You’re not the sort of man to make mistakes.”

“And you know this how?”

“It’s my job to know what you think.”

It’s my job to keep you from knowing that, he thought. I’d do it better if I weren’t in so much pain. As you well know, you leggy blond bully.

“My name is Schneider,” she repeated. “Revienne Schneider. I’m here to find out about your accident. Temporary memory loss about the details is to be expected.”

Her voice was soft, yet rich. He’d heard women announcers on German radio who purred over the airwaves that way, amazingly seductive for a language that seemed harsh. Yet she dressed like a Frenchwoman. And her first name stemmed from the French verb for “returning, haunting.” Odd name. Odd that he should remember such oddments of French.

“You don’t speak much, but you think a lot,” she said.

“A man with temporary memory loss wouldn’t have much to say.”

“Hmm.” She licked her lips judiciously as she studied the unseen chart again. “It’s quite remarkable that you survived a fall of so far. The surgeons said the violence of the impact was severe.”

Surgeons. How many? For what? What was wrong with him, other than temporary memory loss and the fact that his legs were in heavy incapacitating casts? And the pain all over, of course. No one had told him anything. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been unconscious, or conscious. Shards of motion, conversation swirled around his brain, yet his first clear memory had been of looking out the window. Just now.

“I fell here?”

“In the Alps? No. You were flown in.”

“From—”

“Nepal.”

“I am quite the climber, aren’t I?”

Nepal! That didn’t sound right. Falling, yes. Something in his gut twisted and fell again. Falling.

She smiled so slightly he might have been imagining it. “Climbers are a breed apart. I can’t say I understand the sport myself. The ego must be as high as the mountain to be conquered.”

He said nothing. She was both criticizing and admiring him, appealing to his ego, appealing to his . . . libido, whatever he had left of it after the fall and the pain and the medication.

“You’re a . . . psychiatrist,” he said. “You think you can manipulate my memory of the fall to come back.”

Her slight shrug didn’t pain her shoulders, but it did wonders for her bodice. He did have some libido left, after all. Since he was forgoing the pain pills, he might as well sample some alternative medication. . . .

“You’re a man used to being in control, Mr. Randolph. If you weren’t wealthy, you wouldn’t be at this sanitarium. If you weren’t willing to risk, you wouldn’t be in a wheelchair.” She leaned closer again, flashed her subtle cleavage, hardly worth it. “Were you drunk?”

“No!” The response was instant, emphatic. He surprised himself.

“As I say. You are a man using to being in control. Or believing that he is. Or it could be denial. Do you know?”

He was silent, thinking. So much was foggy, even without drugs. Drunk. The accusation repelled him. Why was this his strongest reaction yet? Why was he so sure?

“If you have to ask, you don’t know,” he said.

Chagrin flickered over her annoyingly serene features.

“They’d have taken blood tests right after the accident, yes?” he asked.

She nodded. “No alcohol or recreational drugs in your system. At that point. But you were flown in from another continent.”

He nodded, in turn, to the window and the panorama of what he now knew were the Alps. But which Alps? French, Italian, Swiss? The Alps snaked across Europe like the rim of a massive crater.

He said, “Any climber, especially a control freak, would be crazy to drink anything but water up there.”

“ ‘Control freak.’ I do love American expressions. They always cut to the . . . pursuit.”

“Chase. Cut to the chase. The expression is based on early filmmaking. Directors of cheap thriller movies would skip the exposition, the dialogue, and cut to the action scene: bad guys chasing good guys.”

“And which guy are you?”

He smiled at how formal the word guy sounded in her overprecise English. “We don’t know yet, do we? So why’d you ask if I was drunk, when you knew the tests proved me sober?”

“I wanted your spontaneous answer.”

“Just to be mean? Taunt the invalid?” He almost added, “Get a rise out of him?” but decided that was too close to reality.

Actually, he was enjoying this in more ways than one. He’d heard only solicitous murmurs in the far back of his mind for a long time, maybe even weeks. It was good to exercise his brain on something, someone not treating him like a helpless child.

She pursed her lips while examining the chart he suspected was a meaningless prop for her inquisition. Psychiatrists always thought they could outthink their patients, and she was exactly what he’d suspected she was. But what kind of psychiatrist?

“Actually, Mr. Randolph,” she said at last, “being drunk is the only rational explanation for why you weren’t more seriously injured. The surgeons said your fall had the impact of a car crash at sixty miles an hour. You should be dead, or in a cast up to your cerebellum. Instead, you have a couple of broken legs. Not fun, but not as lethal as it should be.”

“You’d prefer me dead?”

“Of course not. But the surgeons said that the only way you could have come off so lightly, the only way anyone did from an impact like that, was as a drunk driver. The kind that walks away from a crash that kills his victims because he was so inebriated his body was utterly limp during the crash. Senselessness saves the sinner.”

He didn’t like hearing how bad it could have been. Or being compared to a drunk driver. He knew he hadn’t brought this on himself. Why was she trying to make him feel guilty? Some shrink! She was doing everything she could to rile him. Weren’t there laws against this kind of patient abuse?

He gazed out the window. From this distance the majestic peaks seemed only postcard pretty, not lethal. And he couldn’t picture himself attacking those sharp icy teeth with pitons and a pickax. Not his thing. But it must be.

He glanced back. Her eyes had never left his face.

“Maybe,” he said, “I’m just a relaxed kind of guy.”

“That doesn’t go with the control freak.”

“Maybe I’m more complex than you think.”

“Oh, I think you’re very complex, Mr. Randolph. Too much so. I don’t want to keep you. À bientôt.”

Until later.

He watched her leave, relishing a future tete-à-tete. His legs were broken, maybe not badly, thank God, but she was right about his need for control. He hated this wheelchair.

He propelled it into the adjoining bathroom, through a bland blond door wide enough to accommodate it. Brushed steel assistance bars were everywhere, but he was interested in the shower rod above the—nice, if his casts were off!—Jacuzzi bathtub.

Pushing himself upright against the white-tiled wall, he studied the rod and its attachments to the tile. Solid. Everything here was for security and safety. German-built. Like Revienne Schneider.

He grasped the pole underhanded and then hauled up against his imprisoned legs. If he was such a gung ho mountain climber, he didn’t want to lose any upper body strength. He guessed he’d been doing this during every conscious, unchaperoned moment. The first pull-up was still agony. The second worse. He did ten. Twelve, twenty, then stopped and lowered himself on trembling arms into the wheelchair.

He’d forgotten to check himself out in the mirror over the sink while he’d been upright, but it was probably just as well. He had a feeling he wouldn’t recognize his face. He knew “things,” could think, but he didn’t know a damn thing about himself or how he’d got here. What really bothered him was the name “Randolph.” It had a vague familiarity, but it wasn’t his. It didn’t feel like his name.

Nothing did. Surnames tumbled through his brain—O’Donnell . . . Kinkaid . . . Bar . . . Bartle. Moline. But that was a town in Illinois. His brain had salvaged lots of general information, but no specifics. No faces and places. He’d have to analyze himself before that tight-lipped shrink pried out more than he wanted her to.

He knew a lot about mountains and foreign languages and attractive interrogators, but he didn’t know a damn thing about himself except what he could weasel out of his shrink.

Nothing.

Not even his name.

Matt, maybe. The name just came to him! Matt?

Matt Randolph. Didn’t feel right.