Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Missing Max

Garry Randolph had two roles to play that awful morning.

One was genuine. Heartfelt.

His charge was gone, had vanished. Overnight. His “nephew, Mike Randolph.”

This grief he didn’t have to feign. Max was . . . was . . . is . . . so much to him. Pupil. Peer. Partner.

The clinic bedroom reeked with treachery. An overturned IV stand. Far under the bed, a full hypodermic needle. It rested in Garry’s capacious suit coat pocket now. Not for him, or his physical type, the sleek fitted suit. For him the large, lumpy one, capable of holding as many magicians’ tricks as a suit coat the size of the Colosseum in Rome . . . .

“But what happened here?” he asked the supervising doctor, acting as ignorant as he felt for once.

“These head cases can get strange obsessions. The man, who knows what he was thinking, simply ran. Fled who knows what demons in his stressed brain?”

The man, thought Randolph, ran because his life was threatened. Garry had no doubt the syringe would prove to be filled with something fatal.

Max! Out of his head but still possessed of that rare, acute prescience Garry had seen in him as a terrorism-wounded boy of seventeen. A middle-class American boy catapulted into the worst the world had to offer, the worst of global politics a man or boy could face.

Garry had faced it too long. He yearned for a happy ending. The restoration of memory. The restoration of peace. Hope. Happiness.

Now, here, he was called upon to exert all his old, devious skills.

“Perhaps,” he suggested to the night physician, “we should talk to his psychiatrist about this.”

“Gone?” he said, hearing himself sound honestly astounded forty minutes later.

His heart didn’t know whether to soar or sink.

So the able Dr. Schneider had gotten Max out of here. For what? Debriefing? Rescue mission? Laugh at that one. For . . . sex? Max had been attracted, as any man who wasn’t brain-dead would have been.

Was she a lure? Probably. He’d have to seriously investigate her past. Meanwhile, Max was free of the fatal injection, on the run in his plaster casts, with a woman whose motives could be anything from humanitarian to homicidal.

The old Max would have found out which in a heartbeat.

The new, disoriented Max . . . ? Aiyyyee!

Garry wished he had Max back in Las Vegas, where they only wished him dead.

Here, in Europe, they had ways of making Max wish he was dead.