Good Blood

FOURTEEN

At 3:22 that morning a remarkable telephone call was received at Stresa’s Polizia Municipale headquarters on Piazza Marconi. According to the caller, Sister Susanna, the nighttime receptionist at the hospital, there were strange sounds coming from the morgue in the basement. “As if,” she whispered, “something is trying to get out.”

“No, no, Sister,” said Ettore Omodeo, the police dispatcher, with a reassuring laugh. “After all, how could anyone get out of a morgue? But it’s chilly out tonight, it might be someone trying to get in, to keep warm. You stay where you are, Sister. I’ll have someone there right away.”

Omodeo contacted the lone patrol car on duty and gave them the message. Then he shook his head.

What kind of a person would want to break into a morgue?

Gideon had always been an early riser, often earlier than he wished, and going to sleep at 9 didn’t help any. By 5:00 A.M. he was awake and restless, itching to get moving. And he needed coffee. He did some stretching and enough push-ups and sit-ups to get some blood into his muscles, showered, shaved, slipped on a windbreaker against the predawn chill, and trotted downstairs, feeling a bit more positive about the world in general. He nodded to the teenaged nighttime desk clerk, who greeted him with a mournful shrug.

“No breakfas’ yet, signore. Seven o’clock.”

“I know. See you then.”

He walked past shuttered shops and restaurants to the quiet Corso Italia and crossed it to the Lungolago, the lakeside promenade. Near the ferry terminal there was an espresso and snack stand that he knew from past experience would be open for the benefit of early-arriving ferry workers.

By now the barista knew him by sight. “Buongiorno. Cappuccino. Doppio. Senza cioccolato.”

“Si, grazie,” said Gideon, smiling. It was practically like being in Seattle.

Relatively contented now, he walked along the promenade, slowly sipping coffee from a giant Styrofoam cup. The only other people he saw were a couple of elderly men walking their dogs and looking lonesome and pensive in the way of early-morning dog walkers everywhere. The ornamental fountains had still to be turned on, and with no traffic whizzing down the Corso yet, he could actually hear the gentle lapping of the lake against the stone bulwark on which the promenade had been built.

It was very peaceful, very pretty. The air smelled of camellias and lemon oil, cut by the pungent, not unpleasant scent of creosote from the ferry terminal pilings. The globe lamps along the promenade were still lit, but the sky had begun to lighten, so the perfectly pruned trees, the brick walking paths, and the dark lake itself were all highlighted with streaks of rose and gold. After a while he stopped to lean on the balustrade and look out over the water, waiting for the sun to top the mountains on the other side, shoot out its brief explosion of brilliant yellow rays, and touch the graceful towers and parapets of the Borromean Islands with the day’s first light. He’d watched it before, and with a still-warm double cappuccino in his hand, it was about as good a way to start the day as any he could imagine; given, that is, that he had to start it without Julie.

It was the smell that brought on the first trickle of apprehension. Old sweat, stale clothing. Someone was standing too close to him. This was Italy, of course, where the perception of personal space wasn’t as expansive as it was in the States, but it made him wary all the same. And now he could even smell the person’s breakfast on his breath-a ham and cheese panino, espresso laced with grappa… Even for Italy, this was getting a little-

As he began to turn, there was an intake of breath startlingly close behind him, and then his cup went flying and the hot coffee was in his face, the crushed Styrofoam jammed up against his mouth by a bare, muscular forearm pressed against his throat. At first he thought someone was trying to shove him over the balustrade into the water a dozen feet below, but when a knee was forced into his lower spine to bend him over backward, he realized he was being strangled. Somebody had a choke hold on him from behind, clamping his neck between upper arm and forearm and tightening the resulting vise by pulling on his wrist with the other hand.

For a second, gripped by the primal terror that came with having his air cut off, he struggled, clawing at the hold and pummeling futilely behind him with both hands. At six foot one, Gideon was a fairly big man, and strong-he’d been a boxer in his college days and still stayed more or less in shape-but his attacker had forearms as thick as thighs. It was like being squeezed by a boa constrictor. Still, he managed to twist his head a couple of inches to one side so that the front of his neck was now in the small hollow that made up the crook of the man’s arm. The direct pressure was off his windpipe and it was possible to suck in a gasping breath.

With the return of air came sanity. Blind impulse gave way to something like rational thought. And with rational thought came the realization that he had only made matters worse, and not just a little worse. By turning his head, he’d inadvertently changed the man’s grip from a “bar arm” hold, with the forearm pressed directly-and painfully-against the trachea, to a judo hold, the so-called “sleeper hold.” With the crook of the arm now at the front of his throat, his windpipe was free, but the forearm and upper arm, now at either side of his neck, were compressing the carotid arteries. He could breathe again, but the blood supply to his brain was being cut off.

This was bad. The need for air, as overpowering as it was on an instinctive level, was the lesser of his worries. Cutting off a person’s air by compressing the trachea was excruciating, yes, but it could take two or three minutes to shut down the brain. But pressure on the soft tissues of the superior carotid triangles, squeezing shut the arteries-and it didn’t take that much pressure to squeeze them shut-immediately starved the brain of oxygen and created a toxic excess of carbon dioxide. Hypoxia and hypercapnia. And that deadly combination would take only ten seconds to cause unconsciousness, fifteen at the outside. Death would follow. He had very little time. Already he was seeing whirling stars at the backs of his eyes, the first sign of oxygen deprivation to the brain. The first sign of blacking out.

He made himself stop his ineffectual flailing, which was using up what little oxygen he had left. His fingers, already weakening, were never going to budge that tree trunk of an arm, and the feeble blows he was aiming behind him were useless. Instead, he strained to reach his attacker’s face, trying for the eyes or the nose or the lips; anything he could tear at or grind his fingers into. He touched what he thought were nose and upper lip, but the man shook him off and jerked his head back out of the way.

The hold tightened, as if by resisting he’d gotten his attacker good and mad. Gideon could feel the muscles of the biceps and brachioradialis harden and bulge. He could feel the wiry hairs of the forearm against the bottom of his jaw. He was hearing popping sounds in his head now, like static. There were pinprick sensations crawling spider-like over his face and scalp, a scattering of minute explosions, and all at once he was overpoweringly sleepy, so that all he really wanted was to be allowed to lie down and go to sleep. He realized his arms were hanging limply at his sides now. When a bright yellow flash seemed to sear his eyes, he didn’t know if it was in his brain or if it was the sun clearing the mountains. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were open or closed.

But one small part of his cerebral cortex was still working; enough to tell him he had perhaps two seconds of consciousness left. If he was going to live, he had to act now. Now. With a tremendous, gasping effort of will, he arched his body and threw his head backward with all his remaining strength. He heard an “Uff!” as his head struck the other man’s face. The hold loosened slightly, and with the returning flow of blood to his brain came a partial return of strength, of clarity of mind. His head had smashed into the bastard’s nose and it had hurt him. What worked once could work twice. He braced his right foot against the balustrade for added leverage and shoved off as hard as he could, flinging himself backward and sharply snapping his head back at the same time.

The time there was a howl of pain, accompanied by the crunch of breaking bone and a strangled “Merda!”

At the same time, there was a cry somewhere off to the right. “Ehi! Che fai la? Che succede?”

The man cursed again, released his hold, and staggered off. Gideon, deprived of support, found his knees didn’t have the strength to hold him up. His legs were like seaweed, squelchy and boneless. He collapsed to the promenade, twisting as he fell and ending up with his back against the balustrade, trembling and barely able to move as the postadrenaline crash hit him. He lay there with his eyes closed, watching the last of the starry pinpoints blink out and listening to the wary approach of his rescuer (“Signore, si sente bene?”), who seemed to be eons off, in some echoing, parallel universe.

There was a piece of something stuck to his lips, and he thought at first that one of his teeth had been broken, but it was only a fragment of the Styrofoam cup that had been smashed against his mouth. He flicked it off. Then, realizing that the hair at the back of his head was sticky, he touched it and opened his eyes to check his fingers. Blood, but not his. He’d broken the guy’s nose, all right. Good. And from the crackling sound of that crunch, it wasn’t just the ossa nasalia -the two bones that formed the bridge of the nose-that had snapped, but some of the delicate bony structures inside as well: the ethmoid, the vomer. He sure as hell hoped so. That sonofabitch was going to remember him for the rest of his life, every time he heard himself breathe. With any luck Gideon had deviated his nasal septum for him as well, so he’d remember him every time he looked in the mirror too. Fine.

Never again, Gideon thought as he slipped into something like an exhausted, relieved doze, would his students hear him utter a word of complaint about the fragility of the human face.