The Day After Tomorrow

20

THE SOUND of the phone woke her. For a moment she had no idea where she was. A harsh glare came in through the French doors partially open to the patio. Beyond them, over the Seine, a midafternoon sun had given up trying to push through a stubborn overcast and vanished into it. Still half asleep, Vera rose up on one elbow and looked around. Bedclothes were strewn everywhere. Her stockings and underwear were on the floor, half under the bed. Then her mind cleared and she realized she was in her apartment bedroom and her phone was ringing. Covering herself with part of the sheet, as if whoever was on the other end might be able to see her, she snatched up the phone.

“Oui?”

“Vera Monneray?”

It was a male voice. One she’d never heard. “Oui . . .,” she said again, puzzled. There was a distinct click on the other end and the line went dead.

Hanging up, she looked around. “Paul?” she called out. “Paul?”

This time there was concern in her voice. Still there was no reply and she realized he was gone. Getting out of bed, she saw her nakedness reflected in the antique mirror over either dressing table. To her right was the open bathroom door. Used towels lay on the sink and on the floor by the bidet. The bath curtain had come down and was lying half across the tub. On the far side of it, one of her shoes perched ceremoniously on the closed lid of the toilet. To anyone entering now there would be no mistaking that long and forceful love had been made in these two rooms and God knew where else in the apartment. In her life she’d never experienced anything like the past hours. Her entire body ached, and what didn’t ache was rubbed raw land sore. She felt as if she’d locked union with a beast and in so doing had unleashed a primitive fury that had built, moment by moment, thrust by thrust, into a gargantuan firestorm of physical and emotional hunger from which there was no escape or release except through complete and utter exhaustion.

Turning away, she saw herself again in the mirror and came closer. She wasn’t sure what she saw, exactly, except that somehow it was different. Her slim figure, her small breasts were the same. Her hair, though completely disheveled, hadn’t changed. It was something else. Something had gone from her, and in its place something else had come.

Abruptly the phone rang again. She looked over at it, provoked by the intrusion. It continued to ring and finally she picked it up.

“Oui . . .,” she said distantly.

“One moment,” a voice came back.

He was calling.

“Vera! Bonjour!” François’ voice bounded at her over the phone. He was up, bright, demanding.

It was a moment before she replied. And in that moment, she realized that what was gone from her was the child in her, she’d crossed a brink from which there was no turning back. Whoever she had been, she was not anymore. And her life, for better or worse, would never again be what it had.

“Bonjour,” she said, finally. “Bonjour, François.”

Paul Osborn left Vera’s apartment at a little after noon and took the Métro back to his hotel. By two o’clock, dressed in sweatshirt, jeans and running shoes, he was driving a rented dark blue Peugeot down the avenue de Clichy. Carefully following the rental agency’s street map, he made a right off the rue Martre onto the highway that led northeast along the Seine. In the next twenty minutes he made three stops at pull-outs and side roads. None showed promise.

Then at two thirty-five he passed a wooded road that seemed to lead toward the river. Making a U-turn, he came back and turned down it. A quarter of a mile later he came to a secluded park situated on a hill directly along the river’s eastern banks. From what he could see, the park itself was little more than a large field surrounded by trees, with a dirt road around its periphery. Taking it, he drove along until the road began to curve back toward the highway. Then he saw what he was looking for a dirt and gravel ramp leading down to the water. Stopping, he got out and looked back. The main highway was a good half mile away and obscured from, view by the trees and heavy undergrowth.

In summer, the park, with its access to the river, probably saw heavy use, but now, at nearly three o’clock in the afternoon on a rainy Thursday in October, the area was completely deserted.

Leaving the Peugeot, Osborn walked to the top of the ramp and started down. Below, through the trees, he could just make out the river. The dark sky and drizzle closed everything in, making it seem, almost, as if he alone existed. The ramp was steep and had been worn into ruts by vehicles using it as a portal to a landing at the bottom that no doubt served as a launching place for small boats.

As he neared the bottom and the incline leveled out, he saw a line of old pilings rotting at the water’s edge and assumed the site had served as a much larger entry to the river years before. When, or for what reason or in what years, who knew? How many armies, over how many centuries, had passed this way? How many men had walked where he walked now?

A dozen or more feet from the water’s edge, the gravel gave way to a gray sand that quickly became a reddish mud just as it reached the water. Venturing out, Osborn tested the firmness. The sand held, but the moment he reached the mud his shoes sank into it. Pulling back, he kicked what mud he could from his shoes, then looked again toward the water. Directly in front of him the Seine flowed lazily, lapping gently in tiny wavelets against the shoreline. Then, less than thirty yards down, an outcropping of rock and trees jutted sharply, turning the flow abruptly and sending it off into the main current.

Osborn watched for a long moment, all too conscious of what he was doing. Then, turning purposefully, he crossed the landing to a stand of trees at the base of the hill leading up from the water. Finding a large branch, he picked it up, crossed back, and tossed it into the water. For a moment nothing happened and it just hung there. Then slowly, the current nudged it forward, and in a few short seconds it was swept down toward the trees and then out toward the main current. Osborn glanced at his watch. It had taken ten seconds for the branch to move away and get caught up in the predominant flow. Another twenty and it disappeared from sight around the outcrop of rock and trees. All told, just about thirty seconds from the time he tossed the branch in until he lost sight of it.

Turning back, he recrossed the landing to the woods on the far side. He wanted something heavier, something that might begin more to approximate a man’s weight. In a matter of moments he found the uprooted trunk of a dead tree. Struggling for a grip, he hefted it, then carried it to the water’s edge, stepped into the mud once more and heaved it in. For a moment it remained still in the water, as the branch had, then the current picked it up and started forward along the shore. Once it reached the curve of the outcropping it moved swiftly and steadily out toward the main current. Once more he looked at his watch. Thirty-two seconds until it reached mid-river and was swept from view. The tree trunk had to have weighed fifty pounds. Kanarack, he estimated, weighed about one hundred and eighty. The ratio of the weight from the branch to the tree trunk was far greats than the ratio of the tree trunk to what Kanarack weighed, yet both had taken nearly the same time to be swept up and out and then be fully caught up in the current.

Osborn could feel the rise of his pulse and the sweat at his armpits as the reality of it began to set in. It would work, he was certain! Moving sideways at first, then-turning, Osborn started to run, hurrying along the riverbank and past the trees to where the land projected farthest out toward midriver. Here, he found the water deep flowing and free of obstacles. With nothing to stop him, Kanarack, physically helpless under the succinylcholine, would float off like the tree trunk, picking up speed as he reached the flow line. Less than sixty seconds after his body was shoved out from the landing it would reach midriver and be caught up in the Seine’s main current.

Now he had to make sure. Pushing through a stand of high grass, he followed the river’s edge through shrubs and thicket for a half, mile or more. The farther he walked, the steeper the embankment became and the swifter the current flowing between the shorelines. Reaching the top of a hill, he stopped. The river kept on uninterrupted for as far as he could see. There were no small islands, no sandbanks, no yawning catch-alls of dead trees. Nothing but fast-moving open water cutting through raw countryside. Moreover, there were no towns, factories, homes or bridges. No place at all, as far as he could tell, from which to see a thing rushing along with the current.

Especially if it were happening in the rain and darkness.