The Day After Tomorrow

36

“CAN YOU hear me?” Osborn said, as he turned the Citroën northeast along the river road. The rain was coming down harder than before and the wipers beat a steady rhythm across the windshield. To his left, the Seine was just visible through the dark of the trees that lined the road. Little more than a mile ahead was the turnoff to the park.

“Can you hear me?” Osborn repeated, glancing first into the rearview mirror, then turning so that he could look into the backseat.

Kanarack lay staring at the car’s ceiling, his breathing becoming more regular.

“Uh huh,” he grunted.

Osborn looked back to the road ahead. “You asked me if I knew what happened to Jean Packard. I said yes. Maybe you’d like to know what happened to you. You were injected with a drug called succinylcholine. It paralyzes the skeletal muscles. I gave you just enough for you to understand what it does to the human body. I have another syringe filled with a much larger dose. Whether I inject you with it or not is up to you.”

Kanarack’s eyes focused on a button in the Citroën’s ceiling upholstery. The act of doing it made him think about something other than the possibility of having to endure again what he had just gone through. To do it another time was impossible.

“My name is Paul Osborn. Tuesday, April 12, 1966, I was walking down a street in Boston, Massachusetts, with my father, George Osborn. I was ten years old. We were on our way to buy me a new baseball mitt when a man stepped out of a crowd with a knife and pushed it into my father’s stomach. The man ran away. But my father fell down on the sidewalk and died. I’d like you to tell me why that man did what he did to my father.”

“God!” Kanarack thought. “That’s what this is about. It’s not them at all! I could have taken care of it so damn simply. It could all be over.”

“I’m waiting,” the voice said from the front seat. Suddenly Kanarack felt the car slow. Outside he caught a glimpse of trees; the car turned and there was a jolt as they hit a pothole. Then they accelerated again and more trees flashed by. Another minute and they lurched to a stop and he heard Osborn shift gears. Immediately the Citroën backed up, then tilted sharply and continued downward. A few seconds more and it leveled off, then stopped.

Lack of motion was followed by a metallic sound as the emergency brake was pulled up. Then the driver’s door opened and closed. Abruptly the door beside Kanarack’s head jerked open and Osborn stood there, a hypodermic syringe in his hand.

“I asked you a question but I didn’t get an answer,” he said.

Kanarack’s lungs were still burning. Even the slightest breath was agony.

“Let me help you understand.” Osborn stood aside. Kanarack didn’t move.

“I want you to look over there!” Suddenly Osborn grabbed Kanarack’s hair and jerked his head hard to the left so that he could see over his shoulder. Osborn was trying to control his anger but it wasn’t working very well. Slowly Kanarack shifted his gaze, straining to see into the growing darkness past Osborn. Then the river came into focus not ten yards away.

“If you think you just went through hell,” Osborn said softly, “imagine what it will be like out there, with your arms and legs paralyzed. You’ll stay afloat for what, maybe ten, fifteen seconds? Your lungs barely work anyway. What do you think will happen when you sink?”

Kanarack’s mind flashed to Jean Packard. The private detective had been in possession of information he wanted and he had done whatever had been necessary to obtain it. Now someone was equally passionate about getting information from him. And he, like Jean Packard, had no alternative but to give it.

“I—was—a—contract—man.” Kanarack’s voice was no more than a raspy whisper.

For a moment Osborn wasn’t certain he’d heard correctly. Either that, or Kanarack was fooling with him. Tightening his grip on Kanarack’s hair, he jerked it back hard. Kanarack cried out. The effort made him suck in his lungs. Terrible pain shot through him and he cried out a second time.

“Let’s try it again.” Osborn’s face was next to his

“I was paid to do it . . . Money!” Kanarack coughed. The expelled air seared like flame across his dry throat.

“Paid?” Osborn was shocked. That wasn’t what he’d expected, nothing of the kind! He’d always seen his father’s death as the random action of a crazed man. And lacking any other motive, so had the police. It was an act, they had said, done by a man who had hated his own father, or his mother, his brothers or his sisters. Done, he’d always believed, as an expression of unbearable anger and long pent-up fury, randomly and mindlessly unleashed. His father had merely been at the wrong place at the wrong time.

But no, Kanarack was telling him something altogether different. Something that made no sense. His father was a tool designer. A plain, quiet man who owed no one a penny, and had never raised his voice in anger in his life. Hardly the kind of man someone would pay to have killed. Suddenly it came to him that Kanarack was lying.

“Tell me the truth! You lying son of a bitch!” In a thundering rage Osborn dragged Kanarack from the car by the hair. Kanarack screamed in agony, the sound tearing against his throat and down into his lungs. A moment later they were knee-deep in the river. The syringe came up in Osborn’s hand, then suddenly he pushed Kanarack under. Holding him there, he counted to ten, then pulled him up.

“Tell me the truth, God damn you!”

Kanarack, coughing and gagging, was aghast. Why didn’t this man believe him? Kill him, for God’s sake, but not like this!

“I am—” he rasped. “Your father—three others—too—in Wyoming—New Jersey—one in California. All for the same people. Then, afterward—they tried—to—kill me.”

“What people? What the hell are you talking about?”

“You won’t believe me—” Kanarack gagged, trying to spit out river water.

The current swirled around them and the rain came down in sheets, the growing darkness making it all but impossible to see. Osborn tightened his grip on Kanarack’s collar and brought the syringe up directly in front of his eyes. “Try me,” he said.

Kanarack shook his head.

“Tell me!” Osborn yelled, and dunked Kanarack again. Bringing him up, he tore open Kanarack’s overalls and pressed the tip of the syringe against his bicep.

“Once more,” Osborn whispered. “The truth.”

“God! Don’t!” Kanarack pleaded. “Please . . .”

Suddenly Osborn eased off. Whatever it was he saw in Kanarack’s eyes told him Kanarack was telling the truth, that no man would lie in that situation.

“Give me a name,” Osborn said. “Somebody who made the contact with you. Gave you the assignments.”

“Scholl—Erwin Scholl. Erwin, with an E.” Kanarack could see Scholl’s face. A tall, athletic man in tennis clothes. Kanarack had been sent to an estate on Long Island in 1966, recommended for the job by a retired colonel in the United States Army. Scholl had been pleasant enough. It was a handshake deal. Each hit worth twenty-five thousand dollars in cash. Fifty percent down, report back to Scholl for the rest when finished. After the killings, he’d come back to collect his money and Scholl had paid him the money due, had graciously thanked him and shown him out. Then, only moments later, on the way back into the city, Kanarack’s car had been forced off the road by a limousine. Two men got out with automatic weapons. As they approached, Kanarack shot them both with a handgun and got away. After that, they tried three times in rapid succession to hit him: his apartment, a restaurant and on the street. On each occasion he’d eluded them but they always seemed to know where he was or would be, which meant it was only a matter of time before they got him. So with Agnes Demblon’s help, he took things into his own hands. Killing his partner, he burned the body in his own car to make it look as if he’d been killed in a gangland execution. Then, he vanished.

“Erwin Scholl of where?” Osborn was holding Kanarack only inches above the rushing water. Demanding he verify what he had said.

“Long Island—big estate on Westhampton Beach,” Kanarack said.

“Jesus Christ, you son of a bitch!” There were tears in Osborn’s eyes. He was totally thrown off-balance. Kanarack had been no wild, demented man who had slain his father out of sheer malice. He’d been a professional killer, doing a job. Suddenly his murder had been depersonalized. Human emotions had had nothing to do with it. It had been nothing more than a business transaction.

And just as suddenly there it was again. The monstrous WHY? Then it came. It was a mistake. That was it. It had to have been. Osborn tightened his grip. “You’re saying you got the wrong man, is that it? You took my father for someone else—”

Kanarack shook his head. “No. He was the one. The others too.”

Osborn stared at him. It was crazy! Impossible! “Jesus Christ!” he screamed. “Why?”

Kanarack was looking up from the rush of water around him. His breathing was easier, the feeling in his arms and legs coming back. The needle was still in Osborn’s hand. Maybe he still had a chance. Then Osborn suddenly looked off, as if something had startled him. Kanarack followed his gaze. A tall man in a raincoat and hat was coming down the ramp toward where they were. Something was in his hand. He raised it.

A split second later there was a sound like a dozen woodpeckers all hammering at once. Suddenly the water was boiling up all around them. Osborn felt something slap into his thigh and he fell backward. Still the water kept churning. He tried to raise up and saw the man in the hat wade out into the water, the thing in his hand still tap-tap-tapping.

Twisting away, Osborn dove down and swam off. Little noises, like pellets, slapped the water above. Under the water, what little light there was vanished and Osborn had no idea which direction he was going. Something bumped up against him, and seemed to hang there. Then the current caught him and whatever it was hanging with him and swept them away. Osborn’s lungs were bursting for air, but the force of the current was sweeping him down toward the river bottom. Once again he felt the thing bump him and he realized he was entangled with it. Reaching across, he tried to free himself from it. It was bulky, like a grassy log, and seemed stuck to him. His lungs felt as if they were collapsing inward. He had to have air. Whatever it was he was entangled with, he had to ignore, and do nothing but fight his way to the surface. Giving an enormous kick, he swept his arms back and swam upward.

A moment later he broke free of the surface. Gasping, he gulped fresh air furiously into his lungs. At almost the same time he realized he was moving at considerable speed. Looking around, he could just make out the riverbank on the far shore. Turning back, he could see the headlights of cars moving along the river road behind him and he realized he was in midriver, being swept along by the Seine’s swift current.

Whatever had been caught up with him had come loose when he broke the surface, or at least he thought it had, because he no longer felt it. He was riding free with the current when suddenly it bumped into him once more. Turning, he saw a dark object with a grassy clump at the end nearest him. He started to push it away. As he did a human hand came from beneath the surface and clenched onto his arm. Crying out in horror, he tried to wrench free. But the hand held him firmly in its grip. Then he saw that what he’d taken for grass wasn’t grass at all, but human hair. In the distance he heard the rumble of thunder. Suddenly the rain came down in torrents. Reaching out, wildly trying to pry the fingers from his arm, the whole thing bobbed up, and rolled sideways at him. Screaming, he tried to shove it away. But it wouldn’t go. Then lightning flashed and he found himself staring at a bloody eye socket hideously impaled with pieces of shattered teeth. On the other side was no eye at all, just a mangle of flesh where the face had been shot away. A moment later the thing lurched upward and gave a loud groan. Then the hand ever so gently let go of his arm, and what was left of Henri Kanarack floated off with the current.

As Henri Kanarack, or Albert Merriman, who he really was, had looked past Paul Osborn’s shoulder and seen the tall man in the raincoat and hat coming down the ramp toward them, he thought there was something familiar about him, that he had seen him somewhere before. And then he remembered him as the man who had come into Le Bois the night after he’d killed Jean Packard. He recalled seeing him standing in the doorway and looking around, his eyes sweeping the terrace. Then remembered him turning toward the bar, where Kanarack was sitting, and their eyes making contact. He remembered being relieved the man was not Osborn, or the police. He remembered thinking the man was nobody, nobody at all.

He’d been wrong.