It took weeks. The blood did not completely drain away until October. During that time, his bills were paid by his parents, who came from America only once to visit but made regular bank transfers to the hospital. “They want to take him to America,” Jana explained, “but we tell them it’s impossible. Not with his condition.”
“Of course,” the American said.
Despite his condition stabilizing, the coma persisted. “These things, they are sometimes a mystery,” another nurse explained, and the American gave a sad, understanding nod.
Then Bori blurted out something and raised her hands happily.
“And then he wakes up!” Jana translated.
“That was just a week ago?” the American said, smiling.
“December fifth, the day before Mikulas.”
“Mikulas?”
“Saint Nicholas Day. When the children get boots full of candy from Nicholas.”
“Fantastic.”
They called his parents to deliver the good news, and once he was able to talk they asked if he wanted to call someone-perhaps the pretty Hungarian girl who’d come to visit once a week?
“His girlfriend?” the American asked.
“Zsuzsa Papp,” said another nurse.
“I think Bori is jealous,” said Jana. “She falls in the love with him.”
Bori frowned and asked rapid, embarrassed questions that everyone refused to answer with anything but laughter.
“So Zsuzsa came, did she?”
“Yes,” another nurse said. “She was very happy.”
“But he was not,” Jana said, then listened a moment to Bori. “I mean, he is happy to see her, yes, but his mood. He was not happy.”
“What?” asked the American, confused. “He was sad? Angry?”
“Frightened,” said Jana.
“I see.”
Jana listened to Bori, then added, “He tell his parents not to come. He say they are not safe, he will come home hisself.”
“So that’s where he went? He went home?”
Jana shrugged. Bori shrugged. They all shrugged.
No one knew. After four days of consciousness, just two days before this charming American arrived looking for his friend, Henry Gray disappeared. Not a word to anyone, not even a good-bye to the heartsick Bori. Just a quiet escape in the late afternoon, once all the doctors had gone home and Bori was in the break room eating her dinner.
The memory of losing her favorite patient wet Bori’s eyes, and she tried to hide them with a hand. The American looked down at her and placed his own hand on her shoulder, provoking jealousy in at least two of the nurses. “Please,” he said. “If Henry does get in touch with you, tell him that his friend Milo Weaver is looking for him.”
That was the way Zsuzsa understood the event when Bori called her at the offices of Blikk, a popular local tabloid, to pass on the information about the friend. Then Zsuzsa went to the hospital and approached Jana and the others for their versions.
Had the hospital visit been the only sighting, she would have tried to find this Milo Weaver. As it was, he kept appearing, and what struck her was that each time he appeared, though his questions remained the same, his manner and history changed.
With the nurses, he was a friend of Henry’s family, a pediatrician from Boston. At Potkulcs, Henry’s favorite bar, the two Csillas talked of Milo Weaver, a chain-smoking novelist based in Prague who had come down to crash at Henry’s place. To Terry and Russell and Johann and Will and Cowall, all of whom he’d easily tracked down at their regular cafe haunts on Liszt Ferenc Square, he was Milo Weaver, AP stringer, following up on a story Henry had filed last summer on the economic tensions between Hungary and Russia. From a Sixth District cop, she learned that he had even arrived to speak with his chief, representing Henry’s parents’ law firm, and wanted to know what had been learned about their son’s disappearance.
Before his vanishing act, Henry had made it clear to her: Trust no one except Milo Weaver, but tell him nothing. It was a riddle-what use was trust if it meant silence? “You mean you don’t trust him?”
“Maybe. Look, I don’t know. If someone can toss me out of my window only hours after I got that letter, then what protection can any one man offer? I just mean that you should talk to him, but don’t tell him where I am.”
“How can I? You won’t tell me where you’re going.”
Despite what Henry might have thought, Zsuzsa wasn’t about to follow his words blindly. She was a good journalist-a better journalist than dancer-and knew that Henry, for all his momentary fame, would always be a hack. Fear kept objectivity an arm’s length from him at all times.
So when her editor called to tell her that an American film producer named Milo Weaver had come to the office looking for her, she reassessed her position. “Did you tell him how to find me?”
“Jesus, Zsuzsa. I’m not completely corrupt. He left a phone number.”
It was a way. The safety of the telephone would allow her all the distance she needed for a quick vanishing act, as quick as Henry’s had been.
Even so, she didn’t call. This man named Milo Weaver had too many professions, too many stories. Henry’s golden letter had said to trust him, but there was a world of difference between Milo Weaver and a man calling himself Milo Weaver. There was no way for her to know which was which.
She did have some information on him; she’d scoured the Internet months ago, after Henry’s attempted murder. A CIA employee, an analyst at a fiscal oversight office-assumedly the same clandestine Department of Tourism that Thomas Grainger had run. At the time of Henry’s attack, though, Weaver had been in a prison in New York state for some financial fraud-“misappropriation” was the most specific word she could track down. There were no photographs anywhere.
So she settled on silence, which was just as well since she had nothing to tell. That Henry had woken from his months of sleep with weak muscles and a dry mouth and the utter conviction that They would soon be after him- yes, she could share these facts, but anyone looking for Henry would know them already. The details of his attack? Henry had run through what he remembered many times to be sure she had it all. He’d even begun exposing his own flaws, crying as he apologized for having lied to her: He never could have used her on the story.
“You think I didn’t know that?” she’d asked, and that finally ended the embarrassing tears.
She stayed at a friend’s house in the Seventeenth District, took the week off from work, and even skipped her regular weekend slot at the 4Play Club. She avoided all the places she knew, because if he was any good, this Milo Weaver would already know them, too.
Despite the measure of paranoia, her exile was refreshing, because she finally had time to read, which she mistakenly devoted to Imre Kertesz. With a secret agent looking for her and Henry gone, reading the Nobel Prize winner just made her think of suicide.
On the fourth day of what she was starting to think of as her vacation from life itself, she had coffee with her friend, then watched from his window as he left for work. She left the Kertesz novel by the television and showered, then dressed in some fashionable sweats. She’d decided to go out-she would have her second coffee in a nearby cafe. She packed her phone and Vogues in her purse, grabbed a coat, and used the house keys on the front door. Standing on the welcome mat, silent, was a man about six feet tall. Blond, blue-eyed, smiling. “Elnezest,” he said, and the perfectly pronounced Hungarian Excuse me distracted her briefly from the fact that he matched the nurses’ lush descriptions of Milo Weaver.
It came to her, but too late. He’d reached out, hand tight over her mouth, and shoved her against the wall. With a backward kick he closed the door. He glanced to each side as she tried in vain to bite his fingers, then struck him with her purse. She shouted into his palm, but nothing useful came out, and with his spare hand he ripped the purse from her and threw it at the floor. He only needed one hand on her mouth to keep her still; he was remarkably strong.
In English, he said, “Calm down. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m just looking for Henry.”
