23
TUESDAY, AUGUST 31
Blume listened to the clump of nurses’ shoes across the hard hospital floor. The noise level increased as the door to his room opened, then decreased with a puff of air that smelled of antiseptic and mold as it was closed again.
A sigh escaped from someone nearby. Slyly, Blume opened an eye to see who it was, but all he saw was the ceiling. He tried to move his head sideways, but it would not budge. He opened both eyes wide in horror at the realization that he was paralyzed from the neck down. The door opened, closed as someone left, and he found himself alone in the room.
A strangled cry welled up from his chest, and he clenched his fists in rage. He kept them clenched for around ten seconds, then thought about that for a while. Slowly he unclenched them. Clenched them again. It hurt a bit, especially the left arm. Fine. He waved his hand, bent his knee, wiggled his toes and flexed his elbows. Then he fell asleep.
When he next awoke, it was evening. Someone had turned on the television in the corner of the room, which he could hear but not see. A contestant who wanted to be a millionaire was taking her own sweet time about deciding whether Beethoven had written three, seven, nine, or no symphonies at all.
He remembered every par tic ular of the operation he had fouled up: right from the moment he left his house in the small hours of the morning to the time he climbed into the Fiat Punto with Paoloni to when he had seen his junior colleague’s martyred body. The Land Cruiser had stopped dead, they had driven straight into the back of it. The target had made his getaway, probably on that motorbike he remembered hearing. Someone had shot Ferrucci.
Blume turned his mind to his injuries. Memory served him better than present sensation in this case. He realized his neck was in a whiplash collar. He remembered hot metal folding around his heels before he pulled himself out of the car, and the way he had found it hard to walk. While standing looking at the dead Ferrucci, he had become aware of a fierce constriction in his rib cage. His nose, now bandaged, had hit the windscreen, and he had heard his jaw crack. He ran his tongue over his teeth, and felt a fissure ending in a sharp point in his back molars.
The commercials segued into a news update.
Pain was filtering back into his legs, ankles, head, chest, arms. He was definitely coming off some sort of medication, and he wanted back on it.
He dozed off and slept in fits and starts all afternoon, evening and night.
No one fed him.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1
On Wednesday morning, he found himself wide awake. Certainly awake enough to worry if he had been knocked permanently stupid by the crash. Pain had dulled his powers of recollection, and the detailed reconstruction of events that he had been able to manage so easily the day before now seemed an impossible task. He was aching for a visitor and thirsting for knowledge of what had happened.
At ten in the morning, five hours after he had woken up, a doctor arrived.
“Ah, you’re awake.”
A nurse would have said, “We’re awake.” The doctor, more detached and fundamentally not caring one way or the other if he ever opened his eyes again, said “you.” Blume couldn’t say which annoyed him more.
“And hungry, and thirsty,” said Blume. “I think I may die of thirst. Can I get fruit juice?” For hours he had been thinking of how fresh apple juice would feel in his throat.
“Yes, yes,” said the doctor, as if to himself. He placed his hands, pudgy, white, on Blume’s ears and stared into his eyes for a few moments. Then he took a penlight out of his breast pocket and shone the light directly into Blume’s pupils. Blume couldn’t turn his head away or grab the doctor by the lapels and head-butt him in his face, so he lay there looking at the doctor’s nostril hair. Besides, he had an urgent question to ask.
“How long have I been here?”
“Boh.” The doctor shrugged his shoulders, then consulted what Blume surmised was a chart on the wall behind him. “Admitted Sunday lunchtime, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. That makes three days.”
“Three days?” Blume was outraged. He remembered bits of the journey in the ambulance, being rolled onto a stretcher, sharp pains inside his body that seemed to move outward, decreasing in intensity until they floated off his skin like cologne, and then sleep. This was surely only a few hours ago.
“Is this Intensive Care?”
“No. How could it be Intensive Care if you’ve had a visitor in here with you?” He patted his hands together.
“What visitor? What’s his name? Or her name?”
“Why on earth would I know that?” said the doctor. “A colleague, I believe. Another policeman, who looks pretty beat-up. He got admitted shortly after you. He’s asked to be informed when you’re properly awake. I’ll get a nurse to call him now. He left his name and number with the nurses. By the way, did you enjoy the morphine?”
“I was on morphine?”
“Oxycodone. Tiny dose. But no longer,” said the doctor with a touch of relish. “I’m putting you on Celebrex, and then nothing, because, as I say, there’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Can I have some juice, please? Apple if it’s available.”
“I’ll see about that when I’ve finished this examination. Now, can you move your feet in opposite directions?”
He could and did. The doctor frowned, as if Blume were pulling some silly stunt.
“You really are perfectly all right,” he said. “When you came in, your pressure had dropped very low, and we suspected a ruptured spleen, but that was not the case.”
His tone implied it should have been.
“Also, you had a head trauma, but the pressure in your skull remained manageable. Let me see, we also suspected broken ribs, but again, it was just bruising, so lucky again. Your left arm, now that is badly sprained… But,” he concluded sadly, “not broken.”
Blume had a hairline fracture in a kneecap and lacerations in the groin. The doctor seemed to enjoy the effect of this revelation, but eventually, and with some regret, revealed that they, too, were minor. Brightening up a little, he remembered that Blume had managed to misalign his nose and, if he planned on breathing normally again, would require septorhinoplasty.
Blume asked again about getting some juice, and the doctor left, saying he would see what he could do. But he must have been thwarted in his efforts, because the juice never arrived.
After waiting for forty minutes, Blume turned himself around in the bed to see if he could find a button or something to call someone. Halfway through his movement, his ribs seemed to break again and his body locked itself into an agonizing position from which he dared not move. He started groaning and cursing. As his position became more painful and he felt his legs cramp up as well, his curses grew in volume and obscenity. A nurse with flagging cheeks and tired eyes appeared at his bedside and shoved him back down. Blume was about to protest when he realized that most of the pain had subsided.
“What was all that about?” she demanded. In humble tones, Blume begged for some apple juice, and the nurse left, also to see what could be done.
Blume dozed off and dreamed of crystal pitchers of lemonade sitting on a picnic table in Discovery Park, and his father pointing to Bainbridge Island. His mother was drinking a Tab, a beautiful drink for beautiful people, and for some reason was poking him painfully on the arm, over and over again. To get her to stop, he opened his eyes, and there was Paoloni, his unhealthy pale face brightened by a swollen combination of blues, yellows, and reds.
Paoloni handed Blume a small room-temperature carton of apricot pulp with a crooked straw in it.
“The nurse said you wanted this.”
Blume’s arms were heavy, his left hand damaged and his fingers numb.
