City for Ransom

perfectly good sense.”

“You mean, the sense of the world is what you make of your senses?”

He looked into her eyes, confused.

“Nathan, it is so damnably easy for you with your syllo-gisms to live by, but it makes no more sense now to me than ever it did as a child, this place.”

“Live with it.”

“I’ve never understood the people with whom I share this world, why they do what they do— usually self-sabotage,” she thought of Polly and Ransom—“it’s all a mystery . . .” “We’re not here to understand every mystery of life.”

“Blindness is no mystery.”

“Blindness?”

“Blindness to the results of our own confounding decisions.”

“So you retreat into your considerable intellect, Doctor?

This is your answer?”

“When I can no longer take another single second of the insanity of the world, why not?” She indicated the fire devastation spread before them. “I have this nice dark, under-the-rock place where things are black and white, and where what has been rules what is right now, where insane behavior is explainable.” “You’re speaking of understanding this madman again?

But no one can penetrate the mind of a maniac.”

“Science must someday do so.”

“And in the process of your scientific inquiry, you cut yourself off from your own feelings,” he countered. “How adventurous it’d be to open that Pandora’s box you pretend into nonexistence along with your real self, your real gender.”

170

ROBERT W. WALKER

“We set things in motion, Nathan. You set me a-spying on Alastair Ransom, and I’ve been dutiful, and now this? This is an unacceptable result. I’m done with it.”

“Done indeed?”

“Think of it, my prying into this woman’s life not to help her as a physician, but to learn of Ransom’s comings and goings? I did harm. Had I not poisoned her against Ransom as you instructed, then perhaps—” “She’d be just as dead; Polly asked for this.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say; no one asks for this.”

“She lived the life; every day she chanced some awful thing happening.”

Some awful thing like you, she thought but said, “It’s not something I want to be a part of any longer, not for any amount of money.”

“Not even to keep Gabrielle safe from attention?”

Her clenched jaw quivered. She stared into the rubble and curling smoke.

“Not so easy to walk away from me, Dr. Tewes.”

“Damn you, sir.”

“I can make your life hell in Chicago.”

“You said you admired my savvy and determination, and yet you can do this?”

“Think you’ve too few patients now? Imagine should I put out a single word against you. Besides, that little matter of Gabby’s having been born a bastard, all that about her father . . . all quite nicely locked away for now, sealed in my office.” There was the rub. Gabby’s father, all the terrible reports of how he’d died so ignobly in a prison in Saint-Tropez, France, where he’d been caught cheating at cards in a casino brothel. He’d been beaten to within inches of life and then arrested. Dead of his wounds in that cold cell, uncared for, alone, disgraced. Kohler had dredged it all up from French authorities.

“We both want what’s best for your child.”

CITY FOR RANSOM

171

She’d worked to shield Gabby from the truth.

All the volcanic negative raging storms self-created within us that make us do and say stupid hurtful dumb self-destructive things, she thought. And a parent will do anything for a child. Gabby, so much like her, had always and still lived inside her feelings, inside her instincts. Gabby knew. She knew something in addition to Cliffton’s murder troubled her mother’s soul. It had a name—Nathan Kohler.

“I’m glad to see you’re thinking it over,” said Kohler.

“That you won’t act impulsively.”

Kohler had no idea how impulsively she might act. Staring at the charred remains of this day, she realized all her rampant thoughts ended with setting Kohler afire—images of his suffering flitting by like a series of daguerreotypes on a spindle. They were replaced by Gabby dancing riotously in her head, dancing with the phantoms of what was and is and what might be.

“Our bargain stands then.” He kept calm, smiling, his well-groomed mustache gluey with pomade.

She stared forward, wondering where she might purchase a garrote. “I don’t think until this moment that I’ve ever fully realized just how profoundly different Gabby and I are.”

“Really?”

“My intellect is just a tool, Nathan.”

“Of course, to make sense of experience.”

She agreed, “All things large and small, corporeal and spectral.”

“Intellect helps us communicate.”

“But my intellect, much as it is my ‘cover,’ isn’t me. So don’t put too much faith in its always being there for you to manipulate.”

He was the picture of perplexity now.

“I don’t live in my intellect. I live elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere?”

“Where the heart lives.” Her gaze remained on the ashes.

172

ROBERT W. WALKER

“And where is that?” He brushed her hand with his, making another of his crude, awkward passes.

“A place few get to be part of or see, a place that some—like you, Nathan—don’t even know exist.”

“Annnd . . . you’re saying this is a bad thing?”

“I’ve been induced to live outside my feelings in this matter, induced by people like you and circumstances.”

“Get control of yourself, Jane! There’re reporters all around here. At least pretend interest in the current problem we face, and in what I’m saying.”

“Feelings—source of my strength, why people listen to me, trust my deepest felt senses. My father, God rest him, he used to tell people—”

“Perhaps you should be having this conversation with your daughter, Dr. Tewes?”

“Yes, for once Nathan, you’re correct. While I’m at it, I’ll tell her everything. That way no one the likes of you can harm her with your dirty reports.”

“Look here,” he began, snatching at her arm.

“Tewes” pulled away from him, making curious reporters even more curious. She stormed off, wondering where Ransom was at this moment, knowing how hurt he must be, wondering if there wasn’t some way to help him.

CHAPTER 17