The Throat

He walked out without speaking, and a nurse hurried forward out of nowhere with a long blue splint festooned with dangling white strips of Velcro and the information that I was in St. Mary's Hospital. Here was another homecoming: it was in St. Mary's that I had spent two months of my seventh year, and where a nurse named Hattie Bascombe had told me that the world was half night. A great dingy pile of brown brick occupying about a quarter-mile of Vestry Street, the hospital was a block away from my old high school. In real time, if there is such a thing, the whole endless journey in the ambulance could have taken no more than five minutes. The nurse clamped the sling onto my arm, tied up my gown, deposited me in a wheelchair, pushed me down a corridor, loaded me into an empty elevator, unloaded me, and then navigated me through a maze of hallways to a room with a high bed, both evidently mine. A lot of people wanted to talk to me, she said, I was a pretty popular guy. I said, 'I vant to be alone.' She was too young to know about Greta Garbo, but she left me alone anyhow.

A bemused-looking doctor with a long manila envelope in one hand came in about ten minutes later. 'Well, Mr. Underhill,' he said, 'you present us with an unusual problem. The bullet that struck you traveled in a nice straight line past your lung and came to rest beneath your right shoulder blade. But according to these X rays, you're carrying so much metal around in your back that we can't distinguish the bullet from everything else. Under the circumstances, I think we'll just leave it there.'

Then he shifted on his feet and smiled down at me with the envelope of X rays dangling over his crotch in his joined hands. 'Would you mind settling a little dispute between me and the radiologist? What happened to you, some kind of industrial accident?'

He had clear blue eyes, a thick flop of blond hair on his forehead, and no lines at all, none, not even crow's feet. 'When I was a little boy,' I said, 'I swallowed a magnet.'

A tiny, almost invisible horizontal wrinkle, as fine as a single hair on a baby's head, appeared in the center of his forehead.

'Okay,' I said. 'It was more in the nature of foreign travel.' He didn't get it. 'If you're not going to operate, does that mean that I get to go home tomorrow?'

He said that they wanted to keep me under observation for a day or two. 'We want to keep you clear of infections, see that your wound begins to heal properly.' He paused. 'And a police lieutenant named McCandless seemed concerned that you stay in one place. I gather that you can expect a lot of visitors over the next few days.'

'I hope one of them brings me something to read.'

'I could pick up some magazines from the lounge, if you like, and bring them to you the next time I'm in this wing.'

I thanked him, and he smiled and said, 'If you tell me how foreign travel can put about a pound of metal fragments in your back.'

I asked how old the radiologist was.

That little baby-hair wrinkle turned up in his forehead again. 'About forty-six, forty-seven, something like that.'

'Ask him. He'll explain it to you.'

'Get some rest,' he said, and turned off the lights when he left.

As soon as he was gone, whatever they had given me while I was still only semiconscious began to wear off, and a wide track through my body burst into flame. I groped around for the bell to ring the nurse and finally found it hanging on a cord halfway down the side of the mattress. I pushed the button twice, waited a long time, and then pushed it again. A black nurse with stiff, bristling orange hair came in about twenty minutes later and said that I was due for a painkiller in about an hour. I didn't need it now, I just thought I needed it now. Out she went. The flames laughed and caroused. An hour later, she turned on the lights, wheeled in a tray with a row of needles lined up like dental tools, told me to roll over and jabbed me in the butt. 'See?' she said. 'You didn't really need it until now, did you?'

'Anticipation is half the fun,' I said. She turned off the light and went away. The darkness started to move over me in long, smooth waves.

When I woke up, the window at the end of the room shone with a delicate pink light. The happy flames were already racing around and organizing another shindig. A little stack of magazines stood on the bedside table. I picked them up to see what they were. The doctor had brought me copies of Redbook, Modern Maturity, Modern Bride, and Longevity. I guessed the hospital didn't subscribe to Soldier of Fortune. I opened Redbook and began reading the advice column. It was very interesting on the subject of menopause, but just when I was beginning to learn something new about progesterone, my first visitor of the day arrived. Two visitors, actually, but only one of them counted. The other was Sonny Berenger.

3

The man who followed Sonny through the door had a wide, deeply seamed brick-colored face and short reddish hair shot with gray that rolled back from his forehead in tight waves. His tweed jacket bracketed a chest about four feet across. Next to Sonny Berenger, he looked like a muscular dwarf who could bend iron bars and bite nails in half. The detective gave me a quick, unsettling glance and ordered Sonny to close the door.

He came up to the bed and said, 'My name is Ross McCandless, and I'm a lieutenant in Homicide. We have a lot to talk about, Mister Underhill.'

'That's nice,' I said.

Sonny came back from shutting the door and went to the foot of the bed. He looked about as animated as an Easter Island statue, but at least he didn't look hostile.

McCandless pulled up the chair and parked himself about two feet from my head. His light blue eyes, set close to his sharp little pickax of a nose, were utterly flat and dead, far past the boundary where they could have been called expressionless. They did not even have enough life in them to be lifeless. I was suddenly aware that the three of us were alone in the room and that whatever happened between us was going to shape reality. Sonny was going to contribute, or he would have been left out in the hall, I was going to contribute, but whatever reality we created together was mainly going to suit McCandless.

'How are you feeling? You doing all right?'

'No serious damage,' I said.

'Yeah. I talked to your doctor.' That took care of the social portion of our encounter. 'I understand you feel you have some interesting information about the late Detective Fontaine, and I want to know about that. All about it. I've been talking with your friend Ransom, but it seems that you're the key to what happened on South Seventh Street last night. Why don't you just explain that whole situation to me, as you see it.'

'Is Officer Berenger going to take a statement?'

'There's no need for that right now, Mr. Underhill. We are going to proceed with a certain amount of care here. In due time, you will be asked to sign a statement all of us will be able to live with. I assume you already knew that Detective Fontaine died of his wounds.'

He had already cut Fontaine loose—now he was trying to control the damage. He wanted me to give him a quick route out of the chaos. I nodded. 'Before I begin, could you tell me what happened to John and Alan Brookner?'

'When I left Armory Place, Mr. Ransom was being questioned by Detective Monroe. Professor Brookner is being held under observation at County Hospital. Bastian is trying to get a statement from him, but I don't think he's having much luck. The professor isn't very coherent.'

'Has he been charged with anything?'

'You might say this conversation is part of that process. Last night, you made certain statements to Officer Berenger concerning Paul Fontaine and a company called Elvee Holdings. You also mentioned the names Fielding Bandolier and Franklin Bachelor. Why don't you start by telling me how you became aware of Elvee Holdings?'

'I had dinner with John on my first night in Millhaven,' I said. 'Just as we were finishing, he called the hospital and heard that his wife was showing signs of improvement, and he immediately left the restaurant to walk to Shady Mount.' I described how I had noticed that a car was following him, taken down the license number in my notebook, trailed after both of them to Shady Mount, spoken to the driver in the hospital lobby, and recognized him