“. . . Two fingers, dammit, you’ve got to go deeper and clean her out good. The cops want all the guy’s sperm and you need to feel for torn tissue. She’s probably torn inside.”
She was crying helplessly now. He saw the third man finally emerge from the cubicle, wipe his hands on his pants, and come into Taylor’s small enclosure. He nodded to him, then asked him a question in French, speaking very, very slowly. Like Americans did, to make themselves understood to stupid foreigners. Taylor answered him quickly in French, fluently and with no accent, saying without preamble, “The girl who was raped, how is she? Will she be all right?”
The doctor muttered something about Americans minding their own business, to which Taylor looked hard at him and repeated his question. The doctor shrugged as he bent over Taylor’s arm. “She’s eighteen, an American, and her brother-in-law, a damned Italian prince of all things, split her up really good. He bashed up her face, tore her a bit internally, and she’s bleeding like there’s no tomorrow. But she’ll be all right, at least her body will heal in time. I heard the girl’s sister shot him and he’s upstairs in surgery. Jesus, what a mess.” Then he shrugged, a typical French reaction, as if to say: What do you expect from foreigners except endless stupidities?
Then the doctor was talking about his broken arm, Taylor realized, clucking, turning it and making him grit his teeth, punishment, Taylor assumed, for being pushy. Taylor said in a stony voice that did little to mask his pain, “I’m a cop with the NYPD. How long will it take to heal? I’ve got to get home and back to work.”
The doctor raised his head and smiled, and shot off in his fastest French, “Give it six weeks and stay off your motorcycle. As for your head, you’re lucky you were wearing a helmet. Damned machines will kill you.”
“Not a scrap of luck to it,” Taylor said easily. “I’m not stupid.”
The doctor did a sudden about-face. “Say, you’re French, aren’t you? You just moved to the United States?”
“Nary a bit,” Taylor said with a big smile. “Born and bred in Pennsylvania.” He paused and added, “I’m just good at languages and, truth be told, French is pretty easy.”
He wished he hadn’t said anything, because in the next instant he sucked in his breath.
“Sorry. I’m sending you to be X-rayed now. No drugs yet, not with that concussion. Wait here a minute and I’ll send someone for you. Oh, yeah, I could tell you weren’t really French.”
Taylor sighed, closed his eyes, and heard the girl sobbing low now. Her throat must hurt badly, for the cries were hoarse and raw. He waited another five minutes. He was still there when she was wheeled out on a gurney. He saw her briefly again—hair in thick tangles around her face, and God, her face, all bruised, one eye puffed shut, her upper lip swelled and bleeding, a lot worse now than when she’d been brought in. She was unconscious, probably drugged. She looked very young. She looked helpless, utterly vulnerable. At least her sister had shot the bastard.
He didn’t understand what would make a man do such a thing, but the good Lord knew he’d seen enough of it his past two years on the force, at his home in the Twelfth Precinct.
A bloody Italian prince. Nothing figured anymore. Taylor sighed again, wishing someone would come and just get all the pain over with.
He was discharged two days later, his arm in a cast. He still suffered nagging headaches. He’d paid out eight hundred dollars in cash for all the hospital services. He had just enough to go home to New York. As for his motorcycle, he’d insured the Harley since he’d rented it here in Paris, so he was only out a hundred bucks for the deductible.
He was tired and felt sorry for himself, even though he knew, objectively, that he was lucky to be alive. The guy had gunned his white Peugeot from a narrow side street and smacked him hard, sending him flying, not onto the pavement, thank God, but into a stand of thick bushes. Those bushes had saved his life. The guy had driven away, leaving him there to curse and hold his arm and wait for the cops to come. And they had. They’d brought him to St. Catherine’s Hospital and he’d lain there listening to that poor girl screaming and screaming. He was a cop; he should have just endured it with a shrug. But he couldn’t, somehow.
In another day, Taylor was at Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for his Pan Am flight to be called when he saw one of the Parisian dailies screaming headlines about a Prince Alessandro di Contini having survived the two bullets shot into him by his wife. Taylor’s flight was called. He left the small kiosk, aware of the beginnings of yet another headache. He read a bit more, then left the newspaper on the counter. He accepted two aspirin from a flight attendant, leaned back, and closed his eyes, saying his usual prayer that the plane would make it into the air.
He thought of Diane, his fiancee of four months, wondering yet again if it was smart for them to get married. They’d lived together in Diane’s spacious East Side apartment for the past six months. She was rich and he wasn’t. He was a cop and she was trying to talk him off the force, but he was young and arrogant and confident and he didn’t buy it. She’d come around. It was her responsibility. They were good in bed together. His trip to France was his bachelor’s last fling the way he saw it. Diane thought he was nuts because he wanted to vacation by himself, riding a motorcycle all over a foreign country, but she’d only bitched a little bit, content to warn him a good three times not to catch anything with French girls. Everyone knew how promiscuous they were. Taylor didn’t, but he didn’t bother to correct her. He’d tried to explain that it was the country itself that drew him, that he really couldn’t explain it, but when he’d hitchhiked there when he was eighteen, he knew, simply knew that at one time or another he’d lived here, been part of the land, part of the culture. A previous life? He didn’t know, but he did know that he felt wonderful when he was riding a motorcycle beside the Loire River, smelling the ripening grapes in Bordeaux, gazing in awe at the ancient Roman ruins scattered throughout Provence.
He’d be home soon, a couple days early. He wondered when he’d be able to go to France again. There was already the longing for it growing in his gut. He would be twenty-five in two weeks and married in three.
He thought again of the young girl in the emergency room. He knew he wouldn’t forget the rape, nor would he forget her battered face and her screams. Nor would he forget her name, the name beneath the prince’s in that newspaper at the kiosk at the airport—Lindsay Foxe. Not that it mattered, he thought. Not that it mattered.
It was very hot and it was only the beginning of May. Lindsay sat on a stone bench under an oak tree on the Columbia campus. She was wearing loose-legged khaki walking shorts and a short-sleeved white blouse. Reeboks and thick white socks were on her feet. She wore a tennis bracelet on her right wrist, a gift to herself. She admired Martina Hingis enormously. Her legs were already tanned from playing tennis every day for the past two months. She was very good but nowhere near great. Her forehand was a killer, her backhand two-handed but still unpredictable. As for her serve, she got an ace at least one in twenty times. She wasn’t playing tennis until tomorrow morning with Gayle Werth, her best friend from the Stamford Girls’ Academy, also a senior at Columbia, majoring in physical education. Gayle was her doubles partner and the better player.
Lindsay had one more final exam. She would graduate with a B.A. in psychology in two more weeks. From Columbia, a school with a good reputation.
Then what would she do? There had been company reps on campus a few months before, but nothing they had to offer interested her in the slightest, except for the foreign service, which sounded exciting, at least until she’d met the young man who was their primary representative. He couldn’t talk about any place but Italy. Lindsay was never going to Italy.
Her stomach growled and she realized she hadn’t eaten since the previous night at Marlene’s apartment. Salami pizza with extra cheese and a can of light beer. It had made her sick.
The pizza had been god-awful, but it alone hadn’t done her in. It was also that guy, Peter Merola, a friend of Marlene’s, a classmate. He’d been persistent, and when he’d pretended to accidentally rub his hand against her breast, touching her nipple, she’d bolted to the bathroom and been sick in the toilet. When she’d come out, Peter was coming on to another girl and this one looked interested.
She was safe.
Lindsay rose even as she pulled a sheaf of notes from her large floppy purse. It was fine cordovan leather, soft light brown, and it grew softer by the year, four of them now. She carried everything in it, her cell phone, her books, some tennis balls, a razor, and an extra pair of socks and underwear. She fanned the notes out on her lap. This was her last course and it was taught by Professor Gruska, who was an ardent Freudian, a dying breed, thank God. He had intense eyes, looked like a professor, and lived with his father on the West Side at Eighty-fourth Street.
