The nurse made a notation on the chart at the foot of Annie-Vic’s bed. Then she went away. There was nothing in this room to keep a mind working. There was no music. The television was never on. Annie-Vic didn’t like television much. There was Poirot and Miss Marple. She liked those. She’d taken a mystery tour once, gone on a cruise where the guests were given parts in a murder mystery and then were supposed to solve it. She’d liked that cruise, even if it had only gone to the Bahamas, which she did not like. She needed something to keep her mind moving, so that it wouldn’t atrophy. She imagined her mind as a big balloon with the air slowly leaking out of it. She wished they would play some Bach harpsichord piece, or even one of Beethoven’s more triumphal symphonies, anything. She wished she could hear her memory people talking.
Every once in a while, time did a loop, and she was back there—not in this hospital room—but there, with that thick aluminum thing coming at her face. She always saw it in motion. She always concentrated on the metal. She always remembered herself thinking that it was all wrong. You thought you knew people. You thought you understood how the town worked, how the people in it thought and felt and acted, and it turned out that you had it all backwards, you didn’t know what really mattered at all.
Years ago, Annie-Vic had been a prisoner of war in the “Asian theater,” as they’d put it then. She’d been a prisoner of the Japanese. It was more than sixty years ago now. It was so far in the past that she should never feel it was more real to her than the last five minutes, but she did. She hadn’t understood anything then, either, and it had taken her years after her release to come to terms with how wrong she had been.
If she could only get back the ability to sit up and talk and make herself understood, she could explain it all to them. She could tell them not only what had happened, but why.
Annie-Vic had the distinct feeling that they didn’t know what had happened yet. If they did, Gary Albright wouldn’t be parking himself in her room every day like a cold that refused to go entirely away.
EIGHT
1
The first impression Gregor Demarkian had when he walked into the Snow Hill Diner and found Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker waiting for him was that the Bureau had begun advancing twelve-year-olds to the rank of agent. The next impression he got was that Evan Zwicker didn’t even really look young. He had one of those faces that used to be called “boyish” and that went to seed early and without remorse. At the moment, he looked like an evil and alcoholic college boy. In ten years time, he would look like a troll.
Molly Trask, on the other hand, was definitely young, although not as young as she looked. She had her hair pulled back in a bun, but it didn’t really help. It was blond and she was so fair that her eyebrows looked bleached.
Evan Zwicker rose when Gregor came into the diner, which was how Gregor knew for sure who he was. The diner was full of booths with plastic seats, all lined up against the walls. The best ones were against the wall to the street, because those had windows, and Evan and Molly had managed to get one of them. The place was packed with people, yet none of them looked like they belonged here.
“The locals are at the counter,” Even offered, when Gregor came over to sit down. “I don’t think that’s the usual thing, in fact I know it’s not, but with the television crews here they don’t have much choice. Our friends in the press always seem to have somebody staked out here to save a seat for the crew.”
“Oh, honestly,” Molly said. “He’s always bitching about the press, but I can’t see why. It isn’t as if they’re bothering us.”
“They bother everybody,” Evan said. “I’ve been around long enough to remember when we could run a case without having the whole thing filmed for ‘Live at Five.’ Or whatever. Not that there’s much here to investigate.”
“They’re here because of the trial,” Molly said, meaning the press. “You can’t blame them. Monkey trials are a big thing these days.”
“And does that make any sense?” Evan asked. “I mean, for God’s sake. What a thing to sue about. It’s totally nuts.”
A waitress came over, and Gregor asked her for a mineral water and a club sandwich. He hadn’t looked at the menu, but he’d eaten in dozens of diners like this across the United States, and club sandwiches were always a sure thing. They were a sure thing here, too, because the waitress didn’t even blink. She took the order down on the pad and walked away. Gregor watched her go. She was wearing a white polyester-knit dress and big, white, clunky rubber-soled shoes of the kind nurses used to wear when Gregor was much younger. Now nurses wore colored baggy cotton things. Gregor had no idea when that had started. He looked back to Molly and Evan.