“He does have strep throat,” the second-shift doctor told Gregor at one point, trying his best to be polite when he was far too busy to be discussing test results with the patient’s mother’s designated “representative.” “It’s a very bad strep throat, too, and he’s probably had it for weeks or even months. His throat’s so sore, I’m surprised he was able to talk.”
Strep throat was not the kind of tiling Gregor was looking for. As far as he knew, it wasn’t possible for one person to give another strep throat in an attempt to weaken or kill him. The longer he thought about the amount of caffeine in Mark’s system, however, the more sure he was that Mark hadn’t ingested it all by himself, not even accidentally. It wasn’t impossible that a student of Mark’s age and ambitionwould take caffeine tablets in an attempt to stay awake long enough to get extra work done or to study more thoroughly for a test. What seemed impossible to Gregor was that a student of Mark’s intelligence wouldn’t know that he risked injury or death by taking what appeared to have been a handful of the things. Gregor was sure that Mark had not been intent on committing suicide. There was nothing suicidal about the kid who had turned up to greet him at the Windsor Inn yesterday, no matter how much of a mess he was otherwise. There was nothing stupid about that kid either. The problem was that Gregor couldn’t understand how somebody could have given Mark those tablets without Mark knowing he was taking them.
In the end he’d been too tired to think anymore. He’d called the police and left a message, very urgent, on Brian Sheehy’s voice mail. Then he’d loosened his tie and sat down on the bed for what he’d thought would be a rest just long enough to get his shoes off. As the phone rang in his ear, it became obvious to him that he had never taken those shoes off. They were still on his feet, and they hurt. He rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling momentarily. The ceiling had molding on it, the way a lot of eighteenth-century ceilings did. It had cherubs and small bunches of grapes with leaves that looked broad enough to belong to marijuana plants. He reached for the phone and wondered, absently, why people had thought it so important to have bumpy representations of fruit on their ceilings at all.
He picked up and said, “Yes?”
Brian Sheehy said, “I had four phone calls this morning, all about the same thing. I answered yours. You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. He sat up. His back ached. His neck ached, too. He’d been joking about getting old for so long, but now that the state seemed to be visited on him, he did not find it funny. “Meet me somewhere for breakfast. There’s got to be somewhere for breakfast in this town that won’t serve alfalfa sprouts with the toast.”
“Don’t bet on it. I’m in the middle of a workday, youknow. Granted, there’s not a lot of work to the day here at the moment, but I’m informed on the best possible evidence that there’s about to be. It seems a certain Mr. Jimmy Card has been spotted checking into the Windsor Inn. It’s going to be a circus.”
“I agree, but it isn’t going to be one immediately, and I want to lay it all out the best I can,” Gregor said. “Meet me somewhere for breakfast. Pick a place and I’ll find it.”
“The Aubergine Harpsichord on Main Street.”
“The what?”
“The Aubergine Harpsichord. Don’t ask. You wanted breakfast. They do serve alfalfa sprouts with the toast, and some specialty herb teas that would make a dog puke, but they also make a decent omelet, so have that. I’ve got a couple of things to clear up. Meet me in twenty minutes. Go down to your lobby, turn right when you get out the door, it’s just at the end of the block. You’ll know it because it has one of those big wooden signs hanging out over the sidewalk with an eggplant on it. That’s what an aubergine is; it’s an eggplant.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
They hung up, and Gregor decided he had just enough time for a quick shower. He stripped, threw himself under the water, and stepped out again exactly seven minutes later, timing the operation by his travel alarm clock. He gave a fleeting thought to the fact that Bennis had given him this alarm clock, and then, in a hope that gave evidence of more desperation than he knew he felt, called down to the desk to see if he had any messages. He’d picked up his messages when he’d come in the night before, but he told himself that he’d been asleep for a few hours. The idea that Bennis would call him after three o’clock in the morning unless somebody had died was absurd, but he tried it anyway. There were no messages. Tibor had learned long ago not to call him in the early hours of the morning with news about the people on his Internet newsgroups.