“Yes, Mr. Keane—I see.” Kohler sometimes hissed.
As Philo worked, he saw Dr. Tewes join Kohler. Likely here was the only man standing who had no idea what’d become of Alastair Ransom this day.
Jane could not concentrate on what lay before her as either the man she pretended or the woman she was, as both per-sonae had taken this hard. Polly had been Jane’s or rather James’s patient, and Ransom’s lover, and now this. How angry Ransom had appeared the other night did not connect or make logical sense. Yet, it would be the perfect murder indeed if, in a fit of rage, Ransom had killed Polly and made it look like the work of the killer the press now called the Phantom. How simple to cover her murder. And Ransom, being Ransom, knew how to cover up any mistake that might be made or badly juggled. But, in fact, this hadn’t been her notion but rather Kohler had floated the idea past her.
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Was it possible? Did it go with what she knew of the man, despite all the dark tales of Alastair’s temper and questionable morals? Could his police life have spilled over into his private life, and had he used Dr. Tewes as both his excuse and his alibi?
She then decided it too preposterous and not in Ransom’s makeup as she stood here, staring at the ruination of Ransom’s life, his goals, his plans. It led to her own epiphany.
“Nathan,” she said to Kohler, “I can go no further with our charade.”
“The hell you say!”
“Suppose I were called to testify in a court of law over events? To swear on a Bible as Dr. Tewes? It’s preposterous, untenable.”
“Look here! We had a deal. This”—he indicated the fire—
“changes nothing.”
“It changes everything. You don’t need me to bring Ransom down. He is on his back now; you need but crush him, but I’ll be no party to the kill, and no longer part of your web of deceit.”
It’d been Nathan Kohler who’d led Polly directly to Dr.
Tewes’s for the care she sought, as he had led Fenger to Tewes. “Information gathering,” he’d called it.
“You cross me, James, and you’ll be exposed for what you are, Jane.” Kohler had investigated Dr. Tewes the year before and had learned Jane’s every secret.
“Perhaps for the better.”
“Really? You think so?” His half grin curled snakelike on itself.
“I’ve accomplished so little, nothing meritorious about my time spent here.”
“You can do well here.”
“I am not speaking of Chicago.”
“What then?”
“I shouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“Try me, Jane.”
“Accommodate the bloody world so as to fit comfortably CITY FOR RANSOM
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into it is what I’ve done, when in fact, I should make the world accommodate me. It’s what good people have been trying to tell me.” She thought of Gabby, Dr. Fenger, her father, and for some odd reason, Alastair.
“Whatever are you trying to say?” Kohler replied. “If you’re in control of your senses, then the world makes 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.”
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“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.”
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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.”