With a quick look back, he saw the man, Oriental, tall and sinewy, dressed like a doctor, wide-eyed with horror and rage, open-mouthed, gripping with one palsied hand the pencil that jutted from his cheek, afraid to pull it out. He saw Kwan in the doorway, about to escape. He stared, then gave a little cry, and yanked the pencil free, flinging it across the room. Blood spurted from the attacker’s cheeks, and Kwan fled.
Ananayel
They keep moving earlier than I anticipate. First Frank, and now Kwan.
I hadn’t realized that some overreaching bureaucrat within the sprawling Chinese government would decide to order Kwan’s execution. A close thing, that. Kwan saved himself, fortunately, or I would have had to begin all over again, abandoning this entire first group to work out their shortened destinies on their own.
I did arrive to help Kwan, though belatedly. When he let that room door close behind him and ran down the corridor on his tottering legs, his guardian angel was once more at his side. I permitted the assassin, back in the room, once again in the dark and going into shock, to fall over the chair I’d placed in his way, giving Kwan extra seconds to get to the double doors, and through, and find the stairwell.
Kwan’s weakness would have ruined him, but I gave him of my own strength, enough to get him down the stairwell to the ground floor and through a door that was locked until one second before he touched it and locked again one second after he passed through. Various pedestrians — three nurses and one doctor — were shunted slightly from their original routes so that Kwan could pass by unseen. A closet he opened now contained — though it had not previously contained — a tattered topcoat that would fit him reasonably well and cover most of his hospital-issue pajamas. On their sides on the floor lay a pair of shin-high black rubber boots, only a bit too large for Kwan’s feet. He tucked the pajama legs inside the boots and moved on.
A uniformed private security guard would have been at the side exit, except that he’d just been called away to a telephone call, only to find that his party had hung up. (More graceless and clumsy work on my part, but what was I to do with no time for preparation?)
Kwan emerged into a chilly and cloudless night. It was just after five in the morning. First Avenue was to his left, with very little traffic apart from the occasional cruising taxicab. FDR Drive was to his right, scattered with fast-moving cars, and the river lay beyond.
Kwan went to the right, found an on-ramp to the Drive, avoided it, followed a narrow street that ran between the Drive and the rear of various buildings in the hospital complex, found a group of three bundled-up people asleep on a warm-air grate against a high brick wall, and joined them. Lying down, immediately unconscious, the wounds in his neck and left forearm beginning to scab over, he became at once invisible, merely another of New York City’s many thousand street sleepers.
I left him there, and went briefly back to Susan, only to assure myself the demon hadn’t attacked her again — he had not, he was still off somewhere licking his wounds — and turned my attention to my other primary actors.
They’re doing it on their own now. I don’t have to do a thing. Particularly Maria Elena, and also Grigor. I started those tops spinning, but now it’s all happening without any extra push from me. I don’t even appear.
And they’re moving so fast. It’s as though they know, and are in a hurry to reach their end.
26
At ten-thirty the dryer buzzed, and Maria Elena carried the sheets upstairs. She looked out the bedroom window, and of course, the gray Plymouth was still there, across Wilton Road, in front of the house two doors to the right. Yesterday it had been one house farther away, and the day before it had been on this side, down two houses to the left. Always facing in this direction.
Did they think she was a fool? Or were they showing themselves deliberately, trying to intimidate her? That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? Having already given up her connection with the dissenters, to now be pressured by the government — the FBI, the state police, whoever that was out there — to do what she’d already despairingly done.
There were so few cars ever parked on the street along this curving suburban road at the edge of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, that a strange vehicle would of necessity draw attention. Did they think, because the lone observer in the car was a woman — a chain-smoking woman — that Maria Elena wouldn’t understand what was going on? The nondescript gray car, the vaguely progressive (but inoffensive) bumper stickers — I ♥ EARTH; SAVE THE WHALES — were hardly disguise enough, not in a neighborhood like this.
Making the beds — she and Jack slept in different rooms now — Maria Elena engaged in angry silent conversations with the woman in the car. But these fantasy speeches had lost their power to tranquilize. Her make-believe diatribes at the rich and powerful and greedy and cruel did nothing to solve actual problems, had never done anything but soothe her own brittle nervous melancholy. And now they didn’t even do that much.
The worst of it all was, probably she was the one now who should go to the authorities, the one with the specific grievance, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Although she was pretty sure by now that Andras had stolen her past.
Andras Herrmuil, the so-called record producer, the man who made all the promises, and who now, apparently, had disappeared. With her records, her posters, her photos, her clippings.
Not quite two months ago he’d phoned, this enthusiastic baritone voice on the telephone, saying, “Maria Elena? Is this the Maria Elena?”
Even here? she’d wondered, amazed, but even though the thought pleased her she automatically said, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”
“You are! I can hear your voice!” And he dropped into natural native Brazilian Portuguese: “When you were singing I was still at home, I was young, I was one of your most rabid fans, I went everywhere you appeared.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, unconsciously answering him in Portuguese, “you’re mistaking me for—”
“But I’m not. Do you know how many times you played Belem?”
A small city in the far north of Brazil. Maria Elena said, “What? No, I—”
“Three!” he announced triumphantly. “And I went to every one of them, even though I lived then in São Paulo. Maria Elena, do you remember the Live in São Paulo album? I’m on it! Screaming my head off!”
“Please, no, you’ve—”
“Forgive me,” said that insistent voice, “I get so carried away. My name is Andras Herrmuil, I’m an ‘A and R’ man now with Hemispheric Records, and this is, believe it or not, a professional business telephone call.”
“A and R” had been said in English; it caught at Maria Elena’s attention. She said, “A what? A and R? I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means.”
Again in English, he said, “Artists and Repertory.” Then, back to Portuguese, he said, “It means, I help select which records we put out. I don’t know if you know Hemispheric—”
“No, I don’t.”
“We release in the United States,” he said, “music from other parts of the Americas. Canadian, Mexican, Central and South American. To have Maria Elena on our list would be such a—”