This of course he could not do, because in the deepest places of his heart, and, he realized, in a sudden crystalline clarity of thought that was probably the direct result of the Narcan, he knew that he had been well and truly played. Set up and baited and waltzed straight to this room by a calculating mind three steps ahead of him.
He knew that if he went back to Carovita to ask that old dragon some hard questions, he would find out that she had been paid to tell Dalton exactly what this strange old man had wanted him to know. And of course he came running, and got himself a faceful of hallucinogen for his trouble. Whatever the powder in that pouch was, and he assumed from its sudden and overwhelming effects that it was a psychoactive drug of some unknown kind, it had a kick like a Valparaiso jackass.
Stallworth’s words came floating back to him:
“I tell you, kid, I’d love to know what it was. I mean, the company could use something like that.”
Dalton looked down at his hands and saw, in his Narcan-induced acuity, that his left hand carried no bite mark at all.
He flexed it and saw the tendons rising like cables out of his clear skin. There was no blackened wound where he had ripped at the flesh with his scissors. No tiny red pinpricks where the green spider had supposedly bitten him.
He lifted the sleeve of his shirt enough to bare a length of his left forearm. It too was unmarked. No crisscross network of gouges and scratches. He patted his shirt pocket and pulled out the elastic-wrapped packet of Toscanos.
He shook it once.
Twice. Then, gathering his nerve, he ripped the elastics off and popped the lid. Six cigarillos lay in the box. He tipped the packet out over the floor, letting the cigarillos tumble out. The box was empty. There was no emerald green spider.
He had never been bitten.
None of that had ever happened. It had all been a hallucination — and a very deep and long-lasting hallucination, with much of its power remaining in effect even by the following morning. But the essence of the thing was plain: he had been drugged, set up in Naumann’s room and drugged.
But how?
The cigarillos? Had the man left them on the table, knowing that Dalton would pick them up and smoke them?
That was leaving a lot up to chance, wasn’t it?
Moonflowers.
Now he remembered where he had heard about moonflowers. Not from Jack Stallworth. Brancati had mentioned moonflowers when he was talking about Naumann’s hotel room in Cortona. The cops had found a broken vase full of morning glories in Naumann’s room. Brancati had told him that morning glories were nocturnal. That meant that they opened up their petals in the night. Last night there were moonflowers in Dalton’s room at the hotel.
Right on the dresser. Near the minibar.
And his… attack… hadn’t it come on shortly after the flowers opened? Opened up to release… what?
What had he been exposed to?
The persistence of the illusion seemed to imply… what?
Long-term residual effects?
Flashbacks?
Irreversible organic damage?
And even the grim possibility of ever-increasing impairment — leading to what? Insanity. Madness? Confined for life to some high-security institution. The question chilled him to his core.
As if to underscore his panic, the room began to grow pale again. He concentrated on his breathing and fought the rising panic. Gradually his vision stabilized; the colors of normal life came seeping back into the room while he considered the shattered terra-cotta cylinder and the small fan of pinkish powder lying on the parquet flooring.
If the idea had been to drug him for some unknown purpose, a vase full of doctored morning glories seemed like a damned uncertain way to accomplish that. But it had sure as hell worked, hadn’t it?
Is that how Naumann got taken?
Taken by whom, Micah?
Who were they?
And why had they come after Dalton next?
If the idea had been to incapacitate him, or to confront him later in his room, or even to kill him, why had no one followed through? Why go to all the trouble to plant a vase full of doctored flowers in his room and then just walk away?
Unless they had assumed that drugging him was all they had to do, that the drug itself would have killed him, or driven him to kill himself. His reaction to being bitten by the imaginary spider was to take an imaginary blade to his left arm.
But it need not have been imaginary at all. In that state, out of control, hallucinating, a desperate life-threatening act was not only possible but very damn likely.
If he had taken a real blade to his arm, he would have bled to death in the bathroom. If the drug had persuaded him that he could fly, he would have stepped right off the balcony.
These things happened all the time; they were in the news every day. The verdict would have been suicide, or death by a suicidal misadventure, brought on by too much drink and by some unidentified narcotic. Just like Porter Naumann.
Brancati had already decided that Naumann’s death, although possibly drug-related, was just one of those tragic outcomes that happen so often in the world of recreational drug use. In a way, the hallucination of Naumann’s ghost may have saved Dalton’s life, because he spent the rest of the evening chatting with a delusion instead of taking a flier off the balcony. Even if there had been no intent to kill him with this drug, there certainly was a criminal lack of concern with the outcome, which meant that the idea may have been simply to take him out of the picture.
He needed to get all of this stuff to a company lab as soon as possible. Dalton looked around the room for something to put the powder and the shards into and saw a wicker basket by the old woodstove. He got to his feet and staggered over to the oven. The basket was filled with torn scraps of paper, a crumpled grocery sack, a section of knotted raffia cord with a burned end, and the brittle remains of some kind of flat bread.
He rooted around in the basket and found a section of newspaper. He was kneeling on the floor carefully sweeping up the remains of the white powder with a gloved hand when he heard Miss Vasari’s footsteps in the hall, and the sound of ice clinking in silver. To his drug-heightened perceptions, the sounds were amazingly distinct, each silvery bong of the ice as pure and crystalline as a temple bell. He closed his eyes and saw the notes, tiny ruby-colored fireflies floating through a deep-blue cloud. It was beautiful, but scary. Please God, don’t let this be permanent.
“Signor Dalton, I am sorry. I have only Chivas. I hope—”
He opened his eyes as she came into the room, carrying a silver tray with a decanter, a silver ice bucket, and two scotch glasses, and saw him kneeling on the floor.
“What are you doing?”
“Still hallucinating, I think. How are you?”
She set the tray down on the kitchen counter and came over to kneel down beside him. She moved in a cloud of scent and her body was painfully present when she got this close.
As much as Dalton wanted to attribute this alarming return of his sex drive to sheer youthful resilience, he had the feeling that, despite the Narcan injection, whatever drug had been used on him was still sizzling away in his cortex.
Alessandra looked down at the powder. “You should not touch that. Not even with a glove on. And not without a mask. It is poison. You must see a doctor.”
“I know,” he said, still sweeping up the powder. “I can feel it. It’s still in my head. But I need to get this stuff into a container. We can’t let it blow around the room. Whatever it is.”
Sighing, keeping her mouth closed tight, Alessandra helped him to sweep up as much of the powder as they could, keeping it off their skin. The powder went into a folded scrap of paper that Alessandra had retrieved from the wastebasket by the grill. The shards of pottery she put in a paper bag with the name Mercato Via Gesa on the side. Afterward she helped him sit down and knelt down in front of him, biting her lower lip as she studied his face.