“Come on, don’t be afraid, I’m telling you!”
On the ramparts of Fatehpur Sikri, David held out his hand and flashed that killer smile of his. “You won’t fall, I promise. Come on up!”
Juliette slipped her hand into his and felt his fingers closing over hers: “Okay, nothing can happen now.” She felt swept up and David’s arms held her fast and high. His deep, good-hearted laugh was like a child’s as he carried her. She didn’t dare open her eyes. That would mean losing her balance and smashing her skull on the flagstones in the courtyard. How stupid I am! she thought, He’s here holding on to me. I can’t fall. This man, this man of her life, seemed to be made especially for her protection, she the free-speaking young university student. She opened her eyes. “I love you, David.”
Now, that same hand felt soft, weak, damp, and meaningless. Who’ll protect me from vertigo now that he’s gone?
After they unplugged his life support, David didn’t die right away as she had expected. There was a moment of suspension, unbearable, as she and Béatrice hugged each other, two wounded souls, already emptied of tears and pain. Then he was gone, just like that, with no further ceremony. The machines confirmed it.
Juliette wanted to be alone now. She didn’t throw herself on David’s body as she’d done so many times these past few days, but she surprised Béatrice and the personnel by running out into the corridor.
With no one left to protect, the security detail was gone. She rushed into the little room at the end where they’d taken their meals and closed the door behind her. She went over to the window and watched the wind blowing through the trees on Mount Royal, the out-of-breath joggers and a cyclist pumping his peddles.
“You won’t fall, I promise. Come on up!”
He was the one they’d pushed into the void, and she felt dragged along with him — a long fall into the night that might never end. David, David, David. She ought to be remembering the important things, but what came back to her were the little ones: His way of pinching the crease in his pants when he crossed his legs. His inability to make coffee that wasn’t a disgusting mess — “But really it’s so easy!” — The way he slept tangled up in the covers. The scruffy hair he vainly struggled with in front of the bathroom mirror…. Meaningless little memories like that came flooding back.
There was the wind again and a mother, her baby in a carriage, waiting to cross the street. Juliette’s hand went to her belly. “His” child. Suddenly, she just wanted to disappear along with him. Sure, just jump out of the window then and there. Get done with it once and for all. Be with him. What was it the Mahabharata said?
“… the body of the king is laid out with the living body of his spouse. The fire is lit and Madri, without lament, quits her life in the heart of the flames.”
She heard the door open behind her as Dennis Patterson stepped gently into the room holding his cellphone. She didn’t want to see a soul.
“The prime minister wants to speak to you.”
She looked up at Patterson as he held out the phone to her, more sensitive to manners than sadness, she felt.
“Later …”
He didn’t move, but just stood there holding it.
Oh, all right, let’s get it over with, she thought. She took the phone from him.
“Mr. Prime Minister …”
The sympathy, pain, and sadness resonated in his voice as it did on TV, sincere. Sincerity was his job, though, wasn’t it? Well, for thirty seconds at a time, anyway.
Juliette handed the phone back to Patterson, still standing at attention. He wanted to discuss practical details, how things were going to be done. She waved him off: “Not right now.”
“Sorry, Juliette.”
She turned toward him and fell into his arms as she had the first time, and began crying once more, uncontrollably, into his shoulder. Then she raised her head, her voice quavering. “Has he been identified?”
For a moment, Patterson didn’t seem to know what she meant. Then he said, “False alarm. It was a burglar.”
Everywhere in the hospital, she’d seen the signs warning patients and visitors to keep their belongings close at hand.
“Creep probably just chose the wrong hospital at the wrong time.”
Call Juliette, but to tell her what exactly? Max hadn’t a clue. He wanted to talk to her, hear her voice, period. It could wait. Jayesh had left town, knowing that for the time being, Max needed to be alone. From his window, he had a view of the pool, where tourists frolicked without a care in the world. The past caught up with him again. So David’s death was one more in the string of deaths that marked out his life. This one was the most unbearable of them all, but who could he turn to for comfort? Pascale would have talked about the predetermined transition from one life to the next, a constant and harmonious cycle of rebirths. The easy pictures of fatalistic Hinduism, like every other religion, he believed, especially for the uneducated and unlettered, deprived of the acquired wisdom of the ages. Small comfort for such an abysmal tragedy. Religion invented to defeat death actually created it, as now in India.
Max felt somehow responsible for what had happened to David: a vague sort of guilt that was hard to pin down, and it was eating him up. Could things have turned out differently?
Alone, Juliette stood before the desk belonging to Patterson’s secretary, but the young woman was not there. Patterson himself was in a meeting next door. Should she wait for the secretary to announce her or just walk in? Juliette had been relieved to let Patterson deal with the “arrangements,” as he called them. He kept her informed more than she wanted him to. Who cared what happened now? Nothing mattered anymore. Still, she had to sign all these papers. That was why she’d stepped into this maze. But now the secretary had vanished … for good? Wasn’t that her raincoat there in the wardrobe with the others? Juliette thought back to the hospital. Here, as well, it would be easy for someone to slip into any of the offices and make off with the coats. That man had been caught in the act. How could she forget? David’s death had wiped out everything else. She went on looking at the wardrobe. What had he been doing in a hospital? He’d gone to the trouble of disguising himself as a cook … good cover. But what if Patterson and the cops had it wrong and he really was there to kill David?
Voices were raised in Patterson’s office. Juliette could hear the consultant, grave and soothing, then suddenly Béatrice, her voice high-pitched and exasperated, a voice Juliette had learned to recognize among thousands when she called for news of David. There was a third voice, too, a woman’s, that she couldn’t identify.
She moved closer to the door.
“At a moment like this,” Patterson cut in, “the least you could do would be put aside your differences.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Béatrice!”
“I refuse, that’s all. I, too, have a reputation to think about.”
“No one knows anything about it,” replied the unknown woman.
“Exactly.
