A Fatal Debt (15 page)

I wandered back up to Sixty-third and went through a gap in the boundary wall and down the slope toward the joggers running on the perimeter road. I remember stopping under one of the streetlamps that poked into the branches of a tree and looking at the Art Nouveau ironwork around the lantern, with vaselike shapes cut into each corner. I heard a shuffling sound from behind me, but when I turned
there was no one there. It must have been the noise of a jogger approaching down the road, his footfalls refracted off the bushes around me. As I walked farther into the park, those sounds receded and it got darker. The path beneath my feet became gritty as I passed between two softball infields surfaced in sand.

It was quiet there, although the lights of the towers on Central Park South rose over the trees and made a vast stone mound to my right shine in the dark. There weren’t many people in the park, and I wasn’t noticing much. My mind was caught up in what Anna had told me about Harry. I’d learned something about my patient—my former patient—that he hadn’t told me, something that lent a different meaning to all that had happened. It made me feel even sorrier for Nora, who’d been through this torment in ignorance.

I was worried about Anna, too. I could still feel the sensation of her lips on mine, and I touched them with one finger, as if to recapture that moment. Yet our own relationship, if we now had one, had started in the most compromising way. I’d kept her existence secret from my lawyer, and I’d lied to her about my motives for seeking her out. Now she’d told me something Joe would need to know and had sealed my lips with not just a kiss but a promise. She’d given me a choice—whether to betray her or to remain silent.

Cars were passing along a road near the east side of the park, and I walked through a tunnel under it. On the other side, the Wollman Rink had been replaced by an amusement park for children for the summer. It was closed for the evening but a few lights winked in green and red on one miniature aircraft ride and the plastic faces of a pig and a donkey grinned cheerfully from another. I passed to the north and came across a New York scene—a group of dog walkers with their city pooches sniffing one another while their owners stood and talked, in view of the Plaza Hotel. It made me smile, I remember, seeing that gaggle by the rink, then I passed by and walked down into a nook where the reflected light from the buildings around the park was shadowed by trees.

I didn’t hear anything until a split second before he struck me. One moment I was strolling peacefully along the path in a hollow by a
small lake, and the next moment I felt his shoulder slam into my midriff, winding me and knocking me off my feet at the same time. He’d charged at me like a man possessed, running down the slope from above. As he hit me, he wrapped his arms around mine and I could do nothing to break my fall. The side of my head struck the ground at the same time as my shoulders.

My temple smacked on one of the pebbles strewn on the ground and my cheek ground in the dirt as we rolled down the hill toward the lake, out of sight of anyone looking down from the rink or the path. A volcanic eruption of pain surged through my brain, and I was half-blinded by dirt scuffed up into my eyes—all I could see through it were jagged lights. As we slithered to a halt, blood spurted down my forehead.

He’d lost his grip on me as we’d tumbled and I tried to shuffle away and run, but I didn’t get far in my dazed and blinded state. I’d managed only a few paces before I stumbled on a stone and he caught me, throwing himself forward and hooking one hand around my ankles. I pitched headfirst into the darkness and he landed on top of me, knocking the breath out of me again. He rolled my body over to face him.

I was on my back, with my legs above me on the slope and my head half resting on a boulder by the edge of the lake. His left knee pressed down on my chest and he pinned me by the neck with one hand as he raised the other arm above my head. I couldn’t hear anything, and his face was a black shape, silhouetted against the white glow coming off the rink. Then he thrust his arm down and struck me on the side of my forehead with brutal force. Later, I would realize that he must have picked up the stone on which I’d tripped and used it as a weapon.

In the moment, all I knew was excruciating pain and fear that a crazy person was ending my life, alone in this park, far from home.

Then darkness.

Then nothing.

When I regained consciousness a minute or two later, another man was bending over me, holding a wad of tissues to the wound on my head.

“Can you hear me? Are you okay?” he asked.

He had short gray hair and was wearing an orange jacket with security written on it. His face looked reassuringly worn and experienced. I tried to nod, but it hurt the muscles in my neck.

“I’m all right,” I mumbled.

“I’ve called an ambulance. You’re lucky I heard you. That guy wasn’t messing around.”

My head was throbbing with pain, but the tissue had stanched the bleeding. I reached up and checked my face with my hand, feeling for wounds. My features seemed to be intact, but I felt bruising and swelling around my right eye, where I’d been struck. I tried to remember what had happened, checking myself for concussion. All wasn’t clear, but my brain was functioning well enough for me to know that the damage wasn’t severe.

After a while, I heard the insistent squawk of the ambulance and its red lights reflected on the man’s face as he examined me. They reminded me of the glow on Anna’s face only half an hour before, and the memory made me wince. Then the paramedics came and, after checking my pupils for signs of brain injury, carried me up the slope and into the ambulance. I felt it hurtle north through the park and tried to sit up to check with the paramedic next to me where we were going, but I found I couldn’t move—they’d strapped me to the gurney to keep me from falling off. I’d seen a lot of schizophrenics brought into the psych ER like that and been happy they were restrained, but I didn’t like it myself.

“Don’t move,” the paramedic said sharply, inflating the pad he’d placed on my arm to check my blood pressure.

The ambulance swung to the right—eastward—and exited the park on the Upper East Side. I knew where we were going then. It was somehow inevitable, and there was nothing to do but lie back and accept the ride, ironic as it was. The paramedic leaned across me casually and took my wallet from the pocket of my jacket, which was
strewn across my feet. He seemed to want to check for himself who I was.

“Wow. Hello, Doc,” he said, looking at my Episcopal ID card. “Relax, we’ll take care of you.”

“Who attacked me?” I said.

“Security guy didn’t know. Said he’d shouted at him, but he’d run away. You get all kinds in the park. You were lucky.”

I saw the tall shadow of Episcopal from the window, and then we drove into the ambulance entrance and they wheeled me into the medical ER. We were greeted by a resident and directed to one of the cubicles. They left me there alone and I rested for a few minutes, wondering what could be keeping them. Eventually, the curtain parted and a female doctor walked in, wearing green scrubs and a blue surgical cap, and picked up my notes.

It was my ex-girlfriend.

“Oh God,” I said, craning my head up to see her.

“Great to see you, too,” Rebecca replied briskly. “I’m on call and I got paged. For some reason, they thought I’d be worried.”

“Why would they think that?”

She paused as if collecting herself and exhaled through her nose, gazing down at me on the gurney. I could see her eyes soften into the old Rebecca. Then she pulled off her cap and I saw that she’d had her auburn hair cropped, making her eyes look larger and more vulnerable. She’d lost weight, too: misery at not having me around, I flattered myself.

“I leave you on your own for five minutes and this happens. Can’t you take care of yourself?” She sounded affectionately exasperated.

“I like your hair,” I said from my horizontal position.

“Thanks,” she said, containing a smile and glancing down at the foot of the gurney. “Can you move your toes?”

“My spine’s fine. Everything’s working.”

“Then sit up and I’ll take care of that cut. You lost consciousness, they said. Do you remember anything?”

“Quite a lot. I don’t think I’m badly concussed.”

“You’d better have a CT all the same.”

She let down the side of the gurney and I sat up with my legs over the side to let her remove the makeshift dressing and clean the wound on my forehead. Then she held the two sides of the cut in place and sealed it with Steri-Strips. I could feel her fingers working on me expertly and dispassionately, trying to make the scar as small as possible, and I thanked God for her medical training and professionalism. No matter what she felt about me, I was sure she’d do the job well.

“There,” she said, standing back to take a look at her handiwork and stripping off her surgical gloves. “You’re not pretty at the moment, but you’ll be as good as new in a couple of weeks. Who did this to you?”

“I thought you’d sent him.”

“Funny guy. You always told me not to go in Central Park at night, that it was full of your patients. What were you doing there? Night out?”

My head was starting to throb heavily and I didn’t have any idea of how to answer that.
A woman asked me to come for a walk in the park and then she kissed me—just before I got attacked
. I didn’t think so. I met her skeptical gaze—the look of an old lover with a lingering interest.

“I felt like a walk.”

Rebecca looked unconvinced but unwilling to push it much further in case she found out something hurtful. Instead, she looked down and scribbled on my chart, as if to bring our session to a close. As she did, I felt anxious. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t tell her what I’d been doing in the park. I didn’t know why my attacker had picked on me. He’d left my wallet in my pocket, so he was either a bad thief or not a thief at all. Maybe he’d been a paranoid schizophrenic, but it had felt as if he’d known what he was doing.

“Listen, Ben. Are you okay? I heard about that Wall Street guy. I meant to call you, but …” Her voice trailed off and she shrugged regretfully.

“It’ll be sorted out. Don’t worry.” It felt better to be handing out that advice rather than receiving it, although no more convincing.

“I hope so,” she said, hanging the chart back on the gurney. “They
will take you for the scan and then I’m admitting you for the night. We ought to watch you for concussion. You’ve been acting strangely.”

The sheets were welcomingly clean and crisp. Harry hadn’t thought much of them, but they worked for me. After the scan, which revealed nothing of concern going on inside my brain, they wheeled me up to a private room on the eighth floor that no one was using that night, rejecting my offer to walk. With Vicodin inside me and the familiar hum of the equipment by the bed, I soon fell asleep.

I didn’t take to the breakfast—a floppy pancake with fake maple syrup and apple juice in a sealed plastic container, washed down with tasteless coffee. The stuff had usually been cleared long before I got to see the patients, and it made me understand why some of them were so grumpy about the place by the time I arrived. The sun shone through the corner window, and I lay on my bed with
The New York Times
, waiting for the bureaucracy to grind its way toward signing me out again. My head hurt and I hadn’t enjoyed the first sight of my battered face in the bathroom mirror, but I’d survived.

There was a knock at nine thirty a.m. and I put down the paper, half expecting Rebecca to reappear, but Jim Whitehead stuck his head around the door instead. He’d given no warning of his arrival and it didn’t fill me with enthusiasm, but I didn’t have much choice. I couldn’t refuse my department head the right to check on me.

When he wasn’t at York East, Jim hung his shingle off Park at Sixty-fifth. I suspected it was his way of making a professional statement, of moving away from Episcopal, which prided itself on being open-minded about treatment—drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy, whatever worked—for the high church of Sigmund Freud. The clue was his couch, a black-leather-and-chrome affair I’d noticed when I’d dropped by his office in an apartment building stuffed with physicians. It made sense: Manhattan was the only place on earth with enough rich neurotics willing and able to spend five hours a week talking to the human equivalent of a brick wall.

Now that he’d got me lying on my back, I wondered if he’d take
the opportunity for a spot of analysis, but he stood there with his clipboard for a minute, regarding me with an expression that suggested doubts about my mental stability. Then he took a seat by the bed and rested the board facedown on his lap.

“You had a lucky escape,” he said.

I rapped the untouched side of my skull with the knuckles of my left hand. “I’m okay. Last time I go walking in Central Park.”

“That sounds wise. You’re not having an easy time. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.” He paused briefly before coming to the point. “I came to say that I’ve met with Mrs. Duncan about the Shapiro case. She’s considered all the points on which you might be vulnerable.”