Beyond Eden (8 page)

Taylor

 

He heard her screams and reacted immediately because he was a cop. He tried to get up, tried his damnedest to go to her and help her, but he couldn't. He staggered to his feet, then fell back against the examining table, clutching his broken left arm. He felt nauseous and dizzy from the concussion, and the pain in his arm was becoming more than he could handle.

He was in the emergency-room cubicle next to hers and he'd seen a policeman carry her in a few minutes before, a young girl wrapped in a blanket, her hair disheveled, her face terribly bruised, her eyes wild and vague. She was deeply in shock. He recognized it for what it was. She'd been raped, he'd heard them saying.

Okay, so she'd been raped. Why was she screaming now? What were they doing to her? He gleaned quickly enough that she was American and didn't speak French or understand it. Taylor spoke French fluently. He was a Francophile; he had flown to France at least twice a year since he'd turned eighteen. This time he'd spent two weeks riding his motorcycle through the Loire Valley, then back to
Paris for three days. And now this. What the hell were they doing to her?

She screamed again and again, deep tearing cries that were liquid with pain and fear and hopelessness, and he could hear the doctors clearly now because they had to talk over her. They were pissed that she couldn't understand them, pissed that she was giving them trouble, pissed that she was fighting them and the girl was so strong to boot and they couldn't hold her down. They were impatient and hassled and they wanted her to shut up so they could get it over with. He should go in there and help her, he thought again, at least translate for her, but he knew that if he moved he would fall on his face. He listened now, for they were speaking even more loudly over her cries.

“. . . raped by her brother-in-law, the cop said. Look at her face—the man's an animal.”

“Help me get this blanket off her. No, stop fighting. Damnation, she can't understand a word. Hold her, Giselle! Jacques, would you look at the mess here. She was a virgin, just look at all that blood. The guy reamed her good. Dammit, hold her still!”

“Get her legs wider, I've got to get my fingers in there. That's it, press her legs back to her chest. Stop it, no, hold her! Damn, she can't understand me! Ow! Jesus!”

She'd struck the doctor. Hard, from the sound of it. Taylor could hear him lurching around, heard an instrument tray fall to the linoleum floor. He smiled. Good for her. He saw another doctor run into the cubicle. The girl had been raped and they were stripping her and prodding her about like she was a slab of meat. She was quite probably terrified, hysterical, and in pain. There'd been a
three-car pileup, he'd heard, which was why he was lying here unattended. At least they were seeing to her.

But couldn't they go a bit easier with her?

He could hear her crying, gasping for breath. He heard the nurse, Giselle, tell the doctors to stop being pigs, she was just a young girl and afraid of them because they were men and she'd just been raped, for God's sake. And one of the doctors said, “Not all that little, Giselle. Hold her down, will you?”

“Yeah,” another one of the doctors said, “not little at all, and her body doesn't look all that young either.”

The third doctor didn't say anything, he was breathing too hard to catch his breath.

Taylor wished he could hit the bastards. But he just lay there listening to the doctors talk about her, listening to them curse because she wasn't cooperating with them. He listened to the girl's cries, his own pain washing over him. He closed his eyes, but it didn't really help, and he knew he wouldn't forget her screams for a very long time.

“. . . Two fingers, dammit, you've got to go deeper and clean her out good. The cops want all the guy's sperm and you need to feel for torn tissue. She's probably torn inside.”

She was crying helplessly now. He saw the third man finally emerge from the cubicle, wipe his hands on his pants, and come into Taylor's small enclosure. He nodded to him, then asked him a question in French, speaking very, very slowly. Like Americans did, to make themselves understood to stupid foreigners. Taylor answered him quickly in French, fluently and with no accent, saying without preamble, “The girl who was raped, how is she? Will she be all right?”

The doctor muttered something about Americans minding their own business, to which Taylor
looked hard at him and repeated his question. The doctor shrugged as he bent over Taylor's arm. “She's eighteen, an American, and her brother-in-law, a damned Italian prince of all things, split her up really good. He bashed up her face, tore her a bit internally, and she's bleeding like there's no tomorrow. But she'll be all right, at least her body will heal in time. I heard the girl's sister shot him and he's upstairs in surgery. Jesus, what a mess.” Then he shrugged, a typical French reaction, as if to say: What do you expect from foreigners except endless stupidities?

Then the doctor was talking about his broken arm, Taylor realized, clucking, turning it and making him grit his teeth, punishment, Taylor assumed, for being pushy. Taylor said in a stony voice that did little to mask his pain, “I'm a cop with the NYPD. How long will it take to heal? I've got to get home and back to work.”

The doctor raised his head and smiled, and shot off in his fastest French, “Give it six weeks and stay off your motorcycle. As for your head, you're lucky you were wearing a helmet. Damned machines will kill you.”

“Not a scrap of luck to it,” Taylor said easily. “I'm not stupid.”

The doctor did a sudden about-face. “Say, you're French, aren't you? You just moved to the United States?”

“Nary a bit,” Taylor said with a big smile. “Born and bred in Pennsylvania.” He paused and added, “I'm just good at languages and, truth be told, French is pretty easy.”

He wished he hadn't said anything, because in the next instant he sucked in his breath.

“Sorry. I'm sending you to be X-rayed now. No drugs yet, not with that concussion. Wait here a
minute and I'll send someone for you. Oh, yeah, I could tell you weren't really French.”

Taylor sighed, closed his eyes, and heard the girl sobbing low now. Her throat must hurt badly, for the cries were hoarse and raw. He waited another five minutes. He was still there when she was wheeled out on a gurney. He saw her briefly again—hair in thick tangles around her face, and God, her face, all bruised, one eye puffed shut, her upper lip swelled and bleeding, a lot worse now than when she'd been brought in. She was unconscious, probably drugged. She looked very young. She looked helpless, utterly vulnerable. At least her sister had shot the bastard.

He didn't understand what would make a man do such a thing, but the good Lord knew he'd seen enough of it his past two years on the force, at his home in the Twelfth Precinct.

A bloody Italian prince. Nothing figured anymore. Taylor sighed again, wishing someone would come and just get all the pain over with.

He was discharged two days later, his arm in a cast. He still suffered nagging headaches. He'd paid out eight hundred dollars in cash for all the hospital services. He had just enough to go home to New York. As for his motorcycle, he'd insured the Harley since he'd rented it here in Paris, so he was only out a hundred bucks for the deductible.

He was tired and felt sorry for himself, even though he knew, objectively, that he was lucky to be alive. The guy had gunned his white Peugeot from a narrow side street and smacked him hard, sending him flying, not onto the pavement, thank God, but into a stand of thick bushes. Those bushes had saved his life. The guy had driven away, leaving him there to curse and hold his arm and wait for
the cops to come. And they had. They'd brought him to St. Catherine's Hospital and he'd lain there listening to that poor girl screaming and screaming. He was a cop; he should have just endured it with a shrug. But he couldn't, somehow.

In another day, Taylor was at Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for his Pan Am flight to be called when he saw one of the Parisian dailies screaming headlines about a Prince Alessandro di Contini having survived the two bullets shot into him by his wife. Taylor's flight was called. He left the small kiosk, aware of the beginnings of yet another headache. He read a bit more, then left the newspaper on the counter. He accepted two aspirin from a flight attendant, leaned back, and closed his eyes, saying his usual prayer that the plane would make it into the air.

He thought of Diane, his fiancée of four months, wondering yet again if it was smart for them to get married. They'd lived together in Diane's spacious East Side apartment for the past six months. She was rich and he wasn't. He was a cop and she was trying to talk him off the force, but he was young and arrogant and confident and he didn't buy it. She'd come around. It was her responsibility. They were good in bed together. His trip to France was his bachelor's last fling the way he saw it. Diane thought he was nuts because he wanted to vacation by himself, riding a motorcycle all over a foreign country, but she'd only bitched a little bit, content to warn him a good three times not to catch anything with French girls. Everyone knew how promiscuous they were. Taylor didn't, but he didn't bother to correct her. He'd tried to explain that it was the country itself that drew him, that he really couldn't explain it, but when he'd hitchhiked there
when he was eighteen, he knew, simply knew that at one time or another he'd lived here, been part of the land, part of the culture. A previous life? He didn't know, but he did know that he felt wonderful when he was riding a motorcycle beside the Loire River, smelling the ripening grapes in Bordeaux, gazing in awe at the ancient Roman ruins scattered throughout Provence.

He'd be home soon, a couple days early. He wondered when he'd be able to go to France again. There was already the longing for it growing in his gut. He would be twenty-five in two weeks and married in three.

He thought again of the young girl in the emergency room. He knew he wouldn't forget the rape, nor would he forget her battered face and her screams. Nor would he forget her name, the name beneath the prince's in that newspaper at the kiosk at the airport—Lindsay Foxe. Not that it mattered, he thought. Not that it mattered.

 

 

Lindsay

 

It was very hot and it was only the beginning of May. Lindsay sat on a stone bench under an oak tree on the Columbia campus. She was wearing loose-legged khaki walking shorts and a short-sleeved white blouse. Reeboks and thick white socks were on her feet. She wore a tennis bracelet on her right wrist, a gift to herself. She admired Martina Hingis enormously. Her legs were already tanned from playing tennis every day for the past two months. She was very good but nowhere near great. Her forehand was a killer, her backhand two-handed but still unpredictable. As for her serve,
she got an ace at least one in twenty times. She wasn't playing tennis until tomorrow morning with Gayle Werth, her best friend from the Stamford Girls' Academy, also a senior at Columbia, majoring in physical education. Gayle was her doubles partner and the better player.

Lindsay had one more final exam. She would graduate with a B.A. in psychology in two more weeks. From Columbia, a school with a good reputation.

Then what would she do? There had been company reps on campus a few months before, but nothing they had to offer interested her in the slightest, except for the foreign service, which sounded exciting, at least until she'd met the young man who was their primary representative. He couldn't talk about any place but Italy. Lindsay was never going to Italy.

Her stomach growled and she realized she hadn't eaten since the previous night at Marlene's apartment. Salami pizza with extra cheese and a can of light beer. It had made her sick.

The pizza had been god-awful, but it alone hadn't done her in. It was also that guy, Peter Merola, a friend of Marlene's, a classmate. He'd been persistent, and when he'd pretended to accidentally rub his hand against her breast, touching her nipple, she'd bolted to the bathroom and been sick in the toilet. When she'd come out, Peter was coming on to another girl and this one looked interested.

She was safe.

Lindsay rose even as she pulled a sheaf of notes from her large floppy purse. It was fine cordovan leather, soft light brown, and it grew softer by the year, four of them now. She carried everything in it, her cell phone, her books, some tennis balls, a razor, and an extra pair of socks and underwear.
She fanned the notes out on her lap. This was her last course and it was taught by Professor Gruska, who was an ardent Freudian, a dying breed, thank God. He had intense eyes, looked like a professor, and lived with his father on the West Side at Eighty-fourth Street. He was at least fifty and had never been married. He was strange, but he thought she was stranger. Dr. Gruska had come to the conclusion that Lindsay was screwed up after he'd read a short play she had written, an assignment showing how members of a family related to each other. Lindsay had made up a family, but Dr. Gruska had probed and prodded. He'd gone so far as to read some of her play aloud in class. Then he'd called her to his office after class. He'd asked her questions about her father, wondering aloud if she had a thing for him. He suggested to her that he could help her sort things out. They could begin right now if she liked.

Lindsay had walked out, saying nothing. She was shaking and cursing and afraid within five minutes of leaving his wretched little office. Time had dealt with the worst of it, but not her intense hatred of Gruska, hatred coated with a goodly dose of fear. She would have never gone back, but she needed the class to graduate. She'd forced herself to apologize two weeks later; it was the hardest thing she'd ever had to do. He'd nodded, looking grave. He'd said only that she could call him or come to his office at any time. She could trust him. She realized then that he'd probably looked her up in old newspapers, and now he knew she'd been raped by her brother-in-law. She realized then that she wasn't certain what the papers had reported; she'd refused to read any of them. For all she knew, she'd been the one to seduce Alessandro and to shoot him. She closed off her memories. Now she was taking
Gruska's final—essays, he'd told the class, because they were graduating seniors, psych majors, and reportedly somewhat literate. She read her notes as she walked toward the cafeteria, thinking it was a great deal of bullshit. She'd never had a thing for her father; all she'd ever wanted was for him just to recognize that she was there and that she was his daughter. Was that abnormal? Probably no more abnormal than her choosing psychology for a major because she'd hoped, deep down, that she would gain some insights, some self-awareness, to help her stop trembling with terror whenever a man came close to her. Some courses, some professors, had been helpful. Outwardly, no one would ever be able to guess what had happened to her—she'd filled herself with insights from every psychological theory; she'd grown up; she understood that the prince was mentally ill and she had been just a helpless girl drawn in by him; she accepted her fear of men as not being normal, but quite natural, of course, because of what the prince had done to her. She accepted all of it, took it in mental stride, smiled occasionally with cool objectivity at the idea of anyone being actually afraid of the opposite sex, but in the stillness of the night, when she was alone, the pain of those memories could still overwhelm her, the pain and the humiliation, her own stupidity. But she handled it now. At the very least, psychology had taught her how to handle it. Except handling Gruska, the jerk.