“Hey, kid.”
I was sitting in the otherwise empty waiting room in the American Hospital in Paris with the television on. I didn’t have to take my eyes off the French version of Biggest Loser to see who had just walked in. Agent Nolan stood there in the doorway for a long beat, holding his briefcase, waiting to be acknowledged.
“You gonna say hi to me?”
“Sorry.” I turned my other ear toward him, the one that I could still hear out of. “Speak into this one.”
“Where’s the family?”
“In a hotel,” I said. It was basically true. I decided Nolan didn’t need to be informed that my parents were staying in separate hotels on opposite sides of the Seine. There were some things that even the CIA didn’t need to know.
“What about the band?”
“They went back to New York yesterday with our manager.”
“And you? Flying home soon?”
“Tomorrow,” I said, “probably,” and started to reach for the remote.
Nolan looked back up the hall toward the OR. “How long’s she been in surgery?”
“Thirteen hours. They’re finishing now.”
“They get all of it?”
“What do you care?”
“Crazy, huh?”
“What’s that?”
“She’s wearing a bulletproof vest up there, saving her life, and the whole time it was the tumor that was killing her.”
He started to say something, and I turned my bad ear back toward him. When he saw me do that, he walked straight in front of me, blocking the TV set.
“Listen, Perry. Maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Maybe you got a rough lesson in gunboat diplomacy-who knows?” He shrugged. “That part I asked you before about her… I was just being polite. I already talked to the neurosurgeons. They said she’s in a coma.”
“Induced,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s an induced coma. It’s what they do to protect higher brain function during and immediately after major neurosurgery.”
“Somebody’s been reading his Wikipedia.”
I switched off the TV and looked at him. “Why are you here?”
“As a matter of fact…” He sighed and sat down next to me, plucking at the seams of his suit pants. “I want to help.”
“Unless you can give me back the hearing in my left ear or…”-I almost said “save my parents’ marriage”-“undo what happened here, you’re pretty useless to me.”
“I never said I wanted to help you personally,” Nolan said. “Although in this particular situation, I might be in the position to do so.” He opened his briefcase and took out a thick stack of official-looking documents, some of them in English, others in French. “Nobody knows how your little Lithuanian princess is going to come out of surgery, or if she’s going to come out at all. Even the docs say it’s too soon to tell. But one thing’s for sure: At the end of the day, somebody’s gonna get stuck with a hell of a hospital bill. We’re talking millions in rehab, all that shit. She’ll be in debt for the rest of her life.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You can take care of that.”
“The agency could. Probably.” He was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. “In exchange for certain considerations.”
“Forget it,” I said.
“Easy, kid. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At this point we don’t even know if she’s going to make it. And if she does?” Another shrug. “She might not be able to shoot straight. But we’re willing to take that risk.”
“That’s big of you.”
“Hey, like I said, we do what we can. In any case, in the spirit of starting over, I want to just let you know, Uncle Sam’s got this one. Whatever it takes to get her back on her feet.” He grinned. “Alive and kicking, am I right?”
“Agent Nolan.”
“Yeah, kid?”
“And I mean this from the bottom of my heart-”
“Yeah?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
He snapped his briefcase shut and stood up.
“That’s not friendly, Perry.” His voice was cordial but just barely, as if every word was costing him a little bit of dignity. “I extended the hand of friendship and you just pissed on it.”
“Maybe I was just practicing some gunboat diplomacy.”
“Hey, no harm, no foul.” Now his grin was tighter, narrower, seeming to flatten out the broad planes of his face. “No matter who pays, we’re on her. You know that, right? If Zusane Zaksauskas does walk out of here, there’s not a place on this planet that she can hide from us. She’s ours for life.”
“Lucky her.”
He snorted and started for the door. What stopped him was the surgeon in scrubs and a mask and hairnet standing in the entryway. He glanced at Nolan, and then at me.
“Perry?” the doctor said.
I stood up, felt my heart vault upward into my throat. “Yes?”
“I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”
I stared at him, and Nolan stared at him, and I could feel the air molecules in the room fall absolutely motionless around us.
“We did everything we could,” the surgeon said, “but she never recovered consciousness after the operation. I am very sorry.”
Nolan sighed and shook his head, then looked back at me. “Sorry about that, kid. Like I said before, though, it’s probably for the best.”
After he left, the surgeon took off his mask and looked at me.
“I thought you told me you weren’t a doctor,” I said.
“What is your American saying?” Erich tapped his finger against his head. “‘I play one on TV’?”
“So Gobi…”
“The body seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Or soon will.”
“I take it you’ll be making the proper arrangements?”
“Ja,” Erich said. “Is already taken care of.”