Central Park by Guillaume Musso (ebook reader macos .TXT) 📕

“A script?”

“The staging of a role-play psychiatric game, if you prefer.”

Seeing my incredulous expression, Gabriel realizes he needs to tell me more.

“We had to find a way to stop you from denying your condition. To make you confront the ghosts of your past in order to free you from them. This is my job: rebuilding people, trying to help them reorder their minds.”

“And you came up with this ‘script’ just like that?”

“I tried to enter into your logic, your way of thinking. It’s the most effective way of establishing contact. I improvised as I went along based on what you told me and the decisions you made.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t believe a word of this. It’s impossible.”

He looks at me. “Why?”

In my head, the events of the previous day are replaying on fast-forward. And then the images freeze as they are succeeded by questions. “The numbers in blood on your arm?”

“I scratched them there myself with a Swiss Army knife.”

I have trouble believing what I’m hearing. “The claim ticket from the Greenwich Hotel?”

“That’s where I spent the previous night, after a conference.”

“The electrified briefcase?”

“Mine. The alarm and the electric shock are set off automatically as soon as the briefcase is taken more than fifty yards from the remote control.”

“The GPS in my shoe?”

“All the patients in the clinic have a GPS in one of their shoes. It’s common practice for hospitals dealing with patients suffering from memory problems.”

“But you had one too…” I play the scene over in my head, me standing in front of the thrift store as Gabriel throws his sneaker into a trash can.

“No, I told you I’d found one. You didn’t see it. You believed me without checking.”

He walks around the car, opens the trunk, and takes out a jack and a tire iron to change the Shelby’s blown tire. I still can’t believe how easily he tricked me.

“But…what about the whole thing with Vaughn?”

“I wanted a way to get us out of New York,” he explains, squatting down to remove the hubcap. “I’d read in your case file about what Vaughn did to you. I knew I could get you to do anything if I dangled him in front of you.”

I feel the anger rising within me. I am capable of beating the shit out of him, but first I want to make sure I understand.

“The fingerprints on the syringe…they were yours, of course? Vaughn is dead.”

“Yes. If your father says he killed him, there’s no reason not to believe him. I’ll keep your secret. I’m not normally in favor of vigilantism, but in this case, who could blame him?”

“And Seymour?”

“Krieg called him and asked him to cooperate with us. Later on, I called him myself to ask him to give you false clues and direct you toward the hospital.”

“When? We were together the whole time.”

He looks at me and shakes his head, his lips pursed. “Not all the time, Alice. In Chinatown, I waited for you to leave the pawnbroker’s and then asked the guy to let me make a call. And later, by the community garden in Hell’s Kitchen, you stayed in the car while you thought I was calling my friend Kenny from a pay phone.”

Using the tire iron, he starts unscrewing the wheel nuts while continuing his story.

“In the train station, while I was buying our subway tickets, a very sweet grandmother let me use her cell phone to make a call. In Astoria, while you were taking your bath, I had time to use the phone in the hookah bar. And when we were driving north, I left you with Barbie for a good ten minutes while I was supposedly buying cigarettes.”

“And all those times, you were actually talking to Seymour?”

“He was the one who helped me play that FBI special agent role with some degree of credibility. I must admit he was a bigger help than I could have hoped. That thing with the corpse in the sugar factory—where he never set foot, of course—that was his idea.”

“The bastard…”

“He loves you very much, you know. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a friend like him.”

He sets up the jack and begins levering the car a few inches from the ground. Seeing him grimace with pain, I remember stabbing him the night before. It must have given him quite a deep muscular wound. I’m not in the mood to get softhearted, though.

“What about my father?”

“Ah, he was the one I worried about. I really wasn’t sure that the great Alain Schafer would agree to play along. Thankfully, Seymour was able to steal his phone.”

I take all these blows like a boxer caught in the corner of the ring. But I want to know. To know everything.

“The apartment in Astoria? Your friend Kenny Forrest?”

“Kenny doesn’t exist. I invented that story of the jazz pianist because I love jazz. As for the apartment, it’s mine. And by the way, you owe me a bottle of La Tâche 1999. I was keeping that for a special occasion.”

As usual, he thinks that humor will undercut my anger. Or he is provoking me, trying to make me fly off the handle.

“You know where you can stick your bottle! So what about Madame Chaouch, the building owner? How come she didn’t recognize you?”

“I called her from the station and asked her not to give me away.”

Having unscrewed the nuts, he removes the blown tire, then finishes his explanation.

“Agatha, Krieg’s assistant, went to the apartment a few minutes before we got there to get rid of anything that might have identified me: photographs, files, bills…my shoulder really hurts. Could you pass me the spare tire?”

“Go fuck yourself! What about the log cabin?”

Gabriel takes a step away from me and checks the bandages under his sweater and shirt. The strain of removing the wheel must have made his wound bleed again, but he grits his teeth and grabs the spare tire.

“The cabin belongs to the real Caleb Dunn.