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

And I asked Agatha to pin those three pictures to the door after I found them in your wallet.”

“The Shelby is yours too, I imagine?”

“I won it in a poker game when I was living in Chicago,” the psychiatrist says, standing up and wiping his hands.

Listening to him is unbearable. I feel belittled, humiliated. In tricking me this way, Gabriel has taken the last thing that remained to me: my certainty that I was still a good cop.

“I have to admit, I got lucky,” he says. “You nearly found me out twice. First, when you insisted on going with me to the hematology lab to leave the blood sample.”

I’m not sure I understand what he means. I let him continue.

“I do know Eliane; the clinic has worked with her lab for a long time. I didn’t have time to warn her, but thankfully she never called me ‘Doctor’ in front of you.” He smiles.

I do not see much humor in this story.

“And the second time?”

“Your colleague Franck Maréchal. We really came close to disaster there. To begin with, I was lucky that he didn’t know about your medical leave. And then, when he made his request to the parking garage, he just checked the records for your license plate. If he’d mentioned in his e-mail to you that the images were a week old, I would have been screwed!”

I nod. I am so angry, filled with a rage I cannot channel. A torrent of disgust and indignation takes possession of my body. I bend down, grab the tire iron, stand up, move toward Gabriel, and, with all my strength, smash him in the stomach with it.

27White Shadows

I HIT HIM AGAIN and Gabriel crumples into the dust, winded and bent double.

“I hate you, you bastard!”

He wraps his hands over his abdomen. I continue to pour out my rage.

“All that crap you told me about your son, about the death of your wife’s sister…inventing lies like that, it’s disgusting!”

He tries to stand up, holding his arms crossed in front of him to fend off another blow.

“Alice, that’s all true! I swear, that part is all true. The only part I invented was the bit about being a cop in Chicago—I was actually a volunteer psychiatrist in a charity that helped prostitutes.”

I drop the tire iron and let him stand up.

“My wife really did go to London with our son,” he explains as he gets his breath back. “I quit my job here at the clinic so I could move closer to her.”

In spite of this admission, I can’t stop the torrent of anger that is flowing through me. “I bet you had fun with your little masquerade, didn’t you? But what good did it do me?”

I throw myself at him, punching him in the chest and screaming: “Tell me! What good did it do me?”

He traps my fists in his big hands.

“Calm down now!” he orders in a firm voice. “We did all of that to help you.”

A gust of wind. I shiver. It’s true; I was so obsessed with the investigation that I almost forgot about my condition.

I can’t believe that I’m going to die. This morning, my mind is clear and sharp. The windows of the Shelby reflect a flattering image: a still young and slender woman with a pretty face and hair that is blowing in the wind. And yet I now know all too well the ephemeral and deceptive nature of appearances. I know that the senile plaques are attacking my neurons, slowing down my brain. I know that time is running out.

“You have to agree to undergo the second part of the operation,” Gabriel insists.

“What’s the point? That thing of yours won’t do any good. It’s just something you designed to rip off desperate people. Everyone knows there is nothing that can be done to stop Alzheimer’s.”

He speaks more gently. “That’s true, and yet it’s also false. Listen, I don’t know what you’ve heard about this operation. But I do know that this clinic specializes in the electrical stimulation of memory circuits and that the procedure has shown excellent results.”

I listen to him. He tries to explain it to me.

“We use very thin electrodes to send a small continuous current into a couple of strategic zones in your brain: the fornix and the entorhinal cortex. This stimulation generates tiny tremors that have an effect on the hippocampus. We don’t yet understand all the mechanisms, but the idea behind it is to improve neuron activity.”

“But it doesn’t cure the disease.”

“In many patients, we notice a modest but significant improvement in episodic and spatial memory.”

“Modest? Wow, great.”

“Alice, what I’m trying to tell you is that we don’t have enough experience to be certain of the results. It’s true, this is not an exact science. In some patients, lost memories return, and the symptoms regress or stabilize; in other patients, nothing happens and they continue, sadly, to be overcome by the disease.”

“So you can see why I—”

“What I can see is that nothing is certain. The symptoms can accelerate and lead to death or they can slow down. In young people where the disease was spotted early, there is a significant probability that we will be able to slow its progression. That is your situation, Alice.”

I repeat to myself: “Slow its progression…”

“If we can slow down the disease, we can win you more time,” he says. “Researchers are making progress every day. There will be advances in the future, that’s certain.”

“Sure, in thirty years.”

“It could be thirty years or it could be tomorrow. Look what happened with AIDS. In the early eighties, being diagnosed as HIV-positive was equivalent to a death sentence. Then came AZT and combination therapy. Now there are people who’ve lived with the disease for thirty years.”

I lower my head and say wearily, “I don’t have the strength. That’s why I panicked after the first operation. I wanted to go home to France to see my father one last time and…”

He comes closer to me and