The Nanny (22 page)

Dr. Meducca was having trouble writing the letter. First he had started by stating that he had given two grains of morphine to the boy and five to himself. He had crumpled that sheet up and stuck it into his pocket, thinking they wouldn't need to be told that. Pure ham that. Then he began to tell the boy's history, as he had learned it from the nursemaid, because he knew he couldn't trust the parents to tell it. On the contrary, he could trust them not to tell, if he and Lucy were any examples. But then he realized that this was unnecessary because what the boy had done was on record.

He had just finished writing down how tonight's murder must have occurred, and had decided that it wasn't safe to wait any longer and that he would have to take the chance of the boy waking up while he went down to get the morphine, when Mr. Fane walked in. Dr. Meducca explained who he was. (The man had been too sick to recognize him.)

“Is Joey sick, too?” He started towards his son but stopped when asked to.

“No. He's okay. Let's keep our voices down. He's okay, just comatose. He's had sleeping pills.”

“Where is my wife, Doctor?”

“She was here, the doorman told me, but she stepped out.” He changed his plan. In the office. Better in the office. Psychopaths had a highly developed suspiciousness, better in the office, but in case the boy refused to go down, better have the morphine on him. “She must have stepped out.”

Mr. Fane's mouth worked. “Yes, stepped out, stepped right out! She must have gone straight to Nanny!” It was only the need to run to Nanny like a kid which had given Virgie the nerve to get out of the hospital by herself.

Mr. Fane knew nothing. Of course he knew nothing. “No, she didn't do that. Look, I have to step down to my office for a minute. I'll be right back.” He handed him the account of what had happened to Nanny. “In the meantime, I'd like you to read this. Read it,” he urged. “It will save a lot of talk. Oh, and don't try waking the boy while I'm gone, will you? I particularly don't want you to wake him.”

Mr. Fane looked at the closely-written pages with distaste. “You're being very mysterious, Doctor. Okay, I'll read it.”

The noise Virgie made—and it was a miracle that Dr. Meducca heard it from the next room, since she could not rock the chair this time but only managed to tap her ring against the metal of the chair seat—was enough to start the cut bleeding again. All Dr. Meducca took in at first glance was that this must be his daughter's handiwork. He had begun to untie Virgie before he even recognized her with the gag over her face and the cropped head and the bloodied pink volunteer smock.

While he sutured the cut, Virgie told him what Roberta had done and he realized from her hesitations and the gaps in the story that she was censoring parts.
Her
psychopath was only eight. She hadn't got over her squeamishness yet. She hadn't had her face rubbed in it enough yet, he thought, working away at her hand.

But the moment he finished, she was finished with Roberta.
He
could attend to Roberta, was the idea; she must be on her way upstairs to her child, although he had assured her he was okay, okay, sleeping, yes. And do you know the only thing that made this poor cropped-head thing pause? Oh, God, if he had any reservations about what he was going to do, this would have settled them!

“Doctor,” she said, in the meantime busily winding an office towel around her shaved head like a turban to hide
that
damage, “do you have anything I could put on? I don't want Joey to see all this blood,” she said.

Didn't want Joey to see all the blood! He got her the same long white office coat which the boy had put on to keep warm. “Did you hear that?” he asked himself. “Can you beat that?” This miniature monster who had certainly murdered his brother and an old woman and perhaps killed a middle-aged Englishwoman, too … this pygmy Borgia who had slipped what he believed was a fatal poison to his own parents must be spared the sight of blood! Dr. Meducca shook with it, his anguish shook his frame and he had to hold on to the back of the chair onto which
his
monster had tied this girl, his monster who had only refrained from cutting off this girl's finger because she wanted to go to bed with a doorman first.

“Please, please hurry,” she said. “Joey's up there.”

But he had to get the morphine. “Your husband is home.”

“Oh, that's good.”

“Be with you one moment.” He slipped the morphine tablets and the sterile syringe in its case into his pockets and followed her through the door.

Dr. Meducca could tell from Mr. Fane's dazed look that he had finished reading the letter and had taken the Grand Tour of the apartment, the Grand Guignol Tour! When Mr. Fane noticed his wife, he shook himself, to shake loose of the horror, Dr. Meducca thought (as if he could!) and hurried to the gallery to them.

He whispered, “What the hell did you bring her here for? You out of your mind bringing her here?” Then he bounded after his wife, who by this time was bending over the boy on the sofa. “Joey's okay, honey.” He put his arm around her and tried to draw her away.

Mrs. Fane allowed her husband to embrace her, then pulled away to look at the boy again, and when she did, Mr. Fane noticed her bandaged hand.

“What happened to you, Virgie?”

“That doesn't matter now. It's nothing, Victor. If he's all right, why doesn't he wake up?”

“Doctor Meducca says he had a good dose of some sedative. He's out but okay. Come away from him now.”

He made her go up the steps and the three of them sat around the dining room table on the gallery. Mrs. Fane looked across the room at the boy and Mr. Fane looked at her. Now Fane was a mirror image of himself. Now this was the scene he had played with Lucy, over and over and over.

Mrs. Fane said, “Where is Nanny?”

Mr. Fane, unable to come out with it, shook his head and his mirror image, Doc Meducca, shook
his
head. Doc Meducca asked his mirror image silently whether he was going to tell her. Fane's gesture meant that he couldn't. (With Lucy, before he had become hardened to it, he hadn't been able to get it out, either.) He said to Fane, “Have you been in the maid's room yet?” The man looked sickened.

“Yes.”

But she had become suspicious of the messages which had passed between the two men. “What is it?” she asked. “What is it? I want to know, Victor!”

“Nothing, darling,” Fane said.

Ah, what was the good of that?

“Darling, you better go in the—go into the—”

It was to laugh! The poor guy didn't know where he could safely put her in this charnel house since (just as he had figured—mirror image!) for all Fane knew, the empty bedroom had still another corpse in it. This was his double, this was his double!

“Oh, go, then,” Roberta said. “What the hell good are you, anyway?”

She lay on her bed with her hands at her sides, watching him dress, the gun in her right hand, and with one leg crossed over the other's raised knee. And when she was tired of watching him, she wiggled her big toe and watched that. Not a care in the world! Not a thing on her mind! By now Patrick knew better than to believe that she intended to let him go and cut the poor creature loose. While he put his uniform coat on, he prayed to Mary Mother to intercede for the poor creature tied up in there. He reminded Mary Mother that if She didn't help now, there would be a motherless orphan. And then he prayed for himself, to give him the brains to outwit that devil oh the bed, grinning at him now because she had guessed he was praying by the way his lips moved.

“Say one for her, Mick,” she said, brushing at her toe with the muzzle of the gun.

“Mother of God, let it go off
now,”
Patrick prayed.

“You come with me and see the miracle, Mickie.”

His fingers fumbled because this must be a dirty lie. She wouldn't dare cut the lady loose to go and tell the cops what she'd done.

“Get the lead out,” she said, not smiling, on her feet in one movement the way she could do, with her negligee on her in the wink of an eye, less than that, because she did not take her eye or the gun off him while she wriggled into the negligee like the snake she was. “You're going to walk across the lobby and unlock the office door with the passkey and I'm going to stand in my door and gun you down if you make a move.”

He said he would, he would, what else could he do with the gun on him and all? But walking to his own funeral he was, for sure, since that one would massacre the two of them. And make it look like he and the poor lady had gone into the office together, and take away her good name and his along with their lives.

Then he was inside the cursed place again and she right behind him. He heard her lock the door on the inside and gave himself up for lost and, without her asking, marched into the little room where the poor trussed-up creature was, to get it over with.

And before he could even offer up a prayer of thanks for her deliverance, that one was saying that her father the doctor must have come down and found her, that he'd untied her and fixed her up and gone back upstairs with her. “And she let you scot-free?”

“I happen to know she had something else on her mind.”

“The boy, is it?”

“The boy, that's right. That's why she came with me, dopo, and the minute Pa got her off that chair, that's who she'd head for and drag Pa along in case he was needed there.” She stirred the medical paraphernalia her father had left on the table with the muzzle of the gun. “The minute he sutured her up, she went upstairs.” She sat on the chair where the girl had been and said, “That's what I'm going to do to you, Mick, suture your big mouth up.”

“Mother of God!”

“Unless—now you listen, Mickie. You haven't done a thing, have you?” She laughed in his face. “
That's
no crime, big boy! Except for doing what comes naturally you're clean, and my Pa will blame that on me. So what can they pin on you? You wouldn't even do it with her! You tied her up, yes, but she knows it was because I made you. I'm telling you you're clean, Mickie. Think it over. Right?”

“It's God's truth.” What was she getting at?

“Now if I don't sew your big mouth you can do two things. You can sing or you can keep your big mouth shut.”

“I'll not tell a living soul. I'm quitting on the job anyhow,” Patrick said. “I swear to you, I'm quitting anyhow.”

“Then we've got no problem, right? You quit as of now and you don't tell the cops. Anyone.”

“I swear I'll be off. Just let me clear out and you'll have seen the last of me.”

“No cops? If the cops don't get in, I can handle my pa. He'll talk her out of going to the cops. Okay? No cops?”

“I swear,” he said, dazed at this good luck. “I swear.”

“What will you do, Mickie?”

“I'll go downstairs and put on my own suit of clothes and leave the uniform. I'll go to my digs. I'll pack my gear. I'll take the next bus to Cincinnati.”

“Why Cincinnati?”

“I have a pal there. He has a job in a college there. No more schooling than I have, but he has a fine job. He wrote he would get me a job if I came to Cincinnati.”

“Then it's a deal?”

She let him out but he saw her peering at him through the crack of the door and nervously tugged at the uniform jacket to remind her that it wasn't his and he'd have to go downstairs to the staff room in the basement to take it off, and she didn't shoot him in the back so she did remember. Mother of God, he thought he was anxious to get out of Ireland when he left, but that was nothing to what he'd give to see the last of this place.

Mrs. Fane kept turning from her husband to him, frightened.

“I'm not going anywhere, Victor. I can tell there's been trouble here and I'm not …”

“But she has to go, Doctor. She's just been sick. She's—”

Fane didn't finish, but he meant that his wife was (like Lucy) a delicate, sensitive girl and couldn't take it. But his double didn't know the maternal instinct yet, did he? Didn't understand yet how it could transform this delicate, sensitive young woman, but he knew, he knew! And he
wanted
her here to see the dead nurse, better to see her, so he got up from the table, pulled her up, took her arm and led her to the door of the maid's room, opened it for her and gave her a good long look.

She said, “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” like a bell, a tolling bell.

He pointed out, so she wouldn't miss, the stretched rope, the pillow half under the sprawled body, and to prove to her that only her child could have slept in that bed, the cuddly leopard and the elephant. After that, he told her how it happened. He mimicked, “I want a pillow,” in a falsetto which affected him so unpleasantly that he had to clear his throat. He pointed to the bulb and told her that it had been unscrewed in the socket. “Must have stood on that footboard there to reach it.”

And then he had to grab her. My God, fool that he was not to know that her first idea would be to undo the rope, destroy the evidence! And he was just in time because this girl, who until now had moved so tentatively, shot into the maid's room like a bat out of hell. She tried to break out of his grasp.

“But we have to take it down! An accident!”

“Another
accident?” he asked her. (As he had asked Lucy.)

“Let go of her,” Mr. Fane said. “Come out of here, Virgie.”

But she didn't even hear her husband. “No, no,” she said to
him
, “it wasn't what you said. It just looks like that, so we have to untie that rope.”

Fane pulled his hands off her and pushed her out of the maid's room into the kitchen. He had her against a wall on which pot covers hung. One of them was just behind her head, like a halo.
Madonna
, Dr. Meducca thought.