wound, the stitches.
He rose, took off the robe, and dressed in his street clothes.
When Ryan entered the adjacent diagnostics lab, Ismay Clemm was nowhere to be seen. Dr. Gupta and the radiologist had gone, as well.
Nurse Whipset asked if he was all right.
He felt unreal, weightless and drifting, as if he were a ghost, an apparition that she mistook for flesh and blood.
Of course, she wasn’t asking if he felt emotionally sound, only if the sedative had worn off. He answered in the affirmative.
She informed him that the analysis of the biopsy specimens would be expedited. In the interest of greater accuracy and the collection of more precise information, however, Dr. Gupta had ordered the most detailed analysis; he didn’t expect to have the report until Tuesday.
Initially, Ryan intended to ask where he could find Ismay Clemm. He had wanted to ask her what she meant by the strange things she said to him during the brief periods when he had been half-awake.
Now, in the sterile brightness of the diagnostics lab, he was not certain that she had actually spoken to him. She might as easily have been merely a presence in his dreams.
He retrieved his Mercedes from the garage and drove home.
The clear sky presented more birds, more often, than seemed normal. Flocks were strung out in strange formations, a calligraphy of crows in which some meaning might be read if only he knew the language in which it was composed.
At a red traffic light, when he glanced at the silver Lexus in the adjacent lane, he discovered the driver staring at him: a fortysomething man, face hard and expressionless. They locked eyes, and the stranger’s intensity caused Ryan to look away first.
Two blocks later, at another red light, a young man behind the wheel of a chopped and customized Ford pickup was talking on a hands-free cell phone. Fitted to the guy’s ear, the phone stirred in Ryan a memory from an old science-fiction movie: an alien parasite, riding and controlling its human host.
The pickup driver glanced at Ryan, looked immediately away, but a moment later glanced furtively at him once more; and his lips moved faster, as if Ryan were the subject of his phone conversation.
Miles farther, when Ryan turned off Pacific Coast Highway onto Newport Coast Road, he glanced repeatedly in the rearview mirror, looking for the silver Lexus and the chopped Ford pickup.
At home, staircase to hallway to room after room, Ryan did not encounter Lee or Kay Ting, or Lee’s assistant, Donnie, or Kay’s assistant, Renata.
He heard fading footsteps on a limestone floor, a door close in another room. A distant voice and a single response were both unintelligible.
In the kitchen, he swiftly prepared an early lunch. He avoided fresh foods and containers that were already open, in favor of items in vacuum-sealed cans and jars.
A salad of button mushrooms, artichoke hearts, yellow beets, garbanzo beans, and white asparagus was enlivened with Italian dressing from a previously untapped bottle and by grated Parmesan from a new can that he opened after inspecting it for tampering.
He put the salad on a tray with a sealed package of imported panettone and utensils. After a hesitation, he added a wineglass and a half bottle of Far Niente Chardonnay.
As he carried the tray to his office in the west wing of the main floor, he saw no one, though a vacuum cleaner started in a far chamber.
None of the rooms featured security cameras, but the hallways had them. A video record of hallway traffic was stored on DVDs to be reviewed only in the event that the house was invaded by burglars or victimized by a sneak thief.
No one monitored the hallway cameras in real time. Nevertheless, Ryan felt watched.
In his home office, Ryan ate at his desk, gazing out of the big windows at the swimming pool in the foreground, at the sea in the distance.
The phone rang: his most private line, a number possessed by a handful of people. The caller-ID window told him it was Samantha.
“Hey, Winky, you still aging gracefully?”
“Well, I haven’t grown any hair in my ears yet.”
“That’s a good sign.”
“And I haven’t developed man breasts.”
“You paint an irresistible portrait of yourself. Listen, I’m sorry about Wednesday night.”
“What about Wednesday night?”
“I brought the whole evening down, talking about Teresa, pulling her feeding tube, the starvation thing.”
“You never bring me down, Sam.”
“You’re sweet. But I want to make it up to you. Come over for dinner tonight. I’ll make saltimbocca alla romana.”
“I love your saltimbocca.”
“With polenta.”
“This is a lot of work.”
“Caponata to start.”
He had no reason to distrust her.
“Why don’t we eat out?” he suggested. “Then there’s no cleanup.”
“I’ll do the cleaning up.”
He loved her. She loved him. She was a good cook. He was succumbing to irrational fear.
“It’s so much work,” he said. “I heard about this great new restaurant.”
“What’s the name?”
The great new restaurant was a lie. He would have to find one. He said, “I want to surprise you.”
“Is something wrong?”
“I’m just in a going-out mood. I want to try this new place.”
They talked about what she should wear, what time he would pick her up.
“Love you,” she said.
“Love you,” he echoed, and disconnected.
He had eaten no more than a third of his lunch, but he had lost his appetite.
With a glass of Far Niente, he went outside, crossed the patio, and stood watching satiny ribbons of sunlight shimmer through the variegated-blue Italian-glass tiles that lined the swimming pool.
He became aware that he was fingering the bandage on his neck.
As Gypsies read tea leaves and palms, some shaman would read those tissue samples and tell him his fate.
The mental image of a Gypsy by candlelight led him to think of stories in which a lock of a man’s hair was used by a practitioner of black magic to cast a curse upon him.
In the hands of a voodooist, three moist pieces of a man’s heart—more intimate and therefore more powerful than a few strands of hair—might be used to destroy him in ways singularly horrific.
When a centipedal chill climbed his spine, when his heart accelerated, when a thin sweat prickled along his hairline, Ryan chastised himself for surrendering to unreason. A warrantless suspicion about Sam had metastasized into superstitious nonsense.
He went back into his office and phoned Samantha. “On second thought, I’d rather have your saltimbocca.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I don’t want to share you with a gaggle of envious men.”
“What gaggle?”
“The waiter, the busboy, and every man in the restaurant who would be lucky enough to lay eyes on you.”
“Sometimes,