L'Affaire Read Online Free Page A

Adrian and Kerry buried like corpses in the snow. Was it really them? Should he go and look at them? His stomach turned – he bet that they wanted him to identify Adrian and Kerry. He sat, jammed with thoughts and amazement. At least Kerry wasn’t dead.
    ‘I guess I should go to the hospital,’ he said finally. ‘If that’s where they are.’
    ‘Yes, I thought you would want that. We’ll try to make it down to Moutiers. My sister will look after the child.’ Christian, evidently having ready a recitation of what they were prepared to do to help, some lesson learned in hotel school about service, concern, humanity.
    In the car, Kip asked Christian Jaffe over and over to tell him the story, exploring the phrases for additionalinformation, but Jaffe knew no more than had been told. Dug out of the snow, Adrian more dead, Kerry more alive, some delay in notifying the hotel because at first there had been no way of telling where they were staying.
    ‘But they found a ski to go on, with the rental number, only one ski, but they could trace it.’
    The hospital was small, a nineteenth-century building that might have been a school, or one of the sanitoria where the tuberculous came in the old days. A couple of people sat in the hallway on folding chairs. On the wall a large three-dimensional map of the region. At the far end of the corridor, through an open door, Kip could see lights and hear electronic beeps, intensive care noises familiar from television and from when their mother had died.
    With Christian Jaffe, he approached and paused in the doorway. A figure nearest them, mounded in wraps, could be Kerry. Another machine sighed in the corner under another mound of dark blankets. They entered. There were no doctors, just a couple of nurses pottering with the tubes and watching the monitors. It seemed the consultations were over, the measures implemented, the accident victims were now absorbed into the routine of the nighttime shift. No one stopped them coming closer.
    The nearer figure was Kerry. Kip stared and stared at her closed eyes as if to warm them awake with his mounting hot panic. He felt some obstacle to grasping this, a thick, shocked feeling. He could not believe her eyes wouldn’t open, conspiratorially, when she realized it was him looking down at her. But she was like a stone,machines wheezing around her. The other mound must be Adrian.
    Maybe he shouldn’t look at her. People hate it when you look at them asleep. There were several nurses, coming in and out, looking at him, but no doctor talked to him. Kip wondered what he should do, perhaps sit there beside her into the night? But the nurse urged him out after only a few moments.
    Christian Jaffe, smoking in the corridor, pulled up his collar, and with a motion of his head meant to include Kip, moved toward the exit at the end. He looked anxious to start back. ‘The late seating will be beginning, I ought to be there,’ he said. ‘The guests will have heard by now of the accident.’ Such news introduced collective excitement and anxiety, with the resulting increase in food-related complaints, and wines sent back, and general querulousness.
    Kip wondered where the doctor was, and why no one had talked to him, the brother. He looked around for the doctor or someone to talk to. He didn’t speak French.
    ‘She’s not going to die or anything?’ he asked Christian Jaffe. ‘Could you ask how she is?’
    Jaffe spoke to the nurse just coming out. ‘ Non, non,’ the woman said. Kip understood that much, though not the rest.
    ‘She says she is in a stable coma, but she is still very cold.’ This sounded contradictory to Kip, but what did he know? He guessed she meant Kerry was not going to die and that there was no point in sitting there. A doctor stepped into the hall and shook hands with Jaffe. Turning to Kip, he said in English, ‘Monsieur Venn is not good.His brain shows very little activity. But he is very cold, and so it is too soon to say.