“I had no idea.”
“Oh, they’re out there. And these particular Bolsheviks detonated a bomb on our host’s property. My brother, quite unluckily, was near the site of the explosion, which razed a small cottage.”
“He doesn’t look too badly damaged—from the outside, I mean.”
“That’s why we came to see you,” Francis said. “To find out what happened on the inside.”
“Yes,” he said. “The inside.”
Van Hooten hefted a gleaming otoscope and peered into each of Michael’s ears. He noted that both eardrums had been ruptured. Then he studied Michael’s eyes, the way they followed a pencil he drew back and forth across the young man’s field of vision. He ended each phase of the examination with a short hmph, as if time and again he were surprising himself with one of his findings. Van Hooten had Michael remove his shirt in order to get a better listen to his lungs. There were no problems with his breathing, but his torso was speckled with scratches and fading bruises outlined in yellow and purple—proof of the Bolsheviks’ handiwork.
As he examined Michael, Van Hooten chatted idly—sometimes, it seemed, to himself, and other times directing a question at Francis: How long had he been in New York? What were his impressions of the city? How had he come to know the Binghams? When Francis mentioned meeting Anisette and Mrs. Bingham on the transatlantic crossing, Van Hooten dropped his stethoscope. He made no move to pick it up.
“The Binghams were in Europe?” Van Hooten said. “How—how—how long were they away?”
“Two or three months, I suppose.”
Van Hooten was short of breath. Mrs. Bingham had been out of the country—she had been across the ocean—for two or three months? Two or three months when the phone would not have rung. When he could have left the apartment, left the building, even left the city. His mouth was dry, his fingers numb.
“I—I wasn’t aware of that,” he said, the words barely audible. When the older Scotsman asked if his brother could get dressed, Van Hooten could only nod. The younger one buttoned his shirt, tied his necktie, and wandered out of the library and into the hallway. “Is he capable of being on his own, unsupervised?”
“He’s not an idiot,” Francis snapped, then cleared his throat to regain his composure. He had almost said eejit—a dead giveaway for anyone who knew how to tell a Scottish lord from a boy raised in the Irish countryside, though Van Hooten probably wouldn’t have noticed.
Francis’s tone brought Van Hooten back to the room, the examination, the case before him. He retrieved his stethoscope from the floor and placed it on the table with the other instruments, then withdrew a notebook and pencil from a drawer. He asked if Michael suffered from headaches or other signs of physical discomfort.
“He has fits,” Francis said. “Less now than right after the blast, but he still gets them. Very bright lights can start him squirming, and he’s liable to faint straightaway.”
“Has he complained of any other symptoms?”
“How’s he to complain? I told you, he hasn’t said a word.”
“Can’t he write?”
“Not since it happened.”
Van Hooten hummed again. The news of the Binghams’ overseas jaunt had rocked him, but now he was warming to the task at hand. This was the side of medicine that he had always enjoyed: the way that each answer opened the door to other questions, after which you chose the questions that would get you to the next set of answers, followed by more questions, until, like the letters of a crossword puzzle falling into place, you would have a rational diagnosis. For Van Hooten, a diagnosis was a holy grail in a world that resisted reason, a grail reached by treading a cleanly paved mental pathway rather than mucking about in the soupy fens of the body for an answer. In this case, he had precedents, not only general principles, to work from: Hadn’t he seen plenty of cases like this during the Great War? Blank-faced boys whose eyes could never alight on any one thing for long, or whose gazes were permanently fixed on some distant point no one else could see. Of course a blast could rupture the eardrum and send the tiny bones of the ear sprawling helter-skelter. He had seen plenty of men who would never again hear the anguished cries of their brothers-in-arms, or their sweethearts’ voices, or the stirring tones of the songs that had sent them off to Europe in the first place. He had seen men so badly shell-shocked that they ceased speaking for good. Nor was this young man’s inability to read and write unheard of for a wartime casualty.
“Assuming that his hearing does not return—” Van Hooten said.
“Are you saying that it won’t?”
“This type of injury—hearing loss resulting from a single catastrophic episode—is, I must tell you, often permanent. The eardrums can repair themselves, but the real damage runs deeper.”
Francis wanted to be shocked by this. He wanted to express outrage that the doctor was so quickly settling for this fainthearted diagnosis. Surely there must be something that could be done: some procedure, some bit of arcane medical knowledge, that would make Michael, well, Michael again. But a part of him had known from the beginning that what had happened to Michael could not be unwound.
“As for the cognitive issues—the reading and writing—it’s possible that those can be reversed. Given time and the proper treatment.”
“And what would that—”
From somewhere in the apartment came a rapid-fire clacking—like gunshots or tree branches snapping in a storm. The two men followed the sound into the dining room, where Michael sat before a typewriter, his gaze fixed on the wall and his fingers working madly at the keys. He was surrounded on all sides by chessboards. The table, the sideboard, even a few of the chairs were covered with them. On each board, a miniature skyline of royals and their courtiers fanned out in elaborate formations of attack and defense. Vanquished pawns, rooks, bishops, and knights littered the gaps between the boards. And with each fervent punch of the keys, the pieces on the nearest boards jumped.
“Stop that!” Van Hooten shrieked. “Stop!”