Solomon's Knife

by Victor Koman

  "We have ten days. I think we're winning the fight in the court, but the biggest battle is going to be in the press. That's why I want us to do as many interviews as we can."

  Karen shook her head in a near tremble. "I don't think I could do-"

  "Not you," he said. "Just me. And Dr. Fletcher. We're going to skip the question of custody entirely to concentrate on the moral question of transoption." He turned to Evelyn. "Did you go through all this just for the money they paid you? Of course not. You did it because you thought it was right. If we can seize the moral high ground, public sentiment will slip right into our pocket."

  "The way Burke and Decker did?" Fletcher asked.

  Johnson frowned sourly. "

  Valerie said little on the trip home. Ron did most of the talk-ing.

  "There's an old saying: Ìf the law is against you, argue the facts. If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law and the facts are against you, pound on the table.' That's what Johnson's doing. A lot of pounding. It may look great on the evening news, but it's not going to win the case for him." He pulled into another lane to go around a slow car. He watched the road with a detached intensity that revealed his thoughts to be far removed from the act of driving.

  "He thinks he can make a big production number with fire-works to dazzle the jury into believing that Fletcher's a cham-pion of the oppressed." He turned to look at Valerie, then back at the road. "He's an amateur, raised on too many episodes of Perry Mason. Amateurs always get slaughtered in a real court."

  "You're losing, aren't you?" Valerie asked softly.

  Ron replied with instantaneous anger. "I am not losing! No-body knows what's going to happen. He's out there dancing about, harassing my witnesses, trying to score debating points. You want hostile cross-examination? Wait till I get his witnesses under my thumb. This isn't even half over."

  "I wish it were," she said. "I wish we could just settle this quickly and be done." She gazed out the window at the blur of light and darkness, wondering about Renata. Karen and David had a room next to her ICU where they slept every night. She, the baby's true mother, had to live on TV news and the occasional terse report from Dr. Fletcher. Fletcher tried to be cor-dial, but the strain of the trial and the ethics hearings showed in her voice and demeanor.

  "I set the evening news to tape," Ron said, pulling into their driveway. There were no news vans present at the moment, just a handful of reporters staking out the place. He parked and helped Valerie out of the car.

  The reporters switched on recorders and videocams in a practiced, routine manner. Ron, taking a calming breath, de-cided to grant them an audience. He stepped into their circle of light. Valerie watched from the safety of the porch.

  "Do you think you'll win custody?" asked an older man armed only with a hand-held recorder.

  "That's up to the judge and jury, but the facts and the law are on our side. Nobody can steal a baby from an unsuspect-ing woman and seriously call it the moral equivalent of adop-tion."

  "What is your opinion about the BMQA?"

  "What about it?" Ron asked.

  "They're meeting to decide whether to pull Dr. Fletcher's license."

  "Well," he said, facing the cameras, "I can certainly under-stand why, can't you?" With that, he thanked the reporters and joined Valerie at the front door. She had already unlocked it, so he put an arm around her and crossed the threshold with her.

  "Fire up the VCR," he said, closing and locking the door.

  "Do we have to?"

  He was already at the living-room machine, punching but-tons and rewinding. "We've got to know what the press thinks of all this. It's a good indication of public opinion." The televi-sion screen glowed with a high-speed backward view of the evening report.

  Valerie stepped into the kitchen to prepare some herbal tea. She watched the screen from the warm environs of the other room.

  "There!" he said. "Looks like a good one." The tape stopped rewinding, the picture dancing about as the playback attempted to locate and lock onto the control track. Suddenly, the image and sound united. Jill Knudsen, the young, brunette anchor for the station, spoke with an intense, serious expression. Behind her hung the superimposed artwork of the scales of Jus-tice balancing a fetus lying in one pan and a scalpel stabbed into the other.

  "...continued today. Attorney and plaintiff Ronald Czernek produced testimony from pro-life and pro-choice groups. Both sides denounced transoption as an invasion of a woman's body." The image switched to a courtroom camera scene of Avery Decker saying, "...transoption is an unwarranted intrusion into the bodies of two separate women and a threat to the life of the preborn." An instant later, Jane Burke's testimony received its sound bite: "It is the ultimate cruelty for the ultimate in hollow victo-ries. For the maintenance of the sham of fatherhood-"

  "Val-come and watch!" Ron craned his neck to look into the kitchen.

  "Coming."

  Silent shots of both Valerie and Mrs. Chandler in tears alter-nated as Knudsen's voice-over said,

  "Emotions ran high at the trial, with tears and harsh words from both sides." The scene shifted back to the studio set. "The trial recesses until Novem-ber tenth, at which time an as yet unidentified surgical expert will testify about the medical implications of transoption."

  "I hope," Ron muttered, putting the tape on hold and reach-ing for the phone. He punched the autodialer code for the surgeon's answering service and left a message about the date change, apologizing for the fickle nature of court calendars.

  He hung up and punched the pause button on the VCR. Jill Knudsen continued her story without offense at the interrup-tion.

  "In a related story," she said, "Dr. Evelyn Fletcher, the sur-geon who performed the unauthorized embryo transfer, faces an inquiry into her actions by the state of California Board of Medical Quality Assurance. The BMQA has the authority to strip her of her license to practice medicine in the state. More on that as it develops. Jerry?"

  "That was great!" Ron said, switching off the machine. "They totally downplayed Johnson's side. We've got it in the bag from a PR standpoint."

  Valerie gazed at the teapot atop the blue gas flames, think-ing of Renata's isolation tank, where she was safe from report-ers, lawyers, judges, and juries. Yet they surrounded her from afar, deciding her fate. She had done what no other child be-fore her had ever done-survived an abortion to find shelter inside another woman. Now the publicity would mean that she could never again find shelter no matter which mother won her.

  The pain in Valerie's chest once again began to gnaw at her. From without and within. " Evelyn sat on the stage set, trying to collect her thoughts while a young man fiddled with her bodice in an attempt to hide a small condenser microphone. He gave up after a mo-ment and clipped it to the maroon piping of her grey lapel, trailing the wire beneath the jacket and across the floor. She sighed with relief at his departure.

  Terry had arranged this interview on The Gerry Rivers Show, one of the hottest new talk shows in syndication. He had spent half the night convincing her to go. It wasn't that she doubted the need for publicity; she doubted Gerry Rivers' willingness to give her the right kind.

  "You're a fine speaker," Johnson told her. "You'll captivate them all." She wasn't so sure.

  Rivers was a young man, mid-twenties at most, who had made his name as a deep-digging investigative newspaper reporter. It had won him this talk show, which he had prom-ised would be just as incisive. Fletcher doubted it, having watched him for the first time the day before. He had built the entire hour around the beauty secrets of celebrity call girls.

  The floor director waggled his digits for attention as the set fell silent. Dark-haired and sturdily handsome, Gerry Rivers stood in the studio audience to await the countdown. He was not as tall as Evelyn had expected, which seemed strange to her when she considered how small her TV set was. The floor director folded all but his index finger, which he pointed at Rivers. A weak, filtered version of the show's theme song came over a moni
tor, and Rivers switched on a winning smile.

  "Gerry Rivers here with the controversial surgeon Evelyn Fletcher, woman of the hour, and the question of the hour: Transoption-kidnapping or salvation? What do you think of this whole thing?" He stuck his microphone in the face of a woman in the audience.

  She looked up at him as if she had been waiting to be called. "I think it's really wrong," she said in a soft voice. "I don't think doctors should go around experimenting on babies."

  "Dr. Fletcher?" Rivers looked toward her. A red light sud-denly glowed on the camera covering her portion of the set.

  She frowned. Though she welcomed a format that required her to think on her feet, she objected to such obvious setups. "Doctors already perform experiments on aborted fetuses," she said. "Experiments that require the fetuses to be freshly dead. Why is that permitted to occur thousands of times a year while I am being persecuted for a single experiment that allowed one fetus to live?" Rivers laughed and held up his hand. "Whoa, Doctor. I can't interview you if you ask the questions." He looked down at a man in the audience. "How about you? Any questions?"

  "Yes," the balding man said. "I'd like to know how Dr. Fletcher developed transoption."

  "Good question." Rivers looked over to her. "Dr. Fletcher?" That's more like it, she thought. "I first became interested in alternatives to abortion about twenty years ago, when I saw what psychological devastation such a life-or-death decision imposed on women. When the processes of laser microsur-gery and fiberoptics became widely available, I realized that a fetus could probably be removed intact from one woman and implanted into another with only a moderate amount of diffi-culty. Even though I hadn't done any animal experiments, I was certain that a method could-"

  "I'm sorry to interrupt," Rivers said as the audience camera zoomed in on him. "We've got to cut away for a moment and take a break. We'll be right back."

  "Clear for commercial," a tinny voice called over the studio speakers. Rivers flashed Evelyn the OK sign. "Doing great!" he said, barely looking at her as he bent over to speak to one earnest woman.

  "Ten seconds," the lo-fi voice announced. "Nine...eight..." At three seconds, the speaker fell silent, and the floor director took over with his own fingers, then pointed at Rivers.

  "Welcome back. We're talking to Dr. Evelyn Fletcher, cur-rently on trial in the Baby Renata case. We're-"

  "I'm not on trial as such," she interjected. "The plaintiff is seeking an injunction against me for-"

  "You could lose your license to practice medicine, couldn't you?"

  "Yes," she said irritably. "But that's a BMQA hearing, not a trial."

  "BMQA," he said, turning to the audience, "is the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance, am I right?"

  "Yes," Fletcher said. He was asking questions, she realized, in the same tone and manner he had asked the celebrity hook-ers about their opinions of liposuction and tanning booths. This would not be a productive exercise unless she could seize the cameras.

  "You've got an urgent question, don't you?" Rivers asked the woman he had spoken to at the break.

  "Yes," she said, standing. "Would you perform animal ex-periments if you could?" Fletcher knew a trap when she saw one. Not wanting to go off on that particular tangent, she said,

  "Most medical scien-tists would prefer that there be a strong basis in animal re-search before a medical technique is tested on human sub-jects. Because of what I was forced to do with transoption, we now know it works and animal research would seem to be unnecessary."

  Scattered applause arose from the audience. Rivers patted his hands against the air.

  "Now wait. That's fine that you don't need to test it on Lassie and Bonzo. But you performed your first experiment on an uninformed human female. How-"

  "Karen Chandler knew exactly what sort of surgery she would be getting."

  "I didn't mean Karen, I meant Valerie Dalton."

  Fletcher's voice grew stern. "Valerie Dalton was not èxperi-mented' upon. She came in for a pregnancy termination and received just that. I could have used a coat hanger and gotten less outrage than I have for using a device that removed the fetus alive. Why doesn't anyone focus on that? I was legally and professionally entitled to suck out and cut up that fetus to free Valerie from her pregnancy. I did it in a nondestructive manner that-"

  "We've got to-"

  "Let me finish!"

  "I'd love to, but we've got to break away for just a moment." The audience muttered and jabbered amongst themselves during the pause. Fletcher merely sat in her chair and fumed. She could not simply storm off the set, though that was her initial instinct. Instead, she sat furiously still, arms gripping the chair, awaiting the next brief opportunity.

  "Ready to sum up?" Rivers asked, joining her on the set.

  "Sum up?"

  "I've got two other guests after you. We've got to give transoption a balanced viewpoint."

  "I thought I'd be the only one."

  Rivers looked shocked. "There must have been a screwup in communication. No, I've got two others scheduled."

  "Anyone I know?" she asked slowly.

  "Jane Burke and Pastor Avery Decker."

  Get me off this show, she pleaded to an unhearing deity. "Then let me have my say right now."

  "Fair enough."

  When the director cued him, Rivers looked deep into the camera with his dark eyes and said, "Dr. Evelyn Fletcher-pioneer or mad scientist? Here she is in her own words." He nodded over to her.

  "Thanks, Gerry." She gazed into the camera as if she could pinion the viewers to their couches.

  "What no one is willing to acknowledge in this entire affair is that I managed to save a baby from certain death. And even so, I gave Valerie Dalton the way out of pregnancy that she wanted. I satisfied her minimum requirement-that her pregnancy end. As a bonus, though, I also gave another woman a chance to bring a baby into the world. They both got what they wanted. And I'm cer-tain that if you interview Renata in a few years, she'll be happy with the outcome, too."

  "So you feel," Rivers cut in quickly, "that Valerie Dalton has an obligation to keep Renata alive? After all, it's her bone mar-row that is vital to Renata's health."

  Fletcher thought for a short moment. "That," she said, "is actually a very good question. No, I don't think Valerie has any more obligation to keep Renata alive now than she did when she came to me last March. All she has is the obligation not to kill Renata."

  Rivers seemed genuinely puzzled. "What's the difference?"

  "It's the difference between acceding to transoption and demanding abortion. It's the difference between expelling a fetus and killing it. It's the difference..." she searched for the concept, "between abandonment and infanticide. One allows the possibility of rescue. The other takes an active hand in making rescue impossible. That is the difference between transoption and abortion." Fletcher shook her head. "No. If I believed that Valerie was under some sort of obligation to care for Renata, I would never have performed the transoption. There are some rights that you must recognize whether you approve of them or not. A woman has a right at any point to abandon her child. Anything less would be slavery. She has no right, though, to kill that child. And I have every right to take in an abandoned child of any age."

  "We'll be right back," Rivers said to the camera. When the red light flicked off, he turned to Fletcher and smiled. "Well done. If I could have you move down one seat, we'll get into a discussion with Ms. Burke-"

  "Sorry." Evelyn stood, removing her microphone to lay it on the chair. "I made my point. I'm not going to endure their abuse."

  "Why not? I mean, they aren't here to abuse you. They just want their points of view aired, too."

  "Then air them. You don't need me for that. Theirs are the same viewpoints that have been aired for centuries: slavery for women or death for infants. Have fun." She stepped off the risers. A voice over the loudspeaker demanded to know what was going on.

  Rivers sat back in his chair. "People might draw the
wrong inference if you're not here after the commercials."

  She turned to face him. "If my words didn't convince them of anything, neither would my forbearance."

  Rivers raised a hand in defeat. "Have a nice day."

  "

  The door to Terry Johnson's office swung open. Dr. Fletcher stood there, staring at the cramped enclosure. Her eyes nar-rowed, focusing in on Terry behind the small grey military-surplus desk.

  "Don't you ever put me on one of those things again," she said. He looked at her with a merry expression. "You were great," he said. "A few more of those and you'll have the press in your pocket."

  "I'm a doctor. I have to keep my pockets clean."

  "It's the doctor part we've got to worry about." He pulled a small sheaf of papers from under a coffee cup. "BMQA." He pronounced it Bumqua.

  She took the pages from him and looked them over. Her eyes revealed the pain the words caused.

  "It's only a temporary suspension," he said.

  Fletcher reached inside her jacket for her pack of Defiants. "Effectively permanent if they sit on their duffs and do noth-ing else. I could have been convicted of malpractice and man-slaughter, and they'd take years to suspend me. Get a little publicity, though, and pow."

  Terry moved quickly with the table lighter to strike up a flame for her. She took a long drag on the cigarette without even a thanks for the light. Her gaze fixed upon some distant vista outside his window, even though the view stopped four feet across at the masonry of another drab Long Beach building. Johnson filled the silent void. "Nurse Dyer was flat out fired as well as having her credentials pulled."

  "She told me she's moving back to San Francisco." The ciga-rette glowed orange at her fingertips. "I guess I'm available for lecture tours."

  "Don't let it get you down. If we can win the trial, we can file-"