by Dick Cluster
The resident nodded and went on his way. Apparently dropping Jay’s name was enough to prove that you belonged. Alex looked back toward the anteroom just as Yvonne reappeared. She turned the corner into the main corridor and went to wait by the double doors of the transplant unit. The doors bulged and then opened, admitting a long cart covered with plastic, pushed by a black man in white jacket and pants.
Alex noticed tanks on the bottom of the cart, and hoses from the tanks feeding into the plastic. The shape of the person lying inside the plastic was vague. Yvonne Price accompanied the orderly, the cart, and the patient into the anteroom. The cart was a midget, mobile isolation room. Somehow Alex didn’t want to wait around to see the empty cart reappear. Nor did he need to see the kitchen and find out more about what the inmates could and couldn’t be permitted to eat. No salads, Yvonne had told him. Raw vegetables were too hard to disinfect. He looked around for Jay once more and noticed that Kramer, too, was watching the anteroom door through which the cart had disappeared. Somehow Alex suspected this was Yvonne’s patient’s last day of TBI, that the woman had reentered the sterile area for the duration, with her cell counts now down to zip. Did the medical staff ever feel like zookeepers? he wondered. Ministering to the needs of creatures just slightly less human than themselves?
You’d better get out of here, Alex told himself. He walked down the corridor and through the double doors, which on the other side had big red stop signs reading AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY— INTENSIVE CARE. When he was alone in the elevator he let out a deep breath and said, “I’d die before I spent a month like that.” He knew, however, that the opposite was true. Like anybody else, he’d spend a month or two or three in there if he was convinced it could help him stay alive.
5. The Other Shoe
“You’re back.” Deborah looked up from the keyboard, then ignored him while she finished entering whatever she was entering, then finally looked up again.
“I’m back,” Alex agreed. “I visited the unit and took a walk outside— dirty air, but fresh. Has our boss come back?”
“He said to tell you he’s a little hung up, he’ll be free again about four. You can start the meter ticking, or whatever you do. I’m supposed to get clear with you about the charges and all.”
“Thirty an hour plus expenses, the same thing I’m losing by not being in my shop. Only this is tax free, because I don’t report it, because I don’t actually have a license for this kind of work.”
“Yeah, everybody moonlights these days. My husband’s a pilot, he sometimes gives flying lessons to friends and acquaintances on the side. Strictly illegal. I hope to God none of them ever crash. You can sit here or in the examining room if you want to wait around.”
She didn’t offer him the boss’s office, Alex noticed. Did she think he’d go rifling through the files? He would, probably. He wasn’t convinced his new client was planning to tell him everything he needed to know:
“This letter he showed me,” Alex said. “Did you open it, when it came?”
“Uh-huh, I did. It was addressed to Dr. H. J. Harrison, personal, but he gets a lot like that— patients, or people that want to be patients, especially since that article. Not really personal at all, they just hope that will get them past somebody like me. But letters addressed ‘Jay Harrison, personal,’ I don’t open, I just give them to him. Why?”
“I want to know how he reacted, whether he seemed scared, shocked, surprised, what?”
“You don’t trust him?”
“Say I’m professionally skeptical.”
“And born suspicious, too, I bet. Like I’m a born blabbermouth. That’s what you’re counting on, right? Well, he told me I could tell you anything you wanted to know.” She looked at her watch and then at a daily calendar on her cluttered desk. “As long as I’m getting paid to be a blabbermouth, can we go out for coffee?”
“Sure,” Alex said. “Downstairs?”
“No. The coffee’s a lot better across the street. Let me just call home and check on Jennifer. I think she’s about as sick as me, to tell you the truth. She just needed a day off. Don’t we all?”
Across the street meant a pseudo-French fast-food eatery on Brookline Avenue. To get there Deborah McCarthy led him through a maze of corridors and a connecting building and out a service door. They got coffee and pastries and then, over a rickety round table on the roofed outdoor patio, Alex learned a few things. Deborah’s daughter was going on twelve, the same age as Maria, but Deborah was still married, and so unlike Maria the daughter lived with both parents full time. Alex explained about being a parent one week on, one week off. Deborah also had a boy two years younger than Jennifer, and another boy two years younger than that.
Catholic but careful, one way or another, Alex thought. Her husband was a private pilot, not airline. Sometimes Jay talked about taking lessons from Richard, but it hadn’t happened yet. Jay was interested in Richard, they all socialized occasionally, but Jay couldn’t ever really keep the kids and their ages straight. No, Jay wasn’t married. Jay didn’t have any kids.
“When I gave him the letter?” she repeated when Alex pressed her about it again. She’d just taken another bite of her chocolate croissant, so the first part of what she said came out garbled, the words getting caught in the pastry. “I opened it, the way I said, and got kind of a shock. Jay came in and asked about the mail, so I just handed it to him. I didn’t know what to say. He kind of just stood there like his mind was a long way off. He has an expression, it’s kind of like, ironic, I guess.”
She tried to imitate the crinkling Alex had noticed at the corners of the doctor’s eyes. All that did was show off her eyebrows. She had dark, interesting brows, the curvature accentuated with pencil. They knitted together like sketches of birds’ wings, or waves.
“He didn’t try to hide his reaction, if that’s what you’re asking. I was curious, I admit it, and he let me read what passed over his face. Then he went into his office for about five minutes. No lights lit up on my phone, so he didn’t make any calls. I told you I was curious. I wondered if he’d call somebody, and who. He came back and explained what he wanted the new letter to say, the one he showed the police. He told me a little about this Foster, that hitchhiking adventure and all.”
“Why do you think he involved you in writing the substitute letter, instead of doing it himself?”
“You don’t have a secretary. Guys with secretaries, this gets to be a habit, especially doctors. Women doctors too. Jay can type, but not accurately, even though he once ran some kind of printing press, or so he says.”
“Do you think he wanted your advice? Or did he want an accomplice?” Alex didn’t know where he was going. He was just trying to understand his client. The way to understand any mechanism was take it apart.
“Well, he knows me, and I already read the real letter, so…” Deborah took a big bite of her croissant and waved her free hand in a circle, whatever that meant.
“Do you think he could have made this up, this letter, and sent it to himself? People have been known to want other people found and to make up the reason why.”
“Oh, is that what you’re getting at,” Deborah said with her mouth still half-full. She finished chewing. “Sure. That’s possible.” She started to say something else, then raised her arm straight up and waved the remaining end of the croissant. “Here he comes, you can ask him that yourself. Looks in a hurry, dammit. He must want something done. I can’t stay late today. Richard’s away on a job, and I promised Jen I’d be home on time.”
A new look passed over her face, not an expression really but a pallor, as if she’d seen something she didn’t like. Alex turned to see Jay Harrison standing a few feet behind him, heaving deep breaths. Jay was sagging visibly at the chin and shoulders and knees. He looked as if somebody had sucker-punched him on his way in. Unless he was having a heart attack. But he kept catching his breath. Just ran too far too fast, Alex decided, but why?
The other shoe dropped. Th
e doctor sank into a chair. Deborah’s color had come back. Her dark brows were drawn together now as one.
“I don’t believe this,” Jay rasped, then stopped to catch his breath again. “We’re missing a marrow sample from the tank.”
“Jesus,” Deborah said, already on her feet. “Let me get on it. Who did the surgery? Nobody can keep track of anything anymore. I bet it was sent over to the Brigham by mistake.”
Alex felt his spine, which had gone rigid at Jay’s words, grow supple again. Right, he thought, a mistake. The Brigham and Women’s was a major teaching and research hospital somewhere back on the other side of the Dennison toward Huntington Ave. They must also do marrow transplants. Overlapping staffs must make for confusion sometimes.
“No.” Jay looked bewildered. “Why can’t I get this out?” He banged a fist on the table, which rocked onto two of its legs and then bounced back. “Somebody took it, that’s what I mean. For ransom. They want money.” Once he’d gotten that much out, Jay seemed to get himself in hand. He used a napkin to dam up the spilled coffee rolling off the table onto his knee. “They called me with a message: no cops, no questions, just the money, tomorrow morning, left exactly where they say. I’ll have to go through some channels to get the money. Dan, for a start, and he’ll have to go to whoever can authorize Joe Topakian. But she’s my patient. I’m just going to keep saying this is a medical decision and I make the call.”
He’d gone from disbelief to command very quickly, Alex thought, impressed. Alex himself was still watching a gloved hand pull a thin metal box out of the swirling mist. Don’t fucking spill it, Alex was saying to the hand.
Jay said, “Deborah, I’m going to need you to run around with whatever paperwork, if you can possibly—”
“Richard’s off on a job but I’ll call somebody to go stay with Jen.”
“And Alex, I need you to help with the ransom. They said one person, alone, and they said the person shouldn’t be me.”
“Sure,” Alex said, without hesitation. “How much ransom?” What he meant was, did these kidnappers seem rational and businesslike in their demands? He didn’t consider why he thought of them as kidnappers. If you held somebody’s life for ransom, that’s what you were.
“Three hundred thousand.”
To Alex the hand seemed to hold the box more firmly, more carefully. Somehow this price seemed within reason. A marrow transplant cost the patient or insurer about a hundred thousand, Jay had said on the way up to the unit. Three hundred thousand didn’t sound completely out of line.
“Who’s the patient?” Deborah asked.
“Linda Dumars.”
“Oh, Lord.” Deborah grew two pink spots with white centers on her tightened cheeks. “I mean, it would be horrible whoever it was, but… She’s the one with the two little kids, right? The husband’s a doctor, he left them in my office while he was in with you.”
“Uh-huh. She— ”
“Who’s her nurse?” Alex interrupted suddenly.
“Her nurse? Yvonne Price. Why?”
“No, no. I just meant…” He meant this Linda Dumars would be the one he’d seen inert, muffled, wrapped in plastic like some freeze-dried food packet waiting for the hot water that would restore her real appearance, texture, motion, life. “This patient’s already well into her treatment, is that right?”
“She’s just been on three days of chemotherapy and then two days of radiotherapy, yes. Tomorrow is day zero, and effectively zero is what all her counts are going to be. Tomorrow morning is when she’s supposed to get the marrow reinfused.”
Deborah said, “You’re sure it’s true?”
“I got the call. I took down the information. I didn’t believe it either, so I ran downstairs to check. I didn’t tell Edie— the cryopreservation specialist— I just said I wanted to check something in the back. I can’t believe that none of us ever thought about security, special keys, a combination lock. Look, let’s get going. The fewer bankers Joe needs to pull away from the dinner table, the better off we’ll be. He can tell them any goddamn thing he wants except the truth. Alex, we need to leave at three a.m. Dress warm. If you don’t mind, I won’t tell you where we’re going until we go. The fewer people who know, the fewer people to fuck it up.”
“Do you think it’s Foster?” Alex asked.
“Let’s make the trade and get Linda back on schedule. Then we can worry about who took it, okay?”
6. Double Vision, Long Drive
At 2:30 A.M. Alex and Meredith sat waiting on the front steps of the house in North Cambridge which they had bought together a year before. Actually they had bought only the second floor and attic, above the first floor where Alex and his daughter had lived for six years before that. Most of those years were before Meredith Phillips came from England and Kim fixed her up with Alex under the guise of finding a mechanic for an ailing car.
“Are you warm enough?” Meredith asked.
“Warm enough,” Alex said. The temperature was in the mid-forties and he was quite comfortable in wool socks, blue jeans, a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and a new wool jacket, a souvenir of the trip the two of them had recently taken to Hudson Bay. He was comfortable except for an icy feeling deep in his bones.
Meredith said, “I was just talking. I’m glad it’s a cold place, wherever you’re going. The colder it is, the more likely the kidnappers can take good care of what they’ve got.”
“Once it’s been frozen the right way, Jay claimed, all you need is a decently insulated container so the liquid nitrogen doesn’t heat up and try to expand back into a gas. He said if they were shipping a frozen sample they’d usually use a special double-walled steel tank, a glorified thermos bottle. But in a pinch you could probably use a picnic cooler as long you handled it gently enough.”
“I wouldn’t want mine in either one. I’ve been thinking about her a lot. Trying to imagine how she must feel. If I were in her place, I’d feel robbed, defenseless, like a sort of jellyfish with my organs all exposed.” Meredith shuddered. She shook her wide shoulders and lowered her eyes. They were direct, thoughtful eyes set in a long, oval face. Meredith always stood straight, enjoyed her height, liked to walk, to ski, to play racquetball at the university where she taught. Her fingers on the computer keyboard, when Alex sat watching her work, seemed vigorous rather than subtle, determined rather than playful. When she played she played hard.
Alex thought sometimes she loved him for his vagaries, his meanderings, his preference for messing around in his head or with his hands rather than getting straight to the point all the time. Sometimes you loved what reflected you, sometimes you loved what you lacked. What scared Alex when he thought about Linda Dumars living precariously without her bone marrow was the loss of essence, of identity. What scared Meredith was the loss of strength, of physical structure. What scared them both was that, metaphors aside, if those frozen cells were to thaw and die, the patient would die too.
“What about Harrison?” she said. “Does he have enough power to get the money and hand it over without surveillance, without the police?” She sniffed, or maybe sniffled. “I suppose it depends on how many grants he’s pulled in.”
“I don’t know,” Alex said. Come hell or high water I’m not trusting my patient’s life to some damn SWAT team, was what the doctor had said. Alex watched a Toyota Celica, a few years old, turn the corner. Sporty, but kind of low-end-of-the-scale for a doctor. Apparently cars weren’t what Jay Harrison liked to spend his money on. “This must be him.”
“He,” Meredith said, sliding her arm around his waist for an instant. She’d confessed only recently to a longstanding temptation to correct his grammar, a desire she claimed had arisen at about the same time as the temptation to take him by the beard and see what he would feel like to kiss. She’d indulged the second, not the first. Both had to do with her casting him as some kind of American frontier type, Alex suspected. Books about adventurers and explorers had always fascinated her, she said, when she was growing up.
>
This was one reason why during Meredith’s vacation week in mid-March, they’d ridden the single-track Canadian railroad from Winnipeg to Churchill on Hudson Bay. To Alex growing up, Henry Hudson had primarily been the name of a highway leading out of New York City, but now neither he nor Meredith would ever forget the treeless plain alongside the shore, or the vast ice-strewn expanse of bay. As they stood there hand-in-hand Meredith had explained that Hudson had been one of those explorers who ventured too far, until his crew mutinied and put him ashore to die somewhere not far from where they stood. In Alex’s past investigations, Meredith had cautioned him about venturing too far, about taking chances just to prove he wasn’t any more vulnerable than anyone else. Tonight she hadn’t. It seemed that by mutual consent they’d avoided discussing the danger involved in what Alex was about to do.
Now the Celica stopped and Jay Harrison leaned across to open the passenger door. He seemed in a hurry. “Let’s go,” he said. Meredith stayed on the porch steps, watching Alex get into the car. As Jay pulled away from the curb, Alex opened his window to wave good-bye. Meredith nodded back, then rose and went inside.
On Jay’s back seat, Alex saw, rested a miniature version of the storage unit he’d seen in the blood bank: a small nitrogen tank linked by a hose to an insulated cooler. Next to it was a canvas mailbag, stuffed full. “Did you get any sleep?” Jay said. Alex felt like another piece of equipment. Jay was checking him for readiness. Thorough, the way you’d want your doctor to be.
Alex shook his head. “That’s the money, in the mailbag?”
“As specified. It’s full of twenties and fifties. I weighed it; it weighs about thirty pounds. You’re going to be carrying it on a beach, I don’t know how far. That’s another argument for the kidnappers’ rationality. They knew how much that many twenties and fifties were going to weigh.”
Jay circled the block and drove onto Alewife Brook Parkway, toward the Charles River. Everything was quiet. The night was clear. A lot more stars were out than cars.
