"For instance?" Jake challenged a bit hopefully.
"For one thing we're going to believe you're not going to die. We're going to believe that with all our inner strength. We're going to all put our believing together so it's stronger than dying."
Jake pictured it. "Sure," he remarked dubiously.
Springer paused to choose his tack. "Did 1 ever tell you about your greatgrandfather's believing stone?" he asked.
"His what?"
"Believing stone."
"Nope."
"I thought I had."
"What was my great-grandfather's name?"
"Willard."
"You probably told somebody else about it."
"I wouldn't. It's strictly a family thing."
"Confidential information."
A conspiratorial nod from Springer. "One day way back when your greatgrandfather was about your age, he was looking for arrowheads in a field up in New Milford. It was springtime and the ground had just been plowed up, and he knew that was usually the best time to find arrowheads."
"What kind of Indians used to be up around there?"
"Mohawks," Springer said, which was the first tribe that came to mind. "Anyway, your great-grandfather . . ."
"Why don't you call him Willard?"
". . . Willard didn't find any arrowheads that day but he did find a pretty stone, and he took it home and everyone agreed it was so different from the sort of stones seen in those parts that it must have come from somewhere else. Willard was proud of it and it got so he always carried it around with him, and before long he discovered that his stone could do things for him."
"What sort of things?"
"Well, whenever he got low on believing all he had to do was hold the stone in his hand and it would give him a refill."
A skeptical side glance from Jake.
Springer didn't let it faze him. "That stone came in handy countless times for Willard. He always caught trout even when the water in the streams was too warm or too low. Once he caught an eighteen-inch brown with his hands by just grabbing in under the grassy overhang of a bank. And in winter when he wanted to go sledding there was always good ice for him on one hill or the other. Simply because he had enough belief that that was how those things would be."
Jake shook his head incredulously. "You expect me to believe all that?"
"Are you sure I never told you about the believing stone, never even mentioned it?"
"Never."
"Want to see it?"
"You got it with you?"
"I carry it with me a lot." Springer took stone 588 from his shirt pocket, handed it to Jake.
Jake looked it over. "What is it, quartz?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe it's even rock crystal." Jake offered the stone back to Springer.
"Why don't you hang on to it for a while," Springer suggested.
"What for?"
"Seems to me you're low on believing. You could use a refill."
"All I have to do is hang on to it, right?"
"Just hang on."
"For how long?"
"For as long as it takes."
Jake's eyes got blinky and he finally fell asleep. With stone 588 in his hand. When his fingers relaxed and released the stone. Springer found an Ace elastic bandage in one of the dresser drawers, the sort of bandage Jake used to use when he turned an ankle or pulled a muscle playing volleyball. Springer, careful not to awaken Jake, placed the stone on the inside of Jake's right wrist and wrapped the elastic bandage around it just snugly enough to keep it in place. He dimmed the lamp by draping a towel over it, so he could still see for sure the stone was there.
He removed his shoes, hunched down in the chintz-covered chair, settled into his vigil.
It was up to stone 588 now, he thought. Either it was doing what it was supposed to be able to do or it wasn't. He'd risked all for it, he'd stolen for it, he'd been almost killed, and he'd killed for it. Now was no time to start doubting it.
Chapter 40
The following morning at half past ten Springer was in Dr. Stimson's office at Sloan-Kettering. He was alone and feeling it. Jake was down on the second floor being x-rayed, so his condition could be assessed prior to chemotherapy treatment. It was routine. Dr. Stimson was with Jake. He'd told Springer he'd return in fifteen, twenty minutes at most, but Springer had been waiting close to an hour.
The time that it was taking did not bode well, Springer thought. It probably meant the x-rays showed unexpected complications, a severe worsening of Jake's condition, medical decisions having to be made. But maybe. Springer told himself, trying for ease, they were just having equipment problems, or it could be as simple a thing as they'd run out of film.
Springer got up and walked out of the office, went down the corridor to the drinking fountain, sucked up a mouthful, and went back into the office and sat again. For about the twentieth time. He took a medical journal from the hundreds that were stacked around. Turned to any page. His eyes struck upon such phrases as limb salvage procedure, resection surgery, distant metastases, and fully malignant He closed the journal, placed it back on its stack cautiously, as though otherwise he would unleash its contents.
Dr. Stimson finally returned, with a large manila envelope containing x-rays. He appeared solemn, distracted, even a bit rattled. He apologized perfunctorily for having made Springer wait and got right to the point. "We need your consent to do another biopsy on your son's leg," he said.
Those were certainly not the words Springer had hoped to hear.
Dr. Stimson removed a large x-ray from the manila envelope. As it bent and buckled in his hands it sounded like make-believe thunder. "We must obtain some fresh tissue samples in order to evaluate the cells and determine exactly what is going on," he said, clipping the x-ray onto the lighted viewing panel on the wall.
Springer had never seen an x-ray of Jake's leg. It was strange to be able to look into flesh that he'd helped create. There was Jake's thigh and knee with the affected area so obvious, the tumor interrupting and misshaping the femur bone like an ugly growth knot on a limb, crushing in the bone, relentlessly overwhelming the adjacent flesh, blood vessels, nerves. It looked so painful to Springer that he had to close his eyes.
How ridiculous of him, he thought in eyeshut, to have put his faith in anything so illusory as stone 588. He'd been thinking with his hope. But the stone had worked for others. Why hadn't it worked for Jake? Was some sort of moral requirement involved? Could it be that the reason it hadn't worked was he'd stolen for it, killed?
Dr. Stimson meanwhile had clipped another x-ray to the light panel, on the right of the first. "Our initial thought was that the technician had made an error," he said, "that possibly she had developed the wrong film and what we were looking at was someone else's x-ray. Subsequent exposures eliminated that possibility."
Springer's eyes were open now.
Stimson explained. "These are nearly identical views of your son's leg. This one"—he indicated the x-ray on the left—"helped us make our diagnosis. It was taken a month ago. This" — he directed Springer's attention to the x-ray on the right—" is one of the x-rays we took today."
Stimson pointed out the difference between the two, how the most recent x-ray showed both the outer covering of the bone, the periosteum, and the compact bone within it to be perfectly intact, how the surrounding tissues and vessels were not distorted by malignancy. In fact, there was no sign of a tumor there or of one ever having been there.
"We don't know what to make of it," Dr. Stimson admitted. "Our entire Solid Tumor Task Force is down there now theorizing. The Cornell people who came over to take a look say that we must have misdiagnosed. I'm for making sure, doing another biopsy."
Springer was staring at today's x-ray. He knew what he was looking at.
The Righting of Jake.
He had a pang of guilt for having doubted, but that was easily offset by joy.
"Where's Jake now?" Springer asked.
&nb
sp; "Waiting on two. Do I have your consent, Mr. Springer?"
"Thank you, but no," Springer said and headed for his boy. He had a huge happy lump in his throat, and although he walked down the corridor it certainly felt like dancing.
Chapter 41
In the most incorruptible, comfortable-looking casket money could buy, Elizabeth "Libby" Hopkins-Hull was placed on a stone shelf in the family crypt in Greenwich. Her shelf was directly above the one occupied by Audrey's mother, Gillian Croft.
Audrey thought of it as the reunion of a couple of high-spirited adventuresses, sensuous cavorters, both better off having each other to gallivant with on the other side. Audrey left all her regrets in the crypt, which was swiftly bolted and sealed. What she took away were only pleasant, easy-to-carry memories.
For the entire week after the funeral, Audrey was kept busy with legalities and other matters having to do with the Hull estate. She was rushed from one meeting to the next, day and night. She faced, down the lengths of conference tables, so many sincere-suited attorneys and their dry, affected competence that they all began to look and sound alike to her.
The attorneys soon discovered that she wasn't the sort to just take their word for everything and sign whatever documents they placed before her. They patiently patronized her when she wanted to know not only what she was being asked to sign but why. It put a sycophantic strain on their polish when she tried to cut through their legal triple-talk.
The attorneys and executives she met with kept referring to this or that Hull holding, this or that Hull position.
Audrey tired of it. She requested a list of the various businesses and ventures Hull was into, everything it owned outright, controlled, or had any stake in.
It wasn't, she was told, that simple.
"Fuck it," she said, causing the clearing of several old phlegmy throats. "Make it simple."
She didn't realize that she was trampling on their autonomies, that this thing called Hull was so far-reaching and complex, purposely structured in a way that would confound even those who believed they were overseeing it.
Naively trying to get to the bottom line of all the bottom lines, Audrey asked what did the Hull holdings aggregately amount to? (She was beginning to talk like them.)
In other words, how much was she, Audrey Hopkins-Hull, worth?
Did she mean personally worth or worth within the Hull Foundation or what?
How much could she, to put it plainly, count on? That's what she meant
They looked to one another.
Billions was the closest they could come to answering her. Billions.
Audrey, exasperated, asked one more question: Was there enough money so that she would never want no matter what she wanted?
They blew like correctly attired whales, as though it had been absurd of her to ask. More than enough, they told her, with emphasis on the more.
Not really satisfied but thus assured, Audrey graciously withdrew and let them get on with the business of making money. She'd been neglecting Springer, she thought, which was to say she'd been neglecting herself.
Springer did, indeed, feel somewhat deprived of Audrey all that week, but he too was kept busy—with classifying, pricing, and putting into inventory the goods from the Townsend haul and with having to keep convincing Gayle that it was all right for her to allow Jake to go out and play volleyball or whatever. Naturally Gayle found it difficult to accept that Jake was so soon wholly recovered, and nearly every afternoon there would be an SOS from Jake asking Springer to come over and liberate him.
Also, Springer was mentally preoccupied with trying to figure out how stone 588, stolen from his safe, had ended up in Wintersgill's hand. He imagined all sorts of explanations (a few were close to the truth) but not one, he felt, filled the gap acceptably. It bothered him that he'd never know.
Something else that weighed even heavier on his mind was what to do with stone 588.
Now it was Friday night and he was stretched out on the sofa in Audrey's living room. Ample light was being provided by the electric aura of the city. An Usquaebach and water balanced on his bare chest while he talked on the phone with Norman.
"I was sure you'd want it," Springer said.
'I'll admit it's tempting, but—"
"Any doctor would jump at the chance to have it."
"Not this doctor," Norman said.
"Why not?"
"I've given it adequate thought, Phil."
"Just tell me why not."
"Well, I'd probably start off with good intentions, telling myself that I'd only resort to using it whenever a case had me stumped or was hopeless. Before long, though, I'd be doubting my professional self, my decisions, every diagnosis. I'd begin to rely more and more on the stone. Not because of any weakness in my character, mind you. It's only human nature to want to be surely right. I would no longer have to know much, if anything at all, about medicine. Everything I've strived for all my life, all my years of study and training, would be superfluous, time wasted. I'd never even have to lay eyes on another medical journal, keep up with things, attend another symposium. There would be no more challenge for me."
"But you'd become a world-renowned doctor," Springer put in.
"I intend to become that anyway." Norman laughed to temper his immodesty. "You know, Phil, it's ironic — actually, in a way, perverse. Here we are striving so hard to overcome all the horrible physical puzzles and along comes a panacea, a cure-all, and it brings us to realize it's not the best thing that could happen. For some reason, perhaps having something to do with the ongoing collective spirit of mankind, we're better off with our two-steps-forward, one-step-backward ways, rejoicing in our discoveries, being grateful for them."
Springer couldn't argue with that.
"Besides," Norman added, "if I had stone 588 to work with I wouldn't even be a doctor, I'd be a shaman."
"So?" Resigned.
"So, by the way, I had lunch with Janet yesterday. We had an enjoyable talk. God, she's bright. She came down here for a couple of days with someone whom she referred to as her special friend. Seems to me she's smitten."
"Great for her. And what about your love life?"
"Let's just say it's an expendable necessity."
"Find someone," Springer urged. "Take time to look."
Norman too quickly promised he would. "Don't eat too many Eclairs au chocolat, " he said.
"That's not my department. So long, doctor."
"Take it easy, dealer."
A click again put 250 miles between the two brothers.
Springer lay there thinking that perhaps what he should do was just keep stone 588, sock it safely away, and only bring it out whenever there was an emergency. Wouldn't that be unconscionably selfish? The first time some friend was ill—the first time he even heard of anyone seriously ill — wouldn't he run and get the stone to make them well? And how many times could he do that, no matter how clandestinely, before word of it got out and he was descended upon by all sorts of people who had anything wrong with them? He'd become more of a miraculous attraction than Lourdes. He'd become a messiah. He certainly didn't want that.
Could he, then, hand over stone 588 to some well-established medical institution? No matter how ethical and well-meaning the institution might be, it would have to compromise itself. The stone took several hours to perform a Righting. Say, four hours on the average. That meant six people each day would be able to receive its benefits. Two thousand one hundred and ninety people over a year's time: a mere fraction of a fraction of the seriously ill of the world. Who would determine which two thousand one hundred and ninety out of the many millions most deserved to be healed? What would be the qualifications? Wealth? Probably; no—the way the world ran—surely.
He could, of course, let the government have the stone. Just drop it into the hands of power and let it be used for that. A dose of medical extortion to augment questionable statesmanship. Every ailing adversary who became a healthy ally would want to remain healt
hy, stay in line. No doubt that was why those two State Department guys, Pugh and Blayney, had been after the stone. They were only a taste of the extent the government would go to if it got wind of the real stone 588. Anyway, Springer decided, he wasn't that much of a flag waver.
What to do with stone 588?
Springer imagined himself throwing it away, imagined standing on a hill that he was familiar with up near the house in Sherman, the stone in his hand. Bringing his arm forward, letting it fly. He knew he wouldn't be able to doit.
He remained there on the sofa a while longer, considering alternatives. Then he picked up his shoes and his drink and went upstairs.
Audrey was among her pillows at the foot of her bed. She had on a pale blue silk charmeuse teddy and matching spiky heels. Her hair was severely slicked back, looked wet, and her eyes were darkly shadowed and penciled in an exaggerated way that gave them a strong oriental hint. She was wise about varying herself for Springer.
"The pendulum says we should stay at the Crillon," she said.
"I promised Jake the Ritz."
"I had Ainsworth arrange for a double suite at the Crillon." Ainsworth was the man who'd been chosen to take Wintersgill's place as head of the foundation.
"I have confirmed reservations at the Ritz," Springer told her, settling it.
"Well," she said, "we'll keep the Crillon suite as a backup. Who knows, perhaps the Ritz will run out of linens or something. What time do you want to leave?"
"Our flight is at ten Sunday morning."
"What flight is that?"
"Concorde."
"Oh. I forgot to tell you. Ainsworth arranged for one of the Hull jets at Westchester. A seven-oh-seven or something. It'll save us from having to go through all that rush and hassle at Kennedy, and we can take off whenever we're ready. I thought we might leave Saturday night and sleep in nice big beds all the way over. Doesn't that sound the better way to go?"
"I already picked up our tickets," Springer said.
"No problem. Ainsworth will see that they're returned or whatever."
Springer wondered why he so resented Ainsworth. He hadn't yet even met the man. Maybe Wintersgill had soured him on Ainsworths, but then, maybe that wasn't it at all. "We're flying Concorde and staying at the Ritz," he told Audrey firmly.
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