The Conspiracy Club (11 page)

The Lincoln pulled away from the curb and glided.

“Arthur, what does CCC stand for?”

Arthur’s hesitation lasted long enough to make an impression. “Just a little joke. Are you comfortable?”

“Very.”

“Good.”

“Fine cuisine, no?”

“Excellent.”

Arthur smiled.

He drove without comment as Jeremy alternated between nodding off and springing awake. Cracking the window a couple of inches helped a bit, and by the time they approached the hospital, Jeremy’s brain had settled, and his breathing was slow and easy.

Arthur reached the doctors’ parking lot and drove through the nearly empty tier to Jeremy’s car.

“I do hope you had a good time,” said Arthur.

“It was great, thanks. Your friends are interesting.”

Arthur didn’t answer.

“They seem,” said Jeremy, “to have lived full lives.”

Pause. “They have.”

“How often do you meet?”

Another pause, longer. “Irregularly.” Arthur touched his bow tie, flicked a button, and unlocked Jeremy’s door. Avoiding eye contact, he pulled out his pocket watch and consulted the dial.

Curt dismissal.

Jeremy said, “An interesting bunch.”

Arthur clicked the watch shut and stared straight ahead.

What had become of Arthur’s amiability? Jeremy had found the old man’s gregariousness off-putting, but now — maddeningly — he missed it.

He wondered if he’d given his little performance undue credit. Had his discourse been too long-winded? Boring? Offensive, in some way?

Did I screw up, somehow?

Why should I care?

Unable to summon up apathy; he hoped he hadn’t blundered. The Lincoln idled, and Arthur stared out the windshield.

Jeremy opened his door, gave Arthur one more chance.

The warmth of being part of something lingered in his belly. Suddenly — inexplicably — he wanted to be
popular
.

Arthur kept staring straight ahead.

“Well,” said Jeremy.

“Good night,” said Arthur.

“Thanks again.”

“You’re welcome,” said Arthur. And nothing more.

B
y the time he reached home, Jeremy had put Arthur’s strange, sudden coolness aside. There were worse things in life than social error. When he crawled into bed, his mind was empty, and he slept like a corpse.

The cold light of morning — and a hangover — killed further introspection. He popped aspirin, hazarded a run in the icy air, took a scalding shower, called Angela at home but got no answer. It was Saturday morning, but patients depended on him, and he suddenly felt like working. He was at his desk by nine, trying to ignore the grit in his eyelids and the throbbing in his temples.

His pathetic stab at the book chapter glared at him reproachfully. He decided to do personal rounds earlier than usual, see all his patients before lunch, spend more time with each one of them.

He’d dressed as he always did but felt rumpled and uncouth. Grabbing his white coat off the door hook, he threw it on. The coat was something he generally avoided, wanting to separate himself from the physicians.

I’m the doctor who doesn’t hurt you.

That helped with kids. Not that he saw many kids anymore. Too much pain. Some things he just couldn’t handle.

Adult patients didn’t seem to care how you dressed as long as you avoided extremes of grooming and demeanor. Some were even comforted by the image the lab coat imparted.

Clinical rites, priestly vestments. Here’s an
expert
.

If they only knew.

A few minor crises kept him working past noon, and he stretched the day farther by extending his bedside contacts, taking time to sit down with the nursing staff, charting carefully, with atypical legibility.

A page-message from Angela said, “Sorry about today, got called in.”

A major crisis arose just before three: man with a gun near the Ob-Gyn Clinic, and the page operator was adamant that Dr.
Carrier
was needed.

The threat turned out to be the husband of a hysterectomy patient who’d been spotted by a nurse with a telltale bulge under his sweater and now sat alone and smoldering in a vacated waiting room.

Security had been called, the charge nurse informed Jeremy. The husband was an angry man, he’d always made her nervous. Hospital regulations said someone from Mental Health needed to be there, and the department said he was next up.

The affair turned out to be sad rather than frightening. Against everyone’s advice, Jeremy entered the room before the guards arrived. The man was unshaven, red-eyed, and under the influence of depression. Jeremy sat down and talked to him and listened and when the man said, “Why’s everyone so nervous?” Jeremy pointed to the bulge.

The man laughed and lifted his sweater and shirt. Underneath was a colostomy bag. The man said, “They can frisk me if they want. At their own fucking risk.”

He laughed harder, and Jeremy joined in. The two of them talked some more, and the poor fellow got into topics he’d never opened up about to anyone. Raged about his illness, his wife’s, the prospect of childlessness; there was plenty to be angry about. After an hour, he seemed calm, but Jeremy wouldn’t have been surprised if next time he did show up armed.

When the two of them exited the room, three members of the useless security detail the hospital employed were standing by, trying to look competent.

Jeremy said, “Everything’s under control. You can go.”

The biggest guard said, “Now, Doc—”

“Go.”

The time he spent with the poor man cheered him. Someone else’s problems. He’d snapped to attention like the faithful member of the mental health army he was. Any good soldier knew the key to efficient battle: death of the individual in service of the greater good.

Feeling noble and depersonalized, he returned to his office.

Angela had called thirty minutes earlier. He paged her, was transferred to Thoracic Medicine, where a ward clerk told him Dr. Rios had just been called to an emergency lung surgery.

That puzzled him. Angela was a medical resident, not a cutter. No doubt, there’d be an explanation.

He glanced at the sheaf of scolding papers, left to collect his mail. A hefty stack, today; he sorted through the usual memos, solicitations, announcements of conferences and symposia, came to a large, brown interoffice envelope at the bottom.

This one had been sent from the Department of Otolaryngology. No name in the recipient blank. He’d last consulted on an ENT case several months ago — an inner ear tumor that had proved fatal — wondered what they wanted, now.

Inside the envelope were photocopied pages that had nothing to do with ears, noses, or throats.

A seventeen-year-old article reproduced from an ophthalmology journal.

Ablation of corneal tissue using the CO2 Vari-Pulsar
4532 2
^nd
Generation Laser Scalpel . . .

The authors were a surgical team headquartered at the Royal Medical College of Oslo. An international team — Norwegian names, Russian names, English names. None of them meant a thing to Jeremy.

Obviously a mistake; he’d gotten someone else’s mail, not a rare occurrence for the parcels that zipped through the mail tubes veining the hospital’s moldy walls. Perhaps some secretary had confused psychology with speech pathology.

He phoned Otolaryngology and spoke to a male secretary who hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. Tossing the article in the trash, he put aside the envelope for further use. Fiscal responsibility and all that. Financial Affairs had issued yet another order to tighten up.

As he folded it, something rattled inside. Something had wedged at the bottom, and he pulled it out. A small, white index card, a typed message.

For your interest.

He took another look at the envelope. No name in the recipient blank; this had to be a mistake. He rarely saw eye patients, couldn’t recall one in ages — the last, he was fairly certain, had been five years ago, a blind woman who’d decided to curl up and die. After two months of psychotherapy, Jeremy believed he’d helped her, and no one had told him different. No, there could be no connection to this. Why in the world would he have an interest in lasers?

He retrieved the article from the wastebasket, read it, found it to be typical medical jargondygook, stuffed with numbers and tables, barely comprehensible. He cut to the summary. The main point was that seventeen years ago laser scalpels had been judged to be a good, clean way to cut.

Cutting techniques . . .
Humpty-Dumpty
. . . no, that was silly. If his mind hadn’t been addled by the last night’s booze and confusion and pontification about criminality, he’d never have stretched that far.

What a strange night. In retrospect, comic and surreal. He smiled painfully, remembering his acute bout of neediness. Why had he ever cared what a group of elderly eccentrics thought of him? Even if they asked him back, he wouldn’t accept.

Tomorrow was Tumor Board. He was curious how Arthur would treat him.

Then a thought occurred to him: Perhaps
Arthur
had sent the article.

No, the pathologist handwrote with a fountain pen, used that heavy, blue rag paper. A traditional man — an antiquarian, as witnessed by the vintage suits, the old car, the quaint vocabulary.

A typed message on anything so mundane as an index card would be out of character.

Unless Arthur was being coy.

The obliqueness fit — that would be just like the pathologist. Gregarious one day, frosty the next.

A game player, everything a puzzle. Was this a challenge to Jeremy to figure out?

Ablation of corneal tissue? Laser eye surgery? Had Arthur assumed Jeremy would share his eclectic interests? The old man hopped around from butterflies to carcinomas to Grand Discussions of Issues That Matter, so why not lasers?

Still, his approach to Jeremy hadn’t been scattershot. On the contrary, Arthur had sought to find common ground between the two of them. Pathology and psychology converging. Sharing the cold, black space where twisted minds brought about bloody deaths.

The roots of very, very bad behavior.

Arthur had had a very clear focus, and Jeremy had been right about his invitation to supper having something to do with that.

He recalled the pall that had set upon the room after someone — the writer, Maynard, he was pretty sure — had said, “Expediency trumps virtue.”

“Yet again,” the woman judge, Balleron had added.

Then, the silence. Nothing weighty was being discussed — something about fruit, grapefruit — those other things — pomelos. Sweet taste, but they shipped poorly.

Yet, for just a few moments, the mood in the room had changed.

Expediency trumps virtue.

What a strange bunch, no point wasting any more time on them.

Same for this — laser scalpels . . . just a postal snafu; he was making too much of it.

Filling his head with a flotsam of random thoughts because he was avoiding his chapter.

Still, his thoughts shifted back to Arthur. Treating him coolly for no apparent reason — rudely, really.

A puzzle. But not an important one.

Jeremy folded the card into an airplane, sailed it into the wastebasket. Followed up with a toss of article. The envelope, too, fiscal responsibility be damned.

Two paragraphs of chapter outline stared up at him from his desk.

Time to put aside silly stuff. Confront his creative inadequacies.

I
t was 10 p.m. and they were in Angela’s bed, naked in the dark, wide-awake.

They’d been together nearly three hours. Angela had phoned just as Jeremy was preparing to leave the hospital. She said, “Good, I got you.” Her voice was faint.

“Everything okay?” he said.

“Sure,” she said. “No, I’m lying. Can we get together, maybe a quick dinner, then just hang out at my place?”

“Sounds like a plan. Any dinner in particular?”

“How about that Italian place over on Hampshire — Sarno’s? It’s close and I need to move my legs.”

“Sarno’s it is. On me.”

“No, it’s my turn to pay.”

“You get no turn. You’re a starving resident, deserve a free meal.”

She laughed. Nicest sound he’d heard all day.

They met at the hospital entrance and walked, arm in arm, to the restaurant. Angela wore a long, navy blue coat. Her dark hair streamed over the faux-fur collar. She looked waifish, young, worn, and stared at her feet, as if needing to orient herself. The rain was light, dissipating from their clothes almost instantly.

Jeremy put his arm around her shoulder, and her head dropped. He kissed her hair. If she’d put on makeup, it had faded long ago. The shampoo she’d used that morning was tinctured with operating room antisepsis.

Within seconds, she was leaning against him. Heavy, for a woman so thin. They moved slowly and awkwardly through the three dark blocks to the restaurant.

When Sarno’s neon sign — the tricolor boot of Italy — came into view, Angela said, “Jeremy, I’m
so
tired.”

She got down a third of a plate of pasta carbonara and half a glass of iced tea. Jeremy was back to his feeble appetite; last night’s gluttony seemed distant, an aberration. He picked at his ravioli, managed to finish a glass of coarse Chianti.

They bickered playfully over the check and Angela finally allowed him to pay. Her beeper went off, and she phoned in. She returned to the table smiling. “That was Marty Bluestone — another R-II. Tomorrow night’s his anniversary, and he wants to take his wife out. So he offered to finish my shift tonight. I’m free till tomorrow.”

Beneath her blue coat, she wore resident’s casuals — sweater and jeans and tennis shoes. Relieved of the garment and her stethoscope, she looked like a college kid.

“On the phone you said everything wasn’t okay.”

“I was just being a baby,” she said. “It was right after I got off shift.”