Knowing she was in danger.
She’d survived. And thrived. Stepping down from the bench, moving to the city, joining the Haverford.
One good way to keep a low profile was to leave home.
Pearls and fur and a gun in the purse . . . the merriest of widows. A strong woman who took care of herself.
Jeremy thought of something the judge had said that afternoon: One lives a certain amount of time, one experiences.
Maybe they’re just doing the right thing.
Was tragic experience what the CCC people had in common? Crime victims, all of them? Did that explain all the interest in the genesis of violence?
That fit with the pall that had followed Maynard’s comment about expedience trumping virtue.
Finally, he sensed he was on to something. Heart pounding, he plugged “Chess homicide” into the archive.
Found nothing.
The same for “Marquis homicide.” “Levy homicide” pulled up the case of a missing Washington intern, but Jeremy could find no connection to Professor Norbert.
Switching back to the general databases proved no more successful.
Wrong Man. Maybe he should just start feeling comfortable with that.
The third postcard arrived three days later. During that period, Jeremy had seen Angela once for coffee, and they’d shared a hurried dinner in the doctors’ dining room before she rushed back to on-call. Both times, she’d looked tired and talked of being worn down.
Yet she’d found time to observe two of Dirgrove’s surgeries.
“You’re okay with that, right?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“He’s all business, Jer . . . I guess I’m feeling guilty. Overloading my already crazy schedule, not having time for you—I promise to be better when things ease up.”
“You’re fine.”
“That’s nice of you to say—now you see that side of me.”
“What side?”
“Driven, obsessive. My father always kidded me about it. ‘Where’s the race, Princess?’ ” She shot Jeremy a wan smile. “Intellectually, I know he’s right, but the thing is I do feel there’s a race. Against time—against the time when your mind and body slow down and grind to a halt and you end up six feet under. Morbid, huh?”
“Maybe it’s too many hours on the wards,” said Jeremy.
“No, I’ve always been this way. If the assignment was to write a five-page bio paper, I handed in seven. When the gym teacher said ten girl push-ups, I did boy push-ups and struggled for twenty. I’m sure part of it’s OCD. When I was eight, I went through a ritual phase—checking my bedroom for an hour before I’d go to sleep. Lining up my shoes. No one knew. I’d let my mother put me to bed, sneak out, go through the entire rigamarole. If something interrupted me, I started from scratch.”
“How’d you stop?”
“I told myself it was stupid and lay shaking under my covers until the urge passed. For months I got the urge, but I stuck to my guns. When I was twelve I developed an ulcer. The doctor—and my parents—insisted it was a bacterial infection. They treated me with antibiotics and I got better. But still . . . now you know my whole sordid past. Any analysis, Doctor?”
He shook his head.
“Really,” she insisted. “What do you think?”
“Have you ever lost anyone close to you?”
“My grandma,” she said. “I was six and she was old and ill, but we were close . . . it shocked me. The fact that I’d never see her again.”
Jeremy nodded.
She said, “So what you’re saying is that loss was so profound that it traumatized me about death? The essence—the permanence? And now I need to race through life like a headless chicken, piling up experiences?”
“I was thinking more of an untimely death. Someone struck down prematurely. But sure. If your grandmother’s passing was a shock, it could influence you that way. Traumatic loss does that. The gone-ness of it all.”
“The gone-ness.” She shook her head, smiling. “You and words. How’s your writing, by the way?”
“Torturous.”
“It’ll work out.” Angela’s eyes grew distant. “Maybe you’re right. I don’t know.” She looked away, lowered her voice. “Premature death. You’ve been through that.”
“What do you mean?” said Jeremy, louder than he’d intended.
“You know.”
Jeremy stared at her. Knew he was glaring but couldn’t stop.
He said, “Let’s change the subject.”
Her face drained of color. “Sure, I’m sorry, forget I mentioned it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, but his heart was pounding, and he needed to get out of there.
As close as we’ve become, there are places she can’t go. Some things I will not share.
“Jeremy?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.”
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m not sure when I’m going to have free time.”
“Are you on tonight?”
“No, but I need to hit the sack early. I’m still feeling kind of run-down—maybe the flu hasn’t left my system.”
“Want me to walk you up to the ward?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“You, too.”
The following afternoon, she called to tell him she’d been tied up in surgery, planned to observe more.
Ted Dirgrove had “performed” a quintuple bypass. The verb made Jeremy think of a stage and a baton.
“Interesting,” he said.
“Amazing. It’s something to see.”
“And the patient survived.”
“What do you mean?”
“The only patient Dirgrove and I have in common didn’t.”
“Oh.” She sounded deflated. “Yes, that was bad . . . I guess I’d better be going—did I ever thank you for babying me through my flu?”
“More than once.”
“I wasn’t sure if I did. Since I got back on service, things got so hectic so quickly, and I know we haven’t—anyway, thanks again. For the soup and everything else. That was beyond the call of duty.”
Her gratitude sounded formalized. Putting space between them.
Who was he kidding? He’d done that. The conversation-killing glower, when all she’d done was ask about . . .
“Still feeling run-down?” he said.
“A little, but better.”
“So the bypass was amazing.”
“Really, Jer. The human heart, this little thing, like a big plum—like a skinless tomato. What a gorgeous thing, the way the chambers and valves work in concert. It’s . . . philharmonic. While the arteries are being spliced in, they keep the heart pumping artificially and . . . it’s . . . I keep thinking in orchestral terms, that perfect balance, the tempo—uh-oh, I just got another page, have to go.”
The third postcard was from Damascus, Syria. A picture of the ancient Casbah—a shiny shot of jumbled stalls and their proprietors. White-robed men peddling brassware and carpets and dried nuts.
Postmarked Berlin.
Aha!
Aha, what?
All Jeremy could come up with was that Arthur’s wanderlust had its limits. The old man was unwilling to forgo the creature comforts of the Western World for a Levantine jaunt.
But he wanted Jeremy to think Levantine.
Damascus . . . Jeremy knew Syria was a brutal dictatorship, but, beyond that, the country and its ancient capital meant nothing to him.
Oslo, Paris, Damascus . . . Oslo, Paris, Berlin, Damascus? If this was a game, he wasn’t even on the playing field.
He stuck the postcard in the Curiosity file. Had a second thought and pulled out the file and reviewed its contents and ended up with a crushing headache.
He popped aspirin, took the risk of drinking his own lousy coffee.
By the end of the day, alone, with no chance
of seeing Angela, with the prospect of his dark, cold house in his immediate future, he found himself hoping for another Otolaryngology envelope. Anything to clear the haze. He stopped by the Psychiatry Office to make sure no new mail had come through.
The office was closed.
Nothing arrived in either of the next day’s deliveries. Same for the day after that.
Suddenly, life was too quiet.
The weekend rolled around. Angela was back on call and Jeremy endured a solitary Saturday, doing crosswords, pretending to be interested in sports, smiling at Mrs. Bekanescu when she stuck her head out to sweep her front porch. Receiving an ugly look in return.
What had Doresh told her?
He read the entire Sunday paper, wondering if any details about the nameless woman on the Finger would surface. They didn’t. By Sunday evening he was ready to climb the walls.
His beeper had been silent all weekend. He phoned the page operator and asked if any calls had come through.
“No, Doctor, you’re all clear.”
He drove to the hospital anyway, attacked his book introduction, was astonished to find the words flowing. He finished the damn thing by 10 P.M., reread it, made a few changes, and packaged it to send to the Head of Oncology for review.
Now what?
Not long ago he’d have cherished the solitude. Now, he felt incomplete.
He logged on to the computer, returned to the Clarion archive, activated his account and entered Norbert Levy’s name as a search-word. Not limited, this time, by “homicide.”
Zero.
The same went for “Edgar Marquis” and, not surprisingly, the pseudonym-protected “Harrison Maynard.”
Tina Balleron had mentioned a couple of Maynard’s aliases. “Amanda . . . Fontaine,” “Barbara Kingsman.”
Nothing under either nom de plume.
He gave up, turned the computer off, drove to the Excelsior Hotel, made a beeline for the bar. Empty bar, he had his pick of booths and chose the same one where he and Arthur had drunk and talked and nibbled on hors d’oeuvres.
He ordered a double scotch.
The old waiter who’d served them wasn’t on duty. The young man who brought his drink was bland-faced and cheerful and had a high-stepping, prancing walk that made Jeremy think of a racehorse straining at the bit.
“Any particular brand, sir?”
“Nope.”
Same room, same booth, but nothing was the same.
Jeremy sat there for a long time, stretching out his refills in an attempt to simulate self-control.
The young waiter was bored and took to reading the paper. Insipid music played in the background. By the time Jeremy finished his third scotch, his body was buzzing.
No sadder place than Sunday in a big-city hotel. This city prided itself on Midwestern wholesomeness, and Sunday was family day. Even the lobby was deserted, saurian salesmen departed to long-suffering wives, hotel hookers doing whatever working girls did on Sunday.
Sometimes they died.
Jeremy waved that away. Actually moved his hand to dispel the thought. No one was around to notice the ticlike gesture, and he repeated it. Amused, like a naughty kid who’d gotten away with something.
He called for still another drink, filled his blood with alcohol, drank himself rosy. On some level—a cutaneous level—it was a pleasant experience. But for the most part he felt detached.
Living in someone else’s skin.
34
On Monday he woke up mean and logy and stiff, and he wondered if he’d caught Angela’s flu.
A brisk walk in the chilled air burned his chest and woke him up and by the time he drove to work, he felt semicivilized. Stopping for coffee in the dining room, he spotted Ted Dirgrove and another white-coat engaged in what looked like tense conversation. The same swarthy, mustachioed man who’d sat with the surgeon the first time Jeremy had noticed him. The two of them, and the cardiologist, Mandel.
No reason to notice them now, because the room was filled with white-coats, and Dirgrove and his companion were off in a far corner. But something about the heart surgeon . . . Angela’s enthrallment with what Dirgrove did . . .
He was jealous.
He filled a cup, headed out of the room. Dirgrove and the other man hadn’t budged. Their discussion looked tense—something academic? No, this seemed personal. Their body postures were those of two dogs facing off.
Then Dirgrove smiled, and so did the other man.
Two dogs with their teeth bared.
Even match. The other doctor was Dirgrove’s height, had a similar, slender build, and, like Dirgrove, his hair was close-cropped. But this curly cap was as dark as his mustache.
The dark man talked with his hands. Offered a parting shot and exited the dining room. Dirgrove stood there alone, his hands clenched. That cheered Jeremy, and he decided he was hungry and went back for a sweet roll.
He decided to sit down to eat. Dirgrove left. A few moments later, Angela appeared, in a group of residents.
Chattering, happy, hyperactive. All of them, looking so young.
She’d talked about feeling worn-out, but now she was the essence of vitality.
All of them were. Kids.
Suddenly, the eight years between Angela and Jeremy seemed a generation. Jocelyn had been Angela’s age, but she’d seemed more . . . seasoned. Maybe it was the years she’d put in as a nurse. Or the grunt jobs she’d worked to put herself through nursing school.
Angela, anxious and driven despite a happy childhood, her father’s princess, might never get past the guilt of being wellborn.
Jocelyn’s family was trailer-park poor, and she’d been on her own since adolescence. She’d appreciated everything.
A working girl.
No. That sounded so wrong.
Tears filled Jeremy’s eyes. He put his roll and his coffee aside, hurried out, careful to escape Angela’s notice.
The fourth envelope arrived. Finally.
Tuesday morning, stuck in the middle of a stack of ignorables. Jeremy had taken to cruising by the Psychiatry Office or sticking his head out of his door at random moments in hope of coming upon the anonymous mailer.
To no avail. And it really didn’t matter, did it? The medium was the message.
Thin envelope—thinner than usual. Inside was a single slip of paper upon which was typed a single line:
Ethics of the Fathers, Sforno, 5:8e
Obviously some kind of reference. An ancient text? Something Buddhist? Italian?
He got on the computer and had his answer within moments.
Religious but not Buddhist. Ethics of the Fathers was a volume—a “tractate”—from the Jewish Talmud, the only one of sixty-three that didn’t deal primarily with laws.
“The Bartlett’s of Judaism,” one authority called it.
“A compendium of morality,” opined another.
“Sforno” was Ovadiah Sforno, an Italian rabbi and physician who’d lived during the Renaissance and was primarily known for his commentary on the Bible.
He’d also written a lesser-known companion to Ethics of the Fathers.
Where would you find something like that?
Maybe at Renfrew’s, back when the mute man had been alive.
He called two city libraries. Neither carried the book in any edition. Pulling out the phone book, he looked up bookstores in the yellow pages.
He tried several sellers of new books and antiquarian tomes. None of the proprietors had any idea what he was talking about. A couple of stores advertised themselves as “religious booksellers,” but “religious” turned out to be Catholic and Lutheran, respectively.
The owner of the Catholic bookstore said, “You might try Kaplan’s.”
“Where’s that?”
“Fairfield Avenue.”
“Fairfield, east of downtown?”
“That’s it,” said the man. “What used to be the Jewish neighborhood before they all moved out to the suburbs.”
“K
aplan’s still there?”
“Last I heard.”
Fairfield Avenue was a brief, drizzly ride from the hospital, two lanes of sinuous, potholed asphalt crowded with soot-blackened, prewar buildings. Nearly all the storefronts had been bricked over, and the once-commercial avenue was mostly U-rent storage facilities. Faded signs painted on grimy walls hinted at a previous life:
SCHIMMEL’S PICKLES
SHAPIRO’S FISH MARKET
KOSHER BUTCHER
The bookstore was ten feet wide, with flaking gold lettering that read BOOKS, GIFTS AND JUDAICA above what Jeremy assumed was the same legend in Hebrew. The glass was dark—not blackened like Renfrew’s but dimmed by what appeared to be unlit space.
Closed. The last holdout, folding.
But when Jeremy turned the brass doorknob, it relented, and he stepped into a tiny, dim room. No overhead lights; an amber-shaded, copper-based lamp cast a cone of illumination on a battered, oak desk. The room should’ve smelled musty but didn’t.
Behind the desk sat a man, elderly, clean-shaven, wearing a black suede skullcap over a head of bluntly cut gray hair. An old man but a big man, undiminished by time. Wide-shouldered and heavy-boned, he sat with military posture, wore a white shirt and dark tie and braided leather braces. Gold-framed half glasses rested on a thin, slender nose. Behind him was a glass case filled with a mix of objects: silver cups and candelabras, record albums festooned with Stars of David (Uncle Shimmy Sings the Zemiros), children’s games, what appeared to be plastic spinning tops, velvet bags embroidered with more six-pointed stars. Below all that, three shelves of books.
The man was tinkering with a black leather box attached to a series of matching straps and looked up. “Yes?”
“Do you have Rabbi Sforno’s commentary on Ethics of the Fathers?”
The man studied him. “You can get it over the Internet.”
“I’d rather have it, now.”
“Eager to learn?” said the man. “It’s a very good commentary.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“How did you find me?”
“The Catholic bookstore recommended you.”
“Ah, Joe McDowell, he was always loyal.” The man smiled and stood. At least six-three. His torso was huge, and Jeremy wondered how he’d adjusted to the closet-size premises. He extended a hand. “Bernard Kaplan.”
The Conspiracy Club Page 17