by Gen LaGreca
With equipment suitable for the animal, David anesthetized the cat, hooked it up to a respirator and monitor, and then opened its skull. A tiny patch of exposed brain was the only part of the feline visible on a blue canvas of surgical drapes. The surgeon explained the procedure while his brother observed.
“See those optic nerves?” said David excitedly. “They grew back! Look at them, man!”
“Incredible!” Randy smiled under the mask.
“I’m giving the cat an IV of Phil Morgan’s general anesthetic, which is the safe one. Now, I’ll inject the scar inhibitor over the nerves.” David drew a solution in a needle, then sprayed the liquid over the cat’s optic nerves. He waited. “There’s no adverse reaction. The cat’s vital signs are okay. But CareFree removed Phil’s anesthetic from the formulary, so there’s none left, except this small amount, which isn’t enough for Nicole’s surgery. Phil is shipping me more, but it won’t arrive until tomorrow morning.”
“Can’t you use another anesthetic?” asked Randy.
“I used a few different general anesthetics safely on animals in combination with my new drugs, but they’ve all been pulled by CareFree.”
“We can’t wait for Morgan’s anesthetic to arrive. In the morning my resignation will be announced, and I won’t be able to issue an order to remove the garbage.”
David nodded. “In my early attempts to use this treatment, I experimented on the optic nerve of rats. I employed a local anesthetic, which numbed the scalp while the patient remained conscious. Because there’s no sensation of pain in the brain itself, as you know, local anesthetics are sometimes used for brain surgery, such as in cases where the patient’s conscious response is needed. I thought that after I had freed the rats’ optic nerves from the scar tissue, I could immediately check their vision during the surgery. But the optic nerves swelled and the animals didn’t regain sight instantly. When I realized I couldn’t find out the results during the operation, there was no reason to keep the animals conscious, so I switched to general anesthesia.”
He took a vial from the anesthetic cart near him and pierced its rubber seal with a needle. “This is the local anesthetic I used on the rats, and which I can use tonight on Nicole.” He injected the drug into the cat’s scalp, then waited. “Nothing abnormal,” he said, watching the monitor and listening to the cat’s steady heartbeat. “The local anesthetic is working fine with my scar inhibitor, as it did with the rats.”
Then David took another bottle from the cart. “This is the general anesthetic that I used as a replacement when CareFree pulled Phil Morgan’s drug off the formulary. This drug, I believe, reacted with my scar inhibitor to kill two of my cats. I want to prove that by injecting this cat with it.” He injected the suspect anesthetic into the cat’s IV tube. “The scar inhibitor is already in the cat’s system, so let’s see if there’s a reaction.”
In moments the electronic monitor sounded its alarm. The graphs showing the animal’s heart activity and other vital signs lost their regular pattern and rapidly became flat. “The cat’s dead,” said David, relieved. “Now I can do Nicole’s surgery.”
Smile lines beamed above two masks.
From a wall phone David dialed Nicole’s hospital room.
“Hello, Mrs. Trimbell,” he said to the familiar voice that answered. “There’s been a change of plans. Instead of operating tomorrow morning, I’m going to have Nicole brought to surgery right now.”
“Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Trimbell.
“Can I speak to her?”
“She went for a walk.”
The smile lines suddenly disappeared from around David’s eyes. “I thought you weren’t going to let her out of your sight.”
“Oh, this is different,” Mrs. Trimbell said cheerfully. “You needn’t worry. She’s with someone trustworthy.”
“Someone apparently trustworthy got to her twice before and drove her to—” David’s mind suddenly made a chilling connection. “Is Nicole with . . . my . . . wife?”
“Why, yes, she is. How did you guess?”
“You’ve got to find her right now, Mrs. Trimbell, and get her away from Marie!” Mrs. Trimbell did not recognize the desperate shriek that was David’s voice.
After the surgeon raced to Nicole’s room, and after he, Mrs. Trimbell, Randy, and the nurses searched everywhere—in the corridors, the bathrooms, the visitor’s lounge, the other patients’ rooms—but could find no trace of Marie or Nicole, everything was emphatically not okay.
Chapter 32
The Phantom’s Plea
David, Randy, and Mrs. Trimbell stared at Nicole’s belongings in her hospital room. Apparently to avoid being caught, the dancer had vanished in her robe without taking the time to dress or to gather her purse, phone, or other possessions. Riverview’s security guards had combed the medical complex for the missing patient, but to no avail. Mrs. Trimbell had checked Nicole’s apartment but returned to report no sign of anyone having been there.
According to Mrs. Trimbell, Marie was wearing a long coat. The others surmised that she had placed the garment over Nicole’s robe so that the two of them could leave the hospital unobtrusively. David dialed a variety of phone numbers in an attempt to reach Marie. He dialed her pocket phone, their home, her office, her car; but his wife did not answer. Using unrepeatable words, he left messages, but she replied to none of them.
He called Reliable Car Service, the company used previously by Nicole, and learned that she had not requested a car that evening. Had Marie dropped her off somewhere? David tried to discover where the car service had taken Nicole when she had disappeared previously. The dispatcher, however, did not have the information; the owner was not there; the dispatcher would call the owner; yes, he would stress that it was an emergency; the owner was not answering his cell phone; the dispatcher would call David as soon as he made contact.
The surgeon sat on Nicole’s hospital bed, nervously glancing at his watch. Seven o’clock. Exasperated to have come this far only to be stopped again, he called the private detective who had searched for Nicole after her previous disappearance. The investigator responded immediately, arriving to find the troubled faces of David, Mrs. Trimbell, and Randy. The stoical man with astute eyes listened as the others gave an account of Nicole’s disappearance.
“Does she have any close friends or relatives?” asked the detective.
“She has a few girlfriends,” said Mrs. Trimbell, “but I already called them, and they haven’t seen or heard from her today.”
The investigator handed the others a copy of the background report on Nicole, which he had generated during her earlier disappearance. “Is there anything in this report that strikes you? Any person or place that Nicole might have mentioned? Anyone she might still be in contact with?”
David looked at the chronology of a child named Cathleen Hughes being shuffled from one foster home to another. “Nicole never mentioned any of these foster families or case workers to me.”
“Nor to me,” said Mrs. Trimbell, thumbing through the pages.
“All right,” said the detective, “I’ll visit the car service and contact the people she worked with at the theater.”
“Wait a minute. There is someone Nicole mentioned,” David said, recollecting. “A Sister Luke. Nicole knew her as a child and liked her. There’s no mention of her in the report, but there is a reference to a St. Jude’s Parish, where the case workers retrieved her after she . . . ran . . . away—” He sprang from the bed. “I have a hunch. I’m going to try St. Jude’s.” He turned to the detective. “Could you get me the address?”
In a streak of blue scrubs and white coat, he left the room before receiving an answer.
David hurried to his car. He drove past the tree-lined streets with the restored brownstones in Nicole’s elegant neighborhood. The detective called with the address of the parish, and David turned south to find it. The scenery soon changed to a forgotten neighborhood on the West Side, a tattered patch of New York with poth
oled streets and deserted tenements. This was where Nicole was born. He saw stolen cars, stripped and abandoned along the curb. Many of the buildings had no windows or doors, only wooden boards and the charred remains of past fires. Dingy lights flashed inside other structures, revealing bare walls and chipped ceilings. He saw a rat sniffing garbage from an overturned trashcan. A homeless man chased the rat away so that he could have first pickings. A child in torn clothing sat on the curb of an unswept street, playing with empty beer cans. The thought of another child, named Cathleen Hughes, a little orchid struggling to grow in this wasteland, appalled him.
He parked by a tall building resembling a bundle of spears frozen in stone and pointing to the heavens. St. Jude’s Parish, read an old inscription carved above the massive front doors of the Gothic church. He entered a hollow chamber lined by stained-glass windows and smelling of incense. An old man lit candles at the base of a statue. A woman knelt at a brass railing before a marble altar. David walked down the aisles, his eyes surveying every pew, side chapel, and nook. He irreverently opened the confessionals, but they were empty. Nicole was not there.
He walked around the outside of the church, finding no one among the leafless shrubs of late October. In the cool autumn air, he heard organ music and the sweet voices of women singing hymns. The sounds were coming from a building behind the church. Could that be the convent? he wondered. Would he find Sister Luke there? His eyes followed the line of the five-story structure up to a towering, lighted cross on the roof. Next to the giant crucifix, he saw a smaller figure moving, a human form. It was a dainty young woman in a white satin robe!
The sight galvanized him. He reached the door and found it unlocked. He entered the old building and walked past a candlelit chapel where a cluster of veiled heads bowed in prayed and enchanting voices rose in song. Engrossed in their service, with their backs to the door, the nuns did not notice the sleek stranger who ascended the staircase three steps at a time. As he climbed, David dialed Randy on his pocket phone.
“Call off the search party. I found her.”
Earlier that evening, Nicole had gone to Sister Luke of St. Jude’s Parish, as she had when she had run away the first time after her surgery. The nun immediately took the visitor in, bringing her to the small room where she had slept as a child, her cot and nightstand still intact. For a while Nicole lay on her old bed, smelling the pleasant scent of fresh laundry from the sheets. When the sisters retired to the chapel for their evening service, the dancer found her way to the stairway and climbed to a favorite place of her childhood. It was a solitary spot where she had gone to forget the bleak world around her and dream of a better one. Her special place was the roof. From it, the child could see the lights of Broadway and come tantalizingly close to her future. Nicole remembered gazing longingly at the distant explosion of lights that was the theater district.
The grown woman searched in darkness for the bright spot of her childhood. With her arm on the waist-high cement wall encircling the roof, the blinded dancer moved along the perimeter, feeling her way, until she reached the point where a large cross was fixed. This was the spot where she had seen the sparkle of the great New York stage. She felt heat from a spotlight illuminating the twelve-foot high cross; however, she could perceive no more than a faint trace of its light. Soon that final flicker would be extinguished. She wanted to be at the spot where she had first viewed the brilliance of Broadway when the last light that she would ever perceive faded.
Nicole heard the gentle voices of the nuns singing to something sacred.
Let my footsteps slip not
In the path to glory.
She had once traveled a path to glory, and her footsteps had not slipped, she thought, her face to the wind, her satin robe shimmering in the darkness.
Let my spirit arise
And my heart rejoice.
Her spirit had indeed arisen, and her heart had rejoiced. No one can ever take that away from me, she thought.
Let me fly on thy wings,
Oh, glory in the highest.
I once flew on wings. I once knew a . . . glory . . . in the . . . highest.
In thy presence is
Fullness and joy . . .
Let me never forget the fullness and joy I once knew, she thought, facing the dazzling Broadway lights that she could not see.
. . . Darkness turned to light,
And pleasures evermore.
Deliver my soul,
Oh glory in the highest.
Let that sustain me, my memory of a darkness turned to light . . . of a glory in the . . . highest.
Nicole lifted her head, remembering how the immense power of the Broadway lights illuminated a vast circle of sky and kindled a fire in her soul. Hearing the nuns’ hymn, her mind did what it always did at the sound of pleasing music. She thought of how she would dance to it, of the steps and tempo that would express the exultation in the music, as if dancing were synonymous with feeling, as if the two had irrevocably meshed within her long ago. I must never feel sorry for myself, she thought, imagining herself dancing to the hymn, because I once knew . . . glory.
Suddenly the door of the roof sprang open and urgent footsteps moved toward her.
“Nicole!”
Startled at the sound of a voice she had not expected, she jumped onto the top of the narrow cement wall that encircled the roof. She held onto the vertical bar of the crucifix, its crossbar over her head. The spotlight now hit her own body, revealing her willowy shape under the translucent, windblown robe. She heard a gasp from her visitor and the abrupt cessation of footsteps.
“Don’t jump! Don’t move!”
“How did you find me?”
“Your feet are an inch from the edge, Nicole. Don’t move a muscle.” She heard fear in the measured whisper of David’s voice, despite his attempt to control it.
“I’m not having the surgery, David.”
“That’s fine. I won’t force you to do anything. Just stand very still while I get you down.”
“No! Stay away.”
“I swear, Nicole. You have my word. You can do as you please.” She heard him cautiously approach. “No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to,” he said soothingly.
Then her body jerked at the sudden pull of two strong hands around her hips. In one startling, violent motion, she was yanked from her perch. She tumbled down, falling against David. She felt his trembling arms embrace her, stroking her back, her arms, her head. She heard a cry of relief from the lips buried against her neck.
He guided her away from the edge of the roof. Then, as if in proof of his vow not to force her will, he released her. She stood facing him, her robe shining like the brightest star in the night. Her body trembled in the cool fall air. He removed his white coat and placed it around her shoulders.
“Tell me why you’re about to cast your dreams and mine to the wind.” His voice was harder now.
“You were arrested for experimenting on the animals, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll break the law again if you perform my surgery, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I said all along that I wouldn’t have the second surgery if it were illegal.”
“I said all along that I would do it no matter what.”
“You’ll be thrown out of medicine for good.”
“There’s no place for me in today’s medicine. I’m glad to be thrown out.”
“I know you love medicine desperately. I can’t take that away from you, David. You’ll end up as I am now. You’ll hear music and ache to dance, but you’ll be unable to move.”
“Do you think CareFree is the tune I want to dance to? Is that what you’re saving me for? Your surgery is the music I hear.”
“But if my surgery fails, then you’ll be ruined. You’ll go to jail, won’t you? I couldn’t stand that.”
“I may go to jail, but I won’t be ruined. Some things are worth going to jail for. My work m
eans to me what the Phantom’s dream means to him. You said he was the most desperate man in the city because he was about to lose something precious to him. You said that the Phantom shouldn’t confine his dreams to the world he sees on the stage but fight for them in real life. Do you want me to confine my dreams to make-believe? And are you going to confine your dreams to a few fading memories?”
“That’s different. I didn’t mean that we should destroy other people for our dreams. I can’t destroy your future, David, for the sake of my own.”
“I want to do your surgery not to destroy my future but to raise it to new heights—in my eyes, and to hell with what the world thinks. I want you to accept that. I know you want this surgery more than anything.”
“I’ll survive without it.”
“You’ll be crushed.”
“I’ll get used to a new life.”
“You’ll hate your life if you give up without a fight.”
“I’ll manage.”
“You’ll be miserable.”
“I’ll get by.”
“You’ll be devastated. Say it!”
“I’ll adjust.”
“You want this surgery more than you ever wanted anything. Be honest and say it.”
“Okay, I want it.”
“You more than want it. You want it desperately.”
“Yes! Yes! Damn you, David, I want it so much I could kill for it!”
“Then why don’t you live for it?”
“I must let it go to give you your life. You’ll have other chances, other patients, if you let my case go.”
“I want to operate on you, because that’s immensely important to me.”
“Can my surgery mean that much to you?”
“It does . . . and you do,” he said softly.