If I Should Die

by Hilary Norman

  “At least he looks like a doctor.”

  Ferguson approached them. “Would you buy a diagnosis from this man?”

  “Sure I would,” Morrissey said.

  “You wouldn’t lie to me, John, would you?” Ferguson adjusted his Kaminsky name tag.

  “I wouldn’t lie,” Morrissey said.

  “What if he asks me something medical I can’t answer?”

  “Stall,” Joe said. “Don’t invent stuff in case Schwartz knows what you’re talking about. Remember he’s a brilliant man.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “Break a leg,” Joe said.

  “Just don’t come to me to have it set,” Morrissey said, grimly.

  When Ferguson entered Schwartz’s room at ten minutes before midnight, the patient was lying on his back staring at the ceiling. At the sound of the door, he slowly turned his head and looked at the dark-haired young doctor.

  “Dr Kaminsky, I presume?”

  “That’s right, Mr Schwartz.” Ferguson-Kaminsky smiled down at his new patient. “I’m sorry not to have been able to come sooner. How are you feeling?”

  “I’ve been better, I’ve been worse.”

  “You look warm.”

  “I have a fever.”

  The doctor glanced at Schwartz’s chart, then removed the thermometer from its antiseptic-filled container on the wall beside the bed, and stuck it in the patient’s mouth. He drew up a chair, and took Schwartz’s pulse.

  “Okay, let’s take a look.” He checked the thermometer and noted down the reading on the chart. “Up a little,” he said.

  “It was down a few hours ago,” Schwartz said.

  “So I gather.”

  “I don’t think the move did me much good.”

  “I hope it didn’t cause you too much discomfort.”

  “Not too much, though I thought I was recovering well at Memorial, and now I’m not so sure.”

  “It happens in cases such as yours, Mr Schwartz.”

  “What happens?”

  “Some generalized improvement, giving way to renewed deterioration.”

  “So I’m deteriorating, am I?” Schwartz sounded almost amiable.

  “Your condition is giving us some cause for concern.” Ferguson-Kaminsky patted him on the hand. “But it’s nothing we can’t fix.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, doctor.”

  “Provided we act promptly.”

  The hazel eyes watched the doctor carefully. “What do you want to do?”

  “Let me start by explaining the problem, Mr Schwartz.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “You’re aware, I believe, that there is no effective antivenin with which to treat the bite of the Arizona Gila monster.” Ferguson-Kaminsky saw Schwartz nod. “In the majority of cases, bite victims make a complete recovery, but there are some whose hearts become affected.”

  Schwartz glanced over at the EKG monitor, then back at the doctor. “You’re telling me my heart’s been affected.”

  “I’m afraid so.” Ferguson-Kaminsky paused. “The bad news is that once the venom has begun to act on the heart, any damage is irreversible. The good news is that in your case the damage has been to the sinoatrial node, causing it to function abnormally and creating arrhythmia, as shown in your EKG recordings. Do you understand me so far?”

  Schwartz was silent for a moment.

  “May I see these recordings?” he asked.

  “Certainly.” Ferguson-Kaminsky stood up and tore off a long strip of paper from the machine’s read-out. He studied it himself for a minute, then sat down again and laid it out for Schwartz to look at. “The spiked readings are spaced out at quite regular intervals, as you see, which means the heartbeat is quite regular, but it’s a little too slow.”

  “So why is that good news?” Schwartz said.

  “Because although we can’t repair the damage, we can easily correct its effects.”

  Schwartz lay back against his pillows.

  “No,” he said.

  “Have I missed something?” Ferguson-Kaminsky asked.

  “No, I won’t have a pacemaker,” Schwartz said.

  “That is the treatment indicated,” the doctor said. “In fact, it’s the only treatment we can offer you.”

  A small smile played at the corners of Schwartz’s lips. “If I were to believe what you tell me, Dr Kaminsky, there are antiarrhythmic drugs available.”

  “As an adjunct, perhaps, but quite insufficient on their own.”

  Schwartz shook his head.

  “No pacemaker,” he said.

  Ferguson-Kaminsky nodded. “I can well understand your misgivings, under the circumstances.”

  “I’m sure you can.”

  “Maybe I can just offer you one more reason to change your mind.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “I believe Lieutenant Duval has told you that we have another patient suffering from a Gila monster bite.”

  “In this clinic?” Seeing the doctor nod, Schwartz’s lips twitched in another slight smile. “The lieutenant didn’t tell me that. Another coincidence.”

  “Hardly. This is, after all, a specialist unit.”

  “And now we’re all happily under one roof.”

  “Not so happily,” Ferguson-Kaminsky said. “The condition of the other patient is deteriorating rapidly.”

  “Surely even you must admit that is a coincidence,” Schwartz said. “You just finished telling me that the majority of Gila monster bite victims recover completely, yet here we are, two out of two, going downhill fast.” He paused. “I imagine you’re going to give this other patient a pacemaker?”

  “Unfortunately we can’t.”

  “Why not?” The sneer behind the question was unmissable.

  “Because in his case it’s too late for that,” Ferguson-Kaminsky replied. “And unless we act fairly swiftly, I’m afraid it may be too late for you, too, Mr Schwartz.”

  “I’ll take my chances, doctor.”

  “It’s your decision, of course.”

  “And it’s made.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Tuesday, January 26th

  While they stepped up the heat in Schwartz’s room and a nurse went in to tweak his IV, increasing the flow of beta blocker drugs now being delivered into his system, the Howe Clinic’s number one operating room was almost ready for service.

  “Will your boss agree to wear a bomb suit?” Tony Valdez asked Bobby Goldstein.

  “You have to be kidding.” Goldstein, who’d been persuaded to try on an American Body Armor suit, felt like a blimp or some kind of space age monster.

  “Dr Ash will not agree to wear one,” Joanna King said, scathingly, “and neither will I.”

  “You’d be well advised to, ma’am,” Valdez said.

  “If I wore one of those,” King answered, “I couldn’t do my job effectively. And neither I nor Mr Goldstein will be anywhere near as close to the patient as Dr Ash.”

  Humbled and perspiring, Goldstein began to dismantle his suit.

  “Are you wearing panty hose?” Valdez asked King. “I only ask because some bombs can be set off by static electricity, and just wearing nylon can do it.”

  “I’ll remove my panty hose before we begin,” King agreed calmly.

  “And any other garments that might create static.” Valdez looked at Goldstein. “That applies to you, too, sir.”

  Goldstein began a mental re-run of everything he’d put on his body since getting out of bed that morning.

  “There’s no carpet in here, which is a plus.” Valdez wasn’t letting up. “If you won’t consider wearing body armour, ma’am, we’ll be insisting you all wear special cotton coveralls – no metal zippers or buttons.”

  “As long as they’re sterile,” King said.

  “They will be. And we have wrist straps to reduce your body’s static electricity – ”

  “Excuse me,” Goldstein broke in.

  “Sure,” Valdez said.
>
  “All this talk about electricity.” Goldstein, out of the bomb suit, was still perspiring but growing paler. “We’ll be working with all kinds of electrical stuff during the procedure – monitors, X-ray equipment – ”

  “Can’t be done without,” King interrupted.

  Valdez looked at her through clear, narrow eyes. “We don’t need any heroes here today, Miss King.”

  She looked straight back at him. “You won’t be getting any.”

  “Our understanding,” Goldstein said, “was that we’re dealing with a fairly small explosive device here – ”

  “If we’re dealing with one at all,” King added.

  “In our business,” Valdez said, crisply, “a bomb is a bomb until we know different. That’s how we stay alive, or try to. Bomb disposal is all about unknown quantities and taking no chances. And by the way, just because this nutball’s only blown away one victim at a time so far, doesn’t guarantee we don’t all go up today.”

  “A happy thought,” Goldstein commented.

  “Listen, people” – Valdez wasn’t giving up – ”I’m not going to kid you that I don’t want to scare you – I do, because at the end of the operation, I want all of us, including the patient, to be able to get up and go home.”

  “I think we’d like that, too,” King said.

  “Do you know the first thing a cop does when he suspects he’s found a bomb?” Valdez asked. “He clears the area. Everyone leaves – and I mean everyone – except the experts.”

  “We get your point,” Goldstein said. “But Ms King’s right about the armour – we couldn’t do our jobs properly wearing that.”

  “That’s okay.” Valdez grinned. “If the explosion’s big enough, the suits don’t stop you dying, they just help hold your body parts together.”

  “Great.” Bobby Goldstein grimaced.

  “Just great,” Joanna King said.

  Frederick Schwartz’s mind, not quite asleep, not quite awake, was wandering again. Back and forth, into the past, back into the present. His heart-rate was too slow, he knew that, could hear it on the monitor, and it was getting harder to breathe, he was so warm, too warm. He was perspiring again, and he hated that, he was a fastidious man. He longed to be back in his own place, his special place, he needed to be in control, and he was losing it again, and he was surrounded by people he could not trust, and the dragons were out there, and they were coming closer, closer . . .

  They’re lying, I know they’re lying. But the green lines on the monitor weren’t lying, machines didn’t lie, and maybe Kaminsky was speaking the truth, and maybe this was the greatest irony of his life, maybe he did need a pacemaker to keep him alive, but he could never let them do that to him.

  Kaminsky and Duval were laughing because they thought he was afraid they might put one of his own pacemakers into him, but Schwartz knew no doctor would ever do such a thing, however much they might want to, and he knew that was what they wanted, more than anything. Especially Duval, the damnable, smiling, ever-courteous lieutenant, whose grey eyes watched him so carefully, and who hated him, despised him, wanted him dead. They think I’m afraid to die, but there are worse things than death. Mother understood that, she warned him. About dragons, about the ways in which they were created.

  He shut his eyes and his mind spun, remembering Mother’s teachings: serpents born asexually from eggs of roosters incubated in dung, animals changed into dragons. Humans too. Man and metal, Mother had told him. Man and metal, brought together, and the worst could happen, the most terrible thing imaginable, there could be nothing worse. Mother had been terrified of the dentist, not because of the pain, she had never feared pain, but she had never allowed him to put metal fillings into her mouth, and he remembered, too, one day, after one of the women at Eva’s had fallen and broken her leg, and they had taken her to hospital and put a pin inside to hold the bone together, and Mother hadn’t ever let her come back to work again. Man and metal. The woman was one of her best workers, but she couldn’t trust her any more, she couldn’t be near her any more.

  And then, at the end, Mother had let them put the metal into her own body, the box into her chest, the wires into her heart, and she had died. It hadn’t changed her, but it had killed her, it had destroyed her, and so he had become her Siegfried again, and he had taken his revenge, and now they wanted to stop him, and he would not let them.

  At a few minutes before one in the morning, a little while after Hugo had finally been persuaded that he would be more use to Lally if he got some real sleep for an hour or two, Lally, her Garfield nightshirt hidden under a sweater, and wearing her red and white striped socks for extra warmth, emerged, after almost twelve hours of captivity, from her room.

  She was hungry, she was tired and, increasingly, she was feeling more irritable than afraid. You couldn’t just lie around hour after hour being terrified of sudden and violent death; your mind simply couldn’t sustain that level of fear, no longer really believed it might happen. Lally didn’t know any more whether she felt more like a victim or a prisoner, she only knew she wasn’t prepared just to lie there in that pretty pastel bedroom any longer like some stir-crazy Sleeping Beauty, and so she was going for a walk, she was going to find Lucas Ash or John Morrissey or Joe or maybe even Chris, and she was going to start making some demands of her own.

  She half expected someone to jump on her the minute she opened the door, for some armed guard or vigilant nurse or one of Joe’s pals to push her gently but firmly straight back into her room again, but no one stopped her – there seemed to be no one around at all.

  She walked a little way along the corridor. The quietness she’d noticed soon after her arrival, and that she’d put down to the thickness of the bedroom walls, was just as noticeable out here. The place felt deserted, almost ghostly, as if she were the only patient in the place.

  Realization struck her. She was the only patient.

  Softly, she tapped on a door. No one answered. Slowly, carefully, she opened it. Another pastel room, prettily furnished like her own, but empty, the bed neatly covered. She shut the door, opened another, then another.

  Fear returned, then irritation again, then anger. Morrissey had told her that Marie Ferguson, his partner, had been in bed with her husband when her pacemaker had exploded, and he had been unharmed. They were about as close to each other as they could get. And nothing happened to him. Not a scratch. If that was true, why the hell was she being treated like Typhoid Mary, and if they were so goddamned scared of her, why hadn’t anyone had the decency to tell her, or Hugo for that matter?

  Lally turned on her heel and stalked back along the corridor, looking for someone, anyone, who could answer her questions. She came to the staircase she’d seen on her arrival, elegant and circular. Up or down? Or maybe it didn’t matter, maybe there was no one else left in the whole clinic, maybe they’d all abandoned her the way Chris had, and they were waiting now to see if she would blow or not.

  She went down to the next floor, turned to her right, then changed her mind and went the other way.

  People. Two, no three people, standing in a huddle outside a room. She stalked toward them. One nurse, an orderly, and Joe.

  He looked up and saw her. “Lally, what the – ?”

  She walked right up to him, saw the orderly and nurse both throw an anxious glance at the door behind them. “I got tired of lying around like Camille. I’m not sick, Joe, and I’m not stupid, and I want to know what’s going on in this place, and I want to know it now.”

  Joe put his arm around her. “Let’s get you back upstairs.”

  “No.” She shook him off. “Joe, I mean it. Stop treating me like some tender little coward and tell me the truth. Why am I the only patient here?”

  “You’re not,” Joe said.

  “Don’t lie to me. I checked, and there’s no one else in my corridor, all the rooms are empty.” She hardly paused for breath. “If it’s because you’re all afraid I’m going to go up like the Fourth of Jul
y, then you could at least – ”

  “Shut up, Lally.” He took her arm again and steered her firmly back towards the staircase.

  “I will not shut up.” She dug her feet into the carpet and refused to be moved any further. “I’ve been lying up in that room for a whole day, and first of all everyone claims they were going nuts trying to find me so they could take this thing out of me, and then we had to wait for Lucas Ash to arrive – ”

  “Lally, for Christ’s sake keep your voice down,” Joe hissed at her. “You wanted to wait for him – ”

  “But he arrived hours ago, and I’m still waiting.”

  “I explained that to you.”

  “You explained nothing to me, and I’m sick of it.”

  “You’re just upset, sweetheart – ”

  “Of course I’m upset, Joe!”

  “I told you to keep your voice down.” Again, he tugged at her arm, trying to draw her away, and again she resisted. “Lally, let’s go back to your room and I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Tell me here,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you upstairs.”

  Suddenly she knew.

  “He’s here, isn’t he? The one who did this. He’s here in that room.”

  Joe kept his hand on her arm, as if he feared she might break into a run and go for Schwartz’s door.

  “I’m right, Joe, aren’t I?” Lally demanded. “He’s in there, and you’re trying to get him to talk.” She waited. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “He’s here,” Joe said.

  “You can let go of my arm now.” He released her. “Thank you.”

  “Will you come upstairs with me?”

  For a moment, Lally stood still.

  “I want to see him.”

  “No,” Joe said.

  “But it might make a difference.”

  “No,” he said again.

  “He wanted to see her.”

  Morrissey’s voice behind her made Lally spin around.

  “Did he?” she asked.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Joe said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t trust him.”

  “He’s not armed, is he?” Lally asked.

  “Lally, it’s not a good idea.” Joe paused. “Anyway, he’s a lot weaker now than he was when he suggested seeing you.”