Dear Old Dead (6 page)

“Julie,” Karida said urgently. “Come
on.”

Julie took a step toward Dr. Pride’s door just as the man came out of it. He was a big man and he was moving quickly, but that wasn’t what startled her. It wasn’t even that he appeared when she wasn’t expecting him. Julie could have taken all that in stride. She had been on the streets a long time.

What startled Julie Enderson was that this old man wasn’t someone she didn’t know after all. In fact, he was someone she knew quite well.

The last time she’d seen him, he’d been in a very different kind of place.

I
DA VAN STRAADT GREEL
was nothing at all like her brother Victor. For one thing, she wasn’t as pretty. In the way of genetic practical jokes from Irkutsk to Antarctica, where Victor had gotten all their mother’s most distinctive features, Ida had gotten their father’s, and their father had been a small, gnomish, distinctly ugly man. Ida was five feet two inches tall and as gnarled as the sort of tree trunk that ends up polished as a coffee table in the living room of a country house of a lawyer from Manhattan. She had the kind of body that never gained weight, no matter how much she put into it, but other women didn’t envy her for it. She looked nothing at all like a fragile fashion model and everything like the girl voted most likely to succeed at competitive sports by her high school graduating class. Nobody would ever mistake her for the cover of a J. Crew catalog. When people discovered who Ida was, they were often both surprised and resentful. The American rich were supposed to be different from this, at least if they were women.

Very few people discovered who Ida van Straadt Greel was, because unlike her brother Ida hadn’t dropped the “Greel” from her name as soon as she turned eighteen and unlike her brother and her cousin Martha she made an effort to keep her identity hidden. Of course, at the center Ida had no real privacy. Martha was there and Martha would talk, and Ida owed her position to her grandfather. At least, she half owed it to him. When Ida was Martha’s age, she had come down here to volunteer for the obligatory two years—the center insisted on two years—and her acceptance in the volunteer program had definitely been a result of her connections. Since then, however, she thought she’d made it on her own. Ida Greel was very good at what she did. She made a point of it. She had gone through Yale with an unblemished straight-A average, made Phi Beta Kappa and gotten herself admitted to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She had spent her summers first getting her paramedic training and then serving at the center as a paramedic. She had every intention of ending up twenty-five years from now more famous than Dr. Christiaan Barnard. It was a matter of honor. Ida had spent so much of her childhood hearing about how impossible she was, and how much of a blot on the van Straadt family name
(can’t you
do
something about yourself?),
that she had a lot to prove to practically everybody.

She was laying sterile instruments out on a tray when Martha came to the door and waved through the small square of glass at her. Ida waved back and checked her work over one more time before going out. It was seven thirty-five. The shoot-out or whatever it had been—Ida hated rumors, and rumors were all you ever got around here in the middle of a crisis—was over, and the last of the casualties were just coming in. Ida had been feeling a slackening in the tension for a good fifteen minutes. There was no reason why she shouldn’t talk to Martha now. She had her work done. Ida hated to let Martha or Victor or her grandfather or anyone else in her family know she had any free time at all. As soon as she let them know that, she lost control.

Ida checked her instruments for the third time. Then she admitted that there was no further excuse for standing where she was. She went through the swinging fire doors to the hall and wove among the stretchers to where Martha was standing. Half an hour ago, this hall was fall of people. Now there were only a nurse and a cleaning woman, both heading someplace else. All the action for the rest of the night was going to be in Admitting or in OR.

Martha was leaning against the far wall, looking tense. Martha always looked tense. Ida thought of tension as Martha’s occupation.

“Why do you always take so long to do everything?” Martha demanded, when Ida was close enough to hear. “You’re always puttering around at something. It’s maddening.”

“I had work to do. Now it’s done.”

“That’s nice. Victor is here, in case you didn’t know. You might not remember, but we had an appointment to have dinner and talk about the will.”

“Oh, I remember. I just can’t believe he came. Doesn’t he listen to the news?”

“No.”

“I suppose he doesn’t.” Ida was wearing surgical gloves. No one was allowed to handle sterile instruments except in surgical gloves. Ida peeled these off and dropped them in the nearest waste container. It was a red waste container, which was silly—the gloves hadn’t been near any blood or feces, just handling steel in a perfectly clean instruments’ room—but she didn’t feel like walking across the hall again to throw them in a white one. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her lab coat.

“What about you?” she asked Martha. “What are you doing down here? Don’t you have work in the other building?”

“Nobody’s doing anything in the other building. We’re just sitting around staring at each other and saying what a shame it is. I don’t know if it is a shame.”

“I don’t think of things in terms like that. Where’s Victor?”

“Still down in the cafeteria. I couldn’t stand him any more. He was going on and on. What’s wrong with Victor, anyway? We have to get something done and he just… dithers.”

“Maybe he doesn’t care about the money,” Ida said. “I don’t care about the money. Not very much.”

“We all care about the money,” Martha said sharply. “No matter what we say. And we all care about Rosalie. Have you seen her lately?”

“I saw her down at the bank last week. I was coming in and she was going out. She looked the way she always looks, Martha.”

“She looks like the daughter of Dracula,” Martha said firmly. “That getup she’s always wearing these days. What does she think she’s trying to do, audition for a beatnik movie?”

“I suppose she thinks she looks good that way. She does. Rosalie is very pretty.”

“Victor thinks she’s pretty, too. Pretty. It makes me want to spit. She looks like a cat with poisonous claws.”

“There are no cats with poisonous claws.”

“Maybe Rosalie will invent one. Maybe when she gets all our money, she’ll open a genetic engineering lab and concoct all kinds of creatures for herself. Like koala bears that kill on command.”

“Would you feel this way if Rosalie weren’t getting all our money?”

“But she is getting all our money, isn’t she? Or she will if we don’t find some way to stop her.”

“It’s not our money anyway,” Ida said. “It’s Grandfather’s. He made it.”

“Did he? Maybe he stole it from the Indians. Maybe he conjured it up out of a cauldron he keeps in his basement and feeds the flesh of virgins to. I think this whole family is foul, Ida, honestly. I really do.”

Ida was tempted to say that if the whole family was foul, then Martha herself was foul. The drawback to that was that Martha might agree to it. Ida was not subject to guilt, liberal or otherwise. Her grandfather’s money and her own trust funds seemed to her to be as much matters of chance—and as neutral in terms of morality—as the strange shape of her body and the plainness of her face. Martha felt differently, as Ida had good reason to know.

“If Victor is down in the cafeteria, maybe we should go join him,” Ida said. “God only knows I’m hungry, and I don’t have anything I have to do for the next half second. They can always page me if they want me.”

“They want you too much. You should stick up for yourself.”

“There are people dying all over the building, Martha. Myself can wait until all that’s under control.”

Ida went down to the end of the corridor and opened the set of fire doors there. Martha passed ahead of her and Ida let her go. The cafeteria was just at the bottom of this flight of stairs. Ida could smell the cardboard food and hear the clink of silverware and the hum of voices. The hum was low, meaning that the television was tuned to something most people wanted to hear. Ida was sure it was press reports of the shoot-out. There wouldn’t be too much in the way of press reports. The New York City press treated gang wars in Harlem on about the level it treated a bunion on the mayor’s toe.

Ida went in through the cafeteria doors, picked up a tray and put it on the metal runners. She took a fork and a knife and a spoon out of habit, in spite of not knowing what she wanted to eat. She looked out across the sparse crowd and found Victor sitting at a table almost exactly in the center of the room, plowing through a copy of the New York
Sentinel.
There were always stacks of copies of the New York
Sentinel
in the cafeteria and the common rooms of both the east and west buildings, given out free. It was one of the things Charles van Straadt did for this place.

“There’s Victor,” Ida told Martha. “He’s actually reading something. The stars may fall from the heavens.”

“Did you know that Rosalie was here?” Martha asked. “Rosalie and Grandfather both, but you know Grandfather. He gets himself to where he wants to go and then he stays put. Rosalie is wandering around.”

Well, Ida thought. That’s just like Martha. That’s
just
like Martha. She takes the only important piece of news she has, and she treats it like waste paper.

“Bowl of duchess,” Ida said to the young woman behind the counter. The young woman was vaguely familiar from around the center, but not familiar enough for Ida to know her name. The soup was passed over the high end of the counter and Ida said, “Thanks.”

“Now,” she said to Martha, “go back to the beginning on this. Rosalie and Grandfather are here at the center.”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“The usual thing. Probably because of all that news about Michael, don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s disgusting? What is it with men, anyway?”

“I don’t know.” Ida hadn’t known many men. That is, she hadn’t known them intimately. The only reason she wasn’t a virgin was that she had made a point of losing her virginity. “When did Grandfather and Rosalie get here?”

“I don’t know. I saw Rosalie wandering around just after six. And Grandfather’s been trying to call me. He’s probably been trying to call you, too.”

“Probably. What do you mean, been trying to call you?”

“Well, I haven’t been taking the calls, have I? I mean, why should I? I mean, he’s being such a pain in the ass about all this stuff. Why should I hop to it every time he wants to tell me what an idiot I’m being for not getting my hair cut at a good salon.”

“Does he lecture you about that?”

“About that kind of thing. All the time. My clothes. My hair. Why I don’t wear makeup.”

“Maybe he thinks I’m hopeless,” Ida said. “He never talks to me about that kind of thing at all.”

“You want beef, fish, or chicken?” the woman behind the main-course counter asked.

“I want two grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches,” Ida said. Then she turned around and looked at Victor, still oblivious to everything behind the pages of his paper. Maybe he was reading out loud under his breath. Maybe he was spelling everything to himself to decode the words. Maybe she should stop being so nasty about Victor.

The counter woman handed her two grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches on two separate paper plates. Ida put them on her tray and reached into the pocket of her pants for some money.

“Look,” she said to Martha, “do me a favor, will you? Pay me out and bring my tray over to the table. My colitis is acting up.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means I have to go to the bathroom. I have to go now. Will you do this for me, please?”

“Well… I suppose so. Are you going to be long?”

“How the hell should I know? It’s a tension thing. Please, Martha, I’ve got to go
now.”

“Well.” Martha looked mulish. “All right.”

Ida threw the money on the plastic tray and bolted, back down the line, back through the doors, out into the stairwell again. She did not, however, go to the ladies room. She went up the stairs instead.

One of the few things Ida Greel had always liked about her body was her legs, because they were strong, and because they were fast. Right now, she wanted to be very, very fast.

I
T WAS AFTER EIGHT
o’clock by the time Dr. Michael Pride got a chance to breathe again, and by then he was so tired it felt like too much effort to draw breath. It felt like too much effort to take off his gloves and his mask and sit down. It felt like too much effort to think about what he was going to have to do next. He was going to have to do a great deal. He had just performed two very difficult operations, because those two had been the two least able to wait. Over the next twenty-four hours, he was going to have to perform half a dozen more—and that was assuming that his emergency help didn’t wimp out on him, which they probably would. Michael was very good at getting fancy high-paid physicians to come down to the center and do some work, but those physicians defined work in their inimitable Park Avenue way and not in the way anyone on staff at the center was forced to define it. Michael would start to consider himself overworked when he had done three more surgeries back-to-back and without sleep. His two friends probably thought they were about to collapse from exhaustion already, having each performed one.

Paragon of workaholism or not, though, Michael had to admit he needed a break. If he went right back into OR the way he was now, he would make mistakes. He refused to make mistakes. He knew the way these people lived. They were the guinea pigs for every new procedure, the victims of every quack, the client lists of every half-qualified pretender who squeaked through the boards with a crib sheet. Michael’s whole point in starting the center was to give them better than that.

I’d better go upstairs and drink coffee in peace, Michael told himself. He looked around for Augie but couldn’t find her. The hall outside OR was full of people in white coats, people he knew, but he was tired enough so that they didn’t look familiar. He stuffed his used surgical gloves into a red waste disposal and headed for the stairs. Everybody was calming down now. He could feel it. The shooting must have stopped.