Foreign Body (13 page)

After picking up the books and turning out the light in the library, Samira descended to the lobby floor. She appreciated that the lobby was empty and appreciated even more that the doormen had gone off duty. Out on the street Samira caught an auto rickshaw, and as they pulled away, she glanced back at the Queen Victoria Hospital. It looked dark, shadowy, and, most important, quiet.

During the ride home, Samira felt progressively better at what she had accomplished, and the fear, anxiety, and indecision she had experienced rapidly faded into the background. As the auto rickshaw reached the bungalow's driveway, it seemed to her that such problems were mere blips on the radar screen.

"I have to leave you here," the driver said in Hindi, as he pulled to a halt.

"I don't want to get out here. Take me up to the door!"

The driver's eyes nervously flashed in the darkness as he looked back at Samira. He was clearly afraid. "But the owner of such a house will be angry, and he might call the police and the police will demand money."

"I live here," Samira snapped, followed by choice Internet-learned expletives. "If you don't take me, you won't be paid."

"I chose not to be paid. The police will demand ten times as much."

With a few more appropriate words, Samira climbed from the three-wheeled scooter, and without looking back started hiking down the drive. In the background she heard a burst of equivalent profanity before the auto rickshaw noisily powered off into the night.

As she walked, Samira mulled over how she was going to describe her experience taking care of the American. It didn't take her but a moment to decide to leave out the minor concerns and concentrate on the success: Mr. Benfatti had been taken care of. That was the important thing. She surely wasn't going to complain like Veena had.

Entering the house, she found everyone, all four officers and all eleven other nurses, in the formal living room watching an old DVD called Animal House. The moment she walked into the room, Cal paused the movie. Everyone looked at her expectantly.

"Well?" Cal questioned. Samira was enjoying teasing the group. She'd taken an apple and sat down as if to watch the movie without providing a report.

"Well what?" Samira questioned, extending the ploy.

"Don't make us beg!" Durell threatened.

"Oh, you must mean what happened to Mr. Benfatti."

"Samira," Durell playfully warned.

"Everything went fine, exactly as you all suggested it would, but then again, I didn't expect anything different."

"You weren't scared?" Raj asked. "Veena said she was scared." Raj was the only male nurse. Despite his bodybuilder appearance, his voice was soft, almost feminine.

"Not in the slightest," Samira said, although while she spoke she remembered how she'd felt when Benfatti was gripping her arm hard enough to hinder the blood flow.

"Raj has volunteered for tomorrow night," Cal explained. "He's got a perfect patient scheduled for surgery in the morning."

Samira turned to him. He was a handsome man. In the evenings he wore his tie shirts a size too small to emphasize his impressive physique. "Don't worry. You'll do fine,"

Samira assured him. "The succinylcholine works literally in seconds."

"Veena said her patient's face twitched all over the place," Raj commented with a concerned expression. "She said it was horrid."

"There were some fasciculations, but they were over practically before they began."

"Veena said her patient turned purple."

"That did happen, but you shouldn't be standing around admiring your handiwork."

Some of the nurses laughed. Cal, Petra, and Santana stayed serious.

"What about Benfatti's computerized medical record?" Santana asked. Since Samira hadn't yet mentioned it, Santana was afraid she'd forgotten. She needed the history to make the story more personal for TV.

By leaning back against the couch and straightening her body out, Samira was able to reach into her pocket and pull out the USB storage device, similar to the one Veena had provided Cal with the evening before. She then flipped it in Santana's direction.

Santana snatched the storage device out of the air like a hockey goalie, hefted it as if she could tell whether or not it contained the data, then stood up. "I want to get this story filed with CNN. I've already given them a teaser about it, and they are waiting anxiously.

My contact assures me it's going right out on the air." While the people who had been sitting next to her on the couch raised their legs, Santana worked her way from behind the coffee table and started for her office.

"I do have one suggestion," Samira offered after Santana had departed. "I think we should get our own succinylcholine. Sneaking into the OR is the weakest link in the plan. It's the only place in the hospital where we don't belong, and if any of us were to be discovered, there would be no way for us to explain."

"How easy would it be for us to get the drug?" Durell asked.

"With money, it's easy to get any drug in India," Samira said.

"It sounds like a no-brainer to me," Petra said to Cal.

Cal nodded in agreement and looked over at Durell. "See what you can do!"

"No problem," Durell said.

Cal couldn't have been more pleased. The new strategy was working, and everyone was on board, even offering suggestions. He couldn't help thinking that starting the scheme with Veena had been brilliant, despite the suicide scare. Just a few days before, he'd been afraid to talk with Raymond Housman, but now Cal couldn't wait. Nurses International was beginning to pay off, which he couldn't have been more pleased about, even if it wasn't in the way he'd expected. But who cared, Cal thought. It was the results that counted, not the method.

"Hey, who wants to see more of the movie?" Cal called out, waving the remote above his head.

Chapter 9

OCTOBER 16, 2007

TUESDAY, 11:02 P.M.

NEW DELHI, INDIA

The wheels of the wide-body jet hit hard as they touched down on the tarmac of the Indira Gandhi International Airport and jolted Jennifer awake. She'd been awakened twenty minutes earlier by one of the cabin attendants to raise the back of her seat as the plane had started its initial descent, but she'd fallen back asleep. The cruel irony was that during most of the final leg, she'd not been able to sleep until the last hour.

Pressing her nose against the window, Jennifer tried to appreciate her first images of India. She could see little more than the runway lights streaking by as the powerful engines reversed. What surprised her was what looked like fog obscuring the view toward the terminal. All she could see were hazy, individually illuminated airplane tails rising up out of a general gloom. The terminal itself was a mere smudge of light. Raising her eyes, she saw a nearly full moon in the apex of a dark gray sky with no stars.

Jennifer started arranging her things. Lucky for her, the neighboring seat had been vacant, and she'd taken full advantage with the surgery book, the India guidebook, and the novel she'd brought for the flight-or, more accurately, the three flights. Her itinerary required two stops, which she'd actually appreciated as an opportunity to stretch her legs and walk, but only one change of aircraft.

By the time the big plane had nosed into the gate, and the seat-belt sign had gone off, Jennifer had her carry-on items packed away in her roll-on but then had to wait while others closer to the exit slowly filed out. Everyone looked as she felt: exhausted, yet having landed in a strange and exotic country, she could feel herself enjoying a second, or maybe a third or fourth, wind. Despite the fact that she was coming to deal with her beloved grandmother's death, she couldn't help but feel a certain excitement as well as nervousness.

The flights themselves, although remarkably long, had been endurable. And contrary to her initial worry that their duration might give her too much free time to obsess about the loss of her closest friend, it seemed to have been the opposite. To some degree, the forced solitary time had allowed her to come to terms with the loss by tapping into one of the lessons she'd learned from studying medicine: that death was very much a part of life, and its existence was one of the things that makes life so special. Jennifer wasn't going to miss her grandmother any less, but her loss wasn't going to paralyze her.

Once off the plane, Jennifer walked through the mildly dilapidated and dingy terminal building, finally appreciating that she was truly in India. On the plane everyone had been in Western clothes. Now she started to see bright-colored saris and equally bright-colored outfits on women she would later learn were called salwar-kameezes. On men she saw long tunics called dhotis over either voluminous lungis or pajamas, which were loose pants snugged at the ankles.

With some concern that she might face a problem, Jennifer approached her first potential hurdle: passport control. She couldn't help but notice that the lines were long and moving slowly for the few booths occupied by border agents both for citizens and for tourists. On the other hand, the line in front of the diplomatic booth was completely free.

Its occupants were either chatting or reading newspapers. With little confidence in bureaucracy in general, and India's in particular, thanks to what she'd recently read in the guidebook, Jennifer fully expected to have a problem because she was not carrying a visa, even though the airline had been so apprised. It all depended on Mrs. Kashmira Varini and whether she'd made the call she promised and whether she had spoken to the right people.

"Excuse me," Jennifer had to call out at the booth's window to get attention.

Conversations stopped and newspapers were lowered. The rather large group manning the diplomatic line, in sharp contrast to the other booths, which were occupied by single agents, all stared blankly at Jennifer as if shocked that they had business. All the agents were wearing saggy brown uniforms, and although the clothes were not obviously soiled, everybody appeared mildly disheveled.

As directed, Jennifer handed over her passport and began to explain the situation, when the border agent slid back the passport, and without speaking motioned for Jennifer to use one of the other lines.

"I was specifically told to come to the diplomatic window," Jennifer explained. Her heart sank as she began to worry about possibly not getting into the country after such a long trip. Hurriedly, she related that she'd been instructed that a visa would be waiting for her specifically at the diplomatic window.

Still without speaking a word to Jennifer, the border agent picked up his phone. Even from where she was standing outside the booth, she could hear some shouting on the other end of the phone line. A minute later, she watched as the agent opened a drawer beneath the countertop he was sitting at and extracted some papers. He then motioned for Jennifer to hand back her passport, which Jennifer was happy to do. The agent then glued into it what she assumed was a visa, initialed it, and then stamped it. Only then did he slide it back out to Jennifer while motioning for her to pass. With relief at being allowed to enter the county after fearing for the worst and surprised at not having to pay for the visa, Jennifer grabbed her roll-on and quickly moved on in case they changed their minds. It was curious the episode had happened without the agent's speaking one word to her, which reminded her why she disliked bureaucracy.

Next was baggage, which surprisingly turned out to be more efficient than it was at JFK.

By the time Jennifer had located the correct carousel, her wheeled bag was there, having already made several circuits.

The customs agents appeared even more rumpled than the passport people, and even less engaged. They all were sitting on the edges of the long countertops that had been built to facilitate opening and examining luggage, but no one was doing either. Dutifully, Jennifer slowed, but they merely waved her on.

Jennifer then pushed through the customs security doors and entered the terminal's main arrival area. Immediately, she had a presage of one of India's main characteristics: an impressive population. The place was mobbed. Although the arrivals part of the terminal had been crowded thanks to multiple international flights landing almost simultaneously, it was nothing like the rest of the terminal. Just beyond the doors was a thirty-foot-wide upward-sloping ramp more than eighty feet in length and lined with a metal handrail.

Pressed against the handrails and pancaked against one another like sardines were hordes of expectant people, most holding up crude signs. About half the crowd was in Western dress, including a large number outfitted in fancy uniforms with visored hats sporting hotel insignias.

Jennifer stopped in her tracks, taken aback by this new quandary. Having been told she would be met by an Amal Palace Hotel employee holding up her name, she'd not concerned herself with this aspect of the journey. Clearly, that had not been a wise move.

From her vantage point there could have been thousands of signs and even more people.

Never happy to be the center of attention, Jennifer nonetheless tried to make herself apparent as she gradually made her way up the incline. As she vainly looked for her name, she invariably briefly locked eyes with strangers, each of whom appeared to be more foreign and exotic than the next. As a young single woman with essentially no travel experience, it was intimidating, even a little scary, especially with no police or other authorities in sight.

Just stay cool, Jennifer silently advised herself, hoping at any second to hear her name being called out over the din. Unfortunately or fortunately, Jennifer was not sure whether anyone had accosted her by the time she reached the top of the ramp. Unwilling to press into the mob, she turned around and as slowly as she'd risen up the incline, she now descended. No one had called out to her by the time she reached the exit doors, or if they had, she hadn't heard it.

With the idea of returning inside to see if there was any kind of information available for hotels, the doors burst open and out came a youthful man in a porter's uniform that was a step down in appearance from those worn by the custom men. He looked more like a student than a professional porter, and the uniform was not only tattered but also much too big. He was pushing a four-wheeled cart loaded with luggage. As he came through the doors, he had built up speed to get up the incline. As a consequence, he almost ran into Jennifer.