Dear Old Dead Page 3

  “Yes,” Augie said. “Yes, I do know.”

  “Fine,” Sister Kenna said. She went to the door, opened it up, and looked outside. Augie caught a sudden rush of noise, made up of the groans and screams of injured people and the hard clang of metal instruments being used with too much haste and too much force.

  “See you later,” Sister Kenna said, and slipped outside.

  The door closed again and the station was silent. Augie thanked God for the decision, made three years ago, to get this station in the emergency room soundproofed. They’d done that because the nurses were finding it impossible to do the necessary work on dosages and diagnoses in the middle of crises like this one. Augie stood and went back to the window, taking the chocolate pie with her. There were a pair of ambulances pulling up outside. The attendants jumping out the backs of them looked worse than strained. The picketer had stopped his pacing to watch the action. He had his sign up over his shoulder, resting on his collarbone, so that the ambulance men could read it. THIS CENTER IS A DEATH CAMP, his sign read. The ambulance men weren’t paying any attention.

  Augie went back to the desk and began to attack the hot turkey sandwich. Sister Kenna was right. She had to get moving and be a help to Dr. Pride. She had to be a help to somebody.

  As for the rest of what Sister Kenna had said—

  Augie put her fork down and stared out across the desk. She knew exactly how the girls felt about Charles van Straadt. She knew better than they did why they felt that way. The man was a snake, that was the truth, sneaking around Michael the way he did, insinuating himself where he didn’t belong, stocking the center full of his own grandchildren and expecting the rest of the volunteers to put up with them. There was something… sly about this whole operation, something wrong. She only wished she knew what it was.

  In the absence of knowledge, Sister Augustine wished she had the guts to poison the man’s tea.

  5

  WHEN VICTOR VAN STRAADT first heard that his grandfather was thinking of changing his long-standing will to one that left virtually everything to Victor’s cousin Rosalie, he panicked. It wasn’t the loss of the money itself that bothered him—although that did, of course, bother him. He got mixed up whenever he tried to think about it. No, the real problem was time, his own time, the way he would spend it and what it would mean to the dozens of people who knew him, but not very well. Victor never allowed anyone to know him very well. Victor was twenty-two years old and very good-looking, in a cover-of-a-J. Crew-catalog sort of way. He looked best in cotton crewneck sweaters and baggy khaki pants and the kind of overly expensive sun visor that litters the slopes of Aspen at the end of every season. The adjective preppy might have been invented to apply to him. Beyond what he looked like, though, he had very little. He had graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in classics, but his grades had been no better than mediocre and classics wasn’t good for anything. He had done his grandfather-mandated eighteen-month stint at the Sojourner Truth Health Center, but he had done it with such a commitment to laziness, he hadn’t got much out of it. Now he had a job at the New York Sentinel, but it wasn’t much of a job. They had started out trying to train him as a reporter, but that had been impossible. Now he ran the contests the paper was so fond of, like the Father’s Day contest it was red-bannering over the masthead daily now—except he didn’t. Victor never did his own work if he could help it. He got his sister Ida and his cousin Rosalie to help with the contests, because they were both so much smarter than he was and so much better with money. Sometimes he got his cousin Martha to help, too, but he didn’t like Martha very much. Victor didn’t like much of anything that required a lot of work, and work was what he would have to do if grandfather changed his will. Victor thought he really had to do something about that. His parents were both dead. Who would support him? If he never accomplished another thing in his life, he had to stop his grandfather from handing eight hundred and fifty million dollars into the hands of dear cousin Rosalie, that world-class bitch.

  Victor’s appointment to meet Martha and Ida for dinner at the Sojourner Truth Health Center had been set up over a week ago. If he watched the news on television or listened to any radio station besides the all-music Rock Bop on 107.7 FM, he would have known not to come. If he had bothered to look around his own newsroom, he would have known not to come. But Victor had spent the entire day in his office, his Walkman earphones glued to his head, listening to the Beach Boys moan peppily about hot cars and tanned girls and places where it never, ever got any snow. No one had bothered him, because no one ever bothered him. The people he worked with had long ago realized that Victor was useless.

  If Victor had had to take a cab uptown, he would never have gotten there. The cabdrivers were listening to the news, even if he wasn’t. Victor didn’t take a cab because he had learned from previous forays into Harlem that cabs didn’t like to go there. It was easier on the nerves to take his very own car and his very own driver, which is what he kept a car and driver for. Victor’s driver didn’t listen to the news any more than Victor did. He couldn’t. Victor’s driver was from an obscure little town in Brazil. He spoke ten words of English and a dialect of Portuguese so rarefied he shared it with no other person in the city of New York.

  Victor’s driver took the car to the front door of the Sojourner Truth Health Center, around the corner from the emergency-room door and more or less out of the fray. It was only more or less because everything up here was in the fray now. The crisis had gotten so large, there was no real way to avoid it north of 140th Street. Even from inside the car, Victor could hear gunshots. He could have heard the sirens if he’d been dead in a coffin in the back of a hearse. He scooted over to the side of the car closest to the curb and looked out.

  “What do you think is going on around here?” he asked.

  He could have asked the air. The driver didn’t answer. Victor opened the door and got out. Most nights when he came up here—which was not often; he hated coming up here—there were bag ladies in little clusters around the front door and kids in torn jeans cluttering up the sidewalk, but tonight there was nobody. He climbed the steps and rang the bell and looked around again. If it wasn’t for the light spilling out from the front windows, he would have thought everybody had disappeared. Yes, disappeared. Just like in one of those old Twilight Zone episodes. Victor often felt as if he were in one of those old Twilight Zone episodes.

  It took forever for someone to open up. The doors to the center were never left unlocked. The young woman who let him in seemed distracted and upset. Instead of asking her what was wrong, Victor asked her where his cousin Martha was. The young woman repeated “Martha” a couple of times, then went off shaking her head.

  Victor was just about ready to decide that he was going to have to go wandering around looking for Martha himself, when Martha herself showed up in the dimly lit foyer, looking as frazzled as the young woman had. Victor did not put a great deal of stock in this. Martha always looked frazzled. Martha always looked undone. She was pudgy in that depressed-teenage-girl sort of way adolescents got around the time of their parents’ divorce, and her skin always seemed to be on the verge of sprouting out in pimples. Victor had never known her actually to have a pimple, but that was something else.

  Martha was wearing a long black jersey jumper and a short-sleeved shirt. She looked like the least popular girl in camp.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” she said as soon as she saw him. “Don’t you realize what’s going on around here? We’re in the middle of some kind of war.”

  “War?”

  Martha looked impatient. “Never mind, Victor. Let’s just say that dinner is off, all right? Ida can’t make it. She’s all tied up in the emergency room.”

  “Medical school.” Victor made a face. “Can you imagine medical school? Why would she do something like that when she doesn’t have to?”

  “Maybe because she doesn’t want to be bored. I really think you ought to get out of here, V
ictor. Grandfather is up in Dr. Pride’s office and Rosalie is stalking through the building. I keep running into her in the oddest places. You don’t want them to catch you here.”

  “Why are they here?”

  “Grandfather comes up to check things out every once in a while. I suppose he’s here tonight because of all that publicity about Dr. Pride. You have seen something of the publicity about Dr. Pride?”

  Victor had seen it. More to the point, he had heard a violent argument between the city editor and one of the Sentinel’s top reporters about the fact that the Sentinel was not reporting any of the news about Dr. Pride. This, he was caught up on.

  “That explains why grandfather’s here,” he said, “but it doesn’t explain why Rosalie’s here. Is she going everywhere with him these days?”

  “Something like that.”

  “One of us should have gotten a degree in accounting. I should have. We’re going to have to meet on this sooner rather than later, Martha. We can’t wait on it forever. Eventually he’s going to stop talking about changing his will and actually go do it.”

  “It’s not that I want any more money than I’ve already got,” Martha told him. “It’s just that I don’t want to see it all go to her. God, she’s a poisonous woman. She was a poisonous child.”

  “If you had all that money, you could start your own clinic like this,” Victor suggested. “You could be Mother Teresa with your own funds. That would have to be more amusing than sleeping on a board. Isn’t that what Mother Teresa does? Sleep on a board?”

  “I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

  Victor hadn’t the faintest idea. He was babbling. He often babbled. “Look,” he said, “as long as I’m here, I might as well get a cup of coffee or something. I gave my driver two hours off. I can call him back, of course, but he really hates that. He gets sullen.”

  “I don’t have time to have a cup of coffee. I have work to do.” Martha sounded irritated.

  “I know, I know. It’s all right. I’ll go down and get a cup on my own. I know where the cafeteria is.”

  “Rosalie—”

  Victor put on a brave smile. “So, maybe I’ll run into Rosalie. Maybe that would be a good thing. Maybe she’ll go back and tell grandfather that I’m finally taking an interest in the family charity.”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “I’m not. Maybe it would be a good thing if Rosalie did get the idea that we were plotting something. Maybe it would be a good thing if grandfather got that idea, too. Why not? The old man’s a paranoid. He’d probably be terribly impressed that we’d suddenly acquired so much practical intelligence. It couldn’t hurt.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Martha said again, but she was beginning to smile, faintly, and that made Victor feel better. Getting Martha to smile was as easy as convincing Newt Gingrich that Mikhail Gorbachev would make a good president of the United States.

  “Look,” Victor said to her, “try to see it in the best possible light. You know what this place is like. Maybe one of the juvenile delinquents they have roaming through the halls around here will stumble over grandfather on his own, and mug him.”

  6

  ROBBIE YAGGER WAS NOT a very intelligent man. He wasn’t even a streetwise smart one, like some of the boys he had grown up with out in Queens, where the same child who failed miserably at every mathematics test could compute the odds on fifteen different horses in a Monmouth Park trotter race in his head. Robbie Yagger had been the kind of earnest, dim young boy who works very hard to get nowhere and works harder to get half a step ahead, only to be squashed flat the first time he stops to take a rest. For Robbie Yagger, thinking was like swimming through a polluted river in a fog. It was hard to do. It didn’t get him very far. It made him feel awful. He only went on doing it because he felt that he had to.

  It was now seven o’clock in the evening and, May or not, it had started to get cold. Robbie stopped watching the ambulances unload—what the hell went on up here, anyway? It was like one of those war movies he used to like to go to see before the old Majestic Theater closed—and rested his sign down against the side of the building. The sign made only peripheral sense to him. He knew something about the Nazis and the death camps. He’d learned a little about them in school, and he’d seen dozens of movies in which the Nazis were the enemy. He even knew that the Nazis had tried “to kill all the Jews,” as he put it to himself, and that that attempt was what was called “the Holocaust.” He had learned that much at pro-life meetings, where the connection between abortion and the Holocaust was made at least twice in any important speech. Robbie tried not to think too hard about it, because it got him confused. For one thing, he didn’t quite believe that the Nazis really had tried to kill all the Jews. That was like saying you were going to walk to the moon. Robbie knew it wasn’t possible. Maybe they were only trying to kill as many Jews as they could get their hands on. Maybe it had all had something to do with sex. In Robbie’s experience, practically everything had something to do with sex. You saw that in the movies, and on television, too, these days, now that television had gotten more honest and more decadent. Robbie didn’t know. The only thing he was absolutely sure of was that he was doing the right thing to be here with this sign.

  He had his light spring jacket tied around his waist by the arms. He untied it and put it on, looking up as yet another ambulance arrived from uptown and wound its siren down to a blipping moan. The ambulance’s back doors shot open and four men in white jumped down to the pavement. Robbie could see four stretchers crammed into the space that had been meant only for two. He reached into his pocket and found his pack of cigarettes, the only pack of cigarettes he would be able to afford this week. It was half empty already. He took out a cigarette and lit up against the wind. He smoked very high tar and nicotine cigarettes these days. All cigarettes cost the same, whether they were high tar and nicotine or not. When he could only afford a pack a week, he wanted to get as much kick for his dollar as he could.

  One of the white-coated men from one of the earlier ambulances—they were all parked out there together; it looked like an ambulance parking lot—came out of the emergency room and got out a cigarette of his own. He looked at Robbie and Robbie’s sign and seemed to shrug. Robbie could feel himself blush.

  The ambulance man was young and very Brooklyn, as Robbie saw it. He was dark and hip and cool and smart and all the other things Robbie was always imagining himself to be, except that as the years went on Robbie no longer believed he was ever going to achieve any of those things. The ambulance man was looking at Robbie’s sign again and frowning.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  This was a new one. Robbie almost never ran into people who didn’t understand what his sign was supposed to be getting at.

  “It’s about abortion,” he said. “They do abortions in that place.”

  “In the emergency room?”

  “You go through the emergency-room door to get to the family-planning clinic. I used to picket right in front of the family-planning clinic, but they threw me out. It’s private property.”

  “Are you from those clinic-closer people? Operation Rescue?”

  “Oh, no.” Robbie blushed again. He had tried Operation Rescue once, but he hadn’t liked it. It was too military for him, too organized and controlled. All the people he met always seemed to be talking right over his head. It was just like school. “I come up here on my own,” he told the ambulance man. “I’ve been coming for months. Ever since I got laid off.”

  “From what?”

  “Maintenance. I was a janitor. At the Trade Center. Then that bomb went off down there, and they closed the towers and—here I am.”

  “Abortions,” the ambulance man said. “They can’t do abortions in there. The place is full of nuns.”

  “Parts of the place are full of nuns,” Robbie corrected, “but the rest of the place is operated by a private foundation. Run by Dr. Mic
hael Pride.”

  “I know who Dr. Pride is.”

  “He’s a devil,” Robbie said solemnly. “He’s an agent of evil. And he’s slick, too. He makes everybody think he’s a saint.”

  The ambulance man looked skeptical. Robbie’s cigarette had burned halfway down. No matter how careful Robbie tried to be with his cigarettes, they always burned down much too fast for him. The ambulance man’s cigarette was entirely gone. He threw the butt on the pavement and stamped it out with the heel of his boot.

  “Michael Pride isn’t a devil,” the ambulance man said. “He’s just a poor godforsaken poof is all. But he’s a good doctor. Now you want a devil, you should pick on old Charlie van Straadt.”

  “Who’s Charlie van Straadt?”

  “He’s the guy who puts up most of the money for this place. The guy who owns the New York Sentinel, you know, and that television station the Morty Grebb talk show is on.”

  “Oh,” Robbie said. Something was coming to him dimly, some lecture he had heard at a pro-life meeting down in Queens. There had been quite a lot of talk about Charlie—no, Charles van Straadt, and all the money he put into various things, and how he supported all the parts of this center the church wouldn’t. Robbie hadn’t paid too much attention, because it was just the kind of thing that aggravated him.

  Robbie’s cigarette was burned to the butt. He dropped the filter on the ground regretfully and ground it into the pavement with the edge of his shoe. He wished he had thick lace-up boots like the ambulance man, but he knew they were much too expensive. The ambulance man must be some kind of paramedic. Robbie couldn’t have afforded boots like those even when he was working.

  Robbie put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and looked away. “Do you think I could bum a cigarette from you?” he asked. “I seem to be—out.”

  The ambulance man took out a pack of Winston regulars and handed them over. Robbie very carefully took only one and lit up again. Then he looked at the tops of his shoes and sighed.