Dear Old Dead Page 5

  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.

  9

  IT 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.

  Halfway up the stairs to his office, he passed Sister Kenna coming down. She was looking frazzled but relieved. She held her long habit up so she wouldn’t trip on it.

  “Oh, Dr. Pride,” she said. “There you are. People have been looking for you everywhere.”

  “I’ve been operating.”

  “That’s what Sister Augustine said. When you have a chance you should try to find that granddaughter of Mr. van Straadt’s, the pretty one. You know, the one who doesn’t work at the center.”

  “Rosalie.”

  “That’s the one. I just saw her upstairs. She’s looking for you.”

  “I’ll check her out as soon as I get a chance.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Pride. I’m sure it must be something terribly important.”

  Michael thought it must be something terribly important, too, meaning his arrest, or maybe just the publicity resulting from his arrest. He knew he didn’t want to talk about any of it, not now and not later, not ever. God, what a mess all that was.

  He went the rest of the way up and looked into Eamon Donleavy’s office. It was empty. He looked across the corridor at his own door and sighed. His door was closed, and he never closed it when he was still in the building and available for work—meaning he never closed it, except once or twice a month when he made a point of going into the east building and spending the night, just so that the nuns would stop fussing at him. If his door was closed now there could be only one reason for it, a reason he should have suspected as soon as Sister Kenna said she’d seen Rosalie in the building looking for him. Old Charlie van Straadt was here and ready to talk, whether Michael was ready or not.

  “Crap on crap,” Michael said to himself. “Just what I need.”

  Then he got ready to read old Charlie the riot act. Michael was good at reading people the riot act. He’d turned the process into an art form.

  He grabbed the knob of his office door, got ready with his opening sentence—I don’t care how important you think it is, Charlie, we’ve got thirty-two gunshot cases needing attention down in Emergency right this minute—and vaulted himself into his office. He was halfway across the room to the desk when the scene inside made any impression at all.

  The scene inside was pretty grim.

  Charles van Straadt was sitting in the chair behind Michael’s desk just as Michael had expected him to be, but he wasn’t sitting still.

  He was rearing and bucking in a series of convulsions that could only have been caused by strychnine, and that made him look as if he had hold of one end of a live wire.

  PART ONE

  The Cardinal Archbishop of New York

  Has a Suggestion to Make.

  Just a Little Suggestion

  ONE

  1

  ALWAYS BEFORE, WHEN GREGOR Demarkian had come to New York, it had been winter. “New York is cold,” he told friends who asked him how he liked it. Cold was what he thought of when he stood in his apartment in Philadelphia, packing a single large suitcase to take with him on the train. Philadelphia was not cold, at the moment. It had been an unseasonably warm May, and now, at the beginning of June, green buds had blossomed into leaves on all the trees and house fronts had blossomed into red-and-white streamers. At least, the houses on Cavanaugh Street had. Donna Moradanyan, the young woman who lived with her small son in the fourth-floor floor-through apartment in Gregor’s brownstone, was making up to the neighborhood for the funk she had been in for Valentine’s Day. Gregor didn’t remember Father’s Day being a vigorously celebrated holiday. He didn’t remember ever having taken notice of it before in his life. Mother’s Day, that was another story. Mother’s Day was on a par with Easter on Cavanaugh Street. People around here said “my mother” the way twelfth-century religious fanatics had said “my God.” Fathers had always seemed to be superfluous. Now Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store had a Father’s Day poster taking up most of its plate-glass front window, and the Ararat restaurant was offering “the Father’s Day Breakfast Special,” meaning pancakes in the shape of knotted ties. The children at the Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School were getting ready to hold a Father’s Day pageant. The choir at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church had announced its intention of holding a benefit concert for the Armenian refugees in the church basement on Father’s Day proper, made up entirely of hymns with the word Father in the title. Even the Armenian-Ameri
can Historical Society had gotten into the act. They had taken St. Joseph, Foster Father of the Holy Family, as their patron saint.

  “That’s Catholic, that bit about St. Joseph the Foster Father,” Gregor told Bennis Hannaford as he threw balled pairs of black socks into his suitcase. “And it’s all my fault, too. I had that little booklet Sister Scholastica gave me after the mess in Maryville and I gave it to Sheila Kashinian. That was all it took.”

  “It never takes much of anything with Sheila Kashinian,” Bennis said.

  Bennis Hannaford was sitting cross-legged on Gregor’s bedspread, looking curiously into his suitcase without offering to help. She had an ashtray in her lap and one of her standard Benson & Hedges Menthols in her right hand. Her thick black hair was pinned to the top of her head with scrunched-looking amber metal things that looked ready to fall to the floor. Gregor knew she had to be nearly forty, but she didn’t look it. Bennis had the second-floor floor-through apartment in this building. Gregor often felt sandwiched between her and Donna Moradanyan, cream cheese filling between slices of date nut bread. Any minute now, somebody was going to come along and squash him flat.