The Gun Runner's Daughter (26 page)

Things became more complex when he met Rosenthal’s daughter, a strange and impressive woman, graceful and courageous as the world around her came tumbling down. He liked her
immediately—as much, he thought, as he had ever liked anyone. Adding to her misery was not an easy thing. But he reminded himself that at stake was an imperative: nothing was sacred if it
might help keep Greg Eastbrook out of office, and he made his pitch.

The third proof was the most categorical: that at last, after all these years of work, he had gotten close enough to Eastbrook to scare him.

That was when, in a bathroom at Logan Airport, en route to Washington during Labor Day weekend, a thin, tall man slipped behind him at the urinal and spun him around by the hips, as if they were
dancing. And as he turned he felt a sensation that could only be a blade cutting flesh, and then he was being pulled off his feet, his whole body weight on the blade moving cruelly upward through
his abdomen, and his arms were around the man’s neck, and the smell of the man’s evil breath was in his nose, and then he was falling, falling, while the blood of his body drained onto
the tiled floor, and his consciousness fled without even the chance to appreciate how right, how perfectly right he had been all along.

6.

That night, the night before Labor Day, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, at one in the morning, Harry Essex was putting on his coat.

It was the first time he had done so in over thirty hours: during the Labor Day weekend festivities he had performed emergency operations on no fewer that five gunshot victims. When a bleeder
had been announced by EMS, he had just finished changing out of scrubs for the first time in two days, and was about to head back to his home in Newton. The bleeder, he told himself as he listened
to the EMS radio, hadn’t a prayer anyway: his intern could call the code and look into organ donation.

Still, before leaving, he hesitated. It was a moment during which a choice was made as to whether Nicky would live or die: no one else in the hospital, this night, could have saved him. Perhaps
Dr. Essex knew that. And perhaps it was why, when he emerged from his fugue of thought, he removed his jacket and called for scrubs again.

Before the bleeder arrived Dr. Essex was already in the operating room, having his gloves put on while the rest of the team assembled. As the nurse worked on his gloves, he
began to speak in the calm and certain tone of a professor addressing a classroom.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are waiting on a thirty-five-year-old white male stabbing victim, one hundred and thirty pounds. He was stabbed in the lower left quadrant with an unknown blade.
The EMS team reports a definite arterial bleed, and a very grave degree of blood loss. Dr. Armstrong, what will we be looking for?”

A young black woman spoke, gloved hands held up as her facial mask was tied. “Besides the bleed, sir, we’ll want to look straight to the spleen, the lungs, and the other hollow
viscera, depending on the nature and shape of the wound.”

“Good. Dr. Thomas, what will we be preparing for?”

“We’ll be ready to crack the chest cavity and clamp the aorta, while transfusing aggressively. Additionally, we’ll scrub for an emergent splenectomy. Given the EMS report, sir,
we’ve already notified organ donation of a likely candidate, and they are contacting his next of kin.”

“Okay.” Clearly, Dr. Essex’s control over his operating theater was entire, and clearly this control was very much one offered by his respectful staff, rather than demanded by
his authority. But before he could go on, the door was opening as the patient was brought in, the EMS technician squatting on the gurney while still keeping his hand, deep within Nicky’s
stomach, pinching off the arterial bleed.

As for Nicky, he appeared to be, rather than dead, in the grip of exhaustion—hopeless, painful—old far beyond his years, his eyes clenched in a frown, his face tightened as if in
concentration. He was, of course, perfectly unconscious, probably already comatose. Still, when they transferred him to the operating table, it seemed as if the many machines and monitors connected
to him were, rather than sustaining him, only remaining on-line by his massive effort, so massive that in his gray face the skin at the end of his lips, around his nose, and at his temples was
strangely, entirely, bloodless.

Before Dr. Essex’s eyes, now, Nicky was moved to the operating table. Some of the team connected him to a variety of machines, drips, and transfusions; others, monitoring the machines,
began to call out vital signs; and still others began cutting away his shirt, spongy with scarlet blood. For a long moment, the doctor stood, his gloved hands held fingers-up before him, apparently
lost in thought. Then, from the table, a voice called:

“Sir, I think we should notify organ donor stat. This patient will not survive a chest crack.”

“By all means.” Nearly absently, Dr. Essex spoke as he approached the table. “By all means. Now, young man”—speaking to the EMS technician—”I want you
to keep your fingers on that bleed. Very well done, very well. Dr. Armstrong, I agree with you. We cannot open the chest. But we can try something else. I want a lateral cut from the center of the
wound. Be careful of this young man’s fingers. Dr. Thomas, I want you to prepare to clamp the mesenteric artery by feel above this young man’s hand. Then I’ll suture the bleed
blind from the abdominal opening. It might work. We’ll move from there directly to a splenectomy, I have little doubt. Young man, was your hand sterile? No? Well, let’s give cefoxitin,
two grams IV stat . . .”

The operation lasted four hours. And then, still not satisfied, Dr. Essex accompanied his bleeder to the recovery room, where he asked for some dinner, and then settled in for the rest of the
night. Becoming, by the morning, the man who had saved Nicholson Jefferson Dymitryck’s life no fewer than four times.

He would do so again four times before, in early evening, East Coast time, Jay Cohen arrived at the hospital, having taken Stan Diamond’s Gulfstream from its berth at LAX.

7.

At five-thirty on the morning of September 9, Nicky awoke again in his hospital bed, hearing his voice, his dull, drugged voice saying things he never would have said to
anybody, anybody. The room was dark, and for a long time he lay, saying unutterable things, as if emptying his soul in a vast paroxysm of all that had been secret, had been kept secret, all of his
life. Then a nurse was there, inserting a syringe into the tube in his arm, and then she was gone, on a cresting wave of morphine, and once again, before the eyes of Nicky Dymitryck, all was
black.

A night. And then a day.

This time, when he awoke, it was slowly.

Consciousness came before vision, a slow dream about darkness.

There were thoughts, but they were preverbal: sensations of time, of memory. As if there were, floating before him, out of reach and entirely without words, an idea of identity that, although he
felt it to be assured, would not, could not pronounce itself. For a long time he lay in this weightless space, free of all past, free of future, trying to reassemble his awareness, fractured by
massive bodily injury and then by wave after wave of cruelly numbing drugs.

Finally, as if far above, the rouge light of his lids pierced through the channel of his optic nerve into his awareness, and with it a sensation of pain; and then, as if rising from the bottom
of a deep canyon of water, his identity returned.

He was in a white room next to a black window, unlighted save for the red glow of a readout next to his head. For a long time he watched that glow. Then, moving only his eyes,
he let his gaze wander over the ceiling, the window, the chair in the corner, and the mass of instruments around him. And only then did his eye fall on the person standing next to the open window,
leaning out. It was Jay Cohen.

Slowly the room assembled itself: a space of low fluorescent lights, a monitor beeping, the smell of antiseptic in the air mixing with the smoke from the cigarette Jay was trying to keep out the
window. For a long time, he gazed up at Jay, his familiar face with its Coke-bottle glasses under his ring of black hair around a bald scalp, and at the sight, a wave of peace seemed to pour down
the IV into his arm. His throat hurt when he spoke:

“Since when you smoke?”

Jay started, flipped his cigarette out the window, and turned. “Since the late fifties.”

“Thought you quit.”

“Well, I started again, so shut the fuck up.”

A pause while Jay shut the window and came to sit next to the bed, and Nicky noticed now a massive peace through his body, a relaxation so thorough, so total, that it seemed all his pain, all
his days of pain and fear, had been concentrated into the ache in his throat. He wondered if he had ever felt this way before. Perhaps, he thought, in the womb.

“Jay?”

“Yes, Nicky.”

“Tell me what happened.”

An immediate response, in a curious tone, as if asking for information. “Don’t you remember?”

Looking away to the black window, Nicky considered.

“I do remember. I was stabbed at the airport. I mean after that.”

Jay hesitated, then spoke in a neutral voice. “You had an arterial bleed and a ruptured spleen. A sharp goddamn EMS worker held the artery closed all the way to the hospital, and your
doctor improvised a procedure to save you.”

Staring at his boss, Nicky asked: “How close was it?”

“You were coded eight times. I was here for the last one.”

“Jesus.”

“You said it.”

For a moment they regarded each other in wonder. Then Jay said:

“How you feel?”

“Like I been stabbed and coded eight times.”

“Good, boy. You just relax now.”

But Jay, Nicky saw, did not want anyone to relax—Jay wanted to talk. He rose, fetched a pint of scotch from his jacket, drank, and sat again. For a long time there was silence, the weight
of Nicky’s near death between them. Finally, Jay:

“Does she know?”

“Who?”

“The Rosenthal girl.”

“About what?”

“What you’re up to.”

“To a degree. She knows I know about the embezzlement. She knows I want her to tell me about Greg Eastbrook.”

“What’s the story, you think?”

“She’s scamming money off her father’s properties. Did they find my things?”

“Uh-huh. The hospital had put them away, so I got them before the FBI. The film’s at a lab, and the computer disk’s in my pocket.”

“Yeah.” For a moment, Nicky struggled to remember, fighting against the somniferous effect of the pain killer. Then: “The film has images of endorsed checks from renters. The
disk has an Excel spreadsheet tracking the income from rentals. Oh, yeah: the film also has a sheet of practice signatures, if they came out. I was right. The girl’s forging her
father’s endorsement. When Stan’s cancelled check comes back, we can prove the forgery.”

Jay nodded. “We got her.”

“Uh-hmm.”

But Jay was racing ahead.

“Man, it’s gonna be fun telling Rosenthal that. Nicky, when you get out of this bed, I’m going to kick your ass, then fire you. You hear me? But until then, I got to admit,
this was sweet work.”

Nicky paused at the praise, vaguely aware that once it would have meant a lot to him. Much of what he had done in his career, he knew, was designed to win praise from just this source. Now it
seemed immaterial, an unnecessary delay in the conversation. “What’s the plan?”

“Threaten to inform the State Attorney in Massachusetts. Gillian Morreale’ll do it out of Stockyard, Dyson. Let Rosenthal know that we can put his daughter in jail. Then let him know
what we’re looking for, and how he can make us go away.”

“Good. I’m doing it.”

Now Jay smiled. “Uh-uh. I haven’t told you the whole story. You’re dead.”

Nicky considered this for a moment, as if it might really be true. Then he spoke with the almost petulant defensiveness of the very ill.

“No I’m not.”

“Oh, but you are. Check it out. The FBI thinks this whole thing’s about the Harlanstrasse bombing, right? So I tell them, the only way to protect you is to announce to the media that
you died under the knife. They say, no way, so I mention that the second you open your eyes we’re giving a press conference to say that they wouldn’t give you federal marshals although
we warned them of the danger. So we announced that you’d died. Your obit was a few days ago. Made you sound kind of like an asshole, by the way.”