The Sudden Star (2 page)

He watched Jeanne as she slept, and then heard a soft buzzing sound coming from the other side of the bed. He walked over to his videophone, pressed the button for visual black-out, and lifted his receiver. "Hello," he whispered.

"Julio 204," a female voice said. Inwardly Simon groaned.

"Reference?"

"Sam Karenga."

Simon sighed. Sam, he was sure, was already suspected by the police. "Has there been a diagnosis?" he asked.

"It's an inherited form of epilepsy. My little boy has seizures, and the doctor we went to could have stopped them with Dilantin. He even knew the proper dosage. But of course he can't give us any."

"Can you afford a thousand every three months?"

"Oh, no, doctor, five hundred maybe, but not—"

"Then there's no point in discussing it."

"Wait! I can manage six hundred, but a thousand is impossible, please."

"Eight hundred's the limit. And you'll have to accept the fact that I may stop supplying you, if it's too much trouble. Where did you meet with Karenga before?"

"My husband has an office in the World Trade Center. He met him there." Simon winced. Sam was getting careless.

"Fine. Tell him to be there with the money in small bills and coins at ten o'clock tomorrow. Half of it must be coins and the other half gold certificates, not city issue. Remember that, or no medicine."

The woman began to cry. "Oh, thank you, Doctor, you don't know how much—"

He hung up and dialed a number. A deep voice answered. "Karenga."

"Julio 204," Simon said. "Meet that guy with the epileptic kid at ten tomorrow morning at his office. Take some Dilantin. Did he tell you how much he needs?"

"He told me the dosage."

"Take him enough for three months. He'll give you eight hundred. Keep half."

"Fine."

"I assume you checked this guy out."

"Sure." Karenga hung up.

Jeanne was awake. She sat up quickly. "You are being very foolish, Simon. The police will find out soon and arrest you. Marvin would never risk it." She spoke rapidly, with traces of a French accent.

"Marvin wouldn't risk a goddamn thing."

"I am serious, Simon. You must have enough money by now." She was calm, her voice gentle, almost soothing. She might be calm for hours or days before her illness manifested itself once more. She was mad, and there was nothing he or any other doctor could do about it.

"I need more if I'm going to get to Florida," he muttered. "I have to buy papers to immigrate. I have to make sure I'm not extradited."

She got up and walked across the room to the sink. Her protruding belly and waffled buttocks repelled him. She picked up a washcloth and began to sponge the blood off her body.

"Try not to use up my water ration."

"Shut up." Jeanne continued to wash. "I am the one who must use up fuel, dumping that body into the river."

"I'll help you get him up the stairs."

She leaned against the sink. "You act as if you are doing me a favor by seeing me. Johnny and Charlie liked me in the past, it would be no trouble—"

"That's it, Jeanne,
liked
you. In the past. Do you ever look in the mirror? You look like one of those fat starch-fed sluts in the streets who go for half a credit."

She hurled the washcloth at him. "See if you can do better, Simon. You will soon be calling me again. And we are bound together now, whether you like it or not." She walked to where her clothes lay on the floor and began to dress.

Simon realized he was sweating. He wiped his forehead with his arm. He stood up and looked at the murdered man. The crime was punishable by fifty years at hard labor, if the police ever found out, which they never would. Jeanne could mention it. She could also mention the conversations with Karenga. She would never let him leave the city.

She fastened her robe and smiled at him. His shoulder muscles tightened; a claw seemed to grip his head. She said, "Marvin has to go out Tuesday. I shall see you then."

"I'm looking forward to it."

In the morning, Simon got up early to wash the blood off his floor before going to the office. He dressed quickly and climbed the few flights of stairs to his roof to wait for the medical center's helicopter.

Dimly, he heard the sounds of the tanks on morning patrols in the streets fifty-five stories below. The city was awake. Those who had no work were on their way to ration centers. The city government believed that the unemployed should be kept occupied by reporting daily to the centers, where the recipients would stand on line for four to six hours waiting for food. Occasionally they rioted. One of the more serious riots had occurred two days before, and extra militia had been called in. Two hundred people had died. The riot had occurred five blocks away from the medical center where Simon worked.

Two young men who lived on the floor below him were crossing the rope bridge linking this building to the one next door. They hung on to the bridge's sides as they scampered across. The medical center's helicopter whirred loudly as it approached, then settled gently on the roof.

Simon ran to it and climbed in quickly. As it took off, he noticed a new passenger sitting next to Cliff Mahoney. She was young and pretty, with thick, short red hair and sad green eyes. Mahoney grinned.

"Simon, we have a new colleague, transferred from Chicago a week ago." Mahoney turned to the woman. "This guy is Simon Negron, he's a G.P."

The woman smiled. "I'm Yola Kozlowski." She extended her hand solemnly.

"Glad to know you, Doctor." Simon shook her hand. Her fingers were cold.

"Yola's been trying to get here for a while," Mahoney said. "Just received permission to move."

"I'm really amazed by New York." The young woman spoke softly. "I'm only allotted one room here. In Chicago, you can get two, if you're a doctor. But it seems like a much more interesting city. Besides, I wanted to work with Dr. Greenbaum. I'm glad he took me on as a partner when he needed one." Yola Kozlowski blushed, as if embarrassed at having said so much.

"You're a psychiatrist, then," Simon said.

"I just finished my two years of service a year ago, so I haven't had much time to practice. I want to work with adolescents."

"Any particular reason?"

"I feel that if a person can be helped at that age, he'll have less trouble as an adult, be more resilient. It's harder to work with adults. Their habits are set, their identities and their illnesses are intimately connected."

The helicopter landed on the roof of the medical center. Its three passengers got out and the pilot took off again.

"I'd better hurry. I think I'm a little late. Goodbye." Yola hurried ahead of the two men. Mahoney took Simon's arm, digging his fingers into the flesh above the elbow. Simon stiffened.

"You busy this Wednesday?"

"No."

"Good. Moira and I are having a couple of people over to meet Yola, and I thought you might like to come." Mahoney smiled. "You know, Simon, you're past the age where you should live in a single, and you could do worse than a bright girl like that. You could pull in a lot of money together."
      

"I wish you'd stop trying to throw every unattached woman of your acquaintance at me." He was suddenly repelled by Mahoney's broad grin and familiar manner.

Mahoney laughed. "I wouldn't want to deprive them of your charm, boy." He clapped Simon on the back as they walked toward the stairwell. Simon could hear the rapid clicking of Yola Kozlowski's heels two flights below.

Simon, finished with his last appointment of the morning, sat at his desk, bored. Often the faces and bodies of the patients seemed to melt together in his mind; he had to consult his files to remember who they were. Few of them were interesting enough to recall without the files. He had to send the most interesting to the specialists, the doctors who had been able to afford the extra training that Simon's poverty had not allowed him to buy. He had to take the small fees and endure the snobbery of the specialists, who either patronized him or ignored him. He wouldn't have had to practice illegally if he had been a specialist; he would have been as respectable and rich as the others, those former spoiled brats who had it all handed to them. Well, he thought, he would be able to get out of it soon.

Mahoney, Simon realized, might be right. The only way he could get a bigger cut was to go into partnership with at least one specialist, someone like Yola Kozlowski, a naive kid who might marry him.

There was a knock at his door. He looked up as Linda Pura peered in at him from behind the open door. "Mind if I come in?"

He motioned to her. The small woman entered, closed the door, and crossed the room quickly, settling herself on the worn beige sofa against the wall. "It's so quiet in here," she said, pulling her white coat down over her knees. "I just finished with a four-year-old. His mother brought him in for a check-up. 'Tell him it isn't going to hurt,' she said to me. Of course, the kid started screaming at that. I don't know why parents think that kind of comment is comforting."

Simon nodded absently. Linda, a pediatrician, had an office down the hall. She had asked him once about a partnership, but he had put her off. Something about Linda disturbed him. She had dangerous thoughts—which she often mentioned to him, as if trying to draw him into a conspiracy. He ran enough risks without involving himself with her. Yet he had trouble avoiding the woman. She was almost the only person in the center who was friendly to him without apparently wanting anything in return.

"How's Ramon?" Simon asked.

"He's fine. He's pretty worn out most of the time." Linda lowered her voice. "I've been doing some research these past couple of weekends."

"In the lab?"

"In the library. Mura's Syndrome."

Simon sat up, pulling his feet under his chair. "It's on the list now, Linda. Leave it alone. You can't do anything about it anyway. It can't be treated, and it's always fatal."

"And you accept that? A disease which drives its victims insane, sometimes for months or years, before a fever burns them up and kills them? Don't you care?"

"Of course I care." He tried to look concerned. "But there's nothing I can do."

"You sound like my priest. He's quite well educated, and keeps up with intellectual trends. He says that Mura's Syndrome is God's way of demonstrating the indeterminacy of the universe on a biological level, that both it and Mura's Star are mysteries we can't question, signs of God's will. He says the victims will be purged by their suffering and achieve salvation." Linda's dark, almond-shaped eyes glittered. "I can't accept that. We should be doing research, finding out why it affects some and not others. We know it's a virus of some sort, that Mura's Star might have affected it and produced a new disease. A lot of people believe it might have started in a research lab, you know—that it might originally have been something perfectly harmless."

Linda, Simon thought, was becoming obsessed with this problem. He would have to remain more distant in the future, avoid her before she landed in real trouble.

Simon got up. "It's on the list, there's nothing you can do. Let's go to lunch." He moved toward the sofa.

"The list!" She shook her head. Her long black hair swayed. "A woman brought in her baby a month ago. The child was underweight. It turned out that the baby has a metabolic disorder, methymalonic aciduria, which, in time, produces mental retardation. It's on the list, so I couldn't do a thing. All the baby needs is massive doses of vitamin B-12 and a low-protein diet. And if I tell the mother that, and help her at all, I risk the death penalty." Her brown eyes shifted slightly, and Simon knew Linda had given the mother help after all. But no one would ever prove it.

"Let's go eat." For a moment, he wondered if he should be seen with Linda. But at least in the cafeteria she was not likely to discuss dangerous topics. He wondered how much the baby's mother had paid Linda. Maybe Linda hadn't even asked for a fee. He resented Linda’s thinking Simon was like her. She had been as poor as he was once, and she was still ready to risk everything.

She stood up, looking weary. "Fine."

Simon was finishing a cheese sandwich on stale bread, when a heavy hand pressed down on his shoulder, "Hi, Simon." Cliff Mahoney placed his tray next to Simon's and sat down. "Hi, Linda."

"Hello, Cliff." Linda's mouth twisted slightly.

"I heard you were pregnant again. Hell, don't you think that two's enough?" Mahoney laughed jovially. "Why don't you get an abortion? You, at least, don't have to go to a clinic."

Linda got up. "I have to get back to the office. See you, Simon." She hurried off, leaving her unfinished salad on the tray.

"Did you hear the news this morning?" Mahoney said quickly.

"Didn't have time. I had a full slate."

"There was quite a problem out at Kennedy, when one of the food-supply planes came in. About five hundred people tried to get to the plane. A lot of them got shot."

Simon shrugged as he swallowed the last of his sandwich. "They've been having a lot of those problems lately," he said absently.