That ought to get him, Gregor thought, hanging up. He kept walking toward the lights, looking for a taxi. He didn’t know Philadelphia as well as he should. He had lived so long in Washington, and in the years before that in places as far apart as Encino and Austin. Philadelphia was the home of his childhood, and even then it had been a rather restricted area. Nothing much changes with people, Gregor thought. When he had been growing up the big tensions in Philly had not been between black and white, but between native and “foreign,” with the “foreign” including even those people, like Gregor, who had been born in the United States of parents who had not. In those days, too, the greatest point of tension had to do with young men, because young men are always the most dangerous creatures on earth. Or some of them are. Gregor had been bookish and shy and not very aggressive. He had started hard and gone to the University of Pennsylvania in the days when quotas were meant to keep people like him out. That was why he didn’t know as much as he should about Philadelphia. Those were the days when leaving your home turf meant getting hassled by the cops or even arrested for something minor, anything so that they could pick you up and throw you back in the direction they figured you belonged. Gregor had known a few places in the city well: Cavanaugh Street and the streets around it; the bus route to the University of Pennsylvania campus; the streets immediately around those parts of the campus that he had to go to. Since he had lived at home, he knew nothing about Penn’s dormitories or where they were located. There must be even more of them now, and they could be anywhere. Still, as he walked up the street and looked around, he was fairly certain that they weren’t anywhere near there. He would have to get a map, but he thought he could be safe in assuming that if there was any connection between this pipe bomb and the ones that had gone off in Patsy MacLaren Willis’s Volvo, it wasn’t geographical. Gregor had no idea why it should be. It was just one of those things you had to check out.
Gregor walked one more block—there were a few Spanish stores, including one that seemed to be selling the accouterments of Santeria—and then began to look seriously for a cab. Sometimes you can go for hours looking for a cab on the streets of Philadelphia at night. This time he was lucky, and a cab pulled up to him less than two minutes after he started looking.
“St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,” he said, climbing inside.
The cabdriver shrugged. “Sure. I’m going to take a little extra loop on the way. I’ll turn the meter off.”
“A little extra loop to where?”
“To the bombing,” the cabdriver said. “There was another bombing tonight, just like that thing at the garage. It’s terrorists, let me tell you. The world is full of terrorists. It’s all because of that Saddam Hussein.”
“What?”
The cabdriver had swung back into the street with the crowd on it. Gregor could see that the paramedics were still at work, taking people out of the town house and putting them in ambulances. There were a lot more police than there had been a few minutes ago too.
“Saddam Hussein,” the cabdriver said again. “It’s a conspiracy. It’s like, Reagan and Bush, they were paying this guy Saddam Hussein to hassle the Ayatollah, but now he’s gotten out of hand, and Mr. Chickenshit Clinton isn’t going to do anything about him, and it all ties in with the way those Chinese people keep sneaking into the country. You see what I mean?”
“No.”
“Nobody ever does,” the cabdriver said glumly. “That’s why the country is going down the tubes. You do agree the country is going down the tubes?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Good. Talking to some people, it’s like they just came from outer space.”
3.
Walking into St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Gregor thought, fifteen minutes later, was like walking into outer space. Did emergency rooms always look like this? Gregor didn’t spend much of his time in them. The only one he could really remember with any detail had belonged to a free clinic called the Sojourner Truth Health Center in Harlem, and he didn’t think that ought to count. That was supposed to be in a war zone. This emergency room looked like an outpost in a war zone too. So many people seemed to be bleeding, and so many of them seemed to be young. So many people seemed to be waiting, and so many of them seemed to be poor. The patients at the Sojourner Truth Health Center had been almost universally African-American. Here, race was less of a factor than exhaustion. Everybody he saw looked hopeless and tired and halfway dead.
He went up to the woman in the white uniform at the reception window. She had a plate of bulletproof glass in front of her.