Dear Old Dead(10)

“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.