One of the white-coated men from one of the earlier ambulances—they were all parked out there together; it looked like an ambulance parking lot—came out of the emergency room and got out a cigarette of his own. He looked at Robbie and Robbie’s sign and seemed to shrug. Robbie could feel himself blush.
The ambulance man was young and very Brooklyn, as Robbie saw it. He was dark and hip and cool and smart and all the other things Robbie was always imagining himself to be, except that as the years went on Robbie no longer believed he was ever going to achieve any of those things. The ambulance man was looking at Robbie’s sign again and frowning.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
This was a new one. Robbie almost never ran into people who didn’t understand what his sign was supposed to be getting at.
“It’s about abortion,” he said. “They do abortions in that place.”
“In the emergency room?”
“You go through the emergency-room door to get to the family-planning clinic. I used to picket right in front of the family-planning clinic, but they threw me out. It’s private property.”
“Are you from those clinic-closer people? Operation Rescue?”
“Oh, no.” Robbie blushed again. He had tried Operation Rescue once, but he hadn’t liked it. It was too military for him, too organized and controlled. All the people he met always seemed to be talking right over his head. It was just like school. “I come up here on my own,” he told the ambulance man. “I’ve been coming for months. Ever since I got laid off.”
“From what?”
“Maintenance. I was a janitor. At the Trade Center. Then that bomb went off down there, and they closed the towers and—here I am.”
“Abortions,” the ambulance man said. “They can’t do abortions in there. The place is full of nuns.”
“Parts of the place are full of nuns,” Robbie corrected, “but the rest of the place is operated by a private foundation. Run by Dr. Michael Pride.”
“I know who Dr. Pride is.”
“He’s a devil,” Robbie said solemnly. “He’s an agent of evil. And he’s slick, too. He makes everybody think he’s a saint.”
The ambulance man looked skeptical. Robbie’s cigarette had burned halfway down. No matter how careful Robbie tried to be with his cigarettes, they always burned down much too fast for him. The ambulance man’s cigarette was entirely gone. He threw the butt on the pavement and stamped it out with the heel of his boot.
“Michael Pride isn’t a devil,” the ambulance man said. “He’s just a poor godforsaken poof is all. But he’s a good doctor. Now you want a devil, you should pick on old Charlie van Straadt.”
“Who’s Charlie van Straadt?”
“He’s the guy who puts up most of the money for this place. The guy who owns the New York Sentinel, you know, and that television station the Morty Grebb talk show is on.”
“Oh,” Robbie said. Something was coming to him dimly, some lecture he had heard at a pro-life meeting down in Queens. There had been quite a lot of talk about Charlie—no, Charles van Straadt, and all the money he put into various things, and how he supported all the parts of this center the church wouldn’t. Robbie hadn’t paid too much attention, because it was just the kind of thing that aggravated him.
Robbie’s cigarette was burned to the butt. He dropped the filter on the ground regretfully and ground it into the pavement with the edge of his shoe. He wished he had thick lace-up boots like the ambulance man, but he knew they were much too expensive. The ambulance man must be some kind of paramedic. Robbie couldn’t have afforded boots like those even when he was working.
Robbie put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and looked away. “Do you think I could bum a cigarette from you?” he asked. “I seem to be—out.”
The ambulance man took out a pack of Winston regulars and handed them over. Robbie very carefully took only one and lit up again. Then he looked at the tops of his shoes and sighed.
“It’s terrible what’s been going on in there today. There must have been a dozen ambulances driving up to this door in the past hour. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Gang war,” the ambulance man said curtly. “Big shoot-out going on uptown.”
“It’s the culture of violence,” Robbie said, struggling through the fog in his mind to remember what he had heard about all this. “That’s what abortion is, the foundation of the culture of violence. The United States is turning into a third world country now. Life is cheap.”