Dear Old Dead(18)

Paragon of workaholism or not, though, Michael had to admit he needed a break. If he went right back into OR the way he was now, he would make mistakes. He refused to make mistakes. He knew the way these people lived. They were the guinea pigs for every new procedure, the victims of every quack, the client lists of every half-qualified pretender who squeaked through the boards with a crib sheet. Michael’s whole point in starting the center was to give them better than that.

I’d better go upstairs and drink coffee in peace, Michael told himself. He looked around for Augie but couldn’t find her. The hall outside OR was full of people in white coats, people he knew, but he was tired enough so that they didn’t look familiar. He stuffed his used surgical gloves into a red waste disposal and headed for the stairs. Everybody was calming down now. He could feel it. The shooting must have stopped.

Halfway up the stairs to his office, he passed Sister Kenna coming down. She was looking frazzled but relieved. She held her long habit up so she wouldn’t trip on it.

“Oh, Dr. Pride,” she said. “There you are. People have been looking for you everywhere.”

“I’ve been operating.”

“That’s what Sister Augustine said. When you have a chance you should try to find that granddaughter of Mr. van Straadt’s, the pretty one. You know, the one who doesn’t work at the center.”

“Rosalie.”

“That’s the one. I just saw her upstairs. She’s looking for you.”

“I’ll check her out as soon as I get a chance.”

“Thank you, Dr. Pride. I’m sure it must be something terribly important.”

Michael thought it must be something terribly important, too, meaning his arrest, or maybe just the publicity resulting from his arrest. He knew he didn’t want to talk about any of it, not now and not later, not ever. God, what a mess all that was.

He went the rest of the way up and looked into Eamon Donleavy’s office. It was empty. He looked across the corridor at his own door and sighed. His door was closed, and he never closed it when he was still in the building and available for work—meaning he never closed it, except once or twice a month when he made a point of going into the east building and spending the night, just so that the nuns would stop fussing at him. If his door was closed now there could be only one reason for it, a reason he should have suspected as soon as Sister Kenna said she’d seen Rosalie in the building looking for him. Old Charlie van Straadt was here and ready to talk, whether Michael was ready or not.

“Crap on crap,” Michael said to himself. “Just what I need.”

Then he got ready to read old Charlie the riot act. Michael was good at reading people the riot act. He’d turned the process into an art form.

He grabbed the knob of his office door, got ready with his opening sentence—I don’t care how important you think it is, Charlie, we’ve got thirty-two gunshot cases needing attention down in Emergency right this minute—and vaulted himself into his office. He was halfway across the room to the desk when the scene inside made any impression at all.

The scene inside was pretty grim.

Charles van Straadt was sitting in the chair behind Michael’s desk just as Michael had expected him to be, but he wasn’t sitting still.

He was rearing and bucking in a series of convulsions that could only have been caused by strychnine, and that made him look as if he had hold of one end of a live wire.





PART ONE


The Cardinal Archbishop of New York

Has a Suggestion to Make.

Just a Little Suggestion





ONE


1


ALWAYS BEFORE, WHEN GREGOR Demarkian had come to New York, it had been winter. “New York is cold,” he told friends who asked him how he liked it. Cold was what he thought of when he stood in his apartment in Philadelphia, packing a single large suitcase to take with him on the train. Philadelphia was not cold, at the moment. It had been an unseasonably warm May, and now, at the beginning of June, green buds had blossomed into leaves on all the trees and house fronts had blossomed into red-and-white streamers. At least, the houses on Cavanaugh Street had. Donna Moradanyan, the young woman who lived with her small son in the fourth-floor floor-through apartment in Gregor’s brownstone, was making up to the neighborhood for the funk she had been in for Valentine’s Day. Gregor didn’t remember Father’s Day being a vigorously celebrated holiday. He didn’t remember ever having taken notice of it before in his life. Mother’s Day, that was another story. Mother’s Day was on a par with Easter on Cavanaugh Street. People around here said “my mother” the way twelfth-century religious fanatics had said “my God.” Fathers had always seemed to be superfluous. Now Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store had a Father’s Day poster taking up most of its plate-glass front window, and the Ararat restaurant was offering “the Father’s Day Breakfast Special,” meaning pancakes in the shape of knotted ties. The children at the Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School were getting ready to hold a Father’s Day pageant. The choir at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church had announced its intention of holding a benefit concert for the Armenian refugees in the church basement on Father’s Day proper, made up entirely of hymns with the word Father in the title. Even the Armenian-American Historical Society had gotten into the act. They had taken St. Joseph, Foster Father of the Holy Family, as their patron saint.