“This is Sister Kenna,” Eamon Donleavy said, to Gregor, in an off-hand tone. “She works in the refuge program.”
Sister Kenna was taking great gulping breaths. “It’s Rosalie van Straadt. She was going on and on and on about how it was all Dr. Pride’s fault, and then she just seemed to lose it. She began picking things up and throwing them on the floor—and she’s in Dr. Pride’s office, you know, and there’s a lot of equipment in there and medicine and now there’s glass everywhere on the floor and I just don’t know what to do—”
“I know what to do,” Sister Augustine said firmly. She grabbed Sister Kenna by the elbow and began to propel her back up the stairs to the center’s front doors. “I’ve been dealing with temper tantrums for thirty years. I can deal with one more. Trust me.”
Eamon Donleavy sighed. “Come on in,” he said to Gregor. “This isn’t exactly the first impression I wanted you to get.”
Gregor Demarkian didn’t suppose it was, but he wasn’t unhappy about it. First impressions that came off the way they were supposed to almost never told him anything.
THREE
1
THE WEST BUILDING OF THE Sojourner Truth Health Center was six stories high—five plus the basement level—and on the sixth floor there was a small square space that looked out on the street, furnished with an old black couch and three worn chairs and an ashtray. This floor contained administrative offices. Dr. Michael Pride thought of it as providing a commentary on what he thought of administration. The Sojourner Truth Health Center was committed to getting all the necessary paperwork finished and filed. It was determined to see that both the city and state of New York got exactly what they asked for. It just couldn’t bother to waste valuable space in more convenient parts of the building to get it all done. We should have put in an elevator for staff use, Michael thought now. It would have made things easier. It would also have made things more expensive. Back when the center bought the west and east buildings and renovated them, the staff had decided on two stretcher elevators, period, no conveniences provided for people who could walk. It had saved them God only knew how much money. It had been a very good decision. The problem was that here was Michael on the sixth floor, tired as hell and knowing he had to start on down. The problem was that even after all this time, there were days when Michael didn’t want to make the right decision.
Michael had been standing against the windows here when Eamon Donleavy had driven up with Gregor Demarkian. He had seen Augie and Sister Kenna and all the commotion. He knew exactly what was going on downstairs. He had been avoiding it all morning. People at the center thought he was an absentminded professor, an Albert Einstein type—except for the periodic forays into some of the stranger establishments in the side streets off Times Square; only Eamon Donleavy ever talked to him about those—but it wasn’t true. Michael had excellent radar. He had even had excellent radar on that night the establishment he was in had gotten raided. He just hadn’t been inclined to listen to it.
The street was empty now. Everybody had come inside. Michael pushed himself away from the window and wandered back into the hall. This was an old apartment building. The doors that opened off the central corridor opened onto suites, no single rooms. The suites were small and cramped and being drowned in paper. The doors were all open, because with the doors shut the people in the suites couldn’t breathe. Michael said hello to Betsey in Processing and good afternoon to Aramanda in Permanent Files, and laughed a little to himself. If he’d ever described the situation here in just that way to someone who knew nothing about it—to one of his classmates in the Harvard Medical School class, one of the ones who had gone on to make a million dollars a year doing plastic surgery in Beverly Hills—it would have sounded as impressive as hell. There would have been no way for his listener to tell Betsey was one of only two people in Processing or that Aramanda had to do the Permanent Files by hand because the center’s computer system consisted of three Macintosh PCs, all kept in Augie’s office downstairs and used to sort out the medical backgrounds of emergency cases. They needed computers to sort out the medical backgrounds of emergency cases because they got a lot of repeat visits by people who couldn’t remember they were making repeat visits. Michael found it absolutely incredible what crack could do to a human brain. He found it even more incredible that kids in these neighborhoods, having seen what crack could do to a human brain, started taking it anyway. Sometimes he thought his cats had more sense than half of the people he knew.