Dear Old Dead(77)

“I changed my mind,” Robbie said again. “I talked to Shana. I’m not going to picket any more.”

Michael Pride loomed up out of nowhere. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Gregor pointed to Robbie. “What do you think? He keeps talking about the coffee tasting funny.”

“It had stuff in it,” Robbie said again. “Floating around. I didn’t think that was right. I—”

Robbie’s back began to arch and his head snapped forward. Michael Pride lunged at him and caught him around the waist.

“Oh, no,” Michael said. “Not this time. Augie. Get me the Comprozan.”

“Coming,” Augie said.

“Meet me in Emergency Room Three.”

Then Michael Pride picked Robbie Yagger up, slung him over his shoulder, and headed at a full-tilt run for the stairs.





PART THREE


The Cardinal Archbishop of New York

Does Not Get the Solution

He Was Looking For





ONE


1


THIS TIME, MICHAEL PRIDE pulled it off. Gregor didn’t understand how he pulled it off—Gregor didn’t have the first idea how medicine worked, or why it sometimes didn’t—but the impression he got was that nobody else understood how Michael had done it, either. The surprising thing was how quick it all was. Gregor had time to call Hector Sheed. In spite of the fact that he didn’t know, then, for sure, that what he had was a strychnine poisoning, Gregor thought getting Hector to the scene was only common sense. Something was going on. Besides, he was half sure. People had once called Gregor Demarkian America’s foremost expert on poisons. They had been exaggerating, as usual. The real expert was a professor of pathology at the Yale Medical School. Gregor was only number two. He did, however, know poisons. He’d never seen anyone as early in the process of being poisoned by strychnine as Robbie Yagger had been in the Sojourner Truth Health Center’s cafeteria, but he was willing to bet that strychnine poisoning was in fact what Robbie had had. After calling Hector Sheed, Gregor paced back and forth in the open space near the front doors in front of the Admitting desk. The emergency room seemed to be suddenly full of people, although not people with emergencies. Gregor saw dozens of volunteer staff pins, half a dozen short modern veils, a few habits. There were also people from the street, some of them old, some of them young and garish looking, all of them poor. It was as if the center were putting out messages on some kind of silent shortwave. All these people had sensed trouble. All these people were willing to help. Gregor wondered what it was any of them thought they would be able to do.

By the time Hector Sheed showed up, Michael Pride was finished with Robbie Yagger. The doctor came out of Emergency Room 3 looking so gray in the face, Gregor thought he was going to have a stroke. Augie came out behind him, looking ill. Gregor was standing still near the front doors. Michael walked up to him with his surgical mask in his hands. His hands were covered with surgical gloves—two apiece.

“Did it,” Michael Pride said. He looked over Gregor’s shoulder and blinked. “Hello, Hector. You got here fast.”

“Demarkian said there’d been another poisoning,” Hector Sheed said. “Another poisoning.”

Michael ignored him. “The technicians took stomach samples,” he told Gregor Demarkian. “I made them. They’ve got the samples preserved. The police can have them any time they want them. Robbie’s going to be out of it for the next couple of days.”

“How out of it?” Gregor asked.

Michael shrugged. “Don’t expect him to talk to anybody until at least tomorrow afternoon. Even then it might be difficult. What we just did was essentially a stomach pumping operation. It wasn’t just a stomach- pumping operation, but you see what I mean. And we’re still worried about residual effects of the strychnine. He’s heavily sedated. And he’s got to be kept in a dark room with as little distraction as possible for at least ten hours.”

“How do you know it was strychnine?” Hector demanded. “Nobody comes back from strychnine. It’s a bitch.”

Michael was peeling the surgical gloves off his hands. “It was strychnine. Ask Gregor Demarkian here. Test our samples. It was strychnine. Nothing on earth looks like it.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Hector said.

Michael dropped both pairs of gloves into a tall wastebasket with a red lining. The red was to let everyone know that the waste the bag contained was medically hazardous, toxic, contagious. If you put a red trash bag by the side of the road, no ordinary garbage truck would pick it up. Gregor wondered why he was thinking of that and decided it was because he didn’t want to think about Michael Pride’s face, which was getting worse by the minute. It had gone from gray to chalk white. The eyes looked sunk into the sockets. The skin of the head didn’t seem thick enough to hold in the skull. Was it really still the middle of the afternoon? Gregor wondered. But of course it was.