“Mr. Demarkian said you were to be sent directly up,” Sister Vincent said, locking the door again. The reporters hung back and smiled at her. “It might relieve you to know, everything seems to be all right. The doctors don’t believe there will be brain damage or anything like that. I’m afraid she will need some plastic surgery on her face.”
From what Lotte had heard from DeAnna Kroll, this was something of an understatement. She looked at the cross on the wall behind the reception desk and wondered what it would be like to belong to a religion that encouraged you to go to God with every little thing in your life, that promised that God would answer all your prayers and protect all His children. But she didn’t want that. She didn’t even want the God of the Covenant. She only wanted herself.
She went up in the elevator, got out on the fifth floor, and looked around. It wasn’t as hard to find the north wing as she’d thought it might be. All she had to do was follow the trail of doctors and nurses and police officers. She passed another crucifix and thought of what David had told her once, that his friend Father Ryan had said: God answers all our prayers, but most of the time He says no. The next thing she saw was a little menorah on display, just inside the door of a room where an old woman was sitting up in a chair, reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Zimmerman Telegram. In all the other rooms Lotte had so far passed, the space on the wall over where this woman’s head was was occupied by a picture of the Virgin Mary on a cloud. In this one, that wall space was blank. Lotte wondered whose decision it had been to take the picture out of there.
She stopped at the nurse’s station. The woman there could be identified as an RN only by the plastic name tag above the breast pocket of her white polyester tunic. Otherwise, she could have been a surgeon or a waitress.
“Excuse me,” Lotte Goldman said. “I am looking for the room of Miss Carmencita Boaz.”
The nurse looked up, blinked and blushed. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Dr. Goldman. You shouldn’t have been left waiting. Have you been left waiting? You should have been brought up right away.”
“I just got here,” Lotte said. “I would like to see—”
“Never mind,” DeAnna Kroll said, emerging from a knot of people farther down the hall. “Hello, Lotte. I’m glad you’re here. The doctor’s still in with her.”
“Still?”
“They have to make sure the wound is entirely cleaned out before they can bandage it. I’ve had hell’s own time keeping Itzaak out of there. He gets hysterical and the doctors just want him gone.” She looked around. “Now he seems to have disappeared.”
“He was talking to Mr. Demarkian,” the nurse said politely, “but now Mr. Demarkian is over there with that police detective and I don’t see Mr. Blechmann.”
DeAnna sighed. “I’ve got it all arranged with the head nun downstairs that Itzaak can spend the night sitting beside Carmencita’s bed as long as there’s also a police officer in the room—”
“A police officer?”
“Well,” DeAnna said, “they have to take precautions. You and I may know better, but they don’t have any other choice but to suspect—”
“Itzaak?”
“Lotte, calm down. It’s only a precaution. Even Mr. Demarkian doesn’t actually think—”
“Let me talk to Mr. Demarkian,” Lotte said.
Mr. Demarkian was away from the clutch of people at Carmencita’s door. He was standing at the end of the hall looking out a window onto Lotte didn’t know what—probably a parking lot, in this part of Philadelphia—and talking to John Jackman. His clothes were rumpled and one of the pockets on his suit jacket was torn. Beyond him, the gray day Lotte had come out of only a few minutes before had turned nasty. Something that looked like sleet was falling in slanting lines from black clouds that looked as heavy as bowling balls. Lotte strode over to the two men and grabbed Gregor Demarkian by the shoulder. Since he was over a foot taller than she was, this was not as dramatic a gesture as she wanted it to be.
“Mr. Demarkian,” she said, “would you please tell me—me, not DeAnna and not that silly man Itzaak Blechmann—what you can possibly be thinking of to even conceive of the idea that Itzaak might do anything to harm Carmencita? Itzaak, of all people.”
“I agree,” Gregor told her politely. “I don’t think Itzaak Blechmann will harm Carmencita Boaz.”
“Well,” Lotte said. “Well.”
“I don’t think he will, either,” John Jackman said. “I just know how easy it would be to get lynched if he happened to. If you see what I mean.”