I Am Pilgrim(254)

The old bucket was still tied to the rope and the flowers surrounding it were as dead as they had always been. With my body almost spent, I limped past it and reached the old cottage, the lettering on its brass plaque almost illegible now. I knocked hard on the door and, after what seemed an age, it opened and I saw Dr Sydney standing on the threshold – unshaven, his baggy shorts swapped for a pair of frayed chinos and teamed with an old Oktoberfest ’92 T-shirt – but otherwise little changed in the intervening years.

While the booze had probably continued to play havoc with every other organ, his mind – and his memory – were holding up remarkably well. There was something in my face that he recognized, and I watched him dredging through the past to find a name. ‘Jacob, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Near enough,’ I replied.

I saw him take in my bandaged shoulder and foot, the ragged clothes and my haggard expression. ‘You’re looking well, Jacob,’ he said, deadpan.

I nodded. ‘You too, Doctor. Nicely turned out, as always.’

He roared with laughter. ‘Come in. We can keep lying to each other while I see if we can save that foot.’

He led me inside and I realized what a strange thing memory was – the rooms seemed much smaller, the distances far shorter, than the night we had carried Mack along the same route. In the kitchen, the Australian got three lamps into position, laid me on the kitchen bench, stripped off the bandages, took one look at my foot and hit me with a massive dose of IV antibiotics and an even larger amount of painkillers. Thankfully, when it came to medicine, subtlety wasn’t his strong suit.

He decided that, despite the swelling and purple bruises, neither my ribs nor my kneecap were broken. Fractured, maybe, but there was no way of telling without an X-ray.

‘Feel like a drive to the hospital in Milas?’ he asked.

He saw the look on my face and smiled – ‘I didn’t think that was an option’ – and told me he would splint and bandage them as best he could.

After that, he injected a local anaesthetic, cleaned and sutured the gunshot wound and told me I was a lucky man.

‘I don’t feel like it,’ I replied.

‘Half an inch difference and it wouldn’t have been a hospital for you, even a makeshift one. It would have been the morgue.’

With the rest of the wounds taken care of, he turned his attention to the havoc wrought by the hammer blows. He had been a pediatric surgeon, highly experienced with victims of car wrecks, so I believed him when he told me that the bruising and swelling would eventually take care of themselves.

‘There’s little I can do about the small bones that have been broken without scans, X-rays and an operating theatre,’ he said, smiling. ‘A steady hand would help too.’

He decided to manipulate the bones individually into the best position then set and bandage it, hopefully holding everything in place.

‘You’re going to have to do intensive exercise to keep the ankle mobile and prevent the muscles of your lower leg from atrophying. Maybe it’ll work.’

I nodded, and he adjusted the lamps in order to start. ‘This is going to hurt.’

He got that part right. Sometime after midnight, the work was done and he called a halt – I was slipping in and out of consciousness, and I think he doubted whether I could take much more. Holding me under the arms, he got me off the bench and we crossed the kitchen, entered the living room and headed for a stairway leading to a disused bedroom.

Halfway there, I heard voices coming from a corner of the room and saw the old TV again, tuned to CNN. It was the evening news and the network’s Washington correspondent was reporting on the frantic efforts since early in the morning to locate and seize ten thousand doses of flu vaccine that had been accidentally contaminated with potentially lethal traces of engine oil.

I didn’t want the doctor to know I had any interest in the event, so I told him that I needed to rest a moment. Holding on to the back of a chair, I looked at the screen.

‘The alarm was first announced by the president in a 6 a.m. press conference,’ the correspondent reported.

‘Simultaneously, the FBI and local police agencies across the country started locating and securing all flu vaccines manufactured at a plant in Karlsruhe, Germany, operated by Chyron Chemicals.

‘The president delivered high praise to the staff of the Food and Drug Administration who uncovered the problem and alerted the White House in a 4 a.m. phone call—’

‘Ready?’ The doctor asked, and I nodded, letting him help me up the stairs. I wasn’t surprised by the story Washington was relating. What was it somebody once said? In war, the first casualty is truth.