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“Yes.”
“Where’d you go to med school?”
“Oxford.”
The surgeon nodded: “Heard of it,” and he went away to scrub up. Almost made Scott smile again: “Heard of it.”
Then the paperwork and the question about insurance. The woman in charge of payments explained that there were some costs that could be reduced, that the woman might qualify for other aid, and Scott grew exasperated and said, “Listen. Get whatever Mrs….” He didn’t know her name and he looked at her and she said, “Bernal…”
Scott said, “Learn what Mrs. Bernal can afford to pay, and what assistance she can get, and then put the rest on my Amex card. Do you take Amex?”
The payment lady said, “Absolutely. We take everything but chickens and goats.”
—
Scott pried himselfaway from the hospital and Mrs. Bernal a half hour later, when everyone was satisfied that he was willing to pay the bill for the boy’s operation; and he could no longer tolerate Mrs. Bernal’s appreciation. He climbed into his Subaru without telling anyone where he was going, or how to reach him, found a Days Inn, and got a room for the night.
He hadn’t slept well in his tent and he didn’t sleep well in the motel, despite a two-martini dinner. He wondered, in the middle of the night, why he’d worked to save the boy, and a fragment of his Oxfordundergraduate education popped into his mind, courtesy of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Stalin said, Scott recalled, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.”
And that was it, wasn’t it?
The death of the boy would have been a tragedy. The death of a million, or five billion, would be a…
Number. And anecessity.
1
Letty Davenport’s apartment complex had a swimming pool filled with discouraging numbers of square-shouldered men with white sidewall haircuts—even on the black guys, unless they were called black sidewalls; who knew?
They all had big bright wolf teeth, gym muscle, and questionable sexual ethics; and their female counterparts were much the same, the major differences lying in how much butt-cheek was exposed, which, in one case, when the young woman climbed out of the pool, was like watching the moon come up over the Potomac.
They were soldiers, mostly, attached to the Pentagon, just a couple miles away.
Five o’clock on an August afternoon, too hot to be inside, where the barely adjustable air conditioning blew cold damp air on everything; so Letty dozed in the webbing of her recliner, a copy ofTheQuarterly Journal of Economicscovering her face. Beneath that, pressing against her nose, was a paperback version of J. D. Robb’sCelebrity in Death, which Letty estimated was the fortieth of theIn Deathnovels she’d read.
While not as prestigious as theJournal,the Robb novel was distinctly more intelligent and certainly better written; but, a girl has to maintain her intellectual status with the D.C. deep state, so theJournalwent on top.
Some passing dude she couldn’t see made a comment about legs, which she suspected was directed at her, but she ignored him, and was still ignoring him when the phone on her stomach vibrated. She groped for it, and without looking at the screen, pressed the answer tab and said, “Yeah?”
Her boss said, “This is your boss. I’m putting you on speaker.” Other people were listening in; a modicum of respect was required.
“Yes, sir?”
“Can you get out to Dulles in the next three hours and forty-one minutes?”
“Uh, sure. Where am I going?”
“London. Well, Oxford. A guy will meet you at Dulles’s United gate with a packet including the job, your tickets, and a hotel reservation. The return ticket’s open, probably won’t take you more than a day or two.”
“How will he know who I am?”
“He’ll have seen a photograph.”
“Can you tell me more than that?” Letty asked.
“Not really. You know, the phone problem.” He meant that that phone call wasn’t secure, so whatever the problem was, security was an issue.
