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"Everything's fine with me," Patrick replied. "I guess we have a green light."
It was the degree of sexual satisfaction in Wallingford's expression that rang a bell with Dr. Zajac. Where had he seen that expression before? Oh, yes, he'd been in Bombay, where he'd been performing a number of exceedingly delicate hand surgeries on children in front of a selective audience of Indian pediatric surgeons. Zajac remembered one surgical procedure from there especially well--it involved a three-year-old girl who'd got her hand caught and mangled in the gears of some farm machinery.
Zajac was sitting with the Indian anesthesiologist when the little girl started to wake up. Children are always cold, often disoriented, and usually frightened when they awaken from general anesthesia. On occasion, they're sick to their stomachs.
Dr. Zajac remembered that he'd excused himself in order to miss seeing the unhappy child. He would have a look at how her hand was doing, of course, but that could be later on, when she was feeling better.
"Wait--you have to see this," the Indian anesthesiologist told Zajac. "Just have a quick look at her."
On the child's innocent face was the expression of a sexually satisfied woman. Dr. Zajac was shocked. (The sad truth was that Zajac had never, personally, seen the face of a woman as sexually satisfied as that before.)
"My God, man," Dr. Zajac said to the Indian anesthesiologist, "what did you give her?"
"Just a little something extra in her I.V.--not very much of it, either!" the anesthesiologist replied.
"But what is it? What's it called?"
"I'm not supposed to tell you," said the Indian anesthesiologist. "It's not available in your country, and it never will be. It's about to become unavailable here, too. The ministry of health intends to ban it."
"I should hope so," Dr. Zajac remarked--he abruptly left the recovery room.
But the girl hadn't been in any pain; and when Zajac examined her hand later, it was fine, and she was resting comfortably.
"How's the pain?" he asked the child. A nurse had to translate for him.
"She says 'everything's okay.' She has no pain," the nurse interpreted. The girl went on babbling.
"What's she saying now?" Dr. Zajac asked, and the nurse became suddenly shy or embarrassed.
"I wish they wouldn't put that painkiller in the anesthesia," the nurse told him. The child appeared to be relating a long story.
"What's she telling you?" Zajac asked.
"Her dream," the nurse answered, evasively. "She believes she's seen her future. She's going to be very happy and have lots of children. Too many, in my opinion."
The little girl just smiled at him; for a three-year-old, there'd been something inappropriately seductive in her eyes.
Now, in Dr. Zajac's Boston office, Patrick Wallingford was grinning in the same shameless fashion.
What an absolutely cuckoo coincidence! Dr. Zajac decided, as he looked at Wallingford's sexually besotted expression.
"The tiger patient," he'd called that little girl in Bombay, because the child had explained to her doctors and nurses that, when her hand had been caught in the farm machinery, the gears had growled at her like a tiger.
Cuckoo or not, something about the way Wallingford looked gave Dr. Zajac pause. "The lion patient," as Zajac had long thought of Patrick Wallingford, was possibly in need of more than a new left hand.
What Dr. Zajac didn't know was that Wallingford had finally found what he needed--he'd found Doris Clausen.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Twinge
AS DR. ZAJAC EXPLAINED in his first press conference following the fifteen-hour operation, the patient was "at risk." Patrick Wallingford was sleepy but in stable condition after awakening from general anesthesia. Of course the patient was taking "a combination of immunosuppressant drugs"--Zajac neglected to say how many or for how long. (He didn't mention the steroids, either.)
The hand surgeon, at the very moment national attention turned to him, was noticeably short-tempered. In the words of one colleague--that moron Mengerink, the cuckolding cretin--Zajac was also "as beady-eyed as the proverbial mad scientist."
Before the historic procedure, Dr. Zajac had been running in the predawn darkness in the gray slush along the banks of the Charles. To his dismay, a young woman had passed him in the ghostly mist as if he'd been standing still. Her taut buttocks in spandex tights, moving resolutely away from Zajac, tightened and released like the fingers of a hand making a fist and then relaxing, and then making a fist again. What a fist it was!
It was Irma. Dr. Zajac, only hours before he would attach Otto Clausen's left hand and wrist to the waiting stump of Patrick Wallingford's left forearm, felt his heart constrict; his lungs seemed to cease expanding and he experienced a stomach cramp that was as crippling to his forward progress as being hit by, let's say, a beer truck. Zajac was doubled over in the slush when Irma came sprinting back to him.
