On, Off

Miraculously, Ponsonby wasn’t agog to go into detail about his work, which he simply said had to do with the chemistry of a brain cell involved in the epileptic process.

“So far everybody seems to be into epilepsy. Is anyone into mental retardation? I thought the Hug was for both.”

“Unfortunately we lost our geneticist several years ago, and Professor Smith hasn’t found a suitable man to replace him. The DNA business is attracting them, you see. More exciting.” He giggled. “Their soup is made out of E. coli.”

And thus to Dr. Walter Polonowski, who had a big chip on his shoulder having nothing to do with his Polish ancestry: that, like Ponsonby’s art, would have been too simple.

“It isn’t fair,” he said to Carmine.

“What isn’t fair, Doctor?”

“The division of labor here. If you have a medical degree, like me, Ponsonby, Finch and Forbes, you have to see patients at the Holloman Hospital, and seeing patients eats into research time. Whereas Ph.D.s like Chandra and Satsuma do research all the time. Is it any wonder that they’re way ahead of the rest of us? When I agreed to come here, the understanding was that I’d see idiopathic retards as patients. And what happens? I inherit the patients with malabsorption syndromes!” Polonowski said angrily.

Oh, Jesus, here we go again! “Aren’t they retarded, Doctor?”

“Yes, of course they are, but secondary to their malabsorption! They are not idiopathic!”

“What does idiopathic mean, sir?”

“A disorder of unknown etiology—no known cause.”

“Uhuh.”

Walt Polonowski was a very presentable man, tall, well built, his dark gold hair and eyes blending into a dark gold skin. The kind of man, Carmine judged, who wasn’t really griping about his patient load because that was what bothered him; what bothered him were core emotions like love and hate. The guy was miserable all the time, it was there in the set of his face.

But, like all the others, he never noticed anything as mundane as a dead animal bag, let alone noticed how big a dead animal bag was. And why am I fixated on dead animal bags anyway? Carmine asked himself. Because someone very clever took advantage of the dead animal refrigerator knowing that the Hug personnel never ever noticed dead animal bags. That’s why, yet—by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. It isn’t over. Yeah, I know it, I know it!

Polonowski’s technician, Marian, was a pretty girl who told Carmine that she took Dr. Polonowski’s bags downstairs herself. Her manner was wary and defensive, but not about dead animal bags was his guess. This was an unhappy girl, and unhappy girls were usually unhappy over personal problems, not their workplace. Jobs were easy to find for these young people, all science graduates, some with little projects on the side that would count toward a Master’s or a Ph.D. Marian, Carmine was willing to bet, sometimes came into the Hug wearing dark glasses to hide the fact that she’d been crying half the night.

After the others, Dr. Hideki Satsuma was great. His English was perfect and American; his father, he explained, had been at the Japanese Embassy in Washington D.C. from the time diplomatic relations had been reopened after the War. Satsuma’s schooling had finished in America, and his degrees came from Georgetown.

“I’m working on the neurochemistry of the rhinencephalon,” he said, caught the blank look on Carmine’s face, and laughed. “What is sometimes called the ‘smell brain’—the most primitive of human grey matter. It’s very involved in the epileptic process.”

Satsuma was another looker; the Hug sure had its share of them among the men! His features were patrician too, and he had undergone surgery to retract the epicanthal folds of his upper eyelids, thus liberating a pair of twinkling black eyes. Quite tall for a Japanese. He moved with the grace of Rudolf Nureyev, had that same slightly Tartar look. Carmine summed him up as an unerring kind of person who would never fumble a catch or drop a beaker. Likeable too, which troubled Carmine, who had spent his War years in the Pacific, and had no love for the Japs.

“You must understand, Lieutenant,” Satsuma said earnestly, “that we who work in a place like the Hug are not the noticing kind unless it involves our actual work, when we become endowed with X-ray vision better than Superman’s. A brown paper dead animal bag might intrude as an offense, but otherwise would not intrude at all. As the Hug technicians are very good, dead animal bags do not lie around intruding. I never carry them downstairs. My technician does that.”

“He’s Japanese too, I see.”

“Yes. Eido is my assistant in every way. He and his wife live on the tenth floor of the Nutmeg Insurance building, where I have the penthouse. As you well know, since you live in the Nutmeg building yourself.”

“Actually I didn’t know. The penthouse has a private elevator. Eido and his wife I’ve seen. Are you married, Doctor?”

“Not I! There are too many beautiful fish in the sea for me to have singled just one out. I am a bachelor.”

“Do you have a girlfriend here at the Hug?”

The black eyes flashed—amusement, not anger. “Oh, dear me, no! As my father told me many years ago, only a foolish bachelor mixes business with pleasure.”

“A good rule of life.”

“Would you like me to introduce you to Dr. Schiller?” Satsuma asked, sensing that the interview was over.

“Thanks, I’d appreciate it.”

Well, well, another Hug looker! A Viking. Kurt Schiller was the Hug’s pathologist. His English had a very slight Germanic inflection, which no doubt accounted for the look of savage dislike Dr. Maurice Finch had produced when he mentioned Schiller’s name. No love lost there. Schiller was tall, a trifle on the willowy side, with flaxen-blond hair and pale blue eyes. Something about him irritated Carmine, though it had nothing to do with his nationality; the sensitive cop nose smelled homosexuality. If Schiller isn’t one, there’s something wrong with my cop nose, and there isn’t, Carmine thought.

The pathology lab occupied the same site as the O.R. did on the floor below, save that it was somewhat larger thanks to an animal room without any cats. Schiller worked with two technicians, Hal Jones, who did the Hug’s histology, and Tom Skinks, who worked exclusively on Schiller’s projects.

“Sometimes I am sent brain samples from the hospital,” said the pathologist, “due to my experience in cortical atrophy and cerebral scar tissue. My own work involves searching for scarring of the hippocampus and uncinate gyrus.”

And de-de-da-de-da. By this, Carmine had learned to switch off when the big words started. Though it wasn’t the size of the words, it was their abstruseness. Like Bill Ho the electronics engineer talking about a magnetic mu of less than one as if Carmine would automatically know what he meant. We all speak our own kind of specialized lingo, even cops, he thought with a sigh.

By this time it was 6 p.m. and Carmine was ravenous. However, best to finish seeing everyone so they could all go home, then he could eat at leisure. Only four on the fourth floor to go.

He started with Hilda Silverman, the research librarian, who ruled over a huge room packed with steel bookshelves and banks of drawers that held books, cards, papers, abstracts, reprinted papers, articles, significant excerpts of tomes.

“I keep my records on our computer these days,” she said, waving her unmanicured hand at a thing the size of a restaurant refrigerator, equipped with two 14-inch tape reels, and, on a console in front of it, a typewriter keyboard. “Such a help! No more punch cards! I’m much luckier than the medical school library, you know. They still have to do things the old way. At the moment there is a facility being put together in Texas that we’ll be able to tap into. Enter key words like ‘potassium ions’ and ‘seizures’ and we’ll be sent the abstracts of every paper ever written as fast as a teleprinter can produce them. Just one more reason why I quit the main library to come here and have my own domain. Lieutenant, the Hug is swimming in money! Though it’s hard to be so far from Keith,” she ended with a sigh.

“Keith?”

“My husband, Keith Kyneton. He’s a postgraduate fellow in neurosurgery, which is right down the other end of Oak Street. We used to eat lunch together, now we can’t.”

“So Silverman is your maiden name?”

“That’s right. I had to keep it—easier, when all the pieces of paper say Silverman.”

He guessed her at the middle thirties, but she could have been younger; her expression was a little careworn. She wore a badly tailored coat and skirt that had seen better days, scuffed shoes, and no jewelry other than her wedding band. The wavy auburn hair was badly cut and held back with ugly bobby pins, her rather nice brown eyes were diminished by a pair of Coke-bottle-bottom glasses, and her face was free of makeup, neutrally pleasant.

I wonder, asked Carmine of himself, what makes librarians look like librarians? Paper mites? Dust bunnies? Printer’s ink?

“I wish I could help you more,” she said a little later, “but I really can’t ever remember seeing one of those bags. Nor have I ever visited the first floor, except for the elevator foyer.”

“Who are your friends?” he asked.

“Sonia Liebman in the O.R. No one else, really.”

“Not Miss Dupre or Miss Vilich on your own floor?”

“That pair?” she asked scornfully. “They’re too busy feuding to notice my existence.”

Well, well, a useful item of information at last!

Who next? Dupre, he decided, and knocked on her door. She had the southeast corner room, which meant windows on two sides, one looking over the city, the other looking south across the misty harbor. Now why hadn’t the Prof grabbed it? Or didn’t he trust himself not to waste time looking at a gorgeous view? Miss Dupre, who was definitely not gorgeous, also had enough steel, he judged, to resist what lay outside her windows.

She rose from her desk to tower over him, something she clearly enjoyed doing. A dangerous hobby, madam. You too can be cut down to size. But you’re very clever, and very efficient, and very observant; they’re all there in your beautiful eyes.

“What brought you to the Hug?” he asked, sitting down.