Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

“How did the police know there was going to be trouble?”

“I don’t know, Władys had already called them.”

“Before the boy and girl came in?” I said.

“Yes.”

“But how did he know they were going to come in?”

“I have no idea. Perhaps he heard them. It was a long time ago.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Two Jews came in through the window and tied you up, and you don’t remember how your brother knew they were coming?”

“No.”

“Was it because you and he had taken money from them by claiming you could save their relatives?”

She grew very still. “Why are you asking me these questions?”

“Because I want to know what happened.”

“Why should I discuss this with you?”

I thought about it. “Because you and I are the only two people on earth who care, and you don’t look like you’re going to be around much longer.”

She said something along the lines of “Bite your tongue.”

“Just tell me what happened. Please.”

She was going from pale to red. “We sold the Jews hope. God knows they could afford it.”

“Did you save any of them?”

“It was impossible to save Jews during the War. Even if you wanted to.”

“And if they looked at you too closely, you had them killed.”

She turned away at this. “Leave now,” she said.

“Why did you hate them so much?” I asked.

“They controlled the whole country,” she said. “Just like they control America. Get out of my house.”

“I will,” I said. “If you tell me the names of the Jews.”

“I have no idea!” she said. “Get out!”

I stood. I knew I was as sure as I ever would be.

I went to the door. Freezing wind came in when I opened it.

“Wait,” she said. “Tell me the names of your grandparents again.”

I turned back. “I don’t think I will,” I said. “I’m just wondering why they let you live.”

She stared at me. “I’ve always wondered that,” she said.

I left and pulled the door shut after me.

For the record, what I decided was this:

No female targets (which was obvious), but also no targets whose misdeeds were solely in the past. Only ongoing threats. I had no way of knowing why my grandparents had let Blancha Przedmieście live, but she was a woman, and killing her brother had been enough to shut down their operation. So there you had it.

Meanwhile, if David Locano wanted to sic me on killers whose deaths would improve the world, I would verify his information and then feel free—obligated, even—to hunt them down and kill them.

Not once did I think that maybe, if my grandparents would have approved of this course of action, they would have preached to me less about peace and tolerance and told me more about their mission to assassinate Budek. I felt no need to consider such things. Fate itself had told me what to do.

Ah, youth. It’s like heroin you’ve smoked instead of snorted. Gone so fast you can’t believe you still have to pay for it.

I’m on my way to catheterize a couple of people when my med students find me. “Survival five years status post gastrectomy is ten percent,” [26] ”status post ” abbreviated “s/p,” is a common medical term meaning “after” and implying “but not necessarily caused by.” It’s Latin for “Try suing me now, Fucker.” one of them says. “But only fifty percent survive the operation.”

“Huh,” I say.

The upside of this information is that if Squillante does live through his surgery, his odds of surviving another five years are actually more like twenty percent than ten, because the ten percent figure presumably includes people who die during the operation. The downside is that Squillante has fifty-fifty odds of dying today, on the table. And calling David Locano down on me if he does.

The elevator doors open in front of us: Assman, getting returned to the floor in his stretcher-bed. Mostly to make it look like I’m doing something, I fall in beside him.

“How are you feeling?” I say.

He’s still lying on his side. “I’m fuckin dying, you fuckin asshole,” he says. Or something like that. His teeth are chattering too hard to be sure.

It gets my attention. He certainly looks like he’s dying. “Allergic to any medications?” I ask him.

“No.”

“Good. Hang in there.”

“Fuck you.”

I follow him back to his unit and quickly write orders for a whole collage of antibiotics and antivirals, putting “STAT” on every one of them. Thinking: Should I go threaten Squillante some more? With what, and to what end? Then I go pull Assman’s CT scan up on a computer screen.

It’s calming, in a way. If you know what you’re doing, trackballing through a CT is beautiful. Probably even if you don’t. You rise or fall through the hundreds of horizontal cross sections, and the various ovals—chest, lungs, heart chambers, aorta—expand and contract like roiling weather patterns, passing through each other and tapering at different levels. But even then you always know where you are, because the inside of a human being has practically no two cubic inches that are identical. This is true even on a left-right basis. Your heart and spleen are on the left while your liver and gallbladder are on the right. Your left lung has two lobes while your right has three. Your left and right colon are different widths and follow differently shaped paths. The vein of your right gonad drains directly toward your heart, while the vein of the left joins the vein of your left kidney. If you’re male, your left gonad even hangs lower than your right, to accommodate the scissor motion of your legs.

So the two golf ball–sized abscesses on Assman’s CT are immediately noticeable, one behind his right collarbone and the other in his right buttock. On closer inspection they might have some sort of fuzz around the edges—a fungus or something. They look like what alcoholics get when they pass out and inhale their own vomit, then grow colonies from it in their lungs. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anything like it in muscle before.

I send my med students off to page Pathology. It tends to be difficult to pry those people out of their nasty little lairs, which are lined with bottles of human organs like the homes of the serial killers they chase on TV, but Assman is going to need a biopsy. I tell them to page Infectious Disease while they’re at it, since odds are neither service will answer us.

And once they’re out of sight I close out the CT screen on the computer and Google Squillante’s surgeon, John Friendly, MD, just to take one more depth reading on the shit I’m in.

But surprise: the word is positive. My man Friendly has either banded or reduced the stomach of every obese celebrity I’ve ever heard of. In fact, New York magazine—which should know, since its primary function is to transfer pathogens between the hands of people in waiting rooms—names him as one of the five best GI surgeons in the city. Friendly even has a book that’s doing not too sucky on Amazon: Eye of the Needle: Cooking for the Surgically Altered Digestive Tract.

I keep searching until I find a picture that confirms these people are really talking about the guy I met earlier, since it’s been that kind of morning. Along the way I find more happy articles. Apparently Friendly just did the colostomy on the guy who played the dad on Virtual Dad .

Like that guy must have said: what a fucking relief.

I try to figure out just how much of a relief. Does this mean Squillante actually has a seventy-five percent chance of surviving the operation? If so, what are the odds he keeps his word and doesn’t rat me out if he lives? I get a page from a room where I don’t currently have any patients.