Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

“Are you up to talking?” she asked.

“I should be,” said Dahlman. “I don’t think I’ve slept this much since I was a child.”

“I need to know exactly how you got into this mess.”

“Why?”

Jane raised an eyebrow. This man had apparently spent a lifetime collecting and refining ways of being irritating. But she said patiently, “I think it will help. It might tell me all of the people who are searching for you, and that’s useful, because they all search in different ways, look in different places, ask different people. If I don’t know these things, I could take you right into someone’s path.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said. “That isn’t how this happened.”

“I know.”

He didn’t seem to be willing to accept even that. “How do you know? Presumably most people who kill someone say they didn’t either.”

“They would also be willing to use a gun to defend themselves from someone who is chasing them. In fact, most people would. But not you.”

“Oh. I suppose so.” He seemed to respond to logic, and that made Jane feel more hopeful. “It’s a very long story.”

“I expect it will be a very long night.”

Jane turned to look at him, and saw that his eyes were focused on a point in the distance. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts, and that was something Jane did not want him to do. She didn’t want an account full of neat, clean summaries and judicious, erroneous conclusions. “Who do the police think you killed?”

“Her name was Sarah Hoffman. She was a friend and partner of mine for about ten years. She assisted me in surgery frequently. She was a fine plastic surgeon with her own practice, but at the time we started working together I was better known, and was being brought some cases that other people weren’t.”

“What sorts of cases?”

“Reconstructive surgery, mostly—usually people who had been terribly burned or injured. I was developing experimental methods for transplantation of tissue, and some post-op procedures that had brought promising results. It had struck me some time ago that these were the areas where the new developments could be made. We have thousands of surgeons who are now probably about as good at cutting as a human being will ever be. We have methods of magnification and nonintrusive monitoring and micro-instruments and lasers that make use of that dexterity in very sophisticated ways. But maybe seventy percent of the battle with restorative and plastic surgery involves allowing the body’s tissue to grow and letting it make up for what we can’t do with a blade—as well as repairing what the blade has done. Surgeons are the star quarterbacks of medicine: everything has been done to protect our part of the process and maximize its effectiveness. But at a certain level you do one after another. It feels like being a quarterback who throws a pass and is taken out of the game and put into another one before he even sees whether it’s been caught.”

“This isn’t what you taught at the university, is it?” she asked.

“I was a general surgeon,” said Dahlman. “For most of my working life, I probably performed more thoracic operations than anything else. The instruction I gave was almost entirely practical—in an operating room, teaching people who already were surgeons. I spent less time on post-operative work than most surgeons in private practice.”

“What happened?”

Dahlman seemed mystified by his memories, like a man leafing through photographs who kept finding ones he had forgotten and lingering over them. As his eyes stared ahead of the two funnel-shaped beams of the headlights, his face moved, taking on a look of happiness, then sadness, then puzzlement. “I had good hands. By the age of forty I was one of the eight or ten most accomplished traditional surgeons in the country. I had been practicing at the University Medical Center since residency, and was already the Goldsden-Meara Distinguished Professor of Medicine. I was so busy performing surgeries and teaching young doctors like Carey McKinnon that I paid little attention to anything else. At sixty I was forced to do some thinking.”

“Forced by what?”

“My wife died suddenly. An embolism. She was fine in the morning, and when I came home in the evening she was dead.”

“Did you have children?”

“Two,” he said. “My boy, David, was born the year we graduated from college. He was thirty-eight when his mother died, and living in California. My daughter, Terry, was thirty-six, married, and living in Paris. They both came home for the funeral, said the correct things to each other and to me, and went back to what they had been doing. When they were gone, I sat and thought, and looked around me. The kids were grown up and self-supporting in every sense of the word. They seemed to like me, but whatever emotional needs they ever had must have occurred during an earlier period, and my wife handled them while I was too busy to notice. So I was left with a lifetime appointment to an endowed chair, a series of vested pensions, paid-up life-insurance policies, and various savings accounts and investments that my prudent wife had accumulated for a rainy day she never lived to see. I found myself absolutely alone, with no real responsibilities, but no real connections either, and certainly no needs. That was a surprise. There were others.”

“What others?”

“I suddenly realized, as though I were waking up, that I was sixty. What it meant was that the best work I would do with my hands either had been done, or shortly would be. I had to decide what to do next—how to use the next ten or fifteen years. I could spend the time training young surgeons, or use my name and reputation for medical causes—gradually do less medicine and more lobbying and fund-raising—or I could try to do some clinical research to solve the problems I’d noticed during the years of nonstop surgery.”

“I take it you chose research.”

“I found I didn’t need to choose. As it turned out, my name and a letter from me did more for medical causes than my presence. My personality seems to irritate people. So I let the institutions write the letters and signed them for a couple of hours each week. My best teaching was done in the operating room, so it took no exclusive time at all. I spent my afternoons taking on the work I was telling you about.”

“Where did Sarah Hoffman fit into it?”

“I selected her as my teacher. She taught me to perform plastic and reconstructive surgery, like an apprentice. When I was ready, I began to move ahead, and she followed. I learned from her that the surgery itself is more art than science—like being a sculptor. I became good at it, and my broader background in surgery gave me a wider range of techniques, familiarity with more of the situations that can come up, and so on. My credentials gave the universities and big drug companies an interest in keeping me abreast of the enormous amount of research they had been doing on various kinds of induced healing, artificial tissue, and so on. We both made great progress, became extremely productive. We published a number of articles, helped lots of patients.”

“Carey seems to think there’s more to the research than you’re saying.”

Dahlman smiled. “Carey.… He would see what it was instantly, and want it to happen right then, even if the others couldn’t imagine it. He was that kind of medical student—always asking why we can’t do better, asking for a finer instrument. He was right, of course. We were trying to reach the point where we could reliably induce rapid cell replication—persuade the body to do what it does anyway, but much, much faster and more completely.”

“Did you succeed?”

“We had some success, but nothing as dramatic yet as what we’re hoping—what I’m hoping for, and what Carey envisions. We understand a bit about the hormone that makes a human baby grow quickly during its first year of life. We know a bit about rapid cell replication in malignancies. There’s already work being done on giving the body more of what it needs—exposing it to hyperbaric oxygen to stimulate healing, and so on. But ultimately, what we’re talking about is speeding up time within the human body: an increased flow of blood to the wound, increased supply of oxygen and nutrients in the blood, a tremendously increased metabolic rate.”