In the middle of her halting dissertation on the coming Cape Cod summer, she allowed that while the young man couldn't get permission to enter the intensive care unit, no one ever stopped anyone from entering if he just walked in wearing a white coat. There were white coats in the laundry in the basement and no one ever stopped anyone from taking laundry. Where was the young man going? Would he be back? She was getting off work at eight o'clock. They could meet in a motel. If not a motel, then a car in the parking lot. What about a stairwell? An elevator?
For some reason, the laundry room was locked. Remo pressured the handle straight back, and the door popped open. The pressure looked as though he merely pushed open an unlocked door. He stepped into hospital whites and was out in the hallway looking for ICU. He rode an elevator up with two nurses and an X-ray technician. One of the nurses gave him one of those smiles. Why was it, thought Remo, that now that he had this sort of attraction, he didn't have that strong desire to make any use of it? What he could have done with his Sinanju training when he was eighteen.
Smith was under a tent, tubes going into his nostrils, the left side of his head in gauze and sanitary white tape. He breathed heavily but not without the solid life throb of a body waging a successful struggle for its existence. He would be all right.
"Smitty," said Remo softly. "Smitty."
Smith opened his right eye.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello yourself, dummy. What happened?"
"I don't know," Smith said. "Where are my clothes?"
"You're not going anywhere," Remo said, looking at the tubes running to tanks beside the bed. It was as if Smith himself were a part of this bed unit and to move him would rip him away from his life support system.
"I know that," Smith said. "The Tucson program was in my jacket pocket."
''I'll get it. I'll get it. How did this happen?"
"Well, there was this very tasteful piece of sculpture in the town square. Sort of a bicentennial art celebration, and I went close to examine it. Really very nice, and then it exploded."
"Sounds like some sort of trap. You think there's some connection with the people at Bay State?"
"No, no. They were just another group of disturbeds, who got together with Arnold Quilt. He wanted to make money, they wanted to make revolution. No, they were just a small unconnected unit. You finished it."
"They had gotten into our computer system."
"No. Just Quilt had. He found the revolutionaries; they didn't find him."
"Where did he get the readout that called me recalcitrant, unstable, and idealistically confused?"
"From the computer bank, of course."
"I mean, who fed it in?" Remo asked.
"The computer had a list of humans it was supposed to analyze, and that was its own judgment. So that people could be continually measured against what they used to be. You'd be interested in knowing that ten years ago the computer declared you recalcitrant, unstable, and idealistically confused. You haven't changed at all."
"Nobody interviewed Chiun about me?"
"No. Is something wrong?"
"No," lied Remo. "You and I both know computers are big, dumb adding machines. I mean, you know me and, uh, it's just a silly readout. I'm not going to be offended by a computer readout."
"Get the clothes and the program, please. I'm going to rest. I feel awful."
"No drugs?"
"I refused them. I can't go under drugs, Remo. You know that."
"There's something that can help a bit. Not much, but a bit. Pain is really the body letting you know it's fighting to survive." Remo slipped his left hand between Smith's perspiration-wet white hair and the coarse fabric of the pillow, and where the spinal column met the skull, he applied light pressure.
"Now, breathe in slowly, like you're filling up your body with air. White air. Feel the white air come into you. Like the sun, it's light. Feel it? Feel it?"
"Yes. It's better now. Thank you."
"No dipwiddle computer can do that," Remo said.
He walked into the hallway, still resenting the computer that had insulted him steadily over the past ten years, and met a nurse outside the door who reminded him of a computer.
Her uniform was precisely starched and creased. She had a bland unresponsive face, and when she smiled, it was one of those plastic testimonials to overbite that you saw on television toothpaste commercials. Yes, she knew where Dr. Smith's clothes were. He had been asking for them before, which was peculiar because they were bloodied and shredded and his wallet and money were put by his bed to make him feel better. But he didn't seem satisfied. Almost as if he didn't care for the money or driver's license. Just wanted his clothes, no matter what shape they were in.
"Give him whatever he wants in the future," Remo said, flashing the sexy smile and exuding manhood around the nurse like a warm wet fog.
"Certainly," said the nurse unmoved. She flashed a small smile in return, sort of a hello acknowledgment to someone on the street you don't really want to talk to. But Remo did not really pay attention. His mind was on Smitty and the clothes and the computer that had insulted him.
The business office of Cape Cod General had the clothes in a plastic bag. And would the doctor like anything else?
"No, thank you," said Remo. Funny, the nurse outside Smith's room hadn't called him doctor.
In the stairwell, Remo searched the jacket pockets of the blood-moist clothes. His hands felt the stiff paper with the holes along the edge. The program. He took it out to check. There were the payroll figures with the little pencil marks that the late Arnold Quilt had put on them.
But there were no more white edges to the paper. The edges were red. The paper had been photocopied. Someone had gotten into the hospital and made a copy of that program. The sculpture that went boom had been no accident.
Remo took the stairs to Smith's room. He opened the door and was stunned. The bed, the support systems, all were gone. Only the black cord with a button to call the nurse hung uselessly from the wall. The room was empty.
"Nurse, what happened to my patient?" said
Remo to the plastic, smiling nurse whom he had asked to give Dr. Smith everything he wanted.
"He's been removed."
"Where is he?"
"Down the hall," said the nurse, pointing. Her hand moved funny, something most people wouldn't notice because they had not been trained to understand that even the bending of the finger involved the whole body. No part could move without the other parts adjusting. Yet this pointing hand just came up with its finger stuck out as if it weren't connected to a body, but a wall. Remo, senses sharp, noticed it. Perhaps the nurse had suffered some sort of nerve damage. That might explain why she had not responded to his overtures before.
Remo moved quickly down the hallway, but not so fast as to attract attention. A doctor running down a hall in the hospital would terrify any onlooker. Remo opened a door. There was a tent and the tubes going into a nose. But the face was wrinkled and surrounded by faded blonde hair. The patient was an old woman holding onto her last note of life. It was not Dr. Smith.
Down the hall behind him, the smiling plastic nurse pointed at Remo and said, "That's him."
Two overweight policemen nodded and waddled down the hall, their hands on their holsters. The nurse disappeared into a stairwell.
"You there, halt," said one officer. "Who are you?"
"I'm looking for a patient."
"So are we. Let's see your identification."
"I'm looking for a patient in the intensive care unit. Middle-aged man. Have you seen a bed with support systems?" asked Remo.
"We want to know who you are."
Remo slipped through them and opened the next door. Another intensive care unit, but not Smith.
"You there, stop. What are you doing? We're officers. You've got to stop."