In the hands of a superior diagnostician, what he’d stumbled upon could be a great and useful tool. Working backward, and using follow-up studies of survivors from the camps as a control, he could test his theory about the latency of all pathologies. If he could lay his hands on those albums — he doubted the Germans would have let them keep them, but the Jews were a clannish people and surely early pictures of Jews who survived the camps were available in the albums of even distant family relations who’d never entered them — that would be perfect, but it was more important for him to find the survivors themselves, to take their medical histories and examine them, to see, finally, if their conditions jibed, as he was certain they would who could not understand the obstinacy of villains in children’s cartoons but admitted up front that he sometimes shared it, with the diagnoses and prognoses — he didn’t mean malnutrition except as it affected related, subsequent diseases; he didn’t mean psychological disturbances unless they preceded and were exacerbated by their experience in the camps — he’d made in his early holocaust studies. (New technologies were available now; he used blowups and computer enhancements of those grainy old photographs, bringing it all out, punching it all up, making all that latency and incipience stand out crisp as a scab, articulated as a rash.) Because there was no Registrar to answer to now and he had in his personal collection something over a thousand computer-enhanced blowups of men and women at the fences posing for their liberation, most of them right out of the front rows, too, along with some really wizard shots of their palms splayed out against the barbed wire, clumsily leaning against it to take the weight off their bodies, or their fingers clutching it, their distended knuckles and broken nails fine and well defined in his enhanced photographs as the features of knaves, queens, and kings on playing cards. Though it was a risky business, far riskier actually than asking Colin Bible to submit to an examination. (One day, for the sake of the sample, he would have to examine superior specimens, but he supposed that was still a way off.) Though there’d be no more garden parties if it ever got out. And he could kiss his position in Great Ormond Street good-bye. To say nothing of any O.B.E.’s. To say nothing. Not even his nefarious gibe.
In his joke he’s completed the preliminary part of his studies. He delivers a paper: “Diagnoses and Prognoses of Some Jewish Survivors from the Concentration Camps.” Afterward, during the question period, he’s asked if he found no use for the photos of those victims who’d been gassed or shot. After all, his questioner says, the survivors had been clad. Those others had been commanded to strip, killed, then dumped into open graves. Surely their naked bodies could have been useful for his studies.
And he tells him, he says, he goes, “Yes, but only for the diagnosis!”
So he’d come to Florida.
And found his Jew.
Mary Cottle, looking rested, is standing outside Eddy Bale’s door when he answers her knock.
“I’m told you’ve been asking about me.”
“Oh. It was good of you to drop by. It’s nothing important. Come in, why don’t you?”
“Thank you. I seem to have lost the others at the monorail station.”
“Colin said there’d been a mix-up.”
“Yes. Quite stupid of me.”
“No, no, of course not. No harm done. All present and accounted for.”
“Who’s that in the bed, Mudd-Gaddis?”
“Oh. Right. Well, accounted for, anyway. Benny Maxine seemed a little antsy. I thought I’d let him out for a bit. You know how kids love to explore hotels.”
“I don’t actually.”
“Oh, yes. They’re quite in ecstasy in lifts. They quite fancy pushing buttons and being allowed to call out the floors for the other guests.”
“Do they? It just doesn’t seem Benny’s line of country somehow.”
“No, I suppose not. He’s — what? — fifteen. I guess he’d be more interested in hanging about the hotel’s cocktail lounges. I reckon I was thinking more about my son.”
“I’m awfully sorry. I don’t think I ever offered my condolences.”
“Well.”
“It’s just that one feels such a fool. One feels terrible, of course, but there’s nothing to say.”
“Well, that’s very kind of you. I appreciate that.”
“He seemed a nice kid.”
“You knew Liam?”
“Well, more by reputation than otherwise, but I did help with his lunch one or two times.”
“I’m sorry. I think I may have known that and forgotten.”
“Of course.”
“Would you care for a drink? There’s not a great selection, but I have some lovely gin I bought in the duty-free shop. Or if you prefer I think I could organize some of Colin’s sherry.”
“Thank you. You go ahead. Cigarettes are my vice. I was never much of a drinker.”
“Yes. I’ve noticed the smell of your tobacco.”
“I know. It’s a nasty habit.”
“Not at all. I like the smell of foreign cigarettes. French, are they?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes French. Or Russian, Bulgarian. The Iron Curtain flavors.”
“Aren’t those rather harsh?”
“I decided long ago that if I was going to smoke I was going to smoke. In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“Yes, I know what you mean. I hope you’ve stocked up. American brands are mild by comparison.”
“I’m a bit of a smuggler, I’m afraid. I snuck two cartons past Customs.”
“Good for you.”
“Does your wife smoke?”
“She smokes our tobacconist.”
“Sorry. That was stupid of me. I’d heard you’d separated.”
“She separated.”
“She’d been under a strain.”
“It was my strain too.”
“My God, Eddy — may I call you Eddy? That’s right, you insist, we went through this at Moorhead’s — it was all Britain’s strain. Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The Isle of Man, the Isle of Wight. You fair gave all of us the hernia, Ed.”
“Is something wrong? What’s wrong? I lost my boy. What’s wrong with you?”
“Me? Nothing. I’m this volunteer, I’m this paladin. I’m this lenient melt-mood Candy Striper.”
“Shh.”
“Old Mudd-Gaddis can really snore, can’t he? I wonder if any air gets through all that.”
“I’m working on my second lovely gin and you’re the one who’s one over the eight.”
“Organize Colin’s sherry, I’ll join you.”
“You’re a smoker. You were never much of a drinker.”
“You know I gave to all your campaigns?”
“What? Money, you mean?”
“Over the years probably more than a hundred quid.”
“I’m afraid you made a bad investment, Mary.”
“Hey! Watch that. Just who the bloody hell do you fucking think you are?”
“Jesus! Bloody hell is right. You’ve gone and spilled Colin’s sherry all over the place. It looks like a massacre in here.”
“That’s not on. That’s not on, I said!” Mary Cottle said, and stormed out of Eddy Bale’s room.