"You promised to call me when he got here," Eastman said. Shapiro looked up with a bitter smile. "They manhandled us. Those goddamn goons charged in and shoved us all to one corner of the room, so they could talk to each other without being overheard. I had no way of calling you, I was under restraint."
"Was he asking questions? Did it look as if he was interrogating the patient?"
Shapiro nodded. "At one point he showed the kid a sheet of paper, cardboard, maybe a map, and the kid looked at it and pointed at it, touched it."
"You couldn't make out anything they were saying?"
"Not a word. They were whispering, and we were off in the comer with those fascist bastards glowering at us. I swear, you could smell the violence in them. In a hospital. In a hospital. I'll tell you something-if I could have gotten my hands on a scalpel I would have killed one of them."
"You can press charges against them if you'd like."
"I was ready for murder," Shapiro said. "I was ready to cause death. Me, a healer."
"Will you let me talk to him now?"
Shapiro shrugged. "Why not? I'll give you two minutes. But you won't get anything out of it. He won't talk to you."
For all of the time Eastman was in the room bending over the table, Graham Black looked up at the ceiling and moved his lips in prayer. He gave no indication that he knew Eastman was speaking to him, or even that he was there in the room.
Shapiro told Eastman his time was up, and escorted him from the room. "I'm sorry," Shapiro said, "but I told you."
"Yeah," Eastman said. "Tell me, doc, you got some medicine for being middle-aged?"
"If I did, I'd take it myself." He anticipated Eastman's question. "I'm thirty-one. It hits some people early."
Seventeen
If a day that started out badly kept on getting worse, it could turn out to be memorable. When Holly still hadn't shown up by 7:45 for a 7:00 date, Converse knew that the day-which had begun with the helicopter, and gone on with his being fired by the DI and having his neck squeezed, and had continued with his waking up sour and out of sorts from an afternoon nap-was going to be one of those red-staffed calamities that one could look back on in the future with awe and a sort of inverse pride.
For a while, he was sure he was going to turn the day around. He had phoned Holly at her newspaper, where three people, speaking brusquely against a background of clacking typewriters, had asked him to hold on. When he heard her voice he said, "This is Mark Converse. Can I see you tonight?"
"Yes, of course."
"I don't think you could classify it as a case of actual need. I just want to see you."
"I want to see you, too."
She had named the time and the place. The place was a five-minute walk from his apartment on Charles Street, and was called, for no reason of decor, or anything else that he could fathom, the Blue Griffin. Earlier, before she was forty-five minutes late, he had sat at the bar and amused himself by trying to think of more appropriate names. The one that seemed most successful was The First Person Singular. lt fit the clientele a lot better than the Blue Griffin.
The clientele were, as she had told him-warned him-writers who lived in the Village, plus an occasional uptown editor paying a visit to a resident author. Converse had heard of the Blue Griffin, but had always passed it by. Writers didn't interest him; not before Holly, at any rate.
Now, based on his forty-five minutes at the bar, he had concluded that writers were a misnomer. Talkers-that was the right word.
At 7:30 he decided to leave. Half an hour late was already too much leeway, it bespoke indifference, at the very least. But he ordered another drink, to delay broaching the heat outside for another little while, and also to see if two writers who were upstaging each other's books might eventually come to blows. He doubted it, even though they shouted fiercely, but in this weather you couldn't tell.
He became aware that someone was calling out his name. He responded, and wits told there was a phone call for him. He took his drink with him and edged between the two writers, who had by now abandoned scalpel wit and taken up bludgeons: "You're a prick." "Look, you motherfucker…
He found the phone booth in the deeper recesses of the room. It was Holly. "… trying to get you, but the damn phone there was busy. They talk a lot. Had you noticed? I looked for you at the hospital… What did you say?"
He had groaned.
She said, "You don't know? Didn't Captain Eastman call you?"
"Dead?"
"He's going to recover. He's a Purie. Why didn't they tell you?"
"I got fired this morning. Was he able to talk?"
"Fired?" The syllable was sharp, brittle. "What's that all about?"
"Where are you, Holly?"
"At the office. I'm finishing up my story. I'll leave in five minutes and take a cab down." She spoke hurriedly, as though to get the nonessentials out of the way. "What do you mean you were fired? How did it happen?"
"Finish your story," he said, "and come down here and I'll tell you."
"Tell me now. It belongs in the story."
"No."
"Why not?"
Because it's unimportant, he thought, because the only thing that matters is your getting here as soon as possible. He said nothing.
"If you won't tell me yourself I'll have to phone Captain Eastman and ask him about it."
"What do you mean have to?"
"And then it'll take longer, and I won't be able to leave in five minutes.
But if you tell me now-"
"It's a question of priorities, right?" He was deliberately sloshing his drink around, taking some sort of odd pleasure in its running over and wetting his fingers. She was silent. "Is that right?"
"Don't be unreasonable."
"Unreasonable. Unreasonable is what it's all about, isn't it?" He waited.
"Well, isn't it?" The line hummed between them. "You're a dumb bitch."
He hung up.
Converse stood at the bedroom window of his floor-through apartment, which faced the backs of the buildings on Perry Street and their postage-stamp-size backyards. Directly across the way, a handsome, nearly naked couple was broiling meat on a hibachi.
It was stifling in the room. He had turned off the air conditioner, partially to restore a little animation to the python, partially to punish himself, to make his body feel as miserable as his spirits. The bad day had gotten worse, but he was about to put a limit to it. He would take a leaf from his boyhood when, on disaster filled days, his mother would pop him into bed early. She had understood that the only cure was to retire from the day by imposing an end upon it. That was what he would do. Declare the day finished, by edict, by going to sleep at 8:30.
Tomorrow morning-a new, unsullied day-he would go to the park, descend into that hollow, and catch that damn snake once and for all. It was, he thought, quite a snake, even for a black mamba. How many had it killed already-four, five? He had heard of a black mamba in Africa that had killed some eleven people before it was taken. The herpetologist who had told him about it had characterized it as a "rogue." Well, he was inclined to give the snake in the park the benefit of the doubt. Irritable, yes, but with good reason, what with being in an alien terrain and under the constant strain of being threatened. But whether it was a rogue or simply a snake instinctively defending itself, it was sure as hell an aggressive individual of an aggressive species.
He heard the cat spitting, and turned around. The python was crawling toward the cat, which stood its ground, back humped, eyes glowing. He grabbed up the python an instant before the cat leaped. The snake coiled around his arm. He unwound it and put it into its glass cage. He turned on the air conditioner and placated the cat with a bowl of milk. Then he evened matters out by feeding the python a live mouse.