Drummond smiled and said, “Sit down. I’d like to start by admitting that most of this is my fault. I like to keep tabs on all our employees, and I certainly should have kept better tabs on you.”
He sat and found he was facing a large bronze nameplate as well as Drummond. The nameplate read:
He said, “That’s very nice of you, Mr. Drummond. Only it wasn’t your fault, I know that.” He counted silently to three and added, “I really don’t think it was mine either. It just happened.”
Drummond shook his head. “No, I blame myself. I was on the phone with your doctor a moment ago, by the way. She says it’s been a long time since you’ve been to see her.”
He tried to remember whether he had ever been to a doctor. Surely he had, but he could not recall the occasion. Dr. Pille had been his doctor in the hospital, but that was certainly not what Drummond meant. He said, “I guess it has.”
“We want you to see her right away; let me make that clear. Not next week, not tomorrow, not this afternoon—this morning, as soon as you leave my office.”
“I was hoping to get back to my department, sir. There’s a sale, and they need me.”
“And you can,” Drummond told him, “just as soon as you get back from the doctor. Come up here, show me a note saying she’s seen you, and you can get right back to work.”
A great weight lifted from his chest.
“Your doctor will see you as soon as you get to her office—she doesn’t take appointments. There’s no reason you can’t be back at work before lunch.”
He nodded.
“She asked me to ask you whether by any chance you suffered a blow to the head.”
He nodded. “I slipped on some ice and hit my head on the pavement.”
Drummond smiled again. “It could’ve happened to any of us, couldn’t it? That’s all for now. You go over and see her, and don’t forget to bring me the note.”
He rose. “I won’t, sir.”
“One more thing.” Drummond raised a finger. “While you were missing, I had Ella phone your number. She was never able to reach you, but on one occasion she got someone who said his name was Perlman, or some such. Do you know why he was in your apartment?”
He shrugged. “I guess he must have been from the building management company, sir.”
When he was outside in the reception room again, he tried to remember the telephone calls he had made from United. The harsh male voice—had that been Perlman?
Ella asked, “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” he said absently, suppressing the fact that he had to go see some doctor he could not remember. Had there been a doctor’s bill in the mail in his box? Or in all the stuff that he had picked up at the post office? He had not paid a lot of attention to most of it; he could not remember that either.
“Ella, you said you called my apartment?”
She nodded.
“Mr. Drummond mentioned that, too. He said you talked to somebody named Perlman once.”
Ella shook her head. “I never got an answer at all.” She hesitated. “If you’re going to be here in the store about noon, how about letting Personnel buy your lunch? Sort of celebrate your coming back.”
“You didn’t talk to anybody named Perlman?”
“I didn’t talk to anybody,” Ella said. She seemed suddenly depressed, for no reason he could see. “But I was out for a week with my back, and they got a temp. Dixie’s been blaming me for her mistakes ever since, so she was probably the one that talked to Perlman. But if you ask me it was a wrong number.”
There was an employee lounge on the floor below, a bare and frequently dirty room in which associates who brown-bagged ate their lunches. He fed coins into the coffee machine (recalling Joe in the basement of the hospital), found a clean chair, and sat down.
Doctors had to be paid. He got out his checkbook and read through the stubs. He had written no check to any doctor. None at all. Yet doctors were paid, by someone.
By the company’s medical plan, then, very likely; but that was administered by Personnel. If he asked Ella for the number of his doctor, she would tell Drummond. He could not just start telephoning doctors. How many doctors were there in the city? Thousands, probably. He tried to recall what Drummond had said about this one: “Your doctor will see you as soon as you get to his office. He doesn’t take appointments. There’s no reason you can’t be back before lunch.”
No, that was wrong. Not he. It was she. She doesn’t take appointments. The doctor was a woman. There might be thousands of doctors, but how many of those were women?
Fifty, maybe. And he wouldn’t go to a doctor out in the suburbs.
There was a phone in a corner of the room, with a tattered directory on a shelf under it. He opened it to the physicians’ listings and got out his pen.
Some of the doctors had provided only initials; he decided to consider them male for the purpose of his search. At least half the women were gynecologists or pediatricians; they could be eliminated too. He crossed off all those with addresses more than six blocks from the store and his apartment and was pleased to see that only three names remained. Pushing coins into the slot, he got out his wallet and checked the name he and North had chosen in the hotel. A. C. Pine—that was it. He laid the driver’s license on the shelf.
“Dr. Nilson’s office.”
Did this doctor take appointments? He said, “This is Adam Pine. I need an appointment with the doctor as soon as possible—this morning, if you can arrange it.”
“Dr. Nilson—” Faintly someone called, “Lara! Lara!” He could not tell whether the voice was male or female; it sounded far off and scratchy.
“Would you mind if I put you on hold, Mr. Green?”
She did not wait for his answer. Her voice was gone, and after a moment or two had passed, a piano began “Clair de Lune.”
He waited, telling himself he would stand there all day if necessary. “Clair de Lune” ended, and something else began, a piece he did not recognize.
At last a new voice said, “Dr. Nilson speaking.”
“I want to talk to Lara.”
“To Lora? She just left.”
“Then I want an appointment to see you as soon as possible.”
“I don’t take appointments—it’s first come, first served. Come to my office. It’s in the Downtown Mental Health Center, and I’ll fit you in when I can.”
He tried twice before he could get out the words. “I think you’ve treated me before. That you have a file on me.” He gave his name.
Dr. Nilson’s voice became warm. “Oh, of course, Mr. Green. Believe it or not, I was looking over your case the other night and hoping you’d drop in again. It’s been more than a month.”
He started, “If you’ve tried to phone—”
“I never do, except in emergencies. It’s so much better if the patient contacts me because he wants to. Come this morning, won’t you? I’ll see that you get in.”
“Yes.”
“And now, if you’ll excuse me—Lora’s not here, and there’s someone on the other line.”
His Doctor
The crisp air of morning had already been softened by the sun. He strode along with his topcoat folded over his arm, glancing into the store windows he passed. His department rarely got a window—windows went to the clothes people, mostly—but when it did, he was the one most often assigned to set up the display; he was professionally interested, or so he told himself.
As he looked, he wondered what to do with the money from Mr. Sheng’s package. Prudence (his mother’s ghost) advised him to bank it against a rainy day. Caution whispered that Internal Revenue might check his deposits.
How could he explain? And there would be no explaining the fact that he had not reported the income when he had filled out his 1040A. Instead he had asked for a refund, because he always had Accounting withhold more than he needed to cover his income taxes. No, he thought, even the IRS could not blame him for not reporting the money on that return; it was for last year, and he had bought the money this year.