"A little after ten."
"That gives us almost two more hours." He looked out over the East
River. "It's beautiful."
"_Isn't_ it?"
"If I went right into research--took a job somewhere--I could afford to
give this to you."
She thought of saying, _But, darling, I've got it already_, and decided
a change of subject would be more judicious and said, "You _were_
kidding last night, weren't you?"
"Kidding?"
"About the man with two hearts."
Frank grinned a little sheepishly. He was extremely handsome and totally
unconscious of it, and when he grinned that way it made him look like a
little boy caught stealing jam, and Rhoda always wanted to hug him. But
she forebore as he said, "It does seem a little silly, doesn't it?"
"You'd know more about that than I do. Is it silly?"
"Let's say the chances of such a thing happening are rather remote."
"You only used your stethoscope last night?"
"That was all. I went by what I heard."
"What will you do now? X-ray?"
"I'm not sure I'll do anything. The idea is so preposterous."
She regarded him thoughtfully. "It's not like you to lose interest in
anything until you know the answer."
He snubbed out his cigarette. "Let's forget Park Hill and funny
anatomies, baby. Let's sit on the terrace and bathe ourselves in luxury
the way the TV ad says."
And that was the way things stayed for two hours. The time passed
swiftly, and when Frank was finally dressed and ready for the street, he
refused Rhoda's offer to drive him to the hospital because she was very
late, too. He kissed her good-bye, went down the twelve floors in the
elevator, and hurried out of the building.
There was no cab in sight and he began to walk. Half a block later he
turned a corner and stopped dead. He was facing a man who was coming in
the other direction. He stared. The man stared back. Frank automatically
stepped aside, but the man did exactly the same thing, at the same time,
and they did a little dance there on the sidewalk. Then the man veered
around him and moved on up the street. Frank turned and stared after
him, then walked slowly in his own direction.
It was the same man. It was the Park Avenue hit. It was the man he'd
left in Ward Five with a broken leg. It wasn't a brother or a cousin or
a chance resemblance. It was the man himself or an exact double. And
what were the percentages against attending a patient one night and
meeting his exact double on the street the next morning?
They were fantastic. Like hitting the Irish sweeps.
It was the man. It had to be.
Except that he wasn't broken-legged now. He was walking across the Upper
East Side, wearing that same look that was as good as anyone else's,
except that you got the impression of an emptiness behind his eyes.
2
Those in the know in Washington, D.C., upon seeing Brent Taber rush to a
taxi or dodge a pedestrian on Pennsylvania Avenue, could well say,
"There walks power." But there were few indeed who possessed enough
knowledge of the Washington inner structure to be able to make this
observation.
Brent looked more like a coal heaver than a public servant with a
well-oiled escalator into the White House. He appeared more able to
direct a gang of dock workers than to jockey a delicate issue through
the bloody jungle of national politics. Many of the people who accepted
this deception did so at their peril and were not around any more. To
others not so foolish, Brent Taber symbolized a completely necessary
facet of a working democracy--secret government. This necessity sprang
from the realization that even an open society must maintain areas of
privacy or it is doomed.
Such was the man, and such was his mission of the moment--an issue of
the utmost secrecy. So hush-hush, in fact, was this mission that when
Brent Taber arrived at his office that morning and found Senator Crane
pacing his reception-room carpet, his heavy eyebrows gathered and he
began mentally checking his "tight ship" for a leak.
Senator Crane was the exact opposite of Brent, in that he looked to be
exactly what he was; a figure rigidly type-cast to the role of a
blustering, tactless servant of the people. Which, in Crane's case,
meant that he was a servant of Crane's career and any faction of his
supporters that could further it. Still, the Senator could not be called
dishonest. He was merely a flexible rationalizer. He sincerely believed
that what was good for Crane was good for the "folks back home."
And just now, he felt that a knowledge of what the hell was going on in
Brent Taber's orbit was probably not good for anybody and had better be
aired.
As Brent entered, Crane came right to the point. "Goddamn it, Taber,
just what in blazes is going on around here?"
Brent's thick lips hardly moved, a characteristic that Crane found
infuriating because that was the way shady characters talked into
Senatorial investigation microphones and it looked pretty bad. But
Brent's words came quite clear: "Routine business, Senator--an honest
effort to get a day's work done."
"You mean to tell me the meeting that's been set up here is routine?"