Doctors (25 page)

“God? You talk to me about God? I was once an observant Jew. I led an honorable life. I went every Sabbath to the synagogue—and look at my reward. Do you think I can pray now to a God who allowed my whole family to be killed for no reason? Could I believe in a God that gives punishment where there is no crime? I am sorry, my faith disappeared with the smoke from the chimneys.”

Linc could find no appropriate answer. So he merely offered Herschel his hand, which the frail Jew grasped in both his own, and confided, “You know the only thing I can believe in now? I can believe in what
you
gave to me. I can believe in human kindness.”

The two men parted. Line walked slowly back past the sentries, giving them a perfunctory salute, and pondering, How am I going to explain this to my son?

He sat on the edge of the bed, lowered his head into his hands, and began to pray.

He woke up groggy the next morning. His temples throbbed, his back and limbs were aching. That damn flu, he could not seem to shake it. As he showered, trying to clear his head, he vaguely noticed some bluish splotches on his chest and abdomen.

That’s all I need, he thought to himself, bugs in the damn bed or something.

He swallowed a couple of aspirins, then put on his warm coat and went out for roll call.

A little before noon he was able to steal a few minutes from his duties to see how Hannah was faring. She had been taken back to her bunkhouse. Herschel was sitting by her side.

“How is she?” Linc inquired.

Herschel smiled. “We have been talking all morning. Her fever is much lower and that young doctor seemed hopeful. Please come over, I want to introduce you.”

Herschel presented his American savior in long German sentences that Line took to be exaggerated praise.

Hannah tried to smile and whispered hoarsely, “Herschel tells how very much you did for me.”

“No, ma’am,
he
did it all. I was just the go-between.”

“No, no,” Herschel insisted. “If we can ever find happiness again, we will have you to thank.”

Linc was touched. “Is there anything I can get you folks? I mean, are they feeding you all right?”

“Everything is fine,” Herschel replied. “The demons are gone and we can breathe the air. That is what matters.”

Suddenly Linc Bennett began to sweat. Perhaps the place was overheated. No, the Nazis did not bother with heating for these bunks. Maybe he should not have worn his winter coat. He felt dizzy and needed air. He walked as quickly as he could to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the brisk April morning. Then he collapsed and lay sprawled on the ground.

He awoke slowly, and then only to a state of semiconsciousness. He could sense a pillow, so he knew he was in a bed—and he could hear angry voices somewhere in his vicinity.

“Shit, as if we haven’t got enough on our hands, this dumb jigaboo colonel has to go and get himself typhus. I mean, considering it’s something you can fight off if you’re even halfway healthy, the guy must have been actually
trying.
”

“With due respect, sir, if you’d just glance at his x-rays, you’ll see that he’s been walking around with bronchial pneumonia for quite a while.”

“Listen, Browning, I don’t need a goddamn x-ray, I can hear that cottonpicker’s chest from across the room.”

“Dr. Endicott, his spirometer is just about fifty percent. He can barely breathe. Isn’t there anything more we can do to help him?”

“For God’s sake, we’re flooding him with sulfamethazine. The only thing I know that’s stronger is that Nazi doctor’s
RDX 30.
Face it, man, he’s a lost cause.”

Linc had been sweating, but now chills convulsed his body. In a matter of moments the young medic was at his side, helping a nurse spread another blanket over him.

“Browning, is that you?” Linc gasped.

“Take it easy, Colonel, you’ll pull through,” he replied, patting him reassuringly on the shoulder.

“Hey, kid,” Linc said, his great chest desperately heaving, “I’ve been in this war business a long time. And I’d say you’ve already booked this bed for somebody else.”

Browning lacked both the experience and composure to be able to respond.

Suddenly Line groaned softly, “Shit.”

“Sir?”

“If I had to die in this goddamn war, why couldn’t it at least have been in the field—so my son would have had something to be proud of?”

The young man was almost in tears. “You’ll be all right, sir.”

“You’re a lousy liar, Browning. Wise up, if you expect to make it as a real doctor.”

There was a gentle knock as the door opened slowly.

“I’m sorry, no visitors,” the young man said quickly but politely.

Herschel pretended not to understand and walked into the room, carrying a small bunch of wildflowers.

“Please,” he said, “I have come to see my friend.”

Browning shrugged and, as he left the room, simply nodded to Herschel, saying, “I’ll be right nearby, Colonel. Just call if you need anything.”

The two men were now alone.

“Flowers for you, Lincoln,” Herschel said, holding them out as he attempted to smile. “You know something amazing? Just a few meters past this world of barbed wire, flowers grow and trees blossom. There is still life in the world.”

Not for me, Linc thought inwardly. And then he asked, “How’s Hannah?”

“Well, well,” replied Herschel buoyantly, “almost no fever. Tomorrow maybe I can take her for a walk. We will come to visit.”

“Yeah, good, that’ll be nice.” He then suddenly gasped, “Oh God, my—”

It took a split second for Herschel to realize that Linc was unconscious, then he began to shout for help.

Herschel stood wide-eyed and trembling as the clinical staff tried to revive his benefactor.

“I get no pulse in the carotid,” said a voice.

“Nothing in the dorsalis pedis,” said another.

“Respiration nil.”

“Let’s try injecting an intracardiac ampoule of epinephrine.”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” said the calm voice of Dr. Hunter Endicott. “With typhus on top of that pneumonia, the guy didn’t have a tinker’s chance.”

The group around the bed stepped aside for the senior physician, who made a thorough and final check of vital signs and said to the head nurse, “Sheila, you’ll take care of the
paperwork, all right? And make sure everything in this room is disinfected.”

She nodded. In a matter of seconds the intravenous drip was removed from Colonel Bennett’s arm, the sheet pulled over his face, and the bed wheeled out.

None of them even noticed the witness to all this—a thin, stoop-shouldered, frightened man standing in the corner, a few tiny sprigs of flowers still clutched in his hand, tears running down his cheeks.

Almost involuntarily, his lips parted and a prayer emerged: “
Yisgadal ve yiskadosh shmei raboh
 …” Extolled and hallowed be the name of the Lord in the world which He created according to His Will …

It was the Hebrew Kaddish for the dead.

It was at that moment that Herschel Landsmann swore a solemn oath. That Colonel Abraham Lincoln Bennett must not have died in vain.

Swissair Flight 127 landed in Zurich on the bright clear morning of December 24, 1958. The tall, black passenger in First Class buttoned his blazer, straightened his tie, slung his cordovan inflight bag over his shoulder and headed toward the exit.

Once down the metal steps, he strode briskly to the baggage area. The carousel brought his matching cordovan suitcases almost immediately. But, like the others who had brought skis, he had to wait for the special cargo to be unloaded.

He glanced through the glass doors at the crowd gathered outside the Customs area and saw the people he was seeking. He smiled and waved affectionately.

And Abraham Lincoln Bennett, Jr., walked out to embrace his adoptive parents, Hannah and Herschel Landsmann.

T
he victims were clamped tightly to metal tables, salivating, their chests heaving. At the center of the room a beady-eyed scientist, brandishing a scalpel in his right hand, was about to demonstrate to his young disciples how to make the incision to lay bare the viscera of one of these creatures. His blond assistant, fresh-faced as a choirboy, held two other instruments—a forceps and a pair of long sharp scissors.

There was an odor of feces and urine, excreted by the patients in a reflex of fear as they were being pinioned.

The demonstrator’s arm moved downward at a forty-five-degree angle and slit open the abdomen. There was a sympathetic gasp by some of the beholders.

“Are you sure they’re not feeling anything?” a voice asked.

“I’ve told you many times, Miss Castellano,” Professor Lloyd Cruikshank replied. “We’re treating these dogs as humanely as possible.”

They had returned in January to experience their first encounter with the life systems of a living being. Cruikshank would guide them in the “resection” (a medical euphemism from the Latin
resecare
, to cut off) of one of their dogs’ vital organs.

It was also an exercise to develop their tolerance—some would say immunity—toward other people’s pain. To hone the mind while hardening the heart.

Laura had so dreaded the prospect that she could think of little else during the Christmas vacation. As a child she would feed and shelter every stray that wandered into their garden—until her mother would discover them and call the ASPCA.

Since they could pick their own team for this exercise, she had begged Barney “as a Christmas present” to assist her through the ordeal. He had agreed but was now discovering it was not all that easy for him, either. Nor for their third teammate, newlywed Hank Dwyer, who today was taking his turn as anesthesiologist—a
job Laura envied him, since he could keep his eyes on the heart and respiratory dials and not on the dog’s insides. But Hank was upset enough to keep muttering, “Don’t worry, don’t worry.

She’s out, she really doesn’t feel a thing.”

Dissecting the cadavers had been different. After all, these had been, in the most literal sense, inanimate objects. There had also been a comforting anonymity about their faces, which had remained swathed for many weeks and, when finally undraped, were so altered that they were barely recognizable as former humans.

But by now Barney, Laura, and probably every other student in the dog-surgery lab felt as though they were operating on a close friend. For it was their duty to keep their experimental animals alive between resections.

At one point a student nearby was driven to complain aloud, “I can’t do it anymore. This mutt is too damn cute.”

Professor Cruikshank responded with his traditional “Progress of Mankind” speech.

“We must always remember that we are not doing this out of cruelty to animals, but rather as kindness to our fellow man. We must learn to operate on living beings.” And then in a tone slightly less pontifical he added, “Okay, let’s get those knives in.” And with that, he left the room.

The student reluctantly returned his attention to the beagle anesthetized upon his table. He was both startled and relieved to see that while he had been listening to the professor’s sermon, one of his partners had considerately slit the dog’s belly open. The student’s eyes fixed on the beagle’s paw, now pierced—as were all the dogs’—by a needle at the end of a long intravenous tube bringing dextrose and saline to the unconscious animal.

Another difference between dogs and cadavers: Dead people do not bleed. But all afternoon the nervous fumbling motions of the students inadvertently pierced the canines’ arteries that spat blood all over them—and quite often their neighbors as well.

“God, I hate this,” Laura whispered to Barney.

“Stay loose, Castellano. It’s only for a couple of weeks. Just keep reminding yourself we aren’t
hurting
them.”

At this precise moment a chilling howl filled the room. It was followed by a woman’s shriek. The first was from Alison Redmond’s collie and the second from Alison herself, whose fury was now focused on the “anesthesiologist” in her team.

“I
told
you he wasn’t asleep. I
told
you, I
told
you!” she railed. “You didn’t give him enough!”

The choirboy assistant rushed toward her table, syringe in hand. In another instant the needle was in and the animal silenced. But not Alison’s indignation at the pain her dog had suffered.

“You didn’t prep him with enough morphine,” she complained.

“I assure you I did, Miss Redmond,” the assistant replied coolly. “I’m not a tyro at this.”

“Then why the hell did it wake up?”

“It didn’t wake up,” he explained, still unruffled and calm. “What you saw was just a reflex.”

“Come on. Screaming and kicking and groaning in pain was a
reflex
?”

“Correction, Miss Redmond. Your
animal
was reflexively groaning and twitching. It was
you
who did the screaming.”

As he turned back and started to walk off, Alison exploded, “Fink—I bet you even get a kick out of their suffering! I mean, what the hell kind of a doctor are you?”

“As a matter of fact, I’m not a doctor. All right, everybody, get on with your work. I’ll be in Professor Cruikshank’s lab if anyone needs me.”

The moment the double doors had swung behind him, a puzzled Hank Dwyer asked his classmates, “What the hell did he mean about not being a doctor?”

“Oh,” Laura remarked, “aren’t you clued in yet? Cruikshank isn’t a physician, either. Almost none of our teachers is an M.D.—they’re all Ph.D.s. In other words, not lowly practitioners who actually see patients but
pure scientists.
”

The final word was left to Alison Redmond: “Fuck pure science!”

Laura was still upset at dinner.

“I feel like Lady Macbeth—I can’t seem to wash the blood off my hands.”

“Come on, Laura, don’t exaggerate,” Barney admonished. “Look, I very carefully took out a piece of our pooch’s thyroid and he didn’t even twitch. Next time you’ll remove his spleen and he won’t feel anything then, either. Those anesthetics are really powerful.”