Gibbon's Decline and Fall (12 page)

“That's all across town. Why'n't you keep him here?” Her voice rose to a mechanical whine, a vocal nail drawn down the chalkboard of her life. Ophy felt her eyes squinch shut, her senses recoil, her shoulders sag with weariness.

The cop pulled the woman to her feet. “You know why, Ms. Jenks. Infirmary's only for sortin' people out.”

Ophy silently recited the litany Phil Lovato had begun: Receiving infirmaries for quartage: death certificate or emergency treatment at the infirmary; referral to specialized centers for continuing care; referral to rehab agencies for disabilities; referral to hospices for the dying. If Congress acted as seemed likely, there'd be a fifth alternative added for the autopaths who kept coming back and coming back. Autopaths used up over fifty percent of all doctor time, nursing time, hospital space. The taxpayers had revolted at spending half the nation's health resources on people who wouldn't be helped. So if they wouldn't quit smoking, drinking, drugging, getting into fights, the voters said to try what was working for the prisons. Put the autopaths in SLEEP pods until somebody came up with a solution.

There were no more public rehab programs. They were all private now. Substance Abusers Anon. People Abusers Anon. Society for the Developmentally Disabled. Society for the Perpetually Unaware and Only Dimly Cognizant. No more public spending on genetic problems that could have been prevented or avoided. No more dividing Siamese twins at public expense, taking care of crack babies at public expense, no more transplants for people over sixty-five. No more high-tech intervention for patients over eighty. Still a loophole there, though. The public still paid for failed suicides.

The bag ladies were still waiting, watching her expectantly. Ophy went toward the mourners' bench, where they were hunched beneath their stratified layers of clothing, holey sweaters over ragged T-shirts, draggle-hemmed coats over the lot. “Is there something I can do for you ladies?”

“Dr. Gheist,” said one, half smiling. “Ophelia Gheist.”

“That's me.”

“I'm Sarah Sourwood. Do you remember me?”

Ophy stared for a moment, brow furrowed in an attempt at recollection. “I don't think …”

“Well, that's all right, dear. It was a long time ago. But you remember Jen! You worked on her leg once, when she got hit by a cab.”

She turned to the other woman, evading the question of recognition. “I hope I did a good job.”

“Very good. I brought my friends to see you.”

“Have they also been hit by cabs?”

Laughter, surprisingly joyous. “No,” whispered one. “We wanted to see you. See what you looked like. In case one of us needs you, if we get hurt, in the great battle.”

“Now, what great battle is that?”

“The one that's coming. Your friend is leading it.”

“My friend? Who?”

“Baba Yaga.”

Automatically, she said, “I don't know anyone by that name.…” But of course she'd heard the name. Sophy. Sophy had talked about Baba Yaga. The crone. The hag. The healer. The grandmotherly personification of racial wisdom.

Sarah didn't wait for comment. “Well, she says she knows you.” Shrugs. Winks.

Ophy didn't pursue the name question; a matter too complicated for a busy day. “I've heard something about you ladies preaching on street corners. What's that about?”

“Somebody has to,” said one. “You have to give people warning before it happens. You have to cast down the gauntlet and summon the beast onto holy ground.”

They all agreed with nods and murmurs. The rules said you had to give warning. You had to declare war!

“Thank you for telling me.” She half turned, as though to leave, but the woman clutched at her arm.

“There's something else. We've brought her.” The spokeswoman jabbed her elbow toward the end of the bench, where a figure huddled. “She didn't want to come, but we made her.”

The woman looked up, eyes staring redly from circles of livid flesh. She'd been beaten. The line of the cheekbone was dented, broken. Ophy drew breath, whispering, “Who?”

“Her pimp,” said the bag lady without expression. “The
beast made him do it. She hasn't been bringing in as much money as she used to now that the world is …” Her voice trailed off as she noticed Ophy wasn't listening.

Ophy was on her knees before the woman, looking at the injured eyes. One was half-obscured by a blood clot. Ophy got up, pulling the woman to her feet. “Come with me. We'll fix you up.”

“You go with her,” urged the spokeswoman. “You go with her, she'll take care of you.”

Ophy called across the room to one of the aides, on his way from reception to the elevators. He brought a chair. Together they got the woman into it, and the aide wheeled her away toward the first trauma team with free time. Ophy lifted a hand in farewell and went after them, stopping in confusion halfway there, disturbed by some half thought, some illusive odor. Something about those old women, reminding her of something. Sarah Sourwood. Why did that ring a faint chime?

“Problem?” Stroking fingers caressed the back of her neck and drove the memory away.

She moved decorously away from the man who had walked up behind her, Dr. Smithson. Chief of Misery. Whose caresses were purely affectionate and bestowed on all ages, races, sexes, and species with equal largesse.

She stepped back and met his eyes, far above her own, noting the questioning lift of one eyebrow. “Actually, I was trying to identify a smell, I think.”

“Smells like it always smells in here. Like a combination soup kitchen whorehouse. Reason I stopped you, Dr. Bir—Ophy-my-dear …”

“You started to say Dr. Birdbones. I've asked you not to do that, Smitty.”

“I do try. But then I see you fluttering, and all my good resolutions go out the window. Mea culpa. Reason I stopped you, we've having a little meeting that you need to attend. Friday
A.M
., seven, the boardroom.”

“About what?”

“Something mysterious the CDC wishes to consult us on.”

“Ah. Mysterious? You mean you don't know?”

“I don't know. We'll all find out on Friday.”

He gave her a comfortable squeeze, then went off looking for some other huggee. She checked the wall clock for the time, seven-seventeen, and walked toward her reflection in the
glass door. She'd tried to break Smithson from calling her Dr. Birdbones, though she wasn't sure Ophy-my-dear was any improvement. He didn't need to remind her what she looked like. She knew she was all angles, all knobby elbows and long skinny feet and dark-circled eyes! Bedroom eyes. That's how Simon had described them. Used to describe them. Back when he had bothered to look at her.

“Hasn't he bothered to look recently?” the voice asked from behind her right shoulder.

Simon hadn't bothered to look recently because he hadn't been home in weeks. Now he was supposedly in Italy, and last week he'd been covering an economic summit in Germany, and before that he'd been in Paris at a European common-language conference, though so far as the French were concerned, common languages were too damned common.

Simon used to make it a point to get home every three or four weeks, no matter what. So? What was happening with him? And with whom else?

“Does that upset you?” the voice asked.

The thought shook her to her roots. Simon wouldn't do that. Jessamine's husband, Patrick, yes. Bettiann's husband, William, sure. Everyone knew Bill Carpenter fooled around. Bill was often in New York on business, and just last year Ophy had seen him coming out of a cozy little French restaurant with what looked like a high-priced lady, very snuggly during the quarter-block stroll it took to reach a cozy brown-stone. She'd sat through a green light watching them, the traffic behind her piling up noisily. Did one tell one's dear friend, Bettiann?

“You decided not to tell her,” the voice reminded her.

It would only hurt Bettiann, who still had her particular problem, after all these years. There had to be limits. If you told everything you knew or thought or suspected, you wouldn't stay friends long. Like back in ninety-seven, when they'd met in San Francisco and Jessamine's husband, Patrick, had made separate and well-thought-out seduction attempts on every member except Agnes. Evidently a nun was out of bounds, even for Patrick. Each of the others—except Sophy, for some reason—had thought herself singled out until a red-faced Jessamine had announced that Patrick had confessed to testing the loyalty of her friends.

“I don't know if he really did,” she said ruefully, trying to
laugh about it. “But if he did, well, Patrick likes to stir things up. I know I can trust all you guys.”

Which would have been uncomfortable, but not fatal, if Carolyn hadn't remarked tartly:

“It isn't necessarily a matter of trust or loyalty, Jessy. It may simply be a matter of taste. I, for one, find Patrick personally repugnant.”

“That annoyed Jessamine,” Sophy said.

Carolyn's comment had annoyed Jessamine, certainly, and during the ensuing days, whenever Bettiann and Jessamine weren't around, the other five—four, really, since Sophy didn't discuss such things—had speculated whether Jessamine might have preferred any one of them to become emotionally involved with Patrick rather than pronounce him undesirable. Or whether, as Faye seemed to think, Jessy didn't really care what Patrick did, except he ought not to do it with the DFC.

“But you didn't blame Bettiann?” her friend asked.

No, Jessamine thought. They hadn't blamed Bettiann. Even Jessamine, if she'd known about it, probably wouldn't have blamed Bettiann. No matter how expensively groomed, dressed, and coiffured, no matter how rigorously exercised and massaged, Bettiann was still the girl they'd known in school, the swan who could not be convinced she was not an ugly duckling, the beauty queen who needed constant male attention to assure herself she was desirable while at the same time she avoided any intimacy that might test the proof.

“Dressed, I'm fine,” she'd told Ophy long ago, when Bettiann was first married. “You know, clothes can make anyone look great. But even now that I'm married, I can't stand the thought of anyone seeing … you know.” She'd wept. Ophy had held her, unable to comfort her. There was no logic to it, no rationality. It was a wound too deep for medicine to reach.

Patrick had reached it. But, then, according to Jessamine, Patrick was good at that. He could find an opponent's weakness and figure out a way to exploit it in the time it took him to shake hands. Patrick was a born politician; he was clever about people. Jessamine said he used people's weaknesses, playing them as if they were chessmen—pushing one here, jumping another there. What had he offered Bettiann? The promise of a cure, perhaps. “Why, Bettiann, have another drink, dear, I know how to get you over that. I've done it before. Just call me Dr. Pat.”

No one had blamed Bettiann, with her particular problem,
for falling for Patrick's particular line. No doubt stronger women had done so, perhaps even Jessamine herself. Of course, Bettiann's particular problem made it hard to blame William, either. It was an unhappiness, all the way around.

Lucky Faye, who had always preferred women; and lucky Agnes, who was married, supposedly, to heaven. Lucky Carolyn, whose marriage to Hal had been made in heaven. Sophy was out of it, of course, out of everything.

“You're out of everything,” Ophy said aloud to her friend, hearing the words go away into untenanted space. She came to herself in a sudden panic, uncertain where she was, eyes darting around like trapped birds.

She was standing beside her car in Misery's basement garage.

She spun on her heel, searching the shadowed edges of the sloping ramps. She had been talking with Sophy. But she couldn't have.… But she
had
been! And when had she herself come down here into the garage? She was in street clothes, with her purse, though she didn't remember going to her office to change. Where else had she been? What else had she done? Who had been with her?

Frantically, she looked at her watch. Seven thirty-two. Only a quarter of an hour lost. It had been only a short lapse, a kind of daydream. Had she called Orthopedic to reserve a slot for the man upstairs? Yes. She remembered doing that. And she remembered sending the girl with the shattered collarbone there as well. Surely she couldn't have done that without any thought at all?

Leave it, she told herself. Just leave it. This wasn't the first time it had happened. She probably had been talking to herself, pretending Sophy was still alive, pretending she could still be there to listen, to help. Any other suggestion was ludicrous. She was not haunted. She was not possessed. Tomorrow she'd arrange for a psychiatric on Jenks, and while she was at it, perhaps she'd better get one for herself. Doctors couldn't diagnose their own problems.