Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (23 page)

A moment later, piping hot coffee in a large
golden cup arrived at Harvey’s side. Jean Pierre eyed it nervously while Harvey
placed 100 francs on the table next to Jean Pierre’s three-franc chip, the
minimum stake allowed. The dealer, a tall young man not more than thirty who
was proud of the fact that he could deal a hundred hands in
an
houf, slipped the cards out of the shoe. A king for Jean Pierre, a four for
Harvey, a five for the young man on Harvey’s left and a six for the dealer.
Jean Pierre’s second card was a seven. He stuck. Harvey drew a ten and also
stuck. The young man on Harvey’s left also drew a ten and asked the dealer to
twist again. It was an eight–bust.

Harvey despised amateurs in any field and
even fools know you don’t twist if you have twelve or more when the dealer’s
card face
up is a three, four, five or six He grimaced
slightly. The dealer dealt himself a ten and a six. Harvey and Jean Pierre were
winners. Jean Pierre ignored the fate of the other players.

The next round was unwinnable. Jean Pierre
stuck at eighteen, two nines which he did not split as the dealer had an ace.
Harvey stuck on eighteen, an eight and a jack, and the young man on the left,
bust again. The bank drew a queen–”Blackjack,” and took the table.

The next hand gave Jean Pierre a three,
Harvey a seven and the young man a ten. The dealer drew himself a seven. Jean
Pierre drew an eight and doubled his stake to six francs and then drew a ten–vingt-et-une.
Jean Pierre did not blink. He realised he was playing well and that he must not
draw attention to it, but let Harvey take it for granted. In fact Harvey hadn’t
even noticed him: his attention was rivetted on the young man on his left, who
seemed anxious to make a gift to the management on every hand. The dealer
continued, giving Harvey a ten and the young man an eight, leaving them both no
choice
but to stick. The dealer drew a ten, giving
himself seventeen. He paid Jean Pierre, left Harvey’s stake and paid the young
man.

There were no more cards left in the shoe.
The dealer made a great show of reshuffling the four packs and invited Harvey
to cut the cards before replacing them in the shoe. They slipped out again: a
ten for Jean Pierre, a five for Harvey, a six for the young man and a four for
the dealer. Jean Pierre drew an eight. The cards were running well. Harvey drew
a ten and stuck at fifteen. The young man drew a ten and asked for another
card. Harvey could not believe his eyes and whistled through the gap in his
front teeth. Sure enough, the next card was a king and the young man was bust.
The dealer dealt himself a jack and then an eight, making twenty-two, but the
young man did not take the lesson in. Harvey stared at him. When would he
discover that of the fifty-two cards in a pack, no less than sixteen have a
face value of
ten.

Harvey’s distraction gave Jean Pierre the
opportunity he had been waiting for. He slipped his hand into his pocket and
took the prostigmin tablet Adrian had given him into the palm of his left hand.
He sneezed, pulling his handkerchief from his breast pocket in a well-rehearsed
gesture with his right hand. At the same time, he quickly and unobtrusively
dropped the tablet into Harvey’s coffee. It would, Adrian had assured him, be
an hour before it took effect. To begin with, Harvey would just feel a little
sick,
then
it would get rapidly worse until the pain
was too much to bear, and he would finally collapse in absolute agony.

Jean Pierre turned to the bar, gripped his
right-hand fist three times and then placed it in his pocket. Stephen left
immediately and warned Adrian and James from the steps of the Casino that the
prostigmin tablet was in Metcalfe’s drink. It was now Adrian’s turn for a test
under pressure. He rang the hospital and asked the sister on duty to have the
theatre in preparation. Then he rang the nursing agency and asked that the
nurse he had booked should be waiting in the hospital reception in exactly
ninety minutes’ time. He then sat nervously waiting for another call from the
Casino.

Stephen returned to the bar. Harvey had
started to feel ill, but was loath to leave. Despite the growing pain, he found
growing greed the greater incentive. He drank the rest of his coffee and
ordered another one, hoping it would clear his head. The coffee did not help
and Harvey began to feel steadily worse. An ace and a king, followed by a
seven, four and a ten, and then two queens helped him to stay at the table.
Jean Pierre forced himself not to look at his watch. The dealer gave Jean
Pierre a seven, Harvey another ace and the young man a two. Quite suddenly,
almost exactly on the hour, Harvey could not bear it any longer. He tried to
stand up and leave the table.

“Le jeu
a commence
,
monsieur,” the dealer said formally.

“Go fuck
yourself
,”
said Harvey, and collapsed to the ground, gripping his stomach in agony. Jean
Pierre sat motionless while the croupiers and gamblers milled around
helplessly. Stephen fought his way through the circle which had gathered round
Harvey.

“Stand back, please. I am a doctor.”

The crowd moved back quickly at the relief
of having a professional man available.

“What is it, Doctor?” gasped Harvey, who now
felt the end of the world was about to come.

“I don’t know yet,” replied Stephen. Adrian
had warned him that from collapse to passing out might be as short a time as
ten minutes, so he set to work fast. He loosened Harvey’s tie and took his
pulse. He then undid his shirt and started feeling his abdomen.

“Have you a pain in the stomach?”

“Yes,” groaned Harvey.

“Did it come on suddenly?”

“Yes.”

“Can you try and describe the quality of the
pain? Is it stabbing, burning or gripping?”

“Gripping.”

“Where is it most painful?”

Harvey touched the right side of his
stomach. Stephen pressed down the tip of the ninth rib, making Harvey bellow
with pain.

“Ah,” said Stephen, “a positive Murphy’s
sign. You probably have an acutely inflamed gallbladder and I am afraid that
may mean gallstones.” He continued to palpate the massive abdomen gently. “It
looks as if a stone has come out of your gallbladder and is passing down the
tube to your intestine and it’s the squeezing of that tube that is giving you
the dreadful pain. Your gallbladder and the stone must be removed at once. I
can only hope there is someone at the hospital
who
can
perform an emergency operation.”

Jean Pierre came in bang on cue:

“Doctor Wiley Barker is staying at my hotel.”

“Wiley Barker, the
American surgeon?”

“Yes, yes,” said Jean Pierre.
“The chap who’s been taking care of Nixon.”

“My God, what a piece of
luck.
We couldn’t have
anyone better, but he’s very expensive.”

“I don’t give a damn about the expense,”
wailed Harvey.

“Well, it might be as high as fifty thousand
dollars.”

“I don’t care if it’s a hundred thousand,”
screamed Harvey. At that moment he would have been willing to part with his
entire fortune, such was the effect of the prostigmin tablet.

“Right,” said Stephen. “You, sir,” looking
at Jean Pierre, “ring for an ambulance and then contact Doctor Barker and ask
if he can get to the hospital immediately. Tell him it’s an emergency. This
gentleman requires a surgeon of the highest qualifications.”

“You’re damn right I do,” said Harvey as he
passed out. Jean Pierre left the Casino and called over his transmitter:

“Action stations!–action
stations!”

Adrian left the Hotel de Paris and took a
taxi. He would have given a hundred thousand to change places with the driver,
but the car was moving relentlessly towards the hospital. It was too late to turn
back now.

James smashed the ambulance into first gear
and rushed to the Casino, siren blaring. He was luckier than Adrian. With so
much to concentrate on he didn’t have time to worry.

Eleven minutes and forty-one seconds later
he arrived, leapt out of the driver’s seat and opened the back door, gathered
the stretcher and rushed up the Casino steps in his long white coat. Jean
Pierre was standing expectantly on the top step. No words passed between them
as he guided James quickly through to the Salon des Ameriques, where Stephen
was bending over Harvey. The stretcher was placed on the floor. It took three
of them to put the 227 pounds of Harvey Metcalfe onto the canvas. Stephen and
James picked him up and took him quickly through to the ambulance, followed by
Jean Pierre.

“Where are you going with my patron?”
demanded a voice. The three of them turned round, startled. It was Harvey’s
French chauffeur standing by the white Rolls Royce. After a moment’s
hesitation, Jean Pierre took over.

“Mr. Metcalfe has collapsed and has to go to
hospital for an emergency operation. You must return to the yacht immediately,
inform the staff to have his cabin ready and wait further instructions.”

The chauffeur touched his cap and ran to the
Rolls Royce. James leapt behind the wheel, while Stephen and Jean Pierre joined
Harvey in the back of the vehicle.

“
Hell, that
was
close. Well done, Jean Pierre. I was speechless,” admitted Stephen.

“It was nothing,” said Jean Pierre, sweat
pouring down his face.

The ambulance shot off like a scalded cat.
Stephen and Jean Pierre both replaced their jackets with the long white
laboratory coats left on the seat and Stephen placed the stethoscope round his
neck.

“It looks as if he’s dead,” said Jean
Pierre.

“Adrian says he isn’t,” said Stephen.

“How can he tell four miles away?”

“I don’t know. We’ll just have to take his
word for it.” James screeched to a halt outside the entrance of the hospital.
Stephen and Jean Pierre hurried their patient through to the operating theatre.
James returned the ambulance to the car park and quickly joined the others in
the theatre.

Adrian, scrubbed up and gowned, was there to
meet them, and while they were strapping Harvey Metcalfe to the operating table
in the small room next to the theatre, he spoke for the first time:

“All of you change your clothes and, Jean
Pierre, you scrub up as instructed.”

All three of them changed and Jean Pierre
started to wash immediately–a long, laborious process which Adrian had firmly
taught him must never be cut short. Post-operative septicaemia formed no part
of his plans. Jean Pierre appeared from the scrubbing-up room ready for action.

“Now relax. We have done this nine times
already. Just carry on exactly as if we were still at St. Thomas’s.”

Stephen moved behind the mobile Boyle’s
machine. For four weeks he had been training to be an anaesthetist: he had
rendered James and a faintly protesting Jean Pierre unconscious twice each in
practise runs at St. Thomas’s. Now was his chance to exercise his new powers
over Harvey Metcalfe.

Adrian removed a syringe from a plastic
packet and injected 250 milligrams of thiopentone into Harvey’s arm. The
patient sank back into a deep sleep. Jean Pierre and James quickly and
efficiently undressed Harvey and then covered him in a sheet. Stephen placed
the mask from the Boyle’s machine over Metcalfe’s nose. The two flow-meters on
the back of the machine showed five litres nitrous oxide and three litres of
oxygen.

“Take right pulse,” said Adrian.

Stephen placed a finger in front of the ear
just above the lobe to check the preauricular pulse. It was seventy.

“Wheel him through into the theatre,”
instructed Adrian. James pushed the operating trolley into the next room until
it was just under the operating lights. Stephen trundled the Boyle’s machine
along behind them.

The operating threatre was windowless and
coldly sterile. Gleaming white tiles covered every wall from floor to ceiling,
and it contained only the equipment needed for one operation. Jean Pierre had
covered Harvey with a sterile green sheet, leaving only his head and left arm
exposed. One trolley of sterile
instruments,
drapes
and towels had been carefully laid out by the theatre nurse, and stood covered
with a sterile sheet. Adrian hung a bottle of intravenous fluid and tubing from
a standard near the head of the table and taped the end of the tubing to Harvey’s
left arm to complete the preparation. Stephen sat at the head of the table with
the Boyle’s machine and adjusted the face mask over Harvey’s mouth and nose.
Only one of the three massive operating lights hanging directly over Harvey had
been turned on, causing a spotlight effect on the protruding bulge of the
abdomen.

Eight eyes stared down on their victim.
Adrian continued:

“I shall give exactly the same instructions
as I did in all our rehearsals, so just concentrate. First, I shall clean the
abdomen with a skin preparation of iodine.”

Adrian had all the instruments ready on the
side of the table next to Harvey’s feet. James lifted the sheet and folded it
back over Harvey’s legs,
then
he carefully removed the
sterile sheet covering the trolley of instruments and poured iodine into one of
the small basins. Adrian picked up a swab in a pair of forceps and dipped it in
the iodine solution. With a swift action up and down over the abdomen, he
cleaned about a foot square of Harvey’s massive body. He threw the swab into a
bin and repeated the action with a fresh one. Next he placed a sterile towel
below Harvey’s chin, covering his chest, and another one over his hips and
thighs. A third one was placed lengrhways along the left-hand side of his body
and a further one along the right-hand side, leaving a nine-inch square of
flabby belly exposed. He put a towel clip on each corner to secure them and
then placed the laparotomy drapes over the prepared site. He was now ready.