Operation Nassau (2 page)

There is little sign of poverty elsewhere. After a sufficient meal of creamed chipped beef on corn bread, two dollars, I walked through the city, jostled by Chinamen, Germans, South Americans, Swedes and ladies in Fortissimo Garterless Panty Girdles with blue wigs. The Tishman building had red stars blinking in and out all the way up its multiple storeys, and Korvette’s still had a four-storey Christmas tree in green lights. The Plaza fountain was outlined in white stars, and there was a line of expensive, lit fir trees down Park. The Steuben display was three storeys high, of spinning snow crystals three feet in diameter. In the window they had a crystal cheese wedge with a gold mouse, eighteen-carat, price six hundred dollars. In Lord and Taylor’s, a snow leopard lay in a gilt cage with a diamond bracelet clasped round its white neck. I will not mention Tiffany’s.

All the way to Kennedy Airport, I thought of my father, who has squandered the MacRannoch fortune all his life on St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and bridges. I was still thinking of him with, no doubt, a severe cast of expression when the door of the B.O.A.C. Monarch Lounge at the head of the escalator was flung crashing open. A distraught woman in blue darted out, stopped dead with her eyes on the small medical grip in my hand and said, ‘Oh, Nurse. Could you come quickly? Something terrible’s happened.’

I am a person of well-balanced psyche, with a large spectrum of complete psychological control. I need it all when I am summoned as ‘Nurse’. I said, ‘My name is Dr MacRannoch. I am prepared to help. You have, however, an exceedingly capable medical staff of your own. I suggest you summon them.’

My tone braced her sufficiently. ‘I have,’ she said. ‘They’re coming. But he’s collapsed in there. He may be dying.’

‘Show me,’ I said.

The patient was in the men’s lavatory: a well-nourished, large-featured man in his fifties with longish, wavy grey hair, a mohair suit of good cut and an English Guards tie. His face was vaguely familiar, although I could not at once place it, and he was in no state to communicate with me, at the moment being engaged in getting rid of the entire contents of his stomach in no uncertain fashion.

There was a strong smell of brandy, which seemed to remove some of the urgency from the situation. Kneeling beside the unlucky man, I caught the hostess’s attention and lifted my eyebrows.

A younger man, who had been supporting the patient by the head, said, ‘He isn’t drunk. He tried to tell me. He thinks it’s crab sandwiches.’

‘Oh,’ I said. A different matter. Gastro-intestinal infection is a tricky thing, and no good doctor would treat it lightly. I said, ‘When did this happen?’ His pulse was quick and irregular and his fingers were cold: he resisted any efforts to lay hands on his abdomen, which puzzled me slightly.

‘He had a brandy out there,’ said a Cockney voice, surprisingly, behind me. ‘And a cup of tea. Then he said he felt faint and I brought him in here. He was complaining of this hellish pain in his stomach.’

‘And the crab sandwiches,’ I said rather sharply. ‘Did he have these in the Monarch Lounge too?’

My patient raised his head from the washbasin and looked at me with unfocused eyes. ‘Denise made them. My wife,’ he said. ‘I ate one and put the rest down the loo.’ He stared at me and said, ‘My stomach hurts. Over here.’

I did what I could until the doctor and then the ambulance came, helped by the senior hostess, who was more competent than I had feared. She was worried, naturally. ‘He only helped himself to a brandy,’ she kept saying. ‘And a cup of tea with a biscuit. He couldn’t have got anything wrong out of that. I mean, other passengers have been eating and drinking all day.’

I said, ‘He believes it was one of his own sandwiches. It might even have been something wrong with his breakfast. In any case, he’s now out of danger, I fancy. Although it was a nasty attack and the sooner the hospital has him, the better.’

The American said, ‘It wasn’t his breakfast. We had that together, and I ate everything he ate. At the Bull and Bear, as a matter of fact.’ He was a tall, underweight man in his early thirties. Wallace Brady by name. I could feel the air hostess’s surprise as I bent over my patient. She said, ‘Do you know him? I thought you and Sergeant Trotter had come in together.’

The Cockney voice (first-class? Cockney?) said, ‘No, I was just sitting near when the old chap began to act dizzy.’

‘I knew him,’ said the American, Brady. ‘He’s a neighbour of mine. We met this morning by chance. We were going back on the same plane to Nassau - he was only here for twenty-four hours. And there wasn’t a thing wrong this morning.’ He looked at the television screen by the door and added. ‘Damn. We’ve lost the last plane.’

I only half heard him because the airport doctor had arrived with two nurses and I was busy. We got the man on the stretcher and watched him being carried away. The doctor, effusive in his thanks, shook his head at last and said, ‘Why the hell should he eat a crab sandwich?’ and the American, who was still standing beside us, said, ‘His wife made them and he forgot to have them last night. He didn’t want to disappoint Lady Edgecombe.’

Edgecombe. I began dimly to remember. A former minor ambassador, I rather fancied. Retired and living on one of the Bahamian out-islands. Living on a generous pension, perhaps, and devoted to gracious living, Lady Edgecombe and crab.

It was nothing to do with me, and I was pleased that it wasn’t my case.

On the other hand, public health is a doctor’s concern, and the man would be returning to Nassau. I laid in my bag, before I left, a small specimen bottle marked Edgecombe, Kennedy Airport, and the date.

It was a minor precaution. I saw no reason to mention the fact. I was more concerned, as I remember, with the nuisance of having lost the last plane back to Nassau that day.

It did not occur to me, as I left the airport and made my way to the hotel in which B.O.A.C., with their customary propriety, were paying my expenses overnight, that I had just taken the most significant step of my life.

Since I am not what a patient of mine once seriously referred to as a ‘night person’, and had no desire to see a homosexual play, a rave musical or a small intimate niterie, I watched the news headlines on television, and retired at 9.30.

At 10.15 p.m. the airport doctor rang, a courtesy call, to inform me that Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe had received the necessary treatment, was quite out of danger, and was now resting comfortably in hospital. I thanked him, and went back to sleep.

At 11 p.m. the telephone rang again, and an unknown American voice said, ‘Is this Dr MacRannoch?’

‘It is,” I said. Night interruptions are part of a doctor’s life, which is why I go to bed early. ‘Who is speaking?’

‘Dr Douglas MacRannoch?’ The voice was muted and over-familiar in manner, reminding me of a chocolate commercial to which I am not at all partial.

‘Speaking. Who is calling?’

‘Dr MacRannoch,’ the voice said again lovingly. I can use no other word. ‘Today you saved a man’s life. Just don’t do it again, will you? Just don’t do it again.’ And there was a tap followed by the pneumatic-drill noise of a broken connection, which I believe to be a serious insult to the inner ear. I therefore quickly put the phone down.

At that moment, someone banged on my door.

I sat still. The Trueman is a respectable business hotel just off Times Square with perhaps twenty-five storeys of bedrooms, mostly occupied by travellers who mind their own business and seldom stay more than one night. The staff are adequate but quite uninvolved, their main concern being to make the beds if possible by 8 a.m. each morning. At night, the guest may do as he pleases.

One of the guests, it seemed, was pleased to knock on my door in a city where I knew no one. On the other hand, the telephone was by my side, and I had put the chain on the door, receiving my customary electric shock as I did so. Since both the ringing of my telephone and my voice had undoubtedly also been heard, I filled my lungs and said, ‘Yes? Who is it?’ just as the knock was repeated. At the same time I lifted and opened my medical bag, which stood on the chair by my bed, and began to locate and fill a standard plastic syringe with 10 c.c. of a seven-per-cent solution of pentothal sodium.

The knocking stopped. ‘Dr MacRannoch? I beg your pardon,” said another American voice through the door: a voice I had recently heard. ‘I do beg your pardon if you were asleep, but this is Wallace Brady, remember? I’ve just been to the hospital and seen Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe. I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘I know,’ I said. I finished filling the syringe, wiped it, repacked my bag and reached across for my dressing-gown. ‘I’ve just had a call from Dr Radinski. I hear he has made a good recovery. Thank you for coming to tell me.’

‘He has, but it isn’t that. Dr MacRannoch’ - it was an educated voice, in so far as such a thing may be said of a transatlantic inflection: and socially fluent - ‘Dr MacRannoch, I know it’s late and our acquaintanceship is of very short standing, but I have a message for you from Sir Bartholomew which I promised to give you tonight. I’ll tell you through the door if you wish, or I’ll telephone you, but I’d appreciate it if you felt able to see me?’

‘Just now?’ I said. I tied the dressing-gown, put the syringe in one pocket, and rang the bell for room service.

‘Two minutes?’ he said, instilling appeal into his voice. All the same, it was not quite sufficiently flexible, I judged, to be the murmuring voice on the telephone.

‘Very well,’ I said, and unhooking the chain, drew open the door. ‘I’ve just rung for some coffee. Perhaps you will join me.’

Mr Wallace Brady entered, fully dressed I was happy to see, crossed the room and sat in a distant armchair. He made no attempt whatever to molest me. In fact he seemed, if anything, to find the situation amusing. I put my hands in my dressing-gown pockets and remained standing. ‘Yes?’

‘Do sit down,’ he said. ‘You must be tired, and I’ve interrupted your sleep. And the coffee’s on me. Unless you’d prefer something stronger?’

‘The refreshment, so far as I know,’ I said, ‘is on British Overseas Airways; but please order whatever you wish. I do not take alcohol.’

‘Now that,’ he said regretfully, ‘I should have guessed.’

‘And the message?’ I said. The floor waiter appeared at the open door: I gave him the order and he disappeared.

‘It’s an appeal, really, from patient to doctor,’ Wallace Brady said. He had light brown hair and the type of thick skin which browns without burning: his eyes were light grey, almost white, the lids well opened. He was in my view too thin, but not otherwise ill formed. When I refrained from speaking his hand moved for the first time to his jacket pocket and then he removed it. ‘You don’t like smoke in your bedroom, I guess.’

‘The air conditioning will remove it,’ I said, ‘if you cannot endure a conversation without it.’

He looked at me thoughtfully, then smiling, leaned to one side and took a cigarette-case from his pocket. ‘You’re a woman who knows her own mind,’ he said. ‘Bart Edgecombe was right.’

I waited.

‘The problem is,’ said Brady, ‘that Bart wants to get back to Nassau. His wife’s there, Denise. I gather he doesn’t like to leave her for long. But the hospital aren’t keen.’

‘I should think not,’ I said. I could see what was coming. I said. ‘I thought he lived in one of the out-islands.’

‘He does. Great Harbour Cay. I’m working there myself at the moment - that’s how I know him. He came to New York for a couple of days and Denise took off for some shopping in Nassau and expected him back there tonight. The point is, he wants to get the 11.30 flight tomorrow morning, and if he does, would you look after him? He’ll go straight into the United Commonwealth if need be the moment he arrives.’

The coffee came. I allowed Mr Brady to tip the waiter, since its presence was entirely his responsibility, and poured. Since I had hopes of being allowed to sleep at least part of the night, I made my own mostly hot milk. I said, ‘The hospital is perfectly right in not wishing Sir Bartholomew to travel. My advice would be to send for Lady Edgecombe instead.’

The man Brady sipped his coffee and then sat and looked into it. ‘She’s highly strung,’ he said. ‘He’s dead set on getting back with no fuss, and he has a great opinion of your abilities. When he heard what you did at the airport -’ He broke off. ‘He’s met you, you know. Don’t you remember?’

‘I have no clear recollection,’ I said.

‘He came to the hospital in connection with the New Year parade, and you dealt with him then most efficiently, he says. That’s why he thought you might help him. Of course,’ Mr Brady said quickly. ‘I shall be on the plane, and Sergeant Trotter, who lent us a hand. But it would really set his mind at rest to have you, I can see that. And . . . I hope it won’t embarrass you, but I have to say that of course he will make up any difference between your fare and his own. I don’t suppose the hospital let you travel in luxury.’

They don’t. I only travel in luxury when I am travelling with my father, who used this method among many to promote me into a wealthy and suitable marriage. Since I broke the news to him that I do not intend to marry at all, he has travelled in luxury still more frequently, in an insane ambition to spend all the family wealth before it falls into the hands of his successor, the forty-sixth titular chieftain, one T. K. MacRannoch, a native of Tokyo.

I felt that my broken night’s sleep entitled me at least to a first-class flight to the Bahamas. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘If you will kindly arrange to transfer my ticket. Tell Sir Bartholomew I shall call at the hospital at 10.15 a.m. The airport should be warned that he is a sick man, and they must waive all formalities.’

‘I’ll do that,’ said Mr Brady. He looked a trifle unsettled. ‘I should say,’ he said, ‘that I don’t know Bart Edgecombe all that well myself. You know, we play golf occasionally. But I didn’t even know he was in New York until we ran into each other this morning.’

The world is full of people who regard medicine as a public charity. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘And is Sergeant Trotter a friend?’