The Immortality Factor (37 page)

“Have you read all the reports we offered in testimony?” he asked Jesse.

Rosen got to his feet and came around the table. “This is not the proper time for cross-examining the witness.”

Arthur ignored the examiner. “Well, have you?” he asked.

Jesse looked from Arthur to Rosen to the judges. Graves's face was twisted into a worried scowl.

“Dr. Marshak,” he said to Arthur, pointing with his gavel, “you said you
have an objection and I am willing to listen to it. But you may not cross-examine the witness at this time.”

A grimace of anger flashed across Arthur's face but he quickly suppressed it. “I do have an objection,” he said to Graves.

“Well, what is it?”

Looking down at his brother for a moment, Arthur said, “The witness is basing his testimony only on the earliest reports of our animal trials. The later reports show quite clearly that we've been able to control the tumor growth to a considerable extent.”

He's calling me a liar, Jesse realized. Or an incompetent boob.

“I read all the reports,” he snapped, staring straight at his brother.

“Then why don't you admit that we've solved the tumor problem?”

“Because you haven't!”

“That's just not true,” Arthur insisted.

Graves banged his gavel on the desktop. “Quiet! Both of you!”

Arthur stood facing his brother, fists on his hips. Jesse could feel his insides boiling. It took an effort to keep himself from yelling back at his brother.

“Dr. Marshak,” said Graves to Arthur, “you have made your objection and it will be duly noted in the record of these proceedings. Now kindly sit down and let us go on. You'll get your chance at cross-examination later.”

Arthur went back to the front bench and sat. Rosen returned to his seat. Jesse thought of two prizefighters going back to their corners at the end of a round. He turned back to face the judges and saw that Senator Kindelberger was grinning at him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
here was no way that I was going to work with Arby or any of his people, not after the way he blew up over Julia's miscarriage. He had even snapped at Julia at Ma's funeral service, for god's sake. So the hell with him. No sense even thinking about La Guardia and Grenford working together. That was finished before it ever started. Arthur's the big-shot executive with his own laboratory and a whole staff of sycophants kowtowing to him all the time. Let him go tinker with nerve regrowth or organ regeneration. See how far he gets.

I had more important things to attend to.

Like every hospital in the world, Mendelssohn always needed more money. We were even more in the red than most because the hospital is right on the border of the worst ghetto in the city and we had this constant tidal wave of welfare and charity cases. Poverty is ugly. Poverty is kids with sores on their skin and lice in their hair. Crack babies. AIDS babies. And violence. When I worked the emergency room I bet I saw more gunshot wounds than the medics with the First Cavalry.

That's why it seemed to be a perverse sort of godsend when Reverend Roy
Averill Simmonds, one of those television evangelists, was rolled off an ambulance into the emergency room that Friday night.

It'd been months since I'd seen Arby. Julia was completely recovered from the miscarriage and back at work at British Airways. In fact, she was off in London the night Reverend Simmonds was brought in.

He was only a small-time evangelist in those days; you could see him on cable TV late at night. He had come to New York as part of a summertime revival bash at Yankee Stadium, where he had to share the pulpit—or whatever they used—with half a dozen other Bible-thumpers. Even at that they only half-filled the stadium. But it was still the most excitement the Bronx had seen all summer, what with the Yanks doing so miserably.

I was down in the cafeteria, grabbing a quick cup of coffee after being on duty for several hours. I made it a point of honor to do my share of the ER duty. Nobody on the hospital staff got special privileges, starting with me.

One of the Hispanic orderlies came barreling through the empty cafeteria, breathless.

“Quick, they need you!”

“What is it?” I asked, gulping down the last of the coffee.

“A very important man. He's been wounded.”

“Who?”

“Some priest. Not a priest, a minister. He's on TV all the time.”

At that point, I had no idea who Reverend Simmonds was or that he'd been working the crowd at the stadium. I tossed my Styrofoam cup into the waste bin and hurried toward the elevators, thinking that we had an assassination attempt on our hands. Urban violence had found another victim. Or maybe terrorism.

But when I started examining Reverend Simmonds, in a curtained-off corner of the emergency room, I saw that he had been neither shot nor stabbed. He was suffering from a concussion, a pretty bad scalp wound, and contusions along the side of his head and face.

Two deathly pale young men had come in with the evangelist. They were standing at the foot of the gurney while I examined him, both of them sweating in dark suits with narrow ties.

“What happened?” I asked as I watched the patient's pupils. He was semiconscious, unfocused; a concussion, all right.

“One of the light standards collapsed and fell onto the stage,” said the young man nearer me, in a hushed voice.

“Right in the middle of his sermon,” said the other, also whispering.

“Must've been pretty heavy,” I said, starting to clean the scalp wound. The patient winced and groaned.

“It's a miracle that it didn't kill him.”

I wisecracked, “Thank god he's got a thick skull.”

Neither of them so much as smiled.

“Will he be all right?”

“I think so.” I called out to the volunteer on station at the desk outside, “Schedule this one for X-ray. Skull, left cheekbone, and jaw.”

“I think it was an assassination attempt,” one of the young men whispered.

I looked up at him. He was entirely serious.

“Who'd want to kill him?”

“The forces of evil.”

“Like who?” I asked.

His eyes shifted around as if he were searching for demons in the air.

“A man of God has many enemies,” the other one said.

“Like who?” I asked again.

“Those who serve the devil,” he whispered so low I could barely him.

I almost laughed in his face. The forces of evil were most likely a couple of sloppy electricians who didn't set up their stage lights properly. Instead of worrying about the devil, these guys ought to be more careful about who they hire, I thought. Probably nonunion workers.

I bundled him off for X-ray, warning the orderly that this was a concussion case and he'd probably upchuck sooner or later. Then I quickly forgot about Reverend Simmonds. It was a busy Friday night. Early summer, not the muggy dog days yet, but the bars and street corners were producing a heavy stream of fights and slicings. Then an apartment block caught fire and we started getting burns and smoke-inhalation cases. Reverend Simmonds had it easy.

It was Sunday before I saw him again. I was at my desk, wading through the eternal ocean of paperwork, when two other aides—fresh-scrubbed young girls this time—pushed his wheelchair into the doorway of my office. The bandaging on his head made it look like he was wearing a white turban, almost. The swelling on his cheek had gone down, but that side of his face was still purple. He was dressed casually: light slacks, crisp white short-sleeved shirt, no tie.

“You work on the Lord's day,” said the reverend. I was surprised at the depth and power of his voice, especially since he was just a little guy. A bantamweight, really.

“People get sick and injured on the Lord's day,” I said. “Somebody's got to take care of them.” I didn't tell him that as far as I was concerned, the Sabbath had already passed.

He gave me a penetrating look from under those graying shaggy eyebrows. “You're the chief of internal medicine here, I understand.”

“That's right,” I said.

“Yet you were working in the emergency room Friday night.”

“It was my turn. Every doctor on the staff takes his turn, that's the way we do it here.”

“That's very unusual.”

“So is getting bonked on the head by a light stand.”

He threw his head back and laughed, which told me that he wasn't in any real pain. “You see?” he said to the two silent girls behind him. “It's just as I told you. It all has a meaning, a significance.”

“What does?”

Reverend Simmonds motioned for them to push his chair closer to my desk. There really wasn't much room for him; my office is barely big enough for the desk and file cabinets.

“There's no such thing as a coincidence,” he said to me in that deep basso voice. “Everything happens according to God's plan.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. My accident and the fact that you were in the emergency room—both part of God's plan.”

“So what's God planning next?”

He took my question as if I had really meant it. “I think the Lord is telling me that I should help your hospital. I think the Lord wants me to help the poor, downtrodden, hopeless people of the ghetto.”

“They can use all the help they can get,” I said.

“Helping this hospital would help them, wouldn't it?”

“Ninety percent of our patients are from the immediate neighborhood,” I told him. “Most of them are on welfare or Medicaid or Medicare.”

He nodded as if he had just made up his mind. “I'll help you to raise funds for this hospital. Together we will do God's blessed work.”

So help me, those were the words he used. God's blessed work. He took off to complete his tour of revival meetings that he was scheduled to do. Went all across the country, mostly to small and medium-sized cities in the Midwest, although I heard he made stops in Seattle and Salem, Oregon, and then swung back East to Portland, Maine, and Hartford. His TV ministry resorted to tapes of old shows while he was on the road.

All through those weeks several of his people were in constant touch with me by phone, making arrangements for a fund-raising rally in Central Park. At first I just went through the motions, figuring that's what they were doing and the whole wacky idea would fall of its own dead weight sooner or later. But these guys were serious. I mean,
serious
. I was tempted to call them the reverend's disciples. Utterly intent on producing a mammoth rally in the park; not a smile on any of them, ever.

The reverend's business manager seemed more human, though. He was a chubby, jovial-looking older guy named Elwood Faber. Always wore a tweed suit, no matter how hot it was. And he never perspired, despite his chunky build. I wondered what kind of metabolism he had. He was from somewhere out in Kansas or Nebraska, someplace like that. He could crack a smile, at least,
and knew a joke when he heard one. Mentally sharp, too, despite his fat farmboy looks and his seedy clothes.

Little by little, I began to see that Elwood was the real brains behind Reverend Simmonds's operation. And he was dead-set on making this Central Park gig a mammoth success.

“You can really get people to fork out thirty bucks a head for these revival meetings?” I asked Elwood once, when he had come to my office at the hospital.

“Surely do,” he answered cheerfully. “We give them a lot for their money: entertainment, rock music, gospel singing—and salvation.”

I looked at him. He was grinning at me.

“Salvation,” I said.

“People need to feel that there's something bigger'n them, something in control of the world. It's pretty scary out there all by yourself. Folks feel better when they can believe that God loves 'em and is lookin' out for them.”

“Do you believe any of that?” I asked.

Still grinning, he said, “That's not important. The customers do. We make them feel good.”

“Does Simmonds believe any of it?”

Faber's smile clicked off like an electric light. “He surely does. Don't doubt it for a second. He believes, all right. If he didn't he wouldn't be able to do what he does. You can't sway thousands of people with something you don't feel in your heart of hearts. He's convinced of the truth, don't doubt that for a second, son.”

“But you don't swallow it,” I said.

The grin came back. “Like I said, that's not important. The reverend has important work to do, powerful work. And I help him.”

Faber helped a lot. He was the one guy in Simmonds's operation who seemed to know what he was doing. I started to get calls from the mayor's office, from the Parks Department, from Broadway show people, for god's sake. The hospital's board of directors was overjoyed; they would have made me a saint, at least the Catholics on the board would have.

Simmonds flew into town specifically to nail down the final plans for the rally. He invited me to dinner at his hotel and I took Julia.

“Where is he staying?” Julia asked when I told her about dinner.

I grinned at her. “At the Pierre.”

She looked impressed. “The Lord's work must pay pretty well.”

“I guess it does.”

It was over dinner—served in his suite, no less—that I started talking about the research we were doing at the La Guardia Center. Simmonds didn't seem interested at all. He looked bored, in fact.

And then, somehow, I mentioned Arby's work on organ regeneration. I
don't know why I did that, it had nothing to do with me or the hospital or the medical center. But I did, and it perked him up immediately.

“Grow new organs right inside your body?”

We were halfway through dessert and coffee. Julia and me, Simmonds, and Elwood Faber, the business manager. The hotel had sent up two waiters to set things up and serve the various courses. They were out in the hall now, waiting for him to call them when we were finished. No wine with the meal. No after-dinner drinks, either. Simmonds ran a dry ship.