CHARLES VAN STRAADT KNEW, almost as soon as he sat down in Michael Pride’s office, that he had come down to the center at a bad time. That he had come down to the center at all he thought was perfectly understandable. Charles van Straadt was a very rich and a very powerful man, and a very old one. He had reached all three states on his own and by virtue of superior cunning. He had never given himself credit for superior intelligence. Charles van Straadt was no Michael Pride, and he knew it. He could never have graduated from high school at fifteen or MIT at eighteen. He could never have made it into the Harvard Medical School, never mind out with a summa cum laude and an internship at Columbia. What Charles understood was much more basic. Charles knew why the New York press was dying and what to do about it. He knew what people everywhere were willing to pay to hear. He understood populist politics, local television, working-class aesthetics, and the art of the headline. He understood these things so well that he was now the major newspaper player in sixteen cities across the world, from London to Melbourne, from New York to Milano, from Miami to Athens. He was seventy-eight years old and still in excellent health. He attributed his longevity to red meat and fried potatoes and owned a steak house in every city where he owned a newspaper. He made the covers of gossipy magazines in pictures that showed him smoking a big cigar and scowling into the camera. He was an eccentric of the first water and getting more eccentric all the time—but he understood that, too. It had been a long, hard life, but he had loved every minute of it. Lately, he had been expecting to find out he was immortal.
Now he sat in the big plastic-covered easy chair Michael kept just for his visits and looked around at the usual mess, at the papers strewn everywhere, at the charts tacked haphazardly to the wall and notes stuck to the side of the telephone with messages like “call Augie @ cattle cultures” written across them. Charles van Straadt had decided to provide major funding for the Sojourner Truth Health Center seven years ago, and in those seven years he had scrupulously kept his promise to Michael Pride not to interfere in operations, with one exception. Charles van Straadt paid for Michael Pride’s secretary, and paid well. He couldn’t stand the thought of the chaos to which Michael’s life was reduced when Michael was left to organize it alone.
Charles’s granddaughter Rosalie—his favorite one, the one he kept around him all the time—was standing on the other side of the office, looking out the windows onto the street. She wore a black turtleneck sweater and black slacks, like a Beatnik girl from the 1950s, and it was a measure of just how pretty she was that she looked good in them. Her dark hair was pulled up on her head in a knot. Her fingers were full of gold and silver rings.
“I don’t think you’re going to get to see Michael today,” Rosalie said. “There’s some kind of emergency going on down there. I wonder what could have happened.”
“Gang war,” Charles said.
“Do you think so really? It just seems so odd that people would go to all that trouble. To have a war, I mean. Why bother?”
“If you’re asking me what the issues are, I don’t know.”
“I passed Martha downstairs while I was coming in. She isn’t speaking to me. Ida and Victor aren’t speaking to me either. I don’t think any of them will ever speak to me again.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“I don’t worry about it, grandfather. I just get annoyed by it. It’s so unnecessary.”
“Is that what it is?”
“You could have gone about it differently, you know. You could have set it up in secret and not let anyone know until it was over.” Rosalie’s voice was accusing.
“I can’t do anything in secret,” Charles van Straadt said. “That’s why I own a lot of newspapers.”
Actually, he owned a lot of newspapers because newspapers were what had been available for him to buy, all those years ago, and had been what he knew, too—but telling that sort of thing to his grandchildren was like trying to explain the intricacies of oil painting to a blind person. Rosalie was good with money, but she had no ear for the business. Martha and Ida and Victor weren’t even good with money. Charles looked around the office one more time and came up blank. Either Michael hadn’t read the newspapers today or he’d gotten rid of the ones he had read.
Charles took a cigar out of his inside jacket pocket and lit up. What he lit up with was a twenty-two-carat-gold cigarette lighter he’d had custom made for himself at Harry Winston. Like the custom gold cufflinks on his shirts and the custom gold buckles on his John Lobb loafers, the cigarette lighter was part of Charles’s legend. He reached over to Michael’s desk and extracted the black plastic ashtray from under a stack of forms that would have brought Michael a fair amount of money if he’d ever decided to file them with Medicaid. Michael would never decide to file them with Medicaid. Michael said that taking government money made you far too vulnerable to government regulation.
Charles put the black plastic ashtray in his lap and tapped a thin stream of cigar ash into it.
“Did you walk around the building?” he asked Rosalie. “Did you check out what I asked you to?”
“Yes I did.”
“And?”
“The gay rights protesters are gone, maybe because of all the stories this morning. The guy from the Holly Hill Christian Fellowship is still there, carrying the same old sign. Maybe he doesn’t read the papers any more than Michael does.”
“That’s unlikely. And there was a lot of television play. Nobody else?”
Rosalie shook her head. “It’s really spooky up here. It feels dangerous just to breathe the air. Maybe people are afraid to come up and harass him.”
“Well, they’re certainly harassing us,” Charles said. “I checked with the Sentinel office before we came down here. We’re getting fifteen calls an hour on how we’re covering up for Michael Pride. We’re not going to be able to hold off on this story forever.”
“I don’t understand why we’re holding off on it at all,” Rosalie told him. “I mean, it’s not like it really matters. This is a privately funded foundation. There isn’t some bureaucrat someplace who could get Michael fired. The only person who could force him out of here is you, and you don’t want to.”
“True.”
“I don’t see what difference it makes if he does patronize… glory holes. I think it’s gross, but I don’t see what difference it makes. Why shouldn’t the Sentinel make just as much of a fuss about it as everyone else?”
“Well,” Charles said mildly, “we owe Michael something, you know. The whole city of New York owes Michael something.”
“What?”
Charles van Straadt cocked his head. Was it possible that Rosalie didn’t understand what was going on here? Was it possible that his granddaughter didn’t realize how incredible it was, that a doctor of Michael Pride’s training, ability, and stature should be spending his life in this place, bringing medicine to people so poor and so poorly educated, so defeated and so paranoid, that the rest of the country had given up on them all long ago? The disturbing thing was that Rosalie probably didn’t understand—and that Martha and Ida and Victor wouldn’t understand, either. They lived in a fog, these children. The world was not what it had been when Charles van Straadt was young.
Charles took a long deep drag on his cigar and sighed.
“Do me a favor,” he said. “Go downstairs and get me one of those fudgey ice lolly things from the cafeteria. I’ll wait here for a while and think through what I want to do.”
“Do you think it’s safe?”
“Your going or my staying?”
“Your staying, of course. It’s so—deserted up here.”
“It’s deserted up here because there’s an emergency down there,” Charles said. “Take off now, I’ll be fine. I promise.”
“All right,” Rosalie said, reluctantly.
“Take off now.”
Rosalie hesitated a moment longer. Then she shrugged her elegant shoulders and strode out of the office, not looking back.
“Try not to get yourself mugged,” she told him as she slammed the door behind herself. It popped open again, refusing to catch.
Charles van Straadt took another drag on his cigar and got out of his chair. Michael’s phone was covered with Post-It notes, but it was otherwise free of debris. Charles sat down in Michael’s chair and picked up the receiver.
“I would like to speak to Martha van Straadt,” he told the house operator. “I believe she’s on duty in post-op this evening.”
The operator said something inane in half-Spanish, half-English and Charles chewed at the end of his cigar.
Crises, crises, crises, he thought.
There never seemed to be an end to crises.