“Jesus, that sonofabitch behind us is using his high beams. I can hardly see!”

“He’s signaling you, Dave. He’s trying to tell you to get over. He’d like to go faster than fifteen miles an hour.”

Faye was on call at the hospital, which put Dave at the wheel of the Cohenmobile, and Eric was not at all sanguine about his ability to survive, much less catch, Iberia’s evening nonstop to Barcelona.

“Traffic in our lane is doing at least thirty, Dave. He wants you to speed up or move over.”

Vroom. Honk! Screech.

“Are we still alive?” said Eric.

“Stop complaining,” said Dave. “All I need is practice.”

“‘As the surgical resident said to the next of kin.’ I wonder what time it is.”

Swerve. Honk! Screech.

“Jesus, Dave, I have a watch! Keep your eyes on the road!”

The sluggish traffic bottlenecked at the feeder into the Van Wyck Expressway, then speeded up slightly once the merge was completed.

“You lucky duck,” sighed Dave. “Romance. Adventure. Foreign intrigue.”

Eric smiled to himself. You should only know, he thought.

“I don’t think it’ll be very exciting,” he said aloud.

“It just seemed like a good idea to put some space between me and General until Harris cools down.”

“Not being on call for two whole months!” Dave swung jauntily across two lanes of traffic toward where he imagined the airport exit would be. It wasn’t.

“Stay where you are,” Eric begged as Dave began swinging back through the two middle lanes. Drivers in the other cars were stomping on their brakes and swearing. “This lane’ll take you right into the airport. Trust me. Just look for the Iberia sign . . . No! I’ll look for it. You drive.”

Now, safely belted into a window seat, a glass of red wine and a tray with brown food of no known origin in front of him, Eric felt fine. Never mind that terrorists hijacked Americans out of the skies every day, thunderstorms were forecast halfway across the Atlantic, and both pilots had just ordered fish. He was out of the Cohenmobile.

The flight attendants came through the cabin with headsets for the movie, and he rented one. He’d missed their announcement of the title, but it didn’t matter. With the kind of hours he’d been putting in this year, chances were excellent he hadn’t seen it.

He’d have another drink, he thought. Eat some plastic dinner. Watch the film. Doze. Test his glucose tolerance with an airplane breakfast. Assuming he survived all that, he’d stagger off the plane into a brand-new morning and try to figure out what the hell to do next.

“Welcome to the Scottsdale Inn, Dr. Harris. If you’d just fill out this registration card . . .”

Harris liked medical conventions. New information, old faces. A good combination.

“Here’s your key, sir. Room 1615. We’ll have your luggage sent right up. If there is anything we can do to make your stay more pleasurable, please let us know.”

Pleasant, Harris thought automatically, not pleasurable. Unless room service includes loose women.

“John!”

A voice he recognized stopped him a few steps from the elevator, and he turned to see Sam Robertson, an amiable balding cosmetic surgeon from Utah. The two men had met at a convention on microsurgery several years back, and their paths had crossed once or twice since then. Although they didn’t keep in touch between these chance meetings, it was always good to see each other again.

“Just checked in?”

“Yes. You?”

“Got here this morning. Had a swim, lunch by the pool.”

“A swim sounds good,” said Harris. “Where’s the nearest pool?” The convention center was large and sprawling.

“Where are you . . . 1615 . . . that’s the East Tower. I’m West. There’s a pool in between. Take the elevator to LL, that’s lower level, and hang a left. You can’t miss it, it’s the size of Lake Superior. I’ll meet you there. Twenty minutes do it for you?”

“Fine,” said Harris, and followed his luggage onto the elevator.

The room was large, and well decorated in muted tones of blue and beige. A large round table and four chairs were placed in front of sliding glass doors opening onto the small terrace. A mock-Regency tallboy hid the television set. The bed was king-size, and a small dressing room led into the bathroom. Best of all, the red message light on the phone wasn’t blinking and the phone itself was silent.

Tipping the bellboy, he stripped off his clothes and dug his bathing suit out of the suitcase. He checked himself out in the long mirror on the dressing-room door. Not bad for fifty-four, he thought. Not great, but not bad.

Sam was waiting for him when he got down to the pool. He’s put on some weight, Harris thought. Sam had been busy; two large yellow hotel towels graced the chaises facing the sun, and on the low table nearby stood two rum punches garnished with pineapple.

“I’m always warning my patients about solar exposure,” Sam said, rubbing a white lotion onto his balding scalp, “but at times like this I can appreciate why they don’t always listen. Want some?” He tossed Harris a tube of sunscreen with the words “Sample - Not For Resale” prominently stamped on it.

“Thanks,” said Harris, “but I think I’ll have a swim first.”

The water was cool and invigorating, the air hot and dry. As Harris stroked methodically through the water, he felt the tension of the past weeks wash away. It had been hard on Rose, he knew, but hard on him too. Often he’d had doubts about his plan. What if they were wrong about what Talmidge was doing? And if they were right, would Eric be in danger? That was why it had been so important for him to keep up the appearance of anger. For Eric’s sake. God knew he’d come close to blowing it any number of times. When Eric did that superb colon resection last Tuesday, he’d wanted to clap him on the back and buy him a drink instead of scowl and stalk away. And was he really sure he could get Eric’s appointment back for him in the fall? Well, they’d passed the point of no return.

He rolled onto his back and floated, looking up at the cloudless sky, and felt the tightness drain from his shoulders, his neck . . .

Later he and Sam sipped their drinks, crunching the pineapple and discarding the preserved cherries (“. . . pure poison, John, oughta be outlawed!”), and traded shop talk. The pool area began to fill with afternoon arrivals.

Mimi Young, a pretty black doctor from Detroit, joined them briefly. One of the organizers of the meeting, she was eager to make sure everyone was pleased with the hotel, the accommodations, the service. She’d received much favorable national newspaper coverage recently for her work in the field of public medicine; rumor had it she was ripe for political appointment.

Harris watched her move away to another group, admiring her firm high bottom and large breasts.

Noticing, Sam smiled in amusement. “Very nice. Still, it’s hard to know what’s real and what isn’t, these days!”

Harris looked at him in surprise. It had never occurred to him to wonder, or care.

“Don’t mind me,” said Sam. “Occupational hazard. I’ve done those procedures so often, I automatically think the worst.”

“Worst? Since when does a plastic surgeon cast aspersions on his art?”

“Sorry. Bad choice of words. No, when I see something that good, I just can’t help looking for the scars.”

“Bet you don’t often find them, though. Not with the quality of work being done these days.”

“Oh, I don’t know. You have to know where to look.”

“Well, I’ve seen Mimi around these conventions for at least, oh, five years now,” said Harris defensively. “She’s always looked good.”

Sam laughed. “Go get her, tiger!” he said. Harris gave him a look. “Come on, John. It was just a joke.”

An uncomfortable silence fell. Christ, Sam thought, I’d forgotten how stiff John can be about some things. He searched for some way to change the subject.

“Talking about lifts,” he said, “I saw a most interesting case a couple of months ago. Patient of mine I’d done several lifts on over the years, started when she was only forty-one. Anyhow, about two years ago she asked me to do another lift, and I told her frankly that her skin wouldn’t stand up to it. It was so stretched out, another lift was just impossible. She was nearly sixty at that point, looked late forties, but that wasn’t good enough.”

Harris idly watched Mimi approach a third group, chat and laugh with them, move on. He felt sorry he’d barked at Sam; the man hadn’t meant any harm, it was just his way. Yes, and barking is mine, Harris thought sadly.

“She was angry, of course, and upset, as though it was my fault. I said no reputable surgeon would operate on her. She said she’d see about that. We, uh, we didn’t part friends, you might say.”

Harris had stopped listening. The sun felt good on his chest and arms, and the warm breeze ruffled his hair. He spent so little time out-of-doors. His mind drifted. . . .

“. . . Barcelona, and I had to admit she . . .”

“What did you say?” Harris was suddenly alert, the tension in his neck blooming.

“Barcelona,” Sam repeated. “She’d had it done just outside Barcelona. Quite incredible. I mean; I could see the faint scarring around the hairline but on the face itself . . . well, the skin was fresh, young. Not stretched at all.”

“How did they do it?” Harris asked.

“Damned if I know,” replied Sam. “And that’s what puzzles me. Frankly, it’s a medical impossibility. I tried prying information out of the woman, but she claimed she knew nothing about their techniques. Nonsense, of course; any reputable surgeon would have explained the procedure beforehand.”

Sam paused, scowling. His professional pride had been injured, certainly; the woman had fully enjoyed scoring off him. But that wasn’t all that bothered him.

Harris was silent.

“It’s just so hard to believe that someone could develop a technique with results as dramatic as that, and we wouldn’t know about it in the States,” Sam said. “It’s . . . it’s odd.”

Then he brightened. “Enough of mysteries,” he said. “What’s new in your neck of the woods?”

I had a transplant patient whose brother offered to donate a kidney on condition the operation take place in Barcelona, thought Harris. I pretended to fire my star resident on the chance the head of that hospital would take him in and show him what’s going on. I may have ruined his career. Or we may be on the trail of one of the most revolutionary discoveries in modern medicine. And now you’ve given me another part of the puzzle.

“Not much,” said Harris. “Pass the sunscreen, will you?”