Rebecca was examining a mole on an elderly woman’s face when Iris knocked on the door.
“Dr. Koboy on the phone.”
“So it’s official, Doctor. Miss Czarnowa has Gaucher’s. What a charming lady — when I told her, she kissed my hand. You sure she’s not related?”
Rebecca smiled with relief. “I’m very happy to hear that.”
“She’ll have to stay put for another day or so. We’re going to do a blood transfusion and try to get her blood counts up. I’ll keep you informed.”
When Rebecca had a minute between patients, she looked up Gaucher’s in her pathology text:
… a rare disorder of the reticuloendothelial system in which the enzyme glucocerebrosidase is deficient. The clinical features of inherited glucocerebrosidase deficiency were first characterized by Philippe Charles Gaucher in Paris in 1882. He originally described a patient with massive enlargement of the spleen and liver and identified characteristic cells in the spleen that had an increased size and displaced nucleus. These “Gaucher cells,” characterized by lipid-laden macrophages, were later also found in liver, bone marrow, and other tissues. Accumulation of Gaucher cells in the spleen results in splenomegaly. Also associated with Gaucher’s — anaemia, leucopenia, reduced blood platelets, and skeletal involvement. Clinical symptoms vary widely ranging from disability in children to asymptomatic disease in the elderly. The disease is more severe when symptoms manifest in childhood than in adult onset.
Iris was on the phone arranging appointments for the next day when Rebecca walked past her desk on her way out. It was five-thirty. They waved to each other — Iris blew her a silent kiss with her pen hand — and Rebecca was down the stairs and out the door. It wasn’t until she stepped toward her car in the little lot behind the medical building that she realized she wasn’t going home. Halina’s revelation had burdened her. Rebecca had suspected a struggle between Michael and Baron the day of the drowning. Only she couldn’t have known the profound enmity behind that struggle. The disclosure of such betrayal changed her whole picture of that Saturday. It made the taking of vodka and Valium more likely, but it didn’t explain why Michael was in the water.
Rebecca pulled onto Beverley Street and headed south. Baron was probably the last person to see Michael alive. He had refused to consider Michael’s death a suicide when she had suggested it. He also denied being there. This time she would do better. She would use the new information to disarm him. She hated playing games, but some people could not be dealt with any other way.
After parking her car at a meter, she marched up Bay Street toward the Baron Building. Business people in conservative suits were rushing along the sidewalk on their way home from work. She felt underdressed in khaki trousers and an olive green blazer over her camisole. The crowds were giving the area in front of Baron’s building a wide berth.
The miners were still there in their jeans and plaid shirts, only something had changed. Two cops hovered across the street, intently watching the scruffy men argue amongst each other. Tensions had risen along with their voices. One man pushed another until he staggered backwards and started shouting obscenities. Rebecca slowed down, hesitant, searching for Claude Simard but not finding him. She straightened her shoulders, determined to muddle through. After all, she sympathized with their plight. Why should she be intimidated?
She concentrated on the hill of cigarette butts that rose behind a granite planter where some leaves struggled in the shade. But as soon as it was clear she was heading for the entrance, the miners pressed around her.
“I’m on your side,” she said. “But I need to go into the building.”
“Can’t be on our side if you got business in there,” said one heavy-set man.
Twenty faces glared at her, eyes bright with fury.
“Let me by, please,” she said, her voice cooler than she felt.
The men didn’t budge.
“Where’s Claude?” she said, hoping a familiar name would have some influence.
The men began peering at one another furtively as if she had just discovered dirty pictures in their wallets.
“Let the lady through!” a voice bellowed from behind.
A column opened up between the plaid shirts and one of the cops from across the street pushed his way through. He took her by the elbow and led her to the entrance.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Not the best time to be coming in here,” he said, opening the front door for her.
She smiled sheepishly and headed for the elevator. There was no line of visitors this time, but the guard intercepted her and asked where she was going. It was a good thing she hadn’t gone beyond the wall plaque bearing the list of suites.
“Reames, Lehrer and Moss,” she said.
He nodded and let her go.
On the twentieth floor, the elevator opened to the grand foyer of Baron’s offices. But this time there was no dishy blonde sitting behind the marble counter. Only two men in suits standing with their backs to her. It was only after Rebecca stepped out of the elevator and her vantage point changed that she knew she was in trouble. One of the men was tying up Baron’s secretary in the chair. Her Queen Elizabeth hairdo had sprung some curls around the plaid handkerchief that they’d tied around her head by way of her mouth. The noise of the elevator door closing made the men’s heads spin around.
Rebecca gasped.
Claude and George fixed their eyes on her. They had combed their hair, but with their lined, nervous faces, they looked like monkeys in suits.
“What’re you doing here?” Rebecca said.
The two men looked at each other. George’s face contorted into a malicious smirk.
“Look, Claude,” he said in a low voice, “she’s come to visit her boyfriend. Maybe check out his heart. No, wait, I forgot — he hasn’t got one.” He took a step toward her.
“How did you get up here?”
“Shh!” George said. “He doesn’t know we’re here.”
“It was easy once we had the suits,” Claude said quietly. “George here thought of it. Not a bad fit for the Sally Ann, eh?”
“Shut up, Claude.”
George took a few more steps toward her. She was thinking it couldn’t have been Bay Street types who’d cleaned out their closets because the grey suits were cheap and shiny. She put her hand out behind her to reach for the elevator button, but he lurched and grabbed her before she could find it.
“Come on, Claude, gimme a hand!”
Each man grabbed one of her elbows and started dragging her further into the office.
“What’re you doing?” she cried, before George pressed his sweaty hand against her mouth.
She flailed her arms, but she was no match for the two of them. An awful picture rose in her mind that this was how they had pulled Michael into the pool. She threw a glance at Baron’s secretary; her eyes bulged with terror.
“You people think you can just go on life as usual?” George removed his hand from her mouth and shook Rebecca by the shoulders until she was dizzy.
“You don’t even know we’re alive, do you?” he snarled in a hoarse whisper. “Well, we’re fuckin’ tired of pissin’ around here waiting for God Awmighty to make up his mind that we’re human too. We got rights, and he’s gonna hear us out.”
Claude began to cough in her ear, a phlegm-filled, wheezy cough that wouldn’t stop.
Everything was spinning in front of her. She needed to get her head back. “I don’t have anything to do with Baron. I was just coming to talk to him about —”
“I don’t care, lady. It’s your own fault you walked in on this. We might be able to use you.”
Now that her head was slowing down, her pulse started to rush in her ears. “This isn’t the way to deal with things,” she said. “You’re just going to get into trouble like this.”
“You think we aren’t in trouble? Claude here is dying. I’m not far behind. Baron knew the mine was killing us all along. He didn’t give a shit if we were breathing in asbestos dust as long as he got his ore out. He got rich and we got cancer.”
“Look, I’m a doctor. I understand what you’re saying, and I agree he’s a monster. But I had nothing to do with it…”
“You know, lady, if I had a penny for everyone who said that — It ain’t my fault you’re dying. But we’re dying anyway. And he wouldn’t even let us in the building to speak our mind. That’s why we had to dress up.”
“You know,” she said, “I came to talk to Baron about Michael Oginski’s death. I thought he might have had something to do with it. But now I think you did.”
Claude shook his head morosely. “I knew this was wrong, George.”
“That’s how much you know, lady,” George said. “Hell, I never even met the guy.”
“But Claude did. He was there the night before Michael died.”
“Claude?” George snickered, a horsy rumble in the back of his throat. “Claude’s not the killer type. Look at him. He’s scared shitless.”
Claude was watching her intently, as if he would learn something from her face.
“Okay, Claude, it’s time.”
“I don’t know, George…”
“You’re dying, Claude, and you still don’t know? They’ve kicked us around for the last time. Just go down the hall and open the door. He doesn’t know we’re here. This is our last chance.”
“How do you know he hasn’t gone home?” she said.
“Listen,” George said, cocking his head.
She heard the distant murmuring of a television.
“Secretary said he’s watching the news.”
Rebecca looked around and thought for a moment; all she needed to do was make a sudden leap past George. He must have sensed something because he grabbed her arms and pinned them behind her, her back against his chest. She could hear him breathing loudly. His lungs were damaged but he was bigger than she was. She couldn’t move.
“Go, Claude! I’m right behind you.”
Claude stared at them a moment, his large pasty face trembling. “No, you go first.”
“Ah, Christ. Here. Grab hold of her so she don’t get away.”
Claude came up behind her and self-consciously took both her arms in his hands, holding them with an awkward firmness.
George strolled down the hall with a cocky step, his long, Brill-creamed hair stuck close to his head. Claude pushed her along in front of him in the same direction.
They stopped in front of the oak door with Baron’s name on it. Now the TV announcer could be heard clearly.
“The Shah of Iran and his family have arrived in the United States after Muslim revolutionaries overthrew his government earlier this year…”
George placed his hand on the doorknob, turned it slowly, then opened the door. John Baron was leaning back in his huge leather chair, watching the television built into the wall.
George stepped inside. Claude hesitated before pushing Rebecca inside, following closely on her heels. Baron’s round head flipped up as they barged in. His eyes moved quickly over the three of them, trying to size up the situation.
“Who the hell are you?”
“You don’t recognize us all dressed up?” said George. “Picture us with our faces black and working our butts off in the mines.”
He leaped to his feet, his face purple with rage. “What the fuck you low-lifes think you’re doing? I’m going to call the cops up here…” He pressed some buttons on his phone. “Helen! Helen, where are you?”
George lunged forward and pulled the phone from his hand then wrenched the cord clean out from the wall. He swept his arm viciously across the surface of the desk, throwing photos, memos, an onyx pen set crashing to the floor.
“You bastard!” he shouted. “You call us low-lifes, after what you did to us! We worked for you and you fucked us over big time in your office up here in the sky. Like we was nothin’.”
“You are nothing.”
George’s narrow nose twitched. His nostrils flared. He ground the broken glass from the photos into the carpet with the heel of his shoe.
“You bloody bastard! You owe us. We’re dying because of you. Your mine ruined our lungs. And you knew it all along.”
“You didn’t get sick in the mine,” Baron said, shaking with fury. “You can’t prove that.”
“My doctor says it was the mine.”
“They don’t know nothing. I got a doctor that says it wasn’t.”
“This here’s a doctor,” George said, gritting his teeth as he turned around to find her. “Why don’t you ask her? What happens when you work twenty years in a mine that ain’t got enough air because of the asbestos dust? When there’s only one shaft for cutting up the ore and the same shaft for breathing. Because God Awmighty here wouldn’t spend the money for another shaft?”
She assumed it was a rhetorical question.
“The mine had to make a profit,” Baron said, slamming his hand on the desk. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have jobs.”
“You made a profit on our backs. On our graves. We want compensation.”
Baron’s eyes narrowed in triumph. “Ah, so that’s it,” he smirked, his mouth on an angle. “It’s always about money.”
What right does he have to be self-righteous, she thought.
“You owe us compensation. We can’t work no more. How are we supposed to feed our families?”
“You ain’t getting a cent out of me, you scumbags. Not a red cent.”
George spun around, his eyes crazy, searching for something. He grabbed a leather chair, lifted it off the ground, and threw it as far as he could, knocking over a small table that held a crystal vase of roses. The vase broke and spilled water and red petals on the beige broadloom.
“You maniac!” Baron shrieked.
George stared at the pieces of crystal, the wet stain where the water had spilled on the carpet. For a second she thought, He knows he’s gone too far; thank God it’s over. Then, almost in a trance, he reached into his pants pocket and drew something out. She heard a sickening click.
“No, George,” she said. “That’s not the answer.”
He looked up at her with surprise, as if he’d forgotten she was there. He started toward her, holding the switchblade in front on an angle. She couldn’t breathe. Was it because she was already dead? She saw herself lying on the floor beside the broken glass, bleeding to death. Had he stabbed her yet?
“No, man!” said Claude. “Not her!”
He grabbed her from Claude and flipped her around, pinning her arms behind her against his chest with one hand, the other holding the switchblade against her neck. Her legs began to wobble. She had to flex her thigh muscles to keep her knees from buckling.
“Now you’re in for it,” Baron said.
“You think I care about any of that? I’m at the end of my rope, mister. You need to do something and now. You give us what we deserve or I kill her.”
Suddenly everything went quiet. They were all holding their breaths.
Baron sneered. “I don’t care about her. You can kill her if you want.”
“Why you goddamn bastard!” Claude spat out. He marched around the side of the desk. “You don’t give a shit for no one but yourself!” he screamed. “That what it takes to get to the top?”
He raised his arm in preparation to strike. He was taller than Baron, but Baron was faster. He punched his fist straight into Claude’s stomach, making the bigger man double over.
Claude emitted a low, moaning sound. She felt George’s grip on her tense up. The knife blade pricked her skin. It was a standoff.
“I have something to trade,” she said, her voice shaky. “Information Baron wants to keep under wraps. Nothing to do with the mines. This is a secret from Poland.”
Baron turned to face her. She had his attention. “What the hell you talking?”
George swallowed. “Why should we care about that?”
“There are two possibilities,” she continued, addressing herself to Baron. “One: I tell George and Claude the secret and they go to the papers. When they print it, the police will want to question you about Michael’s death. Any hope of respectability you might’ve had will vanish. People will not want to know you. Your stock will plummet.”
Baron blinked at her. “You’re bluffing,” he said. “You don’t know nothing.”
“I don’t bluff,” she said. “Halina told me what you did after the war.”
Baron watched her, the wheels turning behind the eyes, strands of pomaded hair falling forward. “What difference it makes, after the war? Too long ago. I didn’t kill Michael. I went there to explain. I tried to talk to him but he was furious. He wouldn’t listen. He hit me for Chrissake!”
“And then?”
“Then I left.”
“Hey,” said George, “we’re getting way off topic here.”
“Which brings me to the second possibility: I keep the secret to myself and in exchange for my silence, Mr. Baron, you make a concession. You give these men fair compensation, like a pension they can support their families on. The kind of pension companies have that care about their employees.”
Claude, his arm around his middle, looked up at her, confused.
“And if I don’t agree, this animal here kills you?”
George loosened his hold on her and slowly moved the knife down to his side.
“If you won’t agree, I give George a story he can take to the reporters out there. They’ll get front page headlines for at least a week about your disregard for human life thirty-five years ago. Kind of fits in with today, doesn’t it? You might call it a pattern.”
It was a good thing he hadn’t been outside lately. The reporters had lost interest in the strike; they had disappeared from the front of the building.
Baron’s face was purple with rage. “What you trying to do to me?”
“I’m giving you the opportunity to do the right thing. Own up to your responsibilities. And if that doesn’t convince you, think of the stock market. How fickle investors can be when they discover the founder of a company can’t be trusted.”
His jaw set hard. “I won’t forget this. It’s blackmail,” he said. “I give two pensions. That’s all.”
“No!” said George. “That’s not enough. Pensions for everyone that gets sick.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Baron cried. “I’ll be ruined. I’m not made of money!”
“Sell some property,” she said. “Rent out your chef. You’re a resourceful man. I’m sure your army of accountants can figure it out. Meanwhile, George, why don’t you write up a little contract to that effect so Mr. Baron can sign it. Before the cops come up and I’m tempted to spill the beans.”
Baron plopped his squat body back down in the leather chair, dazed.
“What just happened?” Claude said.
Rebecca stepped away from her abductor. “You better go untie the secretary, George. She can help you with that contract.”
That evening Rebecca sat in her den, still shaken from the events of the day. She put off going to bed, knowing sleep would not come. Instead, she opened Michael’s manuscript to the last chapter, “Voyage of the Heart.” Rebecca was saddened to be finishing the book, especially since it was not the end. And she would never know the end. If she took another tiny half-pill now, maybe she could still get a good night’s sleep.