Fonseca stopped. After a quick glance to make sure no one was within earshot, he dropped his voice and said, “There’s no need for the police at this stage. Let’s save the man’s life first. He’s going to be here for a while and he’s going to be pretty helpless. Let’s not make things worse for him before we know what his story is.”
Ramazan held his gaze and considered his words, then nodded. Neither he nor Fonseca were huge fans of the Zaptiye—the city’s police force. Not nowadays.
They rounded a corner and entered the ward, where they made their way past several other patients to reach the man in question.
He was lying in a bed in a far corner by a window, hooked up to several monitors that beeped softly. A nurse by the name of Anbara was checking the drips that snaked into the intravenous cannula attached to his right arm. When she saw the doctors, she bowed slightly and retreated from the bed. The surgeon gave her a small nod back before turning to the patient.
Ramazan couldn’t tell much about the man, given that he was covered by a bedsheet and had a transparent plastic oxygen mask strapped to his face. From what he could see, Ramazan thought the man might be in his late sixties. He had a full head of gray, slicked-back hair.
He couldn’t see much else.
“My name is Moshe Fonseca, effendi,” Fonseca told the man in his customary upbeat, confidence-inspiring tone. “I’m in charge of the hospital’s cardiothoracic unit. How are you feeling today?”
The man’s eyes narrowed as he seemed to study the surgeon for a brief moment. Then he replied with a slow, gentle nod, closing his eyes as he did.
“Good. Well, you’ll be relieved to know your case doesn’t present anything we can’t fix,” Fonseca continued. “Basically, you’ve got what we call mitral valve stenosis. We all have four valves in our heart. The mitral is one of them, and sometimes, for any number of reasons—age maybe, or you might have been born with it, or maybe you had a bad case of rheumatic fever at some point—this valve gets narrower, and it stops opening properly. Which means there’s less blood flowing into your left ventricle, which is the main pumping chamber of your heart. I imagine you’ve been feeling very tired and short of breath lately, yes?”
The man nodded.
“All these symptoms—coughing blood, the heart arrhythmia—they’re all because of this. Your lungs are severely congested; your heart has clearly been strained for quite some time. Frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t had this treated until now. It can easily cause clots that lead to a transient ischemic attack, which is a kind of ministroke, or even a full stroke and—well, that’s not something we want, is it?”
Fonseca studied the man, but the patient said nothing.
After a moment, Fonseca just nodded and said, “The main thing: you’re here now, and we’re going to fix this. The way we do this is by replacing your valve with a bioprosthetic one that will do the job your valve hasn’t been doing. That’s going to be my job.” He gestured at Ramazan. “And this here is Sayyid Ramazan Hekim, one of our finest anesthesiologists. He’ll be the one putting you to sleep. As your condition is rather urgent, I’d rather not wait any more than we have to before doing this, so we’ve scheduled you in this afternoon. I trust you have no problems with that?”
The man shook his head.
“Ramazan Hekim will answer any questions you might have,” Fonseca continued, “and he also has some pre-op questions to ask you, although I’m not sure how fruitful that’s going to be given your”—he hesitated—“condition.”
The man didn’t react.
“Very well then,” Fonseca said. “All you need to do now is relax. You’re in good hands and you have nothing to worry about. I’ll see you in the recovery room.” He turned to Ramazan. “He’s all yours.”
Ramazan looked a question at him, still wondering about what the surgeon had meant by his earlier comment.
“It might be a good idea for you to examine his breathing again,” the surgeon told him. “The fluid level in his lungs is quite high.”
Fonseca lingered for a second with a telling look, as if to make sure his message had sunk in, then wandered off.
Ramazan stood there, confused. He glanced at Anbara, who didn’t react. Then he looked at the patient, wondering what Fonseca was talking about. Examine his breathing? The man was connected to monitors that gave far more information than anything he could glean from a simple stethoscope. Still, the surgeon had been noticeably pointed about it.
He reached into the tray unit by the bed, picked up a stethoscope, and moved in closer.
“All right, let’s see how your lungs are doing, shall we?”
The man’s eyes tightened, visibly uncomfortable about this, which Ramazan noticed as he folded down the sheet covering him. Then he pulled the man’s hospital gown up to expose his chest.
And froze.
The man’s chest was covered in tattoos. All of it, all the way down to his waist. Ramazan had never seen anything like it. He couldn’t see them as clearly as he would have liked, since some of them were obscured under the man’s chest hair, but from what he could see, they didn’t seem ornamental or symbolic. Rather, they were words and numbers written in the same Arabic-Persian alphabet that Ramazan used, only they were written the wrong way, from left to right. The letters were small, the technique intricate. He thought some looked like they might be names and dates, but it was hard to tell. They were difficult to read, given that they were mirror images of normal writing.
There were also several drawings and diagrams, images that looked technical that Ramazan didn’t recognize at all.
Still rigid with surprise, he glanced up at the patient. The man was watching him, his cold, impassive eyes clearly probing him. Ramazan felt a deep-seated unease—and, oddly, he felt scared. He wasn’t sure why, but something about the man’s unwavering gaze, coupled with the tattoos and the strong torso they covered, made him very uncomfortable.
He glanced furtively at the tattoos again, then forced his attention away from them and did his best to sound casual and seem unperturbed by what he’d seen.
“This might feel a bit cold,” he said as he placed the stethoscope’s resonator on the man’s chest. “Take a deep breath, please.”
4
Lying in his hospital bed, Ayman Rasheed eyed the anesthesiologist intently, looking for a reaction.
As the man pulled back his gown, Rasheed saw surprise and confusion along with the reaction he liked most of alclass="underline" fear. Which was good. The doctor wasn’t just unsettled by what he’d seen. He was scared.
And fear, as Rasheed knew, made people clam up and keep their mouths shut.
The tattoos were always going to be a problem. He’d known that all along, but he had no choice. In all these years, he’d been very careful about whom he’d allowed to see them. He’d stopped shaving his torso long ago, since he no longer needed them, but they were still visible. The surgeon, the anesthesiologist, others potentially—they would be wondering about them, asking themselves questions. And the Hafiye—his brainchild, the agency he had created after the dust of conquest had settled, to help ensure the empire’s survival—had its tentacles everywhere.
The good news was that it was unlikely any of them would understand their relevance. He hoped that they would think it curious but not much more. That they would think he was some kind of freak, someone on the fringes of society, an eccentric. Tattoos had been a common sight in the world he’d left behind, more and more so with each generation, but he didn’t know if they were as popular in this new world, in the one he’d helped create.
Either way, he didn’t intend to stick around too long or answer any questions they had. Once he was fixed, once the operation was done and he’d recovered enough strength, he’d go back and leave them even more confused than they now were.