Isa Mogamedov climbed back into the copilot’s seat. “Well, we got through another one-I think.”
“I do, too, now.” Stas allowed himself the luxury of a nod. “Only five thousand to go till peace breaks out.” He laughed, pretending to be joking. So did Mogamedov, pretending to think he was.
A nurse cut off the latest set of bandages that swaddled Chaim Weinberg’s left hand. Dr. Diego Alvarez leaned forward to get a better look. Chaim didn’t, but then the hand was attached to him. He tried to remember how many times Alvarez had carved him up, working to repair the damage a mortar round did. He tried, but he couldn’t be sure if it was seven or eight.
When the bandages came off, the hand stopped looking like one from Boris Karloff in The Mummy and started looking like one from Karloff in Frankenstein. It had more scars and sutures and what-have-you than a merely human hand had any business possessing.
But when Chaim said, “It looks good, Doc,” he wasn’t being sarcastic. He counted himself lucky not to be auditioning for Captain Hook in a road company of Peter Pan. That mortar bomb had smashed his hand to hell and gone-and had killed his longtime buddy, Mike Carroll. When the other Internationals from the Abe Lincoln Brigade brought Chaim back to the aid station, the surgeon there almost decided to amputate on the spot. Then he remembered Dr. Alvarez, back in Madrid. Alvarez specialized in repairing such wounds.
“How does it feel?” the doctor asked now. His English, though flavored by Castilian Spanish, was more elegant than Chaim’s. A street kid from New York City, Chaim quit school after the tenth grade to go to work. Dr. Alvarez, by contrast, had studied medicine in England. Except for his lisp and the occasional rolled r, he sounded like a BBC newsreader.
“Not … too bad,” Chaim answered after a pause to consider. He’d found out more about pain the past few months than he’d ever wanted to know. He’d also found out more about morphine than he’d ever dreamt he’d learn. He was off it now, and hoped he wouldn’t need to go back on.
“Can you move your thumb so the tip touches the tip of your index finger?” Dr. Alvarez asked. He’d concentrated his work on Chaim’s thumb and first two fingers. The other two would never be good for much, no matter what he did. But those-especially the thumb and index finger-were the ones that mattered most.
“Let’s see,” Chaim said. He hadn’t been able to do it yet. That hand was one hell of a mess before the surgeon got to work on it. Christ, it was still a hell of a mess. But it wasn’t-quite-a disaster any more.
Moving his thumb hurt. So did moving his first finger. Too much in there had been repaired too many times for any of it to work smoothly now. But he could move both digits. A good Marxist-Leninist, he didn’t believe in miracles. If he had, he would have believed in that one.
Not only did they move, but, after effort that made sweat pop out on his forehead, the tip of his thumb met the tip of his forefinger. “Kiss me, Doc!” he exclaimed. “I did it! Look! I did it!” Those seven or eight operations had finally led to this: a hand that might work half as well as it had before it got smashed.
And damned if Dr. Alvarez didn’t kiss him on both cheeks. Chaim hardly even resented it, though he would have liked it better from the nurse. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she was definitely cuter than the surgeon.
“Now you need to gain strength,” Alvarez said.
“No kidding,” Chaim agreed. He thought he might be able to pick up a dime with his reconstructed thumb and first finger, but a half-dollar would be too much for him.
“You are not my first case of this sort, though I think your injuries are among the most extensive I have succeeded in repairing,” the doctor said. “I have developed a series of exercises that will help your digits approach the power they had before you were wounded.”
“Approach it, huh?” Chaim said. Dr. Alvarez nodded. After a moment, so did Chaim. “Okay, Doc. You level with a guy. I give you credit for that. You never promised anything you didn’t deliver. How long do I have to do these exercises, and how bad will they hurt?” He assumed they would hurt. It was a pretty safe bet. Everything that had happened to his left hand since the mortar bomb whispered down had hurt like hell.
“You will have to do them for several weeks. Your muscles need strengthening. Your tendons need to work more freely. I have done everything I could to assist that process, but time and practice are also necessary.”
“And after that, I go back to the Internationals?” Chaim asked.
Dr. Alvarez looked unhappy. “After we have spent so much time and effort getting you to this point, it seems a shame to send you back to where you are liable to be wounded again.”
“Doc,” Chaim said, as patiently as he could, “if I hadn’t wanted to take those kind of chances, I never would’ve come to Spain to begin with.”
“I suppose not.” Alvarez sounded unhappy, too. He didn’t want all his hard work gurgling down the drain if Chaim stopped a slug with his face.
“You can take it to the bank I wouldn’t have,” Chaim said. “And you can take it to the bank that there’s a bunch of Sanjurjo’s putos who wish I would’ve stayed in the States. You with me so far?”
“Oh, yes,” Alvarez said dryly. What were his politics? He’d never said much about them. He was here in Madrid, on the Republican side of the fence. If he preferred the Nationalists, the only way he could hope to stay alive was to keep his big mouth shut.
Chaim wasn’t about to push him, not when he’d been gifted with an almost-working hand instead of a hook. “When I get as strong as I’m gonna get, will I be able to handle a rifle, or at least a Tommy gun?” he asked.
“I think it is possible,” the surgeon said carefully. “I also think it is on the very edge of what you will be able to do. For your thumb and those two fingers, the exercises will get you back most of your fine motor skills. The hand has had too much damage to be as strong as it was. I’m very sorry, but that seems to be the situation.”
“Well, it gives me something to shoot for.” Chaim grinned crookedly. He was short and squat and not too handsome. That kind of grin suited him, in other words. “Shoot for! Get it, Doc? It’s a joke.”
Dr. Alvarez, by contrast, was slim and elegant. “Amusing,” he said. A slight twitch of one eyebrow delivered his editorial verdict. With a verdict like that, Chaim was lucky Alvarez wasn’t a judge.
The exercises hurt, all right. As far as Chaim could tell, everything that had anything to do with getting wounded hurt. Funny how that works, isn’t it? he gibed to himself. At first, he couldn’t do everything with the hand that the surgeon wanted him to. Everything? He could barely do anything, and the effort left him more worn down than hauling a sack of concrete should have.
“Patience. Patience and persistence,” Alvarez told him. “You must have both.”
To Chaim, they sounded like a couple of round-heeled Puritan girls. Patience and Persistence Mather: something like that. He imagined himself in bed with both of them at once, because he had an imagination like that-especially after he’d been stuck in the hospital for so long without any friendly female company.
A few days later, as he healed more, he started being able to do things he couldn’t at first. That made him feel better. It also made him think-again-that the doctor might know what he was talking about after all. And, a couple of days after that, La Martellita paid him a rare visit.
The Little Hammer-that was what his ex-wife’s nom de guerre meant. Communist activist, drop-dead gorgeous woman with a mane of blue-black hair, mother of his son … Even a glimpse of her made his dreams of wicked Puritan maids pop like pricked soap bubbles.