Jean-Pierre turned to the bar, gripped his right-hand fist three times and then placed it in his pocket. Stephen left immediately and warned Robin and James from the steps of the Casino that the prostigmin tablet was in Metcalfe’s drink. It was now Robin’s turn to be tested under pressure. First he rang the hospital and asked the sister on duty to have the theater in full preparation. Then he rang the nursing agency and asked for the nurse he had booked to be waiting in the hospital reception in exactly ninety minutes’ time. He sat alone, nervously waiting for another call from the Casino.
Stephen returned to the bar. Harvey had started to feel a little sick, but was loath to leave. Despite the growing pain, his greed was forcing him to play on. He drank the rest of his coffee and ordered another one, hoping it would clear his head. The coffee did not help and Harvey began to feel steadily worse. An ace and a king followed by a seven, a four and a ten, and then two queens helped him to stay at the table. Jean-Pierre forced himself not to look at his watch. The dealer gave Jean-Pierre a seven, Harvey another ace and the young man a two. Quite suddenly, almost exactly on the hour, Harvey could bear the pain no longer. He tried to stand up and leave the table.
‘Le jeu a commencé, Monsieur,’ the dealer said formally.
‘Go fuck yourself,’ said Harvey and collapsed to the ground, gripping his stomach in agony. Jean-Pierre sat motionless while the croupiers and gamblers milled around helplessly. Stephen fought his way through the circle which had gathered around Harvey.
‘Stand back, please. I am a doctor.’
The crowd moved back quickly, relieved to have a professional man on the scene.
‘What is it, Doctor?’ gasped Harvey, who felt the end of the world was about to come.
‘I don’t know yet,’ replied Stephen. Robin had warned him that from collapse to passing out might be as short a time as ten minutes, so he set to work fast. He loosened Harvey’s tie and took his pulse. He then undid his shirt and started feeling his abdomen.
‘Have you a pain in the stomach?’
‘Yes,’ groaned Harvey.
‘Did it come on suddenly?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you try and describe the quality of the pain? Is it stabbing, burning or gripping?’
‘Gripping.’
‘Where is it most painful?’
Harvey touched the right side of his stomach. Stephen pressed down the tip of the ninth rib, making Harvey bellow with pain.
‘Ah,’ said Stephen, ‘a positive Murphy’s sign. You probably have an acutely inflamed gall bladder. I’m afraid that may mean gallstones.’ He continued to palpate the massive abdomen gently. ‘It looks as if a stone has come out of your gall bladder and is passing down the tube to your intestine — it’s the squeezing of that tube that’s giving you such dreadful pain. I’m afraid your gall bladder and the stone must be removed at once. I can only hope there is someone at the hospital who can perform an emergency operation.’
Jean-Pierre came in bang on cue:
‘Doctor Wiley Barker is staying at my hotel.’
‘Wiley Barker, the American surgeon?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Jean-Pierre. ‘The chap who’s been taking care of Nixon.’
‘My God, what a piece of luck. We couldn’t have anyone better, but he’s very expensive.’
‘I don’t give a damn about the expense,’ wailed Harvey.
‘Well, it might be as high as $50,000.’
‘I don’t care if it’s $100,000,’ screamed Harvey. At that moment he would have been willing to part with his entire fortune.
‘Right,’ said Stephen. ‘You, sir,’ looking at Jean-Pierre, ‘ring for an ambulance and then contact Doctor Barker and ask if he can get to the hospital immediately. Tell him it’s an emergency. This gentleman requires a surgeon of the highest qualifications.’
‘You’re damn right I do,’ said Harvey, and passed out.
Jean-Pierre left the Casino and called over his transmitter:
‘Action stations. Action stations.’
Robin left the Hôtel de Paris and took a taxi. He would have given $100,000 to change places with the driver, but the car was already moving relentlessly toward the hospital. It was too late to turn back now.
James smashed the ambulance into first gear and rushed to the Casino, siren blaring. He was luckier than Robin. With so much to concentrate on he didn’t have time to consider the consequences of what he was doing.
Eleven minutes and forty-one seconds later he arrived, leaped out of the driver’s seat, opened the back door, gathered the stretcher and rushed up the Casino steps in his long white coat. Jean-Pierre was standing expectantly on the top step waiting for him. No words passed between them as he guided James quickly through the Salon des Amériques where Stephen was bending over Harvey. The stretcher was placed on the floor. It took all three of them to lift Harvey Metcalfe’s 227 lb onto the canvas. Stephen and James picked up the stretcher and took him quickly through to the waiting ambulance, followed by Jean-Pierre.
‘Where are you going with my boss?’ demanded a voice.
Startled, the three of them turned around. It was Harvey Metcalfe’s chauffeur, standing by the white Rolls Royce. After a moment’s hesitation, Jean-Pierre took over.
‘Mr Metcalfe has collapsed and has to go to hospital for an emergency operation. You must return to the yacht immediately, tell the staff to have his cabin ready and await further instructions.’
The chauffeur touched his cap and ran to the Rolls Royce. James leaped behind the wheel, while Stephen and Jean-Pierre joined Harvey in the back of the vehicle.
‘Hell, that was close. Well done, Jean-Pierre. I was speechless,’ admitted Stephen.
‘It was nothing,’ said Jean-Pierre, sweat pouring down his face.
The ambulance shot off like a scalded cat. Stephen and Jean-Pierre both replaced their jackets with the long white laboratory coats left on the seat and Stephen put the stethoscope around his neck.
‘It looks to me as if he’s dead,’ said Jean-Pierre.
‘Robin says he isn’t,’ said Stephen.
‘How can he tell from four miles away?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll just have to take his word for it.’
James screeched to a halt outside the entrance to the hospital. Stephen and Jean-Pierre hurried their patient through to the operating theater. James returned the ambulance to the car park and quickly joined the others in the theater.
Robin, scrubbed up and gowned, was there to meet them at the door and while they were strapping Harvey Metcalfe to the operating table in the small room next to the theater, he spoke for the first time:
‘All of you, change your clothes. And Jean-Pierre, you scrub up as instructed.’
All three of them changed and Jean-Pierre started to wash immediately — a long, laborious process which Robin had firmly taught him must never be cut short. Postoperative septicaemia formed no part of his plan. Jean-Pierre appeared from the scrubbing-up room ready for action.
‘Now, relax. We’ve done this nine times already. Just carry on exactly as if we were still in St Thomas’s.’
Stephen moved behind the mobile Boyles machine. For four weeks he had been training as an anesthetist: he had rendered James and a faintly protesting Jean-Pierre unconscious twice each in practice runs at St Thomas’s. Now was his chance to exercise his new powers over Harvey Metcalfe.
Robin removed a syringe from a plastic packet and injected 250 mg of thiopentone into Harvey’s arm. The patient sank back into a deep sleep. Quickly and efficiently Jean-Pierre and James undressed Harvey and then covered him in a sheet. Stephen placed the mask from the Boyles machine over Metcalfe’s nose. The two flow-meters on the back of the machine showed 5 liters of nitrous oxide and 3 liters of oxygen.