Mary Cottle, rubbing her hands as if she’d just dried them but hadn’t managed to get all the wetness off, came back into the room and smiled at them beatifically.
“Well,” Moorhead said, and picked up the remaining folders.
“Spit-spot!” said the nanny, Nedra Carp.
Which was when he got the giddies. Could barely refrain from spouting his gibberish about the desperado backgrounds he was constantly sketching in for them, their base curricula vitae pasts. “Chief” had worked on him, on all of them, like an enchantment. Eddy couldn’t help it, was as giddy with their gibberish and low bosh as with his own. Chief he’d never been, yet as soon as Bible spoke Bale perceived the change in the room, the simple fact of the matter. He was their chief, the responsible one in the bunch. The organizer. The enforcer. In their group madness they had, as madmen have always done — even those with delusions of grandeur — looked for someone at whose feet they could dump their delusions, fetching them to him with the pride of cats with dead mice, birds, cleverly preparing their loophole lunacy. While, just as cleverly (if with less good judgment), he saw what they were doing and accepted their nutty proposition, their singular single condition — that he be the one in charge.
So, like the good administrator he had just become, he delegated, who had himself been delegated, delegation smeared as perspective in a funhouse mirror — we’re all mad now, he thought — and asked the doctor for a run-down. He wanted Moorhead’s medical input, he said — he called him Moorhead; he said “input”—into a candidate’s qualifications. He would entertain suggestions, he said, as to who might best benefit from such a trip. And was actually startled to see the doctor take up folders he had already discarded, names and case histories strewn at his feet like debris, like castoffs in card games, and listened attentively as the physician offered his careful Senior Registrar’s considered advice, though not so much attentive — England’s most famous beggar munificent for once — as patient, to the physician’s latinate terms, expecting and getting his almost simultaneous layman’s translation, a kind of due, a sort of deference, as if he were Head of Delegation at the U.N., say, feeling good about things — he crossed his legs — and finally neither so much attentive or patient as complacent — he felt the hair silver about his temples — interrupting only to ask his perfect administrator’s breathtaking questions.
“Thank you, Mister Moorhead,” he said politely when the doctor had finished. And turned smartly to Colin Bible. “And you, are you in concurrence, Sister?” he wickedly asked the poof nurse who would have had dead Liam stuffed and put on exhibit in a case.
“Oh, aye,” Colin said. “There’s nought we can do for the medulloblastomas. They quite put one off with their dizzy spells and fits of vomiting, their falling down and constant headache.”
“Nanny?”
“They would me,” Nedra Carp said.
“What about the Stepney lad with corrected transposition of the great vessels?”
“He’s kind of cute,” Mary Cottle said dreamily, looking at a photograph.
“Well,” Colin Bible said, “as Doctor explained, their autopsies are interesting. Hearts like Spaghetti Junction. I say give him a pass.”
Bale went round the room and gave each of them the opportunity to disqualify one or two victims out of hand. Mary Cottle declined her turn sweetly and Eddy, his administrative eye on the logistics of the thing, reserved for himself the right to use her veto powers. In this way, in addition to Mr. Moorhead’s exclusions and Colin Bible’s of the boy from Stepney, they rid themselves of Dawson’s, Tay-Sachs, Krabbe’s I, Wilm’s, and Cushing’s disease, and were left with one case each of Gaucher’s disease, tetralogy of Fallot, osteosarcoma, cystic fibrosis, dysgerminoma, Chédiak-Higashi syndrome, progeria, and lymphoblastic leukemia.
“Well,” he said, standing up, “it seems all that remains to be done is to notify the parents and work out with the lawyers the wording of the disclaimer. Congratulations to you all and thank you. I’d say we’ve done rather a good day’s work.”
He believed it.
Then why, he asked himself when they left, do I feel like such a prick?
It was a nice question.
3
The kid with Chédiak-Higashi disease was dead. A newspaper reported the story of Eddy’s group three days before its official release date. The child, recognizing Bale’s name on the envelope that had been addressed to his parents, was so excited by the prospect of going on the dream holiday that he tore open the letter without thinking. The discrete paper cut he did not even feel at the time — he was that excited — but the big sandy granules that invaded his white blood cells, and made them ineffectual in fighting infection, did him in.
Janet Order also saw the letter before her parents did, and though she had a pretty good idea about its contents — like many of the diseased children, like Liam himself, she was exceptionally bright; she would, if she lived, be a teenager on her next birthday; her body had begun to fill out months before and already she’d had to abandon her training bra for the real thing; this didn’t particularly embarrass her and, indeed, she quite accepted the idea of becoming a young lady, taking an interest in her puberty, rather proud of it actually, attending her monthlies with a modest though becoming interest, enjoying, if not the discomfort of her periods, at least the opportunity to minister to them, to care for herself, dressing in the queer new tampons and flushing herself with scentless, lightly medicated douches, evaluating not only the different painkillers on the market but their most effective dosages as well, taking an almost ecological interest in the crop of sparse, light brown hair which dusted her mons veneris, and generally presiding over and servicing the new blockbuster secretions of her glands with a solicitude she had a few years earlier shown for her dolls — she did not open it, preferring to wait for her parents, meanwhile practicing the new biofeedback techniques, stretching, and deep-breathing exercises her physical therapist had shown her. In a few minutes her pulse had returned to normal and her pressure, which she had been taught to take by herself, was not, for her, especially elevated.
Janet had a congenital heart disease, tetralogy of Fallot. In all other respects a bright and even beautiful child, she had been born with a hole in her heart and a transposed aorta, a heart like one of those spectacularly deformed vegetables one sometimes sees on Fair days: a potato in the shape of a white bread, say, or a cluster of Siamese-joined grapes. She was tall for her age, delicate but sturdily built, and had long, flaxen hair to her waist. In a black-and-white photograph one would have seen an unsmiling, even pouty, but remarkably attractive child. The pout was put on, a performance, not so much a sign of mood as, or so Janet thought, of character. She was, considering, a cheerful enough girl and sulked at the world only in those pictures, doing it, she liked to think, as a kind of truth in advertising, sending her sneers and sniffinesses, her frowns and scowls, to the people who would see these pictures, so as not to misrepresent herself; to discount her beauty or, rather, to signal its opposite, invisible in the black-and-white photographs. Because of her abnormality, the deficient oxygenation in her holed heart, the surgically attached aorta added on by the doctors like some displaced bit of afterthought architecture, she had been cyanotic from birth, her skin everywhere an even, dusky bluish color, dark as seawater.
Additional operations had, as her parents had been warned, as she had, only been remedial, not treatment so much as a flurry of activity, battles fought over the inopportune ground of her tampered chest.