“Oh, nothing much,” Cathy said. “You’d probably lose your license to practice medicine—after Bernie amputated your fucking hands with a chain saw!”
That got Jack’s attention. Cathy didn’t talk like that.
“No shit?”
“I had a bacon, lettuce, and tom-AH-to sandwich with chips—that’s French fries for us dumb colonials. I had a Coke, by the way.”
“Glad to hear it, doctor.” Ryan walked over to give his wife a kiss. She appeared to need it.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she went on. “Oh, maybe out in Bumfuck, Montana, they do stuff like that, but not in a real hospital.”
“Cathy, settle down. You’re talking like a stevedore.”
“Or maybe a foulmouthed ex-Marine.” She finally managed a smile. “Jack, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Those two eye cutters are technically senior to me, but if they ever tried that sort of shit at home, they’d be finished. They wouldn’t even let them work on dogs.”
“Is the patient okay?”
“Oh, yeah. The frozen section came back cold as ice—totally benign, not malignant—and we took out the growth and closed him back up. He’ll be just fine—four or five days for recovery. No impairment to his sight, no more headaches, but those two bozos operated on him with booze in their systems!”
“No harm, no foul, babe,” he suggested, lamely.
“Jack, it isn’t supposed to be that way.”
“So report them to your friend Byrd.”
“I ought to. I really ought to.”
“And what would happen?”
That lit her up again: “I don’t know!”
“It’s a big deal to take the bread off somebody’s table, and you’d be branded as a troublemaker,” Jack warned.
“Jack, at Hopkins, I’d’ve called them on it right then and there, and there would have been hell to pay, but over here—over here I’m just a guest.”
“And the customs are different.”
“Not that different. Jack, it’s grossly unprofessional. It’s potentially harmful to the patient, and that’s a line you never cross. At Hopkins, if you have a patient in recovery, or you have surgery the next day, you don’t even have a glass of wine with dinner, okay? That’s because the good of the patient comes before everything else. Okay, sure, if you’re driving home from a party and you see a hurt person on the side of the road, and you’re the only one around, you do what you can, and get him to a doc who’s got it all together, and you probably tell that doc that you had a couple before you saw the emergency. I mean, sure, during internship, they work you through impossible hours so you can train yourself to make good decisions when you’re not fully functional, but there’s always somebody to back you up if you’re not capable, and you’re supposed to be able to tell when you’re in over your head. Okay? I had that happen to me once on pediatric rotation, and it scared the hell out of me when that little kid stopped breathing, but I had a good nurse backing me up and we got the senior resident down in one big fucking hurry, and we got him going again with no permanent damage, thank God. But, Jack, you don’t go creating a suboptimal situation. You don’t go looking for them. You deal with them when they happen, but you don’t voluntarily jump into the soup, okay?”
“Okay, Cath, so, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. At home, I’d go right to Bernie, but I’m not at home…”
“And you want my advice?”
Her blue eyes fixed on her husband’s. “Well, yes. What do you think?”
What he thought didn’t really matter, Jack knew. It was just a question of guiding her to her own decision. “If you do nothing, how will you feel next week?”
“Terrible. Jack, I saw something that—”
“Cathy.” He hugged her. “You don’t need me. Go ahead and do what you think is right. Otherwise, well, it’ll just eat you up. You’re never sorry for doing the right thing, no matter what the adverse consequences are. Right is right, my lady.”
“They said that, too. I’m not comfortable with—”
“Yeah, babe. Every so often at work, they call me Sir John. You roll with the punch. It’s not like it’s an insult.”
“Over here, they call a surgeon Mr. Jones or Mrs. Jones, not Doctor Jones. What the hell is that all about?”
“Local custom. It goes back to the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century. A ship’s doctor was usually a youngish lieutenant, and aboard ship that rank is called mister rather than leftenant. Somehow or other it carried over to civilian life, too.”
“How do you know that?” Cathy demanded.
“Cathy you are a doctor of medicine. I am a doctor of history, remember? I know a lot of things, like putting a Band-Aid on a cut, after that painful Merthiolate crap. But that’s as far as my knowledge of medicine goes—well, they taught us a little at the Basic School, but I don’t expect to patch up a bullet wound any time soon. I’ll leave that to you. Do you know how?”
“I patched you up last winter,” she reminded him.
“Did I ever thank you for that?” he asked. Then he kissed her. “Thanks, babe.”
“I have to talk to Professor Byrd about it.”
“Honey, when in doubt, do what you think is right. That’s why we have a conscience, to remind us what the right thing is.”
“They won’t like me for it.”
“So? Cathy, you have to like you. Nobody else. Well, me, of course,” Jack added.
“Do you?”
A very supportive smile: “Lady Ryan, I worship your dirty drawers.”
And finally she relaxed. “Why, thank you, Sir John.”
“Let me go upstairs and change.” He stopped in the doorway. “Should I wear my formal sword for dinner?”
“No, just the regular one.” And now she could smile, too. “So, what’s happening in your office?”
“A lot of learning the things we don’t know.”
“You mean finding out new stuff?”
“No, I mean realizing all the stuff we don’t know that we should know. It never stops.”
“Don’t feel bad. Same in my business.”
And Jack realized that the similarity between both businesses was that if you screwed up, people might die. And that was no fun at all.
He reappeared in the kitchen. By now Cathy was feeding Little Jack. Sally was watching TV, that great child pacifier, this time some local show instead of a Roadrunner-Coyote tape. Dinner was cooking. Why an assistant professor of ophthalmology insisted on cooking dinner herself like a truck driver’s wife baffled her husband, but he didn’t object—she was good at it. Had they had cooking lessons at Bennington? He picked a kitchen chair and poured himself a glass of white wine.
“I hope this is okay with the professor.”
“Not doing surgery tomorrow, right?”
“Nothing scheduled, Lady Ryan.”
“Then it’s okay.” The little guy went to her shoulder for a burp, which he delivered with great gusto.
“Damn, Junior. Your father is impressed.”
“Yeah.” She took the edge of the cloth diaper on her shoulder to wipe his mouth. “Okay, how about a little more?”
John Patrick Ryan, Jr. did not object to the offer.
“What things don’t you know? Still worried about that guy’s wife?” Cathy asked, cooled down somewhat.
“No news on that front,” Jack admitted. “We’re worried what they might do on something.”
“Can’t say what it is?” she asked.
“Can’t say what it is,” he confirmed. “The Russians, as my buddy Simon says, are a rum bunch.”
“So are the Brits,” Cathy observed.
“Dear God, I married Carrie Nation.” Jack took a sip. It was Pinot Grigio, a particularly good Italian white that the local liquor stores carried.
“Only when I cut somebody open with a knife.” She liked saying it that way, because it always gave her husband chills.
He held up his glass. “Want one?”
“When I’m finished, maybe.” She paused. “Nothing you can talk about?”
“Sorry, babe. It’s the rules.”
“And you never break them?”
“Bad habit to get into. Better not to start.”
“What about when some Russian decides to work for us?”
“That’s different. Then he’s working for the forces of Truth and Beauty in the world. We,” Ryan emphasized, “are the Good Guys.”
“What do they think?”
“They think they are. But so did a guy named Adolf,” he reminded her. “And he wouldn’t have liked Bernie very much.”
“But he’s long dead.”
“Not everybody like him is, babe. Trust me on that one.”
“You’re worried about something, Jack. I can see it. Can’t say, eh?”
“Yes. And no, I can’t.”
“Okay.” She nodded. Intelligence information didn’t interest her beyond her abstract desire to learn what was going on in the world. But as a physician there were many things she really wanted to know—like the cure for cancer—but didn’t, and, reluctantly, she’d come to accept that. But medicine didn’t allow much in the way of secrets. When you found something that helped patients, you published your discovery in your favorite medical journal so the whole world could know about it right away. Damned sure CIA didn’t do that very often, and part of that offended her. Another tack, then. “Okay, when you do find out something important, what happens then?”