Rudy shut his eyes, bowed his head, and pretended to say a prayer.
Roberto nudged him. “I don’t mean to tell you what to do,” he said, “but in here it’s not proper to pray with your hands in your pockets.”
“Of course,” said Rudy, “I’m sorry.”
He took his right hand from his pants and placed it on Roberto’s doughy shoulder. It was too dark for the commissioner to see the hypodermic syringe.
“Hail Mary,” Roberto said, “full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed ar—ow!”
The commissioner pawed helplessly at the needle sticking from his jacket at the crook of the elbow. Considering Rudy’s general clumsiness with injections, it was a minor miracle that he hit the commissioner’s antecubital vein on the first try. Roberto Pepsical hugged the doctor desperately, a panting bear, but already the deadly potassium was streaming toward the valves of his fat clotty heart.
Within a minute the seizure killed him, mimicking the symptoms of a routine infarction so perfectly that the commissioner’s relatives would never challenge the autopsy.
Rudy removed the spent syringe, retrieved the loose cash from Roberto’s pocket, picked up the black suitcase, and slipped out of the stuffy confessional. The air in the church seemed positively alpine, and he paused to breathe it deeply.
In the back row, an elderly Cuban couple turned at the sound of his footsteps on the terrazzo. Rudy nodded solemnly. He hoped they didn’t notice how badly his legs were shaking. He faced the altar and tried to smile like a man whose soul had been cleansed of all sin.
The old Cuban woman raised a bent finger to her forehead and made the sign of the cross. Rudy worried about Catholic protocol and wondered if he was expected to reply. He didn’t know how to make the sign of the cross, but he put down the suitcase and gave it a gallant try. With a forefinger he touched his brow, his breast, his right shoulder, his left shoulder, his naval, then his brow again.
“Live long and prosper,” he said to the old woman and walked out the doors of the church.
When he got home, Rudy Graveline went upstairs to see Heather Chappell. He sat next to the bed and took her hand. She blinked moistly over the edge of the bandages.
Rudy kissed her knuckles and said, “How are you feeling?”
“I don’t know about you,” Heather said, “but I’m feeling a hundred years old.”
“That’s to be expected. You had quite a day.”
“You sure it went okay?”
“Beautifully,” Rudy said.
“The nose, too?”
“A masterpiece.”
“But I don’t remember a thing.”
The reason Heather couldn’t remember the surgery was because there had been no surgery. Rudy had drugged her copiously the night before and kept her drugged the whole day. Heather had lain unconscious for seven hours, whacked out on world-class pharmaceutical narcotics. By the time she awoke, she felt like she’d been sleeping for a month. Her hips, her breasts, her neck, and her nose were all snugly and expertly bandaged, but no scalpel had touched her fine California flesh.
Rudy hoped to persuade Heather that the surgery was a glowing success; the absence of scars, a testament to his wizardry. Obviously he had weeks of bogus post-operative counseling ahead of him.
“Can I see the video?” she asked form the bed.
“Later,” Rudy promised. “When you’re up to snuff.”
He had ordered (by FedEx) a series of surgical training cassettes from a medical school in California. Now it was simply a matter of editing the tapes into a plausible sequence. Gowned, masked, and anesthetized on the operating table, all patients looked pretty much alike to a camera. Meanwhile, all you ever saw of the surgeon was his gloved hands; Heather would never know that the doctor on the videotape was not her lover.
She said, “It’s incredible, Rudolph, but I don’t feel any pain.”
“It’s the medication,” he said. “The first few days, we keep you pretty high.”
Heather giggled. “Eight miles high?”
“Nine,” said Rudy Graveline, “at least.”
He tucked her hand beneath the sheets and picked up something from the bedstand. “Look what I’ve got.”
She squinted through the fuzz of the drugs. “Red and blue and white,” she said dreamily.