It made him steel himself for a workout, but they were four quiet hours, not at all like the frenzied activity he had expected. He read three times the single notice on the bulletin board.

TO: All professional personnel

FROM: Emmanuel Brodsky, R.N., Ph.B., Chief Pharmacist

SUBJECT: Missing prescription pads

It has come to the attention of the Pharmacy Department that a number of books of prescription pads has been reported missing from several clinics over the past two weeks. This summer an amount of barbiturates and amphetamines also was discovered to be missing. Because of the growing drug problem, the Pharmacy Department suggests that neither prescription blanks nor drugs should be left where they might fall into irresponsible hands.

Early in the evening Maish brought in a woman alcoholic who told him unconvincingly that her ill-used body had become a mass of contusions when she had fallen down the stairs. He knew that someone—her husband, a lover?—had beaten her. X-rays proved negative, but he waited to release her until he could get a chief resident to come downstairs, following hospital policy that only senior residents could make final dispositions of patients on the accident floor. Adam had the night off and was working in Woodborough. Meomartino finally arrived and sent the woman home to hot baths. It was exactly what he would have done himself twenty minutes earlier, Spurgeon thought, scorning hospital rules.

A colored couple named Sampson came in shortly after 10 p.m. with their four-year-old child screaming and dripping blood from a lacerated palm. He placed half a dozen sutures after removing glass shards; somehow the little boy had fallen from the bathroom sink while holding a medicine bottle.

“What was in the bottle?”

The woman blinked. “Just some old stuff. I forget. It was reddish. I had it a long, long time.”

“You’re lucky. He might have swallowed the contents. By now perhaps he’d be dead.”

They shook their heads as if cut off from him by a language problem.

These people, he thought.

All he could do was give them a small bottle of ipecac and hope if the boy ever swallowed anything poisonous but non-corrosive they would remember to dose him immediately so he would vomit while they waited for the doctor.

If they called the doctor, he thought.

Just after midnight a police prowl car brought in Mrs. Therese Donnelly, shaken but furious.

“I’ve a riddle for you. What does an Irishman become when you make him a cop?”

“I give up,” he said.

“An Englishman.” The officer at her side kept a carefully expressionless face.

Mrs. Donnelly was seventy-one. Her car had run into a tree, forcibly. She had struck her head on impact but insisted she was all right. It was only the third accident she had had in more than thirty-eight years of careful driving, she emphasized.