“A funny profession, this surgery of ours,” Kender said. “I’ve spent years working my head and my tail off in the transplantation field. Next year there will be a new chair of surgery at the medical school. They want to fill it with a transplantation specialist, but I won’t be in it. I’ll be Surgeon-in-Chief.”

“Do you regret that?” Adam asked.

Kender grinned wearily. “Not really. But I’m learning that Dr. Longwood didn’t have an easy job. I’ve taken over all his cases.”

“I know,” Adam said.

“Do you also know the mortality rate for the combined cases of Dr. Longwood and Dr. Kender for the past three months?”

“It has to be high, or you wouldn’t ask. Fifty per cent?”

“Try one hundred per cent,” Kender said softly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigar. “For three months. That’s a very long time to go without a patient who survived. A lot of operations.”

“How come?”

“Because, goddamit, the easy ones go to you guys. At a place like this the head man doesn’t get them unless they’re already ass-deep in the grave.”

For the first time Adam saw that it was so. God. “Next time I get a hernia or an appendectomy I’ll ask for your help.”

Kender smiled. “I would appreciate that,” he said. “Very much.” He lit the cigar and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “We lost that fellow with the gangrenous gut a little while ago,” he said.

Adam’s sympathy dissipated. “We really lost him during that first six-minute cardiac arrest, wouldn’t you say, sir?”

Kender looked at him. “No,” he said. “No, I wouldn’t say that.” He got up and went to the window. “See that big red-brick mausoleum across the street?”

“The animal lab?”

“It was built a hell of a long time ago, before the Civil War. Oliver Wendell Holmes once dissected cats in that building.”

Adam waited, unimpressed.

“Well, you and I and Oliver Wendell Holmes aren’t the only ones who have worked there. For a long time now Dr. Longwood and Dr. Sack and some other people around here have been taking dogs dying of gangrene in their vitals, and by doing to them what we did to that fellow we had in our OR, they’ve been able to save some of those dogs.”

“This was a man,” Adam said. “Not a dog.”

“During the last two years we’ve had sixteen such patients. Each of them has died, but each has lived longer than the last. This man lived for forty-eight hours. The experimental procedures worked for him. They turned an inoperable gangrenous condition into one we could handle through surgery. Who knows—the next patient, if we’re lucky, may not go into cardiac arrest.”