In the days that followed, suffering with a heavy cold, he waited for Longwood to send bolts of thunder at the seducer of his flesh and blood. In a number of ways, the Old Man had the power to destroy him. But two days after the disaster outside the hotel Meomartino stopped him in the surgeons’ lounge. “My wife told me when she was ill you were kind enough to go to considerable trouble to try to get her a cab.” His eyes challenged.

“Well . . .”

“It was fortunate that you met her. I want to say thank you.”

“It was nothing.”

“I’m sure she won’t need your help again.” Meomartino nodded and went away, somehow the winner. Never had Adam felt so much loathing or such respect. What had happened to his revenge, he wondered.

Longwood’s wrath did not descend. Adam worked hard, staying in the hospital and spending his off-duty hours in his room or in the animal or pathology labs. He inherited a flurry of surgical cases, an appendectomy, a gall bladder, several gastrectomies, more skin grafting for Mr. Grigio.

Mrs. Bergstrom received a holiday gift, a kidney. On the next-to-last night of December a sudden Sunday blizzard dumped four inches of clean whiteness on the grimy city. Across the river in Cambridge the sixteen-year-old son of a famed scholar, high on pot, stole a car and, careening away from the police vehicle gingerly pursuing him over snow-slick Memorial Drive, struck a concrete abutment and was killed instantly. His grieving parents, asking only anonymity to protect them from the mercilessness of publicity, donated the boy’s corneas to the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and one kidney each to the Brigham and to Suffolk County.

Adam sat with Kender and agonized over the problem of how much immunosuppressive drug to give Mrs. Bergstrom with the new kidney.

Kender decided on 130 mgs. of Imuran.

“Her renal function is very low,” Adam said doubtfully. “Why wouldn’t 100 mgs. be enough?”

“I gave her ninety mgs. last time,” Kender said, “and she rejected the kidney decisively. I don’t want to have to put her through this again.” They operated after midnight and the new kidney was putting out urine when they took her from the operating room.

On New Year’s Eve Adam was in the operating room again, preparing to do a splenectomy on the first of the drunken drivers, who had had the good sense to rupture his spleen on the highway only two blocks from the hospital. He stood with his gloved hands crossed on his chest and waited with Harry Lee, who would assist. Norm Pomerantz was giving the general anesthesia, which would be light but complicated because the man already had anesthetized himself with alcohol. It was very quiet in the OR.

“It’s twelve o’clock, Adam,” Lee said.

“Happy New Year, Harry.”