He wondered if they had antibiotics, blood donors, trained people, and decided sadly it was improbable that they had more than a few empty stores and hidden weapons and homemade bandages and the notion that they had waited long enough.

It was a large store.

Centrally located in the black community.

He remembered how Gertrude Soames, the hooker with the dyed red hair, had signed herself out of the hospital with carcinoma of the liver because she didn’t trust the white hands that poked and hurt, the white man’s eyes she thought really did not care.

He thought of Thomas Catlett, Jr., whose little black ass he had smacked in the ambulance parked on the bridge, who had eight brothers and sisters and whose unemployed father by now must have planted the seeds of number ten in Martha Hendricks Catlett’s flaccid womb because orgasm was free and no one had taught them how to make love without making babies.

He wondered if wasted people like Speed Nightingale could be reached by somebody in the neighborhood who was ready to help a junky try to break loose.

The sign-writer had dropped some broken pieces of chalk on the gritty floor and he picked one up and played a little game, drawing partitions and creating a waiting room by the door, a reception desk, an examining room and emergency surgery, an x-ray corner and, in the toilet inhabited by thick spider webs and three dead moths, a darkroom.

Then he squatted on his haunches again and studied the white lines on the dirty floor of the empty store.

That afternoon he hung around the Surgical Department until he spotted a pharmaceutical detail man he knew.

His name was Horowitz, a nice fellow and good enough at his job to know that young interns had a way of turning into important customers in a relatively few years. He sat over a cup of coffee in Maxie’s and listened while Spurgeon spoke.

“It’s not so wild,” he said. “Frank Lahey started the Lahey Clinic in 1923 with only one surgical nurse.” He frowned and began jotting figures on a paper napkin.

“I could get you certain items free, because the pharmaceutical industry supports things like this. A supply of drugs, bandages. Some of the equipment you could pick up second-hand. You wouldn’t want x-ray, you could send them to the hospital—”

“No, you would need x-ray,” Spurgeon said. “The whole idea would be to have a black neighborhood clinic they’d come to willingly, with complete trust that it was theirs. And these people have tuberculosis, emphysema, all kinds of respiratory problems. Hell, they live in the contaminated air of the core city. You’d have to have x-ray.”

Horowitz shrugged. “Okay, x-ray. You could pick up old furniture for the waiting room. You know, folding chairs, an old wooden desk, things like that?”

“Sure.”