“You and Dr. Silverstone will have to start repairing it yourselves, Dr. Meomartino.”

“You’re not coming?”

“I can’t. I have an emergency of my own. One of my private patients, a large bleeding ulcer involving the duodenum and the pylorus. I’ll come over to you as soon as I can get done here.”

He thanked her and called the OR to tell them he would be down with an aneurysm case, and then in swift succession telephoned for a medical consult and an anesthesiologist.

Helen Fultz smiled at him when he told her. “You and Dr. Silverstone?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I could be in worse hands,” she said.

They had to wait after they were scrubbed while Norman Pomerantz got her anesthetized with agonizing slowness, but finally Meomartino was able to begin. He made a long midline incision, cutting through the skin and between the rectus sheaths. Wherever a tiny bleeder appeared, he clamped and Silverstone tied.

He went through the peritoneum carefully, and once they were into the abdomen he could see the aneurysm, a large, pulsating swelling on the left side of the aorta.

“There’s our baby,” Silverstone murmured.

It was leaking blood into the intestine, the cause of her bleeding.

“Let’s get it out of there,” he said. Together they bent over Helen Fultz’s big beating aorta.

Miriam Parkhurst came bustling into the OR office after Silverstone had taken Helen to the recovery room. She listened to Meomartino, trying not to look pleased. “I’m glad we’re able to help somebody on this staff. Did you use retention sutures?”

“Yes,” he said. “How did your Mount Auburn emergency go?”

She smiled at him. “We both had a good evening.”

“I’m glad.”

“Rafe, what is going to become of Harland Longwood?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I do love that old man,” she said tiredly. She waved good night at him as she left.

Meomartino simply sat there, listening through the open doors to the nurses talking quietly as they cleaned the operating room.

There was no other sound.

He closed his eyes. He was sweaty and rank but he felt almost post-coital, released, fulfilled, qualified by an act of love to claim a place on the earth. The idea came to him that what Liz had once said to him was correct: the hospital claimed him as a human mistress could not.

What a shabby old trull, he thought, amused.

When he opened his eyes the concept embarrassed him and he pursued it no farther. He took the green cloth cap from his head and dropped it to the floor. There was a tape recorder on the table and he picked up the microphone and leaned back in the chair and placed his feet, still encased in the black static-proof operating boots, on the table next to the machine.

Pressing the button on the microphone, he began to dictate the operative report.