had been terribly stricken with guilt ever since Igor Drukovich was found dead, and he’s still stricken. “He’s convinced that if he hadn’t written that original story on Drukovich—to provoke the very revelations that came to light this morning—Drukovich would still be alive. I’m telling you he’s in a bad way.”
Suddenly Ed burst forth with a loud voice and vehemence, in short, a roar, which nobody, including himself, knew he was capable of: “SMITH, COME HERE!” Now more frightened than forlorn, John Smith stared at his maximum editor, who said, “FEEL GUILTY ON YOUR OWN GODDAMNED TIME! YOU’RE WORKING FOR ME NOW, AND YOU’VE GOT A BIG STORY TO WRITE FOR TOMORROW!”
Nobody knew Edward T. Topping IV had it in him! All the Loop Syndicate and Herald brass saw and heard it happen! It was in that moment, they all decided, that Ed Topping—old “T-4”—had become a new man, a strong man, a real man, and a credit to the newspaper game.
Ed was surprised, too. Actually—and he knew it—he had thundered at John Smith out of fear, fear that the kid might mope off without writing the story that would get him, Ed Topping, and lots of others, out of a real jam.
Her talk with Nestor had reduced Magdalena’s fear level from terrified to scared witless. There is a difference, and she could feel it; but she still got almost no sleep that night. She couldn’t find a single position lying in bed in which she wasn’t unpleasantly aware of her heartbeat. It wasn’t all that fast, but it was primed to gallop at any moment. After a few hours… or that’s what it felt like… she heard the latch on the front door turning, and that almost set her off. Her heart bolted, as if it wanted to attain insane levels of atrial fibrillation. She prayed to God to make it so—
—and it was so: only Amélia coming home. “Thank you, God!” She actually said it aloud, although under her breath.
The last two nights, Monday and Tuesday, Amélia had been at his place near the hospital, he being the thirty-two-year-old resident neurosurgeon suddenly in her life. Neurosurgeon! Surgeons were at the top of the status hierarchy at all hospitals, because they were men of action—surgeons were usually men—men of action who routinely held human life in their hands—literally, tactilely—and currently neurosurgeons were the most romantic of all. They faced the greatest risks of all surgeons. By the time someone had reached the point of needing brain surgery, he was already in a very bad way, and the rate of deaths in their field was the highest of all. (At the bottom of the ladder were dermatologists, pathologists, radiologists, and psychiatrists; no crises to go through, no emergency calls at night at home or, on days off, or over the hospital speaker system, no mortifying treks to waiting rooms in your scrubs, trying to think up the right rhetoric for telling the praying wrecks that their loved one just died on the table and why.) It occurred to Magdalena that Amélia’s and her love lives were now reversed. It seemed like only yesterday that Amélia was Reggie-less and forlorn, while she was about to go out with a young, famous, rich, handsome, dashing Russian named Sergei. Now there was no more Sergei, she devoutly hoped. She was forlorn, and on top of that frightened half to death, while Amélia was busy getting it on with a young second-generation Cuban neurosurgeon who was romantic per se.
Magdalena must have finally fallen asleep for a couple of hours sometime after six, because she had glanced at the luminous hands on her alarm clock and blip she was waking up, and the same clock now said 9:30. Not a sound in the apartment; Amélia must still be sleeping, because she came home late, and this was one of her days off. Magdalena could have happily remained lying there, but all the circumstances of her miseries and fears came plunging back from out of the hypnopompic fog and made her too wary to stay lying there in supine vulnerability. So she got up and put a cotton bathrobe over the T-shirt she slept in and went into the bathroom and brought two cupped hands full of cold water up to her face and felt no better. Her heart was again drumming away a little too fast, and she had a dull headache and a great weariness such as she never had in the morning. She