Hilburn drew Whitney’s blood, took an ultrasound, and checked her heart, arteries, and other internal organs. Whitney felt at ease in Anna and Dr. Mozelle’s presence—in Spain, she had been checked by two different doctors, neither of whom spoke much English. Dr. Mozelle declared Whitney to be in excellent health. Her anxieties, in both the doctor and his nurse’s view, were the results of life changes that had come galloping her way before the light of her own experience was bright enough to illuminate the pitfalls that lined the roadways of her life. But, Howard Mozelle thought, they might also be the result of something unknown that would surface upon the birth of Whitney’s child.
“How much longer do you think it will be?” Whitney asked the doctor as she got up from the examination table.
“About a week, no longer,” said the doctor turning to Anna. “Are you of the same opinion?”
“Yes,” said Anna. “A week. Probably less.”
Whitney Walker hugged her husband tightly.
“Just one week,” Whitney said. Tears flowed from her eyes as Franklyn held her close.
40
IT WAS TO BE A STRANGE SORT OF BIRTH, QUITE POSSIBLY THE strangest in the history of Mount Sinai Hospital, where Dr. Howard Mozelle had enjoyed professional privileges in the obstetrics ward for nearly thirty years. During the course of his career, he had overseen hundreds of births in these delivery rooms. He had delivered babies in rooms full of friends and family, and alongside countless midwives and doulas. Yet in his experience, at the very moment of birth, what couples sought more than anything was privacy and solitude and the illusion that the rest of the hospital was empty, that theirs was the only family in the world. Everything else was a needless distraction.
After a child was born, Mozelle tried to send parents home with their new babies as soon as it was medically permissible—not because he wanted to cut down on costs, but because he knew that, no matter how hard he tried, a hospital would always be an unnatural sort of place. He wanted his patients to leave behind the drugs, the machines, and the medical implements, and get on with the business of becoming a stronger family. He deeply believed that a birth was a profound, private event, which should have as little interference as possible from anyone aside from the family members and their doctor. Part of him wished that Whitney Carson Walker could have the same intimate experience with her husband that Whitney’s mother had had. And yet he knew all too well that this would be impossible. The birth of Whitney and Franklyn’s child was to be a monumental occasion—anything but a private, family affair. Lawyers were involved now, businesspeople, investors. The birth was to be videotaped so that all would be able to see how many coins would be found in the hands of Whitney and Franklyn’s child.
With the assistance of Dr. Mozelle, Montaro Caine had arranged to hold a meeting in a conference room in Mount Sinai on the floor below the obstetrics ward. There, he hoped, the issue of ownership of the coins that already existed and those that would soon materialize would be decided once and for all or rendered moot. Though the whereabouts of both coins were still unknown, all parties sensed that they would reappear at some point, and everything needed to be worked out in advance of that occurrence. Nancy MacDonald, on Caine’s instructions, had sent invitations to just about everyone associated with the story of the Walkers and the coins—including Luther John Doe and Thomas Lund, Carrie Pittman and Hattie Sinclair; he had even instructed Nancy to send an invitation to a certain Bahamian island in care of Matthew Perch, a man whose dwelling had no known address.
Invitations had been sent to both Caine’s allies and his foes. Caine had invited Michael Chasman and Richard Walmeyer, and he had invited Richard Davis and Roland Gabler. He had invited his opponents’ lawyer Julius Hargrove, and he had invited his own lawyer Gordon Whitcombe. He had invited those whose allegiances still seemed uncertain to him—Kritzman Fritzbrauner, Colette Beekman, and Herman Freich. Whitney’s uncle, the Walkers’ only living relative, received an invitation as well, although he was too ill to make the trip from Brooklyn. Along with the invitations that his secretary had sent, Caine had included a letter that expressed how important it was for everyone to work together to solve, or even better, to look beyond the issue of ownership. He