anything out yet?”
The three men looked at one another.
“There’s not enough here. We need more information,” Ex said, as if he was delivering a challenge. “I’d like to examine the site.”
Maybe my relief at having a little ice-breaking moment with Kim blinded me. Maybe I was tired and careless. Or maybe I was too comfortable being who I had always been, rushing in again where angels feared. I didn’t think. Didn’t ask or even consider what the risks might be. I didn’t feel a moment of apprehension or fear.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
FOUR
Two hours with a strong cup of morning coffee, Google, and Wikipedia yielded this:
When it was built in 1921, Grace Memorial was the second largest hospital in a city that was thick with them. Cook County Hospital was only a mile away, and Grace’s redbrick towers and colonnaded walks, cathedral-style entrance, and massive network of wards and offices were a response to the older hospital’s preeminence. But the original buildings changed fast; almost as soon as Grace opened for business, the construction crews came in.
In 1929, the Bureau of Prohibition raided the hospital, recovering enough gin, rum, and beer to feed Chicago’s speakeasies for a week. The men responsible for building the network of smuggler’s tunnels and secret warehouses fled or were arrested, and the hospital itself almost didn’t survive the scandal. All through the 1930s, Grace Memorial had a reputation as Chicago’s hospital of last resort. A prostitution ring ran out of it from 1936 to 1939. One whole wing was demolished as structurally unsound.
The Manhattan Project came to its rescue in 1942. While Fermi conducted the first controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago, the Army Corps of Engineers quietly took control of Grace Memorial, retooling it for research on the effects of radiation. When, in 1946, that project ended, a new group stepped up with the stated intention of making Grace Memorial a functioning hospital again. President Truman himself signed the documents that transferred control of the buildings away from the army. Over the next half decade, Grace Memorial became a cause célèbre among the highest ranks of Chicagoan society. Mies van der Rohe and Declan Souder— the two great lights of Chicago architecture—competed for the chance to redesign it, with van der Rohe dropping out at the last minute to go work on the Farnsworth House.
In the 1970s, it entered into partnership with the University of Illinois at Chicago—one of the largest medical schools in the nation—and became a teaching and research hospital with the joint missions of serving the poor and supporting cutting-edge medical research. If that particular pairing sounded a little ominous to me, no one else seemed to blink. The worst scandal it had been involved with since then was a 1998 report about failures to conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Nothing online mentioned ominous dreams or boxes in dark earth. None of the graphics were of weirdly staring eyes or improbably jointed hands. I hadn’t really expected the Internet to deliver all the answers, but there was nothing there to give me traction. My little spate of research did give me enough background to understand what I was looking at when, after a half-hour drive through the rain-scrubbed streets, we got there.
“Wow,” I said. “Ugly.”
Ex craned his neck as Aubrey drove us all past.
“It looks like ten other buildings that got in a car wreck,” he said.
“It’s worse inside,” Kim said. “When I was interviewing for the job here, they asked how well I read maps. I thought it was a joke.”
She was understating the case. After we stuck Kim’s permit to the window and found a space in faculty parking, she led us to her office. The public areas of the hospital were pleasant enough—well lit, with living plants and relatively humane paint jobs—but as soon as Kim used her key card to get us past the wide metal Authorized Personnel Only doors, things got weird. We passed through two long, looping hallways to an elevator that said we were on the second floor even though we were still at street level. Then up three levels to floor 5-East (as opposed to 5-West, which was actually the floor below). Kim led us through two more sets of locked doors with bright orange biohazard markers on them, and we stepped into a cramped area wider than a hallway but too narrow to be a room where three desks huddled together. A black man with thinning white hair nodded to us as we passed.
“This has got to be a joke,” I said as Kim unlocked the final door. “Who designed this place, and where’d they put my cheese?”
“All hospitals are like this to some degree,” Aubrey said. “My postgrad research was a collaboration with some MDs at the University of New Mexico. I always had to meet people at the front of the place and guide them in.”
“I remember that,” Kim said. “Grace is worse.”
The office was too small for all of us to fit comfortably. There wasn’t even space to put down the backpack I used as a purse. A thin window had wedged itself in one corner, daylight spilling across one wall. Kim’s computer hummed and whirred, a screen saver cycling through images that I assumed fit in with her work: X-rays of skulls, bright pink-and-white pictures of what might have been flesh, drawings of complex microorganisms with joke labels on them like “extra cheese” and “On the Internet, no one knows you’re infectious.” The air smelled of oil and old carpet.
“We do our actual lab workups down in Pathology or over on the UIC campus,” Kim said as she dug through a small metal filing cabinet, “but the paperwork’s all here.”
“Who are you working with?” Aubrey asked.
“Alepski and Namkung,” she said.
Aubrey crossed his arms and leaned against one wall.
“Didn’t expect to hear
“Namkung’s the official lead, but she came here because Alepski and I were willing to sign on if the study was based out of Grace. They ask about you sometimes.”
“And what do you tell them?” he said with a laugh in his voice.
“That you’re traveling the world,” Kim said. “They’re comfortable with that. It’s a good team. One of the nice things about working with them is that sometimes the residents will actually consult with me.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Ex asked.
“I’ve got a PhD. Alepski and Namkung both went on to get MDs, and so I’m respectable by association,” Kim said, as if that explained everything. When she stood up, she had a card in her hand. I caught a glimpse of an old picture of Aubrey on it and a silver magnetic strip. “I got guest researcher access for Aubrey on the strength of the papers we did together. It won’t get you on the medical wards, but if you need to get in there, you can use it to sweet-talk the nursing staff.”
“And the rest of us?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“Are limited to public areas or else going chaperoned,” Kim said. “Or you can get a white coat, carry a clipboard, and scowl a lot. That’s usually enough to keep anyone from bothering you.”
“Security
“More than people, it’s the different systems,” Kim said. “On any given ward, you’ve got the nurses and technicians who work there, and the doctors who come in and out. And then the therapists. And the social work staff. And security and the physical plant guys. Janitorial. Kitchen staff. Compliance inspectors from the state and the fed. And the researchers like me. And the patients. And the families. And everyone answers to a different set of management, if they answer to anyone at all. Everyone has different methods for interacting with everyone else. It’s a complex tissue. By and large, if you aren’t keeping someone from doing their job, they don’t much care whether you’re there or not.”
“So don’t piss off the security guys,” Aubrey said as he clipped his new ID card to his belt. It was just a little square of plastic, but it made him look like he belonged there. It was such a small thing to be a disguise.
“That should be all right,” I said. “We’re just getting the lay of the land, right? Basic recon.”
“Fair enough,” Kim said. “Where did you want to start?”
“I assume there’s a chaplain,” Ex said. “Resident priest might have more of an idea of the spiritual state of play than the other staff.”
