first floor, made his way to the Women's Health Division, and--after a few inquiries--found himself before the door of Miriam Kendall.
He gave a discreet knock. 'Come in,' came a strong, clear voice.
Pendergast opened the door. The small office beyond clearly belonged to a professor. Two metal bookcases were stuffed full of textbooks and journals. Stacks of examination bluebooks were arranged on the desktop. Sitting on the far side of the desk was a woman of perhaps sixty years of age. She rose as Pendergast entered.
'Dr. Pendergast,' she said, accepting the proffered hand with a certain reserve.
'Call me Aloysius,' he replied. 'Thanks for seeing me.'
'Not at all. Please take a seat.'
She sat back behind her desk and looked him over with a detached--almost clinical--manner. 'You haven't aged a day.'
The same could not be said of Miriam Kendall. Haloed in yellow morning light from the tall, narrow windows, she nevertheless looked a great deal older than she had during the time she shared an office with Helen Esterhazy Pendergast. Yet her manner was just as Pendergast remembered it: crisp, cool, professional.
'Looks can be deceiving,' Pendergast replied. 'However. I thank you. How long have you been at Tulane?'
'Nine years now.' She laid her hands on the desk, tented her fingers. 'I have to say, Aloysius, I'm surprised you didn't take your inquiries directly to Helen's old boss, Morris Blackletter.'
Pendergast nodded. 'I did, actually. He's retired now--as you probably know, after Doctors With Wings he went on to consulting positions with various pharmaceutical companies--but at present he's on vacation in England, not due back for several days.'
She nodded. 'And what about Doctors With Wings?'
'I was there this morning. The place was a madhouse, everybody mobilizing for Azerbaijan.'
Kendall nodded. 'Ah, yes. The earthquake. Many feared dead, I understand.'
'There wasn't a face there over thirty--and nobody who took a minute to speak with me had the least recollection of my wife.'
Kendall nodded again. 'It's a job for the young. That's one of the reasons I left DWW to teach women's health issues.' The desk phone rang. Kendall ignored it. 'In any case,' she said briskly, 'I'm more than happy to share my memories of Helen with you, Aloysius--though I find myself curious as to why you should approach me now, after all these years.'
'Most understandable. The fact is, I'm planning to write a memoir of my wife. A sort of celebration of her life, brief as it was. Doctors With Wings was Helen's first and only job after she obtained her MS in pharmaceutical biology.'
'I thought she was an epidemiologist.'
'That was her subspecialty.' Pendergast paused. 'I've realized just how little I knew of her work with DWW--a fault that's entirely my own, and something I am trying to remedy now.'
Hearing this, the hard lines of Kendall's face softened a little. 'I'm glad to hear you say that. Helen was a remarkable woman.'
'So if you'd be kind enough to reminisce a little about her time at Doctors With Wings? And please--don't sugarcoat anything. My wife was not without imperfection--I'd prefer the unvarnished truth.'
Kendall looked at him a minute. Then her eyes traveled to some indeterminate spot behind him and grew distant, as if looking into the past. 'You know about DWW--we worked on sanitation, clean water, and nutrition programs in the Third World. Empowering people to better their own health and living conditions. But when there was a disaster--like the earthquake in Azerbaijan--we mobilized teams of doctors and health workers and flew them into the target areas.'
'That much I know.'
'Helen...' She hesitated.
'Go on,' Pendergast murmured.
'Helen was very effective, right from the beginning. But I often had the feeling she loved the adventure of it even more than the healing. As if she put in the months of office work just for the chance to be dropped into the epicenter of some disaster.'
Pendergast nodded.
'I recall...' She stopped again. 'Aren't you going to take notes?'
'I have an excellent memory, Ms. Kendall. Pray continue.'
'I remember when a group of us were surrounded by a machete-wielding mob in Rwanda. There must have been at least fifty of them, half drunk. Helen suddenly produced a two-shot derringer and disarmed the whole lot. Told them to chuck their weapons in a pile and get lost. And they did!' She shook her head. 'Did she ever tell you about that?'
'No, she didn't.'
'She knew how to use that derringer, too. She learned to shoot in Africa, didn't she?'
'Yes.'
'I always thought it a little strange.'
'What?'
'Shooting, I mean. A strange hobby for a biologist. But then, everyone has their own way of relieving the stress. And when you're in the field, the pressure can be unbearable: the death, cruelty, savagery.' She shook her
