On, Off

“Who knows the combination?” he asked, putting them on.

“I do, and it is not written down anywhere,” she said firmly. “If they have to carry me out feet first, they’ll have to bring in a safe-cracker. Share a secret, and it’s no secret.”

The O.R. itself looked like any other operating room.

“I don’t operate under fully sterile conditions,” she said, leaning her rump on the operating table, which was an expanse of clean linen savers and had a curious apparatus mounted at one end, all aluminum sticks, frames, knobs geared down to Vernier scale. She herself was clad in a clean boilersuit – ironed – and canvas bootees. An attractive woman of about forty, he decided, slim and businesslike. Her dark hair was drawn back in a no-nonsense bun, her eyes were dark and intelligent, and her lovely hands were marred by nails cut very short.

“I thought an O.R. had to be sterile,” he said.

“Scrupulous cleanliness is far more important, Lieutenant. I’ve known O.R.s more sterile than a zapped fruit fly, but no one ever really cleaned them.”

“So you’re a neurosurgeon?”

“No, I’m a technician with a master’s. Neurosurgery is a man’s field, and they give women neurosurgeons hell. But at the Hug I can do what I love to do without that kind of trauma. Due to the size of my patients, it’s very high-powered neurosurgery. See that? My Zeiss operating microscope. They don’t have one in the Chubb neurosurgery O.R.s, not one,” said the lady with great satisfaction.

“You operate on what?”

“Monkeys for Dr. Chandra. Cats for him and Dr. Finch. Rats for the neurochemists upstairs, and cats for them too.”

“Do they die on the table often?”

Sonia Liebman looked outraged. “What do you think I am, hamfisted? No! I sacrifice animals for the neurochemists, who don’t often work on live brains. Neurophysiologists work on live brains. That’s the main difference between the two disciplines to me.”

“Uh, what do you sacrifice, Mrs. Liebman?” Tread carefully, Carmine, tread carefully!

“Rats in the main, but I do Sherringtonian decerebrations on cats too.”

“What’s that?” he asked, writing in his notebook, but not really wanting to know – more abstruse details coming up!

“Removal of a brain from the tentorium up under ether anesthesia. The moment I shell the brain out, I inject Pentothal into the heart and wham! the animal’s dead. Instantaneous.”

“So you put fairly large animals into bags and take them to the refrigerator for disposal?”

“Yes, on decerebration days.”

“How often do these decerebration days happen?”

“It depends. If Dr. Ponsonby or Dr. Polonowski asks for cat fore-brains, about every two weeks for a couple of months, at the rate of three to four cats on any one day. Dr. Satsuma doesn’t ask nearly as often – maybe once a year, six cats.”

“How big are these decerebrated cats?”

“Monsters. Males about twelve to fifteen pounds.”

Right, two floors down and two to go. Utilities, workshops and neurophysiology done. Now it’s up to see the office staff on the fourth floor, then down to the third and neurochemistry.

There were three medical typists, all with science degrees, and a filing clerk who had nothing more imposing than a high school diploma – how lonely she must feel! Vonnie, Dora and Margaret used big IBM golfball typewriters, and could type “electroencephalography” faster than a cop could type “DUI.” Nothing there; he left them to it, Denise the filing clerk sniffling and mopping her eyes as she peered into open drawers, the typewriters clattering like machine guns.

Dr. Charles Ponsonby was waiting for him at the elevator. He was, he said to Carmine as he escorted the visitor to his office, the same age as the Prof, forty-five, and filled in for the Prof when he was away. They’d gone to the Dormer Day School together, did their premed at Chubb together, then their medical degrees at Chubb. Both, Ponsonby explained gravely, were Connecticut Yankees back to the beginning. But after medical school their paths had diverged. Ponsonby had preferred to stay at Chubb to do his neurological residency, while Smith had gone to Johns Hopkins. Not that the separation had been a long one: Bob Smith came back to head up the Hug, and invited Ponsonby to join him there. That had been in 1950, when both were thirty years old.

Now why did you stay home? Carmine wondered, studying the chief of neurochemistry. A medium-sized man of medium height, Charles Ponsonby had brown hair streaked with grey, watery blue eyes above a pair of half glasses perched on a long, narrow nose, and the air of an absentminded professor. His clothes were shabby and tweedy, his hair wisped about, and his socks, Carmine saw, were mismatched: navy on the right foot, grey on the left. All this might confirm that Ponsonby was an unadventurous man who saw no virtue in going farther afield than Holloman, yet something in those rheumy eyes said he might have ended a different kind of man had he too gone elsewhere after finishing his medical degree. An hypothesis based on gut instinct; something had kept Ponsonby at home, something concrete and compelling. Not a wife, because he had said, quite indifferently, that he was a lifelong bachelor.

Interesting too to discover the contrasts between their various offices. Forbes’s had been awesomely neat with no room for plush furniture or wall hangings; books and papers everywhere, even the floor. Finch went in for potted plants and actually had a stunning orchid in bloom; his walls cascaded ferns. Chandra preferred the leather Chesterfield look, with leaded glass-paned book cabinets and a few exquisite Indian artworks. And Dr. Charles Ponsonby lived tidily among gruesome artifacts like shrunken heads and death masks of people like Beethoven and Wagner; he also had four reproductions of famous paintings on his walls – Goya’s Cronus eating a child, two sections of Bosch’s Hell, and Munch’s screaming face.

“Do you like surrealist art?” Ponsonby asked with animation.

“I’m into Oriental art myself, Doctor.”

“I’ve often thought, Lieutenant, that I mischose my calling. Psychiatry fascinates me, particularly psychopathia. Look at that shrunken head – what beliefs can provoke that? Or what visions my paintings?”

Carmine grinned. “No use asking me. I’m just a cop.” And you, he ended in a silent comment, are not my man. Too obvious.

Up here, he saw as Ponsonby conducted him through the labs, the equipment was more familiar: an atomic absorption unit, a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph, centrifuges large and small – the kind of apparatus Patrick had in his forensic lab, just newer and grander. Patrick had to scrape; here, they spent and spent.

From Ponsonby he learned more about the cat brains that were made into what Ponsonby called “brain soup” so naturally that it had no element of jocularity about it. They used rat brain soup too. And Dr. Polonowski was conducting some experiments on the giant axon of a lobster leg – not the big claws, the little legs. Those axons were huge! Polonowski’s technician, Marian, often had to call into the fish shop on her way to work to buy the four biggest lobsters in the tank.

“What happens to the lobsters afterward?”

“They are rostered between those who like lobster,” Ponsonby said, as if the question had no merit whatsoever when the answer was so patently clear. “Dr. Polonowski doesn’t do anything to the rest of the beast. It is very kind of him to rotate them, actually. They are his experimental animals, he could eat them all himself. But he takes his turn with the rest of us. Except for Dr. Forbes, who has gone vegetarian, and Dr. Finch, who is too orthodox to eat crustacea.”

“Tell me, Dr. Ponsonby, do people notice bags of dead animals? If you saw a big dead animal bag stuffed full and you did notice it, what would you think about it?”

Ponsonby’s face registered mild surprise. “I doubt I would think about it, Lieutenant, because I doubt I would notice it.”

Miraculously, Ponsonby wasn’t agog to go into detail about his work, which he simply said had to do with the chemistry of a brain cell involved in the epileptic process.

“So far everybody seems to be into epilepsy. Is anyone into mental retardation? I thought the Hug was for both.”

“Unfortunately we lost our geneticist several years ago, and Professor Smith hasn’t found a suitable man to replace him. The DNA business is attracting them, you see. More exciting.” He giggled. “Their soup is made out of E. coli.”