“Where did Sarah Hoffman fit into it?”
“I selected her as my teacher. She taught me to perform plastic and reconstructive surgery, like an apprentice. When I was ready, I began to move ahead, and she followed. I learned from her that the surgery itself is more art than science—like being a sculptor. I became good at it, and my broader background in surgery gave me a wider range of techniques, familiarity with more of the situations that can come up, and so on. My credentials gave the universities and big drug companies an interest in keeping me abreast of the enormous amount of research they had been doing on various kinds of induced healing, artificial tissue, and so on. We both made great progress, became extremely productive. We published a number of articles, helped lots of patients.”
“Carey seems to think there’s more to the research than you’re saying.”
Dahlman smiled. “Carey.… He would see what it was instantly, and want it to happen right then, even if the others couldn’t imagine it. He was that kind of medical student—always asking why we can’t do better, asking for a finer instrument. He was right, of course. We were trying to reach the point where we could reliably induce rapid cell replication—persuade the body to do what it does anyway, but much, much faster and more completely.”
“Did you succeed?”
“We had some success, but nothing as dramatic yet as what we’re hoping—what I’m hoping for, and what Carey envisions. We understand a bit about the hormone that makes a human baby grow quickly during its first year of life. We know a bit about rapid cell replication in malignancies. There’s already work being done on giving the body more of what it needs—exposing it to hyperbaric oxygen to stimulate healing, and so on. But ultimately, what we’re talking about is speeding up time within the human body: an increased flow of blood to the wound, increased supply of oxygen and nutrients in the blood, a tremendously increased metabolic rate.”
“How close were you to doing it?”
“We were just beginning. We weren’t simply doing theoretical research. We were physicians trying to help the human beings who came to us, and that meant that most of our time with each patient went to applying the proven methods we had. When something was both promising and safe, we would get a patient’s permission to try it.”
“So what went wrong?”
“We took on a case of a sort that we seldom did—purely cosmetic. It was a man who simply wanted to improve his appearance. He came through Sarah’s office, and she did all of the interviewing and so on at the beginning. The paperwork was handled by her nurse, Carol. Sarah used to take her own photographs, so that was done there too. Normally, whatever we had done together was paid for by the patient’s insurance. Since this was purely elective surgery, it would be paid for by the patient. Normal procedure is to alert the insurance company anyway, in case there are complications. Records were created. That’s an important fact. Then Sarah brought him to me.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did she bring him to you instead of doing it herself?”
“We usually worked together on particularly difficult cases. This one wasn’t difficult, medically. But it was a patient who had certain requests, and one of them was my involvement.”
“You just said you were concentrating on using your last years as a working surgeon efficiently. Surely there must have been somebody—some kid with a birth defect or something—that fit better. Or was using a healthy patient better for the research?”
Dahlman waved the question away. “I don’t know that it makes any difference. Our motives aren’t really the issue.”
He was hiding something. “So tell me anyway.”
“It was a combination of things. One was that Sarah had already made up her mind when she brought him to me. She was my partner. I owed her a lot. What was called for was a safe, familiar sequence of procedures. The difference between performing them on a patient who had no physical limitations and a patient who had suffered disfigurement was really only a question of the quality of results. And it would demonstrate the applicability of the methods we had learned in our reconstructive work to another whole category of—”
“He offered you a lot of money.”
Dahlman slumped in his seat. “Yes.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred thousand dollars.”
“I thought you were set for life, and didn’t need money.”
Dahlman squinted, as though he were still trying to fathom what had been in his own mind, and having little success. Jane could tell that this part of the story was an irritant. “I didn’t need money. Sarah was younger—I believe thirty-eight or thirty-nine. I could work for free; she couldn’t. We had always assumed that she would naturally, gradually take over more of our joint work until I retired. The clinic and our research would revert to her. But at this stage the research was enormously expensive, and even the surgeries we did increased the deficit— sometimes because we took on the very sort of patient you mentioned. We had to give some thought to how Sarah would manage to continue the work without me. Two hundred thousand wasn’t much, but it would help.”
“You didn’t like the decision, did you?”
“No. I didn’t. But I couldn’t deny the problem. We discussed it in very specific, practical terms that day. The question was, would we interrupt our real work to do forty tummy tucks and nose bobs, or do one complete, ambitious makeover for a rich patient who would serve as a demonstration for others?”
Jane said, “Tell me about the patient.”
Dahlman said, “I never knew much about him. Sarah told me he wanted not only to have the best medical services available but to be of help. The fee was his idea, and we were to consider the excess a contribution. He had signed a standard agreement to let us publish whatever we learned in the course of his treatment.”
Jane tested a suspicion. “Including pictures?”
“Including pictures. Of course.”
Jane had guessed wrong, but she sensed that she shouldn’t let Dahlman gloss over the patient. “Where did the money come from? What made him rich?”
“Sarah mentioned that he was the heir to the Hardiston fortune.”
“Was his name Hardiston?”
“Yes. James Hardiston.”
Jane still couldn’t be positive: there probably were some living Hardistons. There was no way for her to verify her suspicion while she was driving along a deserted road in the middle of the night, but this was the first part of the story that seemed to sink when she put weight on it. Hardiston was a word that everybody knew: Bulova, Piaget, Timex, Cartier, Rolex, Omega, Hardiston. One of them was printed on your watch, and ten times a day, when you looked to see what time it was, you couldn’t help reading it. Hardiston was undoubtedly the best of the bunch, because nobody could be named Timex, and half the school classrooms in the country had those big Hardiston clocks over the blackboard. Kids sat at their desks watching it out of the corners of their eyes. At three o’clock the red second hand reached the twelve, the minute hand clicked backward a half-step, then forward to the next minute, and the dismissal bell went off.
It was a con game as old as the Industrial Revolution. You just took some brand name that had started out as a surname and told the mark you were the great-grandson. If you could convince somebody your name was Pillsbury or Hilton or Doubleday or Kellogg or Hardiston, they thought they’d already done all the checking they needed to, and they started to get light-headed from the smell of money. “And you—or Sarah—thought the two hundred thousand might be only the beginning.”
“Well, it had occurred to us.”
“How did he know about you?”
“That was one of the things that impressed me. His forms said he had been referred to us by a doctor in Maryland. The doctor was real, and highly respected.”
“Did you call him?”
“There was no reason to. He had simply told Mr. Hardiston that we would be the best specialists in the country for his needs. What was there to ask him—whether he meant it? Afterward I learned that he had given Hardiston copies of some of our articles from medical journals.”
Jane’s jaw muscles worked, keeping her mouth closed so she wouldn’t succumb to the temptation to point
