His patient on this day was an eight-year-old Senegalese girl with severe sickle-cell disease who had recently been dosed with a gene therapy medicine of his own design. He entered her room with his entourage of junior doctors and medical students and repaid her bright smile with his own.
“How is my favorite patient in the whole wide world?” he asked, pulling the privacy curtain.
The small girl was all skin and bones. “I’m good, Doctor,” she said.
“Are you eating lots of tasty food?”
She said she was.
“When are your mother and father coming to see you?”
“Soon.”
“Good. I want to speak with them to tell them how you are doing, which is excellent. I’m going to use big medical words with my colleagues now. Is that okay?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
He addressed his entourage. “So, little Khady received her stem-cell transplant a week ago. We transfected her own hematopoietic stem cells with the normal copy of the HBB gene using a viral construct we developed in our lab. Then we infused the stem cells intravenously. They naturally home to the bone marrow where they should already be producing normal hemoglobin. We’ll draw blood today to see how her peripheral red blood cells look and whether they have the new gene. Where’s the nurse? I want the blood drawn now and hand-delivered to me.”
The nurse, who was with the other patient by the window bed, parted the curtain and said in French-accented Spanish, “Here I am, Doctor.”
It was no easy feat looking sexy in the shapeless scrubs worn by the pediatric nurses, but this young woman managed to do just that. While most of her fellow nurses chose scrubs a size too large for comfort, she opted for a size too small and her voluptuous figure was very much on display. And while the majority of nurses eschewed makeup, she did not, and her red lipstick set against her olive skin could stop traffic. A couple of female medical students exchanged knowing smirks, as if to say: We know your type, lady—could you possibly be more obvious?
For his part, if Ferrol missed a beat the first time he laid eyes on her, it was a well-concealed half a beat.
“I’ll need two red-top tubes and one green-top,” he said. “Do you know where my lab is?”
“No, Doctor,” she said.
“It’s in the Institute of Genetics. Do you know where that is?”
“I’ll find it.”
“Good. I’ll be in room 611. Have you drawn Khady before?”
“I haven’t. I just transferred to this floor, but I am very, very gentle. She will hardly feel it.”
Ferrol nodded and said to the young girl, “So, Khady, tomorrow I’ll be asking you how well Nurse—” he sought out her identity card, hanging on a ribbon that bisected her ample breasts “—how well Nurse Bobier did.”
*
Room 611 was the mystery lab. Ferrol was working at a bench and he swiveled at the knock on the door. Celeste Bobier smiled and held up a small plastic bag containing three tubes of blood.
“Were you very, very gentle?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“And Khady will give you a good report tomorrow?”
“Almost certainly. I have excellent technique.”
Ferrol’s young technician was working away, preparing some reagents at another bench.
“Leave the tubes with him,” Ferrol said.
The technician promptly inserted the tubes into a centrifuge and set them spinning.
“You’re French, aren’t you?” Ferrol asked.
“I am. From Lyon.”
“Why are you here, if I could ask?”
“Well, it’s a good job in a top hospital in a beautiful city. Are these sufficient reasons?”
He nodded vigorously, sending a lock of black hair onto his forehead. “The best reasons, I’d say. It’s amazing really. Here we are in one of the best medical centers in Spain and only one-third of the people in this room are Spanish. We have—” he looked at her badge again “—Celeste Bobier from France and my technician, Ferruccio Gressani from Italy. One has to love the European Union.”
He followed her out into the hall, watching her hips.
“Nurse, do you have a minute?”
She turned before he finished the question, seemingly aware she was being tracked.
“I might even have two minutes,” she said.
“It’s short notice, but I wonder—”
“Yes, I’m free for dinner tonight.”
“How did you know?”
“Maybe I’m psychic,” she teased.
He folded his hands across the front of his long white coat. “Is that so?” he said.
“That, plus the girl talk. I was warned about the dangerous Dr. Ferrol Gaytan.”
“I thought you just arrived on the ward.”
“Word travels fast.”
*
One thing led to another and Ferrol decided to play the castle card; it was his way of sealing the deal with a new girlfriend. They usually went limp at the sight of the fortress walls, the towers, the battlements, but Celeste’s reaction amused him no end.
“Welcome to Castle Gaytan,” he said.
She raised her sunglasses and replied, “I was expecting something larger.”
“I’ll have to take you to the Alhambra for our next date.”
A female housekeeper hugged him at the door and told him she’d have their bags taken up.
“The usual?” she asked, eyeing the long-legged woman in a tight, red skirt. It was just loud enough for Celeste to hear.
Ferrol told her, yes.
“What’s the usual?” Celeste asked him a moment later.
“Adjoining rooms.”
She saluted the suit of armor in the reception hall and said, “I should like a tour.”
“With or without champagne?”
“With.”
He took her to the library first, a vast dark room that required tall ladders on iron rails to scale the highest reaches. He told her there were ten thousand volumes, many priceless, and that one night, many years ago, the fire brigade saved it from fast-spreading flames. When she asked about the fire, he demurred and moved her onto the banqueting hall, where she craned her neck to look at the ancient tapestries and taxidermy and a huge heraldic crest of family Gaytan.
“This is where you have your intimate dinners for a few hundred of your closest friends?” she asked.
“The last time this hall was used was
