Dr. Ludtz laughs. “He is not a man for explanations, Doctor. He could easily get the wrong idea. He could take it as … I don’t know … as an insult, a personal insult.”
“And do what?”
Dr. Ludtz looks at me knowingly. “You know what. I don’t have to tell you.”
“He will not send you home, Dr. Ludtz.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he wants the diamonds.”
“But it’s you who have the diamonds, not me.”
“I would not give him any if he did any harm to you.”
Dr. Ludtz gazes at me beatifically. “Would you do that for me? Would you really?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
Dr. Ludtz grabs my hand and squeezes it gratefully. “Much thanks, Dr. Langhof. I can’t tell you what that means to me.”
I ease my hand from his grasp. “Go to bed, Dr. Ludtz. Take care of yourself. What would I do in this place without you?”
Dr. Ludtz stares at me, transfixed. “Dr. Langhof, I had no idea that … that …” He is practically in tears.
“Go now. Get some sleep.”
“Yes, of course,” Dr. Ludtz says. He starts to move toward the door.
“I will be up to check on you this evening,” I tell him.
“Oh, that would be fine, Dr. Langhof. Thank you so very much.”
I watch as Dr. Ludtz walks away. He moves heavily, something infinitely curious washed up out of time like a bone from the sludge-pit, strange in shape and texture, belonging to no known creature, a small particle of mystery floating in a galaxy of crime.
FEAR IS a great constrictor. In his terror of the fever and what it might portend, Dr. Ludtz mires his mind in the rudiments of the physical. It is in the nature of illness to reduce the parameters of one’s world to a tight little knot of injury. Nothing contracts the self into a small, aching center of restricted consciousness more than a sudden assault upon the integrity of health. The I that is not in pain, the I that is not afraid may follow the ballerina in her flight, may feel the swell of symphonies, may soar along the glimmering rim of verse. But once under assault, once in the grip of terror, the I draws in upon itself in a horrible deflation of sense and understanding. I know this to be true because I am a doctor, and my becoming one had to do with stars.
After his dismal march through the workings of the city, the boy found himself in the park once again. Though weary, he still resisted the idea of going home. He sat down on a bench, stretched his legs before him, and looked up at the sky. And there they were, the stars. Above all else, they seemed to him immensely clean. In his tortured brain he tried to think of something in his earthbound existence that might bear some relationship to this shining cleanliness, this perfect radiance. Nothing appeared. He waited. The stars were silent overhead, as, of course, he fully expected them to be. And so, in the end, he left the park with no grand vision. But that does not mean that he left it with nothing at all. For somewhere during those moments as he sat mournfully watching the sky, the process began that ultimately fused two ideas in his mind: one concerning the workings of the physical universe and the other concerning the workings of man. The thought was simple enough: that man only approached the beauty and clarity of the physical order when he himself studied that order; that is, in the practice of scientific investigation. Later he would find the nature of man’s disorder in the metaphor of disease, and that would lead him to what he fully expected to be his life’s work: hygienic research. His dream was to discover the secret formula of health, to comprehend the very roots of malady, to touch the darkest pits of sickness, and then to cauterize them until they blazed visible before him.
• • •
“And so you want to be a doctor, Herr Langhof?” Dr. Trottman asked.
Langhof sat in the book-lined office of the powerful and decisive Dr. Trottman, his hands turning waxy in his lap. “Yes, Dr. Trottman,” he said.
“You don’t need to be nervous, Herr Langhof,” Dr. Trottman said softly. “This little interview is not an inquisition.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Dr. Trottman stared at the curriculum vitae of our hero as if it were a mysterious specimen from the tropics. “Quite an impressive record.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You must have applied yourself with great vigor to achieve such distinction in the gymnasium.”
“I am a dedicated student,” Langhof said, hoping he did not sound haughty or self-serving.
“Yes, I can see that,” Dr. Trottman said. He looked up from his desk, his small eyes twinkling energetically through the lenses of his glasses. “Tell me, then — why this determination to be a doctor?”
“I have been pursuing this goal for quite some time.”
“That’s obvious. But why?”
“I am … simply … it is simply my greatest interest.”
Dr. Trottman squinted. “And what area of medicine interests you most, Herr Langhof?”
“Hygiene, sir.”
Dr. Trottman looked surprised. “Hygiene? May I ask why?”
Langhof cleared his throat. “Well, as you know, Dr. Trottman, the history of medicine suggests that more improvement has been brought about by hygienic changes than through all the artifice of medical science.”
“Artifice?”
“I meant no disrespect in using that word, I assure you, Doctor.”
“Then am I to infer from your remarks, Herr Langhof, that you are more interested in pursuing medical research than in private practice?”
“I would like a private practice as well, of course, Dr. Trottman. But, yes, research is very important to me.”
Dr. Trottman studied the young man carefully. “What is your … background, Herr Langhof?”
“Background?”
“Background,” Dr. Trottman repeated without elaboration.
“Well, my father was a lawyer. My mother was … well … my mother did nothing.”
“No doctors or scientists in your family history, then?”
“I’m afraid not, Dr. Trottman.”
“How about government service?”
“Nothing above the rank of civil servant,” Langhof said. He had never so pointedly felt the poverty of his history.
Dr. Trottman nodded and glanced again at the papers on his desk. “You have no acquaintance with a large university, I take it?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Dr. Trottman continued to peruse the papers on his desk.
“If I may say so, Dr. Trottman,” Langhof said, “it is precisely such an acquaintanceship that I am seeking here.”
Dr. Trottman looked up and smiled. “Very good, then, Herr Langhof. I shall recommend you for admission. Your record demonstrates great ability. I trust you will never allow yourself to be swayed from your purposes.”
And so the stiff little knight who had stared at the stars in the lonely park had found that particular star to which he wished to attach himself. Science, the study of which was allied in his mind to a vision of perfection — a sense that once all things had been made clear, they would also be made clean.
After years have passed, after the stench that rose above the Camp has been blown into the stratosphere, after the trees rooted in the corpses have come to full flower, after a thousand rains have washed the caked ash from the grasses, there will come singers to tell us what it was. They will say that only those who yearn for the extravagantly good can commit the extravagantly evil. With such illogic, romance shall build its symphony again, shading the lines between act and intent, hovering over the stacked corpses that weighed the lorries down,
