Interface (10 page)

Mary Catherine was not the kind of woman who would carry a
weapon in her purse. She was not sure what kind of woman would, but certainly not her. She did it anyway. At first it had been a con
cession to her father. Ever since the death of her mother, her
father's concern for her safety had become an obsession with him.
When she had moved into her apartment, he drove up from
Tuscola with all of his tools and spent a weekend reinforcing the
deadbolts, putting bars on the windows, caging her in from the
outside world. The people who lived in the apartment across the
air shaft - an extended family of Brazilian immigrants - spent most
of that weekend gathered in the living room, almost as if for a
family portrait, staring in astonishment as the Governor of Illinois
dangled halfway out of a sixth-story window sinking bolt hole after
bolt hole into the brick window frames with a massive three-
quarter-inch electric drill that he had borrowed from one of his
farmer cousins.

The next time her birthday rolled around, Dad had given her a
small, neatly wrapped box. Mary Catherine had been embarrassed
and flushed with gratitude, thinking it was a necklace - and coming
from Dad, it was sure to be too formidable to wear. But when she
had gotten it out of the box, it turned out to be a stun gun instead.
A fitting weapon for a neurologist.

Dad had never observed any limitations on his life. He saw
nothing remarkable
 
in
 
assuming
 
that
 
one
 
day
 
he
 
would be
President of the United States. He had always assumed that Mary
Catherine would feel the same way. He always told her that she could do anything she wanted with her life, and while she never
doubted him, she always took it with a grain of salt. And when he
first became aware that, as a woman, she was in danger in ways that
he was not, and that this danger limited what she could do, he was
deeply troubled. He refused to accept it for a long time. But he was
starting to understand and was trying to find ways to exempt her
from the regulations that society imposed on all women. Because,
goddamn it (she could hear him say), it just wasn't fair. Which was
all the reason he needed to do anything.

She was halfway to her car when her beeper detonated, scaring her half out of her scrubs. She had been awake or virtually awake for
thirty-six hours and was running on a lean, rancid bland of caffeine and adrenaline. One reflex told her to grab the beeper and push the
button that would make it shut up. The other reflex told her to pull
the trigger on her stun gun and get it up into the solar plexus of any
bad guys who might be in her vicinity. The reflexes got a little c
onfused and the two little black boxes collided, the stun gun and the beeper, and the stun gun won; the beeper went silent.

 
(a) This was no time to stand still and figure out the problem and (
b) as of thirty minutes ago, she was no longer on call. This had b
een a mistake on the part of the operator. She had paged the w
rong doctor. Sooner or later, they would figure it out, they always
did. Right now, Dr. Cozzano needed to get home and sleep.

When she got back to her apartment, her answering machine w
as taking down a message from a man whose voice she did not re
cognize. She just caught the tail end of it as she was coming th
rough the door: ". . . condition is stable and he's under the p
ersonal care of Dr. Sipes, who of course is a very fine neurologist, T
hanks. Bye."

She recognized the name Sipes; he was on the faculty of the
Central Illinois University College of Medicine and he showed up at all the conferences. Apparently this call had come from down-s
tate, where some colleague had a question about something.
Didn't sound urgent; she would call him back later. She turned
down the volume on the answering machine, locked all of the locks th
at Dad had installed to keep her safe, fed the cat, and went into t
he bathroom.

There was a mirror in the bathroom. Mary Catherine had not
looked in a mirror for something like a day and a half. She took this o
pportunity to see if she still recognized herself.

Her father was the Governor of Illinois, which meant that this face of hers showed up on television and in the newspapers with so
me regularity. She had to look respectable without being dowdy.
She was also a doctor, so she had to look smart and professional. She w
as a resident, so she had no money and couldn't spend any time at all worrying about how she looked. And she was the product of a
small town in Illinois and had to go back there every couple of w
eeks and not seem uppity and strange to her old Girl Scout c
hums.

Once you left the city limits of Chicago you were in Big Hair
Territory. Mary Catherine had been the only girl in her high school
who had escaped the syndrome. She had extremely thick, black, luxuriant Italian hair with a natural wave that, during the humid
summers, turned into a curl. She would have preferred to shave her head for the duration of the residency. Dad was never happy unless
she let it grow down to her waist. In compromise, she had settled on a cut that let it hang just above her shoulders.

She showered and climbed into bed with wet hair. A few bits of
mail had arrived, notes and cards from friends and family members
in other parts of the country, and she leafed through them by her
bedside lamp. Her eyes could not trace the handwriting, and the
contents penetrated her brain only feebly. It was a waste of time.
She reached to turn off the ringer on her telephone, but discovered
that it was already turned off. She had probably turned it off the
last time she had attempted to get some sleep, whenever that was.
The time was 9:15
p.m.
She set her three alarm clocks for five
o'clock in the morning. She tossed the pager and the stun gun on
to her bedside table. The pager no longer responded when she pushed the TEST button. Apparently the stun gun had fried its
microchips.

When she woke up, the bedside clocks all read within a few
minutes of 9:45 and someone was pounding rhythmically on her
front door with a heavy object. For a moment she thought she had
overslept and that it was 9:45 in the morning, but then she realized
that it was dark outside and her hair was still wet.

It sounded like someone was trying to break in with a sledge-
hammer. She pulled on jeans and an ILLINI sweatshirt, went to the
door, and peered out through the peephole.

It was a cop. The wide-angle view in the peephole made his
body very large and his head very small, amplifying his already cop-
like appearance. He had a hug L-shaped billy club in one hand and
was patiently ramming the butt of it into her door. Standing behind
the cop was a man in a trench coat with his hands in his pockets. He was shorter than the cop, so that the peephole magnified his
face rather than his body. It was Mel Meyer.

"Okay!" she shouted. "I'm up." She sounded cheerful and ready
for anything, even though she was neither. Women of the prairie did not bitch, nag, or whine.

Then she thought: Why is Mel here?

Dad had as many lawyers as a mechanic had wrenches. He
embodied a large business, a fortune, a few charities, and the state
of Illinois, and lawyers came with all of those things. They were
always around. Always calling Dad, taking him to dinner, coming
over to his house with papers to sign. Sometimes she couldn't tell which were his friends, which were his business associates, and
which were actually representing him. To Mary Catherine, lawyers
had always seemed as common as air, the taxi drivers, bag boys, and janitors of the world of affairs.

But if all those other lawyers were William A. Cozzano's army, then Mel Meyer was the stiletto strapped to his ankle. Mel was the e
schatological counselor of the Cozzano clan, drafter of wills, ex
ecutor of estates, godfather of children, and if the whole world turned to decadence and strife one day and civilization collapsed, an
d Dad were trapped on a hilltop surrounded by the heathen, Mel w
ould shoot himself in the head so that Dad could use his corpse as a
rampart. He was small, bald, rumply, tired-looking, lizard-eyed, an
d didn't talk much, because he was always thinking everything o
ut two hundred years into the future.

And now he was standing in her hallway, with a cop, quiet and m
otionless as a fire hydrant, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, st
aring at the wallpaper, thinking.

She undid the locks and opened the door. The cop stepped aside, cl
earing a wide space between Mel and Mary Catherine.
"Your pa needs you," Mel said. "I got a chopper. Let's go."

Springfield Central had started out as your basic Big Old Brick H
ospital with a central tower flanked symmetrically by two slightly sh
orter wings. Half a dozen newer wings, pavilions, sky bridges, and parking ramps had been plugged into it since then, so that lo
oking at it from the window of the chopper, Mary Catherine co
uld see it was the kind of hospital where you spent all your time wa
ndering around lost. The roofs were mostly flat tar and pea-
gravel, totally dark at this time of night, though in areas that were
perpetually shaded, patches of snow glowed faintly blue under the
starlight. But the roof of one of the old, original wings was a patch
of high noon in the sea of midnight. It bore a red square with a
white Swiss cross, a red letter
H
in the center of the cross, and some
white block numerals up in one corner. Well off to the side, new
doors - electrically powered slabs of glass - had been cut into the
side of the old building's central tower.

It made her uneasy. This wasn't Dad's style. As the governor of one of the biggest states in the union, William A. Cozzano could
have lived like a sultan. But he didn't. He drove his own car and he
did his own oil changes, lying flat on his back in the driveway of their house in Tuscola in the middle of the winter while frostbitten
media crews photographed him in the act.

Zooming around in choppers gave him no thrill. It just reminded
him of Vietnam. He took this to the point where he probably
wouldn't have known how to get a chopper if he had needed one. Which is why he had to have people like Mel, people who knew
the extent of his power and how to use it.

"We have limited information," Mel said, on the way down.
"He suffered an episode of some kind in his office, shortly after
eight o'clock. He is fine and his vital signs are totally stable. They
managed to extract him from the state-house without drawing a
whole lot of attention, so if we play this thing right we may be able
to get through it without any leaks to the media."

In other circumstances, Mary Catherine might have resented
Mel's talk of media leaks at a time like this. But that was his job.
And this kind of thing was important to Dad. It was probably the
same thing that Dad was worrying about, right now.

If he was awake. If he was still capable of worrying.

"I can't figure out what the problem would be," Mary Catherine
said.

"They're thinking stroke," Mel said.

"He's not old enough. He's not fat. Not diabetic. Doesn't
smoke. His cholesterol level is through the floor. There's no reason
he should have a stroke." Just when she had herself reassured, she
remembered the tail end of the message she'd heard on her answer-ing
machine, the one that mentioned Sipes. The neurologist. For the
first time it occurred to her that the message might have been about her father. She felt a sick panicky impulse, a claustrophobic
urge to throw the helicopter door open and jump out.
Mel shrugged. "We could burn up the phone lines getting more info.
  
But it wouldn't help him. And it would just create more pot
ential leaks. So just try to take it easy, because in a few minutes we
'll know for sure."