Montaro Caine (10 page)

“Well,” said Dr. Mozelle, “since he isn’t here, and since time is of the essence, I’m going to tell you a story, one I very much wish he was here to listen to. Have you ever heard the name Hattie Sinclair?”

Montaro shook his head. “I haven’t,” he said.

Dr. Mozelle’s eyes seemed to glaze over and to focus on something beyond Caine. He rose slowly to his feet, took a deep breath, and then began pacing the floor as he went on to tell a story that, to Montaro, seemed almost as strange and wondrous as the coins themselves. For him, the story that Howard Mozelle related brought to mind not only the experience of encountering the coin when he was a young man at M.I.T., but also the lesson that he had learned as a child—that there is a great deal more to this world than we can perceive with our eyes. When Montaro began listening to Mozelle’s story, he had never heard the name Hattie Sinclair; when Mozelle was through, he knew that he would never forget it.

D
R
. M
OZELLE STOPPED PACING AND STOOD BEHIND HIS DESK TO
face Montaro Caine. Then he began the story Elsen and Anna Hilburn knew so well but had rarely spoken of in the past two-and-a-half decades. “About twenty-six years ago in the spring—on April seventeenth, to be exact—Elsen was diagnosed as having a quite fatal disease, a type of cancer that is usually unforgiving. To be brief, we explored every option open to us: cancer specialists, the usual institutions, the unusual ones as well. We even made ourselves available for experimental procedures, as long as they held out the slightest glimmer of hope.”

Howard Mozelle said that he had already received three pessimistic opinions about his wife’s prognosis when he arrived at the office of famed cancer specialist Dr. Rudolf Kempler. At first, Dr. Kempler’s prognosis was hardly different from the others that Howard and Elsen had heard from the previous physicians; the cancer had spread too far to respond to treatment, and the only option was palliative care.

“And you see no chance?” Mozelle asked. “None?”

“Early diagnosis is the key to what few victories we’ve had,” Kempler said apologetically.

“Dr. Kempler,” he asked. “Is there any research going on anywhere? Here? In Europe? Anywhere at all?”

“There is nothing that I know of that would reverse what I would characterize as a terminal situation,” said Kempler. “There is, of course, the Hattie Sinclair case, but there has been no scientific verification for the treatment she was supposed to have received, so that case remains little more than an intriguing dilemma.”

“What case was that?”

At first, Dr. Kempler seemed reluctant to tell Howard Mozelle the story of Hattie Sinclair, for fear that it might give the doctor and his wife unreasonable cause for hope. But after Mozelle pressed him, he told the story.

“Hattie Sinclair’s case was an intriguing dilemma out of which we have learned nothing, regretfully,” said Kempler.

“What intriguing dilemma?” asked Mozelle.

“She was cured.”

“How?”

“It’s a very bizarre story, Dr. Mozelle. I wrote a paper on it. It might be interesting for you to read. But again, I assure you, nothing about it can be applied to your wife’s situation.”

“Still, I’d like to hear about it if you don’t mind.”

The story Dr. Kempler told began in this way: Earlier in his career, Kempler had worked as a physician for a family named Gulkievaugh in Great Neck, Long Island, who employed a maid named Hattie Sinclair. Sinclair came from New Providence, one of the hundreds of islands that make up the Bahama Islands, and the seat of the Bahamian government. Sinclair’s family was typically poor and semiliterate and, at the age of seventeen, Hattie had come to New York and found her job as a maid with the Gulkievaugh family for whom she worked for fourteen years. She had ignored all the early warning signs of her disease, and when she finally did seek help, she went to an outpatient clinic at a local hospital where she was misdiagnosed. By the time the family brought her to see Kempler, she was terminal.

When Hattie finally understood that nothing could be done, she went back to her family to die. The Gulkievaugh family received a couple of letters following her departure, and from the contents of those letters, they understood that her condition was rapidly deteriorating. They heard no more from her and assumed that she had died.

But a year later, they received a phone call from Hattie. She said that she was in New York, she was cured, and she wondered if she could have her job back. The family couldn’t believe it. They were delighted, though shocked. They brought her to Kempler to examine her. He was unable to find any trace of the disease.

Sinclair maintained that she had been treated down in the Bahamas by a man with no formal medical training and none of the equipment necessary to ascertain the facts of her condition. The man lived on a virtually primitive island with a population of 150, and no running water or electricity. The only thing resembling modern accommodations on the island was a small tourist hotel in a remote fishing village. This particular gentleman lived a few miles away from that hotel in an isolated hut at the top of a hill.

One day after the terminal diagnosis Hattie had received from Dr. Kempler, her father had called and said he had made contact with this gentleman who would try to help her. Some family members were opposed to the idea because it would entail moving her to be near the stranger, but her father insisted and eventually took her to the island himself on a native sailboat, and left her there.

As Sinclair later described her treatment, the man, whose name was Matthew Perch, had boiled a variety of roots, leaves, and bark into a brew and fed it to her three times a day. Each feeding was a combination of different roots, leaves, and barks, which was all she ingested for three months. After that, he added solid foods to her diet, in addition to reduced portions of the brew for another two months. At the end of five months, she returned to her family in New Providence. They took her to a local hospital where she was examined and found to be free of the disease.

Baffled but intrigued, Dr. Kempler and some of his colleagues traveled to the Bahamas, hoping to meet with the man, but he refused to see them. Hattie Sinclair’s father interceded on their behalf, telling Perch that the doctors wanted only to talk to him. He refused nonetheless. The government was very supportive of Dr. Kempler’s efforts, but they were unable to provide any help. Finally, Kempler and his colleagues went to the island on their own, checked into the hotel in the fishing village, and found their way to the hut on the hill where
the man lived. They waited for four-and-a-half hours and were about to return to the hotel when he suddenly appeared, stepping out of the woods into a clearing to stare at them. As the doctors started toward him, he began backing into the woods.

“We’re doctors,” they called after him. “We only want to talk about Hattie Sinclair.”

But with a shake of his head, the man refused. The doctors begged him, tried to tell him of the importance of what he had done. Perch just turned and walked back into the woods. That was the last they saw of him. Kempler returned the next day and the day after that. But the man never reappeared.

Kempler later learned from Hattie Sinclair that Matthew Perch had been born and raised on that little island. His family history could be traced back as long as records had been kept on his island, which was not all that long, and the records were probably not all that accurate. He had attended a makeshift one-room school until he was twelve years old, at which time he went to work with his father farming tomatoes, root vegetables, corn, and peas. Apparently, a knowledge of root medicine ran in the Perch family; Matthew’s father dabbled in it and so had his grandfather.

Over the years, news of Matthew Perch’s gift of healing spread. Rumor had it that every sick person on Perch’s island wanted to be treated by him, but he nearly always refused. He had treated only eight people aside from Hattie Sinclair over the course of fifteen years, and he had treated each with a method different from the one he had used on Sinclair.

Kempler persuaded Sinclair to accompany him to the Bahamas one more time, with a list of questions for Perch, hoping that the man would answer if she were the one to pose those questions. In fact, Perch did see her, but he did not respond to any of the questions, and Kempler never learned anything further.

“It’s unfortunate that we were not able to obtain his cooperation because there might have been something we could have learned about in that combination of roots, leaves, and barks he used,” Dr. Kempler told Howard Mozelle shortly before he called an end to their meeting. “Or it could have been something in the solid food diet
he put her on, or the water, or her faith, or hell, even his personality or his attitude. It’s hard to say. Well, as I told you, it is a fascinating story. Not a very helpful one for you, though. I’m truly sorry about that.”

“But he did see eight people, even though it was over a period of fifteen years. He did see them, right?” Mozelle asked.

“Yes, he did.”

“And whatever their problems were, they’re still alive as far as you know, right?”

“We don’t know anything about them. But there’s no reason not to think so.”

The two men looked at each other in silence for nearly half a minute before Dr. Mozelle stood up and extended his hand to Dr. Kempler. “You’re right; it’s truly a fascinating story,” he said.

W
HEN
D
R
. M
OZELLE BEGAN RELATING HIS STORY TO
Montaro Caine, he tried to maintain a sense of calm detachment. But as he spoke of the first time his eyes met those of Hattie Sinclair, he couldn’t help but grow more excited. He had called Sinclair at the Long Island residence of her employer—finding her was not difficult, for there were few Gulkievaughs in the phone book. On the phone, she sounded cautious, but she finally agreed to come to his office.

“She walked into this room,” Howard Mozelle told Caine. “She was a tall, majestic-looking woman. About thirty years old, though she seemed older.”

Mozelle told Sinclair about his wife’s illness, and she said that she was sorry. But even after he pleaded with her to help him try to save his wife’s life, she said, “I just don’t think it would do no good, sir. That man never said one word to Dr. Kempler or any of the other people. Even when I went down there with them, he wouldn’t see them. If it weren’t for my daddy knowing his daddy, he wouldn’t have seen me either. Honestly, I’m truly sorry about your wife, and if there were something I could do, I would do it. I wanted Mr. Perch’s medicine to help other people too, but he’s a peculiar, stubborn man. The way he treated Dr. Kempler and the others was uncalled for, but that’s the way he is and nothing’s going to change him.”

Still, Howard Mozelle was unwilling to give up. “But Dr. Kempler and his colleagues wanted his secrets,” he told Sinclair. “I don’t. All those doctors and government officials must have seemed like the modern world coming to rob him of a sacred tradition. All I want is for a dying woman to benefit from that tradition. Please, Ms. Sinclair, I’d like you to meet my wife.”

Mozelle walked over to the door that led to the adjoining room, opened it, and beckoned for Elsen, who had been seated in a chair trying to read a magazine.

Elsen Mozelle had once been a strong, vibrant professor, but the woman who appeared before Hattie Sinclair looked emaciated and exhausted. Hattie gently took Elsen’s hand, and the two women sat quietly, looking at each other.

“Your husband tells me you’re sick like I was,” Hattie said. “I wish there was some way I could help you, ma’am.”

“You can,” Elsen said, her breaths short. “There is no guarantee that he will see me. I know that. And if, by chance, he would, there is no guarantee that he would be able to make me well, I know that, too. But I do want to live, and as small as this chance is, it is all that is left to me.”

“What is it you have in mind?” she asked quietly.

Little more than a week later, Hattie Sinclair was standing beside Howard and Elsen Mozelle on the bow of a rickety sixty-foot motor-boat that chugged among various islands in the Bahamas hauling cargo and mail.

The sky was a deep blue, without a single cloud in it. The little fishing village appeared to glisten in the bright sunshine as the boat approached the makeshift wharf on Perch’s island. During the course of her journey to the Bahamas, Mrs. Mozelle had grown noticeably weaker, though her face did radiate with a glimmer of hope. Dr. Mozelle watched over his wife, very much aware of how deeply he loved her and how much he feared losing her. Hattie Sinclair remained quiet on the trip; Mozelle assumed she was recalling her own boat ride to the island when she first met the elusive Perch.

The two women left the doctor behind and took a taxi from the hotel, driving along a dirt road into the interior of the island.

“Let us out at the sapodilla tree around the next bend,” Hattie instructed the perspiring, heavyset, middle-aged driver, who had subjected the women to very close scrutiny from the moment he had picked them up in front of the hotel, constantly observing them in his rearview mirror. He had seen Hattie Sinclair before. The first time she had been forty-six pounds lighter and near death. Now she had come in the company of a white woman, and from the looks of her, she may have brought her too late.

As instructed, the driver parked in the shade of the sapodilla tree and waited as the two women continued on foot around the bend to the bottom of the hill on top of which sat the secluded home of Matthew Perch. The walk was no more than two hundred yards, but the blazing sun, the humidity, and the stress of the trip were telling noticeably on Elsen. There was no human activity anywhere in sight, just the singing of birds and the humming of insects.

Hattie Sinclair had sent word to Matthew Perch through her family, saying she had to see him as quickly as possible, but she had no idea if he had gotten her message. She had made no mention of the other person she was bringing with her, and she worried about how Perch would react to the frail white woman standing beside her. She hoped he wouldn’t just walk off into the woods without speaking, though she feared that was exactly what would happen.