Too Late

I have heard it said that the worst thing in medicine is not the wrong answer but the right one, arrived at an hour too late. I do not know who first said it. I believe that he must have been in a corridor.

They took him to the intensive care unit at University Hospital on the seventh floor, in a lift that stank of floor polish, with a paramedic kneeling astride the stretcher and a monitor shrieking in her hand. I ran beside it. I remember that the soles of my shoes slapped the linoleum. I remember a nurse in the lift saying, Nine-two over fifty. Nine-two over fifty. Get me two large-bore lines. I remember the doors opening on a bright cold corridor, and a man in blue scrubs, and the smell of antiseptic, and a swinging door with a round window, and then the door swinging shut, and my own reflection in the glass.

They let me stand in the waiting room. They gave me a cup of tea.

It was a quarter past midnight.

…

Let me set down the figures, since they are the only honest part of what follows.

He had taken the compound at four o'clock on the Sunday morning. He collapsed in my arms at eleven fifty-six at night. That was nineteen hours and fifty-six minutes. The window, as I afterwards learned, was thirty-six hours. I had, on that night, sixteen hours and four minutes in which to bring a certain substance into a certain vein.

I had it in my hand. I want you to understand that. I did not lack the means. I had a phone in my pocket with eleven photographs on it, taken in a cellar by a young man with a trembling finger: a glass tube, a stopper, a label, a lot number printed in blue. I had a name, a notebook, and a crate of amber ampoules in a federal evidence locker. I had, if I may say so, a mind that was at that moment trained upon one thing.

What I did not have was an order.

I stood in that waiting room and I said to the first nurse who came out, "He has taken a poison. I have the container. I need to speak to your toxicologist." And she said, quite kindly, "We'll get someone, sir," and went away. I said it to the registrar. I said it to the charge nurse. I said it to a man in a white coat with a name tag that read DR. PIERCE, who was on call for the poison service and was, at that moment, in the lift on his way up from the emergency room, where a woman had swallowed a bottle of pills. By the time he reached me it was five past two. By the time he had looked at my phone, and frowned, and said, "I'll need the compound identified at source," and picked up the telephone, it was twenty past.

Source, I discovered, was a locked evidence room in a federal building. The key was held by the Bureau. And the Bureau's duty officer, who was a decent young man named Pratt, explained to Dr. Pierce over a crackling line that the items were sealed under a chain-of-custody order signed by Special Agent Lang, and that neither he nor anyone below the rank of Assistant Special Agent in Charge could unseal them, and that Special Agent Lang was in the air.

She was in the air because I had sent her there.

…

I had not meant to. I would like that known. At a quarter to one, when the doors of the ICU had closed and there was nothing left in the world for me to do, I had gone out to the car park and telephoned Briona. I told her what had happened. I told her to come at once. I told her she would need to bring the lot numbers, and the notebook, and the crate. She said, I'm in Washington. She had gone down on the late shuttle for a briefing at the Deputy Director's office, to report on the day. She said she would turn round.

She was at the airport at half past one. She was in a car at half past two. She was in the building at ten past three and at the evidence room door at twenty to four, with a form in her hand and the face of a woman who has not been to bed.

And the thing about a federal evidence room is that it is run by people who have been taught, since the day they walked into it, that nothing may ever leave without a signature. I do not blame them. A chain of custody is a sacred thing. A chain broken is a case lost. It took Briona Lang, with all her authority, a little under three hours to persuade four separate officials to break theirs.

It was past seven in the morning when Dr. Pierce held the first sample of the thing.

By then Arlo had been in the unit for seven hours. He had gone into acute failure. His kidneys had stopped. He had been intubated, and sedated, and strapped to a machine that breathed for him. The doctors had treated him all night for a different poison, a common one, which he had not taken; they had done it because there was nothing else to do. By the time they knew what they were treating it was Monday, late in the morning.

It was hour thirty-one.

The antidote, Dr. Pierce told me, in a low voice, in the corridor, does not come in a bottle. It must be prepared. It takes ten hours at the very least. He had a pharmacist on the telephone; he had called in every favor he had. But the thing could not be hurried, and the window was thirty-six, and when he had added it up, standing at the window with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, he turned and looked at me with a face of such honest misery that I had to look away.

"It will be ready at hour forty-one," he said. "Give or take."

"The window—"

"It isn't a wall." He rubbed his eyes. "It's a slope. After thirty-six it's a steep one. I've seen people come back from forty. I've seen them come back from forty-five." A pause. "But their livers weren't his. He made it himself, Dr. Vaughn. It's a pure preparation. There's nothing in it to slow it down."

…

He woke on the Tuesday.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and I was alone with him. I had not been out of that building for forty hours. A nurse had made me a bed on the settee in the relatives' room, and I had lain on it fully dressed, with my shoes on, and slept in ten-minute pieces. At about three the sister put her head round the door and said, "He's asking for you."

I went in.

He was not what he had been. The tube had been taken out, a few hours earlier, for reasons the doctors explained to me and I did not follow. He lay propped on three pillows, with a green mask over his nose and mouth, and a frame of machines around him like a ring of watchful beasts. He was very thin. The yellow had gone deep into his skin. It was in his lips and his nails and the whites of his eyes. His breath came in short soft pants.

But his eyes were open, and they were clear.

"Doctor," he said, through the mask.

"Don't talk."

"It's all right." The mask fogged and cleared. "They said I could. Just a little." He lifted his left hand an inch from the sheet, and I took it. It was hot and dry and weightless. "They told me what it is. The man in the glasses. He said they can fix it."

"They are making it now."

"Good." A breath. "That's good. That's very well."

I said nothing. I could not.

"Don't look like that," said Arlo. "It's not your fault."

"It is entirely my fault."

"No." His fingers tightened a very little. "I put it in my own mouth. I knew what I was doing. I'm the only one who did." The ghost of a smile. "I'm rather proud of it, in a way. It's the first time in my life I haven't been at the door."

…

We talked a little. I shall not tell all. We spoke of the statement, which Julia Reyes had had typed and brought to the bed at noon, and he had signed, with a pen that Briona held for him, in a hand as small and exact as print. We spoke of Mrs. Penhallow. He asked whether the cat had been fed. I told him that it had; that I had gone myself on the Monday morning, at six, with a tin of tuna, and had stood in the yard in a drizzle and listened to the sound of the old woman weeping behind the kitchen door.

"Did she ask for me?"

"She asked whether you had eaten."

He laughed. It cost him; the pain was in his face. But it was a real laugh, a quick one, startled out of him. "Typical," he said. "Typical. Oh, I'm fond of her."

"She knows."

"Does she?"

"She told me that she heard you. On the night. She said she'd lain in bed and listened to the pipes."

He was quiet for a time.

"I should like—" he said, at last. "If it isn't too much trouble. There's a stone."

"I know."

"Cedar Hill. Section D."

"Row nineteen. I have already spoken to the superintendent." I held his hand a little tighter. "It will say Stella Marsh. Nothing else. I have given my word."

His eyes closed. When they opened again they were wet. "Thank you," he said. "That's the only thing I wanted. For her to have her name."

…

He died on the Wednesday morning, at four minutes past five.

I was there. Leo was there, in a chair by the window, with his coat across his knees and his cigar between his fingers, unlit, as it had been all week. Mrs. Penhallow was there. Briona had arranged it, against every regulation in the book: a hospital car, a wheelchair, a police matron to push it. She sat by the bed with a shawl round her shoulders and her rosary wound about her fist, very small, very straight, her clouded eyes fixed on the place where the sound of his breathing was. She had been told that he would not wake. She said she did not mind. She said she had waited fifteen years to sit with him.

The antidote had been given at last at eleven the night before. It was too late by exactly the margin that Dr. Pierce had foretold. The liver had gone, and the kidneys, and at three in the morning the heart began to falter. He did not wake. He lay with his face turned a little toward the old woman, and the green mask over his mouth, and the machine breathing for him in its long slow tide.

Toward five the breath changed.

It came farther apart. I counted, because I count: eleven seconds between, then fourteen, then twenty. The nurse looked at the monitor. Mrs. Penhallow's rosary stopped in her fingers.

And his hand, which lay on the rail of the bed, with a thing wound in the tape about it, moved.

I do not know whether he was conscious. The doctors say not. They say it was a reflex, the last discharge of a failing nerve. I have no wish to dispute them. I know only what I saw, which was a long thin hand with a yellow clip in its palm rise a quarter of an inch from the cold metal, and tap it.

Knock.

A space.

Knock.

A longer space.

Knock.

Mrs. Penhallow said, "Oh."

She had heard it. She put out her hand in the dark of her cataracts and found the rail, and her old knuckles, knotted and spotted, came down upon it.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Slow, slow, slow. Like someone saying good night.

The machine drew its long breath, and let it go, and did not draw another.

…

I walked out into the corridor, and Leo came after me, and stood a little way off with his hands in his pockets, and said nothing for a long while.

At the end, he said, "He did it for the right reason."

"Yes."

"They'll say that. At the trial. Whoever's left to try." He rubbed his face with a big, unsteady hand. "I'd have given him a medal. God help me. And I'd have put him away for life."

"I know."

"It isn't right, is it?"

"No," I said. "It is not."

The window at the end of the corridor looked east. The sky had begun to pale, a thin cold green above the hospital roofs, and a bird, somewhere, was trying out a note. I stood there with my forehead against the glass, and I thought of a number, and I could not stop thinking of it, and it went round and round in my head like a stone in a tin.

Hour thirty-one.

Hour thirty-one.

I had let forty minutes go by. For forty minutes I had sat across a table from a dying man and let him talk, and then I had spent twenty hours learning what forty minutes cost.

I had thought it was the right thing. I had thought it was the only thing. And I had been, in the strictest sense, correct; for the statement was good, and the cause was just, and the men who were named in it would answer.

But I could not make the sum come out.