The Book with the Orange Leaves, page 1
Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
DEDICATION
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright 1942, renewed 1970 by Harry Stephen Keeler.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com
DEDICATION
To
DR. ADRIEN VERBRUGGHEN,
Neuro-Surgeon, whose scalpel has made possible this
and many other of the author’s books!
CHAPTER I
Confidential Information
As Stefan Czeszcziczki, rapid-calculator, ran lightly up the stone steps of Chelsington City’s Parkway Hospital this early afternoon, he felt a curious presentiment of evil and foreboding. A presentiment which caused him to reach automatically, yet fiercely, around in front of himself with his right hand, and to tuck, more carefully yet, into the side coat pocket of his dark serge coat, the end of that partly empty left sleeve—empty because of the missing left hand and wrist. And which presentiment was to become realized almost the moment that Stefan Czeszcziczki, rapid-calculator, stepped into the pillar-studded foyer where people were waiting the hour of 2 o’clock when they could see their loved ones.
For scarcely had he pushed open one of the 2 main doors, the glass of which reflected back to him another Stefan Czeszcziczki, 30 years of age, wearing a crumpled grey hat, a grey flannel shirt and black cotton tie, and stepped inside that foyer, than a man with cold blue eyes and hooked nose, who, with hands folded behind him, had been casually watching the afternoon’s hospital visitors, stepped forward and touched Stefan on the arm.
“Just a minute, Mr. Cze—Cze—”
“‘Zicky,’ most people call it,” said Stefan. “You are—Superintendent Hogleman?”
“Yes,” returned the blue-eyed, hook-nosed man coldly. “Zicky, you’ll have to have that girl upstairs operated—or get her out of here. This is a surgical hospital, you know; she’s been here 3 weeks since the diagnosis of brain tumor—or, specifically, tumor of the pituitary gland—was definitely confirmed, and the reports show that she’s rapidly getting worse. She’s got to—but what’s your business—er—Zicky?”
“Rapid-calculator—when I can get a chance to give an exhibition.”
“And what is it—when you can’t?” The hospital superintendent was gazing searchingly at that left sleeve of Stefan’s. And Stefan—almost defiantly—helped the other out.
“Yes, I’m one-handed—but not one-armed. Hand and wrist lost ten years ago due to blood-poisoning from getting sliced by the stiletto of a Sicilian holdup man I grappled with in St. Louis. That is, you understand, gangrene set in from the blood-poisoning, and hand and wrist had to be amputated. Oh, the holdup man was later hanged—because of killing another man who didn’t grapple with him!—so I suppose I’m revenged, since—anyway, Uncle Sam considers me today of zero use as a soldier—and machine shops doing rearmament work consider me a danger to others in ’em, and mark me out from any employment whatsoever in them, since—but,” Stefan broke off wearily, now that he had told these facts for at least the dozenth time this year, “you asked me my business—when I can’t get rapid calculating. Well, it’s naturally anything where I can lean on my stump forearm as well as the next man, and operate a pen with my right. In short: accountancy—bookkeeping—anything to do with figures.”
The other had heard him through, almost impatiently. And when the obviously last words of Stefan’s detailed and truthful explanation, consisting of “anything to do with figures,” were uttered, the hook-nosed man spoke forth hastily, irritably:
“Well then I don’t need to tell you what happens in the case of a tumor which increases daily in a geometrical proportion. If, for instance, the cells in this particular tumor your wife has, were doubling day by day, then—”
“I understand,” said Stefan miserably. “I understand—only too well—”
“You’re getting together the money, I suppose?”
“Yes,” said Czeszcziczki. “But—but $250 is a lot of money for a fellow who, right now, is only pinch-hitting in offices where an adding machine or so goes out of operation. I get $5 a day when I get sent out from the adding machine company—nothing, if I don’t.”
“We-ell, you can send the girl over to County Hospital, you know?”
“But my God, Mr. Hogleman, over there they—they just practice, don’t they—”
Mr. Thomas Hogleman merely shrugged his shoulders as a man who could not assume upon them all the problems of the world. “I can’t go into such things,” he said testily. “But you’ll have to get Mrs.—er—Zicky operated, or get her out of here. This isn’t a lying-in hospital, you know.”
“No, I—I know it. Well, I’ll bring all my efforts to bear at once. I—”
“Which one of our 4 men did you think you’d have? For I’ve talked to each. And each is willing to operate for $250. So which one have you thought to have? Dr. Duval, Dr. Cantrell, Dr. Mendy or Dr. Wane?”
“I—I thought to go into that when—when—”
“When you got the fee together? Yes. All right. See me—or come to some decision on it yourself. Ah yes, Mrs. Darby—” This to a fashionably gowned woman with diamond eardrops who was entering. “We can give you that suite now. Step into my office, if you don’t mind.”
Stefan Czeszcziczki did not take the elevator to get upstairs, but went up the sunny stairway that lay near it. In a trice he was on the second floor, and hurrying down the wide cork-carpeted corridor he was soon at a door numbered 202. He was just about to step in, when a whiteclad nurse stepped out. She was a woman of about 43, still pretty, with dark reddish hair.—“Why hello there, Mr.—”
“‘Zicky,’ I warned you,” he said, with a smile. “Don’t ever try to pronounce it!” He lowered his voice. “How is Damaris this morning, Miss Iliff?”
The nurse turned and looked painedly at the room she had just left. Then back at him. “Do you mind stepping up the hall with me, Mr. Zicky?”
“Wh-why no—not at all. No.”
She led the way up the hall, at least a hundred feet, to where an end window looked down over a vacant lot. On each side of them, wide-open room doors showed vacant, patientless rooms. The two were, therefore, quite alone.
“Mr. Zicky,” the nurse began, her face sorely troubled, “I—I want to be real frank with you. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking—you see, I’m going to be married next week—to a very fine man—I don’t believe I’ll ever be back in nursing again—for his income is plenty adequate to take care of me well—and he has a big life-insurance policy that will insure my support in case he’s ever taken away from me. And that’s why—why I’m going to talk to you now—as I am. For what I’m going to do now is lese majesté amongst the nursing profession. But I know you’ll respect a real confidence?”
“Why Miss Iliff, anything you tell me is absolutely confidential. Is Damaris–”
“Damaris is just about the same,” the nurse returned, “except, of course, that she’s a bit worse each week as that brain tumor increases in size—and pressure. So there’s nothing to tell you there. Except, perhaps, that she seems—now that we’ve passed well on into the Fall Season—summerlike though it still is!—she seems to have passed into that particular stage of such tumor growth as we call—but here!—I—I won’t permit myself to get technical. Mere medical terminology has nothing to do with what I’m really trying to get at.” She paused momentarily, and then drove directly to whatever she seemed trying to say, “Mr. Zicky, you’re in the process, aren’t you, of raising $250, for an operation for your wife?”
“Yes, I—I am. As best as a man can, that is—who is 100-percent excluded from all this lucrative armament work and all—because of being one-handed due to an old case of—but I’ve told you how I lost my hand and wrist years ago. So that’s that! And it—but answering your specific question. Miss Iliff, I am—yes!—trying to raise $250 for an operation on Damaris. Which—of course,” he broke off, “you know I own a $150 due-bill on this hospital, adequate to take care of her during all the post-operative care, plus nursing—”
“But you’re eating that due-bill up, aren’t you, holding her here—unoperated?”
Stefan bit his lip. “Yes. But—”
“Might I ask how you got this due-bill—which is good only, of course, for hospitalization here?”
“Why, from a magazine that took the due-bill in exchange for an advertisement of the hospital they ran. I did some—some publicity work for the magazine itself—put on some stunts, you know, along my line?—around and about the country?—at so much per exhibition, and travelling expenses? But the travelling expenses were all I eventually got out of it. For the magazine went broke. But did pay up my preferred claim for salary—with the due-bill they had. And my God, but it came in handy when I learned Damaris would have to go to a hospital.”
“Mr. Hogleman doesn’t, I suppose, like to honor it?”
“We-e-ell—”
“No, he doesn’t—but has to, under the law, However, the point is, I take it, that just now you’re trying to raise the $250 cash fee involved in the proposed surgery on your wife? Which has nothing to do with the hospital?”
“Yes. But I—I—”
“Well I won’t attempt to pry into the matter of how you’re making out on that—nor which of our 4 staff surgeons you have selected to do the job—or whom you’ve talked with; but I am going to tell you something, Mr. Zicky, that may shock you.”
“Wh-what—what is it?”
“Just this. If any of those 4 men—if, in fact, any surgeon whatsoever here in Chelsington City—does that operation on your wife, she is a dead woman!”
CHAPTER II
Surgeons and Surgeons!
Stupefied, Stefan Czeszcziczki stared at Elizabeth Iliff.
“A—a dead woman?” he exclaimed. “But—but why? The tumor can be reached. From what I understand, medical literature is full of cases where it’s been extirpated—yes, extirpated was the word. And—”
“I know,” agreed the nurse sadly. “But one thing they haven’t told you, Mr. Zicky, is that the operation should be done by a special type of surgeon. Not a general surgeon, Mr. Zicky—such as you’re about to employ. Not a general surgeon—like the 4 men of this hospital. Nor like any others in Chelsington City, so far as that goes.”
“But—but why not? Would a surgeon undertake to go into a person’s brain—if he weren’t able?”
The nurse smiled unhappily. “This is a terrible thing I’m doing,” she pronounced fearfully. “For it—oh, Mr. Zicky, you don’t know surgeons and surgery, When you’ve been anesthetist, and instrument-passer, and surgical nurse, as I have, in countless operations such as I have, you’ll find that the average general surgeon prides himself that he can do anything—go anywhere in the human body. But—but it isn’t the getting in, Mr. Zicky. It’s—it’s the getting out! Rather, the getting out and not killing the patient. Why—more patients than you could ever dream of, Mr. Zicky, have been rolled swiftly back to their beds after a horrible operation where the surgeon wasn’t capable of doing it properly, and made to do their dying there instead of on the table.”
“But all these 4 men are said to have said to Mr. Hogle—”
“I don’t care what these men said,” she declared emphatically. “Your wife’s case of tumor of the pituitary is so unmistakably diagnosed that these men need no neurological assistance to know where it is. Consequently, they’re willing to tackle it just as they would a—an intradural hemorrhage, which involves only a mere trephining of the skull. They—Mr. Zicky, did you ever see an operation of the nature of the one that has to be done on your wife—rather, ever know of anybody who saw one?”
“Why no—no. Nobody.”
“Well then, how long did you perhaps imagine it might take?”
“Oh—maybe an hour—with fast work?”
“My God!” the nurse said weakly. “The strange conceptions the lay public has on craniecto—Mr. Zicky, that operation can easily take up to 7 hours. Even if done by a competent neuro-surgeon. And—”
“Neuro-surgeon?” he repeated dully. “What—”
She shook her head despairingly. “A neuro-surgeon is a man who operates on only the brain and spinal cord. That’s his entire field. He does nothing else. That’s his life work. That’s—but I was about to tell you, Mr. Zicky: that particular pituitary-tumor operation required in your wife’s case has taken from 5 to 7 hours for neuro-surgeons alone. I have seen such a man—the finest specialist in New York—virtually in a state of physical collapse at the end of one such operation. It is one of the most difficult things ever attempted in surgery. It—why, do you realize that hours of work alone will probably be required to remove a huge dome of bone off your wife’s head and—but not to actually remove it—no!—to make it swing cunningly out of the operation field with enough bone-hinge to keep it nourished all through the operation? Why—the bleeding in the scalp alone, at that stage, will probably be so troublesome that the surgeon will be almost at his nerve’s end before he commences. Commences, that is, with the really terrific work. Do you realize, at all, the deep distance he will have to go in—and actually operate—to get that tiny tumor off that tiny gland way down in your wife’s brain—that tumor which is both blinding her and killing her? Such operating—with a lobe of the brain probably hanging right out!—and done with long fine instruments, requires the most dexterous skill. The clamping of brain blood vessels will be a huge job in itself—and a job for a man who knows how to put on every one. It—oh do you possibly think, Mr. Zicky, that a man who amputates arms and legs—takes out appendixes—even removes gall bladders—can do that sort of thing? Why, Mr. Zicky, I personally know that not one of the 4 men you have in mind to operate on your wife—nor any other surgeon in all Chelsington City, so far as that goes—has ever enucleated a tumor like that.”
“But why—why,” Stefan cried out, “are they willing—to try?”
“Oh,” the nurse returned, with the bitterness of complete disillusion, “because the egotistical fools—some, egotistical; the others just foolhardy, let us call it—because they think they can do it, that’s all! And death means nothing much to medical men. Any one of these 4 men you have in mind figures that by learning something of the difficulties of that operation now—on your wife—he’ll be more in readiness to try it again—maybe successfully then, as he fatuously thinks—when Mrs. Million-bucks comes along—with a like tumor—but ready to pay $10,000 for the operation. And here you are, Mr. Zicky, raising—and even desperately, I daresay?—raising $250 to have an operation done by one of several men who can’t do it!—who never have done it!—an operation that should—must—be done by a competent, skilled, and long-practised neuro-surgeon—if your wife is to survive.”
He was silent. Then he spoke, in a voice he did not recognize as his own. “If—if a neuro-surgeon did it—would she survive”
“If a neuro-surgeon did it,” the nurse replied calmly, “I’m sure she would. I can almost say I know she would. But only, I mean, if it were done by a neuro-surgeon who had done it many times—and not one who had just graduated from the elbow of another neuro-surgeon after a year’s practise in cutting off vertebral crests, in laminectomies, with a rongeur’s forceps—and all that. But if this operation on your wife is done by a general surgeon—oh my God,” Miss Iliff broke off, almost bitterly, “the—the despicableness of these general men—who know nothing of the structures they propose to attack. Thank God, I’m leaving the profession.” She clinched her hands. “I’ve seen murder done on the table more than once, Mr. Zicky, I—why less than a year ago, in St. Paul, I saw a general surgeon try to twist a mere surface tumor out of a brain—through a trephined hole too small to dissect it through—even if the butcher had known how to dissect one free—I saw him twist it out so that it came away a mass of bloody fibres and brain-tissue. The anesthetist looked up before the surgeon even had the tumor in the tray and said ‘He’s dead, doctor.’ I’ve seen—but oh—I can’t say any more.”
Stefan was silent. Waterfalls were roaring in his head.
“You’ve—you’ve shocked me,” he managed at last to say. “I—I suddenly realize—that what you say must be right. You wouldn’t do it—against the ethics of your profession. You—you have the goods, all right. You—but where—where can be found the nearest—skilled—neurosurgeons?”
“Chicago,” she replied sadly, “is the nearest. There are 5 there.”
“Chicago,” he echoed. And then: “But what’s more important, how much—how much would one charge—to come clear here?”
“That,” the white-clad woman answered, “is the part that will hurt you. It just happens that I happen to know that right now, because of a congeries of circumstances there, but one neuro-surgeon can be gotten. Only one. And that man, as I also happen to know, has just refused $900 cash to go to a town not even as far from Chicago as this—to operate. Because it was $100 short of the fee which he felt was correct and adequate.”
