“Higher-up had a big stunt planned for just a week later, and the bright lad in charge of the mining realizes there is no way on earth that they can dig a hole big enough in a week to hold all the gun cotton they need to blow Fritz out.
“So he suggests using ammonal, like they’d use in the coal mines. Harder to handle, but more powerful, you can put less in, see? All very well, but the supply master has no notion what manner of thing ammonal is. They’ve never encountered it before. He asks a chemist friend, and receives this reply…”
Laura paused, grinning. The room was listening, rapt. Jones gave her a look.
“A medicament, says he,” Laura resumed. “For the lessening of sexual desire.”
The room broke up into laughter.
“Now,” said Laura, “I do not know what the reaction of the supply master was, or if he asked what they were doing in Hooge to require so much of the stuff—”
More laughter.
“—but,” said Laura, “they did blow Fritz out, in the end, so someone must have straightened it up. Eventually.”
There was a chorus of laughter and indelicate suggestions. Pim looked scandalized. Jones surprised Laura by barking a laugh, shaking his head. Laura had finished Trovato’s dressing. His head fell back against the pillow. His sprouting beard was stark in the clammy hollows of his throat, but he was smiling too.
The next patient was an attempted suicide, and he was going to die.
Laura didn’t need Jones to tell her. She could see it in the angle of his wound, and the color of his face. Hear the stertor. From the look of things, he’d put the rifle under his chin, tried to fire with his bare toes. “What’s his name?” she said.
“We don’t know,” said Jones. “He came in such a mess. No tags.He kept shouting a name though. A girl’s name. It was all he’d say.Mila,he shouted.Mila.Maybe he shot himself for her, who knows? But we’ve been calling him Mila, for want of anything better.”
Trovato had turned his head to watch. “Poor bugger. Saw the fiddler. Couldn’t stick it. Some say he takes their souls. But maybe the war’s already done that.” Laura had given him morphine; he was rambling.
Pim had been sponging his face; her cloth stilled and she said, “But who is the fiddler, sir?”
Laura found herself listening intently, although she didn’t look up. She had to shake off an involuntary sense-memory, like something dreamed in fever, of the rising cry of a violin, the heavy smell of wine.
Trovato muttered, “There’s all sorts of stories, but none of them’s right for a girlie like you. Fiddler’s for the likes of us. If a man wants to risk it—well, that’s for him to decide. But you—stay away.”
“Sir—” Pim began, but Jones said, “Let him rest, Shaw.”
Laura had questions of her own. But Mila’s wound distracted her. It was as though the doctor hadn’t…She finished the dressing and glanced with some surprise at Jones.
He looked strangely uneasy. Finally he said, “A word, Iven.”
Laura followed him across the hall and into the sterilization room. Jones shut the door. He was watching her. Finally he said, “What do you think?”
“His prognosis? Poor,” said Laura. Cautiously, she added, “It would have been better if he’d gone into surgery straight off. Or at all.”
Jones said nothing.
She added, more carefully still, “I noticed that he hasn’t.”
“No.”
“Strange,” said Laura. “Since I suppose they told you to do your best to save him.”
“They did.” They would have. Suicide was a capital offense. The army didn’t want men justgetting awaywith it. No, they had to besaved so they could stand up and face a firing squad. Maybe Jones was sounding her out because he thought she’d be—shocked, that he was going against protocol, letting a man die in bed? Lord. Poor Jones. A few months ago he had probably been doing surgery in a clean Boston hospital, far from the stew of competing ethics and ad hoc morality that was a military hospital.
“I want us to understand each other,” said Jones stiffly.
“I think we do,” said Laura. “Poor man. No hope. Couldn’t be saved, despite your best efforts.”
They looked at each other. Suddenly Jones’s face relaxed; his lips twitched. “You’ve seen men like him before.”
“I’ve seen a lot of things,” said Laura.
