Privates

By Dan Shine

Grace Paine, eccentric statistician, and Amir Baum, new medical intern, see their romance caught up in an ever-bloodier power struggle for Manhattan’s leading hospital. Who brutally murdered the hospital’s young vice president, found “mostly on the floor?” A Hasidic sect from Brooklyn is clearly bent on taking over. But New York’s banking elites seem to have their own plan. And who is the distant figure pulling strings? As bodies pile up around them, Amir and Grace must find themselves and each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Opal Books
• Release date: Oct 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644372500

Book preview

Chapter 1

Day one—July 1

White coat and stethoscope in his backpack, heart expanding in his ears, mouth chalk.

Lookit, all I have to do today is get through today is all.

Amir Baum stepped into the self-revolving door at the hospital’s street entrance. Half way around, with a shudder and then a jolt, the door suddenly didn’t self-revolve. Stuck. Amir was trapped in a wedge of glass, a line of people forming behind him out on Manhattan’s busy Second Avenue.

He stood there a second, unbelieving that famous and formidable College Hospital and Medical School could really be blocked off from the world by so silly an obstruction. And then it dawned on Amir that in the first five seconds of his stupid internship he was the obstruction. A clog. Ugly hairball in the drain. Amir grew up small town. Afraid of attention. A thing like this felt like fate. Inevitable, even just, to this little, dark, half-an-Arab.

Push! Push! from outside the building and inside, but pushing was no use. Door’s stuck! Door! Door! but nobody was coming. So, what, some kind of electric eye thing? Amir wondered. He squatted down, counted five, and got up. Nope. Must be weight thing? Amir’s hands and feet supported him for a few seconds between the walls of glass, getting him just off the ground. And yes! The door began to move, but knocking him over and shooing him along, now unstoppable. New doctor Amir Baum crawled his first official entrance into College Hospital, on hands, on knees, entangled in his back pack, ending up on the carpet of a very formal, three-story atrium.

This was a hospital and medical school that went back nearly two centuries. Highly regarded nationally. Known internationally for its science and history. The atrium was brand new. A large, round, and free-standing entrance whose only apparent purpose was to let you know, before you went another step, that College Hospital and Medical School took its achievements very seriously.

Getting to his feet, Amir looked out upon an acre of upscale drawing room. Subtly patterned carpet, meticulously clean and dotted with gently worn leather arm chairs or couches placed singly and in clusters. Distressed coffee tables with folded newspapers. Old filaments glowing in antique floor lamps. Nothing fluorescent, all sepia burnished. Far closer to a refined gentleman’s club than a hospital entrance.

Huge fitted stones, castle-like, made up the wall of this circular atrium. Evenly spaced on the cut granite were portraits of important men, framed in gold, frock coats, long dead. Still more portraits surrounded the whole circumference over Amir’s head, in a gallery clinging to the granite and fashioned from hand cut wood. Above that gallery, flags, heraldic or military circled the space yet again. And way above, on a painted cupola, muscular gods in togas gestured to each other.

Baronial. But just where the carpet ended—three hyper-modern gateways. Soaring naked steel. Stamped black tubes. Ducts. Acrylic. Above each gateway, an industrial laser had burned right through the exposed girder to carve one huge word, dripping molten steel. Docere, entrance to the medical school, Curare, to the hospital, Discere, to the research building. Here venerable College Hospital passed the baton to its techno-destiny.

Well sure, Amir conceded as he took all this in, very whatever.

None of it had been there when he interviewed the year before. He remembered that first visit vividly, the applicant tour. A troop of blue suits, black business skirts, white shirts for everyone. But those interviews? Complete opposite of all this. That folksy floor where the dean was. That distracted dean shuffling in and out of his shabby office. The conference area? Jeez, painted-over wall anchors. Indents in the paint where cages for a blood pressure cuff used to hang. Well, he had liked all that. He liked the kind, big, hoarse Roz Yasner, secretary and Brooklyn kvetch. She gave him a Tootsie Roll and rasped in his ear, Don’t worry, sweetheart, we’re pussy-cats.

But mostly it had been those interviewers, old private docs who worked in their own offices and cared for their own patients in the hospital. White men all, but Amir grew up on that. Stretched-out suit pocket where a now antique stethoscope had been fetched and stuffed so many times. Wrong tie for the suit, chosen in the early dark. What those guys were all about was doctoring. By example but exactly, they told Amir just what he wanted to hear. That everything else—like this frou-frou hospital entrance—was pointless without the daily and passionate practice of medicine.

Chapter 2

Grace’s new office—July 1

A security revamp had followed the murder of Nancy Cunningham-Suarez. Administrative personnel moved up onto the second floor, all together and behind a receptionist. A new administrators wing replaced the messy scatter of offices. This was something College Hospital’s new dean had been looking to do even before the murder. And now rooms became vacant that had been grabbed here and there for new hires over the past twenty years. Of course, clamor for these offices left behind was instant and loud.

So, it was actually odd, since she was the cause of all that new space, that no one thought about Nancy’s brutal dismemberment as creating an available office. No one except Dr. Norman Bettle. He swooped in on the very day of the hospital president’s formal eulogy, the office still sealed off with yellow plastic tape. Bettle was head of a statistics department at College Hospital that already had divided and re-divided its small floor. He despaired of finding Grace Paine any office anywhere within five blocks of the medical center.

But now, new owner of this gory prize, Bettle was able to phone Grace with news that space would be available for her when she arrived. He was afraid it would have to be over in the hospital, across the street from his main statistics area, but ready to move into as soon as they had just tidied it up a little. There had been an upsetting event there. He might just as well tell her about it now. Did this concern her? He thought she should bear in mind just how hard any space was to get in a medical center.

Police take their time, but within a month, and on schedule, for Grace’s start date the office was Bettle’s. Housekeeping dealt with dried liquids and any solids on the surface. Maintenance sent a team to excavate Nancy’s office floor, past the saturated carpet and subflooring into stained concrete. Purchasing carted away the coated desk, the bookshelf, the artwork, the ficus, and both chairs. They contracted for the walls as well as affected parts of the ceiling to be scraped down, professionally sanitized, and repainted. And then Housing Services redecorated.

But there was some mistake. Nobody checked paperwork. They just went ahead and restored Nancy’s office back to the level of an assistant vice president. So, assistant vice president carpet, Berber. Art, almost oil. Plant, man-sized tropical. And, of course, furniture—a matching suite, a stylish credenza, and a bookcase made of real wood. Norman Bettle, surveying this error with amusement, did not feel much inclined to point it out. Of course, all this was absurdly above Grace’s pay grade as a junior statistician just out of grad school. She was supposed to get a cubicle.

Only Did It, the Delivery and Installation Division of IT Customer Services, was empowered to replace Nancy’s computer, and nobody was surprised when Did It failed to arrive, because they so seldom Did. So, Nancy’s old machine was Cloroxed and left there. This too, unfortunately, was Assistant Vice President issue. And it was the baby computer that Grace chiefly noticed early on her first day. Her new boss, after escorting Grace across the street with great nonchalance—to give no hint of what was to come—flung open the door of this spectacular office and took a big step back for the magic of it to wash over her. But…would Dr. Bettle, see about upgrading the computer?

Miffed Norman Bettle departed with this assigned task from his very junior hire. And Grace settled into her new, ergonomic, black hyper-nylon, executive chair.

So. Could an office be haunted?

Ghost or not, this fancy new office was the place where she would work. Here she would help with Bettle’s NIH grant project investigating rates, sources, and degrees of error in producing medical statistics. It was very far from the rarified job that her disappointed mentor at Stanford, Pascal Bower, had offered. But error was certainly familiar ground. Grace’s PhD thesis had discovered and described an additional and incalculable error introduced into any statistical statement by the mere attempt to calculate error at all. She got a big prize for it.

So, her work at Stanford was far larger, technically much more complex than this practical project of Bettle’s. But there was certainly crossover between the two. Grace would take on some departmental tasks also, like running the Stats for Dummies online course and handling requests from the basic sciences for statistical support. It was a job. It was in New York. It paid okay. But really she was here because of Amir, her new boyfriend. Well, her first boyfriend. Well, more. Her first living friend. Anyway, it was Amir who had brought her from Stanford to New York.

The idleness of the first day in a new office is always something of a guilty pleasure. Opening and closing new drawers, considering whether to live with the art or get rid of it, watering the giant bush out of paper cups. Tahiti, that plant gamely called from its sunny corner, but the tag said OfficeMax. Grace had saved some of her collection of little shiny computer disc drives for the office. Most of them decorated their living room at home. Home? Is that what that was now?

Laying out her drives on the desk, Grace wondered what Sparky might think of living here. No, she would hate it. Here they could never have their productive conversations. Like they did at the apartment when Amir wasn't around. Because even Amir might not have been okay about the far-ranging discussions Grace carried on with her home-built computer. Sometimes debates and sometimes loud and angry arguments. She had built Sparky to have large calculating power, but also—part of Grace’s plan in designing her—an indirect, you could say intuitive, approach to problem solving, as a complement to Grace’s stepwise process. But somehow, unfortunately, unintended, over time, Sparky wound up with more than an intellectual style. She picked up a lot of raunchy attitude. Sparky even got nasty in a way that made her sometimes just impossible to talk to.

Grace went to log on using the computer that was there. Even a month later, murdered Nancy Cunningham-Suarez was not yet deleted from the system. Her machine still mapped to the location of that office, so up came Nancy’s login screen. User and password were set to be automatically filled in. "Never do that!" Grace said aloud to the specter of Nancy Cunningham-Suarez. Really, who could resist a peek. Morbid lure beckoned Grace on. And she wasn’t the first. The police had certainly been all over Nancy’s e-mails and stored files. The traces of that clumsy search were obvious.

Amazing what you can learn just from an in-box. This dead person had been the assistant vice president responsible for food services and for relationships with the hospital’s private physicians. She also had taken on responsibility for the newborn nursery, and most recently there were congratulations from the chairman of medicine for becoming assistant vice president of his department too. And she was backup administrator for pediatrics, obstetrics, surgery, and orthopedics. Nancy’s corporate sash seemed to be filling pretty fast with badges just before she died. She must have been ambitious.

And, Jesus, look at that…young.

She had a Volvo with problems. She’d ordered from chachka catalogs. Seemed like her death left National Public Radio ten dollars a month short. And an empty seat at the New York Ballet. And the girls’ soccer team without an assistant coach. So, what was this about rumors? And here again, rumors. Nancy didn't say what kind of rumors.

Chapter 3

Busy-ness—July 1

Grace, said Norman Bettle, beckoning, come on in. A youngish, thin man, tall even sitting down, and dressed for the Adirondack Trail, Bettle smiled welcome. So? How are you settling in? Do you have your lunch assignment yet?"

Lunch assignment? asked Grace.

"Wait and see. I won’t spoil it. Wanted to chat a little about your part in the errors grant. It isn’t going to be the level you’re used to. I mean, you know that. But we have done some nice work. So, I guess I think we have."

I read the grant proposal. Or the scope section anyway, she said simply.

Well, the part I need some help with is error calculation and defining categories of error. The denominator I think we have.

Denominator? asked Grace.

Well, we’re measuring errors in medical data. But we want that measurement as a rate, not just a number. The busier a hospital the more errors there are, so I need errors per unit of hospital busy-ness.

Grace nodded.

And we’ve gone ahead and figured out ways to measure just how busy the place is moment by moment. I think it works.

How? asked Grace.

"Well, computer usage. Nothing happens any more that doesn't need a computer. At the main hospital servers, it’s easy to do. We just capture instructions per second, how busy the servers are at any one time. But Jeremy—you’ll meet him—came up with this other idea of also measuring how busy each individual is. Each computer. Each person logged onto the computer. That way we can tell what kind of a person is doing work at any given time—a doctor, a nurse, an administrator. Right? How cool is that?" He beamed at Grace for approval.

Uh huh, she said.

Sad to say, Bettle breezed on, none of that was written into the grant budget. So, had to be cheap. I mean we couldn't go and put some kind of counter on every one of ten thousand machines. Bettle paused with a smile. "Alright then. So how do you think Jeremy solved that little problem?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, Grace uttered loudly at a rapid clip as Dr. Betel explained all this.

You okay? he asked with concern.

Sorry, I’m fine. It's a tic. People get used to it. Or sometimes they don't.

So how did he do it? Bettle repeated proudly. Simple. Elegant. Forget it, you’re not going to guess.

Pushed out a virus, she said.

Virus?

Bet you called it an app. Measuring file size and key-strokes? Grace quickly supposed. Mouse clicks? Mapping to stored log-in information and reconciled hourly or whatever?

Okay, said Bettle, lapsing silent and looking down. So, that’s right.

Pretty obvious, Grace added helpfully.

Okay.

Just, you know. What else would there be?

"Anyway. Bettle nodded and reset. That’s not what I need help with. I want you to define, he said crisply, the kind of errors we measure, identified by type and by importance. I’ll give you what we have so far."

And complexity, added Grace.

What? Okay, yes, I guess by complexity too.

And recoverability, added Grace.

yess…

And discoverability, added Grace.

"Fine, he said a little loudly. So why don't you go ahead and make a list of error characteristics. Put in whatever you think we might want later."

"How do you want to handle my error?"

Your error?

Well, you read my paper. And you’re pretty good. Grace’s boss received his pretty qualified complement in silence. It might have been better if he had known that good to Grace always meant elite, revelatory, and rare. And that, to Grace, pretty was always an intensifier.

She left Bettle’s office with what she needed in the way of direction and now with access to all the grant material, including busy-ness archives, indexed by machine. For the first time, Grace found herself looking forward to the work. She crossed Second Avenue along with a lot of white coats going to and fro. She whizzed through the self-revolving door that Amir had such difficulty with—more to her amusement than his—and only a few steps past the curare portal Grace arrived at her office.

Might as well see how this busy thing works, she thought. So, okay, and how busy was my office-ghost on the days before she died? Grace played on Nancy’s computer for an hour.



The police couldn't really be blamed. You needed to know about Bettle’s doings, and you needed access and a little skill to get to the data. But it was pretty clear, if you looked, that Nancy Cunningham-Suarez hadn’t been busy enough. Her machine held too much material. More than the number and types of her key-strokes. The documents, downloads, emails, spreadsheets, and database queries, saved and deleted that Nancy produced did not account for everything in the machine. There was also what Grace thought you might call dark matter.

Grace’s office door opened suddenly without knock. A small, white-coated old man, monkish fringe around a polished dome, came half way into the room before he stopped. The man had something small that he held in the air between thumb and forefinger, and he peered around through thick black-framed glasses.

What do you want? demanded Grace. The words, blurted out, probably sounded angry.

He seemed surprised. I’m so sorry. I didn’t think. Of course. Apologies. Forgot… He withdrew backwards through the door.

Chapter 4

Tae Kwan Do

Twice a week, the chazn—everybody called him that—left his rabbi after ma’ariv, evening prayers, to teach at the academy. Mindful of possible consequences in leaving his rabbi alone, he varied days of the week. One such evening, more than three years before Grace and Amir arrived at College Hospital, the chazn packed his white uniform, took leave of Rabbi Boruch Bernsdorf, and walked the half mile to 13th Avenue and P in Brooklyn.

Excellent Tae Kwan Do shared space with Dance, Ballerina. It also shared an entrance with Fashion Ready Feet, a dusty shoe store with orange cellophane behind the store window. As usual, the chazn joined a line of mainly small warriors outside the door. Black, white, latin, young boys and some girls. Also, a group of the chazn’s fellow Hasids, a sect of intensely orthodox Jews. Those waiting on the street were all in their twenties, dark and gangly. One grown woman waited too. She was there three days a week, apparently in preparation for some looming apocalypse. They all stood watching through the plate glass as six-year-old ballerinas hopped around and made little hoops of their arms. Waiting until the flurry of pink tutus with their mothers and grandmothers hurried past those white battle uniforms and were gone.

Master Kyu Wan himself oversaw the beginning of each Excellent Tai Kwan do class. He had largely given up Excellence. His own sessions still dwelled on the philosophy of Tai Kwan do and taught the proper Korean name for strikes, defenses, and courtesies of the sport. But his assistant, the chazn, stressed combat only and used Yiddish commands. How did it matter, really? Kyu Wan’s master in Korea was dead. He was alone in this country.

Strange to see the chazn’s traditional Korean bow to his sa bum nin, and even stranger the chazn in Korean fighting gear. His tsitsit, a vest with fringe at its four corners that the observant wear beneath their outer clothes as commanded in the Torah, stuck out beneath the white jacket and black belt. Eighth Dan, awarded by a visiting grand master. His payis, long, curled hairs before each ear, were tied up in the headband. And on this white headband in stark black Hebrew, Adonai, my master, the Hebrew word spoken aloud in place of God’s written name, never to be spoken.

Kyu Wan nodded to his assistant and left the academy while the chazn’s group assembled one by one on the unrolled mat. As the last turned to face him, the chazn struck an immobile pose—warlike and graceful—and then placing hands on hips, white fighting pants spread apart, said in Yiddish,"Ufmerzamkayt!" Attention.

Boys and girls, and Hasids, and apocalypse woman, bowed as one, the woman crying out eagerly, Charyut! attention in Korean.

The chazn paired his class and ordered them to begin fighting. He wandered among them correcting a posture or suggesting lines of attack or defense. Hasids vigorously traded punches and parries. The apocalypse woman, matched with one of them, gave exaggerated battle with staccato cries in Korean. Trying to hide among the larger students, a young boy and his girl partner were slapping at each other, harmlessly and with giggles.

Wait, wait, wait, wait said the chazn, languorously but firmly. All the fighting stopped.

"Like this? No. Kum zhe, c’mon now. He faced the six-year-old boy squarely and assumed his battle stance, eyes steady, hands up—locked but loose, his bare toes curled. Attack me."

The little boy looked up at the Black Belt Eighth Rung and then around the room.

Now maybe? Said the chazn in his curiously high, dreamy voice.

The only place to attack within the boy’s reach seemed to be the chazn’s knees. He aimed a very reluctant little kick, and in much less than a second the boy was flat on his back.

Again, commanded the chazn when the boy got up.

Nooo, said the boy.

Then what? I attack you?

Nooo.

Sweeping his leg in a blur the chazn felled his opponent a second time, now with a hard fall. As the boy struggled up a second, time an arrow-straight shove, palm first, sent him flying against the matted wall. Fear in his eyes now, the boy spread arms in surrender. Pain began in them.

"Junbi," ready, shouted the chazn in Korean, and a warning kick hit the mat with a sudden burst of powder, an inch from the boy’s head. His partner, the girl, reached up and grabbed the chazn’s loose sleeve. He gives up, she said. He turned upon her, fingers straight and aimed down at her chest.

"Junbi" said the chazn again.

A murmur rose from all the Hasids in the room. Genick, enough. But instantly the girl lay on the mat, her nose bleeding a little and eyes closed. Unclear for a moment how badly hurt.

Here? said the chazn, picking her up and dropping her on her feet from shoulder height. Here we fight. A lesson.

He grabbed the little boy by his white jacket and planted him like a sack opposite the girl. So fight. You lose? he said, Then you fight me.

They fought, in tears, throwing punches and kicks that hit or missed, with desperate fury.

Good. Said the chazn.

You’ll thank him, the apocalypse shouted.

Throughout the rest of his class, the chazn kept wary eye on these two. Occasionally he strode over to them and stamped a warning foot "Na!" to renew their fear and energy.

He had attained high master status in this school that nourished his skills and made him hero of the Battle of Crown Heights. That was a great thing, and once he became protector there were no further attempts on Rabbi Bernsdorf’s life. The Tae Kwan Do money bought him clothes and dinner at Dina’s gedempte kich take-away. But often as not he left the academy unsatisfied with the play-acting, the children, the pretense that his deadly occupation was a sport. He felt a little like one of those pink tutu girls.



After the chazn left for his academy, Rabbi Boruch Bernsdorf emerged from a private library, tucked behind his public rooms, to face the brand-new Escalade. Alone at the wheel. His skills in this department were small. He had exercised them not ten times since the politically arranged, very forgiving, driver’s test years ago. For a decade, or more now, the chazn always drove. And these cars kept getting bigger and more complicated. Rabbi Bernsdorf’s enormous black Cadillac advised him constantly of mysterious things done wrong and many precautions not taken. Buzzers and bells warned about aspects of the car’s internal health that he did not want to know, could do nothing about. Even turning it on was hard. Now a car had no key?

Rabbi Bernsdorf pulled away in a jerk, too fast, but then crept below 15 best he could. Many course corrections as the wing mirrors of parked cars came at him on both sides. Stopping is not what you are supposed to do when they honk. They want you to go. But he couldn’t help it. Brake applications, they were called. The wipers turned on by themselves, sticking and squeaking, and it just made everything foolish and frantic at once. Finally, Rabbi Bernsdorf stopped this horrific spaceship as close as he was ever going to get it in front of the Glintzes’ apartment house. He took a deep breath. There was still the whole way back. You have arrived, said his car in English. "Mit gevalt," replied Rabbi Bernsdorf in Yiddish, with grief.

Eva and Alte Glintz were not expecting him. Dvoira was certainly not expecting him. In fact, nobody in Brooklyn in their right mind would expect a physical visit from the renowned Rabbi Boruch Bernsdorf. He climbed to the second floor and stood a moment before the apartment door, alone on the cracked tile, ordering his thoughts before pushing the button. Ding said the bell on press and dong on release. He could be anybody at the door. Rabbi Bernsdorf reflected on