Animals: Chapters Eighteen, Nineteen & Twenty
WHEN SURGEONS OPERATE ON PEOPLE WHO DON’T NEED IT, HOW FAR WILL THEY GO TO PROTECT THE SECRET AND KEEP THE MONEY COMING IN?
Chapter Eighteen
The Oyster Bar at the Four Seasons sat off the lobby, down a short corridor that turned away from the main entrance with the practiced subtlety of a space that doesn’t want to be stumbled into. She asked at the desk and a young woman pointed her the right way with the smooth efficiency of a hotel that has decided directions are a hospitality service and should be delivered accordingly.
It wasn’t busy at one on a Friday. A few tables occupied, two men in suits at the bar with the posture of a lunch meeting that has gone longer than scheduled. She saw Gula at a high top near the window, an iPad on the table in front of him, reading with the self-containment of a man entirely comfortable alone in a room. Dark trousers, a light gray turtleneck, the same silver-framed glasses from Parc. No jacket this time. He looked, she thought, like the cover of something.
He looked up when she was still several steps away, which meant he’d been aware of her before he appeared to notice her, and stood and put out his hand.
“Dr. Gula, how are you?”
He nodded and gestured to the chair across from him. There was a large bottle of San Pellegrino on the table. He poured her a glass without asking, which she noted, the gesture of a man accustomed to assuming that what he prefers is what others prefer, and who is usually right.
“Please. Steven.”
She settled into the chair, draped her coat over the back, took a moment. The bar was quiet in the way of hotel restaurants at weekday lunch, the noise calibrated to conversation, the lighting even and undramatic, the whole thing designed to make people feel that whatever they were doing here was important and also private.
She leaned forward slightly and looked at him.
“I want to be upfront with you about something before we start,” she said. “I discussed what you told me last night with my supervisor at Chubb.”
She watched him. His expression didn’t shift. He picked up his water glass and said, without inflection: “I assumed you would have.”
