What happens when a surgeon turns his eye from the operating room to crime fiction? In "Stone Hearts", Craig R. Smith, MD, cardiac surgeon and former Chair of the Department of Surgery, builds a medical caper rooted in transplant, intrigue, and the peculiar moral weather that hovers above and beyond the hospital.
Follow along each Friday as we release the novel one chapter at a time. You can also see more on Dr. Smith's Substack, Long Incision.
Spring, 1974
Jean wound patiently through the neighborhood streets back to westbound Canal Street, then turned right onto the West Street detour. At Gansevoort the twisted steel and scattered Belgian blocks from the elevated highway collapse refused to be hidden by darkness, like an arresting subscene in one corner of a Breughel. Just past the wreckage Jean drove up the entry ramp to the less damaged continuation of the old West Side Highway, uncharacteristically shifting at low RPM to avoid drawing attention. Reggie was frantic. “You’ve got to stop somewhere I can clean up!”
“In what sense?” Jean asked.
Reggie was not in the mood for drollery. “Take a wild fucking guess! As if you give a shit about my bad habits.”
Jean was feeling jubilant and guilty in almost equal measure and was eager to assuage. “No rush, partner! You hardly smell. You must have dried up pretty well on the walk to the car. And I’ve cleaned body fluids off that back seat before!”
It didn’t take long for Reggie to figure out he was being patronized. When the 57th Street exit came into view, he pulled himself forward between the front seats and said “There are a bunch of lakes in Central Park, right?”
Jean and Elias tried to look like they were pondering this comment respectfully. Jean spoke for the defense. “Sure there are, but the park is closed. All that’s inside is vigilantes chasing the muggers and rapists.” That jibe failed to produce the desired acquiescence. “So you want me to take a detour into the center of the island, and double-park somewhere with this trunk-full, while you hop over the wall for a birdbath?”
Elias couldn’t ignore being the one who’d recruited Reggie for a misadventure that wasn’t over yet. “I won’t pretend to know how you feel, but Jean is right, that’s not our best move. We need to get out of the city. Can you hold on another half-hour or so? And please, can’t you fasten your seatbelt?”
Reggie ignored his plea and flounced dramatically back into the bench seat.
The GTO was staying just below the speed limit, one of only a few cars gliding up the highway. Just north of the 96th Street exit they passed an NYPD patrol car hiding in the shadows on the muddy shoulder next to the soccer fields.
Jean jerked his head twice in that direction, to avoid visible hand gestures, and said “See what I mean? They’re everywhere!” He shifted his hips to reach his wallet, handed it to Elias, and said “Give him another two hundred.” Jean glanced towards the back seat to acknowledge Reggie. “I been thinking.” he began. ”We ended up doing a deal twice the size of what you signed up for, so I’m giving you twice your original fee. Plus another hundred for the extra day, and its…uh, complications. To be fair to a partner.”
Elias was handing four fifty-dollar bills back to Reggie as Jean finished his speech. Reggie grabbed it, crumpled it up, and threw it back into the front seat. “’Partner’ is it? ‘This team goes together in the team car!’ Partner my ass. I’ve got to get clean! Take me to Tubby Hook, I can get clean there, at the canoe club.”
Elias jumped into the argument, shaking his head in confusion. “What canoe club? What’s Tubby Hook?”
“Tubby Hook sticks out into the river at the end of Dyckman.” Reggie slumped and sighed. “The Inwood Canoe Club.”
“Never heard of either one!”
Reggie was straining to remain calm enough for conversation. “My parents put me in a summer thing there, in eighth grade. Racing canoes and kayaks. They hoped I’d kick ass and get recruited by Dartmouth.”
Jean pointed out “It’s the middle of night, we’ve got a car full of drugs, and that river is dirtier than you are!”
“Not in the river, you asshole! They have a couple big hoses on the side of the boathouse, for cleaning the boats. You guys are just like everybody else! You act like I’m stupid.” His voice quivered with tension. “I know some things! So get off at Dyckman and turn left!”
Jean was near the limit of his capacity for unselfishness. “Let me be more precise. This trunk holds years of mandatory time in the slammer as some skinhead’s bitch! For all of us. And Rockefeller ain’t lettin’ you off just because you shit yourself!”
If anyone could claim to hold the high ground in such a subterranean situation, it was probably Reggie, unaccustomed as he was to that lofty plain. Elias said “C’mon, Jean, I think we can meet him halfway. At least check it out. Probably closed anyway.”
Jean replied by easing the GTO down the exit ramp to Dyckman Street, downshifting quietly. With a show of disapproving body language he turned left toward the river. Reggie was preoccupied by trying to remember exactly where the entrance was, conjuring all the times he’d been dropped off and picked up by his Nanny, the voluptuous and teasing Andrea. He remembered his parents returning from their month in Majorca. Dad asked how he’d done—not if he liked it. “I don’t want to paddle anything, anywhere! Ever!” he’d said. “Dartmouth sounds just like prep school.” After that, they didn’t speak much before Reggie shipped out to be one of the new kids at his second boarding school.
The end of Dyckman was behind them as the GTO crept cautiously towards the river. The area captured in the stark glare of the headlights looked abandoned and overgrown. “To the left,” Reggie said, hoping he was correct. Indeed, they quickly arrived at a locked gate in a chain link fence, with a sign to one side that was made unreadable by darkness and shrubbery. It was not a good place to be in the middle of the night but they didn’t see anyone around, and they were a few blocks removed from the demimonde bars and nightclubs on Dyckman and Broadway. Reggie leapt out of the car and rattled loudly up and over the gate, with Elias and Jean in less motivated pursuit.
After the brothers surmounted the gate, the sound of feet running on boards drew their attention to a large, dark building looming in silhouette out of the shadows at water’s edge to the south. The footsteps stopped. They caught up to Reggie on a wood-plank walkway that ran along the north edge of a building sided in dark wood. The sounds and smells of the Hudson River wafted up from the east. Reggie was banging the nozzle of a large rubber hose against the wall in frustration. “Water’s not on!” he shouted. A similar hose hung on the same wall. Each hose emerged through a small port in the siding, with no faucets or valves in sight.
Groping to find something calming to say, Elias stated the obvious. “They must be turned off inside.” Reggie ran to a nearby door, and wrenched at the handle. Locked. They followed him around to the side facing the river, onto a broad wooden platform beneath a series of large bay doors. Reggie was yanking on the lift handles. Securely locked. The three partners stood still and looked around. Centered above the bay doors Elias noticed a heavily weathered sign that read “Inwood Canoe Club” in a faded, gold-bordered Nantucket-style font. Reggie does know some things….
Jean switched moods again and tried to calm Reggie. “You know we’re almost home, man! Can you hold out for another thirty minutes?”
Reggie was struggling to stifle sobs. A wide gangway led from the center of the boathouse deck down to a large floating dock that was creaking quietly in the river. Elias noticed that the gangway descended at a moderate angle, suggesting something in between high and low tides…Why is Reggie staring out there?
As if to answer, Reggie suddenly turned east and began sprinting down the gangway. Elias and Jean hesitated to follow at the same pace, unconvinced that even Reggie was capable of taking a bath in the Hudson River after midnight in early March, no matter what his state of mind. Elias shouted after him. “Are you outta your mind? You can’t see a thing!” Reggie was diving before they reached the dock.
They heard the splash and saw him break the surface ten to fifteen feet away. He was shaking his head violently and treading water. Ignoring their pleas, he turned west and started swimming away from the dock. Standing at the edge of the dock the air was colder, denser, and more odiferous. The water streaming past nearby pilings was producing impressive trailing riffles, proof of a strong ebb tide pushing south with the current. Reggie had been a respectable freestyle sprinter at one of his prep schools, and he was swimming fast and hard away from the dock, but the current was angling him sharply southwest. Elias kept trying. “Where are you going? Are you crazy? Get back here!” No answer, just the sounds of his splashing strokes, growing fainter, then gone.
Jean seemed paralyzed. Elias reminded his brother “Someone might be able to see your shiny car from the highway!” Jean said nothing. “Or someone could drive by!” Still no response from Jean. It seemed Elias was in charge. “Reggie is doing whatever Reggie decided to do. I say we wait two more minutes, by the clock, and if he doesn’t show up we’re outta here!”
About thirty seconds had ticked down when Elias saw a light appear on the river, gently bobbing, a few hundred yards south of the dock. Seconds later another light appeared, just above the first and moving with it, casting light and shadows that faintly outlined the deck and cabin of what he assumed was a boat moored somewhere south of Tubby Hook. Elias heard nothing but the murmuring river. No shouting, no splashing, no rhythmic swimming strokes. Was there something moving in and out of the light on the deck of the boat? He jabbed Jean in the shoulder and pointed at the new lights. They both froze and stared intently through the dark in the direction of the lights. All they could see were a few decrepit pilings weaving in the current. There were no more hints of movement on the faintly illuminated boat deck. Without discussion the two-minute plan was vacated, and seconds later they were back over the fence and gone.
By 04:00 Jean and Elias were in Jean’s apartment and the GTO had been unloaded. Elias felt clobbered with fatigue and lingering tension. He wasn’t sure where to start, how to apply the energy he had left.
“Where did you get the money?”
“About half from my college savings account. It’s lucky I’d converted all the bonds from the grandparents and parked them there at the end of last year. A loan from Silvio covered the rest.”
“Silvio?”
“He manages the diner over on the highway, in front of the water tower. You’d recognize him. He was working the grill when I came in—unbelievably lucky! I reminded him how I got him out of trouble with Diane’s parents. He gave me 30 days. We’ll be fine. Our net in the first month should easily cover Silvio. I’m almost glad Soriano talked me into the extra investment—now we can make three or four-fold on twice as much!”
“Investment? Talked you into it? Are you on acid?” Elias stood up and waved his arms at his older brother, who was still slumped in a kitchen chair. “This was a shakedown! He played us for the dumbasses we are! And what are we supposed to do about Reggie?”
Jean was slow to answer. “Like you said yourself, Reggie made his choices. We didn’t throw him in the Hudson. We tried to talk him out of it.”
“Sure, but what about his parents? Do they deserve to know what might have happened? Does anyone deserve to know?” Elias collapsed back in his chair.
Jean said “There’s a good chance his parents don’t even know he was in town, and no one’s likely to worry about him at Glassboro right away. And remember, we don’t know what happened. All we know is what Reggie did, all by himself. Over our objections.” He paused, shoulders slumped, his face reflecting the fight to recapture his customary brio. “God love him, he went for it, balls out! We don’t know how Reggie’s story ends. Not yet, anyway.”
Looking annoyed, Elias countered. “He went for what, exactly?”
“Like I just said—we won’t know until his story ends.”
“Shouldn’t we try to figure out what’s the right thing to do? Setting aside for the moment how this shit could blow up our lives forever.”
“I see, my noble young prince, you can set that aside? Sorry, I can’t. And this is your big brother speaking—you shouldn’t forget about that either!”
“I’m not saying it’s easy, or I know the answer. But if there is a ‘right’ here, what is it? Independent of all other considerations.”
“Ah, baby brother, I love you dearly, but show me a right, or a wrong, that’s ‘independent of all other considerations!’”
Elias had to admit that stumped him. “Sure, Jean-Charles, go ahead, fuck the absolutes. But where does that leave us?” Jean had nothing to say. Elias realized he would need to answer his own question. “Maybe priority’s the way out. Can we agree on something, on one thing, that comes first?”
“How about you and me?”
“Fine, say it’s you and me. ‘You and me’ doesn’t include our parents, and our sister? Our closest friends? Any of them might suffer for things we’ve already done…or things we don’t do.”
“There you go, peeing on the rug again. I thought you wanted to make it simple, come down to one thing, so I said maybe that should be you and me. And ‘you and me’ is one thing, not two.”
Elias struggled to focus on right and wrong, and black and white, and do this or do that, but everything was blurry, muddy, hopelessly complicated, and he was exhausted.
Quietly, resignedly, Elias said “Okay, you win. I suppose we decided what to do about Reggie when we walked away from the dock. He’ll turn up, or he won’t, and we’ll react then. Meanwhile we really have no choice except Plan A.”
“Not unless you decide to make this about you or me. About two things, not one.”
Elias stared hard at his brother but didn’t answer. It was time for the brothers to disengage and get some sleep. After a nap and a bowl of cereal, Elias boarded a Greyhound bus—’hopped the Dog,’ as Jean liked to say—and slept like a drunk for most of the five hours back to Ithaca, in the clothes he’d worn for two days.
Previous chapters:
Chapter 8: The Brothers Bessette
Related:
- A Conversation with Dr. Craig Smith on His Novel “Stone Hearts,” the Art of Writing, and the Surgeon’s Imagination
- For Us the Living: Reflections on 9/11 from Dr. Craig Smith
- Nobility in Small Things: A Look Back at The Leadership of Craig Smith, MD