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established his own international foundation; was the fresh face of enlightened medicine; and in all those years I didn’t see my old colleague at all. Nor hear from him, until the invitation arrived to collaborate again, in an unusual but exciting case. I’d been so glad to get the call. More than I’d missed Willem, I’d minded the breach between us, and the operation he described sounded like a healing within a healing, a mending of a rift.
    And maybe I should have thought about it more before jumping to agree. And maybe that’s why I didn’t, my fondness for a long-missing friend whose faults and frailties I thought I knew to a T. Sitting at the Faux Henry, I sensed something new about my friend. Or at least, something I’d never noticed before—at the core of his sweetness, a hard, unyielding pit of privilege. That bumbling, boyish smile of his gleamed with new warning: Take a bite out of this bonhomie, and you could break a tooth.
    Eleven years. I’m sure I’d changed too.
    For the moment, he was eager to gab, as long as we gabbed about nothing: museums, plays, concerts, food. Where had I been amusing myself? Where indeed! At any rate, I had something else on my mind.
    â€œYou don’t like the facilities?” he responded, baffled. “Have you let Mahlev know?”
    â€œOf course I like them, Will, they’re top-notch. If anything—”
    â€œBecause, well, look, why don’t we go over there together this week? I told him your needs, that you must be kept completely happy.”
    â€œWillem, it’s not that. What about the patient? When do I meet our mystery man?”
    â€œYou have the profile,” he said. “It’s sufficient, and I can tell you whatever else you need to know.”
    â€œDon’t be a putz, Will, c’mon.” He’d dumbfounded me thoroughly. I protested that I didn’t care if I was administering Novocain for a root canal, I wanted to see the patient, even if that wasn’t how everybody else worked; it was just how I did things, as he well knew. The patient’s anxiety level, for example, was for me alone to judge, in person, and that was just for starters. I’d want to get a good peek at his jaw too, judge if his chin was prominent or weak. The length of the line from lip to larynx (or, more technically, from chin tip to the edge of the thyroid cartilage) can make a life-and-death difference when you go to stick a tube down someone’s throat, which is why we anesthesiologists walk through the world compulsively judging everyone’s thyromental distance. Introduced to a stranger at a party, we don’t think,
Soulful eyes
, or
Lovely hair
, we think,
Get a load of that thyromental distance!
And still it was never included on the chart. Hadn’t Willem got me here so things would be done right? Ergo, we needed to meet, this man and I. “It is a him, isn’t it?” I said. I’d studied the sufficient profile and noticed that its sufficiency lacked a basic thing or two, like gender. Like a name.
    â€œPerhaps.”
    â€œWillem, for Chrissakes.”
    â€œLook, Tilde—”
    â€œPlease don’t ‘look’ me!”
    â€œLook, okay, sorry, I know this may not sound orthodox to a disciple of the great god Maasterlich, but if this weren’t an exceptional situation, then you—
we
—wouldn’t be here. The whole thing demands flexibility. No, you can’t interview our client, because our client’s not around—”
    â€œMeaning he’s still in Lahore.”
    â€œâ€”right now. What makes you think—”
    â€œOh, gee, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just not possible to visit France these days without bumping into the crème de la crème of the Pakistani med corps, never mind a Pakistani potentate. Don’t screw with me, Willem. I know how to use my feet.”
    â€œI recall,” he spat back.