Honor Among Thieves Read online

  Joni had taken considerable time to select an appropriate outfit for the occasion, and was disappointed that her husband didn’t even seem to notice.

  “We’ll have to go without her,” was all he said. “If Sally hopes to be a doctor one day she’ll have to learn that people have a tendency to die when you keep them waiting.”

  “Shouldn’t we give her just a li’l longer, honey?” asked Joni.

  “No,” he barked, and without even looking back set off for the garage. Joni spotted her husband’s notes on the hall table and stuffed them into her handbag before she pulled the front door closed and double-locked it. By the time she reached the road, her husband was already waiting behind the wheel of his car, drumming his fingers on the gear shift.

  They drove in silence towards Columbus School for Girls. T. Hamilton McKenzie checked every car heading towards Upper Arlington to see if his daughter was in the back seat.

  A small reception party, led by the director, was waiting for them at the foot of the stone steps at the school’s main entrance. The director walked forward to shake hands with the distinguished surgeon as he stepped out of the car, followed by Joni McKenzie. Her eyes searched beyond them for Sally. She raised an eyebrow.

  “Sally never came home,” Dr. McKenzie explained.

  “She’ll probably join us in a few minutes, if she’s not already here,” suggested his wife. The director knew Sally was not on the school grounds, but did not consider it courteous to correct the guest of honor’s wife, especially as she’d just received a call from the car service that required an explanation.

  At fourteen minutes to six they walked into the director’s study, where a young lady of Sally’s age offered the guests a choice of dry sherry or orange juice. McKenzie suddenly remembered that in the anxiety of waiting for his daughter he had left his notes on the hall table. He checked his watch and realized that there wasn’t enough time to send his wife back for them. In any case, he was unwilling to admit such an oversight in front of this particular gathering. Damn it, he thought. Teenagers are never an easy audience, and girls are always the worst. He tried to marshal his thoughts into some sort of order.

  At three minutes to six, despite there still being no sign of Sally, the director suggested they should all make their way to the Great Hall.

  “Can’t keep the girls waiting,” she explained. “It would set a bad example.”

  Just as they were leaving the room, Joni took her husband’s notes out of her handbag and passed them over to him. He looked relieved for the first time since 4:50.

  At one minute to six, the director led the guest of honor onto the stage. He watched the four hundred girls rise and applaud him in what the director would have described as a “ladylike” manner.

  When the applause had faded away, the director raised and lowered her hands to indicate that the girls should be seated again, which they did with the minimum of noise. She then walked over to the lectern and gave an unscripted eulogy on T. Hamilton McKenzie that would have surely impressed the Nobel Committee. She talked of Edward Zeir, the founder of modern plastic surgery, of J. R. Wolte and Wilhelm Krause, and reminded her pupils that T. Hamilton McKenzie had followed in their great tradition by advancing the still-burgeoning science. She said nothing about Sally and her many achievements while at the school, although it had been in her original script. It was still possible to be punished for breaking school rules even if you had just won an endowed national scholarship.

  When the director returned to her place in the center of the stage, T. Hamilton McKenzie made his way to the lectern. He looked down at his notes, coughed and then began his dissertation.

  “Most of you in the audience, I imagine, think plastic surgery is about straightening noses, removing double chins and getting rid of bags from under your eyes. That, I can assure you, is not plastic but cosmetic surgery. Plastic surgery,” he continued—to the disappointment, his wife suspected, of most of those seated in front of him—“is something else.” He then lectured for forty minutes on z-plasty, homografting, congenital malformation and third-degree burns without once raising his head.

  When he finally sat down, the applause was not quite as loud as it had been when he’d entered the room. T. Hamilton McKenzie assumed that was because showing their true feelings would have been considered “unladylike.”

  On returning to the director’s study, Joni asked the secretary if there had been any news of Sally.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” replied the secretary, “but she might have been seated in the hall.”

  During the lecture, versions of which Joni had heard a hundred times before, she’d scanned every face in the room, and knew that her daughter was not among them.

  More sherry was poured, and after a decent interval T. Hamilton McKenzie announced that they ought to be getting back. The director nodded her agreement and accompanied her guests to their car. She thanked the surgeon for a lecture of great insight, and waited at the bottom of the steps until the car had disappeared from view.

  “I have never known such behavior in all my days,” she declared to her secretary. “Tell Miss McKenzie to report to me before chapel tomorrow. The first thing I want to know is why she canceled the car I arranged for her.”

  * * *

  Scott Bradley also gave a lecture that evening, but in his case only sixteen students attended, and none of them was under the age of thirty-five. Each was a senior CIA officer, and when they talked of logic, it had a more practical application than the one suggested when Scott lectured his younger students at Yale.

  These men were all operating on the front line, stationed right across the globe. Often Professor Bradley pressed them to go over, detail by detail, decisions they had made under pressure, and whether those decisions had achieved the result they’d originally hoped for.

  They were quick to admit their mistakes. There was no room for personal pride—only pride in the service was considered acceptable. When Scott had first heard this sentiment he thought they were being corny, but after nine years of working with them in the classroom and in the gym, he’d learned otherwise.

  For over an hour Bradley threw test cases at them, while at the same time suggesting ways of how to think logically, always weighing known facts with subjective judgment before reaching any firm conclusion.

  Over the past nine years, Scott had learned as much from them as they had from him, but he still enjoyed helping them put his knowledge to practical use. Scott had often felt he too would like to be tested in the field, and not simply in the lecture theater.

  When the session was over, Scott joined them in the gym for another workout. He climbed ropes, pumped iron and practiced karate exercises, and they never once treated him as anything other than a full member of the team. Anyone who patronized the visiting professor from Yale often ended up with more than his ego bruised.

  Over dinner that night—no alcohol, just Quibel—Scott asked the Deputy Director if he was ever going to be allowed to gain some field experience.

  “It’s not a vacation job, you know,” came back Dexter Hutchins’s reply as he lit up a cigar. “Give up Yale and join us full-time and then perhaps we’ll consider the merits of allowing you out of the classroom.”

  “I’m due for a sabbatical next year,” Bradley reminded his superior.

  “Then take that trip to Italy you’ve always been promising yourself. After dining with you for the last seven years, I think I know as much about Bellini as ballistics.”

  “I’m not going to give up trying for a field job—you realize that, Dexter, don’t you?”

  “You’ll have to when you’re fifty, because that’s when we’ll retire you.”

  “But I’m only thirty-six…”

  “You rise too easily to make a good field officer,” said the Deputy Director, puffing away at his cigar.

  When T. Hamilton McKenzie opened the front door of his house, he ignored the ringing phone as he shouted, “Sally? Sally?” at the t