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Page 198
He cried out in pain, and she moved over to soothe him, stroking his forehead, waking from her fancies.
In fact, Nurse Cullen realized ruefully, Arkady Karmann did not at all resemble Vladimir Gorenko. Her Vladi had been shorter, with a darker complexion marked by childhood smallpox. She stood looking down at the patient, medically alert to his situation.
The hook on his right arm had fascinated Bobby Lee Calhoun, and it fascinated her as well. What strange, dark story did that crude device validate? The broad face was bearded and none too clean. His clothes and shoes were a disgrace, worn and filthy. Nurse Cullen had had no qualms whatever about telling Clarissa Washington to dispose of them.
There had been almost nothing of value in his pockets. Two dollars and a quarter in change, and a pair of soggy work gloves. Apparently her new Vladimir sometimes disguised his grotesque prosthesisperhaps when asking for aid, or work. A wet book of matches from a cafe in Meridian, Mississippi, the name Betty Lou Sims scrawled on it, together with a telephone number, a sandwich wrapper from a fast-food restaurant in Demopolis, Alabama, a crumpled oil company road map of Georgia: traces of the long, hard journey from Brownsville.
And one thing more, a scrap of paper, carefully folded, taped to his chest, with a Washington, D.C., area code telephone number written on it. Bobby Lee Calhoun had promised to investigate the number before going off watch. Irene Cullen regarded her patient with a vast, gentle curiosity.
Should she investigate the number herself, she wondered. She could do it for only the small cost of a late-night telephone call. She studied the man's damp face more carefully. He was clearly ill. Earlier, while Bobby Lee was helping her get him bedded down, he had vomited. The amount of vomitus had been small, possibly because her stranger had been eating infrequently. He was anorexic, showing signs of extreme lassitude. Capillaries in his eyes had ruptured, causing small local

 
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