LITMIR.BIZ

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at him. “Good—see how I worked in your word?—because you’re doing not that excellent a job of it.”

      Abandoning finesse, Harold blurted, “Ivan, you need to learn humility.”

      Ivan cocked his head, as if he were deliberating over the request. He obviously found it wanting. “Why, Harold? Will it make me a better neurosurgeon?”

      Harold blew out a breath. “It’ll make you easier to get along with.”

      Ivan laughed shortly. He paused to take a sip of the iced coffee—he required and consumed all forms of caffeine whenever possible—before commenting on what he felt was the absurdity of the last statement.

      “I’m not here to get along with people, I’m here to put together people’s pieces, remember? You want someone easy to get along with, hire some clown in big, floppy shoes and a red rubber nose. I don’t do floppy shoes or red rubber noses, Harold.”

      Harold looked at him over the half glasses that were perched on the tip of his nose. He wasn’t about to be dissuaded or diverted from the path he was determined to take. “We have classes now.”

      Wide, rangy shoulders that could have belonged to a one-time football guard rose and fell carelessly at Harold’s words. “You’ve always had classes, Harold. This is a teaching hospital.” Holding his sandwich with both hands now, the pastrami overflowing at the nether end, he fixed Harold with a penetrating look. “The question is, do you have hot mustard?”

      Harold sighed. Reaching for a packet of the requested condiment that was on his side of the tray, he pushed it across the desk toward his irritating neurosurgeon. “Classes that teach interns bedside manner,” he doggedly continued.

      To his surprise, Ivan nodded his approval. “Excellent.”

      Harold squelched the urge to pinch himself. His association with Ivan had taught him never to jump to an obvious conclusion even if it was shimmying before him. “You mean that?”

      “Of course,” Ivan attested with feeling. “The more of those little buggers who come out knowing how to coo and make it ‘all better’ for Sally or Bobby or whoever, the less likely we’ll be having this annoying conversation again.”

      Harold sighed. “How is it your parents never drowned you?”

      “I was too fast for them,” Ivan deadpanned, then nodded toward the chief of staff’s plate. “You going to eat that pickle?”

      “Why?” Harold asked. “You’re not sour enough?”

      “Touché.” Not standing on ceremony and aware that the older man didn’t really care for pickles, Ivan commandeered it and dropped it on his own paper plate. A tiny yellow-green pool of pickle juice formed. Ivan played along with the chief’s quip. “Let’s just say I don’t need any input in that category.”

      “No, by God, you don’t.” It was more of a lament than an evaluation. “All right, I can’t force you to take that class.”

      “Glad you see that.”

      Harold wasn’t finished. “But I can assign you a resident.”

      Ivan’s expression was deceptively bland, but his eyes locked on the other man. “Not if you know what’s ‘good’ for you—see, there’s that word again—or for the resident.”

      And then Harold said the unthinkable to him as he shook his head. “This is not negotiable, Ivan. You refuse and you’re gone.”

      CHAPTER 2

      Silence hung in the book-lined office, mingling with the smell of pastrami and the faint odor of lemon-scented furniture polish. Outside, the sky was appropriately gray, nursing a Southern California January that had been fraught with rain for most of the month. The fluorescent lighting seemed somber and dim.

      “You’re not serious,” Ivan finally said.

      Harold was relieved. He’d half expected Ivan to continue his silence—by leaving the room. Dialogue gave him hope. “Very.”

      Ivan frowned. “I don’t respond well to threats, Harold.”

      “This isn’t a threat, Ivan, it’s reality.” It wearied him to have to go over this, but the alternative—to lose Munro—was unthinkable. “As you probably already know, the board is not exactly crazy about you. You’ve alienated over half of them.”

      Ivan pretended to look both aghast and saddened. “And here I was, getting ready to ask them to go to the prom with me.” He shook his head. “You just never know, do you?”

      Like a full-on game of doubles played across an extra-wide tennis court, meetings with Ivan always exhausted him. Didn’t the man understand that he was on his side? That he was one of the very few who actually were? “Ivan, this isn’t a joke.”

      “Isn’t it?” Ivan scowled at the very thought of having to nurture a fledgling surgeon. “How am I supposed to do my work with some wet-behind-the-ears lower life-form following my every move, sucking up to me and trying to absorb everything like a nondiscriminate sponge?”

      Maybe the man wasn’t aware of the way he sounded. Maybe he should have brought in a video camera so that he could play this all back for Munro and let the neurosurgeon witness firsthand just how abrasive he came across. “Now that’s what I’m talking about. You’ve got to change your attitude.”

      Unblinking, cold brown eyes fixed on him. Ivan’s face remained expressionless as he asked, “Why?”

      The answer, Harold thought, was very simple. He smoothed out the edges of his bow tie with his thumb and index finger. A sign to those who knew him that he was nervous. “Because people hate working with you.”

      Ivan shrugged again. “Easy enough solution. Get new people.”

      The man just didn’t get it, did he? For the sake of a tenuous friendship and because Munro was the best neurosurgeon he had ever known in his thirty-year career, Harold persisted. “Ivan, if you don’t change, you can’t operate.”

      Something resembling a smirk crossed Ivan’s lips. But when he spoke, he was deadly serious. No quips, no sarcasm. “I don’t operate with my attitude. I operate with my skill. Everything else is secondary and unimportant.”

      Some people preferred to be nonconfrontational. Sadly for him, Harold thought, the chief neurosurgeon of Blair Memorial did not number among them. Arguing appeared to be something Ivan both enjoyed and keenly relished, sharpening his wit as if it were a sword in need of constant honing. So rather than continue on a field of battle where he was hopelessly out-matched, Harold moved aside what was left of his ham-and-Swiss sandwich and pushed forward a dark blue eight-by-eleven folder.

      Ivan perused the cover with a smattering of interest, but made no effort to open the folder. “If that contains a bribe, Harold, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. I only take bribes on Fridays. Today is Monday.” With a nod of his head, he indicated the calendar on the chief’s desk. “Try me again at the end of the week.”

      Harold pressed his thin lips together. He could almost hear his wife’s voice in his head. Rachel had been after him for years to retire. If he’d listened five years ago, his hair might still be black instead of completely gray. Ivan, he noted, still didn’t have so much as a single gray hair.

      “I’m perfectly aware what day it is, Ivan,” he replied tersely. “And no, it’s not a bribe in the folder. It’s your career.”

      Ivan glanced down at it, then back at the chief. “The folder should be bigger, then.”

      “Open it,” Harold instructed.

      To his surprise, Ivan smiled. Patiently. As if he were humoring someone not entirely in possession of his faculties. A few more sessions like this, Harold thought, and Munro might be right.

      “Is it me,” Ivan asked, “or are you getting testier

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