The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [55]
He glanced over his shoulder at me, went back to scribbling.
“You’re the only one pulled in a fourteen-pointer in nine years,” I said. “That counts in my book.”
I looked to Unc, wanted to see if it’d been all right for me to talk to the man, if I hadn’t disobeyed in this.
He was smiling at me, shaking his head.
“My bon voyage,” Cray said. “My farewell performance. And do you think one of those turds could come up and congratulate me? Not on your life.” He looked at another X ray, scribbled, then at another. “And now you want me to be a mole.”
“A what?” Unc said. He hadn’t moved. I looked around for chairs, saw none. This was his room, and his only, I figured. I leaned against the doorjamb.
“A mole,” he said. “Don’t you read?”
“Haven’t been able to get my hands on anything good lately,” Unc said.
Cray laughed again, said, “That’s a bad one. But a mole. Like in those John le Carré books. A mole is somebody on the inside willing to give info so long as nobody knows who he is.”
He turned, took the cigar out of his mouth, leaned back, all in the near dark of the room, so that I wasn’t quite sure whether he was smiling or not, silhouetted by the light behind him.
“Then I guess you’re a mole,” Unc said.
“Yes, I am,” he said, and now he put his hands behind his head. He bit down on the cigar, made it angle up, like in that picture of FDR. “And do you know why it doesn’t bother me a bit to be a mole?”
“Why?” Unc said.
“Because of what I delightfully refer to as the barium ceiling.” He looked from Unc to me to Unc again. “You’ve heard of the glass ceiling, that point on the corporate ladder of American business beyond which women can’t go? The barium ceiling is the point on the ladder of corporate medicine beyond which the radiologist cannot go. I found it over at the medical university, and realized with that fourteen-point buck and the fact not a single one of those turds even congratulated me that I’d met it. No hard feelings, Leland, but the whole reason I joined Hungry Neck in the first place was because everybody of any importance on the upper echelon at the medical university was a member, and I had my eye on the prize, so to speak: a seat on the board at some point. But no. A radiologist is not a real doctor, see? A radiologist looks at films all day, nothing more than a glorified copyboy to everyone on the board over there, no matter it took me eight years past med school to learn all I needed to learn about MRI and nuclear and all else. That doesn’t matter. What matters is do you have a monogrammed scalpel and a striped bow tie? It doesn’t matter you turn in billable accounts of over a million a year for eleven years straight, keep all those board members in their Lexi—is that plural for Lexus?—and when I took out that fourteen-pointer and you and Tonto were the only ones put up a fuss over there, I decided then and there to bail. Tendered my resignation January third from the South Carolina Medical University, surrendered my tenured associate professorship. And here we are.”
He pulled the cigar from his mouth, spread his arms wide, looked at the place, then gave himself a spin in the chair. “Now what gets billed gets paid to me.”
He stood then, leaned against the counter, crossed his arms. “And the irony of it all is the sword of Damocles over at the Med U is about to fall. That fine little hair is raggedy as all getout, frizzed to the max, and it’s about to fall. And do you know who it’s about to fall on?”
“Who?” Unc said. He was smiling, nodding, eating this up. He hadn’t even had to run a thing up the flagpole.
“It’s about to fall on the board itself. Because there’s been an investigation going on for over two years now, an investigation into the ethics and finances of the University Medical Consortium, which is about to get nasty, because now there’s been a senate committee set up in Columbia to explore the possibility that things stink in Charleston. Which they do.”
Cray turned to the wall, found on the desktop a Magic Marker, and started drawing, right