Turning Point(11)

    Incredible acts of heroism were described. There were videos from the cellphones of people who had been there, and sobbing interviews with the survivors. It was heartbreaking to see the effects of tragedy again, and impossible to understand. Listening to the stories, seeing the damage and loss of life, and hearing how many had died from gunfire or the detonated bombs, the only conclusion a sane person could come to was that the world had gone mad.





Chapter Three


The cleanup after the hotel fire on Market Street was massive, and firefighters combed through the rubble for days, looking for clues to how the fire started. Foul play was eventually ruled out. Faulty wiring had caused it, and the fifteen-foot Christmas trees on every floor of the hotel had fed the blaze. Within a day or two, those with minor injuries left the hospitals where they’d been admitted. Others had to stay longer, and those with severe burns had a long road ahead of them. Three more of the firefighters and two elderly hotel guests died within days of the fire, and the death toll reached a total of fifty-one, with eighty-seven more people injured to varying degrees.

It took several days for the hospitals involved to calm down, and once the people with minor injuries had been released, they were left mostly with the burn victims to be treated. By New Year’s Eve, each of the hospitals had almost returned to normal. Bill Browning and Tom Wylie were working again at SF General and Alta Bates. Wendy Jones was on call at Stanford, and Stephanie Lawrence had the night off from UCSF, much to her husband’s relief and her own. Both boys had come down with the flu the day before, and Stephanie didn’t want to leave them with a sitter, so she and Andy stayed home on New Year’s Eve. At least she wouldn’t have to go to work that night. They opened a bottle of champagne after the boys were asleep, and watched old movies in bed. Stephanie had been working hard all week, and fell asleep at ten o’clock, while Andy saw the New Year in alone.

    The savage attack in Paris took longer to clean up, and the country had been scarred again by tragic losses. Candles and flowers were left in vast profusion up and down the Champs-élysées, and particularly in front of the stores and movie houses that had been affected. More than a hundred people had been killed. There was a special memorial mass at Notre Dame, and a vigil the night before. The images of the mourners on TV were heartbreaking, as people held up signs with the names of the victims whom they knew. It was nearly impossible to conceive of acts of a political nature carried out against innocent people going about their business on a Thursday night. It was an echo of what had happened before, but this time was infinitely worse with more people killed, and not just young people this time, but children too. The youngest victim of the attack was two years old. In some cases, entire families had been slaughtered.

It made no sense to Tom as he watched the coverage. In his mind, politics never justified the murder of people who had nothing to do with the issues. He had been watching CNN all week, and cried every time he saw an interview with someone who had survived the attack and described how the people around him had been assassinated. To Tom, it seemed like a tragedy not just for Parisians, but for humanity and the entire world. It went against everything he believed and had dedicated his life to. He had spent twenty years putting wounded bodies back together, while others wanted to destroy them. He wished there were some way to help, but France was a long way away, and there was nothing he could do. It had depressed him profoundly, and he watched the latest stories emerging from the tragedy every day.

    All the perpetrators had died with their victims. The whole thing seemed like a terrible waste, and he was overwhelmed by sadness every time he thought about it. The story had certainly eclipsed the hotel fire in San Francisco, which had genuinely been a regrettable accident. There was nothing accidental about the Paris attacks. They had been carefully planned, executed with precision, and entirely intentional. It made him think of the last time he’d been in Paris, while he was in medical school. He’d gone there for a summer break with two friends and fell in love with the city, and every girl he met.

The attacks worried Bill Browning too. If it could happen in Paris, it could happen in London, and he shuddered every time he thought of his daughters being potentially at risk. He called Athena to talk about it, and told her not to let their daughters go to movie theaters or big sports events for a while. She pooh-poohed it, and said that the British were much more careful about security than the French, and uttered some gibberish that you couldn’t live in fear, and let terrorists win. And you had to go on with normal life and show them that you weren’t afraid of them. Bill vehemently disagreed with her and said it was a good time to be cautious and not do anything foolish. He reminded her of the bombing of Harrod’s, the London department store, years before, and more recent attacks. She brushed him off again and didn’t want to hear it, which left him even more anxious after he’d hung up.

    Government officials in France and every European country were assuring their citizens that secret service and intelligence operatives had tightened security considerably, but other politicians said that was simply not true. They didn’t have the manpower to do that, and the public wasn’t privy to the truth. Nowadays, it was in fact impossible to keep any nation entirely safe, even the United States, although the U.S. intelligence machine seemed to have much greater resources and manpower at its disposal than most countries, and more sophisticated high-tech methods to identify potential risks. But the crazies appeared to be ruling the world these days. There were plenty of people, even in the U.S., who were disgruntled, or disturbed, or certifiably insane, or had dangerous political affiliations, or some beef with the world, and killed other people in universities, schools, restaurants, on the street, or in government facilities, and even in churches. No one was exempt or entirely safe anywhere in the world anymore. It was unsettling to think about.