Dr. Yes Read Online Free PDF Page B

brought me the wrong coffee from
Starbucks, I did not even shout at him, merely sent him back for the right one.
When he returned I told him to man the till, and trusted him with its key, and
he smiled as if he was in seventh heaven; when he enquired if he might advise
any customers on their choice of book, I said not if he valued his life. But he
seemed content with two out of three.
        With
Jeff busy - well, not busy, but removed - I consulted the internet. It was not
so much a case of know your enemy, because I was far from convinced that Dr Yes was my enemy, or anyone's, apart from Mother Nature's, but by finding out
as much as I could it would at least enable me to talk knowledgeably about him
to anyone else I came across in the course of the investigation.
        This
information was not difficult to find. His whole business was built around his
good looks and personality - the perfectly coiffured hair, the permanent tan,
the gleaming teeth, the wrinkle-free brow, the buff frame, the suggestion of a
six-pack through a thin T-shirt; he was fifty-five years old and looked twenty
younger, and you might have said he was a great advert for his youth-giving
procedures, save for the fact that apart from diet and exercise, it would have
been impossible for him to operate upon himself. Someone else had fixed his
teeth or debagged his eyes or pinned back his lugholes. Buying into his image
was buying into someone else's handiwork. He was born and bred in Chicago,
Illinois, of Ukrainian extraction. I found a Google image of him that appeared
to be lifted from his high-school yearbook. He hadn't changed much. Maybe he
hadn't needed any of the work done to start with, he just had good genes. He
had flown through Brown University and Washington University, and was a
board-certified plastic surgeon and celebrated fellow of the American Society
of Plastic Surgeons. In the mid-nineties he had married one of his patients, an
Irish girl who'd gone to the States for some relatively minor plastic surgery
that nevertheless hadn't been available at home; they'd fallen in love, and
he'd also spotted a gap in the market. Within six months he'd set up his first
clinic in Belfast, bringing a healthy dose of American chutzpah to the
advertising of his services, and before very long he was the go-to man for
women, and some men, throughout the island who wanted something tucked, trimmed
or drained. He'd gone from strength to strength, particularly during the boom
years of the Celtic Tiger, when his ultra-expensive but very quick
multi-part makeovers had proved such a boon to those who felt themselves too
fat, too droopy or too old to compete in the hectic Dublin social scene and
didn't have time to hang around. Very soon there were competing services in the
southern capital, but at least by coming to Belfast you were out of the country
and less likely to bump into your social rivals while swathed in weeping
bandages that kept your new ears on or screaming blue murder every time you
went upstairs because your fresh tits were killing you while they bedded in.
        'Why
are you looking at pictures of boobies?' Jeff asked, peering over my shoulder.
        'It's
work,' I said.
        I was
trying to put myself in Augustine's shoes, even while he was probably trying to
put himself in my father's. He loved his wife and she had disappeared. She had
undergone a number of relatively minor procedures at a clinic owned and run by
Dr Yeschenkov and nobody had seen her since, apart from disputed CCTV footage
from a bank cashpoint in Dublin. He had jumped to the conclusion that she had
died in the clinic because to him it was the only one that made sense; he could
not conceive of her running off to start a new life. He clearly did not know
women as well as I did, and I hardly knew them at all. He was too emotionally
involved to make a rational judgement on the likelihood of some grand
conspiracy swinging into place to cover up his wife's