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made even more tense by the fact that Sebastien’s younger brother, Jacques, was a lovable but completely irresponsible young man who intended to do little that involved work. Jacques, at twenty, was failing as an art student at the Sorbonne and excelling as a playboy in the trendy Left Bank circles occupied by the offspring of the rich.
    Sebastien had never—not even as a teenager—been so carefree as his brother was now. He took his baccalaureate to enter the
grande ecole
at the amazing age of fifteen, knowing he wanted to be a physician, to mend people, to take revenge on death. And, since his father was to blame for what had happened, Sebastien took revenge on him, as well.
    He was a very serious and sophisticated man at twenty-nine, and though several years younger than other physicians at the same level of training, he was already gaining a reputation for being mature, brilliant, and demanding. All of which earned him equal shares of respect and dislike among his American colleagues. He was amused by the fact that some of them called him Young Doctor Frankenstein behind his back and that others, citing the scar on his chin, his love for double-breasted suits, and his town house decorated in art deco style, said that he was a gangster at heart.
    He did not need anyone’s friendship as long as he had their respect, and because virtually all of his waking hours were devoted to his work at the hospital, he did not have time for more than a few social acquaintances. Occasionallyhe pursued more intimate invitations from the hospital’s nurses and female physicians, which he consummated with charm and great skill but with no hint of permanent attachment.
    The women who accepted his single-minded dedication to his work settled for his generosity in bed and other ways, including the use of his several cars, his sailboat and cottage on St. Simon Island, and the free run of his town house in Buckhead, Atlanta’s most exclusive residential area. Women who wanted more from him were quickly yet graciously ushered out of his life.
    On the morning when he drove his white 1936 Cord to the de Savin winery north of Atlanta, he had been at the hospital for three days without sleep. A middle-aged grocer named Alphonso Jones had thrown a clot while undergoing angioplasty, and had to be rushed to the operating room for a bypass.
    The bypass had gone perfectly, but two hours later, with the disregard for explanation that often accompanied such things, another clot broke free and went to Jones’s brain, causing a massive stroke. Jones, a robust father of five and grandfather of seven, clung to life with the aid of machines.
    In the long hours of the second night, Sebastien met Jones’s wife, a stern little woman with a graying afro and a no-nonsense attitude. “None of these other goddamn whitecoats will tell me anything,” she protested. “And I want to know the truth—if my husband makes it, is he goin’ to be an invalid?”
    Sebastien studied her for a moment, while he weighed the consequences of answering a question that should go to the patient’s cardiologist. But if Mrs. Jones wanted the unadorned truth, she had asked the right man. “Perhaps. We’ll have to wait a few days to see how he recovers. And it may take six weeks to determine his long-term problems.”
    She began to cry. “He’ll have to take early retirement, sit in a chair in front of a TV all day, never be able to play baseball with the grandkids again? That sort of thing?”
    “I can’t predict anything at this point. He could do much better than you think. First things first. Right now, we have to wean him off the ventilator.”
    “The what?”
    “The machine that’s helping him breathe.”
    She gripped Sebastien’s arm and looked up at him with a desperate expression. “I want him to die. I want you to tell the others to turn off all those damned machines.”
    “You know we can’t do that.”
    “What’s better—living like a cripple, or