Kate realized that she was blinking through tears as she watched the young woman leave. Father O'Rourke winked at her and slipped into the cubicle. She heard him asking the switchboard operator for a Stateside satellite line. Kate recognized the 202 as a District of Columbia area code.

The conversation could not have lasted two minutes and she caught only snatches of it as her mind kept veering back to what she should have said to Mr. Crawley from the embassy.

“Hello, Jim . . . yeah, Mike O'Rourke, right . . . great, great, how are you? No, not Lima or Santiago this time . . . Bucharest. Yep.”

Kate closed her eyes. She was one of the fifteen top hematologists in the Western hemisphere and she was listening to some parish priest chew the fat with somebody on his Old Boy network, probably another priest at Georgetown University or somewhere . . . some pissant Jesuit with an inlaw in the State Department.

No, she corrected herself, priest don't have inlaws. Do they?

“That's it exactly,” O'Rourke was saying on the phone. Kate realized that she had heard him summarize her visa problems in a dozen words or less. “That's it, Jim . . . no moss growing on your brain since the Bike Patrol days. She's one of the few Americans I've seen in the year and a half I've been here who's trying to adopt one of the real orphanage cases . . . a very sick child . . . sick but not contagious in any way . . . right . . . and this putz in Visa section is making it impossible. Yeah . . . I agree, it amounts to a sentence of death.”

Kate felt her skin go clammy when she heard someone else say that. Joshua. Dead. She thought of the tiny fingers, the trusting eyes. She thought of the scores and scores of small, unmarked graves she had seen behind the orphanages and pediatric hospitals she had toured in Bucharest and beyond.

“OK, Jimmy. Same to you, kid. No, Kev's 'still in Houston, I think . . . NASA . . . and Dale's working on his next book up in the Grand Tetons or wherever. No, uhuh, that was Lawrence's third wedding. No, he invited me as a guest. They had some sort of Grand Prix driver who moonlights as a Zen guru do the actual ceremony. You too, amigo. Talk to you later.”

He came out and touched her knee the way a father would pat the leg of a child who had been crying. Kate choked back her anger at herself and the situation. She was trying to think of the blood specialists, CDC administrators, media people, print reporters, and. medical lobbyists she knew. Certainly, among them there must be somebody with more clout than O'Rourke's Georgetown buddy. She would begin calling that afternoon. Somebody would put pressure on the State Department for her. In three days?

“I'll walk you back to the hospital,” said the priest.

“All right,” she said. Before they got to the embassy's inner doors, she squeezed his arm through the black coat. “Thanks, O'Rourke. Thanks for trying.”

“You're welcome, Neuman.”

They were just out the doors when Mr. Crawley from upstairs came hurrying down the steps, almost sliding across the marble floor in his haste. His tie was askew. His hair was mussed. His face was flushed except where it was pale around the mouth, and there was a look in his eyes that made Kate think that some civil servant with a forgettable name had just had a preview of his career ox being royally and terminally gored.

“Mrs .... ah . . . Doctor Neuman!” cried the embassy man, relief visible on his features. “I'm glad I caught you. There's been a mix-up . . . I'm afraid I may have misspoke myself.” He thrust a sheaf of documents at her. “We'll have the visa application processed by tomorrow morning. This temporary visa should satisfy the Romanian authorities if there are any questions on their part about“

Later, during the walk back to the hospital, Kate said to O'Rourke, “And what were you doing at the embassy, anyway?”

“My job takes me there.”

“Intercepting more inappropriate adoptions?”

He shrugged. Kate thought, irrelevantly, that the man looked very trim, very handsome, and very Irish in his black suit and white collar. “Sometimes,” said the priest, “I expedite as well as interdict.”

“You certainly expedited this situation. You may have expedited Joshua's last chance to survive.” She paused to watch the traffic pass on the busy Bulevardul Balcescu. “Can you tell me your friend Jim's last name?”

Father O'Rourke scratched his chin through the short beard. “Why not? It's Harlen.”

“Senator Harlen? Senator James Harlen? The senator who's head of the Foreign Affairs Committee? The one who Secretary of State Baker wanted as his numbertwo guy even though he was from the wrong party? The senator that Dukakis almost picked as a running mate in '88 rather than Lloyd Bentsen?”

The priest smiled. “Jimmy was right to think that that wouldn't have been a smart move. I wanted him to run, which shows how naive I am. But he's going to wait until '96 to get into national politics . . . and that won't be for a vice-presidential slot. He and Cuomo are the only Democrats left with real presidential timber . . . and I think Jimmy has the energy and new ideas to go with it.”

“And you're friends,” said Kate, realizing how dumb that statement was.

“Were friends. A long time ago.” Father O'Rourke was staring at the ONT tourist offices across the boulevard, but his eyes were seeing something else.

“Well, if I believed in miracles, I'd say that the last couple of days have been full of them,” said Kate. She felt a strange sensation as she said this. It's real. It's happening. l am going to have a child. Kate felt the way she had as a young girl, taking a dare, standing at the edge of the fifteen-foot-high diving board at Kenmore Municipal Pool: too scared to jump, too proud to retreat.

“The only miracle was a Romanian ministry official doing someone a favor without major baksheesh,” said O'Rourke. When he saw her trembling he started to touch her arm again, then dropped his hand. Kate felt the force of his gaze on her. “Neuman, if the boy is going to survive, you'll have to provide the miracles. “

“I know,” said Kate. Then, realizing that she may not have spoken aloud, she said, firmly and clearly, “I know.”

Chapter Twelve

Kate and Joshua were set to fly to the United States on Monday, May 20, and by the evening of Sunday the nineteenth, she was sure that they would never be allowed out of the country.

UNICEF, the cosponsor, along with the CDC International Relief Fund, of her six weeks of medical aid in Romania, had sent the PanAm ticket weeks ago, and since Otopeni Airport did not allow telephone confirmations of flights, she called the Office of National Tourism almost hourly to confirm her reservations. Not satisfied with that, she had Lucian drive out to the airport twice on Saturday and three times on Sunday to confirm that the flight was still scheduled and that she had a seat reserved. Joshua would fly in her arms and needed no separate ticket. She also had Lucian confirm this.

Mr. Stancu at the Ministry had been as good as his word, he was a short, redcheeked, cheerful man, the exact opposite of the stereotype of an Eastern European bureaucrat as well as the opposite of all the other bureaucrats Kate had met in the countryconfirmed that Joshua's exit visa was complete and cleared. They had waived the usual requirement for the signature of one of the birth parents. The Romanian end of the adoption process was amazingly simple.

The American Embassy was slower, but by Saturday afternoon Mr. Crawley had expedited Joshua's exit visa . . . Lucian had brought a Nikon to the hospital to shoot the infant's photo, but it turned out that no photo was necessary . . . and the U.S. part of the adoption was begun through their liaison with Rocky Mountain Adoption Option Services. Their American headquarters was Denver, so Kate had no problems in completing the process once she got home.