Eugenio Selman-Housein Sosa was desperately frightened. His blood pressure was rising into dangerous numbers, his pulse rate was at least a hundred and thirty beats per minute and his breath was coming in short, painful gasps. If he wasn’t careful he was going to go into ventricular fibrillation and drop dead on the front step of Dublin’s Shelburne Hotel. As Cuba’s senior cardiologist, Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein knew this was no exaggeration, and at seventy-seven years of age he was painfully aware that one incidence of VF would probably be his last. He cursed silently. If only he’d taken the two days he needed at the Swiss conference two years ago, he would have had the cardioverter-defibrillator implanted at the Lindenhofspital in Bern and he wouldn’t be in this situation. Dear God, if only he hadn’t decided to walk back from the Trinity College campus, he wouldn’t be in this situation. The doctor composed himself as best he could, nodded to the top-hatted doorman in the red frock coat and stepped into the front lobby and confronted the staircase that led up to reception.
