Plague (5 page)

‘And you don’t know
which one it is?’

‘I’m not sure
that it’s any one of them. The way it looks right now, it could be a new strain
of bacillus altogether.
Some kind of super-plague.’

Dr. Petrie bit
his lip. ‘Do we know where the boy picked it up? Isn’t it carried by fleas?’

Dr. Selmer
sounded weary. ‘I talked to the parents, but they say he went out all day
Sunday, and he could have been any place at all. He visited some friends, and
then went swimming, and then he came home.’

‘How about the friends?’

‘Oh, we’re
having them checked. The police are out now, tracking down the last of them.
We’re taking this very seriously, Leonard. I believe we have to.’

‘Do you think
he might have come into contact with an infected rat, or a squirrel?’

‘It’s possible,’
agreed Dr. Selmer. ‘They’ve had three or four outbreaks in California and
Colorado recently, and it seems like a few people got bitten by fleas from
infected ground squirrels. That might have happened here, but we can’t tell.
The way it’s transmitted depends on what type of plague it is.’

‘What do you
mean?’

‘Well, bubonic
plague is mostly carried by fleas which have bitten plague-ridden rodents, and
then accidentally bite people. It isn’t a human disease at all, and humans only
get caught up in the cycle by mistake. But that doesn’t make it any less fatal,
and the trouble is that a flea which has been infected in October can still
pass on plague the following March. What’s more, plague can spread to domestic
rats and mice.’

Dr. Petrie
frowned. ‘But can’t one person pass it straight on to another?’

‘With bubonic
plague, that’s difficult,’ said Dr. Selmer. ‘It doesn’t spread easily from man
to man.’

‘How about the other plagues?
Surely pneumonic plague is
catching?’

Dr. Selmer
said, ‘Yes, it is. If you’re suffering from pneumonic plague, you only have to
cough in someone’s face, and they’ll almost certainly catch it. It’s the
sputum.

Plague bacilli
can stay alive in dried sputum for up to three months.’

‘Oh, God,’ said
Dr. Petrie. ‘Listen – when will you get your final results?’

‘Two or three
hours, the lab people say. As soon as I know for sure, I’ll warn City Hall and
all the health people.’

Dr. Petrie
nodded. ‘Okay, Anton. Keep me in touch, won’t you? And don’t forget to take
some streptomycin yourself.’

‘Are you
kidding? We’re walking around here in masks and gloves and flea-proof clothing.
It’s going to have to be a pretty damned smart bacillus to get through to us.’

Dr. Petrie laid
the phone down. Adelaide was looking at him anxiously. On the floor, Prickles
was tucking her doll in for the night underneath the armchair, and singing her
a lullaby in a small, high voice.

‘Did I hear you
say plague?’ asked Adelaide.

‘That’s right.
That boy I picked up this morning, the one who died. He was infected with some
kind of mutated plague bacillus. They’re trying to pinpoint it now.’

‘Is it
dangerous?’

Dr. Petrie went
across and picked up his drink. He took a long, icy swallow of chilled white
rum, and briefly closed his eyes.

‘All diseases
are dangerous, if they’re not treated promptly and properly. I’ve taken a
couple of shots of antibiotics myself, but I think you and Prickles ought to
have the same. Plague will kill you if it’s left untreated, but these days it’s
pretty much under control.’

‘Are you sure? I
mean...’

Dr. Petrie
shrugged. ‘I can’t be sure until the experts are sure. But I wasn’t close to
that boy for very long, and the chances are that I probably haven’t caught it.’

Adelaide sat
down. She watched Prickles playing for a while, and then said, ‘I just find it
so hard to believe.

I thought
plague was one of those things they had in Europe, in the Middle Ages. It just
seems so weird.’

Dr. Petrie sat
on the arm of the settee opposite. Unconsciously, he felt he ought to keep his
distance. There was something about the word Plague that made him think of
infection and putrescence and teeming bacteria, and until he knew for certain
he was clean and clear, he didn’t feel like breathing too closely in Adelaide’s
direction.

He sipped his
drink. ‘I was reading about it the other day, in a medical journal. We’ve had
plague in America since the turn of the century. We’ve still got it –
particularly in the west. They had to lift the ban on DDT not long ago, so that
they could disinfect rats’ nests and ground squirrels’ burrows. Don’t look so
worried. It’s just one of these things that
sounds
more frightening than it really is.’

Adelaide looked
up, and gave him a twitchy smile.
‘Plague.
The Black Death.
Who’s frightened?’ she said softly.

Prickles was
shaking her doll. ‘Dolly,’ she said crossly,
‘are you feeling giddy again?’

Dr. Petrie
smiled. ‘Is dolly feeling sick, too?’ he asked. ‘Maybe she needs a good night’s
sleep, like you.’

Prickles shook her
head seriously.
‘Oh, no.
Dolly’s not tired. Dolly
doesn’t feel like going to bed yet. Dolly’s just feeling giddy.’

Dr. Petrie
looked at his little daughter closely! Her hair was drawn back in a pony-tail,
and her profile was just like his. When she grew up, and lost some of that
six-year-old chubbiness, she would probably be pretty. Margaret, when he had
first married her, had been one of the prettiest girls on the north beach.

‘Well,’ he
said, ‘if dolly’s feeling giddy, perhaps dolly would like some nice
streptomycin.’

Prickles
frowned. ‘No, dolly doesn’t want any of that. Dolly doesn’t like it. She’s just
feeling giddy, like Mommy.’

Dr. Petrie
stared at Prickles intently. ‘What did you say?’ he asked her. He said it so
sharply that she looked up at him with her mouth open, as if she’d done
something wrong.

He knelt on the
floor beside her. ‘I’m not angry, darling,’ he said. ‘But did you say that
Mommy was giddy?’

Prickles
nodded. ‘Mommy went swimming, and when she came back she said she felt sick,
and the next day she was giddy.’

Dr. Petrie
leaned back against the settee. The creeping sensation of anxiety was spreading
all over him.

Adelaide, her
face pale, said, ‘Leonard... you don’t think that Margaret...?’

Dr. Petrie
stood up. ‘I don’t know,’ he said hoarsely. ‘What worries me is how many other
people have caught it. I think I’d better get down to the hospital and find out
what’s going on.’

‘Is Mommy all
right?’ said Prickles, frowning. Dr. Petrie forced a smile, and laid a gentle
hand on his daughter’s pony-tail.

‘Yes, honey.
Mommy’s all right. Now – don’t you think it’s time that dolly went to bed?’

Prickles
sighed. ‘I suppose so. She has been very giddy today. Do all dollies get giddy?
All the dollies in Miami?’

Dr. Petrie
picked Prickles up in his arms, and held her close against him. The doll was
made of lurid pink plastic, with a shock of brassy blonde nylon hair. He
examined it closely, and then pronounced his diagnosis.

‘I think that
dolly’s going to get better. And I don’t think that all the dollies in Miami
will get giddy. At least...’

He couldn’t
help noticing Adelaide’s anxious, attractive face.

‘At least I
hope not,’ he finished quietly, and laid his daughter down.

It was nearly
midnight when the black and white police patrol car turned the corner from
Washington Avenue into Dade Boulevard, cruising up the warm, deserted streets
at a watchful speed. At the wheel, in his neat-pressed shirtsleeves, sat
24-year-old Officer Herb Stone – a thin-faced cop with a dark six o’clock
shadow and a pointed nose. Beside him, eating a hot dog out of a pressed
cardboard tray, sat his buddy, 26-year-old Officer Francis Poletto, a chunky,
tough-looking young police athlete with a face like a pug.

‘I almost broke
my ass laughing,’ Poletto was saying, with his mouth full. ‘The guy gets on
the water-skis
, the boat starts up, and the next thing I
know, they’re pulling him right across the bay underwater. He climbs out,
coughing and spluttering, and he says, “Well, that’s great for a start – now
teach me how to do it on the surface!”

Laugh? I broke
my ass.’

Herb Stone
grinned politely, and left it at that. He liked Poletto, and there were a
couple of times when he’d been glad of Poletto’s rough-house style arrest. But
Stone was quiet and academic, and hoped to make it through to detective school,
and promotion.

Poletto, on the
other hand, liked to keep in touch with the streets, and the tough cookies who
hung around the beaches. He was hard and dedicated and had once shot a hippie
in the left arm.

They stopped at
a red light, and waited at the empty junction. Crickets chirruped in the grass,
and palms rustled drily in the soft night air. Herb Stone whistled tunelessly
under his breath. Poletto munched. The radio said something indistinct about a
traffic violation on Tamiami Trail.

Just as they
were about to move off, a second-hand silver Pontiac came swerving across the
junction in front of them, bouncing unsteadily on its springs, and roared off
down Alton Road. Stone looked at Poletto and Poletto looked at Stone.

‘Let’s go,’
said Poletto, screwing up his cardboard hot-dog tray. ‘This might be the only
action we get all night.’ Herb Stone switched on the siren, and the police car
squealed and skittered around the corner and bellowed off after the speeding
Pontiac. They saw its crimson tail-lights vanishing down Alton Road in the
direction of MacArthur Causeway, swaying erratically from one side of the road
to the other.

‘Drunk,’
snarled Poletto.
‘Drunk as a fucking skunk.’

Herb Stone,
tense and sweating, closed the gap between the speeding Pontiac and the
warbling, flashing police car. In a few seconds, they were close enough to see
the dark shape of the driver, hunched over his wheel. Herb tried to nudge the
police car up alongside the Pontiac and force him over, but the Pontiac slewed
from kerb to kerb, tires squealing and suspension banging at every turn.

Suddenly, the
Pontiac driver slammed on his brakes. Herb, dazzled by the red glare of the
fugitive’s tail-lights, went for his brake-pedal and missed it. The black and
white police car smashed noisily into the back of the silver Pontiac, knocking
it sideways into the kerb. Herb stamped on the brakes and stopped savagely.

‘You’re,
supposed to chase him,’ said Poletto bluntly. ‘Not smash the ass off him.’

The two officers
climbed out of their car and walked across to the Pontiac. Poletto unbuttoned
his top pocket and took out his notebook.

‘Okay,
Charlie,’ he snapped. ‘What’s all this, Death Racesooof?’ The driver didn’t
answer. He was middle-aged, with rimless glasses, and he was sitting upright in
his seat like a wax dummy. His face was a ghastly and noticeable white.

Herb stepped up
closer and saw that his eyes were closed. He had gray, close- cropped hair and
a check working man’s shirt. He looked respectable, even staid. He was
shivering.

‘Do you think
he’s okay?’ asked Herb uncertainly. ‘He doesn’t look too well to me.’

Poletto
shrugged. ‘Herb – if you’d drunk as much as this guy, you wouldn’t look too
well, neither. Okay, Charlie, out of the car.’

The man didn’t
open his eyes, or stir, or say anything.

He just sat
there shaking, pale and beaded with perspiration.

‘Come on, wise
guy,’ ordered Poletto, and wrenched open the dented car door. He was about to
reach in, but he stopped himself. He pulled a contorted face and said, ‘Jesus
H. Christ.’

‘What’s wrong?’
said Herb. Then, before Poletto could answer, he smelled it for himself. It was
so rank that he almost felt sick.

‘I think he’s
ill, Frank,’ said Herb. ‘Get an ambulance, will you, and the wreck squad, and I’ll
pull him out of there.’

Poletto screwed
up his nose. ‘Rather you than me, buddy boy. That guy smells like a goddamned
drain.’

Poletto went
across to the police car, reached inside and picked up the mike. Herb heard him
calling for an ambulance. Taking a deep breath he pushed open the Pontiac’s
door as wide as he could, and tried to get his hands under the driver’s
armpits. The man murmured and mumbled, and feebly pushed Herb away. But then he
sagged and collapsed, and Herb dragged his heavy body out of the diahorrea- filled
driving seat, and laid him on the road.

The man
whispered something. Poletto, coming back from the police car, said, ‘What’s he
chirping about? Is he sick, or what?’

‘I don’t know,’
said Herb. He knelt on the road beside the feverish driver, and put his face as
close as he could to the sick man’s mouth. He never did understand what the man
was trying to say, but he remembered the spittle that touched his cheek as the
man’s lips whispered those last, incomprehensible words.

In the distance,
they heard the ambulance siren. Herb lifted the man’s head from the concrete
road and said gently, ‘Don’t worry, mac. You’re going to be all right. They’ll
take you away, and you’re going to be fine.’

Dr. Petrie
reached the hospital a little after twelve. He was surprised to see that the
casualty reception area was crowded with ambulances and police cars, and even a
couple of Press cars. All the lights were on inside the building, and people
were running backwards and forwards with medical trolleys and blankets.

He parked the
Lincoln on the road and walked across to the hospital doors. A shirtsleeved
policeman said, ‘Sorry, friend. This is off limits.’

Dr. Petrie
reached into his white linen jacket and produced his identity card. ‘I’m a
doctor. I came down here to see Anton Selmer. He’s in charge of emergency. Say –
what goes on here?’