The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  Carriscant began again, moderating his voice, trying to sound as reasonable as possible. “None of this is at my instigation. Chief Bobby has only called me out whenever Dr Wieland has been, ah, unavailable.”

  “But you accepted the invitation to the Governor’s palace,” Cruz said, unable to keep the note of sneering triumph out of his voice.

  “Exactly,” Wieland echoed.

  “For heaven’s sake, what else was I meant to do? The Governor himself asked—”

  “You should have come directly to me. As medical director of the San Jeronimo it is my responsibility. You are on my staff. I speak for the board, for the institution.”

  “These killings have nothing to do with the hospital.”

  “The American corpses are being kept in my hospital and I am the last to know. It’s intolerable!” He banged his fist petulantly down on the arm of his chair. “And what is more,” he went on, acidly, “Dr Wieland, a close friend and colleague, has been officially reprimanded by Governor Taft as a result of testimony you provided.”

  Wieland rose to his feet, the studied neutrality all gone. His eyes were heavy with resentment and distaste. “I demand to know what you said to the Governor.”

  “And I order you to tell him,” Cruz added.

  Carriscant felt his jaw muscles knot and his shoulders bunch. He deliberately waited a few seconds before replying, adding a drone of bureaucratic indifference to his voice now, the better to goad them. They had just handed him the advantage with their hectoring pomposity; they no longer unsettled him.

  “That must remain a confidential matter between me and the Governor. The Governor requested that our discussion of Dr Wieland’s merits, or otherwise, be conducted under such conditions. I regret—”

  This was too much for Wieland, clearly. He stepped towards him. “Listen to me, you nigger bastard—”

  “What did you call me? I warn you, I—”

  Carriscant’s swinging fist caught Wieland too high, on the left ear, and it caused his knuckles to ring with pain, but the force was sufficient to send Wieland down and a moment later Carriscant was astride him, fingers round the plump and pleated throat, his thumbs searching for his windpipe. Cruz threw himself bodily at him, charging him with his shoulder like a man trying to break down a door, and sent him flying into his desk, his head connecting with one of the mighty turned legs. For a second or two all three men were sprawling on the floor, Manila’s medical elite in professional dispute. Wieland was the first to his feet, coughing, massaging his throat, and helped Cruz up, shakily. Carriscant, somewhat dazed, rubbed his face with his hands, both excited and shocked at the violence which had risen in him. He rose to his feet slowly, his head was aching and his body was trembling.

  “I’ll get you, Carriscant!” Wieland shouted at him, hoarsely. He spat on Cruz’s polished floor. Twice. Two silver dollars.

  Cruz seemed not to notice, or care. “I’m reporting you to the board,” he bellowed also. “You’ll be dismissed!” His chest was heaving, his grey hair spikily awry.

  Carriscant said nothing. With one hand held out, fingertips brushing the wall, he walked round the room to the door. There, he paused and turned to face them.

  “If you ever insult me again, Wieland,” he said in a low, quavering voice, “I’ll kill you.”

  “I heard that,” Cruz yelled. “I am a witness to that threat!”

  He turned to Cruz. “And as for you, I’m going to ask the board for your removal as medical director. You are a disgrace to the profession.”

  He left the room, heedless of their furious shouts.

  “My God,” Pantaleon said, with an enthusiastic smile. “It’s war.”

  “It had to happen sooner or later,” Carriscant said. They were walking from Pantaleon’s apartments towards the nipa barn. “But I have a feeling everything will go quiet.” He smiled with some bitterness. “Cruz knows full well that you and I are the source of the hospital’s real prosperity. And I have Bobby—even Taft—on my side. Cruz is washed up. Wieland’s a fraud and a hopeless drunk. You and I could move to San Lazaro tomorrow—they’d take us with open arms.” They pushed through the gap in the plumbago hedge. “No, I’m expecting something more underhand, something more insidiously worthy of the two of them.”

  He saw that the barn doors were open wide and that the sounds of delicate hammering came from within, small hammers on fine tacks.

  “By the way,” Carriscant went on, “you know that storeroom, just off the corridor to the theatre? I’ve had it cleaned out.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “It’s our new morgue. I’m having some of Cruz’s freezing boxes put in there. Big locks on the door, make sure Braun stays safe. I’ll see if I can get Ward back from the other place.” He shrugged. “It should make a difference. Keep Cruz and Wieland out of our hair.” He turned towards the barn. “What’re you up to now?”

  “Wait here,” Pantaleon said. “I’ll show you.”

  Carriscant waited while Pantaleon entered the barn and the sound of hammering ceased. He exhaled and closed his eyes, feeling his aches, feeling the tension in his limbs groan and tighten. His life was complicated enough, confused and disturbed enough, at the moment, he knew, without violent animosity breaking out between him and Cruz, but the uneasy neutrality that had existed since the war had ended in July was bound to founder eventually. Perhaps it was better this way, he tried to tell himself, it would at least take his mind off this impossible, obsessive infatuation he had developed…Put Cruz out to pasture with his dogs and monkeys, run the hospital in his way, according to his principles and advanced scientific method, sweep out the dead wood—

  “Salvador, look.”

  He opened his eyes. Pantaleon’s flying machine was being wheeled out of the shed by a quartet of local carpenters. The thin tapered body rested on a carriage of four bicycle wheels, with a fifth, a smaller one, further back to provide stability. The Aero-mobile, as he remembered it was called, had two wings, one above the other, a dense network of slim bamboo struts and tensed wires between the two. Thrusting up from the rounded nose was a third shorter wing held out and aloft by cradling wooden arms. At the rear was the horizontal semicircular tail, and he noticed that both this and the small panel wing at the front were attached to wire pulley devices that led back to simple wooden levers mounted above the four–wheel carriage. Most of the body and wings were covered with near-transparent panels of silk. He reached out and touched the end of a wing: the material was hard and varnished, it reverberated beneath the tap of his fingernail like a drum.

  “Extraordinary,” he said, genuinely amazed. “And you’re sure this thing will fly?”

  “In theory. Far enough to win the prize, certainly.”

  It looked, to his eyes, very frail and very ugly. Like a giant botched model of a dragonfly, crudely conceived, as if by someone who has only had a dragonfly described to him, rather than seen it with his own eyes, and been told to construct a simulacrum from basket weave, matchwood and paper. It looked front-heavy and impractical…And yet there was something touching and ethereal about its cackhandedness, its very inelegance. Like certain insects, certain ephemera, which look as if they were never designed by God to fly and yet somehow take to the wing to everyone’s surprise. Perhaps Pantaleon’s machine would be the same.

  “What’s missing are the propellers, two of them,” Pantaleon said, indicating a wooden mounting on the lower, leading wing. “Screw propellers, based on the marine model but larger. The engine will be here in the nose, and we’ll run chains out here to drive the propellers.”

  Carriscant wandered around to the rear of the machine. He really had to congratulate Pantaleon: this idealistic dedication, this single-minded pursuit of a dream was rare in anyone, and now it produced a Pantaleon he hardly recognised. He felt sudden tears of emotion in his eyes and his gaze blurred with salty water. Tears of pride and admiration, tears of love for this lanky young friend of his.

  Pantaleon was wi
ggling the large semicircular tail. It was mounted on a block that could turn, allowing the tail to rotate partially on its axis: one tip dropping two feet while the other rose, and vice versa.

  “This is the crucial control,” Pantaleon was saying. “It took me a year to develop, and long observation of gliding birds—hawks, buzzards. It’s this ability to twist their tails—” he demonstrated with his spread fingers, waggling left and right, “—that controls rolling in flight.” He smiled at Carriscant. “Pitch, yaw and roll,” he said, “that is what the aero-mobilist really has to conquer. Once we control these three devils then the air will become our new domain…”

  He walked over to Carriscant and put his arm round his shoulders. “Please, Salvador, don’t cry, there’s no need.” Carriscant, wordless, moved, turned away and blew his nose into his handkerchief.

  “I’m overwhelmed, Panta, overwhelmed.” He embraced him. “After a day such as I’ve had you don’t know what a tonic you are, my friend, what an inspiration.”

  Carriscant supervised the installation of the ice chests in the new morgue himself. They were in fact used for the refrigerated transportation of perishable food at sea, first developed in Australia, Udo Leys had told him, when Carriscant had first described Cruz’s arrangement. And it was Udo who had managed to procure these three second-hand examples for him, not quite as large as Cruz’s, but capacious enough to hold two bodies very comfortably. He had had the interior lining cavity restuffed with new straw and had had the stencilled sign on the side, “Oh Chung Lu, Meat & Fish Importers”, painted over. Filled with ice, the chests (one containing Ward, whom he had rescued from the old morgue, one containing Braun) were pushed against three walls of the new morgue while in the middle of the room was an enamel-topped examination table with three tin basins beneath. There was already a sink against the fourth wall and the wooden floorboards had been covered with a waterproof cork carpet on his instructions. The morgue would function perfectly until he could secure Cruz’s dismissal. It also provided him, he realised, with an ideal place for his own dissections and investigations, should he require it. There was no longer any need to visit the anatomy laboratory at San Lazaro hospital: everything necessary was now under his own roof.

  He was standing in the new morgue at 6 o’clock the next evening, indecisive, wondering whether he should return home now the day’s work was done, or whether he should make one further tour of his wards, when a porter knocked on the door with an envelope marked “urgent and personal”. He tore it open and read the large rapid scrawl.

  Dear Carriscant,

  I need your help with the utmost urgency on a delicate medical matter. I would be most grateful if you could call on me this evening at my house, 5 Lagarda Street in San Miguel, at your earliest convenience, any time this evening. I count on your help and your confidentiality.

  Yours faithfully,

  Jepson Sieverance.

  Sieverance’s house was one of five large newish villas built in the Antillean style not far from the Malacanan Palace, all occupied by members of the Governor’s staff, that formed a small compound called the Calle Lagarda. There was even a marine on guard at the entrance to the cul de sac, sitting idly in a sentry box. He waved Carriscant’s victoria through with barely a glance.

  Carriscant was shown up to the living room on the first floor where Sieverance greeted him, clearly in a state of anxiety, his face drawn, and somehow sucked in, as if he had lost weight dramatically in the last twenty-four hours. He shook Carriscant’s hand over-eagerly, almost abject in his gratitude.

  “I can’t thank you enough, Carriscant. I’m in your debt.”

  “It’s nothing, really. What’s the trouble? You don’t look at all well, I must say.”

  “This way, please.”

  He led Carriscant out of the living room and down a corridor towards, Carriscant imagined, a bedroom where he could be examined in privacy. He paused at a door and knocked gently on it.

  “Delphine?” he said. “May we come in?”

  He knew at once, of course, immediately, with no doubts or second thoughts. He was vaguely aware of Sieverance opening the door, and of following him into the room. Oil lamps, turned down by a bedside. A gauzy tent of mosquito netting. The sway of the punkah fan on the ceiling, to and fro, to and fro…

  He ordered his legs to carry him to the bedside as Sieverance gently folded back the netting. He held his face immobile, eyes still, as she turned from her doze to see who it was.

  She was propped on several pillows, her dull chestnut hair spread, loose, a moist sheen of perspiration on her pale stressed face.

  Sieverance said to her softly, “This is the doctor I was telling you about, my love. This is Dr Carriscant.”

  She frowned, lifted an arm as if to block the glare from a lamp and her eyes grew wide with incredulity.

  “How do you do, Mrs Sieverance,” he managed somehow to say quickly. “I’m very sorry to find you unwell.”

  He felt his face hot, is skin itched. “Dr Carriscant?…Doctor?” She shook her head, trying to clear it.

  “The doctor I told you about. The hospital, remember? Every latest style of equipment.”

  She closed her eyes and exhaled. He knew, suddenly, instinctively, that she would say nothing.

  “Dr Carriscant…” she repeated. “Thank you for coming.”

  He allowed himself a weak, twitching smile. He felt he was about to fall over. He felt the sweat roll from his armpits, his shirt sticking damply to his back. He reached out and pulled a chair to the bed. Not too close.

  “What seems to be the trouble?”

  She told him, prompted occasionally by Sieverance, that she had been suffering from pains in the abdomen for a week or so but she had thought nothing of it, suspecting a digestive problem. Then that afternoon she had been stricken by a severe attack of vomiting and the pain had reached intolerable levels. She felt feverish. A friend had called the doctor.

  “She called Dr Wieland,” Sieverance interjected. “I was at work. Dr Wieland was called.” He glanced meaningfully at Carriscant, apologetically. “He is our medical officer. It was the natural thing to do, unfortunately.”

  “What did he diagnose?”

  “He didn’t offer one. He prescribed a purgative and opium.”

  “I see. Have you taken them?” He turned his gaze back to her. Delphine. Even sickly and in pain that face, her hair loose, makes me…He smiled, all reassurance.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, a hint of irritation in her voice. “What else was I meant to do? The pain has gotten less, but the purgative…” She winced. “But the fever is worse, and the pain is coming back, badly.”

  “Which is why I called you.” Sieverance looked pleadingly at him.

  “Strictly speaking Mrs Sieverance is Dr Wieland’s patient now. I can’t really—”

  “To hell with that,” Sieverance said with untypical fierceness. “I’m not going to worry about the niceties of medical protocol. My wife is seriously ill. I don’t care—”

  “Jepson,” she said, wearily. “Don’t worry. Dr Carriscant will help.” She knew her power. Already we had a secret between us. A silent promise had passed between us, he thought.

  “Where is the pain?” he asked.

  “My stomach, low to the right side.”

  “Did Dr Wieland examine you?”

  “No.”

  He sighed. Unbelievable. “I have to,” he said. “If you’ll permit me. I’m sorry to sound like a textbook but palpation is often our best diagnostic tool. May I?”

  Sieverance looked at his wife for permission.

  “Of course,” she said. “Please do.”

  Carefully he folded the sheet back to her knees. She was wearing a white cotton nightdress with frilled bib-effect over the chest. A smell rose up from the bed, briefly. Her smell, a trace of perfume and powder, of fresh sweat and a sour, momentary reek of shit. He filled his nostrils before the punkah fan swished it away.

  “Would you
mind indicating…”

  Her finger went to a point three inches to the left of her right hip. Very gently he rested the tips of his right hand’s fingers on her body, feeling its softness through the cotton, feeling its heat, and pressed down.

  “It’s generally sore, down there. I can’t really say—”

  “Tell me when there’s a spasm.”

  He moved his hand further to the left. Beneath the tip of his little finger he felt the prickle of her pudenda, a wiry yielding. He moved again a little lower. She gave a gasp of pain. Beneath his fingers he felt the stretched ripe capsule of the abscess, tuberous, rotten, ready to burst.

  “May I smell your breath?” He moved his face, not capable of meeting her eyes, and she breathed upon him, brackish and foul. He took her temperature: 102 degrees.

  “Dr Wieland said I should take the purgatives every four hours.”

  “Of course he would. He has no idea what he’s doing. May I have them please?”

  Sieverance handed him a dozen brown paper sachets from the drawer of a bedside cabinet and Carriscant put them in his pocket. He sat back in his chair, steepling his hands, pressing the fingers together to stop them trembling.

  “Mrs Sieverance, you have what they call in America appendicitis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There is a small vermiform appendage to part of your intestine called the blind gut. Literally an appendix to your gut, which has become inflamed and swollen. I imagine it is already perforated which is causing the pain and vomiting. It has caused an abscess which will rupture, I should say, sometime in the next twenty-four hours.” He paused. “What happens then is that the corrupt matter will be released into the abdominal cavity, the peritoneum. And once that occurs there is very little we can do.”