Sweat trickled down Cora’s forehead, and her blouse clung to her back. Beneath the late afternoon sun, the enclosed roof of the morgue was acting like an open-air oven. The rooms below had to be cooler, but even if she army-crawled to the stairwell, the door’s movement might give her away.
Riverside had sat dormant before, but only for brief periods. She’d survived those transitional times with food stockpiles and her victory garden. According to the recent gossip, this closure was permanent.
Cora shimmied to her eastern spy hole so she could see the silent physical plant across the street. Soon the ferry would leave, and she could refill her canteen at the cistern. That morning, the city had shut off the flow of clean water through a pipe beneath the river. The notion of drinking dirt and algae made her shudder, but at least the microbes couldn’t harm her.
From Ulrich, she’d learned much about her abilities. And limitations. Because of his first experiment after Otto disappeared in 1936, she knew that her body could wipe out most common infections. Over the two years that had followed, he’d continued to probe her physiology. And then, after the war, Ulrich had further expanded the scope of his work.
He’d employed the methods developed by his colleagues during their transplantation experiments on the “Ravensbrück rabbits”—eighty-six female concentration camp prisoners. Unbeknownst to the world, Cora had become the eighty-seventh lapin. Seeking to pinpoint the source of her immunities, Ulrich inserted tissue from her organs into infected hosts. Since he no longer had access to a pool of expendable human subjects, he used the livestock at Lab 257.
When that effort produced no conclusive results, he reversed the process by implanting bovine and swine tissue into her. After a month-long incubation period, he removed the samples and returned them to their original—subsequently infected—hosts, in the wild hope that the animals would acquire her special traits.
Months later, undaunted by failure, Ulrich moved onto other hypotheses influenced by his Nazi colleagues.
In 1950, the veterans received their diplomas, and the idyllic island community departed with them. Forced to relocate, Ulrich moved his family to Long Island to split his time more easily between Plum Island and North Brother. During those two years, with no one around to hear her cries, he’d ruled over both Riverside and her.
On July 1, 1952, the day the hospital reopened, Ulrich, with his family in tow, became a resident doctor, while maintaining his affiliation with Lab 257. The very next day, he registered Cora as an addicted juvenile whose treatment plan required isolation. And whose “heroin-induced schizophrenia” meant no other doctor would believe her “fantastical claims.”
In addition to testing environmental influences, he embarked on a side project to determine the effects of trauma on her vitality. While installing apparatus that enabled her isolation cell to double as a gas chamber, he explained that he’d observed a correlation between stress and accelerated aging in the Jews. “I began collecting data,” he said as he secured his mask, “so they could serve as my control group for you.”
Gas flowed into the room, and she choked backed her screams to keep from inhaling the poisonous vapors. Each time her body began to convulse, and she was sure that death had finally arrived, he would turn off the spigot.
After seven stints in solitary confinement, Cora still looked eighteen years old, which taught them both something: Her cells were tougher than her psyche.
Now, a whole new form of isolation—and torture—was about to begin. Cora shook her canteen, and the last few drops landed in her mouth.
The American flag, affixed to a pole in the corner, flapped in the wind.
Two years ago, she’d watched Kennedy’s inauguration on the television from the doorway to the crowded commons room in the staff house. She would have voted for him, but the island hadn’t contained a polling station. Not that she could have registered: she’d lost her citizenship with the filing of her death certificate. The convicts on neighboring Rikers Island had more rights than she did.
During the ceremony, Ulrich had sat near the TV with Angela and their young daughter. Every time the camera panned to the crowd blanketing the National Mall, they searched for Rollie, who’d volunteered in Kennedy’s grassroots campaign.
When the president had implored, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” Ulrich had winked at Cora and grinned with those straight, pure white teeth. Otto had viewed his ability to resist tobacco, coffee, and liquor as a testament of his faith, whereas Ulrich abstained simply because not doing so would be a sign of weakness.
Although Ulrich had never said it, she knew he wanted to use her to develop a biological weapon for which the United States—or he alone—would possess the antidote. With her in complete seclusion, he could extend her deadly disease count without fear of triggering an outbreak.
The door to the physical plant banged open, and two mechanics exited the building. They didn’t bother to lock up, which would save her the trouble of having to break in.
For weeks, she’d been hoping that the moving crew would leave behind the large backup battery stored there. The unit could power her space heater on the cruelest of days. The Farmers’ Almanac had predicted the winter of 1963–1964 to be brutal.
The taller of the technicians tossed a cigarette to his greaser partner, and they lit up. “About time they pulled the plug on this shithole.”
“Where’d they take all them junkie teens?” The greaser took a drag.
“Some other shithole.” He chuckled. “You got a new gig yet?”
The greaser pulled a pair of shades from the breast pocket of his jumpsuit. “A lead or two, but what I’d really dig is another place like this, with easy chicks.”
Guffawing, they ambled toward the dock.
Cora pressed her fingernails against the cement bordering one of the bricks and wished she could hurl it at them. Some of the girls sent here had been keen on messing around, but others had been raped by staff or other patients. Or both.
When she’d first learned that Riverside would specialize in treating teenagers, she’d fantasized about making friends. Out of the couple hundred that would come, she’d hoped that at least a few would be willing to hang out with her from a safe distance.
The teenagers who’d been treated for communicable diseases hadn’t prepared Cora for how different these addicts would be from Sophia and her friends at Wadleigh High. How she missed them! By now they were nearly eighty years old, if even still alive.
Riverside’s cold-turkey treatment approach had seemed to make the kids crave heroin even more. A few had been friendly, and one handsome, sweet fellow had taken an interest in her. To keep him from coming too close, she’d had to pretend that she wanted nothing to do with him. Repeatedly. The sting of those memories still felt as fresh as the day they’d happened.
Cora released a single, strangled sob of self-pity.
Come on, woman. Get a grip. You. Are. Strong.
Mary. Cora closed her eyes and imagined her old friend beside her. If she were here now, she’d make sure neither of them starved. Cora should have paid more attention to Mary’s chatter about the foods she’d once prepared or preserved.
Far more than her cooking, though, Cora missed her companionship and bold spirit.
Mary would have thrown a brick at those technicians.
But Mary was dead, Cora reminded herself, and an intense wave of sorrow and loneliness deluged her.
She brought her palm to her mouth and concentrated on the coolness of her breath against her skin. It’s only air. Not water.
She visualized the supplies in her two secret caches, which she’d accumulated over the past three months. The food, toiletries, and batteries would make her less reliant on Ulrich initially, and the tools, clothes, blankets, and kitchenware should last for decades.
The iciness
within her receded. Once again, she could feel the sun baking her backside. She returned to the spyhole facing the ferry. Most of the two dozen laborers were awaiting the “all aboard” call. Many were smoking, and almost all were shirtless.
“We forgot the flag!” hollered a guy with Coke-bottle glasses.
She dropped her head to the asphalt. The hot, rough surface pricked the side of her face, and its stench filled her nose.
If they found her, they would make her leave with them. She’d be dead within days, and shortly thereafter, a large portion of Gotham’s population would join her. The spread wouldn’t stop there: the passenger planes that thundered overhead from LaGuardia would carry her invisible assassins to England, France, and every other country on her atlas.
The sound of muffled conversation interrupted her thoughts. Cora raised her head and heard laughter.
“No way I’m setting foot in there, no matter who fought in Korea. It’s full of spooks.”
“Don’t be such a candyass.”
“Boys!” said a sharp voice. “The scheduled departure’s in . . . three minutes.”
Cora’s mouth felt like it was filled with sand. She put her eye back to the gap and located Ulrich, in a white lab coat, which had to be for her benefit alone.
Last night, from this same roof, she’d watched him stroll aboard the ferry to spend the night with Angela and Greta in their new apartment on the Upper West Side. He hadn’t arrived with the crew this morning. So how had he gotten here?
“Boss says I have to fetch the flag,” protested a man whose large biceps were covered in tattoos.
“Until that ferry’s unloaded in the Bronx, you work for me,” he declared, waving a clipboard authoritatively. “The flag stays.”
She wished she could believe that Ulrich had inadvertently saved her, but everything he did was premeditated. He must know she was up here. How long had he been avoiding her surveillance? Likely long enough to have made his own preparations before the movers began boxing up the medical supplies.
“Grab a dolly and two of your buddies,” Ulrich said. “There’s a backup battery in the plant that needs to go. We leave on schedule.”
She spat out a curse. Ulrich had helped her, only to increase her suffering. He’d told her about the hypothermia experiments his colleagues at Dachau had conducted on the Jews, and so he knew exactly what that battery meant to her.
The McSorleys’ apartment hadn’t been wired for electricity. Cora’s mother had heated their watery soups, rarely containing meat, over a coal stove, and the three had eaten beside a kerosene lamp. At the time, Cora hadn’t known life could be better.
Now that she’d become accustomed to those luxuries, she didn’t know how she would go without. And Ulrich knew that. He wanted her entirely dependent on him. Her head burned fever hot, and her muscles twitched. She despised that man.
If for no other reason, she would survive to spite him.
I know who you are: the descendant of a great Celtic warrior.
O’Toole. Expecting to see him, Cora whipped her head around. “No,” she said, sharing her anguish with the empty rooftop. “He died fourteen years ago.”
But maybe he’d been right.
Fisting her hands, Cora decided that she would do more than endure: she would best Ulrich. Instead of agonizing over the ways he might torture her with no one around to intervene, she should be viewing the island’s abandonment to her advantage. If she fought back, there would be no one nearby for him to harm in retaliation.
Her grip tightened on the shaft of an imaginary javelin. She would love to drive a spearhead into the back of his graying head the first time he returned, but that would be akin to killing herself. Her revenge needed to be carefully crafted.
First, she would get through a full cycle of the seasons, which she couldn’t do without his assistance.
Second, she would figure out how to survive on her own.
Third, she would exterminate him.
Fourth, Cora unclenched her fists. Rollie was nothing like his father. As far as she knew, to him, she’d been merely a groundskeeper, part of the island’s scenery. Whenever he’d passed her, he’d smiled and waved. Since she’d always worn a wide-brimmed hat and kept her distance, he couldn’t have noticed that she hadn’t aged as he’d grown.
But now that he was a premed student at Columbia University, she had to assume that Ulrich had shared with him the details of their family’s spezielles Projekt.
A thud, followed by the reverberation of metal, drove Cora’s attention back to the physical plant. Three of the laborers were maneuvering the battery, strapped to a dolly, toward the dock, with Ulrich snapping commands to keep them lumbering in the right direction. With age, his limp had worsened. Ever since learning that he’d sustained the injury to his right knee while at the concentration camp, she’d fantasized that a Holocaust prisoner had fought back, and wounded him—proof he wasn’t invincible.
Cora moved to the other wall now to watch Ulrich and the last of the crew climb aboard. The captain blasted the horn, and the men cheered as the ferry began backing into the currents.
Through the crowd at the bow railing, Ulrich emerged and stared at the morgue roof.
Even though he couldn’t possibly see her, Cora sensed those arctic eyes fixed on her. If she tried to murder him and failed, his rage would be animalistic. And to punish her further, he could find victims in Manhattan who wouldn’t be missed.
Ulrich put his hand to his mouth and then left the bow.
He just blew me a kiss, she realized. An urge to dry-heave rose from her stomach, and she forced the sensation back down.
“I will kill him,” she said, her attention fixed on the receding ferry. Until the ship disappeared, she couldn’t be certain he was truly gone.
How and when he would return, she had no idea. The sensation of heavy water, pressing down, stole her breath. In staccato gasps, she sucked in air.
When the boat passed under the Hell Gate Bridge, she was alone. Truly alone.
Her breathing slowed, and she stood up. A breeze whipped her hair across her face, its whistle filling the silence. Riverside Hospital existed no more.
Eventually New York City would reclaim its land. Whether the campus would house the sick, the insane, or soldiers preparing to fight a third world war didn’t matter. For now, North Brother Island belonged to her, Cora McSorley.
“Cruadal, my friend, cruadal,” Mary seemed to whisper inside Cora’s head.
Repeatedly over the years, Mary had told Cora that it wasn’t her fault Ulrich had turned out the way he had; Cora owed him no compliance or forgiveness. In response, Cora had always nodded to appease her friend. As hard as she’d tried to believe Mary, a niggling doubt had remained.
Now, fully understanding her deceased friend’s often repeated advice to muster courage, Cora nodded as if Mary were standing beside her. “You were right,” she whispered.
Turning to the abandoned grounds, she yelled, “I do have the blood of a Celtic warrior. And I will show no mercy. Ulrich Gettler, you are not my fate: I sentence you to death.”
The wind blew her voice across the atoll, and Cora cringed at her boldness.
Reflexively, she curled inward to protect herself from a beating. The first time she’d rebelled against him after their reunion in the meadow had been her last.
The memory of Susie’s small fingers, frantically clawing at the tiny air holes drilled in the wood, and at Cora, throughout the hour that Ulrich had kept them locked in a coffin together, still made her squirm. The girl had been the six-year-old daughter of a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, whom Cora had beseeched for help.
Cora pressed her hand against the pocket of her satchel, where she kept the bunny barrettes Susie had been wearing that day, then looked across the river. Somewhere behind the glare of the sun stood the Gettlers’
new brownstone, which she suspected had been paid for with Ulrich’s share of the valuables stolen from the prisoners at Dachau.
She knew he was relying on the lasting trauma from Susie’s death to keep her in submission. Picturing an armored Celtic chieftain, she decided to instead use that memory against him.
Cora turned to face the four-story tuberculosis pavilion. Although the building had become the wellspring of her disgust with this island, avoiding it would be shortsighted. The most modern of the structures, its ventilation would make it the coolest place during the summer’s peak heat, and in winter, without that backup battery, she would have to rely on the thicker insulation within its walls.
Also, she needed to control the pavilion so that Ulrich couldn’t. She would make it so that he could never operate on her in there again.
She rotated to survey the rest of her twenty-acre domain. The campus had become a ghost town.
Wistfully, she stared at the fenced-in tennis courts across the street from the nurses’ residence. The shouting of players and thwacking of balls had practically been constants on the island. Their absences now were deafening.
In 1916, O’Toole had taught her the game, and she’d picked it up quickly. She could still remember the exhilaration of beating him for the first time. From the porch of her nearby bungalow, Mary had shrieked in celebration.
After Mary’s death in 1938, her “germ-infested” hut had been razed.
Now even the nets were gone. Cora turned away from the clay courts and headed down the stairwell.
Moving through the gloomy hallway, she passed the pathology lab, stripped of equipment, and recalled the original Dr. Gettler, bent over his microscope. Cora could almost hear him repeating his favorite quote from Pasteur: “It is in the power of man to make parasitic maladies disappear from the globe!”
While he’d been operating a centrifuge or cleaning his equipment, she’d often kept him company in the hopes of hearing an update that would enable him to shift his focus to ridding her body of the germs. Occasionally, using a pair of forceps, Otto would dip a chocolate bar in honey and give it to her. He never kept a piece for himself: protocol dictated that he didn’t eat in the lab.
The Vines Page 23