The Poison Tide

by Andrew Williams

  A whinnying, the scraping of hooves and Wolff was suddenly conscious of the horses shifting in the old warehouse at his back, their shoulders shaking the planking. It was lit by only a few dim lamps so he could see no further than the first pen, but its darkness seemed to have a pulse, to breathe, move with a will, inexorably, like the tide. There was something else too – fear. Close by, an animal snorted and whinnied, startling its neighbours. Christ, he wished he had the gun. Treading lightly on tiptoe, he advanced towards the central feeding aisle. At the corner of the first pen he paused to place the movement on the opposite side. Creeping forward a few more steps, he could see the horses stirring in the second pen, pressing together, heads high in distress. Another step, and brown packaging in the straw at the gate, a wooden box with its lid open, phials, a glass syringe with a cork on the needle, and he knew it was the contents of Delmar’s case. Crash, a horse kicked at the gate and, shying away, exposed in the murky light of a wall lamp, the poisoner and his poison, motionless, his face covered by a mask, the syringe upright in his right hand like a priest holding the host. Then he was hidden again and on the move, the horses buffeting the slats as he tried to force a way through to the first pen. If he’s running, he isn’t armed, Wolff reasoned, and he isn’t thinking clearly.

  Releasing the bolts on the gate, Wolff eased his way in among the horses. The longshoreman was in a blue funk. Had he dropped the syringe? Terror was infectious too, borne in the air from pen to pen, screaming, sweating, restless enough surely to worry even a corrupt nightwatchman. Ahead in the darkness the fence creaked and he heard a sound like the slapping of a horse’s haunches; yes, closer, closer, and he tensed to spring – but the poisoner was ready too. His needle missed Wolff’s face by inches. Instinct must have made him flinch. Grabbing the man’s right arm, holding the needle away, in desperation Wolff tried to gouge his eye with a thumb; the beasts shouldering them, locked in their dance. Then, thrusting at the man’s chin, pushing the facemask up, the needle dropping, Wolff knew his enemy was stronger, and for a second he remembered: Christ, it was like this with the man in the derby hat. A shower of glass and liquid as the syringe splintered in the poisoner’s hand and, grunting with fear, he loosened his grip. Wolff struck hard at his throat and he staggered back, grasping for some support. But a horse kicked out, catching him below the knee and he fell, then Wolff kicked him again – in the head – again, and again – in the back, his sides, again, again.

  ‘All right,’ Wolff gasped at last, ‘the syringe, what was in it?’ But the young longshoreman was curled tightly in a ball, his face hidden by his rubber gloves. ‘Come on,’ Wolff bent over him, shaking him by the collar. ‘What was in the syringe?’ He slapped the man’s head with the palm of his hand and shook him some more. ‘Tell me or I swear to God I’ll make you eat the stuff.’

  ‘Anthrax.’

  ‘Anthrax?’ Wolff grabbed his coat and was dragging him to his feet when someone at the entrance of the warehouse called, ‘McKevitt, that you?’ A Southerner, an old voice trembling with fear. ‘McKevitt?’

  Wolff shook the longshoreman again: ‘You McKevitt?’

  He dropped his hands at last. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘That’s Flynn and he’s got a gun.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘Yeah,’ McKevitt drawled. ‘Here – over . . .’ he tried to shout. Wolff caught him hard in the mouth. He tried to cover his face but Wolff punched him again and grabbed his hair, slamming his head once, twice, against the stone floor until he lay there unconscious. Then Wolff pushed through the horses to the gate, let himself out and turned to pick up the box of phials.

  ‘McKevitt?’ The old nightwatch was advancing slowly with a cavalry revolver.

  ‘Flynn? I’m working with McKevitt.’

  ‘Just wait there, mister.’ He waved the revolver at Wolff. ‘McKevitt said nuthin about anyone else.’

  Wolff kept walking: ‘I brought the stuff for him.’

  ‘Don’t want to know about that – don’t wanna know nuthin’. Where’s McKevitt?’

  ‘He didn’t say where he was going.’

  ‘Now hold it there. You ain’t from here, are you?’ This time he levelled the gun at Wolff. ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Sure you want to know? I mean, best not to – best let me get on. You got the money, didn’t you?’ Wolff was close enough to register the uncertainty in Flynn’s weatherbeaten face. ‘You see, what you don’t know can’t get you in trouble, can it?’

  ‘No, no, reckon you’re right,’ he said, his voice quaking. Wolff stopped beside him and gazed down into his rheumy drinker’s eyes. ‘Forget you saw me – that would be best for you, Flynn.’

  Then he left the way he had come, discarding his coat by the fence. It was stained with the contents of the syringe.

  ‘Is that the parcel?’ Thwaites enquired, as Wolff climbed into the motor car beside him.

  ‘This? This is Delmar’s box,’ he remarked grimly. ‘Fetch Masek – we need to leave – at once.’

  On the journey to the hotel he told them what he’d seen and done.

  The little he knew of anthrax he’d learnt as a boy growing up on a farm; a contagion in horses, cattle, sheep – a killer.

  ‘Evil,’ Thwaites declared, and he repeated it many times, and that only the Germans would behave so dishonourably. ‘Are you afraid you might be infected?’ he bellowed over the roar of the road.

  Wolff said he was too tired and hungry to be afraid.

  ‘And the poisoner,’ he shouted, ‘did you kill him?’

  ‘Knocked him out.’

  ‘Pity.’ He glanced across at Wolff. ‘You should have, you know – killed him, I mean. He saw you.’

  ‘For God’s sake, man,’ Wolff exclaimed, thumping the door of the car. ‘What do you take me for?’

  At the hotel they wrapped the box in brown paper as before and wrote on it: Handle with Care. Their courier caught the last train to New York. ‘I’ll telephone Wiseman – warn him it’s on the way,’ said Thwaites. ‘Have a bath, old boy, you smell of horse shit and you should,’ he hesitated, ‘well, you know – you have to be careful.’

  Later, they sat in his room and drank too much whisky – antiseptic, Thwaites called it. After a time he observed with the tearful sentiment of the tipsy that no one could doubt they were fighting a war for civilisation. ‘You – you – you’ve had your doubts, I know,’ he slurred, ‘but you can see now, can’t you – you can see what we’re up against.’ Wolff sipped his drink and wondered why poisoning animals made it a war for civilisation when so much that was an abomination had been done already. He was confused and a little drunk, exhausted too – he ached all over. Was the poison working through his system?

  Thwaites prodded his knee. ‘I know what you’re thinking – you – you’re thinking “animals – just animals” – but what if they’re using it on us, eh?’

  ‘Then why poison horses?’

  ‘Who knows how far this Delmar will go. I don’t understand why, why . . . a doctor would do such a thing.’

  Wolff gazed at him for a few seconds. ‘Men like us have to, well, prove we belong somewhere.’

  Thwaites looked at him quizzically. ‘Don’t . . . don’t . . . follow . . .’

  ‘A bad joke, that’s all.’

  ‘You know there have to be laws, Wolff,’ he muttered, then louder, ‘There . . . there have to be limits – without them there’s no civilisation.’

  31

  Breaking the Seal

  THERE WERE TELEPHONE calls, telegrams, and on the second day Thwaites caught the train to Washington, but he was back in the hotel at dusk. ‘We’re to sit tight while they put the pieces together.’ Time had meant little to Wolff in a Turkish cell with only dreams and memories to measure the dark hours between interrogations. A wristwatch and a square of leaden sky made for harder time, the hours trickling like grains of sand through a glass. Too bored and restless to read, he sat on his bed wrapped in
a blanket, fighting the future, his past, civilised society and his feelings for Laura. After a few drinks he recalled her large blue-green eyes gazing up at him with a smile; a few more and he wanted to kick down the door.

  ‘Are you sick?’ Thwaites enquired warily.

  ‘Aren’t you? Delmar may be halfway across the Atlantic.’

  ‘Ah. I see.’ Thwaites couldn’t disguise his relief. ‘Don’t worry – Masek’s people say there’s nothing unusual. Hinsch is still aboard his ship, Hilken in his Hansa Haus. The man at the remount depot may have kept his mouth shut.’

  Wolff didn’t think so.

  ‘This anthrax – it’s very nasty,’ said Thwaites uncomfortably. ‘You know, Sir William thinks you should see someone.’

  ‘Oh?’ He muttered impatiently. ‘It isn’t necessary, I feel fine.’ It was a lie; he felt terrible – hungover and out of sorts.

  ‘Don’t be an ass,’ Thwaites chided. ‘It’s for your own good – and mine.’

  The Johns Hopkins Hospital was a five-minute cab ride, its tissue culture laboratory on the third floor of a red-brick neo-Gothic block that resembled the station hotels of the last century.

  ‘I’ve told Sir William I want to keep you a while,’ Dr Reid said, breezing into his office in a spotless white coat; ‘a few tests, a skin and a blood culture.’ He bent over his desk, distracted for a moment by some paperwork. He was a tall man with boyish features and a shock of ginger hair he must have spent most of fifty years trying to tame. ‘Blood,’ he muttered in his Scots American brogue; ‘blood,’ and lifting his gaze to Wolff at last, ‘How are you feeling? Any shortness of breath, sneezing, light-headedness? Fever? Any itching or blisters?’

  No aches and pains that couldn’t be placed at the door of a longshoreman with fists the size of dinner plates, Wolff assured him.

  ‘We’ll see. Put this on, would you,’ and he handed Wolff a surgical mask. ‘Just a precaution, and please – don’t touch anything.’

  As old as man, he explained as he guided Wolff along the corridor to the tissue laboratory. Bacillus anthracis: one of the biblical plagues. Grazing animals ingested or inhaled its spores from the soil and once they were infected they could spread the contagion to man. ‘Through the skin or sometimes by breathing in the spores – tanners and wool workers have picked it up from animal hides. Here we are . . . no, no, let me get the door,’ he said, placing a firm hand on Wolff’s arm. ‘Don’t touch anything, remember.’

  His laboratory was larger and better equipped than most, perhaps; brighter than some, with arched windows facing south, and emptier than many at midday, with just a single research student bubbling a flask at a bench.

  ‘This won’t take long,’ Reid declared, summoning his assistant with a wave. ‘Cutaneous infection from a diseased animal is the most common cause – the tiniest unseen abrasion on your skin is enough, or by touching eyes, nose or mouth.’ He was busying himself with a microscope and some slides. ‘Here, this is a gram stain – it’s the rod-shaped bacilli between the cells.’ Wolff bent over the eyepiece. The bacilli looked unnervingly like tiny jointed worms and he said so. ‘If you’ve spoken to Sir William, you’ll know . . .’

  Reid had closed his eyes and was shaking his head irritably. ‘I live here now and whatever dirty little war is being fought behind the backs of the authorities . . .’ He sighed heavily. ‘Yes, it can be used as a weapon. It spreads quickly – horses brushing against each other. If you’re asking me about people . . .’ he paused, his gaze fixed on the microscope slide. ‘It’s a zoonosis. Human-to-human transmission is rare. The reservoir for the infection is the animal.’

  For a few strained seconds they stood in silence while the laboratory assistant laid syringes and dishes on a surgical trolley. Reid reached for some rubber gloves. ‘You can thank the Germans for this test,’ he said with a sardonic smile.

  He took some mucus from Wolff’s nose, some blood from his arm; he examined his mouth for ulcers and his skin for blistering, tapped his chest and prodded for signs of soreness. ‘I’m fine,’ Wolff repeated, hoping to God it was true.

  ‘Yes, you’re probably free from infection,’ Reid conceded a little reluctantly. ‘Too early to be sure. Did you bring some things?’

  But Wolff refused to stay. ‘I’ll let you know if I find any blisters.’

  ‘Too late by then,’ the doctor observed savagely. ‘Want to know how you die?’

  ‘No. You can spare me the details.’

  They parted without a handshake even though Reid was wearing his gloves. But as Wolff was approaching the end of the corridor he came bounding like a camel in pursuit, his white coat flapping about him. ‘Do you read German?’ He thrust some medical papers and a book into Wolff’s arms. ‘Put them in the mail when you’ve finished, if you please.’

  Wolff was turning away again when Reid grabbed his arm. ‘Just a minute.’ He waited for three nurses to rustle by, then said, ‘Since Wiseman came to see me I’ve given this . . .’ he hesitated, searching for a suitable corridor euphemism, ‘. . . problem. I’ve given this problem some thought, and it occurs to me the clever thing about Bacillus anthracis is that it would be easier to target than most diseases.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, I don’t . . .’

  ‘Look, it’s in those papers,’ he reached a finger across to them. ‘Just a possibility – I hope I’m wrong. I’m sure I’m wrong,’ and with a curt nod he walked away.

  The summons to the British Embassy in Washington was delivered by telegram the following morning. Thwaites wanted to drive. They arrived in the middle of a downpour and were escorted without ceremony up the ornate oak stairs to a salon on the first landing.

  ‘You must be frustrated,’ said Wiseman, advancing across the silk carpet to greet them. ‘It’s taken an age.’ They shook hands and he drew them into the circle of chairs about the fireplace. The room was furnished with pretentious gilt pieces of a sort favoured by diplomats of all nations. The King-Emperor hung above the black marble chimneypiece and on the longest wall a large canvas of British soldiers engaged in another battle.

  ‘Congratulations the order of the day again,’ said Gaunt from his place at the hearth.

  ‘Plaudits from everyone,’ agreed Wiseman, squeezing his hips into a fragile-looking fauteuil. ‘Agent W – the toast of Whitehall.’

  ‘How gratifying,’ Wolff replied.

  ‘Must be.’ Wiseman smiled weakly. ‘So, let’s begin. We’ve tested the poison, spoken to C, the Admiralty, the War Office, the British Army chaps here, and we’ve enough information to be sure the Germans are trying to infect everything on four legs we buy – horses, mules, cattle.’

  ‘Evil bastards,’ Gaunt murmured.

  ‘There have been fatalities.’ Wiseman leant forward, elbows on his knees; ‘London says five British sailors on horse transports – and a newspaper here reported another – a stevedore in a hospital just before Christmas.’ His gaze rested pointedly upon Wolff: ‘You’ve seen Dr Reid?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said, with more confidence than he felt.

  ‘He’s sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Wiseman relaxed back in the chair. ‘This whole thing has been an almighty cock-up. The damn fools in the War Office who organise the supply of horses kept it to themselves. C says they admit to more than a dozen outbreaks of anthrax in the last three months – that’s thousands of animals destroyed at depots or tipped into the sea – no one is entirely sure of the precise number. Infections have been reported at five ports on the East Coast and on goodness knows how many ships – the last the Brownlee, two weeks ago. The Admiralty dismissed it as poor animal husbandry. Well, biological warfare – who would have thought it?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Gaunt, stooping to stir the fire. ‘Why are they killing animals?’

  ‘Only a sailor would need to ask.’ Wiseman observed with an indulgent smile. ‘An army can’t feed or fight without horses and mules, Captain; it can’t move. The Americans have so
ld us hundreds of thousands already. We’re getting through horses pretty quickly, aren’t we, Norman? Thank God we don’t publish those casualty figures.’

  Thwaites coughed. ‘Depressing thought.’

  For a few silent seconds it hovered in the room.

  ‘And Agent Delmar?’ Wolff prompted. ‘Did London come up with a name?’

  ‘You were right. He’s an American doctor,’ said Wiseman, rising to his feet. ‘Doctor Dilger – Anton Casimir Dilger;’ and leaning on the back of his chair he trotted through the facts he’d gathered as if intent on making up the lost time. A bacteriologist he had consulted knew of a Dr Dilger and was able to find papers on tissue cultures he’d written before the war. The family were Germans from Virginia, his father a hero of the Civil War. ‘The rum thing is that old man Dilger stayed in America to breed horses. Ironic, don’t you think? Berlin must have run our Dr Dilger as a separate sabotage operation, with Hilken to handle financial affairs and Hinsch to recruit and run the necessary . . .’

  ‘Scum,’ Gaunt chipped in with venom.

  ‘. . . network. German and Irish, no doubt,’ Wiseman continued with a twinkle in his voice. ‘They’ve kept things tight. If you hadn’t followed Hinsch, who knows how long it would have been before we picked up the scent.’

  Wolff raised his eyebrows: ‘Are you confident we still have it?’

  ‘Sent a fella to the Dilger farm yesterday – he spoke to some people. Dilger’s living with a sister just a few miles from here. The cheek of the man – he’s listed in the directory as a “physician”.’

  Thwaites sighed heavily. ‘Isn’t it time to give this to the Americans?’

  ‘Your leader has thought of that.’ Wiseman paused, putting his palms together as if in prayer. ‘London says, “Ask our Ambassador.” The Ambassador says, “Proof.” He can’t – won’t – take it to the White House without proof. President Wilson wants to keep the temperature with the Germans low. He’s campaigning for re-election on the slogan “I – kept –”’ and Wiseman drew it in the air, ‘“us – out – of – the – war”.’