The Blue Death

by Joan Brady

  David’s gaze eased a little. A revelation is a revelation: whatever can be achieved in prison with killing, can be achieved on the outside with money. The language doesn’t even need translation.

  ‘Bribery, extortion, intimidation, theft, blackmail.’ He paused, then added, ‘Just the usual cage-rattling.’

  On the morning David had got back to Springfield, he, Lillian and Helen had composed a poster and printed off hundreds of copies.

  Women Workers Wanted

  Laborers, Painters, Carpenters,

  Plumbers, Electricians

  UNION RATES PLUS 10%

  Women only need apply

  We also require a state-certified

  child-care provider for our

  employees’ children

  Lillian had spent the afternoon putting these posters up on the east side, where many women were out of work at the best of times, more of them now because west-side employers no longer had functional houses to clean or businesses to clerk. David had taken on Springfield’s singles bars, lesbian bars, all-women hotels, gyms. Helen called members of the Springfield Arts Society, and they spread the word to the Springfield branches of women’s associations, local and national. She also persuaded the single functioning radio and TV station that the story would bring out a World War II spirit of cooperation, camaraderie, hope for the future: battalions of women doing traditional men’s jobs like the Women’s Land Army in England and America’s counterpart, a pin-up of a shipyard worker called Rosie the Riveter.

  In any normal time, an all-female construction company like David’s would cause sex-equality grumbles right at the beginning. But this was hardly a normal time. Fear of disease. Fear of terrorists. Fear of what else the weather might have to throw at the town. What these people needed was inspiration. They also needed all the information they could get on how to deal with the after-effects of the flood. Most of all, they needed cash in hand. The black markets were still thriving, albeit a little more discreetly – many of them under the watchful eye of private security firms who supplied them, insisted on extortionate prices for a quart of milk, took three-quarters of the profit. But nobody wanted to shut them down. There was plenty of food, but without the black markets and the mercenaries, not enough manpower to distribute it.

  Springfield’s single functioning TV station covered the first day’s work on Becky’s house. The opening shots showed David’s team arriving, twenty women, all in boots and rubber gloves, hair cropped or tied back under a scarf or a cap, a motley mixture of races and ages, chattering and smiling. Before any work started, the mud had to go. Tools in use were shovels, hoes and wheelbarrows. Lillian directed operations. David stayed in the background.

  He’d known even as he made it that his proposal of two weeks wasn’t really enough time to clean up the mess that the flood had made of Freyl House. Becky’s insistence on ten days was out of the question, but he’d taken it as a dare. He kept hiring. He rotated his teams twenty-four hours a day every day, just like the prison inmates on the Grand canal.

  During the first few days of the Freyl clean-up, Springfield Fever lost its grip on the town. The death rate plummeted. Makeshift wards in hospitals emptied. Military camp beds disappeared. On the fifth day after David began work on Becky’s house – at precisely three o’clock in the afternoon – the water was declared safe and the quarantine was lifted.

  Liberation!

  The news came over radio and television. Loudspeakers blared it from the tops of trucks. Horns honked all over town. People ran out of their houses and hugged the first person they met. Spontaneous parties erupted in the streets, singing, dancing, music, crying, hollering. Within hours, TV crews started arriving from all over the country. Radio too. The next day they arrived from all over the globe. Neither the country nor the world seemed able to get enough of this town and these Americans who’d suffered through a terrorist attack as frightening as the Twin Towers. Hardly any street was without a camera crew recording the damage. Reporters vied for interviews with residents. Anyone who’d been through the quarantine was a hero. Movie stars posed in front of garbage dumps and ruined houses.

  Jimmy organized a celebration parade with marching bands and the floats that usually came out only for Lincoln’s birthday. People appeared from neighbouring towns to distribute popcorn, balloons, cotton candy for the kids, to barbecue great racks of spare ribs for the residents and pass around booze by the gallon. To hell with austerity. After a climatic disaster, a plague and a full-scale military occupation, Springfield was free.

  But nobody could forget that these were a people who’d lost children, parents, spouses, friends. Lots of them. The final death toll neared a thousand. Those were the stories the world really craved, just as they had after the Twin Towers. Anybody who wept for the cameras hit big time. Many residents got rich with tearful stories of a hard-working father’s first realization that he’d fallen victim, of shy little Benny’s last moments in an inflatable hospital and of poor blind Jennifer, who’d returned home after the quarantine lifted to find her entire family gone. The President of the United States himself gave a prayer for the dead on the steps of the Old Capitol. Hollywood studios sent crews to work up film scripts.

  Daily life was abruptly easier. Supplies flooded onto supermarket shelves and volunteers flooded in to help, crews from colleges and universities, from political parties, religious organizations of every variety, Rotarians, Elks, Kiwanis, national women’s groups, even the Camp Fire Girls. As for David’s construction company, its workforce increased as fast as he could interview candidates, and there were dozens of them. Quack’s lessons in business administration went into high gear again just as they had during the early days of the drug trade in South Hams State Correctional Facility.

  Becky played no part in any of this. She refused all interviews despite offers from America’s most prestigious talk shows. She had work to do. The Hilton hosted meetings of the Springfield Arts Society, the Coalition of Concerned Citizens of Springfield and the League of Women Voters. And on the morning of the tenth day after David began work on the house, she left the Hilton.

  Lillian drove her through Springfield in a new Porsche. The floods had washed the Lexus away, and Becky had decided that now she actually needed a four-wheel drive. She wasn’t wrong, even though Lillian had worked out a route to bypass the most badly damaged streets. The trouble is, television can only hint at what it’s really like on the ground weeks after a flood. Block after block of the town’s once-beautiful houses were no more than shamed and filthy relics isolated in acres of dried and cracked mud. It wasn’t possible to avoid neighbourhoods where garbage hadn’t been cleared, and not even the Porsche’s advanced air conditioning could entirely kill the stench.

  Becky sat tense throughout the trip, horrified by what had happened to her town, profoundly fearful of what she’d find at the end of her journey. She was somewhat reassured to find the iron gates outside the Freyl property locked, guarded, electrified. A sign warned of guard dogs and trip wires. Lillian drove slowly down the quarter of a mile of Freyl woods that led to the house itself; the road was rough. Becky held her breath as the trees gave way and she rounded the bend for her first view.

  And if she’d been anyone but Rebecca Freyl, she’d have burst into tears. It wasn’t perfect, but it bore no resemblance to the terrifying wreck she’d left. Its two-storey-high columns looked as noble and as pristine as ever. The pure copper roof still gave off a warmth that no other material can match. One team from ‘Lillian’s crew’ – as the TV programme had titled David’s workforce – were painting the arched and many-paned windows. Another team were laying turf for the famous Freyl lawns.

  Nobody had enjoyed this crisis or its aftermath like Jimmy. He’d been king in the wartime of the flood with army troops at his command. He’d liaised regularly with the Governor. He’d stood on the steps of the Old Capitol and introduced the President of the United States to his people. He’d spoken daily on radio and televisi
on, become an icon for Springfield; and in the days that followed the army’s withdrawal, his approval ratings soared right alongside UCAI’s stock and Springfield’s spirits. The university proposed to give him an honorary doctorate. If this kept up, maybe by the middle of November, he’d be ready to announce dates for work to begin on the James Zemanski Memorial Stadium.

  The last thing this man of the moment expected was the summons that landed on his desk:

  48

  SPRINGFIELD: Friday

  Jimmy paced back and forth across his study at home, clutching the telephone to his ear; it was barely eight o’clock in the morning, and he hadn’t slept since he’d received Becky’s summons. ‘What the hell are we supposed to do about this goddamned thing?’ he cried.

  ‘Why, Mr Mayor,’ said Sebastian Slad, ‘you sound all aflutter.’

  ‘I tried to contact you. You know that. I drove to St Louis at once. You refused to see me. A phone is hardly the appropriate place to discuss something like this.’

  ‘Hey, come on now, Mr Z, ain’t no cause to be uncivil. We got a summons too. Don’t know what good seeing yours would do us.’

  ‘With all due respect, Mr Slad, I’m not sure you realize just how serious this is.’

  ‘Don’t I? Funny. Thought I did. Maybe not though. You go right ahead and tell me all about it.’

  Jimmy shut his eyes. ‘“Privatization in and of itself creates a significant change in the environmental status of the water department.”’ Even to himself he sounded like an automaton; his pacing took on a mechanical beat. ‘Changes like this require an environmental impact report. Look, Mr Slad, the Council vote to accept UCAI’s purchase of Springfield’s water utility can be construed as a self-declared exemption from the report, and that can be construed as an abuse of discretion. And that is exactly what the citizens of Stockton did a while back.’ Stockton was the California town that Becky and her Coalition had used as a template for their campaign; Ruth had told Jimmy all about it. ‘The bastards won.’

  There was a pause. ‘Go on.’

  ‘“Go on” where? Can’t you see how serious this is?’

  ‘Yep. Yep, I can, but you ain’t told me nothing I don’t know already.’

  ‘Why isn’t your brother in on this conference? We need all the brains we can get.’

  ‘He got kind of a busy agenda today.’

  This was not as it had been. Up until now, Jimmy had been pleasingly aware that the Slads had cancelled meetings to accommodate his schedule. His calls went through to their private number on a priority basis. That’s the kind of deference he’d expected when he’d arrived at Follaton Tower with the summons. He’d left Springfield within minutes of receiving it, driven as fast as he dared, made it to St Louis in record time.

  But security wouldn’t even let him near the elevators to the Slads’ floor. They told him to take a seat in the main lobby, that somebody would be down to see him. He’d watched the seconds tick by for half an hour, and the ‘somebody’ turned out to be the secretary’s secretary. The secretary’s secretary, for Christ’s sake. A mousy little thing with no-colour hair in a Dutchboy bob. She told him to call the CEOs’ secretary tomorrow. He was furious. He swore at her. She turned on her heel and left him standing there like an idiot, staring after her.

  He called at half past seven the next morning; the Slads’ private secretary told him that the twins were extremely busy. Neither twin would be free to see him for at least a week, but she could squeeze him in this morning on the telephone if he could hold a few minutes. For nearly another half hour he listened to beeps every second.

  ‘One thing you can help me out with, Mr Z,’ Sebastian went on, ‘is how come a high-powered New York attorney for Galleas International got mixed up in these here cornfields of ours.’

  Jimmy’s face went prickly. ‘A Galleas lawyer?’

  ‘Who-all was you thinking done the ground work for a summons like that?’

  This time Jimmy felt faint; he had to sit down. ‘How in the name of Christ did Galleas figure a way to muscle in?’

  ‘I’d like the answer to that one myself.’

  ‘What do they know that we don’t? What could they know?’

  ‘You get me them answers, Mr Mayor, and we can talk. Now I got me a important meeting downstairs in . oh, me, oh, my, it began five minutes ago.’

  ‘This is an important meeting,’ Jimmy protested.

  ‘Not to me it ain’t.’

  ‘UCAI works fast,’ Becky said, looking at Helen over the morning’s Journal-Register, not even trying to hide the glee in her voice.

  They sat at the breakfast table in Freyl House. The room was plainer than it had been when they’d last had breakfast there. The chairs belonged in the conservatory; all upholstered furniture had gone to a specialist firm in Chicago. The television stand was bereft of a television, and the pictures were still with the restorers in St Louis. But the table itself had been scrubbed, disinfected and deodorized; it looked exactly as it had before the flood. The silver coffee pot was as highly polished as ever.

  ‘Have you rattled a cage already?’ Helen asked. ‘Let me see.’

  Becky held the up the paper:

  Terrorists Threaten Entire

  Midwest Water Supply

  ‘Doesn’t look like a rattling cage to me.’ Helen went back to her poached egg.

  ‘You just don’t know a rattled cage when you see one. The think tank they quote is the Incol Executive.’

  ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘Oh, Helen, how can you be so dense? I told you all about them. At that first Council meeting, Jimmy based his whole case on one of their math-packed treatises.’

  Helen put down her spoon. ‘Are Incol the ones . ’

  ‘With secret ties to UCAI,’ Becky finished for her. ‘They most certainly are.’

  The story reported that just last night the Incol Executive had issued an abstract of its report on their findings in Springfield. The full report would become public only when it was ‘finalized’ and ‘cleared by the Department of Homeland Security’.

  ‘That does make it sound like a rush job,’ Helen said. ‘How long have they had now? A week? Just collating the statistics could take months.’

  ‘It claims that chance alone made Springfield the first major city to suffer floods on this scale,’ Becky said. ‘It says no town in the Midwest has a sewage system capable of dealing with such a situation. They are just as pessimistic about water purity. “Crumbling infrastructure in public utilities throughout the Midwest, poorly trained and underpaid staff, years of financial mismanagement, failure to make use of scientific advances and to take into account the extreme unpredictability of climate change. Even without the threat of terrorism these elements render public utilities incapable of insuring a clean water supply.”’

  ‘Nobody is safe without private water?’ Helen gave a laugh, half incredulity, half that annoying academic contempt. ‘You’ve got to give them credit for sheer gall.’

  Beyond the tall windows of the breakfast room, Lillian’s crew were pounding down the final strips of turf. There were no flowers in the flowerbeds, but the famous Freyl lawns were as green and lush as they’d ever been.

  Becky glanced out at them, then went on reading out loud. ‘“Terrorism threatens our society at the level of its most basic needs, and the pitiful state of our public utilities gives terrorists a helping hand to kill Americans right in their own homes.”’ She took a bite of toast. ‘UCAI stock shot up ten points this morning – the moment the markets got wind of this report.’

  Helen reached out for the paper. ‘What about Jimmy’s terrorist-proof control room?’

  ‘Not even mentioned.’

  ‘And the summons itself?’

  ‘I assume the primary aim was to push it off the front page. They succeeded.’

  ‘Second page?’

  Becky shook her head. ‘The war on terror takes up the second and the third. But the fourth page makes it perfectly clear
that UCAI and Jimmy can’t touch Springfield until the case is settled. And it’s hardly as though anybody can try intimidation. Not with hundreds of plaintiffs.’

  ‘Think we could get hold of this report? Not just the abstract, but the report itself? They’ve made mistakes, Grandma. I know it. They got it out too fast.’

  ‘Could you spot them?’

  ‘I could try.’

  ‘I will get it for you, Helen.’

  ‘Sounds like it’s got “Top Secret” plastered all over it.’

  ‘Leave that to me.’

  Helen read the front pages for herself. According to the Incol Executive, tests of the water, carried out by their scientific team, showed traces of arsenic and pesticides as well as ‘unidentified’ bacterial agents in the town’s water. ‘I don’t suppose they can say the bacterial agent is Springfield Fever until somebody figures out what it is, but pesticides and arsenic? I sure as hell didn’t know anything about that.’

  Becky shook her head. ‘It’s meaningless.’ She’d done a lot of reading about water over the past few months. ‘There can’t be a single water supply in the entire Western World that doesn’t have “traces” of pesticides and arsenic in it.’ She couldn’t help adding, ‘You’re the family scientist, Helen. You should know that. It’s like being shocked to find out that butter contains fat. More coffee?’

  Helen gave her grandmother an irritated glance. ‘For people who don’t have your insider knowledge, Grandma, this is very shocking stuff. It’s going to scare them. It scares me.’ Helen glanced at the article again, bit her lip, then burst out laughing.