by Ross Pennie
“Wa-alaikum salaam,” the parents responded together, their heads bobbing. Desperate for answers, they peppered her with a rapid string of questions none of which she could remotely understand.
She shook her gently and held up a hand. “I’m so sorry, I don’t speak your language.”
A tall man, who’d been standing two paces behind the couple and scanning the room as if on the lookout for threats, stepped forward. He had the square, clean-shaven jaw of a Hollywood idol and looked about Zol’s age, not yet forty. He had a thick black moustache, and his luminous grey-blue eyes glowed from deep within his tan face. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. Did he look like an actor she’d seen on TV?
“May I be of assistance, miss?”
Natasha introduced herself then asked, “These are Jamila’s parents?”
“That is correct.”
“I believe they have a young son. I spoke to him on the phone on Friday when —”
“Ah yes, you are the kind lady who telephoned the ambulance and perhaps saved Jamila’s life. Achraf is her younger brother, and he is at school today. I am hoping that is not a problem?”
Natasha deflected both the compliment and the question. “I’m hoping they have information that might help their daughter.”
“My name is Hosam Khousa. And I am their interpreter.” He cleared his throat. “And also their friend and fellow countryman.”
Natasha swallowed hard at his physically commanding presence. His carefully groomed moustache matched his thick black hair, cut fashionably long at the front and tapered sharply at the back and sides. Like Zol and Hamish, he’d found a skilled barber and visited him recently.
Barber! That’s how she recognized him. For the past few months, he’d been Max’s barber. They’d exchanged nods and waves from some distance during the few times she’d picked Max up after a haircut at Paradise Barbers. He was also the one who’d been so helpful to Max and Travis after that awful knifing.
She debated mentioning their connection but decided against it. This was anything but a social visit. She needed to stick to her agenda without complicating the situation.
Her first task was to establish whether Jamila had acquired Zika virus locally or somewhere else. “I’d like to know how long the family has been living in Ontario. Would you ask them for me, please?”
“I do not need to ask. I know that they arrived in Canada several weeks before me and my family. That means they are here about eight months.”
“Where did they arrive from?”
“The Kingdom of Jordan. They stayed almost three years there. In a camp supported by the United Nations.”
Zika’s incubation period was no more than a few days. Sometimes it stayed hidden in certain parts of the body for a number of weeks after that but never longer than six months. If Jamila had arrived in Canada eight months ago and had never left, she could only have acquired Zika in this country. “Please ask the parents if Jamila has ever left Ontario since the family first arrived.”
Hosam conferred briefly with the patients then told Natasha, “None of us have the papers, the funds, or the wish to leave Canada at the moment.”
Natasha gestured to the poor girl motionless on the bed. “Has she ever been on a school trip to Niagara Region?”
His response was immediate. “Her high school took her to Niagara. That was in April.”
“Goodness, you seem to know this family well.”
“Jamila, she was sitting beside my son on that bus trip. Both the going and the coming home.” His eyes turned dark. “To be honest with you, Miss Sharma, I worry that this girl passed her infection to my son and he may be the next victim of your epidemic.”
“Let me assure you, we have no evidence that this illness is being transmitted directly from one person to another.”
“Then what is the mode of transmission? In the case of classic poliomyelitis, the transmission it is fecal-oral, if I am not mistaken.”
Hosam Khousa, she now realized, was no medical layman. He talked like a doctor, and according to Max, he’d acted like one in the barbershop on Friday morning. “You were a physician in Syria, weren’t you, sir?”
He smiled. “A general surgeon. Dealing mostly with major trauma.”
She couldn’t let herself imagine what he’d been confronted with on his operating table. The reports of the carnage caused by the Syrian conflict were horrendous. “You’re correct, of course, Dr. Khousa, about classic polio. But what Jamila is suffering appears to be an entirely different entity.”
“Different in what respect?”
“I’d like to tell you we understand this disease, but the simple truth is, we don’t. We are pursuing a number of avenues of investigation, and one of them has taken us to a specific location in the Niagara Peninsula.”
“To the famous Niagara Falls?”
“Not the Falls, but a village not too far from them. Do you know exactly what sites the students visited on that trip?”
Dr. Khousa shook his head. “You are knowing how teenagers are. They are never giving you any details. But when I get home, I can ask my son and see what he can tell us. Omar is at home today. I do not want him at school until this polio business is —”
Frustrated at being left out of such an important conversation, Jamila’s father threw up his hands and started talking loudly in Arabic. When Dr. Khousa answered him calmly in their native tongue and pointed to Natasha with a warm smile, the distraught man’s face relaxed a little.
“Would you like to borrow my cellphone, Dr. Khousa?” Natasha asked. “To call your son?”
“Thank you,” he said, scanning the room. “Are we allowed to make mobile calls from here? They are not interfering with the equipment?”
“There’s no problem.”
She opened the telephone app on her phone and handed him the device. After a moment’s hesitation, he tapped out a number then said, “I press here to complete the call?”
“Yes, this green button.”
It seemed to take ages for someone to answer, but once they did, an animated conversation in Arabic ensued. At one point, Hosam mimed a pen and paper. She handed him a ballpoint and her notebook.
After he’d scribbled a few lines in Arabic script, he looked up from the notebook and said, “Omar says they visited one fort. He cannot remember the name.”
She mimed a series of upright poles. “Was it made almost entirely of wooden posts?”
Omar’s answer, through his father, was a confident nod. Fort George was a standard feature of school trips to Niagara.
“Did they visit any greenhouses?”
Hosam Khousa relayed the question, listened for an answer, then seemed to ask a question or two of his own. He moved the phone away from his ear and nodded. “Yes, a big one. Where they had tomatoes growing. Nothing but rows and rows of tomatoes.”
“Did they visit any other greenhouses? One where they grow nothing but flowers, perhaps?”
It took a long time for Hosam to coax an answer out of the teenager. After a lot of back and forth in Arabic between father and son, Hosam finally told Natasha, “They did visit one greenhouse that was only for the growing of flowers. The boys, they stayed outside smoking cigarettes.” A flush came to Hosam’s cheeks. “He knows I do not like him smoking, but at least he told me the truth. He knows his answers are important for Jamila.” He rubbed the back of his neck as his blue eyes seemed to gaze into a troubled past. “Omar has experienced first-hand that in wartime there is no such thing as the truth. Everybody lies and everybody suffers. Inshallah, it will be different in this country.”
Except for the ventilator’s hiss-cluck-hiss, a hushed silence filled the room.
After a long moment, Natasha said, “Did all the girls go inside the greenhouse?”
Hosam’s face was still sombre. “Yes. And they were giv
en flowers for taking to their homes.”
“And Omar is certain that Jamila joined the other girls inside the greenhouse?”
“He remembers yellow flowers. She was holding them while riding the bus back to the school.”
“Does he remember the name of that greenhouse?”
Hosam relayed the question to his son then said, “Sorry, he is having no idea.”
She took back her notebook and skimmed the notes she’d made earlier this morning. They’d covered nearly everything on her list, but she had to be sure she hadn’t missed something important. “During that bus trip, did the students visit anything in addition to what we’ve talked about?”
Hosam relayed the question then chuckled with her at Omar’s answer. “Just the wooden fort, the two greenhouses, and the highlight for the day — a stop at McDonald’s. Big Macs for the lunch.”
Hosam ended the call, and Natasha slipped the phone and her notebook into her briefcase. Omar’s high school group could easily have visited that same Aedes-infested greenhouse as the students from Cathcart Elementary.
Through Hosam, Natasha asked the parents whether Jamila had recently suffered any insect bites. The father shrugged dismissively. The mother nudged her husband out of the way and lifted the bedsheet covering her daughter’s legs. Letting loose a torrent of Arabic, she pointed to half a dozen dark lesions around the girl’s ankles. Then she lifted her daughter’s flaccid right hand from the bed. Encircling Jamila’s wrist were five more spots, identical to the others.
Hosam’s face went ashen. “Rima says her daughter came home from that trip with those spots. And now, I remember that Omar was having similar lesions on his arms. He scratched at them for days.” He steadied himself against the side rails of Jamila’s bed. “Those are not innocent insect bites, Miss Sharma. I can tell by your interest in them. My only son, he is in grave danger. And so are the many others who went on that trip.”
Chapter 26
Hosam fixed his gaze on the beautiful girl lying helpless on the bed half a world away from her home in the shattered city of Hama. He watched her chest rise and fall to the rhythm of the mechanical ventilator that dominated the room like a fierce beast. Was the nightmare ever going to end for any of his people? In Syria, the war had brought rampaging thugs to their homes at midnight and bombs from the air at any time of day. But here, in this gold-plated sanctuary provided by the earnest people of Canada, the threats were less predictable, more difficult to evade, and just as deadly.
“Please, Miss Sharma. You must tell me what terrible thing my son he was exposed to on that school trip.”
Her warm smile was long gone. Her lips tightened. “As I said, we are in the early stages of our investigation. All I can say is we are following a new and important lead in the case.”
“‘Investigation’ . . . ‘Important lead in the case’ . . . You are using the language of the police. Jamila and my son, are they victims of a crime the details of which you do not choose to share?”
She looked surprised and affronted at his conclusion. “No, we don’t expect any criminal activity.”
“Then why will you not tell me what you and your colleagues suspect happened on that excursion?” In Aleppo, it was often helpful to point out the connections you had with those in power. Perhaps it worked the same way here. “I know Dr. Zoltan Szabo personally. I am certain he would want me to be in complete awareness of any threats to the life of my son.”
Miss Sharma looked down at her obviously expensive shoes and said nothing. The refined design of her footwear reminded him of the days when Leila could afford to similarly adorn her feet so gracefully.
“Can you at least tell me,” he pressed, “what you suspect has bitten my son? Was it a tick? A poisonous spider? Some sort of nasty Canadian beetle?”
She looked up from her shoes but avoided his face. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen your son. And I’m not a doctor. I’m not in a position to say what might have bitten him.”
Struggling to suppress his anger, he pointed to the child in the bed. “Jamila, then. What caused those lesions on her wrists and ankles? At least tell me that so that I can explain it to her parents. You do not need an interpreter to see how upset her mother is. She is convinced her daughter sustained the bites of some sort of poisonous insect.”
Miss Sharma stood for a long time fingering an earring and gazing at Rima, who was sobbing over her helpless daughter. Miss Sharma seemed to be debating with herself. Finally, she looked straight into Hosam’s face and said, “Perhaps you’ve heard of the Aedes mosquito? Specifically Aedes albopictus?”
“Yes, of course,” he told her in as confident a tone as possible, colleague to colleague. He had reviewed the chapter about mosquito-borne diseases in his Toronto Notes. He could not remember every virus that Aedes mosquitoes transmitted, but he knew they did carry yellow fever. And dengue. And West Nile, or was that the Culex mosquito? On the other hand, he was certain that poliovirus was not transmitted by any type of insect.
“The Aedes,” he said, “it transmits certain tropical viruses. But that does not include the poliovirus.”
“Exactly.”
“So, in Jamila’s case, which virus are you suspecting?”
She looked around the room, obviously uncertain how much official information she should release. Finally, she said almost in a whisper, “Zika virus. The people affected by our poliomyelitis outbreak were recently infected with Zika virus. Every one of them.”
Into what sort of strange land had he led his family? In January, you could freeze to death in a matter of minutes unless you were wearing multiple layers of the correct clothing. And by April, your child could catch a deadly tropical virus during a brief outing with his school.
He wiped the sweat from his brow with his handkerchief. “An invasion of Aedes mosquitoes has brought the Zika virus to Canada?”
“It appears that way,” she admitted.
“And Omar? My son, he must be infected as well. How quickly will he show signs of this horrible disease? Oh, Miss Sharma, there must be something we can do to catch it before . . .”
The blank look on her face confirmed his worst fears. Poliovirus had no antidote. The disease’s respiratory paralysis could be managed with a ventilator, nourishment could be administered through various tubings, but nothing could stop the virus from running rampant inside the central nervous system.
“Don’t despair, Dr. Khousa,” she said. “There is hope.”
“I am a realist, Miss Sharma. A surgeon who operated day and night on war-ravaged civilians. For the love of God, I was forced to amputate what was left of my own son’s lower leg. Please, do not try to calm my fears with foolish false hope.”
“But I’m serious. There is hope. And it’s because . . .” She paused and again seemed to debate with herself about whether she should explain further.
“Yes?”
“It appears that the expression of this form of poliomyelitis requires simultaneous infection with two distinct viruses.”
“Two viruses? What is it, the second one?”
“Something the medical community has never reported before.”
“Does it have a name?”
“We’re . . . we’re calling it . . . Parvo-W.”
“And there is hope because there is a chance my son is not infected with this second virus?”
“A very good chance.”
“How does one contract this Parvo-W?”
“We don’t know,” she admitted. “No one does. And to be honest, that’s a major stumbling block in our investigation.”
“So, you have cracked one half of your medical puzzle, but there remains the other half.”
“You could say that. But we have a long way to go to prevent more people from acquiring Zika virus locally. We’re in the process of pinpointing the exact location of the Aedes mosquitoes t
hat seem to be carrying it.”
“Clearly, Jamila visited at least one of them,” he told her. “And probably Omar and other children on that outing.”
She glanced at her watch. “From what I’ve learned from you in the last few minutes, that appears to be the case.”
“Can you test Omar to see if he has the Zika? A blood test for antibodies, perhaps?”
“We can certainly do that. In fact, I will arrange for Omar’s blood sample to be taken this afternoon. At the Health Unit.” She tapped the screen on her mobile phone. “Can I reach you at the number you just used to call your son?”
“I will make certain that Omar is at home to answer your call. Can he arrive to your health unit on the city bus?”
“No problem. It’s easy to get to.” She paused, and her face brightened as if she had been struck by a bright idea. “If we are going to pinpoint the source of the second virus, the Parvo-W, we’ll need to establish an hour-by-hour timeline of the polio victims’ activities within the past few weeks. Can you help me with that?”
“What would you like me to do?”
“Sit down with Jamila’s parents, establish the date when she first developed fever and headache, count back, um . . . say, twenty-one days. Then make a list of everywhere she went and everything she did during those three weeks.”
“Everything? Including what she took at every meal? Every friend she talked to? I am afraid, Miss Sharma, you are asking for the impossible. As a parent myself —”
“I know. You’re right. The parents won’t remember that degree of detail. And teenagers get up to all sorts of things their parents know nothing about. Just track her movements as best you can. If you can access her cellphone, that might help.”
“What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know. But if we track the movements of as many of the polio cases as we can, we might see that during the weeks prior to their illness, they visited the same place.”
“I will do my best. Shall I take your mobile number?”