by Ross Pennie
The answer came in a millisecond: Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, took the marble sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens to the British Museum in London in the 1800s. Something rang a faint bell far back in Jesse’s memory. He let it keep ringing until . . . grade eleven history class . . . yes, the Elgin Marbles. Had Darryl known enough about the Elgin Marbles to create a clever clue? If he’d done crosswords often enough, he could have stuffed his brain with all kinds of fascinating trivia. On the other hand, perhaps he was parroting a puzzle clue that had stuck in his mind. Either way, it didn’t matter, Jesse knew he was onto something. Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin. That gave him four Hamilton street names to consider, and a street number: 70, the sum of 11 plus 59.
He typed Thomas and Hamilton, Ontario, into Google Maps. Surprisingly, there was no street by that name in the entire city.
When he searched for a street or avenue called Bruce, he found one. A single block in the centre of the city. From the images on Google Maps, it was in a neighbourhood of small, detached redbrick houses, probably built in Victorian times. Given that the addresses of several of the polio cases were clustered in the city’s central core, a dentist operating out of a house on Bruce Street fit the bill nicely. Jesse checked the street numbers on Bruce Street with Google and verified them on Canada Post’s website. The houses ranged from number 3 to number 31. No number 70. (Damn!)
He searched for Earl Street and found it in the city’s central core. It was four kilometres from Jamila’s high school and only three from Cathcart Elementary, the school attended by the first three polio cases. Canada Post said the house numbers ran from 55 to 308. The pictures on Google Maps showed a neighbourhood of modest, mostly detached houses, a few barren lots, and a couple of small warehouses. Number 70 was obscured by trees; Jesse couldn’t tell whether there was a house there or an empty lot.
A search for Elgin Street yielded another residential street in the central core, dab in the middle of the Beasley neighbourhood that Miss Sharma had circled as an area of interest. It was 500 metres from Cathcart school. (Perfect!) On the east side, the street numbers ran from 245 to 2499. On the west, they started at 246 and ended at 2500. Google’s photos showed Elgin Street to be more of a hodgepodge than the other streets suggested by Darryl’s riddle. It included detached Victorian homes, newly constructed townhouses, and several empty lots. The Good Shepherd Food Bank took up a full block on the east side. The northern end terminated at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre, the notorious Barton Jail. This was not the sort of street in which a dentist would set up shop, and there was no number 70. (Damn!)
He looked again at Darryl’s cryptic numbers and nearly kicked himself for being simple-minded. Darryl had been too much into numerology to use the addition and subtraction of plain numbers in his clues. Jesse eyed the prime-number book and remembered reading a novel told from the viewpoint of a deeply intelligent boy with autism. The book had a long title that mentioned something about the night and a dog. The title was beside the point; the boy was fascinated by prime numbers and headed his chapters with them in sequence: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, etc.
What if Darryl had used prime numbers in his code?
Jesse opened Darryl’s prime-number book and turned to the chart that listed the first five hundred primes in order. The page was covered in smudges and greasy finger marks, indicating it had been referred to a lot. Darryl had called the dentist Dr. 8-4. The eighth prime number in the chart was 19; the fourth was 7. Nineteen minus seven was twelve.
Dr. Twelve. What could that mean? Was twelve a number in the Fibonacci Sequence? No, the introductory chapter of the Fibonacci book showed the first few numbers were 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 (each being the sum of the two before it).
The doctor’s name would start with a letter, of course. The twelfth prime was 37, which wouldn’t denote a letter of the alphabet. What was the twelfth letter? Jesse counted on his fingers. Dr. Zed had said to find Dr. Elle. And here she was in Darryl’s book! She was Dr. L as in Lima, Lighthouse, Limburger, Lichtenstein, Loretta. Not Elle, but a name that started with L. Did the dentist’s patients call her Dr. Elle because her last name was long and difficult to pronounce? Or was it out of the same friendly respect with which Jesse called his boss Dr. Zed? Or, could it be that her name actually was Elle and Darryl had simply turned it into code?
He looked again at the numbers Darryl had written after Marble Taker. If his code was consistent (autistic people craved consistency, didn’t they?), then 11 + 59 meant the eleventh prime plus the fifty-ninth prime. Jesse looked at the chart and counted out the primes. The fifty-ninth was 277, the eleventh was 31. Their sum was 308.
But . . . was he looking for house number 308, or for the 308th prime, which was 2029? Either way, Elgin Street and Earl Street warranted a detailed look. In person, of course. The photos on Google Street View didn’t tell the whole story and were years out of date.
He pocketed Darryl’s daily planner and stuffed everything else into the garbage bag, which he stashed under his bed behind his camera case, well away from the clutches of Morgan’s curiosity. His Nikon D3500 was great for weddings and wildlife, but the thing was too showy for surveillance work. His smartphone would be fine for snapshots and his tiny IP camera perfect for continuous surveillance. He grabbed the gear and his car keys.
Chapter 42
“Hush, Hosam,” Leila told him over her lunchtime pita and hummus in their kitchen. “You do not need to shout. You will frighten Omar.”
“I was not shouting. Besides, we have never hidden our problems from him. Now is not the time to be deceptive.”
The ICU’s overmotherly receptionist had brought him a sickly sweet coffee and watched him drink it down before deeming him recovered from his near faint. With her blessing, he had left the hospital immediately and caught the first bus home.
And though it was good to be home, he could not shake the feeling that as a family they were under attack from every side. The horrifying murder at the barbershop, the virus-infected mosquitoes on Omar’s school trip, the escalating threats from the Caliph, and now, the names on the ICU’s whiteboard that made it almost certain that a lethal microbe had contaminated Leila’s equipment.
“Again, we must dig ourselves out of the mess others have thrust upon us,” he told her. “If we do not step carefully, we will both be thrown in jail and Omar will be orphaned.”
“Hosam, please. Do not say such things.” Leila mimed covering her ears. “I cannot bear to hear you talk like that.”
“I am only speaking the truth.”
“Your vision of the truth.” She paused and they both looked around the modest kitchen. Their house in Aleppo had a kitchen four times this size, and it opened into a garden resplendent with oranges, olives, and apricots. “What are we going to do?”
“Suspend your practice as of this minute.”
She glanced at her watch, conscious that time was running out on her luncheon break. “I cannot do that. My afternoon clients will already be on their way. And people are counting on me.” She opened her appointment planner and stabbed at the weeks of crowded entries. “Look — I have bookings more than a month in advance. I cannot cancel all these people at a moment’s notice. And you know as well as I, as long as you’re off work, we won’t be able to pay the bills without the money I earn.”
“We have no choice. You must call this afternoon’s clients on their mobiles and put your practice on hiatus until this polio business goes away.”
Tears flooded her cheeks. She tried to dry them with her palms, but the more she rubbed at her cheeks the more the tears flowed. “How can you be so certain I am . . .” she could barely bring herself to utter the word, “. . . responsible for this nightmare?”
As soon as he had returned from the hospital, he had compared his photo of the ICU’s whiteboard with Leila’s appointment log. Of the fifteen patients listed on the board, five wer
e Leila’s clients. He had expected as much, but seeing it confirmed in black and white was a punch in the gut. As soon as Leila finished with her last patient of the morning, he led her to the kitchen and showed her the startling evidence. Together, they had confronted the unthinkable: five of Leila’s patients, all with appointments in April, were now attached to ventilators in Caledonian’s high-tech ICU.
He grabbed Jamila Khateb’s phone from the table and held up the damning photo again. “How many times do I need to show you? The evidence is undeniable.”
She pointed to the screen. “Then you must send that picture to the health department and tell them what you discovered. The man in charge — you cut his hair, do you not?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then you can make him understand. Tell him we did not mean any harm.”
“He would not see it that way.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I helped you commit a criminal act that led to unthinkable consequences. The authorities will be anything but forgiving.”
“Criminal? You’re exaggerating. It is a matter of incomplete paperwork, nothing more. We agreed about that.”
He said nothing. Months ago, they had told themselves that Leila would be committing a minor bureaucratic violation when she started her practice. Her qualifications back home were exemplary and it would be worth the risk. It was their best shot at a good life in this new land. He would have done the same except a surgeon needed a hospital and an operating theatre. Neither was available to him without the proper credentials vetted by the Canadian authorities.
“What about the other polio cases?” she said after her tears had begun to abate. “Surely, I am not responsible for those as well?”
All he could tell her was what he had seen half an hour ago on the television news. The outbreak total now stood at eleven and included three deaths. For the sake of the privacy of the families, no names were being released.
“If the six others are not my patients, then something else is responsible for the polio. I have always operated a spotless clinic, you know that. The equipment you purchased for me may be basic, but it works perfectly well. I refuse to believe I am responsible for this.”
Hosam pulled this morning’s Hamilton Spectator from the recycling bin under the kitchen sink. He opened it to a story on page four that talked about the city’s small but tightly knit Ghanaian community. At breakfast, he had skimmed through the article and taken little note of the details. Now, as he read it again, he saw that the Ghanaians were organizing a candlelight vigil for a woman named Esi Asante who had been the first to die in the polio outbreak. A teacher’s aide, she had been working to establish her credentials as a teacher. The community was raising money to send Esi’s body home for burial in Africa.
“Look at this,” he told Leila as he pointed to the woman’s smiling face in the newspaper. “Do you remember her?”
Leila’s face turned to ashes. “An extraction and two restorations. The woman had not seen a dentist in years.” Leila put her head in her hands and sobbed so forcefully she could barely get any words out. “Oh my God. That makes six!”
Hosam knew there were bound to be more of Leila’s patients among the epidemic’s unnamed victims. But he refused to go to jail. Another incarceration would break him. It would kill Leila. And it would scar Omar forever.
The only answer was to go through Leila’s supplies and equipment drawer by drawer and cupboard by cupboard. They had to find where the Parvo-W was hiding and destroy it. He looked toward the garage door. The virus was in there somewhere. And they were going to find it.
Bang!
It was only a sharp fist on the front door, but it hit both of them with the force of an explosion. Hosam’s heart leaped into his throat as Leila screamed and covered her mouth. Seconds later, they heard the squeak of Omar’s footsteps retreating up the stairs. Merde, the boy had heard everything.
The hinge on the mail slot creaked and something hit the floor with a soft thud. It could not be the mailman. He never came before two o’clock.
Chapter 43
Once he hit Barton Street, Jesse drove eastward toward Sherman Avenue. Ahead on the right, the striped brick steeple of St. Stanislaus Polish Roman Catholic Church rose above the fast-food joints and the We-Fix-Anything shops. He knew the Ukrainians’ church was in the block beyond the Poles’, but he couldn’t make out its distinctive metal dome.
One block before St. Stan’s, he turned left onto Earl Street (as in the 7th Earl of Elgin, the Marble Taker who swiped the Parthenon’s statues and gave them to the British Museum). Jesse drove slowly, studying the house numbers as he went. There weren’t many to check, the street being a mere two blocks long. Between the tired Victorian houses and empty lots resplendent with windblown litter, flat-roofed industrial blocks sat abandoned, their windows opaque with grime. One property stood out because of the lushness of its well-tended lawn, the gleam of its black iron fence, and the harmony between its high-pitched roof and arched front windows: the All Slavic Full Gospel Church. If it weren’t for churchgoing Eastern Europeans, Jesse decided, this world-weary part of the city would be a heck of lot bleaker.
He’d memorized Darryl Oxman’s cryptic daily-planner entries for the critical dates in April. If Jesse was on the right track as a code breaker, the possible numbers for Dr. L’s (or Elle’s) street address were 70, 308, and 2029. Here on Earl Street, number 70 was a vacant lot. The highest number was 310 where the road dead-ended at the railway tracks transecting the city’s north end. Unit 308 was home to Happy Hydroponics. It was housed in a Frankenstein cross between a single-bay garage, a warehouse, and a budget self-storage facility. It looked like a respectable business, but any dentist who had set foot in the place had been set on gardening, not drilling teeth.
Jesse put the Mazda through a three-point turn at the tracks, headed back to Barton, and turned right toward downtown and Elgin Street.
At Barton Jail (that place was always in the news because of some scandal or other), he turned right at Elgin into a short block that once again terminated at the train tracks. No buildings fronted this block. The entire east side was taken up by the sizeable grounds of the jail. Along the west side stretched the parking lot that served the cut-price grocery store in the next street.
After another three-point turn, this time under the watchful eyes of the jail guards, Jesse drove south on Elgin. He crossed Barton at the Beer Store and started checking the street numbers. The first house on the left was 2129, the end of a row of nice-looking townhouses. The block had six front doors, 2119 to 2129, and two double-car garages, one at each end. After a slight gap, there was an identical six-unit row. Jesse hit the brakes when he spotted the number on the end unit’s door: 2029. The 308th prime number, exactly as predicted by Darryl’s code! (Could it be true?) The unit had an attached garage and nothing to indicate it was anything but a private residence. No sign on the lawn, nothing written on the front door, no notice in a window.
It was a decent-looking place that could easily accommodate a dentist’s clandestine office, and Jesse’s palms were slick with sweat at the possibility he’d cracked Darryl’s code. Still, there were two other numbers on Elgin he had to investigate.
He drove into the next block. One hundred metres in, Elgin ended at a playground. There was no number 70. Number 308 was a small business, Beasley Glass and Window. A pickup outside it showed the same name and logo as the shop. There was no way this place was fronting for an underground dentist.
His heart thumping, he drove back to the townhouses. On the west side of the street, opposite number 2029, sat a derelict Honda Civic with rusted wheel wells, large patches of denuded paint, and four flat tires. It looked like Moses had been the last one to drive it and had faced it the wrong way for that side of the street. Jesse checked his left blind spot and drew in behind it. He took out his phone and snapped a few pics of house
number 2029 to show Dr. Zed what he’d found (the boss couldn’t help but be impressed).
A moment later, a tall woman cloaked in black from head to foot, and walking alone, rounded the corner from Barton Street. As she approached along the opposite sidewalk, Jesse could see that most of her face was covered with one of those black Muslim veils. A niqab, was it? Her gait slowed as she passed the first row of townhouses and got closer to the Honda in front of him. Jesse pulled his ball cap over his forehead and pretended to be asleep.
She stopped opposite number 2029 and looked up and down the street. She seemed satisfied that no one was watching and strode to the front door. She pulled something (an envelope?) out of a pocket with a gloved hand. She rapped on the door, slipped the envelope through the mail slot, then turned sharply and jogged back toward Barton Street. Her gait was no longer a woman’s. The figure under the clothing had beefy shoulders, Jesse realized, and a long, athletic stride. He was wearing construction boots.
Jesse hunched down in his seat and snapped the retreating figure through the front passenger window. Then he opened his backpack and pulled out the gear he’d assembled at home.
He took the tiny, high-resolution IP camera, connected it to the battery pack, and switched it on. The battery-strength indicator was at ninety-seven percent, which would run the camera for forty-eight hours. The data-only cellular service via the camera’s SIM card showed four bars — full strength. In Settings, he chose the time-lapse mode at five frames per second and the day/night option that made the cameral switch automatically to infrared after sunset. Finally, he made sure the images would be sent continuously to his Dropbox account in the Cloud. Now, from any computer or smartphone, he would be able to observe the comings and goings at number 2029. (Well, as long as no one spotted the camera and snatched it.)
Before getting out of the car, he studied the little Victorian house beside him. Every curtain was drawn. Across the street at numbers 2029, 2027, and 2025, the blinds were in various degrees of closure, and he could see no one in the windows. If he was quick, no one would see him. He stuffed the gear in his windbreaker pocket, stepped out of the Mazda, and eased the door closed.