Approaching the two steps to the door of Number 13, she pushed a gloved hand inside the A&P bag and removed the brown envelope from inside its plastic cover. It slid easily into the brass letterbox. As she had known it would.
The Kokoschkas looked down on the scene as Seema poured wine and raised her glass to the two men. So, I guess we’ve crossed the Rubicon. The breezy tone fooled no one, least of all herself. Stephen turned his mouth down, as if to say ‘no big deal’, but in the end he could not resist raising his glass. ‘Iacta alea est.’
Michael turned an inquiring look at Seema, who sighed patiently. ‘The die is cast. It’s what Caesar is supposed to have said when he crossed the Rubicon.’
‘According to Suetonius,’ said Stephen, ‘Who of course was mistranslating Menander’s Greek.’
Seema screwed up an empty packet of potato chips and threw it at him. The stove was burning normally again after the black smoke made by Stephen’s gloves.
For a few minutes they discussed how to let Toby and Hélène know and then the conversation turned to travel plans: when Michael would be going back to Geneva; how long Stephen planned to stay in New York; would Hélène already be back in Africa. But it was impossible, finally, not to speculate on what might be happening in Sutton Place.
Stephen refilled their glasses. ‘I imagine the FBI will be the first port of call.’
Seema frowned. ‘What will they do, send an agent with the key?’
Michael shook his head. ‘They can’t just go along there and open it. They’ll have no idea what they’re dealing with. It could be a door-operated detonator, or some kind of aerosolized device. It could be anything.’
Seema was making an effort to remain calm. ‘So how will they pick it up?’
Michael summoned up the scenario he had already envisaged many times. ‘My guess is they’ll go for a bomb scare. Seal off the area. Blast screens. Maybe a robot. Then announce it was a hoax. By that time the vial will probably be in a bio-safety containment lab down in Atlanta.’
29 | Take this cup from me
By eight o’clock Camden Hughes had warmed and eaten the dinner left for him by his housekeeper and was sitting in his study wishing it had been possible for him to leave the office at five o’clock instead of seven. As usual, he would probably have no more than an hour or two before tiredness took over, and it was on this account that his biography of Marcus Garvey was proceeding more slowly than he had anticipated. But now, as he sipped his favourite blend of coffee and savoured the quiet of his study, he reflected that, although these hours were too short, they were still there to look forward to.
Youthful impatience had perhaps prevented Camden Hughes from recognizing an academic calling. After Howard University, he had been steered towards the law by a father who had been the grandson of a slave. But Camden had found himself unsuited to life at the bar and when the chance had arisen he had been glad to join the Civil Service Commission and to move his wife and young family to the nation’s capital. There, over three decades, he had steadily moved up the ladder, eventually becoming head of the Federal Labor Relations Authority. But, following the death of his wife, a certain restlessness had descended and it had not been too difficult to persuade him to accept an offer to run the United Nations Office of Human Resources Management in New York with the rank of an Assistant Secretary General. Now within touching distance of retirement, the move had meant a useful boost to his pension. But he was already a wealthy man, thanks to his late wife’s estate, and the greater attraction of the move had been New York City itself. Despite a conventional appearance, and a conservative, almost courtly, manner, he had retained an attachment to the Civil Rights struggle of his youth and in middle years this had mellowed into an abiding interest in African-American history in general and the Harlem Renaissance in particular. While his wife was alive, he would not have dismayed her by contemplating a move to New York. But as a widower the prospect of being closer to where it had all happened had proved compelling. True, he had been disappointed when the job at the UN had turned out to be more demanding than he had thought and, as the months went by, the Garvey biography had begun to look more and more like a retirement project. But the day when he could devote all his time to it was now not too far off and, unlike many of his colleagues, Camden was not unhappy to think of himself as the retiring type.
He had heard the clank of the brass letter box soon after he had switched on his reading lamp, but decided to ignore it. Probably it would be junk mail, or his copy of the Sutton Place Newsletter, or a memo from the office that some zealous P5 had thought he should read before tomorrow’s round of budget meetings. But this was his own time, and he forgot about whatever might be waiting on the doormat as he sank into his chair with an early volume of The Negro World and a half-finished cup of coffee on the table by his side.
Twenty minutes later, on his way back from the bathroom, he stooped to pick up the manila envelope from the mat, carrying it with him into the study. Leaving it on the desk, he replaced his reading glasses. He had just placed another record on the turntable when he caught sight of the label – ‘Personal – to be opened only by Camden Hughes’.
The Cab Calloway number was still playing softly on the turntable, though the book-lined room seemed strangely silent. The three sheets of paper lay on the side table with his coffee cup. Draped over the arm of the chair was a plastic bag containing a single key.
Eventually he reached up to switch off the reading lamp, closing his eyes and sinking back into the chair. A long delay might have to be accounted for. Yet his first move was likely to be critical. For a few moments his mind seemed unable to engage, as if the long anticipation of his quiet time had made it more difficult to turn himself around into day-time mode. It might of course be a hoax. There had been others, though all before his own time at the UN. In any case, the thought had little to offer in the way of comfort. And there was something about the message that suggested it was far from being a hoax; something that he would have to go back to once he had decided what to do in the here and now.
After a few minutes he crossed the hall to the kitchenette and made a second cup of coffee. Clearly, the most important thing at this stage was to do nothing that might trigger a panic. Which meant involving as few people as possible. The second requirement was to kick this thing upstairs as quickly as possible; he thought briefly of his old boss at the Office of Management and the framed quotation on his desk: Take this cup from my lips, O Lord.
He returned to his chair, still not switching on the light. The question was – which of his two hats to wear? He glanced up, as if expecting advice from the bronze bust of Duke Ellington that occupied the only free space on the shelves. As an Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, his duty was to put on his overcoat and outdoor shoes, retrieve his umbrella from the stand, and walk back to the UN where he knew his current boss, the recently installed Under-Secretary General, would still be at work. Then, after an hour or two at most, he could be back in his study and breathing freely again. The evening would have gone, but so would the responsibility. He looked again at his watch; fifteen minutes had passed.
The problem with this course of action was that the idea of anything being kept secret in the glass house of UN headquarters was risible. The USG would doubtless also kick the matter upstairs to the Secretary General who, although a charming dinner guest, was known for near-terminal indecisiveness combined with a finely-honed talent for covering his ass with layers of bureaucratic padding. For sure, his first instinct would be to share the responsibility as quickly and widely as possible, which would mean emergency committees, task forces, special advisers, with discussions transcribed, minuted, and very possibly translated into Swahili. It would be all over the Delegates’ Lounge by tomorrow lunchtime. Probably the Soviets would have to be informed, and the French, and the British.
He walked over to his desk and stood for a moment, slowly turning the illuminated globe under his fingers. Africa came
by, five or six times bigger than the United States, soon followed by India, with more people than both put together. The leather-inlaid surface of the desk glowed as he revolved through the emptiness of the Pacific. His only other option was to act not as an international civil servant but as a high-level appointee of the United States government, which is what he was in fact if not in name. That would have the advantage of bypassing the UN and dealing direct with – with whom? Someone at the State Department? Defense? The Department of Health? The FBI? To make any of these his first contact, even supposing he could identify the right individual to call, would no doubt be a betrayal of his position at the UN. But the message that had been delivered was a message for the government of the United States. And going that route, if he handled it right, would involve a much smaller number of people. A much tighter response altogether.
He perched on the edge of the desk, sipping the second coffee. Underneath the concern with what to do next was a strong urge to sit in the armchair to work out his personal reaction to the contents of the envelope that had been put through his mailbox by someone who would by now have disappeared into the New York night. But at this moment he did not have the leisure.
Just under twenty minutes had passed by the time he flipped the hood of the Rolodex, located a card under ‘B’, and punched in area code 404.
The flames behind the scorched-glass doors had died down an hour ago. On the table, a bottle of wine stood beside a stereo softly playing The Dark Side of the Moon. Seema, Michael and Stephen sat around in the light of the two remaining candles, only occasionally exchanging a few words. There was nothing left to say, but no one wanted to go out into the emptiness of the night.
They had attempted to talk of other things: the launch of the International Year of the Disabled that had been featured on the ten o’clock news, and the fire that had apparently destroyed the Las Vegas Hilton. But there was only one reality that meant any thing as the candles guttered and the music played on like the soundtrack of an earlier life. Four months ago they had been five friends at an insignificant college reunion. Ten days ago they had been having a quiet dinner together in Billy’s Bar. Even four hours ago, they had still had some sense of being in touch with normality.
‘Anybody want more wine?’ Seema turned the bottle in her slim fingers, reflecting the candlelight. When Michael and Stephen both shook their heads she set the bottle on the table, controlling the waves of anxiety that were throwing themselves at the walls of her composure. ‘So, how long did you say it would take them?’
Michael, coming out of his own reverie, looked as if the question had taken him by surprise. ‘To get it into a laboratory? I don’t know. A day. Maybe two. They’ll move fast, but there’ll be a whole bunch of precautions.’
Stephen had gradually left behind the pretence of being blasé and had been quiet, introverted all evening. Now he too stirred himself towards some semblance of normality. ‘I assume anyone working in one of those labs is fully protected.’
Michael nodded, relieved to be on firmer ground. ‘They’ll all have had their annual smallpox jabs. And everything’ll be done in the containment lab. Things have gotten a lot tighter down there since Lassa and Marburg. Class III biosafety cabinets, decontamination chambers, double-door autoclaves, glove boxes, HEPA filters.’
Stephen, too, took refuge in the specific. ‘And I guess they’ll know what they’re looking at more or less straight away?’
‘Not right off, no. They’ll probably split it into two or three parts and fix one with a pigment, probably crystal violet. Then it’ll go under the lab scope for a first look. Only a thousand times magnification, but enough to tell them they’re looking at a virus.’
Stephen was frowning in concentration, though nothing in what Michael had said was at all difficult to follow. ‘But not what kind of virus, I take it?’
‘They won’t have much of an idea until they get it under the electron scope.’
Seema sank back into the Bikaner, afraid of what Michael was saying, feeling the pain of anxiety beating against her brain with each new stage described.
‘Smallpox is one of the ugliest diseases imaginable, but the structure of the virus itself …’ Michael paused, looking up at the other two, the candles casting an inconstant light on hands and faces, ‘… is beautiful, awe-inspiring.’
Seema, too, stared into the unreal halo of the candle flame and pushed herself further back in her chair, feeling the lattice work of fine cane through the silk of her shirt, her hands tight-clasped in her lap.
Stephen assumed his world-weary smile. ‘Nature with a beauteous wall doth oft close in pollution. And that’s when they’ll know?’
‘They’ll know it’s a pox virus. To be certain it’s smallpox they’ll have to culture it. Take two or three days.’
Stephen twirled his empty wine glass and held it in line with the candle flame, as if the viscous runs might be able to tell the future. ‘And that’s when the fun begins.’
‘The fun will begin long before then.’ Michael looked up with concern at Seema, now leaning far back into the shadows.
Camden Hughes had almost given up when the phone ringing softly in an Atlanta suburb was answered by the tired voice of Becket Bradie.
‘Beck? It’s Camden, from New York.’
‘Camden. Good to hear you. How’s it going?’
‘Okay. At least it was until a half hour ago. Listen, Beck, truly sorry to raise you at home of an evening, but something’s come up you prob’ly should know about. May I ask, this line is likely to be secure?’
The Director of the US Centers for Disease Control had listened in silence to the soft, almost lulling tones of Camden Hughes reading the contents of the envelope that had been delivered to his home. Then he had asked for two or three of the paragraphs to be read over again. Even before replacing the receiver, Becket Bradie had known he would be cancelling his vacation.
Returning the phone to the desk, Camden Hughes looked back with regret at his armchair. There was nothing more he could do now. The cup had been taken from him. But neither was there any possibility of rescuing his evening. He strolled over to his bookshelves and stood for a few moments, looking with something like nostalgia along the sets of magazines: DuBois’ Crisis, Charles Johnson’s Opportunity, and his treasured collection of Garvey’s The Negro World with every issue from 1918 to 1933. In all his fifty-eight years he had had little exposure to the world outside the United States. Long ago, his personal interests had settled on the Civil Rights struggle. Yet he knew he would not have to think very hard to bring connections to the fore. Eventually he returned to his chair and picked up the three sheets of paper. Switching on the lamp, he read them through again more slowly, troubled now in a different way. He breathed in deeply. One of the connections stared at him even now as his eyes came to rest on the framed photograph on the bookshelf. It was too far away to make out the four lines that had been scrawled on the ivory mount, but he had long known them by heart.
I weep for the sufferings time forgot,
the lives not lived, the injustice borne,
I weep for the laughter that died at birth
and the waste, the waste of it all.
Underneath, the only one of the Harlem poets he had known had scribbled: ‘To Camden – Freedom is never given; it is won.’
30 | The girl next door
Eight hundred miles southwest of Sutton Place, Becket Bradie stared up at the ceiling of his basement den. On the radiogram, a Brahms symphony was playing as if the phone call had never happened. His glass stood empty on the small swivel-table attached to the stem of the lamp. After a few moments he pressed the lever to bring the recliner upright and struggled to his feet, deciding he could afford to pour himself a small bourbon. Not bothering with the ice, he carried his drink back to the chair.
Like his caller, Becket had been looking forward to a quiet hour or so before bed, listening to music and perhaps reading a chapter of the book on the Lewis and Cl
arke expedition that he had been trying to finish for weeks. Since his divorce, his working day had gotten longer, and the decision to book himself on to a singles cruise out of Miami had been a rather forced attempt to break out from a binary pattern of work and sleep. The cruise had taken some working up to and, under the surface annoyance, he acknowledged a distant feeling of relief.
For a moment or two longer he listened to the music as though the evening were still his own, sipping the bourbon, regretting not bothering with the ice, closing his eyes without reclining the chair. He could allow himself a few more minutes.
Like at least half a dozen others in the upper echelons of the world’s leading public-health institutions, Becket Bradie had risen via the Peace Corps, the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the USAID-funded public health campaigns in Africa in the 1960s. In other words, he was part of that can-do generation of global public-health pioneers that has become legendary.
Now, eyes still closed but brain back in work mode, he faced up to the problem that had been dropped into his lap, wisely he had to admit, by Camden Hughes. For the moment he was in space. The question was – how and where to throw the pass that would get this thing into the end-zone without a hundred other people having to handle the ball. He pushed his fingers under his cheekbones and rested the weight of his head on his hands. If maximum air-yards was what he needed, then what it came down to was deciding who, these days, was his highest-level contact in the Administration. And it had better be the right call. He took another sip. Goddamn it, there should have been a protocol in place for something like this. He opened his eyes again as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra brought the piece to a close. On the wall of the den were the familiar ranks of photos: a faded black-and-white shot of himself with Tom Weller at Harvard; a truck being winched out of the mud on a rubber plantation in Eastern Nigeria; a younger version of himself waving a jet-injector outside the medical centre in Yahe; the staff posed on the steps of the Holy Family Hospital in New Delhi; a group shot from Bihar taken after they had identified eleven thousand cases of smallpox in a single week. For a moment or two he felt the outrage, the contempt for anyone who could even consider releasing this most dreadful of all diseases into the world again. But underneath the anger he also knew that there had been something that was troubling in a different way about the words that Camden Hughes had just called through.
The Kennedy Moment Page 18