Dr. Selmer motioned to the nurse and they drew a sheet over his face and disconnected the diagnostic equipment. One of the doctors called for a porter from the mortuary.
'Poor guy,' said Dr. Petrie, 'He never even knew what it was.'
Dr. Selmer turned away. Though an emergency ward doctor he was torn apart by losing his patients. He was skilful and talented and he never lost his enthusiasm for other people's survival. What was happening here today was, for him, relentless and unstoppable agony.
'There's one consolation,' said Dr. Selmer hoarsely. 'It looks as though we're not going to get it ourselves.'
'We're not? I always thought doctors and nurses were first-line casualties with plague.'
'Maybe they are. But it was nine o'clock this morning when you came into contact with David Kelly, wasn't it? And are you sick yet? I came into closer contact than you, and I'm okay. Perhaps we're going to get lucky, and stay alive.'
'I still think you ought to call Firenza. Tell him again how bad this is.'
Dr. Selmer shrugged. 'It's not that he doesn't believe me. It's his reputation. I don't think he wants to be known as the health official with the highest mortality rate in the history of Florida.'
'That's absurd,' said Dr. Petrie.
'You think so? Go and talk to him yourself. Meanwhile, you can do me a favor.'
'What's that?'
'Tell this guy's wife that he's gone. Her name's Haskins. She's waiting by the water fountain, just down the corridor.'
Dr. Petrie lowered his head. Then he said, 'Okay,' and went back to the wash-up room to take off his mask and robe. He glanced at himself in the mirror as he straightened his jacket, and thought that he looked tall, tired, handsome and helpless. Maybe Margaret had been right all along. Maybe it was futile, caring for rich and hypochondriac old ladies. Maybe his real work was here, in the thick of the blood and the pain, the failing hearts and the teeming bacteria.
He opened the door and peered down the crowded corridor. Mrs. Haskins was standing on her own — a gray-haired woman in a cheap brown print dress, holding a plastic carrier bag with her husband's clothes and shoes in it. She seemed oblivious to the bustle of medics and porters, as more and more sick people were wheeled swiftly into the hospital. Outside, as the doors swung open, the ambulance sirens echoed through the warm night streets of Miami. Mrs. Haskins, alone by the water fountain, waited patiently.
Dr. Petrie walked across, and took her arm. She looked up at him, her eyes pink with tiredness and suppressed tears.
'Mrs. Haskins?'
'Yes, sir. Is George all right?'
Dr. Petrie bit his lip. In a few short words, he was going to destroy this woman's whole world. He almost felt like saying nothing at all, prolonging her suspense. At least she would believe her husband was still alive. At least she would have some hope.
'George was very sick,' said Dr. Petrie softly.
She nodded. 'I know. He was taken bad right after his lunch. He took his swim in the morning, and then he came back and was taken real bad.'
'He took a swim? Where?'
'Where he always does. Off the beach.'
Dr. Petrie looked at the woman's weary, work-lined face. First it was David Kelly, and he'd taken a swim. Then it was Margaret, and she'd taken a swim. Now it was George Haskins. And all along the beaches, raw sewage was floating in from the Atlantic Ocean. Poisonous, virulent, and seething with diseased bacteria.
'Mrs. Haskins,' he said simply, 'I'm sorry to tell you that George is dead.'
Mrs. Haskins stared at him. 'I beg your pardon?' she said.
'George died, about five minutes ago.'
She frowned, and then looked down at her carrier bag. 'But he can't have. I've got all his clothes in here.'
'I'm sorry, Mrs. Haskins. It's true.'
She shook her head. 'No, that's all right,' she said, with an attempt at brightness. 'I'll just wait here.'
'Mrs. Haskins — '
He was interrupted by the public address system. 'Dr. Petrie, telephone please. Dr. Leonard Petrie, telephone.'
He held Mrs. Haskins' hand. 'I'll be right back,' he told her. 'You just wait there, and I'll be right back.'
Mrs. Haskins smiled blandly, and agreed to wait.
Dr. Petrie pushed his way past trolleys and anaesthetic cylinders, nurses and porters, and made his way to the phone outside the emergency ward. He picked it up and said, 'This is Dr. Petrie. You have a call for me?'
'Hold on, doctor,' said the telephonist. 'Okay, ma'am, you're through now.'
Dr. Petrie said, 'Adelaide?'
Adelaide sounded jumpy and frantic. 'Leonard? Oh God, Leonard, something awful has happened! I've been trying to call you for the past twenty minutes, but the hospital lines were all tied up.'
'What is it? Is it Prickles? Is she sick?'
'No, it's not that. It was Margaret. She knocked at the door, and I opened it up, thinking it was you. She came straight in, like she was drunk or something, and she pulled Prickles out of bed and carried her off.'
'She what?'
'She carried her off, Leonard,' said Adelaide miserably, bursting into tears. 'I tried to stop her, but I couldn't. Oh God, Leonard, I'm so sorry. I tried to stop her.'
'You say she was drunk?'
'She seemed like it. She was swaying around and cursing. It was awful.'
Dr. Petrie rested his head against the wall. 'Okay, Adelaide, don't worry, I'll get right back there. I shouldn't think she's taken Prickles far. Just stay there, and I'll get back in ten minutes.'
He laid down the phone. Dr. Selmer was standing right behind him.
'You're not going home?' asked Dr. Selmer. 'I'm sorry, but I came to look for you, and I couldn't help overhearing.'
'Anton, I have to. My wife has taken my little girl.'
'Leonard, I need you here. You have to talk to Firenza. Please. I can't get away myself.'
Dr. Petrie shook his head. 'Anton — I can't. I think that Margaret has the plague. I have to go get Prickles back, Anton. I can't just leave her. Look — ' he checked his watch ' — just give me two hours, and I'll come right back here. I promise.'
Dr. Selmer looked desperate. 'Leonard, it's Firenza. You have to convince him. If we don't put this whole city into quarantine — well, God knows what's going to happen. I spoke to him just now. He still refuses. He says that until we find out what's causing this epidemic, there's no medical justification for sealing the city off.'
'We do know what's causing it,' said Dr. Petrie.
'We do?'
'I think so. It's the sewage that's been washed up on the beaches. Every one of the people I've come across with plague went swimming — either yesterday, or today.'
Dr. Selmer dropped his hands in resignation. 'Then we have to close the beaches,' he said. 'Go see Firenza, tell him what you think, and insist that he closes the beaches.' Dr. Petrie looked at his watch again. He had just seen a man die from the plague; he knew how short a time it took. If Margaret was already in the dizzy, drunken stage, she may only have a couple of hours left — three or four at the most. Supposing she died when Prickles was with her? Supposing she was driving her car?
'Anton,' he said desperately. 'Just two hours. Please. No one goes swimming at night, anyway.'
Dr. Selmer wiped his brow with the back of his hand. 'Go on, then,' he said softly. 'I can't stop you.'
'Anton, it's my daughter.'
Dr. Selmer nodded, and looked at Mrs. Haskins, waiting, shocked and patient, by the water fountain, and the white shivering people who were being wheeled in through the hospital's double doors.
'Sure. It's your daughter, and her husband, and his son, and my uncle. Everybody belongs to somebody, Leonard. I'm just disappointed, that's all. No matter how people criticized you, I didn't think you were that kind of a doctor.'
Leonard Petrie rubbed the back of his neck. The muscles were knotted and tense, and he could feel the beginnings of a pounding headache.
Dr. Selmer watched h
im, saying nothing, waiting for him to make up his mind.
Finally, Dr. Petrie sighed. 'All right, Anton. You win. Where does Firenza live?'
'Out by the university on South West 48th Street. The number's here.'
Dr. Petrie took the creased card and tucked it in his pocket. 'I'll be right back when I've seen him. Then I must go and look for Prickles. You understand that?'
Dr. Selmer nodded and laid a hand on his shoulder. 'I won't forget this, Leonard. Just talk sense into those bastards, that's all. I'll catch you later.'
Dr. Petrie was about to leave when he noticed Mrs. Haskins.
'Anton,' he said quietly. 'She still doesn't believe it. Tell her, for Christ's sake, or she's going to stand by that fountain all night.'
Dr. Selmer nodded. Then Dr. Petrie turned, and walked quickly down the hospital corridor, out through the double doors, and into the humid tropical night. By the clock over the hospital's main entrance, it was just past one-thirty. He slung his jacket in the back of his car, started the engine, and squealed off south.
He made a conscious effort to wipe any thoughts of Prickles out of his mind as he drove. There were too many giddy dollies in this city to think about just one of them, no matter how dearly he loved her, no matter how much it hurt to leave her to whatever fate she faced.
Two
Ivor Glantz stalked fiercely across his New York apartment, plucked the stopper out of the whiskey decanter, and splashed himself a more-than-generous glassful. He swallowed it like medicine, grimacing at every gulp, and then, with heavily suppressed fury, he set the glass quietly and evenly back on the table.
His attorney, Manny Friedman, stood watching this performance with respectful distaste.
'Ivor,' he said, in his persistent, nasal voice. 'Ivor, you'll kill yourself.'
Ivor Glantz looked at him and said nothing. He walked across to the floor-to-ceiling window, and parted the expensive translucent drapes. Sixteen floors below, on this gray and rainy Tuesday, the four o'clock traffic was beginning to congest the junction of First Avenue, measled with yellow taxis and teeming with people. Glantz let the drape fall back, and turned to face his attorney with exasperation and badly-concealed ill grace.
'You smart-ass,' he growled. 'You unctious, greasy, half-circumcized smart-ass.'
Manny Friedman frowned nervously. He was clutching his briefcase in front of him like a protective shield.
'Ivor,' he said uncertainly, 'it's a question of legal technique.'
'Technique?' snapped Glantz. 'You tell the jury what a short-tempered tyrannical bastard I am, and that's supposed to be technique?'
Manny Friedman licked his lips. 'Ivor, I explained it. I explained that we had to admit your past mistakes before the defense could get their teeth into them and make a meal out of the whole thing. What we're trying to say is that you're human, and you've made mistakes, but that now, in spite of everything, you've been misjudged, and taken advantage of.'
Ivor Glantz sat down heavily in one of the huge off-white armchairs. 'Oh, sure,' he said sarcastically. 'Well, you certainly made a good job of that. Now they think I'm a cross between Caligula and Adolf Hitler. I've been misjudged? And taken advantage of? What the hell kind of a performance is that?'
'Ivor, listen to me — '
'I won't listen!' snapped Glantz. 'I think I've listened to your half-assed advice long enough! This is my court case, and we'll run it the way I want it! Just because that Finnish bastard has lived a life of one hundred percent purity, that's supposed to give him the right to steal my research? It's not my fault the guy's a virgin, is it? That's my fucking patent, and he's infringed it. That's all there is to it!'
Manny Friedman swallowed hard. He sat down, still clutching his briefcase.
'Ivor,' he said. 'For one moment, just for one second, please listen.'
Ivor Glantz sniffed. 'What do you want me to do now? Confess that I'm a homosexual, so the jury won't think I'm having an incestuous relationship with my daughter?' He paused, looking the discomfited Manny up and down. 'Come on, stop looking so goddamned nervous!'
'It's all a question of credibility,' said Friedman earnestly. 'You're a scientist, and a good scientist, but you also have a checkered kind of a past.'
'Because I argued with those stuffed shirts at Princeton, and told DuPonts to go fuck themselves? That's a checkered past?'
Friedman winced. 'To a jury, Ivor, yes. What we've been trying to do today is to show that you're an honest American Joe, with a particular talent for bacteriological research, and that in spite of your mistakes you've been trying to make good. All of a sudden, you find out how to mutate bacilli with radioactive rays — the greatest discovery of your whole life, the discovery that's going to make it big — and what happens? Some foreign schmuck steps in and claims that it's his idea, and that you're some kind of a quack.'
Ivor rubbed his eyes tiredly. 'Manny,' he said, with immense and laborious patience, 'I am not just an honest American Joe. I am the best-paid, best-known, most successful research bacteriologist in the entire American continent. Manny, just look around you. Is this the kind of place your honest American Joe lives in? Concorde Tower? Stop playing Perry Masonstein and treat this whole thing with reality!'
Manny shrugged. 'You're looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope, Ivor. We don't want the jury to think you're some kind of fat plutocrat, parking your backside on medical patents for your own financial benefit.'
'I discovered it!' protested Glantz. 'Why the hell shouldn't I get the financial benefit?'
Manny flapped his hands like two neurotic doves. 'There's no reason at all, Ivor. No reason at all. Except that any wealthy executive with any kind of capitalistic sympathies never serves on a jury. The people you get on juries are threadbare working-class mugs whose employers won't say their services are indispensable. Juries don't like people with bulging wallets.
Ivor Glantz shook his head impatiently. 'That's bullshit, Manny.'
'That's where you're wrong,' said Manny. 'The way things are going, the jury is more likely to feel sympathetic towards Forward than they are towards you. Forward is a proud, dedicated man who's worked his way up from a working-class background. He's scored one or two minor successes in pharmacology and bacterial study. Not as spectacular as you, Ivor, but steady, reliable stuff. If you want to win against a man like that, you've got to come down off that stack of dollars and make out you're Thomas Edison, slaving away in a shed. You've got to make the jury believe that Forward stole this idea from a plain and hard-working American worthy. Ivor, in cases of patent infringement, you have to look deserving, as well as right.'
Glantz slumped down in his chair. 'I'm beginning to wish that patents were never invented.'
Manny opened his briefcase and began to shuffle green and yellow papers. 'Well, maybe you do,' he said, in his plangent Bronx voice. 'But if you keep hold of this one, it will make you rich. I mean, really rich. Not just rich rich.'
Ivor Glantz watched his attorney rustling through sheaves of flimsy legal paper with mounting distaste. He had never liked litigation, but right now he had about as much say in the matter as a man who leaps off the Empire State Building has in whether he hits the ground or not. He took a cigar out of the breast pocket of his tight gray suit, and clipped the end with a gold cutter. He lit up, and began to puff out cloud after cloud of pungent blue smoke.
Glantz was not a handsome or friendly-looking man. He was almost bald except for a frieze of neatly-oiled curls around the back of his neck. His face was apishly coarse while his bright, near-together eyes were as sharp as his tongue.
He smoked some more, and drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. He hadn't even had time to get used to his new apartment — one of thirty luxurious new condos in Concorde Tower. He had wanted to spend this month settling in, rearranging the paintings and the furniture, and sorting out his stacks of books. His stepdaughter Esmeralda, who shared the condo with him, had already shuffled the bedrooms and the sittin
g-room into some kind of shape, but Glantz felt the need to move things around himself.
It was all Sergei Forward's fault. When Ivor Glantz had returned six weeks ago from an extended lecture tour of South and Central America, explaining his new bacteriological techniques to major universities, he had been tired and irritable and aching for rest. But then he had picked up Scientific American to find a lengthy and colorful article by Sergei Forward on how he, the great Finnish research bacteriologist, had discovered how to mutate various bacilli with Uranium.
Glantz had had no choice at all but to sue, and right now, the case of the mutated bacilli was a minor cause celebre in the Federal District courts.
Manny Friedman sniffed, and then took out a crisp white handkerchief and blew his nose like the second bassoon in the Boston Pops.
'Tomorrow,' he said, 'we start proving what a two-hundred-percent clean cut, hard-working American fellow you are. We also emphasize the privations of your background — how hard it was to get to the top.'
Ivor Glantz stared. 'Privations?' he said. 'What do you mean — privations?'
'Your parents had to work for a living, didn't they? That's a privation.'
'My father, as you well know, was president of the Glantz and Howell Banking Trust. That's not exactly your roach-ridden corner store.'
Manny looked philosophic. 'Well, maybe it's not. But we'll try and play that down. Let's just say that you worked your way to the top through your own efforts, and despite some hard luck and bad knocks, you made it.' Ivor stood up, and walked across to the far wall. He carefully straightened a large abstract canvas, and stepped back to make sure it was hanging true.
'Manny, you're wasting your time. Just go in there tomorrow and show the jury the absolute, indisputable truth. Sergei Forward is a cheap no-hoper who thought he could filch his way to medical fame by cadging my discovery. Tell the jury something they'll understand. Tell them he's just as much a thief as the guy who steals apples from the A. & P.'
Plague Page 5