Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (21 page)

rolling moors, no highlands—but what could you ask of a warm coastal plain?

Oglethorpe himself designed the city in detail before a stick of wood was laid. The design was unique and brilliantly imaginative: a settlement planned around forty-three large, handsome plazas; each to form an island of green in the heart of the city. Twenty-eight of those plazas actually were built and still existed at the time when Carlos Quintana came to Savannah, forming green oases every few blocks, with the main thoroughfares dividing to go around them. Each plaza was planted differently, yet each was now set with tall, ancient thick-leafed trees, shrubs and flower beds; each had a central monument, crisscrossed walkways of old brick, and iron benches; some boasted fountains of cool water. A slow, stately traffic passed around those plazas in the old days; now fast-moving cars squealed their tires and geared down for the corners, but the plazas remained islands of quiet delight and Savannah was a city for walkers. On each plaza Oglethorpe had provided space for a public building on one side and space for a church on another. In the remaining spaces, and on the streets between the plazas were erected the fine town houses of the wealthy burghers and plantation owners of Savannah, the cotton factors and the traders, great three-and-four-stoiy houses of brick and frame, the outsides handsomely kept, the interiors finished with oaken parquet floors and dark glossy walnut paneling, vast dining rooms, reception halls, master bedrooms. Household slaves were quartered in the lower regions of the houses, field slaves on the outlying plantations.

In those early days of the Old South Savannah waxed and grew prosperous. The ultimate source of wealth lay in the two-mile-long row of huge brick cotton warehouses built along the riverfront in an arching curve. These mammoth buildings, with their foot-thick brick walls and iron reinforcements, their iron lattice supports for each weight-bearing floor, were footed at river level and rose up four, five or six stories in front of the riverbank escarpment rising behind them. In the space between buildings and riverbank, a strange arrangement of haphazard ramps, narrow stone staircases, driveways, tunnels and bridge-ways were built, so that each floor of each warehouse building could somehow be reached from behind with carts laden with baled cotton. One of those buildings had the first approximation of an elevator to be built in America (it was still there when Carlos arrived in Savannah)—an open wooden platform held plumb by iron poles and run up and down from floor to floor on a crude ratchet powered by an enormous hand-turned wheel. That elevator was an exception, however; most of the cotton was hauled to successive floors and stored by way of the ups and downs and burrows and bridgeways of Factor's Walk, the name given the ramp system on account of the cotton buyers and traders and brokers who worked there, directing what cotton should go where, for what ship and what market. Sometimes donkeys dragged the carts of cotton bales up the ramps and bridgeways for storage; sometimes slave teams hauled them. And by the end of each harvest the warehouses were stuffed and crammed with cotton bales and dirt and dust and rats.

Then when the ships came, the waterfront swarmed with black slaves pouring sweat in the murderous sun, loading deep holds with bales of cotton bound for England and France and Norwalk and New Haven and New Hampshire, and what wasn't sold was stored for later sale, and the rats scrambled for scraps and invaded the slave quarters and plundered the wharves and docks for food and dug their grottoes in the beams and supports and cubbyholes of Factor's Walk and moved up into the city only when times were lean. And the city of Savannah itself grew rich and beautiful (at least to the fortunate) and complacent, a languid, flourishing flower of the Southland.

A terrible war changed all that: the War of the Rebellion, according to arrogant Yankee invaders, the War for Southern Independence, according to the Confederate gentry, an ordeal by fire according to history, the Civil War. There came a time late in that war when General William T. Sherman's Union Army, having utterly destroyed Atlanta, marched eastward across Georgia and South Carolina toward the sea, burning everything in its path. It was perhaps the world's first cold-eyed experiment in Total War, not War against an Army but War against a People, since no one needed that land, and there was no significant defense for the cities in Sherman's path. His purpose was to break the back of a People, once and for all, to strike such terror that resistance everywhere would melt. Flames and long rifle fire and mocking songs from Sherman's men:
Peas, peas, peas, peas, eatin' goober peas; goodness, how delicious, eatin' goober peas!
while the Union men scorched crops and pillaged larders and the defenders starved on rotten peanuts. One by one, in that sweep toward the sea, the cities and towns and villages of Georgia were sacked and burned, one by one by one.

It was almost Christmas of 1864 when Sherman approached Savannah, literally sniffing the salt air, but at Savannah something different happened. The city fathers approached him in the field under appropriate guarantees. They did not want their beautiful city burned, and to spare it that fate they offered to yield the city and everything in it without dispute or bloodshed. Sherman himself could have the finest mansion in the city for his residence and headquarters. And if that were not enough, he could have those two miles of riverfront warehouses—stuffed with cotton.

General Sherman was no fool. Fire would bum cotton as well as wood. Thanks to the northern blockade, the cotton here was piled high, while the North was starving for cotton. That year, as a Christmas present, General Sherman presented President Lincoln the intact city of Savannah—and several hundred thousand bales of cotton. The price to the city was high—but Savannah did not burn.

The old days of languid prosperity never came back, of course. With the slaves gone and the plantations ruined, cotton production moved to the plains farther west, where machinery could do the work. Railroads and Mississippi riverboats carried the bales north, and northern ports transshipped it. Savannah's warehouses stood empty; Factor's Walk fell quiet. The stately old mansions stood empty, too, quietly decaying. Freed slaves came to live in huge board-windowed tenements forming a vast ghetto around the Old City. For almost a century Savannah was dormant, a quiet sleepy out-of-the-way backwater town on the Georgia coast, forgotten by time. But bit by bit other industry came, drawn by low taxes and plentiful labor. People of wealth and taste began buying up the old mansions for peppercorn prices and then restoring them. Factor's Walk came alive again as architects and lawyers established offices in the upper stories of the warehouses; riverfront levels were developed into boutiques, craft shops, pleasant restaurants and bistros. Hotels came in, and tourists, and the city grew—now a city of 300,000 souls, Carlos Quintana learned, when he arrived late that steaming morning in early September, totally exhausted by the long flight from Denver and the long struggle in Colorado, to help Savannah face an ordeal nobody in the city had ever even dreamed of. Beautiful Savannah did not burn in 1864—but now the conflagration was riding nigh on a pale horse.

31

In Canon City, Colorado, Madge Miller, twenty-nine-year-old housewife, got out of bed on yet another bright September morning and looked out at the brilliant sunshine as though peering through an ever-darkening screen.

It wasn't that she couldn't see, exactly. The images were quite sharp and clear—that tree, that street, that pickup driving by—but the total light, day by day, was receding to a dim twilight. A week ago colors were largely gone, as though a color print, fully developed, were unaccountably darkening and fading and turning to black and white. The change had been going on for two weeks now, ever since she had begun pulling out of the plague infection that had nearly killed her. The doctor had a name for what was going on,
retinitis pigmentosa,
he called it, where cells in the retina slowly collect an abnormal pigment and cease to respond to light. There was nothing to be done, he'd told her. Maybe it was just a temporary reaction to the new medicine they'd given herforthe plague—and after all, she
had
survived when a lot of others hadn't, he'd said. Probably it wouldn't last, he'd said. Maybe it would just go away, pretty soon; but then, again, maybe it wouldn't. He really didn't know.

And meantime, Madge Miller couldn't drink her morning coffee, either. She slopped it all over the table tiying to get the cup to her mouth. Along with the dimming of her vision, her hands had begun to shake. Not when she rested them in her lap, they were just fine then. It was only when she started to move them, to reach for something—then they started shaking, and shook worse and worse the closer she got to what she was reaching for. An intention tremor, the doctor called it, and he didn't know what caused that, either. It was a little like Parkinson's disease, he said, but he didn't think it was that. She was awfully young to get Parkinson's disease. It would probably go away, he assured her, he didn't see any reason it wouldn't, but if it got any worse, he'd have her try some L-Dopa and see if that helped any. Meanwhile, she could use one of those plastic straws to drink her coffee with and probably do okay—
And to pour the coffee, doctor? Can I do that with a straw? Or sign checks? Or wash dishes? Or change the baby? Or stroke Jerry to get him hard these days when he's almost scared to come near me ? Can I do these things with a plastic straw?

Madge Miller stared out at the dark sunny street for a long time, her hands at rest at her sides. The medicine had saved her from a fast, dirty death, all right—she knew that. But now, for the first time, she was beginning to wonder what, exactly, she had won. . . .

32

It was abundantly clear to Carlos Quintana that the major problem in Savannah, when the plague first appeared there, had been that the index of suspicion was appallingly low. There was simply nobody there who had thought of it quickly enough.

Cholera would have been nailed down in twenty-four hours, typhoid fever in forty-eight. Yellow fever, certainly, who could miss that? Malaria—of course. But
plague?
Preposterous. Of course, they'd heard reports of the trouble out in Colorado or Wyoming or someplace, but that was the sort of low-grade endemic sylvan plague from wild rodents that kept turning up in those remote parts all the time, wasn't it? A sort of a local flareup, out there, they assumed, and who paid attention to patches from a TV scare story? As for Savannah, they hadn't had a case of plague there since—since—since when? Hell, they hadn't
ever
had a case of plague there. Period.

Index of suspicion has always been a vital factor when it comes to making an obscure diagnosis. As Carlos pointed out later to Jack Cheney, "It's really very simple—you have to think of it to diagnose it. A doctor in this country is
never
going to think of loa-Ioa when his patient complains about something crawling around under his skin. There isn't any loa-loa in North America, that I ever heard of. He's not going to think of yaws when a patient turns up with a festering leg ulcer, either—he's going to think of varicose veins. And before the Vietnam refugees started coming over, most local docs would have missed primary leprosy until their patients' fingers dropped off. You think of things that are familiar and likely, you don't think of things that just don't
happen. ..."

Whatever the reason, Carlos saw clearly, the reality of plague in Savannah had been missed for far too long. He arrived on the scene much too late for any hope of tracing elements and events back to their index sources; it would have been folly to have tried. But if he had made up a scenario out of whole cloth, the things that had actually happened would have fit into his imaginary screenplay with uncanny accuracy.

The truth was that the dance of death Chet Benoliel had triggered in Savannah some three weeks before had played to an indifferent audience at first. Two men from Sundown Explorations, Inc., wisely dispatched to Savannah to back Chet up at that critical oil-executive meeting at the Hyatt, had found Chet's body at the Hilton Head condominium after he had failed to make any appearance at all at the appointed time. They had found his clothes and the car-rental packet in his hotel room, and figured that Hilton Head was where he had gone.

They'd expected to find him stoned giddy and shacked up with a whore; when they found him alone and dead instead, it shook them up a little, and they checked with the home office fast. After considerable hasty debate, they followed orders and turned things over to the local constabulaiy. The investigation was perfunctory; he'd been rolled but not knifed, and it didn't really look like homicide. The local coroner wrote it off as bilateral lobar pneumonia with pulmonary hemorrhage—reasonably close, without benefit of autopsy, but still half a light-year away from the answer. The coroner released the body to a Savannah mortuary, where he was cremated and buried in some inexpensive niche somewhere, courtesy of Sundown Explorations, Inc., who sent a bunch of flowers to his mother in Cincinnati and thanked the Almighty that they'd had wit enough to send backup men to nail down that meeting. All told, including the two backup men, two police, a detective, a doctor, a coroner, a mortician and sundry ambulance attendants and hotel clerks, Chet Benoliel had exposed a total of nineteen people to a virulent bacteria before they got him tucked away, all nineteen of them in a state of wide-open susceptibility.

Shari Adams did much better. After ditching the car and getting a few hours sleep, Shari had turned up for the dinner shift at the restaurant feeling vaguely unwell, a state she chalked up to her unsettling experience the evening before. Since things were slow, she went home early and straight to bed. That night she had trouble with the bedbugs in her mattress again, quite a bit of trouble, to judge from the bites she found on her legs and arms. It was an old story—she'd been fighting these "bedbugs" in her mattress for months, every time she spraiyed the damned things they just went away for a day or two and then they were right back again, which was not really surprising considering that they were actually not bedbugs at all, but the fleas which she shared with the rats which she knew sublimi-nally were always around the place and which, at the moment, were sharing her mattress with her, scuttling out of their warm, cozy nest inside and into the baseboards whenever she got into bed, just waiting for her to leave again for them to return. They were large, black Norway rats, the kind that were thriving in swarms all around the riverfront area despite Savannah's vigorous rodent-control program, and their fleas were largely indifferent to the species they bit, man or
Rattus,
as long as whatever they bit had blood in it.