Plague (14 page)

The sidewalks –
usually crowded with shoppers and tourists – were almost empty.

People who
needed to go for food or drink were, hurrying back to their cars and avoiding
strangers
like- Like the plague, thought Dr. Petrie
bitterly.

‘Have you seen
any bodies?’ he asked Adelaide. She shook her head. ‘I’ve heard though,’ she
said quietly. ‘I caught a taxi, and the taxi-driver said he’d seen people lying
on the ground, dead.’

‘I saw a whole
family last night,’ Dr. Petrie said. ‘It was awful. They were just lying on the
sidewalk. I can’t understand how Donald Firenza has kept this under wraps for so
long.’

‘Are you going
back to the hospital?’ Adelaide asked.

‘I have to.’

‘Do you want me
to come with you?’ He shook his head. ‘It’s too risky. The hospital is full of
infection. I don’t know why on earth I haven’t caught the plague yet but Dr. Selmer
reckons that a few people could be immune. Maybe I’m one of them.’

Adelaide held
his arm.
‘Maybe?
Leonard – what if you go to the
hospital and – well, what if I never see you again?’ She looked away.

‘Adelaide, I’m
a doctor. This city is dying around us. Look at it. Have you ever seen downtown
Miami as quiet as this on a Tuesday lunchtime? I have to find out what’s going
on, and I have to help.’

‘Leonard, I’m
not leaving you. Not again. I’ve just spent the most frightening night of my
life, waiting for you to come back, and I’m not going to let it happen again.’

A cab was
parked at the corner. The driver, a squat middle-aged man in a straw hat, was
calmly smoking a cigar and sunning himself as he leaned against the trunk.

Dr. Petrie
walked over, holding Adelaide’s hand, and said, ‘Will you take me to the
hospital?’

The taxi driver
looked him up and down. ‘You sick?’ he asked.

‘No, I’m a
doctor.’

The man reached
behind him and opened the door. ‘That’ll be forty bucks,’ he said, without
taking the cigar out of his mouth.

‘Forty bucks?
What are you talking about? That’s a
two-dollar ride at the most.’

The taxi driver
slammed the door shut again. ‘That’s the price.
Forty bucks
or no trip.’

Dr. Petrie said
firmly, ‘Come on, Adelaide. We’ll find ourselves a cab driver with some
goddamned morality.’ The taxi driver was unfazed. ‘Mister,’ he said, ‘you can
search all day. All the moral cab drivers have taken their taxis and headed
north. So has anyone else who’s realized what the hell’s going on in this
town.’

Dr. Petrie
reached for his wallet and peeled off three ten-dollar bills.
‘Here’s
thirty.

Take me down to
the hospital, and you’ll get the other ten. But don’t think for one moment that
I enjoy paying money to a flake like you.’

The taxi driver
tucked the cash in his shirt pocket, and opened the car door. They climbed in,
and the driver performed a wide U-turn, and drove them downtown to the
hospital.

‘I’ve seen
fifty, sixty people dead in the streets,’ said the driver conversationally,
puffing on his cigar. ‘I came out for my roster this morning, and I couldn’t
believe it.

You know what
they said on the radio? It’s a kind of
an influenza
,
and that it’s all going to be over by the end of the week.
Nothing
to get excited about.
You think fifty or sixty stiffs
is
nothing to get excited about?’

‘I’m surprised
you didn’t leave town along with the rest of your buddies,’ said Adelaide
tartly.

‘Why should I?’
said the cab driver, turning the car towards the hospital. ‘I can make a few
bucks here in the city. I’ve lived here all my life. Look – there’s another
stiff on the sidewalk – right there.’

They looked,
and saw the body of a woman in a blue-and-green dress lying on the concrete
sidewalk outside a delicatessen. Her basket of groceries had spilled all over
the pavement, and her arms were drawn up underneath her like a sick child.

The
delicatessen proprietor was standing in his doorway staring at her, but what
struck Dr. Petrie more than, anything else was the attitude of the few
passers-by.

They stepped
over the sprawling woman as if she and her shopping were quite invisible.

Dr. Petrie
said, ‘Don’t slow down. I have to get to the hospital as soon as I can.’

Adelaide was
pale. ‘Leonard,’ she said.
‘That woman.’
Dr. Petrie
looked away.

‘There’s
nothing we can do. She’s probably dead already.’

The taxi driver
puffed his cigar. ‘You bet she’s dead. I hear tell they got so many stiffs in
the streets, they’re going to start collecting them with garbage trucks.’

Adelaide looked
shocked. ‘Yes,’ Dr. Petrie said, ‘I heard that too.’

Dr. Selmer was
waiting for him in his private office. The corridors outside were jammed with
medical trolleys, and the weeping and wailing relatives of the dead were adding
to the confusion of amateur ambulance drivers and local doctors who had been
brought in to console the sick. All that was left to give was consolation. In
spite of every kind of antibiotic treatment, people who caught the plague were
dying with the inevitability of mayflies. ‘Firenza was on the phone about an
hour ago,’ said Anton Selmer, leaning back wearily in his large leather chair,
and resting his feet on his cluttered desk. ‘He’s agreed to close the beaches.’

‘What’s the
death toll?’ asked Dr. Petrie, taking off his jacket and rolling up his
sleeves.

‘About a hundred and twenty so far.
That’s with this
hospital and all the others. Add to that another thirty who may be lying dead
in their apartments or in the
streets,
and you’ve
probably got yourself a reasonably accurate figure.’

‘The city’s
real quiet. I thought it would have been more.’

Dr. Selmer
shook his sandy head. ‘Don’t worry, Leonard. It will be more before the
day’s
over. Every one of those dead people came into contact
with seven or eight or maybe even more live people, and every one of those live
people, right now, is incubating the plague bacillus.’

‘What about
quarantine? Did Firenza mention that?’

‘He said that
he’s talking to Decker, when the mayor flies back from Washington this
afternoon. Between them, they’re going to decide what emergency action they
ought to take.’

Dr. Petrie
heaved a sigh. ‘For the first time in five years, I feel like smoking a
cigarette.’

Anton Selmer
pushed a wooden box across the desk. ‘Have one,’ he said. ‘It might even be
your last.’

Adelaide
knocked on the door and came in. She had been down in the ladies’ room, washing
her face and repairing her make-up. She looked pale and tense, and her hands
were trembling.

‘Hallo,
Adelaide,’ Anton Selmer said. ‘Take a seat. Can I fix you a drink? I have some
fine medicinal whiskey.’

‘Please.’

‘Leonard?’

‘I’ll take a
beer. The way this city’s going, I’m not sure how long it’s going to be before
we taste cold beer again.’ Selmer fixed the drinks. ‘I wish I knew how this
city was going, Leonard. It seems to be impossible to get any straight
information. Either the newspapers are blind and deaf, or else they’re
following a deliberate policy of keeping this thing quiet. It’s the same with
the TV channels. They all keep saying that the epidemic is isolated, and that
it’s containable, and that it won’t spread. But, Jesus Christ, you only have to
come here to the hospital, or walk out into the streets, and you can see that
something’s wrong. We have a major epidemic on our hands, Leonard, and yet
everybody in charge of anything seems to be smiling and waving and making out
it’s nothing worse than a slight headcold.’

Adelaide said,
‘Doesn’t the government know? What about the federal health people? Surely
they’ve been informed? Even if they haven’t, they must be worried.’

Dr. Petrie
pulled the ring of his flip-top can, and took a freezing mouthful of beer. He
stood up and walked across to the window. Through the Venetian blinds, he could
see the sparse streets of downtown Miami, and the afternoon sun on the white
buildings opposite. High in the sky, a long horse’s-tail of cirrus cloud was
curled by the wind.

‘Maybe they do
know,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’re helping to keep the whole thing quiet.

I haven’t heard
any airplanes coming out from the airport this morning, Anton.’

‘Oh, that,’
said Dr. Selmer. ‘As a precautionary measure, the baggage handlers at Miami
International Airport have suddenly decided to go on strike, which means all
Miami flights are being diverted to Palm Beach or Tampa.’

‘That’s
convenient. Maybe Firenza does take this plague more seriously than we think.
What about boats?’

Dr. Selmer
shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but I guess they’re working the same kind of stunt
there.’

‘But why no
official quarantine?’ frowned Dr. Petrie. ‘I know this thing has spread in just
a few hours, but surely there’s somebody around with enough nous to seal the
city off for a while, even if Firenza won’t do it.’

‘Don’t ask me,’
said Dr. Selmer. ‘The official line is perfectly straightforward. We have a
minor epidemic of something akin to Spanish influenza which we expect to have
run its course by the end of the week. I’ve seen it on the television, and I’ve
read it in the paper. Here.’

He leafed
through a stack of letters and manila files, and produced the morning’s paper.
The main headline read: Twenty Die
In
Influenza
Outbreak.

‘That’s
incredible,’ Adelaide said. ‘There are people lying around in the streets dead.

Why don’t they
print the truth?’

Dr. Petrie
shuffled through the newspaper until he found the telephone number of its city
desk. Without a word, he picked up Dr. Selmer’s phone, and dialed. He waited
while it rang, and Adelaide and Anton watched him in tense anticipation.

The girl on the
newspaper’s switchboard answered, and Dr. Petrie asked for the city desk.

There was a
long pause, and then finally he was switched through. A nasal, surly sub-editor
answered. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Maybe you can.
My name is Dr. Leonard Petrie and I’m down at the hospital here with Dr. Anton
Selmer. Look, I’ve just seen your morning edition and it doesn’t seem to bear any
relation to what we know to be the real facts.’

‘I see.’

‘What we have
here is a form of Pasteurella pestis, which is the medical name for plague.
It’s very virulent, and very dangerous, and so far as we know to date, almost a
hundred and fifty people have died. By the end of the day, it could be five or
six times that figure.’

There was a
silence. The sub-editor coughed, and then said, ‘Well, Dr. Petrie. Your theory
is very interesting.’

‘What are you
talking about? These are facts! I’ve seen dead people on the streets myself.’

‘Oh, sure.’

‘Aren’t you
interested? Isn’t this newsworthy? Or have you gotten so goddamned deadened to
violence that when a hundred and fifty Miami residents die of the plague, it
only rates two lines on the inside page?’

‘I am not
deadened to violence, Dr. Petrie. I am simply doing my job.’

Dr. Petrie
frowned. ‘I wish I knew what your job was. So far, it seems to amount to
out-and-out misrepresentation.’

‘I resent that,
Dr. Petrie.’

‘Oh you do,
huh? Well, I resent a newspaper that deliberately obscures the truth.’

The sub-editor
sighed. ‘Dr. Petrie, we’re not dummies. We know what’s going on, and so
does
City Hall and the County Health Department and the US
Disease Control people in Washington.’

‘Well, there
isn’t much evidence of it.’

‘Of course not.
We’ve already been briefed along with all of
the other media that we have to play this thing right down. No screams, no
shouts.’

‘No facts?’
said Dr. Petrie, incredulous.

The sub-editor
sighed again. ‘Dr. Petrie, do you have any idea what would happen if the
majority of people in Miami became aware that plague was loose in the city?

Panic, looting,
robbery, violence – the city would die overnight. Apart from that, people
carrying plague would spread over the surrounding countryside faster than you
could say epidemic. It’s not the way we usually do things, this play-down
policy, but in this particular case we felt obliged to agree.’

Dr. Petrie was
silent.

‘The city
health people have known about the plague since Friday of last week,’ the
sub-editor continued. ‘A young baby in Hialeah went down with it, and died. The
doctors did a routine test, and passed the information to Mr. Firenza. He went
straight to the federal health authorities, they sought higher sanction, and
the government decided that fewer people would be exposed to risk if they kept
it quiet.’

Dr. Petrie
said, ‘You can’t keep it quiet! The rumors are going around already. Have you
seen US 1 and the North-South Expressway? People are beginning to drive out of
Miami like rats out of a sinking ship.’

The sub-editor
coughed. ‘They won’t get far.’

‘What do you
mean?’

‘Well, you’re
not supposed to know this, doctor, but you’re bound to find out sooner or
later. Every route out of Miami is sealed off. The whole city has been in the bag
since about midnight last night. The National Guard
have
orders to stop and detain anyone trying to leave or enter the city limits.’

‘And what about
people who insist?’

‘They’re
detained along with the rest of them.’

Dr. Petrie
rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said wearily. ‘I
guess you’ve told me all there is to know.’