Plague (4 page)

Dr. Petrie was
wearing a sky-blue sports shirt and white slacks belted with rope. He was
feeling relaxed and calm, and he drove the Lincoln with one hand resting
lightly on the wheel.

Beside him,
Adelaide Murry was trying to put on lipstick in the sun-vizor mirror. She was a
tall, elegant girl, dressed in a low broderie-anglaise dress the color of
buttermilk, which showed off her deep-tanned shoulders and her soft cleavage.
Her brunette hair, streaked with subtle tints, was brushed back from her face
in fashionable curls. She had unnusual, asymmetrical features – a slight squint
in her hazel eyes and pouting lips that made you think she was cross. At the
moment, she was cross.

‘Do you have to
drive over every pothole and bump?’ she said, as her lipstick jolted up over
her lip.

Dr. Petrie
grinned. ‘It’s a hobby of mine,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It’s called “Getting Your
Girlfriend to Push Her Lipstick
Up
Her Nose”.’

Adelaide patted
her mouth with a pink tissue. ‘You’re such a laugh, aren’t
you.
What time are we supposed to pickup Priscilla?’

Dr. Petrie
checked his watch. ‘Ten minutes. But I like to go a little early. Margaret has
a habit of making her wait outside the house.’

‘I don’t know
why you stand for it,’ said Adelaide tartly, crossing her long brown legs.

Dr. Petrie
shrugged.

‘If I was you,’
said Adelaide, ‘I’d march right in there and beat the living shit out of
Margaret.
And that flea-bitten dog of hers.’

Dr. Petrie glanced
across at Adelaide and smiled a resigned smile. ‘If you’d paid out as much
money as I have – just to get free from a wife you didn’t want any more – then
you’d be quite satisfied with paying your alimony, seeing your kid, and keeping
your mouth shut,’ he said gently.

Adelaide looked
sulky. ‘I still think you ought to break the door down and smash her into a
pulp,’ she said, with emphatic, youthful venom.

Dr. Petrie
swung the Lincoln left into Collins Avenue. ‘That’s what I like about you,’ he
said. ‘You’re so shy and ladylike.’

He switched on
the car radio. There was a burst of music, and then someone started talking
about this year’s unusual tides and weather conditions, and the strange flotsam
and jetsam that was being washed up on the shores of the East Coast. A
coastguard and a medical officer were discussing the appearance of unsavory
bits and pieces around Barnes Sound and Old Rhodes Key.

‘I’m not
prepared right now to identify this washed-up material,’ said the medical
officer, ‘but we have had complaints that it contains raw sewage, in the shape
of sanitary napkins, faecal matter and diapers. We have no idea where the
material is coming from, but we believe it to be a completely isolated
incident.’

Adelaide
promptly switched the car radio off. ‘We’re just about to have dinner,’ she
protested. ‘The last thing I want to hear about is sewage.’

Dr. Petrie
glanced in his mirror and pulled out to overtake a slow-moving truck. ‘One of
my patients complained this morning... She said she went down for a swim, and
found her whole beach smothered in shit.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’
said Adelaide, wrinkling up her nose.

Dr. Petrie
grinned. ‘It’s pretty revolting, isn’t it? Maybe we’re learning that what the
Bible said was right. Throw your sewage on to the waters, and it shall come
back to you.’

‘I don’t think
that’s funny,’ said Adelaide. ‘This is supposed to be the great American
resort. I make my living out of people coming down here and playing tennis and
swimming and having a good time. Who’s going to come down here to paddle in
diapers and sanitary napkins?’

Dr. Petrie
shrugged. ‘Well, it hasn’t killed anyone yet.’

‘How do you
know? They might have swum out there and sunk without trace.’

‘Listen,’ said
Dr. Petrie, ‘more people die from bad food in restaurants than ever die of
pollution in the sea. You get uneducated kitchen staff
who
don’t wash their hands, and before you know where you are, you’ve got yourself
a king-size dose of hepatitis.’

‘Leonard,
darling,’ said Adelaide, acidly, ‘I wish you wouldn’t play doctors all the
time.

For once, I
wish I was cooking my own supper.’

Margaret Petrie
lived in what their divorce attorneys called the marital residence out on North
Miami Beach. Dr. Petrie said nothing at all as he piloted the Lincoln down the
familiar streets, and up to the white ranch-style house with its stunted palms
and its small, neatly-trimmed lawn. It was here, in this quiet
suburb, that
he had first set up in medical practise eight
years ago. It was here that he had worked and struggled to woo the wealthier
and more socially elevated sick.

It was here,
too, that Margaret and he had gradually discovered that they no longer had
anything in common but a marriage license. Uneasy affection had degenerated
into impatience, bickering and intolerance. It had been a messy,
well-publicized, and very expensive divorce.

As Dr. Petrie
pulled the Lincoln into the kerb, he remembered what Margaret had shrieked at
him, at the top of her voice, as he drove away for the last time. ‘If you want
to spend the rest of your life sticking your fingers up rich old ladies, then
go away and don’t come back!’

That remark, he
thought to himself, summed up everything that was wrong with their marriage.
Margaret, from a well-heeled family of local Republicans, had never wanted for
money or material possessions.
His own
deep and
restless anxiety for wealth was something she couldn’t understand at all. To
her, the way that he pandered to rich old widows was a prostitution of his
medical talents, and she had endlessly nagged him to give up Miami Beach and go
north. ‘Be famous,’ she used to say, ‘be respected.’

It only
occurred to him much later that she really did hunger for fame. She had
fantasies of being interviewed by McCall’s and Redbook – the wonderful wife of
the well-known doctor. What she really wanted him to do was discover penicillin
or transplant hearts, and on the day that he had realized that, he had known
for sure that their marriage could never work.

Priscilla, as
usual, was waiting at the end of the drive, sitting on her suitcase. She was a
small, serious girl of six. She had long, honey-colored hair, and an oval,
unpretty face.

Dr. Petrie got
out of the car, glancing towards the house. He was sure that he saw a curtain
twitch.

‘Hallo,
Prickles,’ he said quietly.

She stood up, grave-faced,
and he leaned over and kissed her. She smelled of her mother’s perfume.

‘I made a
monster in school,’ she said, blinking.

He picked up
her case and stowed it away in the Lincoln’s trunk.
‘A
monster?
What kind of a monster?’

Priscilla bit her
lip.
‘A cookie monster.
Like in
Sesame Street.
It was blue and it had two ping-pong balls for its eyes
and a furry face.’

‘Did you bring
it with you?’

Priscilla shook
her head. ‘Mommy didn’t like it. Mommy doesn’t like Sesame Street.’

Dr. Petrie
opened the car door and pushed his seat forward so that Priscilla could climb
into the back. Adelaide said,
‘Hi,
Prickles. How are
you, darling?’ and Priscilla replied, ‘Okay, thanks.’

Dr. Petrie shut
his door, started up the engine, and turned the Lincoln around.

‘Did you have
to wait out there long?’ he asked Priscilla.

‘Not long,’ the
child answered promptly. He knew that she never liked to let her mother down.

‘What happened
to the cookie monster?’ he asked. ‘Did Mommy throw it away?’

‘It was a
mistake,’ said Prickles, with a serious expression. ‘Cookie fell into the
garbage pail by mistake, and must’ve gotten thrown away.’

‘A mistake,
huh?’ said Dr. Petrie, and blew his horn impatiently at an old man on a bicycle
who was wavering around in front of him.

They had
chicken and pineapple from the Polynesian restaurant, and then they sat around
and watched television. It was late now, and the sky outside was dusky blue.

Prickles had
changed into her long pink nightdress, and she sat on the floor in front of the
TV, brushing her doll’s hair and tying it up with elastic bands.

Right in the
middle of the last episode of the serial, the telephone bleeped. Dr. Petrie had
his arm around Adelaide and his left leg hooked comfortably over the side of
the settee, and he cursed under his breath.

‘I should’ve
been an ordinary public official,’ he said, getting up. He set down his glass
of chilled daiquiris, and padded in his socks across to the telephone table.
‘At least ordinary public officials don’t get old ladies calling them up in the
middle of the evening, complaining about their surgical corsets. Hallo?’

It wasn’t an
old lady complaining about her surgical corset – it was Anton Selmer. He
sounded oddly anxious and strained, as if he wasn’t feeling well. As a rule, he
liked to swap a few jokes when he called up, but tonight he was grave and
quiet, and his voice was throaty with worry.

‘Anton?’ said
Dr. Petrie. ‘What’s the matter? You sound upset.’

‘I am upset. I
just came back from the bacteriological lab.’

‘So?’

‘It’s serious,’
said Dr. Selmer. ‘What that kid died of -it’s really, genuinely serious.’

Dr. Petrie
frowned. ‘Did you finish the post-mortem?’

‘We’re still
waiting for the last tests. But we’ve discovered enough to kick us straight in
the teeth.’

‘You mean it’s
not tularemia?’

‘I wish it was.
We found minor swellings in the joints and the groin area, and at first I
thought they could have been symptoms of lymphogranuloma venereum, or some
other kind of pyogenic infection. The kid had a lung condition, and we were working
on the assumption that the swellings might have been associated with a general
rundown of health brought on by influenza.’ Adelaide looked questioningly
across the room.

Prickles, busy
with her doll’s coiffure, didn’t even notice. On the TV screen, the hero was
mouthing something in garish color, a million light-years away from disease and
infection and nine-year-old boys who died overnight.

‘Well,’ said
Dr. Petrie, ‘what do you think it is?’

Dr. Selmer said
evasively, ‘We carried out a pretty thorough examination. We took slides from
the spleen, the liver, the lymph nodes and bone marrow. We also took sputum
samples and blood samples, and we did bacteriological tests on all of them.’

‘What did you
find?’ asked Petrie quietly.

‘A bacillus,’ answered
Dr. Selmer. ‘A bacillus that was present in tremendous numbers, and of terrific
virulence.
A real red-hot terror.’

‘Have you
identified it?’

‘We have some
tentative theories.’

‘What kind of
tentative theories?’

Dr. Selmer’s
voice was hardly audible. ‘Leonard,’ he said, ‘this bacillus appears to be a
form of Pasteurella pestis.’

‘What? What did
you say?’

He could hardly
believe what Anton Selmer had told him. He felt a strange crawling sensation
all over his skin, and for the first time in his medical career he felt
literally unclean. He had dealt with terminal cancer patients, tuberculosis
patients, Spanish influenza and even typhoid. But this – Adelaide, seeing his
drawn face, said, ‘Leonard – what is it?’

He hardly heard
her. She came over and he held her hand.

In a dry voice,
he said to Anton Selmer, ‘Plague? Are you suggesting that it’s plague?’

‘I’m sorry,
Leonard, but that’s what it looks like. Only it’s worse than plague. The
bacterial samples we have here are not identical with any known profile of
Pasteurella pestis. They certainly don’t correspond with the 1920 records –
which is the last time we had an outbreak of plague in Florida. The bacilli
seem to have mutated or developed into something more virulent and
faster-growing.’

Dr. Petrie looked
at Prickles, squatting innocently in front of the television in her pink
nightdress. Supposing he had picked it up himself, when he was carrying David
Kelly? Supposing…

‘Anton,’ he
said abruptly. ‘Do you think I could have caught it?’

Dr. Selmer coughed.
‘Right now,’ he said, ‘it’s difficult for me to say. I’m still waiting for the
sputum reports, and that will tell us whether the boy’s throat and lungs were
infected. You took the streptomycin shots, though, didn’t you?’

‘Sure. Right
after you called me this morning.’

‘Well, those
should help. All antibiotics are useful in plague treatment. If you’ve come
into contact with anyone for any length of time, I should make sure that they
get shots too. I can get some serum flown in from the West Coast tonight, and
we can all get ourselves vaccinated just in case.’

Dr. Petrie
looked at Adelaide, and squeezed her hand reassuringly.

‘Anton,’ he
said, ‘what should I look for? What symptoms?’

‘Leonard – I
can’t say. You’ll just have to keep yourself under strict observation. If you
have any swelling, or dizziness, or headache get in touch with me straight
away. And cancel your clinic for three days. That’s how long plague usually
takes to develop.’

Dr. Petrie felt
chilled. ‘Anton,’ he insisted, ‘I have Adelaide and Priscilla with me. I had
Esther around me all day. I went to a restaurant for lunch.
And
what about my patients?’

‘I don’t know,
Leonard,’ said Dr. Selmer tiredly. ‘It depends on what kind of bacillus
mutation we have here. Basically, plague comes in three recognized forms.
There’s bubonic plague, which is when you have buboes or swellings in the groin
and axilla.

Then there’s
pneumonic plague, when the bacilli are localized in the lungs – and septicemic
plague, when the blood is infected.’