The Virus (6 page)

“She’s dead.”

Kaplan groaned. “Didn’t they give her the serum?”

“There wasn’t enough, Lowell. They gave it to you.”

Kaplan groaned again. “Did Reuben know?”

“Reuben knew. He insisted that you should have it.”

“Oh my God.” Kaplan put down the phone and turned his face to the wall.

4

For those who had not been intimately involved, the incidence of disease which occurred in New York in the summer of 1982 passed rapidly into history. The
New York Times
noted the recovery of one of the victims, Dr Isaac Reuben — ‘a medical practitioner of long standing in this city’ —and the death of several others. It mentioned that serum had become available during the course of the outbreak which had aided the survival of at least one of the victims. Making a comparison with the Legionnaire’s disease which had laid waste a veterans’ convention in Philadelphia in 1976, the
New York Times
commented: “We may never know the ultimate, or even the proximate, cause of this recent threat. What we do know is that it was successfully contained, and that is something for which the City of New York, the United States and perhaps even the civilized world itself, should be duly grateful.”

For Lowell Kaplan, now fully recovered from his illness after a three-week period of convalescence, things weren’t quite as simple as they seemed to be to the
New York Times.
He knew just how close they had been to disaster. Marburg, after fifteen years, had come out of the closet with a vengeance, and Kaplan did not intend to ignore that fact. The personal response combined with the professional one. He knew the effect the disease had had on himself and on others, and was determined that it should not strike again.

One morning, when he was back at his desk at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, he put a call through to New York and spoke to Isaac Reuben.

“I just wanted to thank you,” Kaplan had said simply. “You saved my life.”

The old man answered: “God has given you time. Use it, son.”

Kaplan wanted to say something about Reuben’s sister, but somehow the words would not come. Perhaps some debts were better left unacknowledged, he thought, as he put down the receiver.

“You know,” he turned to Susan Wainwright, once again his constant companion at work, “that man Reuben is a saint.” For a few moments they talked about Reuben and about the events of the past weeks.

“What are you going to do now?” Susan asked. There was an anxious note in her voice.

“Aw, hell!” Lowell smiled. “I think I’ll take a vacation for a few days. I might go to Europe. I haven’t been there for a couple of years.”

Susan Wainwright relaxed. A broad smile crossed her pretty face.

“That’s wonderful, Lowell. That’s just what you need. Whereabouts in Europe?”

She caught the mischievous expression in Kaplan’s eyes.

“Ever heard of a town called Marburg on the Lahn?” Kaplan replied laughing.

“Honestly, Lowell!” She remonstrated. “You never give up, do you?”

Kaplan flew overnight to Frankfurt. The plane was half-empty and he was able to stretch out for most of the flight. He awoke with the sun to see the flat countryside beneath him crisscrossed by autobahns and other high-speed roads. Even at this early hour, Germany was a nation on the move.

Frankfurt airport itself was a gleaming antiseptic place. A smiling freckled girl rented him a car at the Hertz counter. Less than half-an-hour after landing, Kaplan was on his way.

He left the autobahn twenty minutes out of Frankfurt to drive up through the vast forests of the Lahn region. He twisted through sleepy villages and crossed bridges over clear sparkling streams. He could not help contrasting the magic of the scenery with the nature of his errand. Somehow it seemed so far-fetched, so implausible. Here he was, looking into something that had happened over fifteen years earlier in a small town in Germany, an incident that was unique in medical history. Twenty-three persons infected; twenty-three persons dead. No other disease had such a fatality rate. Not Lassa. Not Embola. Not even the bubonic plague itself. Yet the extraordinary thing was that so little was known about the Marburg virus. Somehow a wall of silence had grown up around the episode and its aftermath. Why? That was the question.

He checked in at the Waldeckerhof, a modest hotel near the station. In the afternoon, tired from the long flight and the drive, he slept for a couple of hours. Then, towards evening, with the bells of the famous church of St Elizabeth — Elizabethkirche — ringing out for Evensong, he set out on foot.

He had been given a map at the desk of the hotel, but he didn’t need to use it. The Landgraf Schloss, once the seat of the ruling princes of Hesse, towered 900 feet above the town. Kaplan made his way towards it, through narrow streets with overaching houses and up mediaeval staircases which connected one level to another.

As he climbed, Kaplan had the distinct feeling that he was walking back through history and that he would eventually find himself in another century. Ducking under archways, twisting round corners as he followed the cobbled path upwards, he had a vivid sense of what towns like Marburg must have been like six hundred years earlier. He could smell the stench of closely packed humanity, the halt and the blind populating the streets, the insanitary conditions and, above all else, the fear of disease. The mediaeval towns of Europe were no strangers to the cry “Bring out your dead”. They had been ravaged by the Black Death, and they had been ravaged again by the Plague. Marburg, unlike other cities of similar antiquity, had had a third visitation. Looking at the passers-by in the street — some clearly visitors like himself, but others equally clearly locals — Kaplan wondered how many of them recalled the 1967 incident or realized what a close call it had been.

Where the road began to skirt the ramparts of the castle, he saw a sign saying
Alte Universitet
, and realized that he was nearing his destination.

Professor Franz Schmidtt’s residence was a solid affair, suitably professorial in character, set in a large, leafy garden just outside the edge of the campus. From the stag’s antlers mounted, Bavarian fashion, above the front door to the heavy shutters which guarded the Schmidtt family privacy, the house bore all the marks of bourgeois success. The manicured lawns with their picturesque gnomes, the neatly gravelled drive, the sweeping view over the roofs of the old town to the river meandering in the distance, all testified to Professor Schmidtt’s status.

In fact, Franz Schmidtt was a heavyweight in more senses than one. When Kaplan first met him, they had been students together at Yale Medical School. Schmidtt, Kaplan recalled, had had a reputation as an athlete and as a dab hand with the sabre. Kaplan doubted that the Professor would be lithe enough to perform such feats now. He had thickened considerably about the waist and his complexion was markedly florid. But there was no mistaking the genuine warmth in his welcome.

He came out onto the doorstep followed by his wife, a tall, rather beautiful but strained-looking woman with straight grey hair swept back from her forehead.

“Lowell! Wonderful to see you. Come on in. Such a surprise! I couldn’t believe it when I got your cable.”

“Franz, Heidi! It’s fantastic to see you both. How marvellous you look! You haven’t changed in years!”

Kaplan shook the Professor’s hand warmly and gave Frau Schmidtt a kiss on both cheeks before following them inside.

They sat with drinks in the living-room. Kaplan realized that the Schmidtt family was incomplete.

“Isn’t Paula joining us?” Lowell asked.

“So you remember my little Paula?” Schmidtt sounded pleased.

“How could I forget her? Remember, you brought her with you last time you came to Washington on an N.I.H. Conference. We had a great time. I guess she was around sixteen then.”

“I guess she was. Well she’s Head of Medical Records at the Clinic now. She takes her work seriously.”

“But I imagine she has time for some fun?”

It was Frau Schmidtt’s turn to answer. She looked faintly disapproving.

“Marburg’s a difficult place to be young in. There are so many . . .” — she searched for the right word — “so many different influences. A girl can be swept this way and that. Remember, Paula grew up during the great radical movement of the late ’sixties. That was when the young people thought they were going to change the world. I’m not sure she’s ever recovered.”

Heidi Schmidtt had no time to say more. The front door banged shut and a slim, dark-haired girl in her early thirties entered the room somewhat breathlessly.

“I got held up,” she said in German. Then she noticed Kaplan, and her face lit up with pleasure. She rushed over and threw herself into his arms.

“Lowell!” she cried, switching to English. “How tremendous to see you!”

Kaplan blushed. It was a long time since an attractive young girl had given him such a welcome. Fleetingly, he wondered whether Paula’s gesture was not just a little over-exuberant, a little false, but the thought passed almost as soon as it occurred.

“What are you doing here?” Paula asked, disentangling herself from Kaplan’s arms.

“Didn’t your father tell you?”

Franz Schmidtt interrupted. “I didn’t see her this morning. Paula was in Berlin for the week-end and she went straight to work when she got back.”

“In Berlin? What were you doing there?” Kaplan asked with interest.

“Oh, just staying with friends,” the girl replied vaguely.

She sat down and had a drink with them. Later, when she had left for a “meeting” in the town, Kaplan said: “I hope I’ll have a chance to talk to Paula properly. I have always thought there’s a lot to her.”

“There certainly is.” Frau Schmidtt spoke with feeling, indicating that she had tangled with her strong-willed daughter more than once in the past and had come off second-best.

She went off to prepare the supper.

Over the meal, Kaplan came to the point. “Franz, you were here throughout the late ’sixties, weren’t you? I’m right in thinking that you came straight back to Marburg after Yale?”

“Yeah.” Franz dug deep into the large pile of boiled potatoes which took up half his plate.

“And you were at the University Clinic, weren’t you?”

“Sure, all the time. I’d just begun in toxicology. I was working out the first protocols for the animal-testing of new drugs. Bonn took it over later, and now they’ve written it into the rules. Why do you ask?”

Kaplan looked at his hosts, two earnest, kindly Germans, the one a respected pillar of his profession, the other his house-proud wife.

“Franz, Heidi,” he said. “Not long ago, I was desperately ill. In fact, I almost died. If I am here today, it’s thanks to the grace of God together with a little bit of the devil’s own luck.”

“But what happened to you?” There was real concern in Franz Schmidtt’s voice.

“Yes, tell us,” echoed Heidi. “This is bad news. Are you still ill?”

“No, I’m fully recovered. But it was a close thing.”

Kaplan began at the beginning with Diane Verusio’s death in New York, followed rapidly by Reuben’s sickness and the other fatalities. He described the symptoms in some detail.

Professor Schmidtt and his wife listened to him with obvious fascination.

“And did you discover the cause?” the Professor asked when Kaplan stopped speaking. “Do you think it was an outbreak of Lassa fever in New York? Some of the symptoms seem similar.”

Kaplan lowered his voice. “No, it wasn’t Lassa. It wasn’t Embola. We’re sure of that. We ran an E.M. on serum and tissue culture from the first case and from all subsequent cases. They all pointed to the same thing. An outbreak of . . .” he paused “. . . Marburg virus. We kept it as quiet as possible. We didn’t want to start a panic. But it was Marburg all right.”

He watched his old friends closely as he spoke and was quick to catch the cautionary look which Heidi flashed her husband. Franz, who was about to speak, pulled himself up. After an awkward pause, he said in a deadpan, give-nothing-away voice:

“Marburg virus? I’m not sure what you mean, Lowell. This Marburg? Marburg on the Lahn? We have no virus here.”

His wife pushed her chair back in such haste that it almost fell over. “Coffee, gentlemen,” she interrupted. “I think we’ll take it into the sitting-room.”

For the time being, Kaplan decided not to press the point. Somehow, he would get Schmidtt on his own later. He followed his hosts into the hot, overfurnished sitting-room, where they sat together over coffee and liqueurs. Their talk was strained. An awkwardness had descended on them, as though the mere mention of the Marburg disease could itself create a blight on the surroundings. At last, Franz Schmidtt suggested that they might take a walk round the old town.

“The Schloss looks superb when it’s floodlit, and there’s nothing like a walk to clear the head. It’s too hot in here anyway.” He laughed heartily and turned to his wife. “Heidi, are you coming?”

Frau Schmidtt seemed in two minds. It was clear to Kaplan that she was anxious not to let her husband too far out of sight, but a look of resignation suddenly passed over her face.

“No, you two go. It’s been a long day, and I’m tired. Try not to be late.”

Schmidtt and Kaplan walked together through the town. Even though it was past eleven o’clock, the steep narrow streets were still crowded, and from the bars and wine cellars came the noise of students.

“The university is still in session,” said Professor Schmidtt. “They’ll be breaking up for the summer in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, they’re getting in some drinking before they go.” He laughed again. “We may join them eh, Lowell, old friend?”

The sound of singing blared up from one of the cellars. Kaplan recognized the tune. “Isn’t that the old Horstwessel song? I thought it had been banned in Germany since the fall of the Third Reich.”

Schmidtt looked a bit embarrassed. “These things tend to creep back, you know. In any case, the Horstwessel song was never officially banned. It just wasn’t sung. We in Germany prefer not to be remembered of the Nazi era.”