Plague (12 page)

Dr. Petrie
rubbed his face tiredly. ‘Have you seen many like this?’ he asked the cop.

‘A couple of dozen maybe.’

‘And what are
you supposed to do about them?’ The cop shrugged. His radio was blurting
something about a traffic accident on the West Expressway. ‘We have to report
them,
that’s
all. Those are the orders. Report them,
but don’t touch them.’

‘And that’s
all? No orders to stop people using the beaches, or leaving the city?’ The cop
shook his head. Dr. Petrie stood beside the police car for a moment, thinking.

Then he said,
‘Thanks,’ and walked back to his Lincoln. He climbed in, gunned the engine, and
drove off in the direction of Donald Firenza’s house.

The more he
heard about the health chief’s inactivity, the more worried and angry he grew.
If one cop had seen two dozen cases, there must be at least a hundred sick
people in the whole city, and that meant a plague epidemic of unprecedented
scale.

He drove fast
and badly, but the streets were deserted, and it only took him five minutes to
get out to Coral Gables.

He had no
trouble in picking out Donald Firenza’s house. There were cars parked all the
way up the street, including a television truck and a blue and white police
car, and every window was alight. He pulled his Lincoln on to the sidewalk and
switched off the engine. Over the soft rustling of palm trees and the chirrup
of insects, he could hear voices
raised
in argument.

He was greeted
at the door by a fat uniformed cop with a red sweaty face.

‘I’m a doctor,’
Petrie said. ‘I just came up from the hospital. Is Mr. Firenza home?’

The cop
scrutinized Dr. Petrie’s ID card. He was monotonously chewing gum. ‘Guess Mr.
Firenza’s pretty tied up right now, but you can ask. Go ahead inside.’

Dr. Petrie
stepped through the door. The house was crowded with newspaper reporters and
television cameramen, all lounging around with cardboard cups of coffee and
cans of beer. It was one of those houses that in normal circumstances was
guaranteed to make Dr. Petrie wince. There were coach lamps and sculptured
carpets, wrought-iron banistairs and paintings of horses leaping through the
foamy sea. On one wall was a print of a small girl with enormous eyes, out of
which two fat sparkling tears were dropping.

In the
pink-decorated sitting-room, Petrie found Donald Firenza, sitting back in a
large plastic-covered easy chair, talking to a young reporter from the Miami
Herald and a bald man in a bright sport shirt from UPI. Dr. Petrie recognized a
couple of friends from the city health department at the back of the room, and
he nodded to them briefly. Tonight was not a night for smiles.

‘Mr. Firenza?’
he said crisply. ‘I’m Dr. Leonard Petrie. I just came from Dr. Selmer, down at
the hospital.’

Mr. Firenza
looked up. He was right in the middle of saying, ‘-all the epidemic deaths
we’ve suffered so far have been tragic, but unfortunately they’ve been
unavoidable...’

He didn’t look
at all pleased at being interrupted.

‘Can it wait?’
he said. He was a small, pale-faced, curly-headed man wearing a green
turtle-neck sweater.

‘I don’t think
so,’ said Dr. Petrie.

The UPI man
turned around in his chair. ‘Is it something to do with the epidemic? Is it
getting worse?’

Dr. Petrie
didn’t look at him. ‘I came to talk to Mr. Firenza, not to the press.’

‘What’s the
latest death-toll?’
persisted
the man from UPI. ‘Has
it gone above twelve yet?’

Dr. Petrie
ignored him. ‘Mr. Firenza,’ he said. ‘I’d appreciate a private word.’

Mr. Firenza
sighed, and stood up. ‘Excuse me, you-guys,’ he said to the two reporters.
‘I’ll be right back.’

He led Dr.
Petrie through the throng of police, health department officials and newsmen to
a small study at the back of the house. He closed the door behind them and shut
out the babble of conversation and argument.

‘Sit down,’
said Mr. Firenza. ‘We’ve met before, haven’t we?’

Dr. Petrie sat
down, and nodded.
‘Two or three times, at health department
meetings.
Maybe at dinners once or twice.
Perhaps we should’ve gotten better acquainted.’

Firenza reached
for a large briar pipe and proceeded to stack it with rough-cut tobacco. ‘I
want to tell you here and now that I’m very proud of the way that Miami’s
doctors are rallying to help.’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘However – I
don’t really think that you picked the subtlest way of breaking into a press
conference,’ Firenza went on. ‘I’ve just been trying to convince our friends
from the papers that this epidemic is containable and isolated.’

‘Do they
believe you?’

Firenza looked
at Dr. Petrie curiously. ‘Of course they believe me. Why shouldn’t they?’

Dr. Petrie
coughed.
‘Because it’s not true.’

Firenza pushed
some more tobacco into his pipe, and then laughed. ‘You’ve been talking to Dr.
Selmer, haven’t you? I know he thinks this is the end of the world, and that
we’re all going to get stricken down. I had to remind him that this is Miami,
which has more qualified doctors per square inch than almost any other city in
the continental United States, and that we have both the finance and the
resources to cope with any kind of epidemic.’

‘Is that
your
considered opinion, or is that the story you’re telling
the press?’ Dr. Petrie asked.

‘It’s both.’

‘Have you been
down to the hospital within the last hour?’

‘No, of course not.
I’ve been up here. This is where we’re
doing all the planning and the organization. I get constant reports from all
over, and the police and the hospitals are keeping me up to date with every new
case.’

‘So you know how
many people have died?’

Firenza looked
at him narrowly. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said, in a slow voice. ‘What are you getting
at?’

‘I’m not
getting at anything. If you know how many people have died, how come this city
isn’t already in quarantine? When I drove here, I saw people lying dead on the
sidewalks.’

Firenza struck
a match and began to light his pipe. ‘There are more people lying dead on the
sidewalks in New York City, my friend, and they don’t even have an epidemic
there.’

Dr. Petrie
frowned. ‘Mr. Firenza,’ he said, ‘that is completely irrelevant. We have a
serious epidemic disease on our hands right here in Miami, and it’s up to us to
do something about it.’

Firenza crossed
his little legs. ‘We are doing something about it, doctor. We have all the
medical people on call that we need. But you don’t think that a medical officer
can only concern himself with medicine, do you? It’s just as important for me
to protect Miami’s interests as a city as it is for me to protect the health of
its citizens.’

Dr. Petrie
stared at him. ‘You mean – what you’re telling the press – it’s all to protect
the city’s business?’

‘Partly.
It has to be. You think I want panic in the
streets? What we have here is a very tragic, very unfortunate incident. But
it’s no more than an incident. The last thing we want is for people to get
hysterical.’ Dr. Petrie looked up. ‘In other words, you don’t want them to
cancel their holidays?’

Firenza caught
the tone of his voice. ‘Look here, Dr. Petrie, I don’t quite know why you’re
here, but I have a serious job to do and I don’t appreciate sarcasm.’

‘Dr. Selmer has
a serious job to do, too. He has to stand there and watch people die.’

‘He’s getting
all the back-up he needs. What more does he want?’

‘He wants to be
sure that this epidemic doesn’t spread. We have a general idea of how it
started. All that raw sewage that’s been piling up on the beaches in the past
couple of days has polluted the water and the sand. Somehow, the plague
bacillus has been developing inside the sewage, and anyone who’s gone down on
the beach or swum in the ocean has caught it.’

Firenza puffed
his pipe. ‘You’ve got proof?’ he said shortly.

‘I don’t think
it needs proof. Every plague victim we’ve come across went swimming over the
weekend or early yesterday morning.’

‘That doesn’t
mean anything. Sixty percent of the population goes swimming over the weekend.’

‘Yes – but
mostly in private pools. All the victims went for a swim in the ocean.’

‘I still find that
hard to believe, Dr. Petrie. We’ve had raw sewage wash up on the beaches a
couple of times before, and each time it’s proved neutral.’

‘Have you
tested this sewage?’

‘The health
department didn’t consider it necessary,’ Firenza replied firmly.

Dr. Petrie
stared at him. ‘Mr. Firenza,’ he said, ‘
am
I hearing
things? We have a dozen people dead of plague down at the hospital, and thirty
or forty, maybe more people sick. We have beaches ankle-deep in sewage. Don’t
you think that, between the two, there’s just the shadow of a probable link?’

Firenza
shrugged. ‘You’re a doctor. You ought to know the danger of jumping to
conclusions.’

Dr. Petrie
sucked in his breath in exasperation. ‘Mr. Firenza, I came here to ask you to
close down the beaches. Not ask – insist. We have some kind of disease on our
hands that’s spreading faster than any disease we’ve ever come across before.

People are
dying within three to four hours of first catching it. Unless you want the
whole population of Miami dead or dying within a couple of days, I suggest you
act pretty fast.’

‘Oh, you do, do
you?’
sneered
Firenza. ‘And just how do you suggest
that I shut down twenty miles of beach without setting off the biggest
hysterical exodus in American history?’

Dr. Petrie
stood up. He was very tired, and he was angry. ‘I think it’s far better to set
off
an
hysterical exodus of living people, than it is
to shovel them up unhysterically when they’re dead.’

Firenza almost
grinned. ‘Dr. Petrie,’ he said. ‘You have a fine turn of phrase.

Unfortunately,
you’re reacting like
all of your
breed when you’re
faced with genuine diseases instead of old people’s hypochondriac complaints.
Real diseases frighten the pants off you. For once, you’ve got to do some real
medical work, instead of prescribing sugar pills and syrup for rich and
bad-tempered old ladies. Come on – admit it – you’re scared.’

Dr. Petrie’s
face was strained with suppressed fury.

‘Yes,’ he said,
in a shaking voice. ‘I’m scared. I’m scared of a disease that kills people off
like bugs down a drain, and I’m scared of you.’

Firenza stood
up, too. He was nearly a foot shorter than Dr. Petrie.

‘I suggest you
go get yourself some rest,’ said Firenza. ‘In the light of day, the whole thing
is going to look a lot less scary. I’m not saying that the situation isn’t
serious. It is, and I’m treating it as a medical emergency. But that’s no
reason to disturb the whole city, to cause unnecessary distress and anxiety,
and to kill off the proceeds from a vacation season that’s only just started.
If we quarantine this city, Dr. Petrie, we’ll destroy our business-folk, and
our ordinary men and women, just as surely as if they’d gotten sick.’

Petrie looked
at him for a long while,
then
slowly shook his head.

Mr. Firenza
said, ‘I promise you, and I promise Dr. Selmer, that if this epidemic gets any
worse by tomorrow noon, I’ll bring in the Dade County Health Department, and
seek some federal help if we need it. Now – is that to your satisfaction?’

There was a
long, awkward silence. Dr. Petrie opened the door of the study. ‘I don’t know
what to say to you, Mr. Firenza. If you won’t listen, you won’t listen. Maybe I
should go straight to the mayor.’

‘The mayor’s in
Washington, for two days.’

‘But he knows
about the epidemic, surely?’ He’s heard about it, on the news. He called me,
and I told him it was all under control, and to stay put. All I can say, Dr. Petrie
is that it’s up to the men of healing like you and Dr. Selmer to prove me
right.’

Dr. Petrie
turned away. ‘If it didn’t mean a terrible loss of life,’ he said bitterly,
‘I’d do anything to prove you wrong.’

He called Dr.
Selmer from the phone-booth on the corner of the street, and told him what had
happened. Selmer sounded frayed and worried, and on the point of collapse.

‘Doesn’t he
have any idea how bad it is?’ asked Anton Selmer. ‘I’ve had fifteen more deaths
since you left. I’ve had three nurses and two doctors down with
it,
and it won’t be long before I get it myself.’

‘Of course you
won’t. Just like you said, you and I are probably immune. Maybe it was contact
with David that did it, or maybe we’re just lucky.’

‘I need to be
lucky, if Firenza won’t close the beaches.’

‘I’m sorry,
Anton. I did try. He’s still telling the press that it’s containable and localized,
and that we’re all going to wake up in the morning and discover it was nothing
more than a nasty dream.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘I’m going
after Prickles now,’ Dr. Petrie said. ‘I don’t know where Margaret’s taken her,
but maybe if she’s sick she’s gone home. It shouldn’t take long.’

‘Will you come
back here, just as soon as you can? I need every bit of help I can get.

Joe Mamiya is
making some tests on the bacillus, but it’s going to take him a long time to
come up with anything positive.’

‘Anton – I’ll
be as quick as I can.’

Dr. Petrie put
the phone back in its cradle, and went back to his car. On the far sidewalk, he
saw a man shuffling and staggering along, leaning against parked cars for
support. The man suddenly stopped, and his head jerked back. Then he dropped to
his knees, and fell face first on to the concrete. He lay there muttering and
twitching, his cheeks bruised and pale, his right leg nervously shuddering.