Plague (16 page)

The cop paused
for a while, then nodded again and stepped his way back along the corridor.

‘Plague is a
great leveller,’ said Dr. Selmer hoarsely. ‘Chief of Police or not, that’s the
end of him.’

‘You’re in a
philosophical mood today, Anton.’ Dr. Selmer pushed the elevator button and
waited while the numbers blinked downward to the ground floor. ‘I think I’m
entitled to be,’ he replied bluntly.

Adelaide was
still waiting in Dr. Selmer’s office. She had been trying to call Washington on
the phone all afternoon, but it was unrelentingly busy. She made them a couple
of cups of instant coffee, and they took off their shoes and relaxed.

‘Is it still
bad?’ she asked. She sat beside Leonard, stroking his forehead, and he loved
the touch and the fragrance of her. It almost made the carnage of the wards
seem like a half-forgotten nightmare, and nothing more. ‘Worse,’ put in Dr.
Selmer.

‘But I guess it
can’t go on forever. Sooner or later, the people who keep on bringing people to
the hospital will get sick themselves, and that will be the end of that.’

Dr. Petrie
rubbed his eyes. ‘This whole damned city is dying and we can’t do a thing about
it.’ Adelaide said, ‘I had a priest in here a little while ago.’

‘What was he
doing?’ asked Dr. Petrie. ‘Hiding from the vengeance of the Lord?’

‘No,’ said
Adelaide, brushing her brunette curls away from her forehead. ‘He seemed to
think that America was getting no more than it deserved. He really felt that we
were getting our just desserts for everything.
For
mistreating the Indians, for inventing the motor car, for suppressing the
blacks, for destroying the environment.’

Dr. Petrie
sipped his coffee. ‘I don’t suppose he was willing to intercede with God, and
get this whole thing stopped?’

Adelaide shook
her head. ‘If you ask me, the Church will be delighted. If this doesn’t turn a
few more millions into true believers, I don’t know what will.’ The office
phone rang. Dr. Selmer answered it,
then
passed it
over. ‘It’s for you, Leonard, Sister Maloney from the emergency ward.’

Sister Maloney
spoke to Dr. Petrie in her careful Irish accent, ‘We have a patient down here
who is asking for you by name, doctor.’

‘By name?
Do you know who she is?’

‘I’m afraid
not, sir. She’s very sick. I think you’d better come down quickly if you want
to see her alive.’

‘I’ll be right
there.’ He put down the phone, swallowed the rest of his coffee, and collected
his green mask and gown.

‘Leonard,’ said
Adelaide. ‘Is anything wrong?’

‘Sister Maloney
says a woman is calling for me. She’s probably one of my regular patients. Why
don’t you stay here and force
An
ton to drink another
cup of coffee?

‘At least it’ll
keep him out of the ward for five more minutes.’

Dr. Selmer
chuckled.
‘Alone at last, Adelaide!
Now we can pursue
that affair I keep meaning to have with you.’

Dr. Petrie
closed the office door behind him and walked quickly down to the elevators.
There was a strange bustling whisper throughout the hospital, a sound he had
never heard before – like a thousand people murmuring their prayers under their
breath. He was alone in the elevator, and he leaned tiredly against the wall as
it sank downwards to the ground floor.

The elevator
doors slid open, and he was back in hell. The corridors were crowded with
moaning, crying people. There were people lying white-faced and shuddering
against the walls; people coughing and weeping; people hunched silently on the
floor.

The plague had
taken both the rich and the poor. There were elderly widows, tanned by years of
Florida sun, dying in their diamonds and their pearls,
There
were waitresses and mechanics, shop assistants and chauffeurs, hotel managers
and wealthy executives. Anyone who had swum in the polluted ocean was dying;
and anyone who had talked to them or touched them was dying, too.

Dr. Petrie,
grim-faced, stepped carefully through the plague victims, and pushed open the
door of the emergency ward. Sister Maloney, wearing a big white surgical gown
and a surgical mask, was waiting for him. ‘Where is she? Is she still alive?’

‘Only just,
doctor, I’m afraid. It won’t be many minutes now.’

Dr. Petrie put
on his gown and mask, and followed Sister Maloney into the crowded ward. He had
to squeeze his way past the bedside of a 24-year-old policeman called Herb
Stone, who was now in the final stages of sickness. His face was gray, and he
was muttering incoherently.

Sister Maloney,
forging through the patients like a great white ship, brought Dr. Petrie at last
to a bed in the corner. A woman was lying on it with dark circles under her
eyes, clutching a soiled blanket and shaking with uncontrollable spasms.

Dr. Petrie
leaned forward and looked at her closely. He felt a long, slow, dropping feeling
in his stomach. The woman opened her eyes and blinked at him through the glare
of the ward’s fluorescent light. ‘Leonard,’ she whispered. ‘I knew you’d come.’

‘Hallo,
Margaret,’ he said quietly. ‘Are you feeling bad?’

She nodded, and
tried to swallow. ‘I’d sure like a drink of water.’

‘Sister?
Could you get me one please?’ Dr. Petrie asked.

Sister Maloney
steamed off for him, and Dr. Petrie turned back to his former wife.

‘Where’s
Prickles?’ he asked. ‘Is she safe?’

Margaret nodded
again. ‘I left her with Mrs. Henschel, next door. She’s all right, Leonard. She
didn’t catch anything.’

‘You can’t be
sure.’

Margaret looked
at him for a while. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t be sure.’

‘Is there
anything you want me to do? Are you comfortable?’

‘It hurts a little.
Not much.’

He reached out
and took her hand. He could hardly believe that, less than two years ago, he
had lain side by side in bed with this same woman, that he had kissed her and
argued with her, and that he had actually given her a child. He remembered her
in court, in her severe black suit. He remembered her on the day that he had
walked out, red-eyed and crying by the front door. He remembered how she had
looked on the day they were married.

‘Leonard.’ she
said, stroking the back of his hand.

‘Yes,
Margaret?’

‘Did you ever
love me?’

Dr. Petrie
turned away and stared for a long time at the wall.

‘You can’t ask
me that, Margaret. Not now.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I would probably lie.
Or worse than that, I might
even tell you the truth.’

‘That you did
love
me,
or that you didn’t?’

He felt her
pulse. She was fading fast. She was being taken away from him like a Polaroid
photo in reverse, each detail gradually melting back to blank, unexposed,
featureless film.

‘How do you
feel now?’ he asked her.

You’re changing
the subject.’

‘No, I’m not.
I’m trying to treat a patient.’

‘Leonard,
didn’t you ever love me? I mean – really, really love me?’

He didn’t
answer. He looked at her dying, and held her hand, but he didn’t answer.

He didn’t know
at that moment what the true answer was.

‘Leonard,’ she
said, ‘
kiss
me.’

‘What?’

‘Kiss me,
Leonard.’

He saw that she
was almost dead. Her eyes were glazing, and she could barely summon the breath
to speak. Her head was slowly sinking towards the rough blanket trying to treat
you like a doctor on which she lay, and even the shudders of plague had
subsided in her muscles.

There was no
time to decide whether to kiss her. Instead, he pulled the blanket over her
face.

Sister Maloney,
busy with a sick boy, said, ‘Has she gone, Dr. Petrie?’

Dr. Petrie
nodded.
‘Yes, sister.
She’s gone.’

As he passed
by, Sister Maloney laid a hand on his sleeve. Her sympathetic green eyes showed
above her surgical mask.

‘Was she
someone you knew rather well, Dr. Petrie?’

Dr. Petrie took
a deep breath, and looked around him. ‘No, sister, she wasn’t. I didn’t know
her well at all.’ It was not a callous denial, it was the truth. There were
parts of Margaret he had understood thoroughly, and hated – but there was so
much, he realized now, that he had not known at all.

Afterwards, as
he walked back down the crowded corridor towards the elevators, he felt oddly
calm and numb. He didn’t feel happy; he had never, in his bitterest moments,
wished Margaret dead. But now the problem had been taken out of his hands by
chance, and by Pasteurella pestis. He was free at last.

A nurse came up
to him and touched his arm. She was a small, pretty colored girl.

He had seen her
around the emergency wards before, and even toyed with the idea of asking her
out for a drink.

‘Doctor
Petrie?’ she said.

He looked at
her. ‘Yes, nurse?’

She lowered her
eyes. ‘I don’t know how to say this. It sounds ridiculous.’

He looked at
her steadily. Like every nurse in the hospital, she had been working for hours
without a break, and all around her, she had seen doctors and interns and
sisters dying on their feet. She was tired, and her black face was glossy with
perspiration.

‘Why not try
me?’ he asked huskily.

‘Well,’ she
said, ‘I heard a rumor.’

‘What kind of a
rumor?’

‘My brother’s
friend works for the Miami Fire Department. It seems like he told my brother
they’ve been given special orders. The firemen, I mean. They’ve been told to
get ready for some big blazes.’

Dr. Petrie felt
a cold sensation sliding down his spine.

‘Some big
blazes?’ he said. ‘What did he mean by that?’

‘I don’t know,
doctor,’ said the nurse. She still didn’t look up, and her voice was barely
audible. ‘I guess they mean to burn the city.’

Dr. Petrie let
the words sink in. I guess they mean to burn the city. It was a medieval way of
dealing with an epidemic, but then, all things considered, they were faced with
a medieval situation. For the first time in a hundred years, they had a raging
disease on their hands that modern medical treatments could neither suppress
nor deflect.

He reached out
and gently lifted the nurse’s chin. ‘I’m not going to pretend I don’t believe
you,’ said, ‘because I’ve seen enough of this administration’s tactics to
believe it could be true. You might as well know that Miami has been thrown to
the wolves. The city is surrounded by National Guardsmen, and there’s no way
out.’

She held his
hand for a moment, and then nodded. ‘I guessed they would do that,’ she said
simply.

They stepped
back for a moment while a medical trolley was pushed between them, carrying a
shivering middle-aged woman in a soiled white summer coat.

‘Well,’ said
the colored nurse. ‘I suppose I’d better get back to work.’

Dr. Petrie
said, as she turned, ‘You could try to escape, you know. You could run away.’

She looked back.
‘Run away? You mean, right out of Miami?’

‘That’s right.
Right out of Miami.’

‘But there are
people here who need me. How could I leave my patients?’

‘Nurse,’ said
Dr. Petrie, ‘you know and I know that they’re all going to die anyway.

You don’t think
that anything you can do will prevent that?’

‘No, I don’t,’
she said, without hesitating. ‘But it’s my duty to stay with them, and do
whatever I can. It’s only human.’

Dr. Petrie
said, ‘
You
know that you’ll die yourself, don’t you?’

She nodded.

He didn’t say
anything else – just looked at her, and thought what a waste it was. She was
young and she was black and she was pretty, and she had everything in the world
to stay alive for. Now, because of some crass and destructive official
bungling, she was going to die.

‘Doctor,’ she
said quietly, ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

He looked away,
but she stepped up to him again and laid her hand on his arm.

‘Doctor, we’re
all human here. We’re nothing special – just ordinary people. I want to stay
because that’s my choice, but maybe you want to go. Doctor, you don’t have to
seek my approval to do that. You only have to walk right out of here, and take
your chance.’

‘I have a
daughter,’ he said, in a trembling voice.

The nurse
smiled, and shook her head. ‘There’s no reason to make excuses. Not to me, nor
anyone. Just go, Doctor Petrie.’

He bit his lip,
then
turned away to the elevators. The last he saw of
the colored nurse was her forgiving, resigned and understanding face, as the
elevator doors closed between them. There are some people, he thought, whose
devotion makes everything else around them seem tawdry and irrelevant.

Dr. Selmer was
fast asleep on the couch when Dr. Petrie returned to the office.

Adelaide was
sitting beside him reading a medical magazine and yawning.

‘That didn’t
take long,’ she said.

He sat down
next to her and rubbed his eyes. ‘It was Margaret,’ he said wearily. ‘She just
died, about five minutes ago.’

Adelaide slowly
put down her magazine. ‘Margaret?’ she said, shocked.

‘She’s dead,
Adelaide. She had the plague.’ She reached over and grasped his wrist.

‘Oh, Leonard.
Oh, God – I’m sorry. I know that we wished all
kinds of things on her.

But not this.’

Dr. Petrie
sighed. ‘There’s nothing we can do. She caught it, and she died. It doesn’t
matter what we wished or didn’t wish.’

‘What about
Prickles? Has she got it too?’

‘I don’t know.
Margaret said she hadn’t. She left her with the woman next door when they took
her into hospital.’