Plague (9 page)

‘Cretin,’ said
Herbert Gaines. He gripped Nicholas by the back of the neck, and forced him
over to the large gilt Victorian pub mirror that hung on the wall beside the
desk. Then he lifted the open book and held it up beside Nicholas’ face.

‘Well,’ said
Nicholas. ‘I guess there’s a kind of passing resemblance. But we’re not exactly
the Wrigley Double-mint twins, are we?’

Herbert Gaines
let him go, and tossed the annual back on the desk.

‘You don’t
think so? You don’t even know. The first time I saw you, down in the Village, I
felt a sensation like I’d never felt before. At first, I couldn’t understand
it. I stared and stared at you, and still I couldn’t grasp what it was that
made me stare.

Then I saw
myself in a bookstore window. I saw myself. And I realized what it was about you
that attracted me so much. You, Nicholas, are the spitting image of me, when I
was in movies.’

Nicholas looked
uncertain. ‘That’s not why you like me, though, is it? I mean – that’s not the
only reason?’ Herbert Gaines walked carefully back to his chair, and sat down.
It looked as if his jumpsuit was filled with nothing more substantial than bent
coat-hangers and odd bones. When he was comfortable, he fixed his gaze on
Nicholas again – those deep, disturbing eyes – and he spoke in grave, sonorous
tones. ‘Nicholas,’ he said, ‘I love you.’

Nicholas
scratched the back of his neck in embarrassment. ‘I know that, Herbert, but...’

‘

‘But nothing,’
said Herbert. ‘I love you. Does it matter why?’

Nicholas
lowered his eyes. ‘I guess not. It was just that I wondered if you loved me
because I was
me,
or because, well...’

‘Because what?’

‘Well, because
I was you. I mean – is it me you love, or your old self?’

There was an
uncomfortable silence. Then, unexpectedly, Herbert Gaines nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said.
‘It is me that I love. You are the personification of what I once was, and what
I could be once more, if they would give me a chance.
That,
and that alone, is why I love you.’

Nicholas stood
there, biting his lip. He watched Herbert Gaines for a while, but Herbert
didn’t look back. The old actor sat in his Victorian chair, smoking steadily
and staring at the floor.

‘Well, fuck
you,’ said Nicholas.

Herbert Gaines
said nothing.

‘Do you think I
can take that?’ said Nicholas, his eyes filling with tears. ‘Do you think I can
just stand here and take that? What do you think I am?
Just
one of your goddamned celluloid images?
Just one of
your old movies?
Well, fuck you, Herbert Gaines!’

Gaines
shrugged. ‘Please yourself, dear boy.’

Nicholas wiped
his eyes with his arm. ‘Oh, that’s great, that is. That’s just too fucking neat
for words. You spend your whole time sulking and moping like an over-age
Shirley Temple, and when I tell you the truth about it, you come out with a
charmer like that. Well, I can tell you here and now – I’m packing.’

‘Packing?’ said
Gaines.
‘What for?’

Nicholas bent
forward and hissed the words at him. ‘To leave you, my withered darling, that’s
what for.’

Herbert caught
his wrist. His mouth twitched for a moment as he searched for the words. ‘You
leave me, you young bastard, and I’ll break your neck.’

Nicholas pulled
himself away. ‘You might have been a muscle boy in 1936, but there’s not much
chunk left on the old bones now, is there, Herbert?’

He turned and
walked towards the bedroom. Herbert Gaines, with a curiously intense expression
on his face, heaved himself out of his chair and went after him.

Hobbling as
quickly as he could, he caught up with Nicholas in the doorway, and snatched at
his arm.

Nicholas shook
himself free. ‘Herbert, it’s no fucking use!’

Herbert
clutched his young lover again. ‘You’re not leaving, Nicky. Not really.’

Nicholas turned
away. ‘What do you want me to do? Stay here and listen to your ramblings about
the good old days for the rest of my life, and how fucking wonderful I am
because I look just like you used to look, in one of those two dreary old
pictures of yours? Jesus, Herbert, I don’t know which is more boring – you or
your second-rate movies.’

Herbert slapped
him, quite hard, across the face. Nicholas stared at him, more in surprise than
in pain. A red bruise spread across his left cheek. He lifted his hand and
dabbed it.

Without a word,
Nicholas punched Herbert in the stomach. Herbert gasped, and collided with the door-jamb.
Nicholas hit him again, with his open hand, and he fell to the floor with his
nose bleeding.

Herbert didn’t
cry out, didn’t even raise a hand to protect himself. Viciously and
systematically, Nicholas punched him in the face and chest, lifting him up each
time he dropped to the floor by tugging his pale blue jumpsuit. There were
speckles and splashes of blood down the front, and Herbert’s face was a mass of
bruises.

Finally, with
his rage exhausted, Nicholas let him fall on to the pink Wilton carpet, and
stumbled unsteadily into the bedroom. He collapsed on to the bed, and lay there
panting and sobbing, his legs curled up in a foetal crouch.

After a few
minutes, he became aware that Herbert was standing at his bedside, his white
hair awry,
his
Jumpsuit dark with blood. Herbert
reached out with a wrinkled and trembling hand and touched his bare shoulder.
Nicholas recoiled.

‘Nick,’
whispered Herbert Gaines. ‘Nicky.’ Nicholas turned his face away. ‘Nicky,
listen,’ said Herbert thickly. Nicholas shook his head. ‘Nicky, you still
haven’t punished me enough.’ Nicholas turned, and lifted his head. The
handsome, wrinkled face was swollen and red. The bony shoulders were bowed.

‘Not enough?’
said Nicholas, unbelievingly.

Herbert Gaines,
the one-time movie hero, dropped to his knees. ‘I have sinned against myself,’
he said hoarsely. ‘I have grown old, and unappealing. You must punish me.’

Nicholas sat
up. He took Herbert’s hand in his, and gripped it tight. ‘Herbert, you mustn’t
say things like that. Nobody can help themselves from growing old. And anyway,
what’s
sixty? It’s when you get to ninety-five that you’ve
got to start worrying!’

Herbert wiped
blood from his chin. ‘Sixty is older than twenty. Nick. It’s
all
my
fault. I threw my youth away.
Two movies, too much
money too fast.
They offered me $25,000 for my third picture. I was high
on my own conceit. I said $100,000 or nothing.’

‘And?’

‘You know what
happened. I got nothing. I was young and headstrong, and I wouldn’t give in.
Don’t you think that’s worthy of punishment?’

Nicholas rested
his head in his hands. He felt tired and depressed, and he didn’t know what
possible words of comfort he could give. He was a one-time art student, a
one-time merchant seaman, and articulating his sympathies didn’t come easy.

‘Nicky,’ said
Herbert Gaines, ‘you must hit me.’

Nicholas shook
his head. ‘No, Herbert, I can’t.’

‘But you must!
It’s the only way I
The
past must punish the future!’

Nicholas stood
up, and walked over to a painting of a Chinese mandarin on the other side of
the room. He looked ancient, and inscrutable, and deeply wise. The youth gazed
at his calmness, and wondered how it was possible to live the kind of life
where you could smile as calmly and benignly as that, even once. ‘Nicky,’
whispered Herbert Gaines again. ‘What is it, Herbert?’

‘I want you to
kill me.’

Nicholas almost
smiled – ‘No, Herbert, I can’t.’

‘The police
needn’t know. You could drown me in the bath.
An unfortunate
accident.

Only – I
couldn’t do it myself. I’m a Catholic. It isn’t easy to want to die, and to be
afraid of it.’

Nicholas turned
around. He stared at this pathetic, blood-smattered figure, and he shook his
head once again. ‘I can’t kill you, Herbert. You’re indestructible. You’re in
movies, aren’t you?
Two magnificent movies.
It doesn’t
matter if your body is dead, does it? Every time those movies play, you’ll come
back to life again.’

‘Nicky,’ said
Herbert wretchedly, ‘I need to be punished.’

‘You are being
punished,’ said Nicholas, quietly. ‘Every day of your miserable life, you’re
being punished. You don’t need me to do it. Only one thing will ever let you
off the hook, Herbert, and that’s the end of civilization. When there are no
more people to go to the movies, and the last picture-house closes down, that’s
when you get your freedom.’

Herbert lowered
his head. In a scarcely audible voice he said, ‘If that’s true, Nicky, then I
pray God that civilization comes to an end before I do.’

Nicholas walked
back and rested his hand on Herbert’s shoulder.

‘The way things
are going these days, God might even grant your wish. Now, let’s go and get you
cleaned up, hey?’

Across the
hallway, in apartment 109, Kenneth Garunisch was the only person in Concorde
Tower who was concerned about the plague. He was sitting at his cluttered desk,
trying to fix his necktie, watch television, and talk to his union attorneys on
the telephone, all at the same time. He spoke with the steady relentlessness
that had earned him the nickname of ‘Bulldozer’, and he was angry.

‘This thing
broke out last night, Matty. How come they only told me this morning?

Because I have
a right to know, that’s why! What do you
mean,
emergency? I don’t care what they call it.’

Through the
open hatch in the sitting-room wall, he could see his wife, Gay, in the kitchen,
fixing cocktail snacks with their black maid, Beth. She was warbling Strangers
in the Night as she popped little curled-up anchovy fillets on to crackers and
cream cheese. Beth, silent and fat, was peeling prawns.

‘You’d better
believe it, Garunisch said, in his hectoring voice. ‘I got a call from two of
my guys at the hospital. Plague, that’s what they got.
The
Black Death.’

He put his hand
over the receiver and sighed. He was a short, stocky, bullet-headed man with an
iron-gray crew-cut. His eyes were pale and uncompromising, and there was a
prickly roll of fat at the back of his neck. He spoke with a monotonous
harshness, like the retreating sea dragging pebbles down the beach. He was
Germanic and hard-bitten, and he was president of the Medical Workers’ Union –
a union he had started himself in 1934, with four other hospital porters from
Bellevue – and which was now a powerful, nut-cracking international with a
billion-dollar fund and a two and a half million membership.

‘You hear that?
Plague.
They don’t know what kind, and they’ve got
people dying like flies. So how come I only found out this morning?’

Gay stuck her
heavily-lacquered blue-rinsed curls through the serving hatch.

‘What did you
say, Ken? Did you say something?’

Kenneth waved
her away. ‘I was talking to Matty. They got some kind of plague in Miami. Can
you believe that?’

Gay, with her
head still stuck through the hatch, blinked her eyes as if she was trying to
work out whether she could believe it or not. Finally, she said, ‘What’s plague?’

Kenneth ignored
her. His attorney was asking him what he intended doing about Miami.

‘What do you
think I’m going to do? I want to protect my members. If my members have to
handle people with plague, they’re gonna catch it themselves, right?’

His attorney
guessed that was right.

‘In which
case,’ went on Garunisch, ‘I suggest you call the health department down at
Miami and tell them it’s double time or nothing, and all hospital workers got
the right to refuse to handle plague cases, without penalization,
recrimination, or loss of benefits.’

His attorney
was silent for a while. Then the lawyer suggested that under the circumstances,
union action might be construed as taking immoral and unfair advantage of a
medical emergency.

‘Listen,’
grated Garunisch, ‘you just get on to that telephone to Florida, and you tell
those health folk that if they want my members to risk their lives, they’re
gonna have to pay for it. I don’t want
no
arguments,
and I don’t want no fuss. Now do it.’

He clamped the
receiver back on the phone, and shook his head. ‘Immoral and unfair advantage,’
he repeated, sarcastically. ‘You get some underpaid Cuban hospital porter to
risk his life, and you don’t expect to pay him no more?
Immoral
and unfair advantage, my ass.’

Gay popped her head
through the hatch again. ‘Did you say something, Ken?’

Garunisch stood
up and walked over to the kitchen, tying up his necktie as he went.

It was a very
lurid necktie, with purple flowers and greenish spots. It had been an expensive
gift from Gay.

‘Was that
something serious, dear?’ said Gay, rinsing her hands. ‘You look awful sore.’

Garunisch
reached over to pilfer a smoked-salmon canape. ‘It’s just the usual,’ he said,
with his mouth full. ‘They got some kind of epidemic down in Florida, just like
the Spanish influenza, and they’re expecting the porters and the drivers to
handle the patients without any compensation for extra health risk.’

‘That’s awful,’
said Gay. She was a small, busty woman with wide-apart eyes.

‘Supposing they caught it?
Supposing their children caught
it?’

Garunisch
looked around the expensive, glossy, Colonial kitchen, with its antique-style
tables and chairs. It still gave him a sense of justice and satisfaction, this
condominium. For the first time in his life, he owned a luxurious home,
decorated just the way that he and Gay had wanted, and he could turn around to
all those capitalist palookas who had tried to crush him, and grind him and his
union out of existence, and he could raise two rigid fingers.