Virus: The Day of Resurrection (8 page)

“You’ve gotta be kidding!” cried the investigator, as did all the newspaper reporters who had been thronging in with her from the start.

“Since when is only one person allowed?”

“Everybody, wait just a minute,” said the inspector in charge of the accident investigation. “Right now, please let the police take her statement first. It doesn’t sound like Ms. M is ready to be answering a lot of obnoxious questions yet. So first and foremost, we’ll be asking her about what happened, and that’s all. At least save the morning-after talk about her and Tonio until she can sit in a wheelchair. In exchange, I’ll let you listen to what Ms. M has to say by way of this wireless microphone. Tape it, and then do whatever you need to do.”

Some called this a high-handed abuse of authority, and as a result there was some brief trouble, but in the end it was agreed that the detective would go as representative, while the Alfa Romeo investigator and the members of the press remained glued to the speakers in the waiting room.

The inspector’s voice came from the speaker: “Are you feeling better, Ms. M?”

“Yes, thank you,” replied an unexpectedly strong, if coquettish-sounding voice. “I’m very … well. But my face. I wonder if these wounds will heal completely.”

The doctor’s voice sounded over the speakers. “If you wish, we can make you even more beautiful than before. Though you’re lovely enough already.”

“Do you feel well enough to talk for a few minutes?” asked the inspector. “I’d like you to tell me about what was going on in the car at the time of the accident. A simple explanation will be fine. Just so we can understand the circumstances a little better. And in particular, so we can establish for sure that the truck driver was not responsible.”

“The man in the trailer was not to blame,” Ms. M said crisply. “It was all Tonio’s fault.” Suddenly, she began to cry bitterly. “It was terrifying … truly terrifying. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.”

“Easy, now,” the attending physician said. “It’s all right. You’re completely safe now.”

“What did Tonio do?”

“Well, I want to say up front, there’s nothing between Tonio and me … it’s true,” Ms. M said through her tears. “We first met last winter in Lausanne, and then by coincidence I ran into him again. It was about a month ago. After that, we went to Monaco, and Tonio and I both won quite a bit of money. He called me his goddess of luck. We were together as far as Genoa. I was in Livorno when Tonio went to pick up the new car. Later, he called and said he’d drive me to Rome …”

“Nothing between them, eh?” sneered a reporter from
Paris Match.
“Hah! A whole month wandering around together on the Ligurian coast? Any way you shake it, that falls into ‘hot and heavy’ territory.”

“That’s enough about Tonio,” said the inspector, her voice patient. “Please tell us about the accident.”

“Yes, well … when we left Civitavecchia, Tonio was feeling
perfectly well
. He’d gone to bed early the night before.”

This elicited a snort of laughter from somewhere in the press corps. The news that Tonio had been well had the Alfa Romeo investigator biting the frills on her hat. “Hey, look at that …” said one of the reporters, nudging another who stood nearby. “How much you wanna bet she eats that Borsalino before she’s done talking?”

“… the new car was so amazing that the boy at the petrol stand had his mouth hanging open for a full minute. Even so, Tonio drove like he was afraid of it. He went at a crawl in the city, and when we came out onto the highway, he made sure his seatbelt was on tight and would hardly speed up at all. I told him I’d heard these cars could do over two hundred, and maybe I shouldn’t have, but I told him to go faster. But that man—he would only go up to around fifty or sixty on average, and other cars kept passing us. For a man who said he was a Le Mans racer, I thought he would be a little more masculine. Finally, Tonio said he’d open her up once we got onto a long, straight stretch of road. No, he didn’t in the least look like he was particularly frightened. He seemed relaxed, and he was even singing a song. But he never once turned to look at me, and he didn’t reach out to touch me either. I was a little irritated and was sitting pretty far away from Tonio in the seat.”

“He may have had a body like a Volante,” someone murmured, “but when it came to
engine performance
 …”

“Still, he seems to have been fine up to about a hundred,” said someone else.

“Sssh!”

“Pretty soon we got on a straight road. Tonio said, ‘Here we go!’and stepped on the pedal. He was leaning over the steering wheel just a little. It was a truly incredible car, and we were doing over eighty in no time. And that’s when …” Suddenly, her voice grew a little shrill and trailed off. For a time, there was only the sound of her sucking in air as she breathed.

“I saw the truck coming from far away … and that’s when Tonio gave a kind of little shout, and then just suddenly hung his head and his body slumped against the steering wheel, and slipped … and we swerved so sharply I thought I would be thrown from the car … and then the truck was right in front of my eyes … this huge tractor trailer the size of a mountain was … I screamed, ‘Tonio! Tonio! What’s wrong with you? Stop it!’ ”

There was an earsplitting shout from the speaker.

“Ms. M!” cried the doctor’s voice. “Get an injection ready.”

“Ms. M!” urged the inspector again and again. “Hang on, Ms. M!”

The reporters all looked at one another.

“Well, sounds like that’s it for today,” said one. “But at any rate, it’s clear now that the cause of the crash had something to do with Tonio.”

“It was probably cerebral anemia,” another reporter opined. “Caused by freaking out in a car that was just too awesome. Alfa Romeo will be relieved to hear their car wasn’t defective.”

They were all already moving away from the speaker. Rather odd noises had emanated from it for a few moments, but now they stopped. Presently, the inspector returned from the direction of the intensive care ward with an oddly stiff, sullen expression on his face. Everyone crowded in around him.

“Hey, Inspector!” called one of the reporters. “Ms. M was in hysterics! Has she calmed down any?”

The inspector glared back at all of them silently.

“How about it? Can we get a direct interview tomorrow?”

“That won’t be possible,” the inspector said through twisted lips. “Ms. M
is dead
.”

“What?” Reflexively, the reporters all looked at one another. “But the doctor said she was completely safe now.”

“But just now, she died.” The inspector’s face was shaded with gloom. “It wasn’t due to her injuries, though; she suffered a heart attack.”

This was the first case to appear in the public record of what appeared to be
it.
There may have been other prior instances that were ruled simple heart attacks or written off as sudden deaths whose causes were unclear, but it is nearly certain that this case of March 13 was the first that can be pointed to as being unmistakably
it
. This is because a written record of the investigation remains at Alfa Romeo—intended by the investigator from that company to be the last word on the matter—in which she contended that Antonio Sevellini was
already dead
before the accident. The fact that Tonio had few external injuries, and the results of the autopsy showed no internal effects of the shock that could be pointed out as a clear cause of death, hinted at this possibility. If the driver protection system that the company had labored so diligently over had proven to be useless at less than ninety kilometers per hour, it would have had a negative effect on sales from that point on. When the pathologist’s statement came, it was unusually late, unusually vague, and speckled with wiggle words and obfuscations. Because of this, the company investigator decided to try to contact him to clarify some points.

She never got the chance. It appeared clear that the elderly doctor had harbored doubts about the cause of Tonio’s death from the moment he had inserted his scalpel. It was learned from his assistant that the doctor had taken samples from Tonio’s brain and medulla oblongata. However, before the doctor could share his thoughts with his assistant in detail, he left for Switzerland on urgent business.

Because she had another investigation to deal with herself in England, she decided to give up and retreat for a while. Several days later, she sent another telegram from her destination to Rome, requesting a meeting at his convenience. From Rome, she received an extremely simple reply.

DR
.
D
.
DIED THREE DAYS AGO
.

2. The First Week of April

April—it was spring in the northern hemisphere, autumn in the southern hemisphere, and in Antarctica preparations were already under way for wintering.

“So who’s your money on?” asked Tatsuno, the engine technician, clapping Yoshizumi on the shoulder in the passageway leading to Dome 3.

“For what?” Yoshizumi asked.

“The pennant race. The season’s about to start.”

“Toei in the Pacific League. And in the Central League, Hanshin.”

Tatsuno grinned wryly as he wrote Yoshizumi’s picks down on a list. He was editor-in-chief of the
Showa Station News
, but he also doubled as its entertainment and sports columnist. He had his ham radio operator’s license, so he was able to get news from Japan early. “I don’t know about Hanshin,” said Tatsuno, with a shrug of his shoulders. “I think the Giants are gonna go all the way this year.”

Yoshizumi didn’t really know much about baseball, or care. He was only thinking about all the machines that needed to be set up before they were snowed in for the winter—the instruments he would use to take readings of the earth’s crust. Seismometers were to be set up here and there on the exposed bedrock. Equipped with transistor radios and mercury batteries, they would provide him with readings throughout the winter. He needed to decide on the setup points soon and get them installed.

“Anything unusual going on?” Yoshizumi asked Tatsuno as he was about to pass him by. Tatsuno was carrying in one hand a katakana manuscript that was apparently freshly typed. He typed one-handed when communicating on the ham radio.

“Nothing terribly interesting,” Tatsuno said, raising up the manuscript a little to show him. “Another general election, and again no change in government. Influenza and polio are going around again. Aside from that, hmm, signs of a major epidemic of suspected distemper …”

“Distemper?” Yoshizumi laughed. “You mean that disease that dogs get?”

“Yeah. Since around the end of March, most of the dogs and cats in western Japan seem to have come down with it. I’ve got three fine hunting dogs myself, so I’m climbing the walls worrying about them.”

“Dogs, eh?”

Yoshizumi thought suddenly of the dog he had been raising back home. That half-blood Akita mutt never barked, was not especially smart, and certainly wasn’t brave, yet somehow there was a sense that he and the dog understood each other. That dog was already pretty old and so was sluggish. All he did was bask in the sun. It was a strange thing, but when Yoshizumi thought of that stupid dog’s wet, black nose and those sleepy eyes he could barely keep open—eyes truly characteristic of Japanese mutts—he could also see the hedge of miniature orange trees that ran along one side of the doghouse, the hill climbing up out of the plum orchard, the old and weathered roof of his home peeking out from among the shrubbery surrounding it. The small white frame of his ever prim, ever proper mother also rose up before his eyes. He had asked his elderly mother, and his nephew who was in elementary school, to take care of Gonbei—that was the goofy name he had stuck on that dog. They were the only two other people Gonbei would listen to. If it was anyone else talking, that hateful dog would put on an act of thorough incomprehension and at times be nothing but uncooperative.

“It’s pretty rare for distemper to go around,” said Yoshizumi. “Is it that bad?”

Tatsuno suddenly cracked up with laughter. “Well, look at the date of this paper. It’s the April first edition.” He was suddenly holding his stomach laughing as he waved around the kana newspaper in his hands. “I’m gonna make everyone guess which stories in here are real.”