Weekend
TANIA GROSSINGER
and
ANDREW NEIDERMAN
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS
NEW YORK
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DEDICATIONS
To a very special friend, with love.
Tania Grossinger
To my parents, who taught me that good and evil are things of the heart.
Andrew Neiderman
And for each other.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The writing of WEEKEND would not have been possible without the very real support and encouragement of our agents and editors. To Anita Diamant, Humphrey Evans III, Tom Dunne, and Bob Miller, our heartfelt thanks.
Dr. Sid Bronstein stood up straight and backed gravely away from his dark field microscope. His eyes blinked as though he had just emerged from a total blackout. His bushy eyebrows nearly touched when he frowned and shook his head.
“Can’t be,” he muttered and leaned over the eyepiece again. Against the pitch-black background, the pulsating stream of rod-like bacteria looked like a speeded-up old-time movie of flashing neon lights.
He shut off the microscope and turned slowly toward the doorway that led back to his examination room. His patient, a diminutive Chinese man brought in from the Congress hotel, lay uncomfortably on the examination table. He grimaced and pressed his hands tightly against his abdomen. When Bronstein approached, he turned to him expectantly, hope for relief evident in his eyes.
“How long have you been sick?”
The ailing janitor had been brought in unable to control his digestive function or bowels. He was so weak he had to be guided by Bronstein’s nurse. “His name’s Tony Wong,” she said before depositing him at the table.
Tony lifted his hand, demonstrating four fingers.
“Four days?”
The janitor nodded.
“Christ. If it’s what it looks like,” Bronstein said, mostly for his own benefit, “it’s a wonder you’re still alive. When did you urinate last?”
It was obvious from the confusion on Wong’s face that he didn’t understand a word the doctor was saying. Bronstein tried again, this time first pointing to his groin and then to the toilet.
“When you pee last?”
“No pee,” Tony managed to whisper. “Too much hurt. Just shit all time. Thirsty too.”
Sid reached over and took an oral thermometer out of the glass container. He placed it under Tony’s tongue. Then he felt for pulse. While he checked his watch, he remembered that Sylvia was probably waiting impatiently at home. They were due at his in-laws for dinner in half an hour. Now it was unlikely he’d make it at all, an act guaranteed to displease her. She had little compassion for his patients when they threatened to interfere with her social schedule.
Tony Wong’s pulse was thready. That, along with his pinched facial expressions, scaphoid abdomen and abnormally swollen body corroborated Bronstein’s preliminary suspicion. He took the thermometer from Tony’s mouth. The janitor worked at one of the largest resorts in the Catskills. They would probably have over a thousand people there this weekend. He shuddered to think of the consequences if what he thought was true.
Tony’s temperature had dropped dangerously, indicating severe electrolyte imbalance.
“Let’s see how much you weigh,” Bronstein said. He lifted the Chinaman’s arms and was distressed by the fragility of his frame as it leaned against him for balance. He registered ninety-five pounds, easily twenty pounds underweight even for a man of his height.
Tony rubbed his hands against the skeleton of his ass.
“Gotta go, doc,” he said, pointing anxiously toward the bathroom. “Fast!”
The doctor put his arm around him for support. “Anyone else at the hotel sick like you?”
“Don’t know.” Tony’s voice, already thin and high pitched, was strained. “No talk much. No got any friends.” He closed the bathroom door. Bronstein stood nearby for a moment thinking. Then he went to his library.
Amazing how the mind works, he reflected. From the book-shelves he took down his anthology of world diseases—their descriptions and symptoms, causes and treatments. As soon as he had set eyes on this Oriental, something had been triggered in his memory, some past image of disease resurrected from his days as a medic in the Philippines. He quickly found the pages he was looking for, then picked up
Merck’s Manual
to double-check. The description on page 114 was precise:
An acute specific infection involving primarily the ileum and manifested by profuse diarrhea, vomiting, muscle cramps, dehydration and collapse. Also intense thirst, sunken eyes, wrinkled skin. Fatality rate, 50 percent in untreated cases.
He closed the book thoughtfully as the ringing of the phone jarred him back to reality.
“Where the hell are you, Sidney?” His wife always called him Sidney when she was angry.
“I have an emergency.”
“How come you always have emergencies when we have to go to my parents for dinner?”
“Believe me, Sylvia, I don’t plan it that way.”
“Well, how much longer are you going to be?”
“I don’t know. It could be a while. Something very serious just came up, something …”
“That’s just great,” she interrupted. “The Bentley’s on the fritz and I was counting on you to …”
“Take a cab, Sylvia.” He drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk. “This is not the time for one of your scenes. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
He said good-bye without waiting for a response, clicked the phone and dialed the hospital.
“Admissions,” he said when the thin, mechanical voice answered. It was then, and only then, that he realized what he was about to do. For a brief moment he hesitated, ignoring the insistent “Hello? Hello?”
What if he confided to his colleagues what he really suspected and then, by some fluke, he was wrong?
“Rita, Dr. Bronstein. I’m sorry. Listen, I’m sending over an admission from the Congress and I want him kept in Isolation. The name’s Tony Wong.”
“Preliminary diagnosis?” There was an unusual pause. “Doctor?”
“Suspected gastrointestinal infection,” he said hesitantly, “possibly contagious. Call downstairs and have them send over an ambulance to my office immediately and give me the fourth floor nurses’ station please.”
“But you said Isolation, doctor. That’s the fifth floor.”
“Right,” he said. “Sorry.” God, he thought, what’s happening to me today?
“And doctor, while I have you on the phone, are you aware that Mrs. Kresky has used up all her Blue Cross days? Mr. Deckelman said …”
“Rita, I’ll look into it later. Really, this is an emergency. Just connect me with the fifth floor.”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Fifth floor, Sue Cohen.”
“Sue, hi. Sid Bronstein. I’m sending you a patient for Isolation. He’s suffering from severe dehydration, possibly uremia. Set up IV five g’s sodium chloride, four g’s sodium bicarbonate and one g potassium chloride to one liter of pyrogen-free distilled water. Infuse at fifty mils per minute. Also I want a stool specimen and five hundred mgs of oral tetracycline every six hours.”
“Food poisoning?”
“I think so,” Bronstein said, crossing his fingers superstitiously. It suddenly occurred to him that the driver of the hotel’s house car was still waiting outside. He hung up, buzzed the receptionist and asked her to send him in.
“You might as well go back to the hotel, Gary. I’ve sent for an ambulance.”
“That bad, huh?”
“I don’t know how this man could have been left so sick for so many days.”
The driver shrugged.
“They thought he had some kind of virus. He just came over, you know. Fresh off the boat. The first two days, Halloran thought he was drunk.”
“What about his roommates?”
“They ain’t been around for nearly a week. Lots of guys take off for a few days before the Fourth. Last time to have a fling before the season begins.” He winked at the doctor. “Know what I mean?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bronstein said, still deeply in thought. “Okay. I’ve got to go back to Mr. Wong.”
As soon as the driver left, Bronstein dialed the Congress.
“Give me Jonathan Lawrence, the general manager, please. This is Dr. Bronstein.”
“Hi doc, Rosie. He’s in a meeting, his secretary stepped away and he asked me to hold all his calls. It should break any minute.”
“Get him to call me immediately. It’s important.”
He put the receiver down and looked through the door at his microscope. To confirm his suspicions, he’d have to test with antiserum, a diagnostic substance used so rarely it was never stocked in hospitals in the Catskills.
He suddenly realized that Tony had been in the bathroom longer than he should have. He went to the door and knocked. “Tony, are you all right?” He waited. No response. He turned the knob and pulled back, surprised at the pressure from within. Tony’s body, collapsed against the door, fell forward at his feet.
Sandi Golden moved slowly around the corner of the stucco white building that served as housing for the chambermaids and stopped just in front of a lighted window. Once before, walking around the great lawn between the main building of the Congress and the “old farmhouse” where she lived, she had accidentally looked through the window and spotted the naked buttocks of a man. At first she was stunned, then she found the sight exciting.
Growing up on the grounds of one of the Catskill’s largest resorts, she had come to realize at a very early age that pleasure of any sort was a commodity, whether it be food, entertainment or sex. Her parents had made valiant efforts to shield her from the all-pervasive hedonism but it was almost impossible, especially during the hot summer months when it seemed almost everything was permissible.
She leaned over until she was just able to look past the sill. Not more than ten minutes before, she had seen Caesar Jiminez, a plumber, escort Margret Thomas, a chambermaid, through the shadows between the laundry and the staff dormitory. It was his naked buttocks she had seen the first time and ever since that night she had made it her business to listen in to whatever chambermaids’ gossip she could. They called him “Superman” after a well-known stud in Havana, bragged about his staying power, and compared the length of his “thing” to that of a baseball bat. One maid even boasted that he did it to her twenty times in a row without ever getting soft, whatever that meant.
