Plague (2 page)

Mr. and Mrs.
Kelly were waiting at the door.
‘Cholera?’
Mr. Kelly
said.

Dr. Petrie
swallowed as much coffee as he could. ‘It’s like cholera,’ he said, as
reassuringly as possible, ‘but it’s not exactly that. I can’t tell without a
blood sample.

Dr. Selmer will
do that for me at the hospital. He’s a good friend of mine. We play golf
together at Normandy Shores.’

Mrs. Kelly
couldn’t take in what he was saying. ‘Golf?’ she asked vaguely.

Dr. Petrie went
through into David’s bedroom, and helped Mr. Kelly to dress the boy in a pair
of clean pajamas. David shuddered and whispered to himself while they buttoned
the jacket up, but that was the only sign of life. Dr. Petrie lifted David up
in his arms, and carried him out down the fire escape. Mr. Kelly followed with
the medical bag.

‘I sure hope
he’s going to be okay,’ said Kelly. ‘He was supposed to go on a school outing
today. He’ll be sorry he missed it. He didn’t talk about nothing else, for
weeks.

“When I go to
the Monkey Jungle...
“ every
sentence.’

‘Don’t worry,
Mr. Kelly. Once we get David to hospital, he’s going to get the best treatment
going.’

They were
nearly at the bottom of the fire-escape when Dr. Petrie felt something go
through David’s body – a sigh, a vibration, a cough. He was a skilled doctor
and he recognized it. The boy was dying. He needed to get him into a respirator
as fast as he could, within the next two or three minutes, or that could be the
end.

‘Mr. Kelly,’ he
said tightly, ‘we have to get the hell out of here!’

Mr. Kelly
frowned. He said, ‘What?’ But when he saw Dr. Petrie clattering rapidly down
the rest of the fire-escape and across to his car, he came running behind
without a word.

‘My car keys!’
Dr. Petrie said quickly. ‘Get them out of my
pocket.
No, the other side.

That’s right.’

Mr. Kelly, in
his panic, dropped the keys on to the sidewalk, and they skated under the car.
He knelt down laboriously and scrabbled beneath the Lincoln while his son
weakened in Dr. Petrie’s arms. ‘Hurry – for Christ’s sake!’

At last Mr.
Kelly hooked the keys towards the gutter, picked them up and opened the car.
Dr. Petrie laid David carefully on the back seat, and told Mr. Kelly to sit
beside the boy and hold him, in case he rolled off. The hospital was five
minutes away if you drove slow and sedate, but David didn’t have that long.

The Lincoln’s
engine roared. They backed up a few feet,
then
swerved
out into the street. Dr. Petrie crossed straight through a red light, sounding
his horn and switching on his headlamps. He prayed that downtown Miami wouldn’t
be jammed up with early-morning traffic.
Swinging the Lincoln
across a protesting stream of cars, he drove south on South West 27th Avenue at
nearly fifty miles an hour.
He swerved from one lane to the other,
desperately trying to work his way through the traffic, leaning on his horn and
flashing his lights.

‘How’s David?’
he shouted.

‘I don’t know –
bad,’ said the father. ‘He looks kinda blue.’

Dr. Petrie
could feel the sweat sliding down his armpits. He clenched his teeth as he
drove, and thought of nothing at all but reaching the hospital on time.

He swung the
Lincoln in a sharp, tire-howling turn, and in the distance he could see the
white hospital building. They might make it yet.

But just at
that moment, without warning, a huge green refrigerated truck rolled across in
front of them, and stopped, blocking the entire street. Dr. Petrie shouted,
‘Shit!’ and jammed on the Lincoln’s brakes.

He opened the
car window and leaned out. The driver of the truck, a heavy-looking redneck in
a greasy trucker’s cap, was lighting himself a cigar prior to maneuvering his
vehicle into a side entrance.

‘Out of the goddamn way I’ yelled Dr. Petrie.
‘Get that
truck out of the goddamn way!’

The truck
driver tossed away a spent match and searched for another.

‘What’s the
hurry, mac?’ he called back. ‘Don’t get so worked up – you’ll give yourself an
ulcer.’

‘I’m a doctor!
I have a sick kid in this car! I have to get him to hospital!’

The driver
shrugged. ‘When they open the gates, I’ll move out of your way. But I ain’t
shifting till I’m good and ready.’

‘For God’s
sake!’ shouted Dr. Petrie. ‘I mean it. This kid is seriously ill!’

The truck
driver blew smoke. ‘I don’t see
no
kid,’ he remarked.
He looked around to see if the gates were open yet, so that he could back the
truck up.

Dr. Petrie had
to close his eyes to control his fury. Then he spun the Lincoln on to the
sidewalk, bouncing over the kerb, and drove around the truck’s front fender. A
hydrant scraped a long dent all the way down the Lincoln’s wing, and Dr. Petrie
felt the underside of the car jar against the concrete as he drove back on to
the street on the other side of the truck.

Three more
precious minutes passed before he pulled the car to a halt in front of the
hospital’s emergency unit. The orderlies were waiting for him with a trolley.
He lifted David out of the back of the car like a loose-jointed marionette, and
laid him gently down. The orderlies wheeled him off straight away.

Mr. Kelly
leaned against the car. His face was drawn and sweaty. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered.
‘I thought we’d never make it. Is he going to be all right?’

Dr.Petrie
rested a hand on Mr. Kelly’s shoulder. ‘Don’t you doubt it, Mr.
Kelly.
He’s a very sick boy, but they know what they’re doing
in this place. They’ll look after him.’

Mr. Kelly
nodded. He was too exhausted to argue.
‘If you want to wait
in the waiting-room, Mr. Kelly – just go into the main entrance there and ask
the receptionist.
She’ll tell you where it is. When I’ve talked to
David’s doctors, I’ll come and let you know what’s happening.’

Mr. Kelly
nodded again. ‘Thanks, doctor,’ he said. ‘You’ll – make sure they look after
Davey, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’

Dr. Petrie left
Mr. Kelly to find his way to the waiting-room. He pushed through the swing
doors outside the emergency unit, and walked down the long, cream-colored
corridor until he reached the room he was looking for.

Through the
windows, he could see his old friend Dr. Selmer talking to a group of doctors
and nurses, and holding up various blood samples. Dr. Petrie rapped on the
door.

‘How’s it
going?’ he asked, when Dr. Selmer came out. Anton Selmer was a short,
gingery-haired man with a broad nose and plentiful freckles. He always put Dr.
Petrie in mind of Mickey Rooney. He had a slight astigmatism, and wore heavy
hornrimmed eyeglasses.

Dr. Selmer, in
his green surgical robes, pulled a face. ‘Well, I don’t know about this one,
Leonard. I really can’t say. We’re making some blood and urine and sputum
analyses right now. But I’m sure glad you brought him in.’

‘Have you any
clues at all?’

Dr. Selmer
shrugged. ‘What can I say? You were right when you said it looked a little like
cholera, but it obviously isn’t just cholera. The throat and the lungs are
seriously infected, and there’s swelling around the limbs and the joints. It
may be some really rare kind of allergy, but it looks more like a contagious
disease.
A very virulent disease, too.’

Dr. Petrie
rubbed his bristly chin.

‘Say,’ grinned
Dr. Selmer. ‘You look as though you’ve been celebrating something.’

Dr. Petrie gave
him half a smile. ‘Every divorced man is entitled to celebrate his good fortune
once in a while,’ he replied. ‘Actually, it was the golf club party.’

‘By the look of
you, I’m not sorry I missed it. You look like death.’

A pretty
dark-haired nurse came out of the emergency unit doors and both men watched her
walk down the corridor with abstracted interest.

Dr. Petrie
said, ‘If it’s contagious, we’d better see about inoculating the parents. And
we’d better find out where he picked it up. Apart from that, I wouldn’t mind a
shot myself.’

‘When we know
what it is,’ said Selmer, ‘we’ll inoculate everybody in sight. Jesus, we’ve
just gotten rid of the winter flu epidemic. The last thing I want is an
outbreak of cholera.’

‘What a great
way to start the week,’ said Dr. Petrie. ‘They don’t even live in my district.
The guy runs a garage on North West 20th.’

Dr. Selmer took
of his green surgical cap. ‘I always knew you were the guardian angel for the
whole of Miami, Leonard. I can just see you up there on Judgement Day, sitting
at God’s right hand. Or maybe second from the right.’

Dr. Petrie
grinned. ‘One of these days, Anton, a bolt of lightning will strike you down
for your unbelieving. You know, I bent my goddamn car on the way here. Some son
of a bitch in a truck was blocking the street, and I had to drive over the
sidewalk.

Would you
believe he just sat there and lit a cigar?’

Dr. Selmer
raised his gingery eyebrows. ‘It’s the selfish society, Leonard. I’m all right,
and screw you Charlie.’

They started to
walk together down the corridor. ‘I guess that must have been when it
happened,’ Dr. Selmer said.

‘When what happened?’

‘When the boy died.’

Dr. Petrie
stopped, and stared at him hard. ‘You mean he’s dead?’

Dr. Selmer took
his arm. ‘Leonard – I’m sorry. I thought you realized. He was dead on arrival.
You better have your car cleaned out if he was sitting in the back. You
wouldn’t want to catch this thing yourself.’

Dr. Petrie
nodded. He felt stunned. He saw a lot of death, but the death that visited his
own clientele was the shadowy death of old age, of failing hearts and hardened
arteries.

The people who
died under Dr. Petrie’s care were reconciled to their mortality. But young
David Kelly was just nine years
old,
and today he was
supposed to have gone to the Monkey Jungle.

‘Anton,’ said
Dr. Petrie, ‘I’ll catch you later. I have to tell the father.’

‘Okay,’ said
Dr. Selmer. ‘But don’t forget to tell both parents to come in for a check-up. I
don’t want this kind of disease spreading.’

Dr. Petrie
walked quickly down the fluorescent-lit corridors to the waiting-room.

Before he
pushed open the door, he looked through the small circular window, and saw Mr.
Kelly sitting hunched on a red plastic chair, smoking and trying to read
yesterday’s Miami Herald.

He didn’t know
what the hell he was going to say. How do you tell a man that his only son, his
nine-year-old son, has just died?

Finally, he
pushed open the door. Mr. Kelly looked up quickly, and there was questioning
hope in his face.

‘Did you see
him?’ Mr. Kelly asked, ‘Is he okay?’

Dr. Petrie laid
his hand on the man’s shoulder and pressed him gently back into his seat. He
sat down himself, and looked into Mr. Kelly’s tired but optimistic eyes with
all the sympathy and care he could muster. When he spoke, his voice was soft
and quiet, expressing feeling that went far deeper than bedside manner.

‘Mr. Kelly,’ he
said. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that David is dead.’

Mr. Kelly’s
mouth formed a question, but the question was never spoken. He simply stared at
Dr. Petrie as if he didn’t know where he was, or what had happened. He was
still sitting, still staring, as the tears began to fill his eyes and run down
his cheeks.

Dr. Petrie
stood up. ‘Come on,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll drive you home.’

By the time he
got back to his clinic, his assistant Esther had already arrived, opened his
mail, and poured his fresh-squeezed orange juice into its tall frosted glass.
She was sitting at her desk, her long legs self-consciously crossed and her
skirt hiked high, typing with the hesitant delicacy of an effete woodpecker.
After all, she didn’t want to break her long scarlet nails. She was twenty-one
– a tall bouffant blonde with glossy red lips and a gaspy little voice. She
wore a crisp white jacket that was stretched out in front of her by heavy,
enormous breasts, and she teetered around the clinic on silver stilettos.

For all her
ritz, though, Esther was trained, cool and practical. Dr. Petrie had seen her
comfort an old woman in pain, and he knew that words didn’t come any warmer.

Apart from
that, he enjoyed Esther’s hero-worship, and the suppressed rage of his medical
colleagues whenever he attended a doctor’s convention with her in tow.

‘Good morning,
doctor’, said Esther pertly, when he walked in. ‘I looked for you in your
bedroom, but you weren’t around.’

‘Disappointed?’
he said, perching himself on the edge of her desk.

Esther pouted
her shiny red lips.
‘A little.
You never know when
Nurse Cinderella might get lucky and catch Dr. Charming’s eye.’ Dr. Petrie
grinned. ‘Any calls?’

‘Just two.
Mrs. Vicincki wants to drop by at eleven. She
says her ankle’s giving her purgatory.
And your wife.’
Dr. Petrie stood up and took off his jacket. ‘My ex-wife,’ he corrected.

‘Sorry.
Your ex-wife.
She said you’d have to pick your daughter up
tonight instead of tomorrow, because she’s going to visit her mother in Fort
Lauderdale.’

Dr. Petrie
rubbed his eyes. ‘I see. I don’t suppose she said what time tonight.’

‘Seven.
Priscilla will be waiting for you.’

‘Okay. What
time’s my first appointment?’

‘In ten
minutes. Mrs. Fairfax. All her records are on your table. There isn’t much
mail, so you should get through it all by then.’

Dr. Petrie
looked mock-severe. ‘You really have me organized, don’t you?’