Plague (20 page)

Jack Gross
still smiled. ‘Mr. Gaines,’ he said gently, ‘we don’t want you to talk about
anything like that. We want you to talk about plague.’

Herbert Gaines
frowned. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Plague, Mr.
Gaines.
The ancient scourge of nations.
The Black Death.’

‘I don’t
understand.’

‘Have you heard
the news?’

‘I haven’t had
breakfast yet, for God’s sake.’

‘Well,’ Jack Gross
explained, ‘there’s a serious epidemic down in Florida. The government and the
press have been keeping it tightly under wraps, saying it’s an isolated
outbreak of swine flu, but we know better. It’s a highly dangerous, highly
virulent strain of plague. The whole of Miami is afflicted, and there’s talk of
razing the whole city to the ground. It’s also broken out in Fort Lauderdale,
Jacksonville, Brunswick and Charleston.’

‘Is this some
sort of joke?’

Jack Gross
shook his head. ‘It’s not a joke, Mr. Gaines. It’s the most disastrous result
of this administration’s mismanagement we’ve ever experienced. The US Disease
Control Center
have
failed to contain the outbreak,
and the government is so terrified that they don’t know what to do next.
They’re too frightened even to tell the nation what’s really going on.’

‘But...’

Jack Gross
raised his hand. ‘It’s the chance my people have been waiting for, Mr.

Gaines. It’s
the chance to show up these weak-kneed liberals for what they really are. It’s
the chance to make the GOP a pure and concerted and effective machine again.’

Herbert Gaines
ran his hand through his white hair. ‘And you want me to help you? Is that it?’

‘We want you as
our figurehead.
Captain Dashfoot to the rescue.’

Herbert Gaines
found himself a kitchen stool and sat down. He was thoughful and grim-faced.

‘Mr. Gross,’ he
asked, after a few moments, ‘is this epidemic really serious?’

Jack Gross
nodded. ‘As far as we can tell, between six and seven thousand people are dead,
and many more are dying.’

Herbert Gaines
looked up. ‘So there must be great fear and panic in those places?
In Florida and Georgia?’

‘There is. The
police and the National Guard have cordoned off the Florida state line, as far
as they can. And no one, but no one, is allowed out.’

Herbert Gaines
got up from his stool and walked across to the kitchen window. He stared out at
Gabriels Park for a while,
then
he said, ‘Mr. Gross,
you’re asking me to do something that conflicts with my sensitivities.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr.
Gaines. I don’t get you.’

The old movie
actor turned around. ‘If there’s an epidemic in the south, and people are
dying, then the last thing I want to do is make political capital out of it.
It’s against my nature to advance myself through the fear and suffering of others.
I have made terrible personal mistakes in my life, Mr. Gross, and I have been
fortunate or unfortunate enough not to have been punished for them. I don’t
intend to add callousness and exploitation to my list of sins.’

Jack Gross
smiled. ‘Well, I understand your objections. But there’s no reason why they
should stand in your way. You have to see this thing in its historical context.
A chance like this may never happen again.’

‘A chance like what?
A chance to put the
squeeze on the public’s uncertainty and fear?
A chance
to sweep into power on a tide of dead bodies?
I’m not interested, Mr.

Gross.’

Jack Gross
sighed. ‘I really think you’re being oversensitive, Mr. Gaines.’

Herbert
returned to his blender, and mixed his vegetables into a reddish-green froth.

He poured the
juice into a tall glass of crushed ice, and sipped it. He didn’t look at Jack
Gross, and was obviously waiting for him to go.

Jack Gross
stared at the floor. ‘I didn’t want to do this, Mr. Games,’ he said softly.

Herbert Gaines
patted his lips with a Kleenex. ‘Do what?’ he said impatiently.

‘Exert
pressure.’

‘Don’t make me
laugh,” said Herbert Gaines. ‘What possible pressure could you exert on me?’

Jack Gross
shrugged, still staring at the floor. ‘There’s always Nicky,’ he said.

“What do you
mean by that?’

Jack Gross was
silent. He just smiled.

‘What do you
mean by that?’ Herbert snapped.

Jack Gross
looked up. ‘I mean that our patriotic duty sometimes has to come before our
personal opinions and that it always has to come before our personal
pleasures.’

‘Is that a
threat? By God, you’d better not threaten me, Mr. Jack Gross.’

Jack Gross took
his hat off his knee and parked it neatly on his head.

‘I’ll make
myself plain, Mr. Gaines. We need you, and we need you now. If you don’t oblige
us with your assistance, then some friends of ours will have to pay you a
visit.

Those friends
of ours come from Chicago, Mr. Gaines, where the stockyards are, and they’ve
had a lifetime of experience with stud bulls like Nicky. When those stud bulls
won’t behave, they take their stockman’s knives, the sharp ones with the hooked
blades, and they castrate them.’

Jack Gross said
all this with the same radiant smile on his face with which he had first walked
in. At the kitchen door, he turned and said, ‘Think about it, Mr. Gaines. I’ll
be in touch.’

Then he let
himself out of the apartment, and closed the door behind him.

Herbert Gaines,
pale-faced, went slowly into the bedroom, and stared for a long while at Nicky,
sleeping peacefully on the satin sheets. ‘Oh, God ...’ he murmured, with a
shiver and went back into the living-room to find the brandy.

At two-thirty,
just before the court hearing Glantz vs
Forward
went
back for its afternoon session, the news finally hit the streets that Florida
and parts of Georgia were stricken with plague.

The New York
Post brought out a special edition with a front-page photograph of Miami’s
ruined Civic Center, and a banner headline saying SUPER-PLAGUE SWEEPS SOUTH,
THOUSANDS DIE. A kind of nervous ripple went through the city, and the
lunchtime bars stayed crowded until well after three as New Yorkers watched the
special half-hourly TV reports on the effects of the epidemic.

The President,
looking tired but, trying to sound optimistic, explained in a special interview
that ‘everything humanly possible has been done to contain the outbreak.’

He announced
that the entire state of Florida was quarantined until further notice, and that
ocean bathing was prohibited all the way from Cape Fear to Key West.

‘It appears on
first examination that a possible source of the plague bacillus is pollution of
the ocean by raw sewage, although where this sewage is coming from, and how
such an unusual and virulent bacillus could have developed within it, are still
mysteries. This year’s unusual climatic conditions, in which the currents in
the ocean are running counter-clockwise, may be a contributing factor.’

The President
wound up by saying that he intended to pray for the sick and the dying, and
that the best medical brains in the country were working on antidotes.

Ivor Glantz,
sitting with his attorney Manny Friedman in a dark and busy Wall Street bar,
watched the President fade from the TV screen next to the bottles of Jack
Daniels, and shook his head.

‘You know what
that means?’ he said seriously.

‘Sure,’ said
Manny Friedman, rustling impatiently through a sheaf of pink legal papers. ‘It
means the end of civilization as we know it. Now, can we please go over these
patents?’

‘It means,’
said Ivor, ‘that they haven’t yet found a way to cure it. If they could cure
it, or contain it, they’d say so. But they can’t. You see what the paper says?
“Super-plague”.
Ordinary plague responds to sulfona-mides or
HafEkine antiserum, but this one evidently doesn’t.’

‘Ivor,’
interrupted Manny impatiently, ‘today is the most crucial day of all. Can we
just concentrate on your bugs, and leave the President’s bugs alone?’

Ivor checked
his watch. ‘We’d better get back to court anyway. But I’d sure like to know a
little more about this plague. Do you realize – this could be an entirely new
disease?
Some new strain of bacillus, totally unknown?’

They collected
their things together and went out into the humid afternoon street.

Manny hailed a
cab, and they drove through heavy traffic towards the court house.

Ivor, sweating in
his dark, too-tight suit, mopped his forehead with a clean handkerchief.

The cab-driver,
a big-nosed Czech in a cloth cap and horn-rimmed spectacles, was rapping about
the plague.

‘If you ask
me,’ he said, swerving imperturbably across three lanes of traffic, ‘if you ask
me it’s the Soviets.’

‘How do you
make that out?’ asked Ivor. ‘Are you a buddy of Kosygin?’

The cab-driver
laughed. ‘You gotta be kidding. If you ask me, the Soviets
is
responsible for half the troubles this country’s got. They bought our wheat,
correct?

Well, they
bought our wheat so that they could trade good American grain for worthless
roubles, right? I mean, what good’s a rouble to anyone? Grain – that’s
different. You can offload a loaf of bread any place.’

Ivor grinned.
‘You wouldn’t be Polish by any chance?’ he asked.

‘Am I hell,’
said the cab-driver.

The courtroom,
dusty and badly-lit, looked as if a burglar had just rifled it. Sheaves of
paper spilled on to the floor, and volume after volume of legal books and
evidence, files and clippings lay scattered all over the attorneys’ desks. It
was the debris of a four-day hearing.

Ivor Glantz and
Manny Friedman pushed open the swing doors and went to their places. Across the
court, a thin, blue-suited figure with a gray crewcut, Sergei Forward the
Finnish-born bacteriologist, was consulting with his lawyer. He was a calm
polite man with a meticulous accent and a way of leaning forward when he spoke,
like a near-sighted stork investigating an appetizing grub. He didn’t look up when
Glantz and Friedman came in.

By three
o’clock, the courtroom was filled. There was a high burble of conversation – more
intense than this morning. News of the Florida plague had spread, and every
science journal and bacteriological expert in the place was discussing it. To
them, it was the hottest medical story in years.

Esmeralda,
severe and elegant in a pale pink 1930s suit, her curls tucked into a pink
turban hat with a diamond brooch and a feather, came into the courtroom just
before the judge
..
She sat down behind her stepfather,
in a heady cloud of Chant d’Arfimes, and touched his shoulder.

‘Have you heard
about the plague?’ she whispered. ‘Isn’t that awful?’

‘I heard over
lunch,’ Ivor whispered back. ‘I’m only guessing, but I’d say it’s even worse than
they’re pretending.’

‘The Army
have
sealed off Pensacola and Mobile,’ said Esmeralda. I
just heard it on the car radio. They say that people are dying at the rate of
two thousand a day.’

At that moment,
Judge Secombe came into the courtroom, and they all stood. When he had sat down
and put on his spectacles, Sergei Forward’s attorney raised his hand to make an
application.

‘My client
respectfully wishes to apply for adjournment, your honor. While he appreciates
the serious consequences of this action for infringement of patent, he believes
he can make a material contribution to the government research work to find an
antidote for the plague that we now hear is threatening our southern states.

Mr. Forward is
sure that Mr. Glantz will not stand in his way in this crucial emergency, and
he hopes that Mr. Glantz will perhaps also wish to join in the government
research work.’

Manny Friedman
swore under his breath. ‘What does he mean,’ Ivor Glantz asked.

‘He can’t do
this.’

Manny Friedman
said, ‘He can and he has. Unless you agree to an adjournment, you’re going to
look like a self-centered schmuck who puts his own money-making before the good
of America. He’s got you, right by the balls.’

Ivor frowned.
‘But why does he want an adjournment?
What for?’

Manny shrugged.
‘Don’t ask me. Whatever he’s up to, I don’t like it.’

Judge Secombe
called for Manny Friedman’s attention. ‘Mr. Friedman,’ he said, ‘does your
client have any strong feelings about an adjournment?’

Manny Friedman
stood up. ‘My client appreciates Mr. Forward’s devotion to public service, your
honor, but does not regard an adjournment necessary. This action can only take
one more day at most, and twenty-four hours is hardly likely to make any
material difference to Mr. Forward’s research. Perhaps I can remind the bench
that most of the great breakthroughs in bacteriology only came after years of
intensive labor – including the process claimed by my client under this present
action.’

Sergei
Forward’s attorney protested. ‘Your honor, we believe that twenty-four hours – even
four hours – could be vital. This plague has infected an entire state in a
week.

People are
dying right now, even as we speak.’ Manny Friedman glanced down at Ivor Glantz,
who shrugged helplessly. Then he looked at the press table, where reporters
from The New York Times, The Daily News and Associated Press sat with their
pens poised, eager for any story that would tie up with the plague. He could
see the headlines now. ‘No Mercy Adjournment, Insists Litigating Scientist.’

Manny said quietly,
‘Very well. We will agree to an adjournment until the present national crisis
has passed.’

Judge Secombe
said, ‘Adjourned sine die,’ and rose. The court rose, too, and people began to
shuffle out.