Plague (29 page)

He laughed.
‘I’m like a – what? I was never called that before.’

Esmeralda was
giggling so much she could hardly explain what she meant. ‘Well,’ she said,
‘just imagine you’re driving along and you see a tunnel ahead of you.
Very straightforward.
But supposing you drive into it, well,
you just bounce back out again, because it’s rubber. That’s what you’re like. I
think I’m getting someplace with you, but I just bounce back out again. You’re
a rubber tunnel.’

They laughed
and laughed until Esmeralda thought she was going to cry. Then, when they had
quietened down, Charles reached over and took her arm and said, ‘Esmeralda – do
you mind if I lay something on you?’

She was
bright-eyed. ‘What?’

‘Do you dig
massage?’

‘M-massage?’
The idea of it seemed hilarious.

‘Listen, I’m
serious. Massage can do fantastic things for your inner being. It -calms you
down, it brings you closer to yourself. I don’t mean your massage parlor stuff.
I mean real meditative massage.’

‘Who’s going to
massage me?’ she giggled.
‘You?’

Charles shook his
head. ‘No – Kalimba. She’s an absolute expert. I mean she’s really into it.
She’s done it for me, and she’s given me a whole new slant on myself.’

‘Well,’ said
Esmeralda. ‘I don’t quite know what to say.’

‘Try it. That’s
all you have to do.’

‘I’m not sure.’

Charles checked
his expensive wristwatch. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I have to make a phone call to the
coast, and tidy up a few papers. That means that you and Kalimba can have a
half-hour to yourselves. You can be totally private.’

‘I don’t know,
Charles. I mean, Kalimba’s kind of threatening, don’t you think?’

‘You only feel
she’s threatening because you don’t know her. She’s very warm and
understanding. Just let her give you a massage session, and you’ll understand.’

The idea of
being massaged by Charles Thurston’s tall and sultry black lady was quirky, but
in the mood she was in, it seemed exciting as well. She giggled, and sipped
some more champagne, and then finally said, ‘Okay. I’ve done kinkier things.’

Charles
Thurston leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. ‘That’s terrific,’ he
said. ‘I’ll go call Kalimba, and I’ll see you later.’

As he stood up,
she tugged his hand. ‘Charles,’ she said. ‘If I tell her to stop, she won’t be
offended or anything, will she?’

‘Kalimba?
Not on your life. She’s a totally sympathetic
person. Now, have fun, you hear?’

Esmeralda sat
on a cushion cross-legged while Charles left the room. She heard him talking to
Kalimba in the kitchen, but the black girl didn’t speak once. Maybe she was
deaf-and-dumb, or maybe she was just the silent type. Whichever it was, it
didn’t seem very warm, understanding or sympathetic. Esmeralda drank more
champagne, and found she was laughing to herself as she drank.

She sensed
Kalimba’s presence in the room even before she turned around and saw her. The
black girl had a kind of smoldering charisma that she couldn’t ignore. Now, the
kaftan had gone, and she was nude, except for a thin gold chain around her
loins, and gold anklets around her legs.

Kalimba came
softly across the room and squatted down beside her. Esmeralda felt odd tingles
of sensation trickling up and down her spine, and suddenly she didn’t feel like
laughing any more. Kalimba’s body was inky black, shining and perfumed. It had
a sexual
warmth that radiated from it and somehow warmed
Esmeralda as well.

Without a word,
Kalimba opened a jar of scented oil. Then she pointed to Esmeralda’s dress, and
indicated that she should pull it down over her shoulders.

When Esmeralda
fumbled, Kalimba took over, and unbuttoned the front of the dress for her, all
the way down. Then she gently tugged it down around Esmeralda’s waist.

Kalimba knelt
down behind her, and Esmeralda could hear her smothering her hands in the
scented oil. Then she felt the black girl’s long supple fingers around her neck
and shoulders, slippery with oil, beginning to flex and caress and soothe her.

Esmeralda, head
bowed, felt the gradual warmth and relaxation flow through her shoulders, and
closed her eyes. It was the most delicious sensation she had ever experienced,
and she couldn’t think why the idea of massage had repelled her so much.

She felt
Kalimba reach for the clasp of her bra. At first she raised her hands to
resist, but the black girl gently held her wrists, and lowered her arms again,
and she thought: Why not? She’s another woman – an experienced masseuse.

Kalimba’s
slippery hands kneaded and massaged her back muscles, and all the tension
poured away. Then she felt the girl’s hands around her breasts, fondling and
stroking them. She sleepily opened her eyes, and looked down. The long black
fingers were pressing rhythmically into the gleaming white flesh of her breast,
squeezing and stimulating them, coaxing and arousing the wide pink nipples into
stiffness.

She closed her
eyes again. The feeling was so good that she wished it would last forever. She
felt Kalimba’s own rigid nipples brushing against her bare back as the black
girl swayed from side to side, and had a strange urge to massage Kalimba’s
breasts in return.

Kalimba tugged
Esmeralda’s dress even further down. Her oily hands massaged the white girl’s
bottom, her fingertips occasionally brushing her sensitive sphincter.

Esmeralda said:
‘Mmmm...
that’s
beautiful ...’ and she reached down
between her own thighs to draw Kalimba’s hand against the moist flesh of her
vulva.

She never knew
how long the massage lasted. It might have been ten
minutes,
it might have been an hour. She was more than high on champagne, and all the
images of that afternoon were crystal-bright, but disjointed.

She remembered
Kalimba’s tongue lapping insistently between her legs. She remembered holding
the black girl’s tight-curled head, and kissing her full sensual lips. She
remembered seeing a dark glistening flower, with petals that stickily parted to
reveal a moist interior.
Music, drumming, lips, eyes,
fingers, and magical sensations.

She was lying
on the floor, wrapped in an Indian blanket, when she woke up. Her mouth felt
like used glasspaper, and her eyes were stuck together with sleep. She lifted
her head. Her neck ached. She tried to focus, but the room was
dim,
and outside, the New York sky (was murky metallic
green. It felt as if an electric storm was imminent. She looked at her
wristwatch and saw it was seven-fifteen in the evening.

Gradually,
unsteadily, she managed to stand up. Her head pounded with pain. Still wrapped
in the Indian blanket, she padded across the apartment and called, ‘Charles?
Are you there, Charles?’

There didn’t
seem to be anyone around. She crossed the dining-room, with a table that was now
cleared of all dishes and decorations, and peered into the main bedroom. The
bed was neat and unslept in. It was covered in grayish-brown reindeer skin, and
on the wall was a painting of snow in Lapland.

She went back
into the living-room. She called out again, and at that moment the front door
of the apartment opened and Charles walked in, beaming and confident.

‘Esmeralda!’ he
said. ‘You’re awake!’ She nodded. ‘I just woke up. I feel like hell.

Why didn’t you
wake me earlier? I have to be home at seven-thirty. Daddy and I are going out
to dinner tonight, and he’s going to go crazy if I’m late.’

Charles kissed
her. ‘That’s nothing,’ he said. ‘So you’re fifteen minutes late. That’s
nothing.’

‘What do you
mean – ‘that’s nothing’?’ Charles reached in his pocket and produced a small
black something, a couple of inches long. Esmeralda tried to focus on it, but
couldn’t. ‘What’s that?’ she said.

Charles tossed
the black something in the air and smartly caught it again.

‘This, my
lovely gallery lady, is a roll of film. I have just come back from the photo
laboratories, where even at this minute they are printing me up sufficient
copies for my needs.’

She stood there
and stared at him for a long, long time.

‘Kalimba and
me,’ she said dryly.

‘You guessed
it.’

She dropped the
blanket. She didn’t care that she was naked. She picked her clothes up from the
floor and slowly dressed. Charles Thurston bobbed and fidgeted around, tossing
the film from one hand to the other, and saying, ‘Well, that’s it, isn’t it?
That’s life.’

Esmeralda
finished dressing and tugged a brush through her tangled hair. She collected
her pocketbook and got ready to leave.

Charles
Thurston said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask what I want? I mean, us blackmailers
always want something.’

She paused. ‘All
right,’ she said tiredly, ‘what do you want?’

‘Isn’t it
obvious?’

‘It might be,
but I’d prefer you to spell it out.’ He looked at her almost coyly. ‘What I
want, in return for these highly diverting negatives, is for your father to
drop his patent
action.
’

That was when
the reality of the whole day’s work fell into place. She looked around the
sparse, Nordic apartment and said, ‘This is Sergei Forward’s place, isn’t it? I
didn’t think it was your style.
And what about Kalimba?’

‘Not her real
name, I’m afraid.
A hired gun, so to speak.’

She stared at
his handsome, disgusting face. ‘You won’t take money?’ she asked, softly. ‘Five
thousand to say the film didn’t quite come out?’

Charles
Thurston shook his head. ‘A job’s a job, lovely gallery lady. I have a reputation
to maintain.’

‘I see. How
long do I have?’

Thurston looked
at his watch. ‘It’s now seven-thirty. We would like to know how your father
feels about the matter in twenty-four hours. Otherwise, every porn magazine in
town gets these, along with Scientific American and every journal your father
ever wrote for in his whole life.’

Esmeralda ran
her hand through her hair. ‘Now I understand the adjournment,’ she said. ‘If
Sergei Forward had gone into court today, he would have lost the whole case
outright. So he decided to get a little help from his friends.’

‘I’m not his
friend,’ protested Charles Thurston III, as Esmeralda waited for the elevator.
‘I just work for him. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a cheap Finnish fuck.’

Esmeralda
slammed the concertina gates of the elevator and glared at Thurston through the
bars. ‘Anything’s better than being a cheap American fuck,’ she snapped, as the
elevator took her down.

By Friday
afternoon – the same afternoon that Esmeralda spent in Sergei Forward’s West
81st Street apartment – the plague zone had officially extended to New Orleans
in the south, and with the help of police, National Guardsmen, vigilantes and
cadets from summer colleges, it was being held back on a ragged line that
stretched northwards to Jackson, Mississipi, Tuscaloosa, Chattanooga,
Charleston and Cumberland.

The President
had appeared on television at lunch-time and had said ‘solemnly, and with a
heavy heart’ that he had to instruct every American to take up arms to protect
the disease-free parts of the nation. That meant anyone from within the plague
zone must be shot dead if they attempted to leave it.

‘At all costs,’
said the President, ‘we must contain this threat to our national health and heritage,
and urgently seek to find some kind of cure.
At the present
speed of plague within six weeks.’

A reporter from
NEC News asked the President if some people were more susceptible to the plague
than others. The President reported that interim figures indicated that adults
succumbed more rapidly than children, and that certain groups of workers within
the community appeared to be partially or wholly immune. These included some
hospital workers, some employees of ConEd, some military and naval personnel,
some merchant seamen, some dentists and doctors, and one or two assorted minor
professions.

Was there any
clue why these people might be less prone to plague? The President said no, but
‘our best scientists are working on it.’

The Medical
Workers’ Union
were
still on strike, although in some
of the worst devastated parts of Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina, there was
radio, TV and telephone blackout, and it was impossible to discover what was
happening. Even police helicopters were forbidden to take reconnaissance
pictures in case the bacillus was airborne to operational height. The nation
was locked now in a terrible paralysis of fear, and in spite of strict highway
controls and the banning of westward airline flights, thousands of panicking
refugees, in cars and-pick-ups and motor-homes, streamed towards the west.

By five o’clock
on Friday afternoon, the official estimate of plague dead was seventeen
million. Every Atlantic beach was closed from Key West, Florida, to Portland,
Maine. The most explosive story of the day, though, was where the
plague-infected sewage had originated. It was being suggested by NEC and CBS,
and strenuously denied by the New York Department of Sanitation, that the
sewage was polluting the Eastern seaboard from an area twelve miles off the
Long Island shore.

According to
official sources, sanitation barges had left Pier 70 every day for longer than
anyone could remember, and dumped untreated sewage into the Atlantic. It was
supposed to sink to the ocean floor, and slide, in the form of black viscous
ooze, down the shelving incline that would take it out towards the
mid-Atlantic.

The New York
Department of Sanitation, in a joint statement with the U.S.

Environmental
Protection Agency, agreed that the sludge was highly infectious, but that it
could not have been a breeding-ground for the plague that had ravaged the
southern states.