Plague (31 page)

‘Mr.
Garunisch,’ he said wanly, ‘I can’t repeat often enough that this hospital
adminstration has nothing more to offer your members in the way of pay, bonuses
or incentives, unless you can guarantee something special in return. At the
moment, all you’re offering us is work that they should be doing anyway under
our last agreement with you.’

Kenneth
Garunisch blew smoke. ‘The plague was not mentioned in the last agreement,’ he
said hoarsely.

Seidelberger
nodded his head patiently. ‘My dear Mr. Garunisch, no disease is specified in the
agreement, and so one can hardly make out a special case for this plague.

I urge you to
think again. Your members’ attion has already accelerated the spread of the
plague by two days at least, according to my expert informants, and if you hold
out any longer, and the plague reaches Manhattan, we here at Bellevue will be
totally unable to cope with it.’

Garunisch was
about to answer when there was a rapping at the conference door. A pale-faced
young hospital executive walked in, smiled nervously at everyone, and leaned
over to whisper something in Ernest Seidelberger’s ear. Seidelberger listened
for a few moments, his face expressionless, and then waved the young executive
away.

Garunisch
ground out his latest cigarette. ‘Is it something we should hear?’ he asked
bluntly. ‘Or is it privileged information for hospital big-wigs only?’

Seidelberger
shook his head. ‘It’s not privileged, Mr. Garunisch. It’s just been on the
news. The plague has infected so many people in New Jersey that the state has
been declared a quarantine area. Nobody is allowed to enter or leave, and
anyone attempting to do so will be forcibly detained by the National Guard.’

One of the hospital negotiators, shocked, said, ‘My wife’s in
Trenton today, visiting her mother!
And my children! They’re all there!
What am I going to do?’

Ernest
Seidelberger said, ‘I suggest you go home, Rootes. See if you can call your
family from there. Meanwhile, I have a last word to say to Mr. Garunisch before
we close this meeting.’

Rootes,
shaking, gathered up his papers, crammed them into his briefcase, and left.

When he had
gone, Seidelberger looked steadily at Kenneth Garunisch, and said, ‘You know
what I’m going to say, don’t you, Mr. Garunisch?’

Kenneth
Garunisch shrugged. ‘I haven’t a notion, Mr. Seidelberger.’

‘I’m going to
demand that you send your members back to work. New Jersey is in quarantine,
and that means the plague could, be with us in Manhattan by tomorrow morning
this city is going to catch it, Mr. Garunisch, and thousands will die, and it
will all be your fault.’

Garunisch’s
mouth went taut and hard. ‘Mr. Seidelberger,’ he grated, ‘just because you work
for a hospital and you wear a white coat, that doesn’t mean that you are
automatically on the side of the angels. My members, if they deal with plague
victims, are going to be doing the next best thing to committing suicide. They
will do it, just as they have always done it, but I’m damned if I’m going to
allow them to do it without some recognition from the federal government and
the hospital authorities. In Japan they paid kamikaze pilots a little bit
extra, and gave them a few more privileges, and they did it because they
recognized courage and they recognized human sacrifice. My members will give
you their courage, Mr. Seidelberger, and they will give you their sacrifice,
but they won’t give it for nothing.’

Ernest
Seidelberger sniffed. ‘Fine words, Mr. Garunisch.
But not
quite accurate.
Your members are not prepared to give courage; they’re
not prepared to give their lives.

They’re only
prepared to sell them, at a price. I suggest to you, Mr. Garunisch, that your
medical workers are whores, and that you are their whoremaster.’

Kenneth
Garunisch stared at Seidelberger with bulging eyes for a moment, and then
laughed loudly.

‘In that case,
Mr. Seidelberger, we’re all whores. We’re all getting paid for sitting here.
All I can say is, when you get out on the street and
strut
your stuff, I hope you get picked up by some sex-starved matelot who fucks some
sense into that impervious skull of yours. Come on, Dick, let’s call it a
night.’

Seidelberger
sat silent while Garunisch and Bortolotti packed up their cases and made ready
to leave. But as they opened the door of the conference room, he turned his
clerical profile in their direction and said, ‘Mr. Garunisch!’

Kenneth
Garunisch paused. ‘What is it? Did you finally see sense?’

Seidelberger
shook his head. ‘No, I have not seen what you so inaccurately call ‘sense’. I
just wanted to wish you a happy Saturday, and a long life, because the longer your
members stay out on strike, the more urgently you will need it.’

Kenneth
Garunisch bit his lip, saying nothing. Then he turned on his heel and slammed
the door behind him. Outside the hospital, on First Avenue, a warm and grimy
summer breeze was blowing from the south-west. The glittering spires of
Manhattan were reflected in the oily depths of the East River, and a lone barge
chugged upriver towards Roosevelt Island. From the north, they heard the sound
of sirens, and there was a strange amber glow in the sky.

A Medical
Workers’ picket was standing by the hospital entrance, smoking a cigarette.
Kenneth Garunisch recognized him – a tough onetime stevedore called Tipanski.
He had shoulders as wide as a taxi-cab, and a blue baseball cap.

He slapped
Tipanski on the back.
‘How you doing?’

Tipanski
nodded. ‘Okay, thanks, Mr. Garunisch.’

‘What time are
they relieving you?’

‘Two-thirty.
Then Foster comes on.’

‘Any trouble?’

‘Naw.
But look at them fires uptown.’

‘Fires?
Is that what they are?’

‘Sure. This
Gaines guy says on the tube that the niggers is all to blame for the plague, so
the white gangs have been cruisin’ up to Harlem and puttin’ a torch to
every-thin’ that burns, and a few things that don’t.’

Even as they
spoke, a fire chief’s car came howling past them.

‘Mr.
Garunisch,’ said Tipanski. ‘Is it true what they say about the plague? That
it’s comin’ here? It says on the news there aint no way they can stop it.’

Kenneth
Garunisch looked at the man for a long while, saying nothing. For the first
time in his life, he was beginning to feel unable to protect his members. His
instincts had always been those of a tough mother henscooping her brood into
her wings at the first sign of trouble. But now, just across the Hudson, a
different type of peril was growing, a peril that could be carried invisibly in
the warm night wind, and could infect them all without any chance of saving
themselves.

Kenneth
Garunisch felt frightened.

‘I guess
they’ll find some way of stopping it okay,’ he said, unconvincingly, ‘After
all, they can seal Manhattan off like a lifeboat, right? Just close all the
tunnels and all the bridges, and presto, we’re all safe.’

Tipanski
frowned. ‘They seem pretty worried on the news, Mr. Garunisch. They even said
what to do if you thought you had it.’

‘Don’t you
worry,
brother.
When the time comes, we can deal with
it.’

‘Okay, Mr.
Garunisch.’

Kenneth
Garunisch was about to say goodnight, when he heard footsteps clattering up the
sidewalk behind him. Dick Bortolotti said, ‘Ken,’ in a nervous kind of way, and
tugged his sleeve. Kenneth Garunisch turned around.

There were five
of them. They were hard-faced and big, and they could only have been off-duty
cops. No mugger cuts his hair so neat, nor wears such a well-trimmed mustache.
They wore black leather jackets, and they stood around Kenneth Garunisch and
Dick Bortolotti so that there was no possible way to escape. ‘Are you
Garunisch?’ said one of them gruffly. Kenneth Garunisch looked from one cop to
the other. He was trying to memorize their faces. He kept his arms down beside
him, and said, ‘What of it?’

‘Kenneth
Garunisch, the Medical Workers’ boss?’

‘What of it?’

‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes. What of
it?’

Garunisch had
once been a physically hard man but he was too old and slow these days. The
leading cop stepped up to him, pulled back his arm, and punched him straight in
the face. Garunisch felt his bridge-work break, and he was banged back against
the hospital wall behind him. Another punch caught him across the side of the
face and fractured his jaw, and then he was kicked in the wrist and the hip.

Tipanski,
shouting with rage, tried to attack the cops, but they were too quick and too
well-trained. One of them twisted his arm around behind his back, and another
one thumped him in the stomach. Tipanski dropped to his knees on the sidewalk,
gasping.

Dick Bortolotti
got away. He ran down the length of the hospital as fast as he could, crossed
34th Street, and didn’t stop running until he reached Second Avenue. He leaned
against a building panting for breath, and then slowly and cautiously made his
way back to Bellevue. As he crossed back towards the hospital, he had the
strangest sensation that everything had changed now, and that life was never
going to be the same again. The laws of the jungle had returned, and he was
going to have to learn them.

Edgar Paston
was lying on his uncomfortable bunk in the jailhouse, reading the weekly
Supermarket Report which Tammy had brought him that lunchtime. It appeared that
the spread of the plague was hiking up the price of oranges and other citrus
fruits, although California growers – in the light of the plague’s disastrous
effects on the Florida crop – were predicting their most profitable year ever.

Edgar laid down
his paper and checked the time from the clock on the flaking wall outside his
cell. It was a few minutes past midnight, Saturday morning. He shifted
uncomfortably, and yawned. He was exhausted, but he had never been able to get
to sleep with the light on, and the cop in charge had refused to switch it off.

He wondered
briefly what Tammy was thinking about. She was probably awake, too, lying alone
in their quilted double bed under the painting of Yellowstone River in spring,
listening to the children breathing in their separate bedrooms and feeling
lonesome. The thought of it almost choked him up, and he had to think about
something else to stop himself from crying.

He thought,
too, about the dead Boy Scout. The cops had questioned him for four hours
solid, and they still didn’t believe him. The shooting happened again and again
in his mind, like a loop of film. He saw himself stepping out of the
supermarket door.

He saw himself
raising the gun. They were laughing – that was the trouble. If they hadn’t been
laughing, he wouldn’t have fired. He saw the dead boy lying on the concrete car
park, and someone said, ‘Is he dead?’

Edgar was
almost dozing off when he heard footsteps. He blinked. The cops were bringing
in a new prisoner – he could distinguish voices. Edgar rolled over on his bunk
and pretended to be sleeping, in case he got involved in any more pointless
conversations. He heard the cop say, ‘In here.’

Another voice,
younger, said, ‘You mean I don’t get a cell to myself? What is this?’

‘This aint the
Ramada Inn,’ said the cop. The cell door unlocked, squeaked open, and then
banged shut again. There was a jingle of keys. Edgar kept his eyes shut and
faced the wall.

For a while, he
heard the new prisoner shuffling around. Then he heard the lower bunk complain
as the prisoner sat down on it. Eventually the newcomer stood up again, leaned
over him, and shook him by the shoulder. ‘Hey man – are you awake?’

Edgar Paston
opened one eye. ‘I wasn’t,’ he said
Wearily
, ‘but it
looks like I am now.’

‘I’m sorry,
man. I just thought you might be awake.’ Edgar rubbed his face, and sat up
painfully. Then he swung his legs over the side of the bunk, and looked at his
new cellmate for the first time.

At first, he
couldn’t believe it. But then he felt his throat tighten, constrict. Just a
foot or two away from him, pale and foxy-faced, still methodically chewing gum,
was Shark McManus.

Edgar stared at
him.

‘Shark McManus
said, ‘Do they bring you coffee in this joint?’

Edgar said
hoarsely, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t
understand what, man?’

‘Don’t you know
who I am?’ said Edgar, in a tight voice. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’

Shark McManus
shrugged. ‘Sorry, man.’

Edgar said,
‘Last night, you and your gang of hoodlums broke into a supermarket out at the
crossroads, and wrecked it.’

McManus looked
surprised. He screwed up his eyes and said, ‘Not me, man. You must’ve gotten
the wrong dude.’

Edgar climbed
unsteadily down from his bunk. He faced McManus from only six inches away.

‘I don’t have
the wrong dude, McManus, That store you wrecked was mine.’

McManus chewed
steadily for a while, but his chewing became slower and slower, and he finally
stopped altogether. He stared at Edgar as if he couldn’t grasp what was going
on, and he nervously rubbed at the side of his neck.

‘You and your
kind, you make me sick,’ said Edgar, plucking off his spectacles and pacing the
floor. He turned on McManus again, ‘You’re like wild beasts!’

McManus looked
uncomfortable. But then he said, in an unexpectedly quiet voice, ‘Well, man,
you may be right.’

‘Right?’ snapped
Edgar. ‘Of course I’m right. You smash, you destroy – you’d kill if you had to.
What the hell do you think the world is out there?
Some kind
of jungle?’

McManus sat
down. ‘Yes, man,’ he nodded. ‘You’re right.’