Plague (7 page)

Dr. Petrie
rested his head against the wall. ‘Okay, Adelaide, don’t worry, I’ll get right
back there. I shouldn’t think she’s taken Prickles far. Just stay
there,
and I’ll get back in ten minutes.’

He laid down
the phone. Dr. Selmer was standing right behind him.

‘You’re not
going home?’ asked Dr. Selmer. ‘I’m sorry, but I came to look for you, and I
couldn’t help overhearing.’

‘Anton, I have
to. My wife has taken my little girl.’

‘Leonard, I
need you here. You have to talk to Firenza. Please. I can’t get away myself.’

Dr. Petrie
shook his head. ‘Anton – I can’t. I think that Margaret has the plague. I have
to go get Prickles back, Anton. I can’t just leave her. Look-’ he checked his
watch ‘-just give me two hours, and I’ll come right back here. I promise.’

Dr. Selmer
looked desperate. ‘Leonard,
it’s
Firenza. You have to
convince him. If we don’t put this whole city into quarantine – well, God knows
what’s going to happen. I spoke to him just now. He still refuses. He says that
until we find out what’s causing this epidemic, there’s no medical
justification for sealing the city off.’

‘We do know
what’s causing it,’ said Dr. Petrie.

‘We do?’

‘I think so.
It’s the sewage that’s been washed up on the beaches. Every one of the people
I’ve come across with plague went swimming – either yesterday, or today.’

Dr. Selmer
dropped his hands in resignation. ‘Then we have to close the beaches,’ he said.
‘Go see Firenza, tell him what you think, and insist that he closes the
beaches.’ Dr. Petrie looked at his watch again. He had just seen a man die from
the plague; he knew how short a time it took. If Margaret was already in the
dizzy, drunken stage, she may only have a couple of hours left – three or four
at the most.

Supposing she
died when Prickles was with her?
Supposing she was driving
her car?

‘Anton,’ he
said desperately. ‘Just two hours. Please. No one goes swimming at night,
anyway.’

Dr. Selmer
wiped his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Go on, then,’ he said softly. ‘I
can’t stop you.’

‘Anton, it’s my
daughter.’

Dr. Selmer
nodded, and looked at Mrs. Haskins, waiting, shocked and patient, by the water
fountain, and the white shivering people who were being wheeled in through the
hospital’s double doors.

‘Sure. It’s
your daughter, and her husband, and his son, and my uncle. Everybody belongs to
somebody, Leonard. I’m just disappointed, that’s all. No matter how people
criticized you, I didn’t think you were that kind of a doctor.’

Leonard Petrie
rubbed the back of his neck. The muscles were knotted and tense, and he could
feel the beginnings of a pounding headache.

Dr. Selmer
watched him, saying nothing, waiting for him to make up his mind.

Finally, Dr.
Petrie sighed. ‘All right, Anton. You win. Where does Firenza live?’

‘Out by the university on South West 48th Street.
The
number’s here.’

Dr. Petrie took
the creased card and tucked it in his pocket. ‘I’ll be right back when I’ve
seen him. Then I must go and look for Prickles. You understand that?’

Dr. Selmer
nodded and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I won’t forget this, Leonard. Just
talk sense into those bastards, that’s all. I’ll catch you later.’

Dr. Petrie was
about to leave when he noticed Mrs. Haskins.

‘Anton,’ he
said quietly. ‘She still doesn’t believe it. Tell her, for Christ’s sake, or
she’s going to stand by that fountain all night.’

Dr. Selmer
nodded. Then Dr. Petrie turned, and walked quickly down the hospital corridor,
out through the double doors, and into the humid tropical night. By the clock
over the hospital’s main entrance, it was just past one-thirty. He slung his
jacket in the back of his car, started the engine, and squealed off south.

He made a
conscious effort to wipe any thoughts of Prickles out of his mind as he drove.
There were too many giddy dollies in this city to think about just one of them,
no matter how dearly he loved her
,-
no matter how much
it hurt to leave her to whatever fate she faced.

I
vor Glantz stalked fiercely across his New York apartment, plucked
the stopper out of the whiskey decanter, and splashed himself a
more-than-generous glassful. He swallowed it like medicine, grimacing at every
gulp, and then, with heavily suppressed fury, he set the glass quietly and
evenly back on the table.

His attorney,
Manny Friedman, stood watching this performance with respectful distaste.

‘Ivor,’ he
said, in his persistent, nasal voice. ‘Ivor, you’ll kill yourself.’

Ivor Glantz
looked at him and said nothing. He walked across to the floor-to-ceiling
window, and parted the expensive translucent drapes. Sixteen floors below, on
this gray and rainy Tuesday, the four o’clock traffic was beginning to congest
the junction of First Avenue, measled with yellow taxis and teeming with
people. Glantz let the drape fall back, and turned to face his attorney with
exasperation and badly-concealed ill grace.

‘You
smart-ass,’ he growled.
‘You unctious, greasy,
half-circumcized smart-ass.’

Manny Friedman
frowned nervously. He was clutching his briefcase in front of him like a
protective shield.

‘Ivor,’ he said
uncertainly, ‘it’s a question of legal technique.’

‘Technique?’
snapped Glantz. ‘You tell the jury what a short-tempered tyrannical bastard I
am, and that’s supposed to be technique?’

Manny Friedman
licked his lips. ‘Ivor, I explained it. I explained that we had to admit your
past mistakes before the defense could get their teeth into them and make a
meal out of the whole thing. What we’re trying to say is that you’re human, and
you’ve made mistakes, but that now, in spite of everything, you’ve been
misjudged, and taken advantage of.’

Ivor Glantz sat
down heavily in one of the huge off-white armchairs. ‘Oh, sure,’ he said
sarcastically. ‘Well, you certainly made a good job of that. Now they think I’m
a cross between Caligula and Adolf Hitler. I’ve been misjudged? And taken
advantage of? What the hell kind of a performance is that?’

‘Ivor, listen
to me...’

‘I won’t
listen!’ snapped Glantz. ‘I think I’ve listened to your half-assed advice long
enough! This is my court case, and we’ll run it the way I want it! Just because
that Finnish bastard has lived a life of one hundred percent purity, that’s
supposed to give him the right to steal my research? It’s not my fault the
guy’s a virgin, is it? That’s my fucking patent, and he’s infringed it. That’s
all there is to it!’

Manny Friedman
swallowed hard. He sat down, still clutching his briefcase.

‘Ivor,’ he
said. ‘For one moment, just for one second, please listen.’

Ivor Glantz
sniffed. ‘What do you want me to do now? Confess that I’m a homosexual, so the
jury won’t think I’m having an incestuous relationship with my daughter?’ He
paused, looking the discomfited Manny up and down. ‘Come on, stop looking so
goddamned nervous!’

‘It’s all a
question of credibility,’ said Friedman earnestly. ‘You’re a scientist, and a
good scientist, but you also have a checkered kind of a past.’

‘Because I argued
with those stuffed shirts at Princeton, and told DuPonts to go fuck themselves?
That’s a checkered past?’

Friedman
winced.
‘To a jury, Ivor, yes.
What we’ve been trying
to do today is to show that you’re an honest American Joe, with a particular
talent for bacteriological research, and that in spite of your mistakes you’ve
been trying to make good. All of a sudden, you find out how to mutate bacilli
with radio-active rays – the greatest discovery of your whole life, the
discovery that’s going to make it big – and what happens? Some foreign schmuck
steps in and claims that it’s his idea, and that you’re some kind of a quack.’

Ivor rubbed his
eyes tiredly. ‘Manny,’ he said, with immense and laborious patience, ‘I am not
just an honest American Joe. I am the best-paid, best-known, most successful
research bacteriologist in the entire American continent.
Manny,
just look around you.
Is this the kind of place your honest American Joe
lives in?
Concorde Tower?
Stop playing Perry
Masonstein and treat this whole thing with reality!’

Manny shrugged.
‘You’re looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope, Ivor.

We don’t want
the jury to think you’re some kind of fat plutocrat, parking your backside on
medical patents for your own financial benefit.’

‘I discovered
it!’ protested Glantz. ‘Why the hell shouldn’t I get the financial benefit?’

Manny flapped
his hands like two neurotic doves. ‘There’s no reason at all, Ivor. No reason
at all. Except that any wealthy executive with any kind of capitalistic sympathies
never serves on a jury. The people you get on juries are threadbare
working-class mugs whose employers won’t say their services are indispensable.

Juries don’t
like people with bulging wallets.

Ivor Glantz
shook his head impatiently. ‘That’s bullshit, Manny.’

‘That’s where
you’re wrong,’ said Manny. ‘The way things are going, the jury is more likely
to feel sympathetic towards
Forward
than they are
towards you. Forward is a proud, dedicated man who’s worked his way up from a
working-class background.

He’s scored one
or two minor successes in pharmacology and bacterial study. Not as spectacular
as you, Ivor, but steady, reliable stuff. If you want to win against a man like
that, you’ve got to come down off that stack of dollars and make out you’re Thomas
Edison, slaving away in a shed. You’ve got to make the jury believe that
Forward
stole this idea from a plain and hard-working
American worthy. Ivor, in cases of patent infringement, you have to look
deserving, as well as right.’

Glantz slumped
down in his chair. ‘I’m beginning to wish that patents were never invented.’

Manny opened
his briefcase and began to shuffle green and yellow papers. ‘Well, maybe you
do,’ he said, in his plangent Bronx voice. ‘But if you keep hold of this one,
it will make you rich. I mean, really rich. Not just rich rich.’

Ivor Glantz
watched his attorney rustling through sheaves of flimsy legal paper with
mounting distaste. He had never liked litigation, but right now he had about as
much say in the matter as a man who leaps off the Empire State Building has in
whether he hits the ground or not. He took a cigar out of the breast pocket of
his tight gray suit, and clipped the end with a gold cutter. He lit up, and
began to puff out cloud after cloud of pungent blue smoke.

Glantz was not
a handsome or friendly-looking man. He was almost bald except for a frieze of
neatly-oiled curls around the back of his neck. His face was apishly coarse
while his bright, near-together eyes were as sharp as his tongue.

He smoked some
more, and drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. He hadn’t even had time
to get used to his new apartment – one of thirty luxurious new condos in
Concorde Tower. He had wanted to spend this month settling in, rearranging the
paintings and the furniture, and sorting out his stacks of books. His
stepdaughter Esmeralda, who shared the condo with him, had already shuffled the
bedrooms and the sitting-room into some kind of shape, but Glantz felt the need
to move things around
himself
.

It was all
Sergei Forward’s fault. When Ivor Glantz had returned six weeks ago from an
extended lecture tour of South and Central America, explaining his new
bacteriological techniques to major universities, he had been tired and
irritable and aching for rest. But then he had picked up Scientific American to
find a lengthy and colorful article by Sergei Forward on how he, the great
Finnish research bacteriologist, had discovered how to mutate various bacilli
with Uranium.

Glantz had had
no choice at all but to sue, and right now, the case of the mutated bacilli was
a minor cause celebre in the Federal District courts.

Manny Friedman
sniffed, and then took out a crisp white handkerchief and blew his nose like
the second bassoon in the Boston Pops.

‘Tomorrow,’ he
said, ‘we start proving what a two-hundred-percent clean cut, hard-working
American fellow you are. We also emphasize the privations of your background –
how hard it was to get to the top.’

Ivor Glantz
stared. ‘Privations?’ he said. ‘What do you mean – privations?’

‘Your parents
had to work for a living, didn’t they? That’s a privation.’

‘My father, as
you well know, was president of the Glantz and Howell Banking Trust.

That’s not
exactly your roach-ridden corner store.’

Manny looked
philosophic. ‘Well, maybe it’s not. But we’ll try and play that down.

Let’s just say
that you worked your way to the top through your own efforts, and despite some
hard luck and bad knocks, you made it.’ Ivor stood up, and walked across to the
far wall. He carefully straightened a large abstract canvas, and stepped back
to make sure it was hanging true.

‘Manny, you’re
wasting your time. Just go in there tomorrow and show the jury the absolute,
indisputable truth. Sergei Forward is a cheap no-hoper who thought he could
filch his way to medical fame by cadging my discovery. Tell the jury something
they’ll understand. Tell them he’s just as much a thief as the guy who steals
apples from the A. & P.’

Manny rubbed
his nose. ‘I don’t know whether that’s the right approach, Ivor. Most of the
people you get in juries these days are so poor that stealing apples from the
A. & P. is nothing. They do it themselves, all the time.’