Plague: A gripping suspense thriller about an incurable outbreak in Miami

by Graham Masterton

  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-235.

  Glantz had had no choice at all but to sue, and right now, the case of the mutated bacilli was a minor cause célèbre 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.’

  The door chime rang. Ivor went across and opened it, and in came Esmeralda, piled high with marketing bags and with a long French loaf tucked under her arm. She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  ‘Hi, pa. Hi, Manny. Tonight, we eat French. Clams gratinées, baby lamb with fresh beans, and hot garlic bread.’

  Manny, rising up from his chair, dropped a pile of papers on to the carpet. ‘I’m afraid I can’t eat garlic,’ he blushed. ‘It gives me heartburn.’

  Ivor came over and patted him on the back. ‘That’s okay, Manny. You’re not invited to dinner anyway.’ Esmeralda walked through the sitting-room and into the kitchen. She dumped her parcels and her loaf of bread, and came back in. ‘He can stay if he wants to. I bought enough for three.’

  Ivor sucked his cigar and shook his head. ‘I’ve had enough of attorneys for one day. I would just like to spend an evening in the quiet and charming company of my daughter.’

  ‘It’s quite okay,’ Manny said. ‘My sister is coming around tonight, and she cooks a beautiful fish pie.’

  ‘That’s wonderful for you. Es – do you want a drink? I’ll just show Manny out.’

  ‘Brandy-soda,’ called Esmeralda, disappearing into one of the bedrooms, ‘I’m just going to change into something more comfortable. See you soon, Manny. Come for dinner next time.’

  Ivor showed Manny to the door.

  ‘There’s just one thing,’ said Manny, laying his hand on Ivor’s sleeve. ‘When we go in there tomorrow, I want you to understand that you mustn’t show any signs of bitterness, or revenge. I want you to act magnanimous. Like, Forward’s made a mistake, but you’re willing to forgive and forget – provided he drops his claim to the process. If you’re all sour grapes and spit, the jury won’t like you. Will you do that for me?’

  Ivor stared at him, poker-faced.

  ‘Please?’ said Manny.

  Ivor nodded. ‘Okay. Tomorrow, it’s all sweetness and light. Do you want me to wear the wings, and the halo?’

  Manny shook his head. ‘A smile should be quite enough.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Without another word, Manny turned on his heel and made off towards the elevator. Ivor thoughtfully shut the door, and walked back into the sitting-room to fix himself another Scotch, and a brandy-soda for Esmeralda. He sat down with a heavy sigh, and wondered if all men of fifty-two felt as old and used-up as he did.

  Esmeralda came back in, dressed in a long turquoise silk negligee. It had a wide, floppy collar, pleated sleeves, and yards an
d yards of floating train. She was a tall, pale girl, with an exquisitely beautiful face; the kind of haunting eyes that fin-de-siècle artists gave to their decadent dryads. Her hair was long and curly and very black, and she wore a thin turquoise headband. As she walked past the windows that made up two walls of the high, rectangular room, the pearly afternoon light shone through the silk of her negligee and gave her stepfather a shadowy outline of high pointed breasts and fiat stomach.

  ‘Bad day at Black Rock?’ she asked, picking up her drink, and sipping it.

  He shrugged. ‘Courts were made for lawyers, not people. This is the fifth day, and so far we haven’t got any place at all.’

  She sat down, in a cloud of turquoise, in the opposite chair.

  ‘Never mind. It will soon be over. You’ll see.’

  He swallowed Scotch. ‘That’s why I love you. You’re such an optimist.’

  There was a short silence. Esmeralda looked at him over the rim of her glass.

  ‘My optimism?’ she said. ‘Or my body?’

  Ivor grunted in amusement. ‘I guess it’s both. Seems like, these days, I’ve had more of the former than the latter.’

  ‘Are you saying that man cannot live by optimism alone?’

  ‘I don’t want to force you. I don’t want to make you feel obliged.’

  She gave him a calm, almost supercilious smile. ‘No man ever could. You know that.’

  ‘I hope so,’ he said, crossing his legs. ‘I mean, the gallery, and this place – you mustn’t feel you have to pay me back.’

  She didn’t look up. She was twisting a gold and cornelian ring around her finger. ‘I feel grateful,’ she said. ‘You can never stop me feeling that. You know, I looked around the gallery today, and it’s so perfect, and it’s all because of you. You’re a very beautiful man, pa. I mean that.’

  He pulled a face. ‘Your mother didn’t think so.’

  ‘My mother didn’t know shit from sauerkraut.’

  He laughed, despite himself. ‘Don’t say that. That’s my former wife you’re talking about.’

  Esmeralda stood up, and walked around the apartment with her bluey-green train floating around her. She wore gold rings on her toes, which Ivor always thought was incredibly erotic.

  ‘Do you think this place is too sombre?’ she asked.

  He looked around. The sitting-room was decorated in creams and grape colors, with muted abstract paintings on the two inner walls. The furniture was all mirrors and maple.

  ‘It has to be sombre,’ he said. ‘When you pay $185,000 for seven rooms, and $1,100 a month carrying charges – that’s sombre.’

  She came over and looked at him. Then she knelt down beside his chair, holding her brandy in one hand, and stroked the back of his wrist with one finger. He looked back at her, expressionless, seeking some kind of emotional flicker. She smiled.

  ‘I’d like to say thank you,’ she said softly.

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘But I would.’

  She took his hand, and stood up.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, tugging him.

  He thought for a moment. Then, without a word, he laid down his drink, and followed her. They walked across the soft, silent carpet to the main bedroom.

  On the wide, tapestry-covered bed, she sat him down and undressed him. First his shoes, then his short black silk socks. He started to loosen his own necktie, but she wouldn’t let him, and picked at the knot herself with her long dark-red fingernails.

  Soon he was naked. His body was white and plump. There was gray wiry hair around his nipples, and his legs were thin and stick-like. He lay there, bald and old and unprepossessing, with his eyes closed. He knew what he looked like, but he also knew that when his eyes were shut, and the reality of age and unfitness were blocked out, there was a warm world of fantasy waiting that was more than nourished by Esmeralda’s arousing treats.

  Like a great blue-green moth, she mounted him. Her hand sought his hardened penis, and guided it up between her wide-parted thighs. She eased herself back on him, and she sighed a distant, muted sigh, as strange as the cry of some satisfied bird. Ivor kept his eyes tight shut, and said nothing.

  Time passed. The apartment was quiet, except for the smooth rustle of Esmeralda’s negligee, and their tense and excited breathing. Then Esmeralda started to tremble and shake. She sat in her stepfather’s lap with her hands clenched tight against her breasts, feeling the deep, dark ripples of her own orgasm.

  They lay side by side in silence for nearly half-an-hour. Ivor felt himself drifting into a curious sleep, and awoke after five minutes with a headache, and a metallic taste in his mouth. He sat up, and reached for his black silk bathrobe.

  Esmeralda, her negligee spread romantically around her, opened her dark eyes and grinned.

  ‘We’re a strange pair, you and I,’ she said, as Ivor walked across to the mirror.

  He raised his head and examined her for a few moments in the glass. Somehow, she seemed less beautiful when her face was transposed by a mirror. But that didn’t make him love her any the less. He loved her more than any possession he had ever had. Almost as much as his work, and far more than her mother. To fuck a daughter after fucking her mother is like buying your first new car, after you’ve had second-hand models all your life.

  He brushed his few curls flat, splashed on some aftershave, and turned back to his stepdaughter with a serious face.

  ‘I guess we are. Strange, I mean. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s really happening.’

  ‘Isn’t that the way with everything wonderful?’

  Ivor nodded. ‘It is. But it’s the same with terrible things, too. When something truly terrible happens, you can never believe it’s for real. You keep smacking yourself and hoping that you’ll wake up.’

  Esmeralda stretched luxuriously. ‘Pa,’ she said. ‘What in the whole world could possibly happen to us that’s terrible?’

  *

  On the floor above, in apartment 110, a tall man of sixty years old sat in a large Victorian spoonback chair, in almost total darkness. The heavy drapes were drawn over the windows, and the condominium was rank with cigarette smoke. The man had a handsome but heavily wrinkled face, a white mane of leonine hair, and he was dressed in a light blue nylon jersey jumpsuit that was absurdly young for his age. He held his cigarette in a long ivory holder, and the ribbon of blue smoke rose rapidly up to the ceiling.

  He had been watching home movies. An expensive projector on the small inlaid table beside him had just run through, and the stray end of the film was still flicking against the spool. On the far wall of the sitting-room was a blank movie screen – an incongruously modem intrusion in an apartment that was crowded with antiques.

  The man seemed to be paralyzed, or frozen. His eyes were focused into some remote distance, and he let his cigarette burn away without lifting it once to his lips. His name was Herbert Gaines, and he had once been Hollywood’s hottest new property.

  If you ever saw The Romantics or Incident at Vicksburg, you’d remember the face. Or at least a smoother and younger version of it – a version that remained confident, and open, and bright. Herbert Gaines had just been watching that face, and those movies, for the thousandth time. It no longer hurt, but on the other hand it no longer anaesthetized the present, either.

  The door from the bedroom opened, and a diagonal slice of light lit up the ageing actor, in his antique chair, like a movie spot. A young man of twenty-two, with denim shorts and bare feet, his chest decorated with tattoos of eagles, came padding into the sitting-room. He was drying his short-cropped hair with a yellow towel.

  The young man looked at the blank screen. ‘Have you finished sulking yet?’ he asked. ‘Or are you going to watch the other one as well?’

  Herbert Gaines didn’t answer, but there was a subtle change in his expression. His attention was no longer fixed on the faded memories of 1936, but on the present, and on the careless intrusion of his lover, Nicholas.

  The yo
ung man came and stood between Gaines and the blank screen. A rectangle of white light illuminated his tight denim shorts, with their suggestive bulge, and the fine plume of hair that curled over the top of them. Herbert Gaines closed his eyes.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re sulking,’ said Nicholas. ‘I never said anything unpleasant.’

  Gaines opened his eyes again. He reached over and switched off the projector, and as he did so, a long column of ash fell on the pale blue jumpsuit.

  ‘You’re so sensitive,’ Nicholas went on. ‘This is supposed to be an open, man-to-man relationship. Least, that’s what you called it when it first began. But all we do these days is argue, and fight, and then you go off in a sulk and play those terrible old movies of yours.’

  Gaines’ mouth turned down at the corners in bitterness. But he still refrained from answering.

  ‘I sometimes think you want to fight,’ said Nicholas. ‘I sometimes think you take umbrage on purpose, just to get me upset. Well, it won’t work, Herbert, ft won’t. I’m not the vicious kind. But damn it all, I’m the kind that gets tired of fights.’

  Herbert Gaines listened to this, and then took the burned-out cigarette from his ivory holder and replaced it with a fresh one. He lit up, watching Nicholas with one limpid eye.

  ‘When you’re tired of fighting me, Nick,’ he said, in a rich, hoarse, cancerous voice, ‘then you’re tired of loving me.’

  Nicholas finished rubbing his hair and threw his towel on the floor. Herbert Gaines smoked listlessly, with his holder clenched between his teeth.

  Nicholas paced from one end of the room to the other. Then he stopped beside Gaines’ chair – tense and exasperated.

  ‘You won’t understand, will you? You’re too busy wallowing in forty-year-old memories and uneasy nostalgia. Why don’t you try looking outside yourself for a change? Open up the drapes, and realize what year it is? Christ, Herbert, I wasn’t even born when you made those movies!’