Cold Plague

by Daniel Kalla

  “And you want my help?” Avril said, confused.

  “Yes.”

  “How, Dr. Tanier?”

  “I need you to find her.”

  “Find who?”

  “Pauline Lamaire.”

  “Pauline?” Avril sat up straighter. As a teenager, she had babysat Pauline, a sweet energetic girl who never shed her perpetual smile. Avril still remembered how moved she was the first time she saw Pauline play her violin. It looked like she was holding a cello to her chin, but in Pauline’s hands the instrument sang beautifully. “How do you know she is missing?” Avril asked.

  “I went to make a house call this morning before clinic,” he said. “She was not home.”

  “I see.” If it were anyone else on the phone, she would have found a way to end the call right then, but Dr. Tanier had been her physician since she was a child. And she was not going to brush him off now. “Isn’t it possible that Pauline forgot you were coming and went out to run errands instead?”

  “I am not an imbecile, Avril. The woman was in no condition to have gone anywhere.” He sighed. “Listen, perhaps if you come here, it will make more sense.”

  And so Avril dropped everything else to head back to the town where she had grown up. As she entered the outskirts of Montmagnon, childhood memories bubbled to the surface. Driving past the seventeenth-century church, she could almost hear the raised choir voices even though she had been inside only once or twice since her confirmation. She looked out the window past the town square and mentally wove her way through the lanes and shortcuts between the buildings to reach the gravel soccer pitch where she had spent so many summer hours scrimmaging with her brother, cousins, and numerous friends, including her future husband, Antoine Avars. Thirty-five years later, Antoine shattered her heart when, in a blinding storm, he crashed his helicopter into the side of a mountain.

  Putting aside the usual adolescent traumas—and the added ones that came with being one of the only dark-skinned residents of a mostly white town—Avril remembered her childhood as for the most part happy. But just as she had outgrown her favorite bicycle and her cozy bunk bed, Avril had also outgrown her hometown. Despite its proximity to Limoges, Montmagnon was now a place to return to on special occasions, like holiday visits with her father or her annual checkup with Dr. Tanier. As she pulled up to the charming little house a few kilometers past the village center, she wondered why a concert violinist like Pauline Lamaire had chosen to live in Montmagnon.

  “Good day, Avril,” Dr. Tanier puffed as he struggled out of his red sports car. The heavyset balding doctor, who was well into his sixties, looked ridiculous wedged inside the sporty German vehicle, but Avril, like everyone else, respected the man too much to point it out to him.

  “Hello, Dr. Tanier.” Avril was overcome by reflex embarrassment, because most times she saw the doctor she was on his examining table in nothing but a paper gown.

  “Come,” he said, striding past her on his way up the walkway to the front door.

  Aware that most doors in town were left perpetually unlocked, Avril was still a little surprised when, instead of knocking, Tanier turned the door handle and stepped inside the house.

  She stopped at the doorway to sniff the air. Years ago, one of her criminology professors in Paris had drilled into her the notion that competent detectives use all their senses; accordingly, Avril had come to believe in the investigative significance of odors at crime scenes. Despite the clinical scent of air freshener, she noticed something lingering beneath it—the faint stench of urine and something else that she couldn’t place.

  From the threshold, Avril studied the combined kitchen and living room. Several colorful oil paintings, including a series of individual fruits, lined the walls. A few photos stood on the bookshelf along with numerous musical trophies and awards. Beneath the bookshelf, a violin rested upright on a stand with the bow lying across, as if it had just been played. On the kitchen table, a cluster of magazines lay beside a vase full of tastefully arranged flowers. Spotting the ceramic water and food dishes in the room’s corner, Avril realized that Pauline owned a cat. Based on the smell, she suspected its urinary indiscretion had only recently been tackled with deodorizers.

  She glanced over at the white-bearded doctor. He assessed her with wrinkled brow and troubled gray eyes. “What do you think, Avril?”

  “Cleaned recently. And fresh flowers. Perhaps she was expecting company?”

  “At eight in the morning?” Tanier grunted, unimpressed. He pointed toward the violin. “Pauline has been nearly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis these past three years. Especially her hands. I have not seen her violin out in all that time. So why now?” He shook his head sadly. “And look!” He pointed to the sofa beside him.

  Avril crossed the creaky wooden floor to get a better look. Stiffly, Tanier crouched down to his knees. Glancing at the floor, Avril spotted a single red pill lying beside one of the sofa’s legs. “When I bent down to pick up this pill, I found these,” he said.

  Avril knelt to Tanier’s level and saw several more of the same tablets scattered on the floor underneath the couch.

  “Anti-inflammatory medicine that I prescribed her,” he explained. “Pauline is meticulous about her medication. Especially this one. Never misses a pill. And now I find a pile of them lying loose under the furniture….”

  Breathing hard, Tanier rose to his feet. So did Avril. He eyed her expectantly.

  She chose her words carefully. “Dr. Tanier, I agree there are unusual features here, but we don’t know that Pauline has been gone longer than this morning. In fact, we have no evidence she is missing at all.”

  Tanier sighed and lowered himself heavily onto the sofa. “I dropped in on Pauline three days ago,” he said.

  Avril waited, but when he didn’t offer more, she asked, “How was she?”

  He shook his head and sighed heavily. “Confused.”

  “In what sense, Dr. Tanier?”

  “She barely recognized me. She mixed up my name on several occasions. At one point, she mistook me for her childhood music teacher.” He shook his head again. “And she was acting paranoid. Suspicious of every sound around us. And this room”—he indicated it with a wave of his meaty finger—“was a mess. Food, papers, and medications everywhere. Most unlike Pauline.”

  Avril sat down on the couch beside him. “I see.”

  Tanier pointed to the coffee table, whose surface was now clear. “Her tablets were scattered all over this table. And you would not believe how many medicines she was ingesting!”

  “But…did you not prescribe them?”

  “Only a small minority.” Tanier grunted. “Pauline has such terrible arthritis. She has seen so many specialists. With each one comes a new prescription. And she has turned to alternative medicines, too. She is on enough vitamins and supplements to drug a herd of elephants.”

  “You don’t approve?” Avril asked.

  He leaned forward and exhaled heavily. “Five years ago, she was a concert violinist. Now she is crippled by disease. And modern medicine has failed her. I have failed her.” He cleared his throat and glanced away. “Pauline will clutch at anything, regardless of the lack of rigorous science or testing, that might offer hope. I’m worried that one of these new treatments has affected her mental state…Maybe she has wandered off somewhere.”

  Avril glanced around the room again, trying to correlate its orderly appearance with what the doctor described. “Why did Pauline ask you to come see her this week?” she asked.

  Tanier hesitated. As his patient, Avril appreciated his reluctance to share confidential information. “She was having trouble with her hand,” he finally said.

  “The arthritis?”

  “No. Something neurological. Her right arm and hand had gone numb. She was having difficulty using it.”

  “What did you think was wrong?”

  “I did not know, but I thought it related to whatever accounted for her state of mind, her confusion and s
uch,” he said. “I wanted to send her to the hospital in Limoges for further testing, perhaps even a CAT scan, but she would not hear of it. She seemed afraid to even leave the house.”

  “Can you think of a medication that could explain her confusion and her arm numbness?”

  Tanier shrugged. “It would be unusual, but there are such toxins. For example, lead poisoning can cause confusion and weakness of the limbs.”

  “I don’t smell any fresh paint.” Avril forced a smile.

  “It was only an example,” Tanier grumbled. “I have no idea what was going on with Pauline. All I know is that the woman I saw three days ago was in no condition to tidy up her house and then head out for a long morning stroll.”

  “I see,” Avril said, still calm. “Maybe Pauline’s mental state improved after you saw her. Perhaps she is in town as we speak?”

  Tanier grunted his disdain for her theory. Avril shared his skepticism. Her instincts told her not only that Pauline was missing but also that she was in trouble.

  8

  Limoges, France. January 17

  Noah lay on the hotel bed, staring at the slivers of light that leaked through the blinds and cut zebra stripes on the ceiling. Though he had traveled the globe several times over while working for the WHO, he never adjusted to changes in time zones. Now, at 4:12 A.M., he lay wide awake and unable to decelerate his racing mind.

  Noah mulled over what he knew of cases of BSE in France. Aside from its hastened course, the outbreak among humans and animals was far smaller in scale than the British epidemic in the nineties. Yet the situation gnawed at him far more than the handful of cases warranted. Another flashback of slobbering brain-dead patients from the neurologist’s video clip ran through his head. Is this really vCJD? he wondered again. What if it spreads faster than anything we’ve seen before?

  He had tried to broach the subject with Duncan earlier over dinner, but Duncan had been unusually distracted, hardly saying a word. Noah sensed something more than an unpleasant personal history with a BSE outbreak accounted for the black cloud enshrouding his friend, but given their long association, Noah knew better than to ask.

  Noah glanced at the bedside phone, fighting off the impulse to call Gwen and run the situation by her. Instead, he reached for the receiver and asked the operator to connect him to a number in South Carolina. His ex-wife answered the phone on the second ring. “Noah,” Anna said, her warm tone tinged with a sweet shyness that he had only noticed since their separation. “Isn’t it the middle of the night for you?”

  “For France maybe, but not for my internal clock,” he said. “How’s South Carolina?”

  “Warm, thank God! Besides, it’s nice to see my folks.” She hesitated. “They always ask about you.”

  “Say hello for me.” Noah had always felt close to Anna’s parents. He knew that all along they had quietly pulled for Anna to reconcile with him, but they were too decent and too Calvinist to ever push their point of view upon their daughter.

  “Is Chloe still up?” he asked.

  “She’s not supposed to be.” Anna laughed. “But yeah, she’s here. We can’t get her out of the pool.”

  After a moment, he heard the clattering of the phone and then his daughter’s breathless voice came on the line. “Daddy-o!”

  Noah’s heart leaped. “Hi, sweetie! You having fun with Granna and Gramps?”

  “Daddy, I’m swimming in their pool!” Her voice surged with pride.

  “No water wings?” Noah asked.

  “Not even the floatie vest like Mexico!” she cried. “I can swim across on my own. Even the deep end.”

  “You really are my little mermaid.” Proud as he was, Noah felt slightly deflated at the realization that he had missed another milestone in her life.

  “I can show you at the club pool. Right, Daddy?”

  “Sure, soon as we’re both home,” he said. “I’ll race you.”

  “Only one arm, right?” In Mexico, they had “raced” across the pool with Chloe in her life vest and Noah swimming one-armed. “Will you be home when me and Mommy come back?”

  “I hope so,” Noah said, though he had the sinking feeling that his time in Europe was going to extend well beyond the seven days that Chloe and Anna were planning to spend in Hilton Head. “Are you sleeping in the pool, too?” he asked.

  “No, Daddy!” she laughed. “I’d drown. I’m not a fish.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder,” he said. “What else is happening?”

  Barely pausing for breaths, she poured out the news of other exciting developments, including a detailed description of her new sundress that featured “tons of sequins,” the latest fairy book series that she and her mother were reading, and the stray cat her grandparents had adopted at Chloe’s urging. As infectious as his daughter’s enthusiasm was, Noah hung up the phone feeling more isolated than ever.

  Noah tossed and turned for another hour before he finally gave up on sleep and climbed out of bed. Just before six o’clock, he decided to take a predawn walk through the French city he had yet to explore. He slipped into his jeans and sweater and headed out.

  Stepping onto the street, he was thankful for his thick gloves and lined leather jacket, though when the icy wind cut through his turtleneck he realized a scarf might have helped. Lit by the yellowish illumination from old street lamps, the sidewalk in front of the hotel was deserted. Halfway down the block, he noticed a glow waxing and waning from inside the cab of an old pickup truck—one of the more commonly seen French flatbed van-truck hybrids—parked in the shadow between lamps. As he neared the truck, its headlight flicked on and flashed him twice.

  On edge, Noah stopped and pulled his gloved hands from his coat pockets. He stood still and waited, but nothing happened except the glow from inside the truck brightened and then faded. Noah inhaled a few deep chilly breaths and then ventured nearer. As he came alongside the truck, the passenger window creaked open. Cigarette smoke wafted out of the opening.

  The interior lights remained off, but the sole occupant’s lit cigarette and the nearest streetlight illuminated the inside enough for Noah to see the shadowy outline of the large man hunched behind the wheel. From what Noah could see when the cigarette burned brightest, the man had droopy eyes and a thick five-o’clock shadow.

  The man stared at him but said nothing. Noah leaned closer so that his face was inches from the window. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Parlezvous français?” the man said in a sandpaper voice.

  “Un peu,” Noah said. “Who are you?” he repeated in French.

  Ignoring the question, the man said, “You are Dr. Haldane, correct?”

  Noah nodded.

  “I can help you,” he pronounced the words slowly for Noah’s benefit.

  “Help me with what?”

  He cleared his throat with a loud hacking sound. “I know where they come from.”

  “They?”

  “The mad cows.”

  Noah leaned closer, resting his hands on the door’s rusty windowsill. “Where?”

  The man glanced over his shoulder before speaking in a hushed tone. “It has nothing to do with the farmers here.”

  A jolt shot up Noah’s spine and his heart sped up. “The mad cow problem has nothing to do with the farms in Limousin?” Noah stammered.

  The man nodded impatiently.

  “Then where does it come from?” Noah leaned his head inside the truck and inhaled such a mouthful of acrid smoke that he felt as if he had stolen a drag off the man’s cigarette.

  “Ferme d’Allaire.”

  Noah shook his head, confused by the language. “But you said that no farms—” He stopped, remembering Ferme d’Allaire from his earlier interview with Pereau. “The cattle supplier?” he asked in English.

  “Pardonnez?” the man replied.

  “The place that sells the cows,” Noah sputtered in French.

  “Exactly!” The cigarette bobbed up and down in his mouth. “Yes. All the bad cows co
me from there.”

  The explanation made epidemiological sense to Noah. In any outbreak, the primary goal was to track the source back to the index, or first, case that initiated the others.

  “All of the cows!” the man repeated and then cleared his throat again.

  “Why there?” Noah asked, almost more to himself.

  He wasn’t really expecting an answer, so he was surprised when the man grumbled something in French. Noah understood only snippets of the response, catching the words “feed the cows” and “illegal.” He tapped the window in frustration. “Slower, please! Why did the sick cows come from Ferme d’Allaire?”

  “They make bad feed,” the man said, much more slowly. “They put dead cows, sheep, and pigs into the mix. It is against the law.”

  “But they do it anyway?”

  The man nodded once.

  “How do you know this?” Noah asked.

  In response, the man turned the key and the engine kicked in, churning with a loud grumble. Noah’s hand vibrated on the windowsill. “Go check,” the man said. “You will see for yourself.”

  “Are you a farmer?” Noah asked, but the man didn’t respond. “Were your cows sick?”

  Suddenly the truck lurched forward and Noah had to yank his hand off the door to avoid being pulled with it.

  “Go check, you will see!” the man barked, and the truck rocketed off down the street, overlaying the cigarette trail with a plume of blue engine exhaust.

  9

  Vishnov, Antarctica. December 22

  The bumpy flight on the small Twin Otter was a huge step down from the first-class comfort Claude Fontaine had grown accustomed to in the ten months since he had last seen the Antarctic. In the interim, he had been wined, dined, and feted from New York to Tokyo. But as he stood at the entryway of the “Igloo” (as the high-tech dome had been dubbed by those inside) he had the sinking sensation that he had never left this desolate unwelcoming continent.