The Blue Death

by Joan Brady

  David took a swig of champagne. ‘If you’re trying to tell me something, just spit it out.’

  ‘The Slads think you know where she is.’

  ‘Why would I know a thing like that?’

  ‘They have a record of the marriage, Mr Marion.’

  Hugh Freyl liked women as much as David did, and the upright principles he’d betrayed to get David released were tied to the law, not to sex. Aloysia may have been the daughter of a schoolmaster who’d become a friend, but he’d known where he wanted this to go as soon as he met her at Lambert-St Louis Airport on her first trip to the Midwest.

  ‘Mississippi sidewheelers,’ she’d whispered into his ear even before saying ‘Hello’. All this happened a quarter of a century ago.

  ‘Sidewheelers? What about them?’

  ‘I read that they’ve become gambling boats,’ she said. ‘They paddle down the Mississippi. I want to gamble on one.’

  ‘I believe they are all moored now, Aloysia. Not even engines to drive the paddles. No gaming tables either, only slot machines and smoke. Although—’ He broke off. ‘There was a piece in the Post-Dispatch about a new venture that just might—’

  ‘I’m going to play roulette,’ she interrupted.

  She’d embraced him then, kissed him on the mouth.

  Hugh’s wife Rose had died the year before, an icy road, a moment’s distraction, her car head-on into a tree. Grief isn’t orderly. Emptiness, yes. Aimlessness, yes. All that’s at least half expected. But the crazed preoccupation with sex had come as a shock.

  The casino boat was called Maverick, and it was a floating slice of wedding cake right out of the movie; it even had red velvet plush and serious gamblers. But Aloysia lost again and again. Within an hour, she was as depressed and disappointed as she’d been excited when she set out. Hugh turned her attention to Maverick ’s famous restaurant. As they ate, he talked to her about David, knowing how very sexy talk of murderers can be. There really wasn’t any need for it; by the time they reached coffee, even the waiter could smell sex on her.

  ‘I want to play again,’ she said.

  ‘Not roulette.’

  ‘Everything on red.’

  ‘Aloysia, you will only lose. Why not a room upstairs instead?’

  ‘Here’s the deal. If I win, you fix it so I can bed this exciting murderer of yours as well as you.’

  ‘You would have to marry him to do that.’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘I am afraid so.’

  She considered a moment, then said dreamily, ‘Aloysia Gonzaga, patron saint of plagues and wife of a murderer. I like it. Promise me you agree. Promise?’ She put a hand on his thigh.

  ‘So you got lucky,’ David said to Hugh during their next prison lesson. ‘How come you’re telling me about it?’ David had just turned eighteen. Prison sex is power and release. Pleasure doesn’t come into it. For most inmates, a woman is Nirvana.

  ‘She won, David.’

  Hugh had taken the talk as foreplay. He wasn’t wrong, but by morning, she was already pressing him to fulfil his promise. She kept the pressure up, so hard – so insistently – that he said he’d tell David about it if for no other reason than to keep her quiet. She made him swear he would.

  ‘You play a game of roulette to get laid and I’m the bait?’ David said.

  Hugh was puzzled rather than shamed. ‘I seem to have lost all sense of proportion.’

  ‘What about conjugal visits?’

  ‘You cannot be taking the idea seriously.’

  ‘If you can get her in here, I want her.’

  ‘She walks with a limp. One leg is shorter than the other.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘David, this is not a good idea. She made it disagreeably clear that she enjoyed pressuring me into this.’

  ‘Conjugal visits or not?’

  How could Hugh hold back from David the only thing that gave him solace himself? Besides, maybe a wife on the outside would calm that explosive temperament. ‘I believe they now allow one every other month.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When what?’

  ‘How soon can you get her here?’

  Hugh made the arrangements and served as witness to the prison chaplain’s blessings. There were two conjugal visits before Aloysia returned to England. A correspondence carried on for months, growing more desultory on her side – more desperate on his – until she stopped responding at all. He wrote again and again, trying to rekindle her interest, amuse her, shame her, anything to get her back for another visit.

  He even exchanged a month’s supply of crack to get one of the guards to seek out a postcard of a Mississippi sidewheeler for him. He’d written the single word ‘Remember?’ on it, sent it to her in an envelope.

  He’d received no answer.

  Christina rang a bell beside her that brought attendants with a platter of shellfish and a small bottle of white Bordeaux; the sommelier poured it out with what David considered an irritating reverence. He wasn’t a picky eater, didn’t pay much attention to the taste of the fish, but the wine: for some reason it pleased him.

  ‘I presume your new wife doesn’t know about your old one,’ Christina said, setting down her fork.

  Prisoners learn to eat fast. David’s plate was empty. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Or the boy?’

  ‘What boy?’

  ‘You have a son.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘I gather Dr Gonzaga managed to confirm paternity.’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘The prison probably has your DNA on file.’ Christina studied him a minute. ‘I don’t suppose she’s going to show up now and complicate matters, is she?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good, good. Excellent. She’s important to the Slads. I’m sorry to say I don’t know why. What I do know is that they want you alive until they have some idea what happened to her. Or perhaps to some of her work. Hence the suspension of the contract on you.’

  ‘They don’t happen to operate a little local security company of some kind, do they?’

  Christina smiled. ‘You’ve noticed.’

  ‘Yellow logo? Round? A Lincoln’s head inside it.’

  ‘That’s the one. Sangamon Security.’

  David told her that one of them had warned him against a speed trap when he was pushing the Riley to its impressive 120 miles an hour and that a couple of them had intervened to keep him from getting arrested for a fight on the railroad tracks – even deposited him at a hospital to get patched up.

  ‘It’s quite touching, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘They want to make certain nothing bad happens to you. I gather that the Messrs Slad are fairly certain you’re hiding Dr Gonzaga. They don’t know you very well, do they?’

  David didn’t ask Christina how she’d come by her information. He’d learned for himself, back when he’d been looking for Hugh Freyl’s murderer, that the many Cold War secret services, CIA, KGB, MI6, had put themselves at the disposal of large corporations as soon as international amity made their personnel redundant by the thousands. After all, what were the spies of the world to do with their specialized training when governments needed so much less of it? And corporations were falling all over themselves to acquire it?

  The sommelier appeared with fresh glasses and a bottle wrapped in a napkin. ‘Mr Marion,’ Christina said then, ‘I need something solid, something well beyond Mr Zemanski. I need to get the men at the top not just the corporation: the Slads personally. Their worries about Dr Gonzaga tell me she’s deeply involved. Perhaps somebody she knows? Some professional contacts she has? Perhaps something in England? Work she’s done? Come back when you’ve got something I can use.’

  ‘Suppose I can’t find anything?’

  ‘That would be foolish.’

  David nodded and tasted the new wine.

  ‘You look puzzled, Mr Marion,’ Christina said.

  ‘This one doesn’t have a nasty wine taste either.’ She laughed. A rack of l
amb accompanied the wine. A second bottle came with cheeses and fruit, then cognac in snifters. It was midnight before he and Christina were ready to leave. ‘What about the papers?’ he asked her.

  ‘You didn’t give us much time,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure you’ll manage. Anything else, you let me know.’ She handed him an envelope, which he slipped into his breast pocket.

  43

  TIPTON COUNTY, TENNESSEE: Thursday morning

  Marina Rodriguez was the first female undertaker to practise in the Blow Pops capital of the world. She was a much-loved figure in the community – they even forgave her for marrying a Mexican – but the summer had been slow; she’d welcomed the floater that Dillon Effingham and his little brother Stonky found on the banks of the Mississippi.

  Ordinarily, the coroner of Tipton County would have collected the body-finding fee – set and regulated by the state of Tennessee – chucked the body back in the river and phoned a coroner further south in expectation of the agreed (if not statutory) fifty-dollar acknowledgement of a professional courtesy rendered. But Marina’s Uncle Bill was the coroner of Tipton County; she’d roasted him a whole pig for his fiftieth birthday. She’d invited everybody he loved, the best birthday he’d ever had, and he was deeply grateful.

  Uncle Bill turned the floater – and its burial fee – over to her as a thank-you.

  The law says unknown dead people are to be held for thirty days to give relatives a chance to find them and claim them. That’s why the body had still been lying in Marina’s storeroom when the Springfield Police Department issued a Missing Persons Alert for Aloysia Gonzaga. The Illinois alerts pages carried photographs. They gave details: age, mid-forties; height, approximately five foot eight; eyes, brown; hair, brown with gold highlights; teeth, professionally perfect; distinguishing characteristics, one leg shorter than the other.

  Marina hadn’t noted the eye colour because the eyes were long gone by the time she got the body, and there was no way to make out features on the face to match a photograph on the Net. But she’d taken note of what she could, the height, teeth, one short leg, the hair. She’d liked those gold highlights, even on a corpse; she’d put them in her own hair at once. Which is to say she had all she needed to identify the dead woman, and yet it was hardly any wonder that she didn’t. There are well over a hundred thousand active Missing Persons cases in America. Of these, something like fifteen thousand will never be heard from again. Besides, Missing Persons alerts tend to stay in the state where they’re issued, and Marina was in Tennessee, two states south of Illinois. On the other side of the Mississippi as well.

  As for the thirty days, that was up not long after the storms hit Springfield. They hadn’t touched Tennessee; like everybody else in Tipton County, Marina read about them, felt relieved not to be involved and went back to work. She was meticulous in her job. She’d begun that thirtieth day doing the paperwork for the county’s indigent burial programme; she accompanied the floater to an open field not far from where Blow Pops first went on sale, conducted a simple ceremony, watched the coffin lowered into the ground beneath a numbered stake.

  But the media shut-down in Springfield, the military occupation and the terrifying rumours: the entire world was glued to news in any and all formats. Marina was only one of billions who’d spent days trawling the Net for something, anything that would give her a peep into what was really going on.

  She happened across Aloysia Gonzaga listed as one of the ‘Missing Persons in Illinois’ just by chance.

  44

  SPRINGFIELD: Thursday noon

  At eight in the morning, the Greyhound bus from Chicago deposited David near the town of Sherman, Illinois, just north of Springfield. He walked for an hour along the old Route 55 before he reached the road block for the outer perimeter around town.

  Four soldiers guarded it. One, a blonde – hair in a tight bun at the back of her head – sat behind a desk under an open tent. Soldiers on either side of her held M16s in their arms. Another soldier watched from an army truck in front of the cordon that cut off the road. The scaremongering rumours of Springfield’s disease showed their power here. Money poured in, but people who might otherwise have volunteered to help, found they had commitments elsewhere. Barely a handful of volunteers waited at the road block, most of them from the Salvation Army.

  David fitted right in.

  ‘Padre?’ the desk soldier said to him. He wore the turned-around collar that Helen insisted he take with him. His clothes were baggy and worn, courtesy of Galesburg’s charity shops. He hadn’t slept since he left a day and a half ago, and the weariness showed.

  ‘I understand that Springfield is in need of spiritual aid,’ he said.

  ‘You go in there, you ain’t coming out,’ said the soldier.

  ‘I do not wish to come out. I wish to go in.’

  ‘Got any documentation on you?’

  David handed her the contents of the envelope Christina had given him in Boston. He’d studied it as best he could on the bus. It said he was Jeremiah Michaeljohn, born in Devon, England, a man of God with a Master of Theology from Oklahoma Baptist University; his present post was Director of Bright Hope, Nagaland.

  ‘Nagaland?’ said the soldier. ‘Where’s that?’

  David had never heard of it. For all he knew, some Galleas technician had made it up on the spot. ‘West Africa,’ he said, ‘off the Ivory Coast.’ He didn’t know where the Ivory Coast was either.

  ‘What do you do there?’

  David’s papers did tell him that. ‘I train poor people in Piggery.’

  ‘You . Jesus. I got to pat you down. Search that bag.’ David handed over a bag as worn as his clothes. It contained a Bible, some underwear, two shirts, another pair of trousers and a somewhat less-worn black suit for official duties.

  Half a mile further on, at a road block on the inner perimeter, he repeated his story.

  The smell hit him first. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what was causing it, but a mere thirty-six hours was enough to make him forget how intense it was – and it was worse now.

  In a single night, the flood had created a whole year’s worth of garbage.

  Garbage spilled out over front yards, higher-than-the-head heaps of it for block after block, whole housefuls sodden and smeared with mud: stoves, washing machines, air conditioning units; mattresses, sofas, lamps, chests of drawers; windows and window frames; plasterboard ripped off with wallpaper still intact. Nothing reeks like hundreds of broken refrigerators that have spent days in the sun. Human shit may be the worst smelling shit there is, and the pressure of the flood had turned toilets into geysers that belched it out; but the stench of rotting meat overwhelmed it. Flies and wasps hovered and buzzed in swarms. People moved slowly, grown-ups and children both, adding item after item to the gigantic heaps, handkerchiefs or masks across their noses and mouths to keep out the smell.

  Everything had to go, and the clean-up had barely begun. On the luckiest streets, construction trucks with vast jaws – bucket excavators, shovel excavators – tore into the heaps of detritus to deposit mouthful after mouthful into massive container trucks that ferried their loads to long-deserted landfill sites reopened for the emergency.

  As for the military, nobody was attempting to make its presence look like anything other than occupation. Soldiers were everywhere. Foot patrols threaded their way through the streets with automatic weapons in their arms, and masks to keep out the smell beneath their wraparound sunglasses. Vehicle patrols drove carefully along roads that could abruptly turn into no more than slabs of tarmac ripped out of the ground by the force of water alone. Nobody in uniform took up a shovel to help. Why should they? The quarantine meant that there was no media to watch them doing good deeds. Residents grumbled among themselves, but they were too disoriented, too tired, too scared to do anything beyond grumble.

  As David approached the centre of town, private security firms began to dominate, each one easily identified by its logo as well as the guns strap
ped to their legs. Janus Secure stood in formation around Springfield’s New Capitol, built more than a hundred years ago, tallest Capitol building in America, far taller than Becky’s beloved Old Capitol, more beautiful too, more wedding cake even than a Mississippi sidewheeler, wings out to either side, square of columns rising to circle of columns, then to tier of arched windows, then to zinc and stained-glass cupola. A bronze Lincoln stood in front – unhappy, skinny Abe in a rumpled vest and a coat that hung badly – looking down on four mercenaries, one stationed at each corner of his pedestal. Blackwater troops surrounded the Illinois State Supreme Court and the Illinois General Assembly. DyneCorp guarded the premises of Herndon Freyl & Zemanski, the most prominent law firm in town. Banks, brokers, businesses, as well as other major law firms: mercenaries were on guard wherever the army wasn’t.

  The streets were cleaner around here. Most of the detritus was gone. But the roar of machinery was deafening. On some streets, flood water gushed out of the sides of buildings like torrents through spillways in a dam; on others, huge mobile pumps sucked water out through blue hoses as thick as a man’s chest.

  David listened for ambulances, his mind on what he’d read online at O’Hare, as well as what Christina and Quack had told him. He didn’t hear any. It didn’t occur to him that they’d been silenced during the night when military intelligence realized that their increasing frequency carried its own message.

  According to the World Health Organization, there are specific steps to be taken in an epidemic:

  1. Isolate patients

  2. Clean all surfaces touched by patients and burn all clothing

  3. Increase garbage collection and institute hygienic disposal mechanisms for all bedding

  4. Conduct a massive public education campaign to acquaint people with the signs and symptoms of the disease and instruct them in home care

  The first three steps were just plain impossible in a flood-devastated town like Springfield. As for education, how can you educate people about a disease when you don’t have any idea what it is? A group of army epidemiologists taking samples at Memorial Hospital decided to name it Springfield Fever, if for no other reason than to give themselves as well as the government and the military a sense that progress was being made.