by Joan Brady
‘She made a lot of contacts fucking Hugh Freyl.’
David nodded again. ‘Somebody at the university suggested Cawkerville for supplies of any plants she wanted to smoke. That was back in January. In March, at just about the time UCAI was initiating secret talks with you – so many discussions about how to pressure the Midwest into privatizing – Cawkerville hosted the first outbreak of Springfield Fever.’
Jimmy jolted partway out of the fake Eames, fell heavily back into it; the chair squealed in protest. ‘You’re kidding me. That was real? I didn’t believe a word of it. Don’t believe a word of it now. She said—’
‘“I have incontrovertible evidence”,’ David interrupted, reading from the sheet in front of him, ‘“that UCAI has stolen my patent. I can now only assume that Springfield’s plans to privatize bodes ill for the future of the town’s water supply.”’ David ran his hand again over the pages in front of him. ‘I really didn’t expect to find a treasure like this. She’d taken samples at Cawkerville. Their water supply was swarming with the microscopic whatever that she’d created, patented and tried to flog to the British secret services: Springfield Fever.’
Jimmy glanced at the mess that had been David’s face, winced despite himself, leaned back in the fake Eames so he didn’t have to look at it. ‘She emailed me about that too. You can’t believe anything she says. Nobody could. She had a truly weird imagination.’
‘Her notes record interviews with Cawkerville people who told her that they ran a regular supply to Francis Slad. Apparently they were quite proud of the contact. Protective of it too, mentioned it only because she was so concerned about their health.’
Jimmy shook his head. ‘That’s the dumbest part of all. She kills her rats in a nice little lab in far-off Oxford. If UCAI is experimenting on Cawkerville – and making plans for Springfield – they’re going to need their own supply. For all I know, they’ll need truckloads of it. Somebody’s got to manufacture it. Come on. Gimme a break. Who are they going to get to do that? Some outfit in Peoria? You have to have special licenses for that kind of work.’
‘In America, yes,’ David said.
‘My point exactly.’
‘Ever been to Gary, Indiana?’
David sketched for Jimmy what Jane Doe had explained to him from behind a mesh screen. As she’d told him, US pharmaceuticals tended to be made where profits were highest and wages lowest: India, Venezuela, Egypt, Pakistan. Workers skimmed off drugs for sale to customers on the Net and to private contractors like Medical Services Direct. They also ran small, unregulated labs to do jobs for special customers. Manufacturing Aloysia’s patented cryptosporidium was just another order to fill, and importing it was just another shipment. Medical Direct’s courier picked it up at Gary International Airport along with supplies for South Hams and the rest of UCAI’s prisons.
When David stopped talking, Jimmy stared at him a moment, then got up. He sat down. Got up again, bolted to the downstairs toilet – black porcelain, heated slate floor, cost a fortune – and threw up, leaned on his haunches, then threw up again. David seemed to be dozing as before when he managed to stagger back to the living room. Jimmy had been very little when he saw Lon Chaney in the old black and white movie of Frankenstein ; he’d had nightmares for weeks about that shambling wreck.
It took him a while to control his voice. ‘They told me it wasn’t cholera,’ he said at last.
‘I know.’
‘They said just to sit on it.’
‘I know,’ David repeated.
‘They’d thought, just a little outbreak of something. Very mild. Stomach flu. Gastroenteritis. Nobody’d ever know. The pipeline from the aquifer – the pumping stations too – they don’t show up on utility maps. All it’d take was a little electrical blip in the control room, and nobody could ever trace the entry point. They hadn’t counted on the flood. Funny thing is, they didn’t need an outbreak, but they’d already done whatever they’d done. It was too late.’
‘That’s what they said? Something “very mild”?’
‘Just enough to scare people. That was the idea, but I never got any impression – I swear to you – that it would be so—’
‘What about the “accident”?’ David interrupted.
‘“Accident”? Oh, that. Those twins . There was talk of some hose that sprung a leak or something. It didn’t make much sense to me, but then I didn’t really want to dwell on how they were going about it. I’ve never been sure what gastroenteritis—’ He broke off, took in a breath, and the words ripped out of him. ‘You are going to kill me, aren’t you?’
David sighed. ‘You know what the real pity is? I told Helen that if I beat you to death, I’d shove those glasses up your prick first. I’d enjoy that. It breaks my heart to tell you that neither is an option for a man of means like me. If I hadn’t found all these glorious papers of Aloysia’s, I might have had to exert a little gentlemanly force, but this material . ’ David took in a breath of appreciation. ‘It’s far more than I’d figured I’d get by sticking your hand in the kitchen grinder – far more than I needed. Kill you though? No. I’ve brokered a deal, and I never go back on a deal.’
‘A deal?’
David replaced Aloysia’s pages in his briefcase, snapped it shut, took hold of it and pulled himself painfully out of the Eames. ‘Quite frankly, I don’t see how anybody could swallow the idea of you masterminding as ruthless and daring a plan as poisoning a town to scare it into privatizing its water, much less having the guts to carry—’
‘I had nothing to do with this. Nothing!’’
‘Doesn’t matter. There’ll be plenty on your iPad to build a case around you. Aloysia’s emails to you certainly look like proof that you knew about the “incontrovertible evidence” and her Cawkerville investigations. The stupidest thing you did was to forward the information to the Slads. It upset them. They don’t like being upset, and then they couldn’t find the woman to mitigate the damage she might do. That was another upset. A bad one. Since you knew all this stuff, they had to keep you on board until she showed up. They had to keep me around too, just in case I was hiding her somewhere. Now that she’s dead, they have no use for either of us.’ David paused. ‘Or rather they have no use for you. Fortunately, I found a way to make myself valuable to them.’
‘I swear to Christ, I had nothing—’ Jimmy broke off, tears rolling down his cheeks. ‘You’ve got to believe me. I wouldn’t do anything like that. I couldn’t.’
David was also learning that rich men don’t have to take responsibility for what they do. ‘I’m just looking into this for a colleague, Mr Mayor,’ he said, patting the briefcase. ‘I’m afraid nobody cares whether I believe you or not.’
61
SPRINGFIELD: A few minutes later
It was David, briefcase in hand, who opened the door to two policemen. He nodded towards the living room as he left.
The two cops found Jimmy slumped in the fake Eames, tears still rolling down his cheeks.
‘Mr Zemanski?’
Jimmy looked up. ‘Greg?’ he said in astonishment. Tall, gawky Greg owed him. Getting the kid off a charge of rape – rape of an underage boy at that – hadn’t been easy. Jimmy even managed to get the record erased, and now Greg had reached the level of Detective Sergeant. The work had been a personal favour; Greg’s uncle was Commissioner and an important client of Jimmy’s. Of course, he was one of the clients whose account had helped swell Jimmy’s election fund, but neither he nor his nephew knew anything about that.
‘How the hell did you get in here?’ Jimmy went on.
‘Door was open.’
‘Well, fuck it all, however you got in, you have no idea how glad I am to see you, but why in the name of Christ didn’t you take David Marion? He was right here. You know he killed Aloysia Gonzaga because she was going to expose him, and she—’
‘Mr James Zemanski,’ Greg interrupted, ‘I have a warrant for your arrest for—’
‘What!’ Jimmy crie
d, only half hearing the words.
‘—the murder of Morris Kline.’
‘For the murder of —? What is this? Some kind of joke? You’re out of your fucking mind. Where’s your uncle? Call your uncle.’
‘You have the right to remain silent . ’
David’s revelations had shaken Jimmy to the core, but now that David was gone, the idea that Jimmy himself could be charged with responsibility for the Springfield epidemic was too ludicrous to be terrifying. It would never play in court. Morris Kline? Well, yes, it just could – except for its ramifications. UCAI’s security guy Huxtable had given the orders for Morris’s Chicago trip as well as the rumour that the poor bastard had taken a bribe. Maybe Jimmy couldn’t prove that. Besides, the more he thought about it, the more he thought Huxtable had to be NSA and the NSA survives everything. Jimmy couldn’t kid himself into believing he’d ever see Aloysia’s ‘legacy’ again, but Aloysia’s patent, her emails to him, the very fact that he’d forwarded them to the Slads: together they could lay bare something that would shake the world. UCAI would sink in shit. No way were the big boys of government going to let that happen.
So what was really going on in this arrest?
Greg’s hands on Jimmy’s shoulder – steadying him to be cuffed – abruptly brought back a childhood Sunday school lesson. The verses appear in Leviticus, a difficult book, a lawyer’s book. First there’s something about a laying on of hands, just like Greg’s, that transforms the innocent into the bearer of all transgressions – Jimmy strained to remember the words – ‘and the goat Azazel shall take upon him all the sins’, and something, something, we shall ‘kill the goat’ and ‘dip our fingers in his blood’.
There’s just so much a person can take. The pain in Jimmy’s head began as a flash of that goat’s blood. He’d never felt a pain like it, fire and ice that exploded into a pounding agony behind his left eye. The room around him tilted sideways. Eames chairs, Murano bowl with David’s cigarettes: all slithered towards his peripheral vision. The final words of Greg’s Miranda caution came out as an animal’s yammering.
Jimmy tried to say he really was the innocent in all this, but his words too came out as nothing but yammering. And yet nothing seemed unreal, not the pain, not the yammering, not even finding himself suspended somewhere near the ceiling while he watched the cops support him out of the house. They were gentle – he appreciated it too – but his right foot dragged behind him like the club end of a tree trunk. It didn’t even seem unreal to remain suspended at ceiling height during the entire time it took them to transport him to the squad car, drive him to the police station, put him into a cell there. For the next four hours, he lay in a foetal position in a police cell while the James Zemanski he’d known for forty-nine years dissolved into the iron cot beneath him.
Towards dawn, the charges against him escalated abruptly: bioterrorism and the murder of eight hundred and twenty-three citizens of Springfield, Illinois. Early morning newscasts announced the charges; they added a discussion of rumours flying about that Mayor Zemanski had suffered a cerebrovascular ‘incident’ during his rendition to Guantanamo Bay for safeguarding until his trial.
62
ST LOUIS: Late November
Aloysia Gonzaga? The coroner’s official ruling was ‘Accidental Death’.
As for the Marriage certificate that proved David’s bigamy – if nothing else – somehow it got lost in the shuffle of papers from the active file on David Marion to safekeeping in the evidence room. Since it wasn’t available for forensic examination, it could just as well have been a fake. If anybody had followed up the case – nobody did – they’d have found a copy of the marriage in the Knox County Recorder’s Office, but why would anybody try? All that was left as evidence against this member of the Freyl family were letters from a lovelorn prisoner and a birth certificate naming that prisoner as the father of a child who’d died.
Nor was any trace ever found of the papers David took away from Jimmy’s house. Not that anybody had any reason whatever to look for them. And yet those papers did exactly what Jimmy thought they would: they shook the world, even if only a select few were aware of it at the time.
As Jimmy himself was on his way to Guantanamo, fevered negotiations were going on in high places. The announcement of the result came in late November. Christina Haggarty held a press conference in the Follaton Tower with Francis and Sebastian Slad at her side. Behind them, a huge screen held the simple initials: IPWAC.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said to the cameras, ‘the events in Springfield, Illinois, make a terrifying and tragic episode in United States history. Nothing can repair the damage done to the people of that city or the scar left behind on the American soul. If any good has come out of this terrible evil, it is that at long last we have learned our lesson. It’s a simple enough lesson. Water is our greatest resource, and it is profoundly vulnerable. We must protect it.’
A murmur of assent went up from the gathering of reporters.
‘But protection brings us up against a dilemma: the old way of doing things versus the harsh necessities of the modern world. Not until the Twin Towers did we grasp how imminent the threat of terrorism is. Not until Springfield have we . ’ She paused, shut her eyes, took in a breath. ‘Nearly a thousand people had to pay with their lives to make us understand that bioterrorism is as great a threat as bombs, artillery, airplanes. We are just going to have to give up some of our ancient rights to ensure our survival here and now.’
The flash of cameras was almost continual. ‘So how do we go about protecting ourselves? Not an easy answer. It took years of negotiation to establish an International Monetary Fund to protect our financial system and an International Atomic Energy Agency to protect our nuclear resources. They not only do their job supremely well, they serve us as a template. We at Galleas International and our new partners at UCAI have joined with the US government, the Canadian government, the European Union and a dozen of our most valued major enterprises to form an entirely new world entity: The International Protection of Water Consortium.’
She gestured at the screen behind her and the logo IPWAC. ‘Hereafter, no citizen of the countries in which this regulatory agency operates will have to fear the inadequate regulation that our old-fashioned, inadequately protected, publicly owned systems failed so sadly to deliver in Springfield. As of today, all public utilities will begin dismantlement.’
She bowed her head. ‘Now I come to James Zemanski. At nine-thirty yesterday evening, this man died of the massive stroke he’d suffered en route to Guantanamo Bay.’
Pandemonium broke out in the lobby of Follaton Tower. Nobody had heard this news, and it ensured headlines on front pages for an announcement that otherwise might have languished in financial sections. Security guards needed a five full minutes to restore order. Only then did Christina go on.
‘The loss of any human life – even his – is sad. But in his case what’s saddest of all is that we’ll never know why he did what he did. We’ll never know how he did it either. We can only guess and fear. Terrorism comes in all forms and sometimes – as in the case of James Zemanski – in the person of somebody we thought we knew. Somebody we trusted. That really hurts. We trusted him.’ She paused again, took in another breath, then looked directly at the cameras.
‘The International Protection of Water Consortium is not only the best way we can protect ourselves, it is the only way. We can’t afford another Zemanski. Ladies and gentlemen, we simply cannot afford it.’
63
SPRINGFIELD: March
When Louis XIII was born, cannon resounded throughout Paris. When an heir to Spain is born, there’s a salvo of twenty-one guns. But fireworks celebrated America’s Lincoln on his bicentennial, and they were Becky’s choice for the first male Freyl in sixty years.
The ice storm was God’s contribution. Ice storms belong in Canada. Illinois doesn’t have them any more than it has last summer’s droughts and floods. A sandwich of cold air wit
h a filling of warm air means that snow starts as regular snow, melts, then super- cools: too damned cold even to freeze. Everything it touches gets an even coat of ice all around, not frost, ice as clear as plate glass and gloriously beautiful. Dangerous too: a quarter of an inch adds five hundred pounds of weight. Branches on massive trees snap like twigs. Electricity pylons crash to the ground.
But the famous Freyl lawns were lit up like a fairground as the weather moved in. A string quartet played in the dining room, visible to the many guests but muted. In the living room, three servers stood behind Becky’s mahogany table, one carving crowns of well-aged mutton flown in from Keens Steakhouse in New York, another at work on game birds piled high, the third over a whole wild salmon. Everybody who was anybody milled about in the conservatory with champagne flutes. Security was heavy. A couple of sleek young men in black – headphones, earpieces, expressionless faces – made no attempt to look discreet. They were part of the celebration, a presence that heightened the importance of the event as well as the guests’ excitement and sense of privilege.
The security had nothing to do with Becky; she didn’t need it any more. Nobody was worried about the new mayor of Springfield either, nor even about the governor of the State of Illinois. The three people here that other people might want to kill were international royalty: Christina Haggarty, CEO of the newly formed GalleasUCAI and Director of the newly formed IPWAC – maybe a woman in form but, like Elizabeth I, every inch a king – and her two vassals, Francis and Sebastian Slad, Joint Chairmen of the Boards of both organizations.
