The Blue Death

by Joan Brady

  In addition to their usual brief, the security officers were to listen for signs of dissent. Becky had withdrawn the Coalition’s suit against UCAI. She’d had no choice: publicly owned utilities were now against the law. Even so, there was a lot of anger about the idea of a corporate-driven regulatory agency with the power to enforce privatization. Some members of her Coalition of Concerned Citizens had joined with Greenpeace and various other environmental groups to form an international opposition.

  No such people had been invited this evening. The two security officers wandering through the guests caught only grumbling on the subject:

  ‘. water prices doubled in the single month of December . ’

  ‘. pipes on Washington Boulevard broken for weeks . . .’

  ‘. the stench of sewage again . ’

  Mostly though, gossip concentrated on the new baby and Becky’s vibrant health: not even a hand at the elbow now, a gait as steady as it ever had been. The only talk with guts to it concentrated on the uneasy regrouping of opinion about the baby’s father. David Marion had fathered a male heir for the Freyls. That changed everything. Becky’s tongue was no longer acid on the subject of her grandson-in-law, which left the elite of the west side alone with a puzzled, defeated resentment. But it would pass. Shifts of power in the town were common. Shifts of allegiance went with them. Meantime, there was Becky’s flowing champagne, toasts to the newborn, plates of mutton and salmon, black ties and glittering jewellery.

  Towards midnight God made a second contribution. He eased the storm so fireworks could begin across the Freyl lawns in isolated flashes of light that exploded into a criss-cross of fire fountains with perfect spheres floating above. A canopy outside protected David and Helen from the cold while they watched.

  ‘It’s your baby they’re celebrating,’ Helen said to him, leaning into the warmth of his arms.

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  ‘Ours then.’

  ‘He doesn’t even look like me.’

  ‘Oh, David darling, fortunately nobody looks like you.’

  David’s face had arrived at an Elephant Man stage, but it would heal. Faces do. Helen was uncomfortably aware that she rather liked him as a gargoyle off a church. There’s something vulnerable about a gargoyle. ‘You didn’t do any of this to protect me and Grandma, did you?’ she said, not irritated, only amused.

  He shrugged. ‘Too complicated.’ Not really true. The deal David had brokered was blindingly simple: turn Jimmy over to Christina with sufficient evidence against UCAI for her to force the Slads to their knees and wrest control of IPWAC for herself. The choice she’d presented them with was stark. Somebody had to take the fall for Springfield Fever. The only two candidates were UCAI and Jimmy Zemanski. David’s reward? Removal of the UCAI contract on his life. If he told Helen about that, it would scare her, and she wasn’t altogether rational when she got scared.

  But she wasn’t so easily put off either. ‘Come on, David, damn you. Answer me. Did you do any of this for Grandma and me?’

  ‘Some of it.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘I don’t like being pushed around.’

  Helen removed her gloves and found the postcard she’d been carrying with her since she’d uncovered it in Aloysia Gonzaga’s house: a Mississippi sidewheeler and the single word ‘Remember?’ where the address should be. The fireworks burst into chrysanthemums and peonies, croisettes, pearls, spinners, swirls. In the light they gave, she showed it to him.

  ‘I figure you were just about twenty when you wrote this,’ she said.

  He took it from her, looked it over, nodded. ‘How’d I miss it?’

  ‘She kept it in a math book. Nobody looks in math books. Except me. Jesus, though, I searched that damned place – up, down, inside out – for any trace of a laptop, iPad, cell phone. I was certain there’d be something about you on one of them.’

  ‘Possible.’

  ‘You took them?’

  He nodded again. ‘She wasn’t a good person.’

  ‘You only kill bad people?’

  ‘I try to discriminate.’ He glanced at the card once more, frowned, looked down at her. ‘It’s a limitation in a Freyl, isn’t it?’

  ‘Killing only bad people?’ She stroked his arm. ‘I imagine it’s a limitation you’re stuck with.’

  A final rocket opened out into a gold shell and disintegrated into stars that drifted to the ice-covered ground below.

  ‘You don’t think . ’ David began, then paused. ‘I’m not sure a man as rich as me should have limitations. You think maybe you could teach me to overcome them?’

  Helen studied the lopsided cheeks – the eyes were almost back to the eyes she’d known – then laughed delightedly. ‘Now that is really going to be fun.’

  They went back inside as the storm built up again, the party ended and the guests went out to their cars to brave their way home through the ice.

  Acknowledgements

  A book with a disease as a central character calls for medical expertise that I just don’t have, and my first thanks go to Dr Tim Manser and Dr Tony Maggs; between them they built me a bug to fit my symptoms and provided many fascinating medical and microbiological details along the way. A good number of sociological ones too. For the same reasons, I want to thank my niece Tanya Syfers, who has a wonderful eye for detail.

  I needed help in other techniques too. My cousin Eleanor Barrett, ex-prosecutor – who read the manuscript in more versions than anybody could have wanted to – made many excellent suggestions on the law. So did my correspondent Ellen Shaffer, who came through my sister Judy Brady; both of them shed truly scary lights into some of the dark corners of international profit-making. As for city government, my dear friend Sylvia Sutherland, five-term mayor of Peterborough, Ontario, did what she could to give me some idea what goes on there. And thanks also to Kasimierz Debek and Piotr Buzdygan, who were endlessly patient in working out ways to construct a canal using labourers instead of machines.

  I owe so much to my superb editor Suzanne Baboneau that I can’t quite tie it down. I also owe a very great deal to my persevering agent John Saddler. As to my son Alexander Masters and his partner Flora Dennis: how can I ever thank them? They read, suggested, discussed, analysed, supported, encouraged throughout, even spent a gloriously drunken Christmas working on pages with me.

  But no list of thanks could be complete without a nod to the South Hams District Council, whose relentless attacks gave me practical lessons in how to hate and whose name fits so neatly as a ‘facility’ in the singularly unpleasant US penal system. Nor can any list be complete without a final thankyou to Nigel Butt, who rescued me from their clutches.