The Plague Tales

by Ann Benson

  The seal said: HIS HOLINESS CLEMENT VI, BISHOP OF AVIGNON.

  Eight

  Janie inserted the plastic card key into the slot in the painted metal door to her hotel suite. As soon as she passed through the door, she dropped her briefcase on the floor and flopped down on a chair. She leaned back, stretching her long frame almost straight out. She dropped one arm down limp beside her and draped the other one over her forehead. Her position was one of total submission to the frustrating events of the day.

  “Go ahead, world, beat me up,” she said to Caroline, who followed her into the room and closed the door after herself. “I could use a few more bruises.”

  Caroline immediately removed the wrapped circle of plastic from her purse and put it in Janie’s refrigerator. “Wallowing in self-pity just a little bit, are we?” she said as she sat down across the small table from Janie.

  “Absolutely,” Janie said, her arm still covering her eyes. “Under the circumstances it’s the right thing to do.” A moment later she sat up, rubbed her eyes, and sighed. She looked at the stack of papers on the table before her and said, “Well, we might as well figure out where the missing samples are from.”

  Leafing through them, she found both the grid map and the owner’s list. She checked the list of the forty-eight accounted-for samples against the total list and made a separate list of those she determined were missing. Then she compared that list to the grid map and marked a small circular frowning face at each of the locations for the missing samples.

  “Of course,” Janie said. “They’re from all over London. Why did I think I’d find a nice neat row of missing samples?”

  Caroline looked over her shoulder. “Ignorance? Stupidity? Wishful thinking?”

  “All that and more,” Janie said. “There’s no logical order to them. I guess whoever moved the tubes around just took any old six and put them someplace else.”

  “Someplace inconvenient, I’ll bet, the way things seem to be going,” Caroline said.

  Janie put the papers back on the table and rubbed her eyes again. With her elbows on the tabletop she rested her face in her hands for a few moments. “I can’t let this get me down,” she said when she straightened back up again. “I’m going to start making the calls so we can dig new ones immediately. We won’t need to repeat the paperwork. A verbal okay should suffice on the second samples.”

  Caroline was surprised. “Are you sure you want to do that?” she said. “Why don’t you wait until you hear from your friend before you start repeating what we’ve already done?”

  Caroline picked up the list of owners and scanned through, noting which ones Janie had checked. She made a little frown as she read it. “Two of these owners were difficult to convince,” she said. “We might not get a second shot from either of them. But thank God that last one isn’t missing. I can just see us going back to that old man again saying, ‘Pardon me, Mr. Sarin, but do you remember that sample of dirt we stole from you? Well, I’m sorry to tell you this, but we’ve got to steal another one.’ Not to mention that one trip out on that field in the middle of the night was quite enough for me in this lifetime. What a spooky place.”

  Janie concurred. “It was, indeed,” she said. “But you know what? Even though I didn’t get what I wanted from him, I kind of liked that old guy. He was very sweet while he was turning us down.” She pushed away from the table and tilted the chair back, one arm folded across her chest, and chewed the end of a pencil. “I wonder what his story is. He lives alone in that old cottage, just the dog to keep him company. Seems too strange to have a wife or kids, don’t you think?”

  “I didn’t see any pictures that looked like they might be family. I did see one of a woman and a boy, though, and it looked kind of old fashioned, maybe from the forties. It was black and white and the woman had that kind of rolled-up hair and the stumpy heels. Could have been him and his mother.”

  “Maybe. He seemed slightly retarded, I think. Maybe he never got married.”

  “Slightly something. I don’t know if I would say retarded. Slow, maybe. But something’s not quite right.”

  Before Janie could come to a conclusion about just what it was that set Robert Sarin apart from the rest of his species, the phone rang. She leapt up and answered it after the first ring.

  “Hello?” she said anxiously.

  A male voice said, “You’d better be careful, or I might get the impression that you’re eager to hear from me.”

  She could almost hear him smiling over the phone. “Bruce?” she said.

  “Yes, Bruce.”

  “Did you find them?”

  He chuckled. “I’m fine, and how are you?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Forgive me my anxiety. I’m fine too. And I am glad to hear from you.”

  “You’re about to be gladder. I have in front of me a shipping manifest listing six metal tubes, each one meter in length.”

  “That’s wonderful!” Janie said gleefully. “Where are they?”

  “Well, that’s the sticky part. I’m not exactly sure. They could be in one of two places. We have two long-term storage facilities, one in Manchester, and one in Leeds. The manifest just says they left here and things were being shipped to both places, but not specifically where those items went. I have calls in to both places already, and I expect to hear back by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”

  “Not today?” she said, her disappointment obvious.

  “Maybe today, but I’m not sure. But it will definitely be no later than tomorrow. Can you be patient just a bit longer?”

  She sighed and slumped slightly in the chair. “I don’t suppose I have a lot of choice. We need those six tubes. We set up a grid of dig sites that’s six rows by nine rows, so we could drop a row of six on either end and still have a valid sample. But we didn’t collect them by rows. It was a lot more random than that, mostly depending on whether or not the paperwork for a particular site was done, so they got stored in no particular order. The missing ones are from all over the grid, so we either have to get the originals or take new ones. Caroline was just telling me that two of the owners were difficult about the first samples, so I think it would make sense to wait one more day to avoid having to approach them again.”

  “Sounds complicated. I guess if I were you I would wait too.”

  “Unfortunately, that leaves us twiddling our thumbs.”

  Bruce laughed. “Didn’t you know that thumb twiddling is illegal in London? The lord mayor finds it highly offensive. There’s an entire ministry of bureaucrats who do nothing but make sure that no thumb twiddling occurs within the city limits.”

  “Why am I not surprised? There seems to be a ministry of everything here.”

  “Well, perhaps I could help you avoid the pitfalls of ennui. Have you seen the British Museum yet?”

  “I haven’t seen anything but the handle of a soil plugger. We’ve been too busy to do any sightseeing. We took all our samples in four days.”

  “Wow,” Bruce said.

  “Wow is right. I was pretty sore the second and third days. I’m not used to doing all that bending.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen the museum myself in a while, so why don’t we go together tonight? I can pretty much assure you that there’ll be no bending required. Then we can have a drink or maybe even dinner afterward and catch up a bit.”

  She hesitated before answering, wondering if their association should be kept strictly professional. But the invitation seemed sincere, and Bruce was a very attractive man. Loosen up, Janie, she told herself. “Hold on a minute,” she said. She placed one hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered to Caroline, “Would you mind being left alone this evening?”

  Caroline raised her eyebrows slightly and shook her head no.

  Janie took her hand off the mouthpiece and said, “I think I’d like that.”

  “Good,” he said. “It’ll be fun. Why don’t I get you about five?”

  She looked at the clock; it was three
-thirty. Time enough to make myself presentable, she thought. “Sounds good,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

  “What’s the story?” Caroline said after Janie had hung up the phone. “That sounded like a very friendly conversation, especially toward the end. I assume that means it was good news.”

  “It was. He found out that the tubes were sent to one of two places, and he’ll know tomorrow where they are.”

  “Great!” Caroline said. “Oh, boy, what a relief! But what does that have to do with my being left alone this evening?”

  “That’s where it gets better,” Janie said, grinning. “He’s taking me out tonight.”

  “Good deal,” Caroline said. “Come to London to get data, end up getting a date too.”

  “I haven’t been on a date in almost twenty years. I’m not sure I’ll remember what to do.”

  “You’ll do fine. It’ll all come back to you after the first five minutes.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Janie and Bruce stood over a glass cabinet in a dimly lit room on the second floor of the British Museum. A cloth cover was draped over the top of the cabinet, on which was written, Please lift cover to view document. Kindly replace cover when finished viewing.

  As she lifted the cloth, Janie said, “These Brits! Always polite, even when they’re telling you what to do.”

  “Etiquette is the national pastime here.”

  “I was beginning to get that idea.”

  As she held up the cloth, Bruce read the placard next to the exhibit. “Letter from Pope Clement VI to King Edward III written during the Black Death, 1348, concerning a papal representative being sent to the English court to help protect the royal family from bubonic plague.”

  The parchment was browned with age, and the ink quite faded. Janie could make out a few of the words, but not enough to read it. “Wow,” she said. “That thing is old.”

  “Really old,” Bruce said, replacing the cloth. “That was one of the things that took me the longest to adjust to when I first came over here. Everything is so ancient.”

  “Well, you come from California, don’t you?” Janie asked.

  “You remember that?” he said.

  “I remember bits and pieces, here and there. I have to say, though, my memory’s just not what it used to be.”

  “Mine either,” Bruce said. “But, yes, I’m from California. Los Angeles. It’s the polar opposite of England in almost every way. Oh, there’s some old stuff from when the Spanish settled, but nothing like what there is here. And everything is small here too. Much smaller than in the States. People were smaller when London was built. You’re from Massachusetts, aren’t you?”

  “Still am,” she said. “I live in a small town on the western end of the state. I’m about a hundred miles from Boston. We have some pretty old stuff there, a few seventeenth-century houses. It’s quaint, typically New England; a nice old Main Street area with buildings from the early nineteen hundreds.”

  They wandered on, exchanging observations about the various exhibits and general comments about their lives; eventually they came to a room of massive Egyptian pieces. There was a bench at one side of the room, unoccupied, so they sat down, two very small beings in a room full of very large objects.

  “I wonder if this is how a dog feels sitting next to a couch.”

  Bruce glanced around. “A small dog, maybe.”

  Janie looked at him. Not one wrinkle, she thought to herself. He looked back, and their eyes locked for one uncomfortable moment. Janie broke the discomfort by speaking. “So how long have you been here? In England, I mean?”

  “Eighteen years,” he said.

  “That’s a long time.”

  “I don’t know, it doesn’t really seem that long to me. Ted recruited me right out of residency. He knew Dr. Chapman, who was chief on my rotation, and Chapman told him about me. Made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  “Which obviously you didn’t.”

  “Nope. Here I am, after all these years. And I’ve never really regretted it. I’ve been involved in some really exciting research at the Institute.”

  “For some reason it sounds very forbidding when you call it that.”

  “It can be a very forbidding place to some people. Depending on what you do, working there can consume your entire life. But I love my work. I get up every day and I’m glad to go in there. The only fly in the ointment is that I’ve never actually practiced medicine, and I think I might have enjoyed that. I’ve been isolated from the real world inside my glass-and-chrome lab, just researching my brains out.”

  “I did practice for about fifteen years,” Janie said.

  “Did?”

  “Yeah, did. I’m not practicing right now.”

  “Why not? Is it part of that long, sad story you mentioned before?”

  “It is. You want to hear it? It takes a while.”

  He glanced at his watch. “They won’t be kicking us out of here right away.”

  “Okay, then,” she said. She drew in a long breath. “When the first Outbreak happened and so many people died, it was right after the whole medical reorganization took place. They hadn’t worked the kinks out of the physician distribution formula—come to think of it, they haven’t yet. They may never, now. Anyway, there were huge surpluses in several different types of specialties. I was a surgeon; surgeons were one of those surplus categories. The GPs came into contact frequently with people who were infected, and a lot of them died as a result of that. There was no one left to treat sore throats, so Congress passed an emergency measure reassigning some groups of specialists to general practice and a few other areas where there were shortages. But there were still too many doctors for the remaining population, and a lot of the funding for health care got eaten up by the cost of dealing with the epidemic, so to keep the federal budget balanced, a lot of us got bumped, literally.”

  “Bumped?” he said. “I don’t understand.”

  “We were literally ordered to stop practicing.”

  “Sounds like a potential lawyerfest to me.”

  “Oh, it was. The suits will go on forever. I’m part of several class-action suits. But my lawyer says such a move is essentially legal under emergency conditions. War, famine, pestilence, situations like that. Congress can make anything legal or illegal by passing legislation. It’s ultimately up to the courts to decide if the legislation is constitutional, and we all know how quickly they move. So the real question is not whether or not those regulations are going to stand, in my mind anyway—it’s how long it will take to get rid of them. It may take a while. In the meantime they gave us the option of entering a lottery where we were randomly assigned new medical-type fields, with retraining provided if needed.”

  “You obviously took that option,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “What did you end up with?”

  “Forensic archaeology.”

  “Well, that’s about as obscure a specialty as I’ve ever heard of.”

  Janie’s tone became very sarcastic. “Not as obscure as you’d think. The skills run anywhere between archaeologist and coroner. The reason why there were a lot of openings is that a lot of them died too. They handled the bodies at first.”

  “And dropped like flies, no doubt.”

  She nodded.

  “You mentioned certification this afternoon.”

  “Yeah. I have to take certain courses that I wouldn’t have had a need for before, and then I have to do a thesis, which is what this trip is all about.”

  Bruce let out a long breath and shook his head. “I guess we have it a lot better here than we thought. Maybe I’ll stay here for good.”

  “Have you changed citizenship?” Janie asked.

  “Nope,” he said, “and I don’t think I ever will. I like being an American too much. Over here, at least, it gives me a certain cachet.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve been Stateside?”

  “Oh, God, you had to ask
… it’s been at least five or six years.”

  “Pre-Outbreak, then.”

  “Yeah.”

  Janie sighed. “You might not be so anxious to retain your citizenship if you’d been there since then. Things are really a mess.”

  “I’ve heard some of it, read the papers, watched CNN. I guess you have to be there.”

  “I think you do,” she said. “There’s this sort of martial-law feel to life in the States these days that doesn’t come through in the media reports. No one says much about it, but everyone knows it’s there. There aren’t Gestapo running around all over the place or anything like that, at least not anymore, but it’s like someone sprayed Eau de Gestapo in the air during the Outbreaks and the stink won’t go away completely. Sort of like a dead skunk. You can smell it for a long time.”

  “I’ve heard a little bit about that. I guess I’ve ignored it. I don’t really have good reasons to stay on top of it, since I’m not planning on going back anytime soon. I’ve tried to maintain contact with people there, but I haven’t really done a good job of it. My whole professional life has been here. I have a few old friends there, but that’s about it, and none of them are terribly tuned in to politics. My parents are gone, and I’m an only child.”

  “My parents are gone too. It feels like we skipped a generation or two backward during the Outbreaks. It used to be that people our age had parents. In fact, I had a grandmother until two years ago. She didn’t die during the Outbreaks, though. She died of old age. Woke up dead one morning. My parents weren’t so lucky.”

  She hung her head a little and was silent for a few moments. Bruce didn’t say anything more than a quiet “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I am too. I miss them.”

  He wondered if it was the appropriate time to ask the other question that had been nagging him. Well, we are talking about family, he rationalized. “You said your last name is Crowe now. Are you married?”