by Ross Pennie
Natasha Sharma completed her master’s in epidemiology eigh -teen months ago, after earning a degree in biology. She’d finished top of her class and impressed everyone as the best applicant for the vacant communicable-disease epidemiologist position. She’d proved her mettle within her first six months by unearthing the culprit behind an outbreak of 120 cases of bloody diarrhea: E. coli in the undercooked sausages at a Croatian wedding. She discovered that the bride’s mother had ordered the toxin-laden canapés be served prematurely to keep the six hundred guests occupied while the bride underwent a meltdown between church and banquet hall. Something about a spirited flower girl and a handful of rhinestones torn from the bridal gown. Natasha said the altercation made perfect sense, but Zol reckoned it was pointless for any man to try to understand that part of the puzzle.
He tried Natasha’s number again. Still busy. He strode down the hall to her office and stood in her open doorway.
Natasha tugged on the short, fly-away curls at the nape of her neck. A scowl and a fist had replaced her trademark poise and charm. She enunciated every syllable as though forcing it through the telephone and rolled her eyes in response to her mother’s daily ritual.
“I already told you, Mamaji,” said Natasha with a rapid shake of her head, “if you invite him, I am not coming.” Catching sight of Zol, she squared her shoulders and picked up a ballpoint. “Gotta go. Dr. Szabo just came in. I’ll call you after work,” she said, and hung up.
Zol stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.
Natasha stood up and swept the folds of her dress. “Sorry, Dr. Zol,” she said, glancing toward the phone as though her mother were still attached to it.
Zol smiled and waved away Natasha’s embarrassment. He knew her Punjabi mother phoned every morning with some urgent family matter and managed to steer the conversation toward the discovery of another suitor for Natasha to look over — just this once.
Gripping the file folder of notes he’d made last night with Hamish, he lowered himself into the chair in front of Natasha’s desk. “Something big has landed in our lap,” he said, “and I need you to drop everything.” He hoped he didn’t sound too sombre.
Natasha’s dark eyes glowed with alarm. “But at Shalom Acres,” she said, “they’ve still got tons of questions about their invasive strep outbreak. I was going to —”
“Don’t worry about Shalom Acres. We’ll find someone else to go over there.” He rubbed his palms together. “First off,” he said, “what I’ve got to say is strictly confidential. The implications for the unit, for the entire country, could be enormous.”
Natasha put down her pen. “I understand. I won’t discuss —”
“I know you won’t.” They both eyed the ballpoint on her desk as though it were a secret recording device.
“Do you know Dr. Hamish Wakefield, the ID specialist?” Zol asked.
“He’s the shy man, mid-thirties, blond, gravelly voice, and perfectly ironed shirts, right?”
Zol brushed a cluster of Cory’s cat hairs from the sleeve of his blazer. “I never noticed his shirts, but yeah, gravelly voice. My age, or a couple of years younger.”
Natasha smiled. “I’ve seen him present at Grand Rounds over at the medical centre. He seems really smart.”
“He dropped a bombshell on us yesterday.” Zol recapped the details of the three cases of variant CJD while Natasha, her chair pulled tight to her desk, jotted on a crisp, yellow pad. She shook her head at the story of Joanna Vanderven, the philanthropist’s wife; she gasped at the details of Dr. McEwen’s suicide in his dental chair; she nodded as though already familiar with the incident when Zol recounted the hit-and-run death of Danesh Patel, the car salesman.
Zol took a deep breath and raised his eyebrows. Natasha’s sandal -wood scent cast a soothing wave through his nostrils. They would solve this together, he told himself. All three victims must have lived in foreign parts far enough in the past to acquire their variant CJD by eating tainted meat outside Canada.
Natasha’s lips tightened, and she narrowed her eyes. “I’m afraid there’s a problem with the foreign beef angle,” she said, tapping her notepad with her pen. “The Patels are strict vegetarians. I know the family. Mrs. Patel is a fanatic. Reads the labels on everything.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Was the husband just as strict?”
She nodded. “He always seemed the type who’d keep peace in the family at any cost. Just like my dad.”
Stale coffee churned in Zol’s stomach. “Damn. So much for our blame-it-on-English-beef solution.”
“I’m sorry,” she said with an embarrassed smile. Then she added quickly, “One thing, though. The Patels did live in England for a while. Before they came to Canada. I’m not sure when, but I can find out.”
“Okay! So we might still have our English connection.” He lifted the file folder and waved it in the air like a flag. “I’ll be grateful for every bit of insight you can offer.”
“We can plot the epidemiological curve,” Natasha said with bright notes of optimism in her voice. “Let’s see . . . the deaths occurred June twenty-second, June twenty-eighth, and September fifteenth, so the curve looks like this.” She sketched a graph on her notepad, then looked enquiringly at Zol, as if the visual depiction of the deaths and the dates might have cracked some sort of code. When he didn’t say anything, she shrugged and frowned. “Doesn’t tell us much, does it?”
He stood and gazed through the window. Pedestrians crowded the sidewalk, their coats fastened and necks wrapped against the November wind. For a moment, he longed for their humdrum office jobs — predictable hours, nothing more at stake than shipments of hamburger buns, toilet seats, and paper clips. “You know,” he said, turning away from the window and shaking himself out of his daydream, “a traditional epi curve might not be much use. CJD’s incubation period is ten or fifteen years. That’s too long to let us link these cases together in time or place.”
“Unless,” said Natasha, her voice rising, “this cluster is the first indication of some brand-new kind of variant CJD.”
He felt a tightness in his throat. Was this some new form of rapid-onset CJD? A Canadian variant? Hamish had said they should be prepared for other cases to turn up, already dead or still alive. But how many more?
“That’s a bold thought, Natasha. But not one I’m ready to swallow at this point,” he said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. He pulled a tissue from his pocket and wiped his palms. “Our best hope is to discover that their lives intersected at a common factor — a decade ago and a continent away. As far away from Hamilton as possible.”
Natasha drew her fingers through the curls at the back of her neck. “Where do you want me to start?”
“By interviewing Mrs. Patel. In her home. See what you can dig up.” He smiled. “That Croatian wedding case showed you’re an expert at digging toxins out of nibbles.”
Two hours later, after scanning his bookshelves for articles about CJD in the back issues of the New England Journal of Medicine and the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Zol sat at his computer searching public-health databases on the Internet. Bit by bit, a blend of lime and cedar insinuated itself into the office, like an unexpected guest. Hamish had splashed on that unmistakable scent last evening before arriving for dinner. And now he was standing in the office doorway, wearing the expectant face of someone hoping to be noticed. He’d unbuttoned his winter coat and was clutching his briefcase to his chest, quietly shifting his weight from one foot to the other. It was obvious he’d discovered some important facts about the case: his eyes were smiling, and his lips formed a satisfied smirk, like Cory the cat depositing a freshly killed mouse at Zol’s feet.
“You’ve got some good news,” Zol said, rising from his chair. At six-foot-two, he was a head taller than Hamish. “I can see it written all over your face.”
Hamish smiled, thrust his gloves into his pockets, and unwound his scarf. “I think you’re going to be pleased.
”
“Terrific!” Zol said, smacking the air with his fist. “Banbury reviewed his slides? No CJD after all?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Damn.”
Hamish placed his scarf and coat on the rack in the corner of the room. He turned and shrugged. “Sorry.” He pulled up a chair and sat down, then lifted a tooled leather notebook from his briefcase. He reached in again and brought out a bottle of imported spring water. He unscrewed the cap and took a swig. Before setting the bottle on Zol’s desk, he hesitated. “Do you have a coaster?”
Zol threw up his hands. “Forget the coaster! Tell me the good news.”
“First, you have to congratulate me for finding the dentist’s widow and chatting her up for a tonne of details, all before ten thirty in the morning.”
“Yeah, you’re right. You did great. Now start talking.”
Hamish opened his notebook. He’d inscribed a title page: Mad Cows — And Englishmen. “I phoned Brenda McEwen first thing this morning,” he began. “She remembered me from U of T. The three of us were undergrads together. Hugh, Brenda, and me.” He took a swig from his bottle. “She invited me right over. I was there by nine.” He put down the bottle and fingered his notebook, clearly in no hurry to turn beyond the title page.
Hamish would try even the patience of Job. “And?” Zol said, spinning a get-on-with-it gesture with his hands.
“She reminded me that she and Hugh . . .” Hamish smiled and raised his eyebrows, as if on the brink of serving up the pièce de résistance. “Well, it turns out that she and Hugh lived in England for a couple of years. And — get this — he had a passion for British sausages.” He paused and pursed his lips, putting on his professorial expression. “They call them bangers, you know.”
“I know that,” Zol said sharply. Why did university docs always figure they had a monopoly on knowledge and brains? “I also know that bangers are usually pork, and there’s often veal or beef in the mix.”
Hamish turned and coughed a string of staccatos, as if covering his embarrassment at Zol’s unexpected roughness.
Zol shifted in his chair and tugged at the collar of his shirt. Hamish’s cologne hung in the overheated air. Zol was about to remove his jacket but thought better of it; any movement on his part might distract Hamish into stalling further. “When did Hugh live in England?”
Hamish tightened his lips. “I’m getting to that.” He tipped his bottle and swallowed another mouthful. “After we finished our biochem degrees in ninety-one, he went to Oxford. Spent two years there as a Rhodes Scholar. Brenda went with him.”
“That’s twelve years ago,” Zol said.
Hamish beamed. “Yes. And it’s perfect. Exactly within the incubation period of variant CJD.”
Zol nodded. The timing of Hugh McEwen’s years at Oxford was spot on. And his passion for British sausages seemed like a clincher. Zol had been dismayed at the hole Natasha had punched in the English beef connection, but could she be wrong about Danesh Patel? Could the man have been a closet carnivore? Zol gestured at his computer. “When you arrived I was digesting the latest reports from England. So far, they’ve had seventy-two human cases of variant CJD.”
“I know,” Hamish said. “I reviewed that ProMed posting this morning. Not too helpful. They’re releasing so few clinical details we can’t tell how closely our three cases match theirs.”
“Tell me about the bangers,” Zol said flatly. Once again, Hamish had leapt ahead of him.
“Hugh loved them. Ate them for breakfast every single day during their years in England. Brenda said she got sick of frying them up.”
“Any other culinary infatuations?”
Hamish scanned his notes. “Just a few. Seville orange marmalade, Scottish shortbread, smelly cheese, and Swiss chocolate. He was addicted to the stuff.”
“Addicted to what?”
“A certain kind of Swiss dark chocolate. With creamy centres. His favourites were . . .” He peered at his notes and began to count the flavours on his slender fingers: “Raspberry, kiwi, passion fruit, and hazelnut. Half a pound a day.”
“That is a heck of a lot.”
“Funny, eh? A dentist addicted to chocolate. I wonder if his patients knew about it?”
“It’s not that easy to find Swiss chocolates with fondant centres in Hamilton. I only know of one place that sells them.”
Hamish uncrossed his legs and straightened the crease in his trousers. “Four Corners Fine Foods. Just down the street from here.” Triumph shone in his eyes. “Hugh made a pilgrimage there every Saturday. Had a standing order of four pounds a week.”
“Good God!” Zol said. “Anyone who eats that much chocolate is bound to rot more than their teeth.”
“And die happy.” Hamish smiled, then frowned and covered his mouth. “But Hugh McEwen was no happy dentist. For the past few years he’d been having difficulty swallowing. Could only eat meat that was thoroughly ground up. His wife blended most of his meals, including his favourite Viennese sausages and English-style bangers.”
Zol pictured one of his festive rack-of-lamb dinners tossed into a blender. A terrible assault on fine ingredients. “That sounds like an esophageal stricture,” he said. “Or that condition where the far end of the esophagus doesn’t open properly when you swallow.”
“You mean achalasia,” Hamish said, narrowing his eyes and raising a forefinger as if instructing a student. “Brenda’s description fits it exactly.”
Zol raised his hands and spread his fingers. Sometimes Hamish’s pedantic manner was just plain annoying. Zol took a deep breath, tucked his hands beneath his thighs, and reminded himself that Hamish was a rare friend — obsessive and finicky, but unfailingly loyal and too socially insecure to be an egotist.
Hamish picked at the flecks of lint on his necktie, then ironed it smooth with his palm. After a moment he said, “Hugh saw a gastro -enterologist who performed a manipulation every few months. His wife didn’t know much about it, except that the treatments did improve his swallowing for a few weeks each time.”
“What about his suicide?” Zol asked. “How long had he been depressed?”
“Only recently. But it wasn’t exactly depression. More like a change in personality. Since early June he’d been distractible, getting angry over trivialities. Brenda found him weeping in the bathroom a few times.”
“Any confusion or memory loss?”
“He cancelled his workday a number of times. Always at the last minute. Walked out without warning — threw his staff into a tizzy.”
“Had he been given a psychiatric diagnosis?”
“Refused to see a doctor.”
“And then,” Zol said “within three or four months, he kills himself.”
Hamish bit his lower lip. “Sunday, September fifteenth. In his dental chair. Morphine, midazolam, and nitrous oxide.” He gulped several mouthfuls from his bottle. “Very sad. I remember him as a really nice guy. Always in a good mood.”
Zol picked up his pad and jotted several lines. After a few moments, when Hamish had regained his composure, he asked, “Anyone else in the family sick, depressed, forgetful?”
“Brenda’s grieving but she seems okay — between bouts of tears. They have just the one child, a nine-year-old girl. She missed school for a couple of weeks after her father’s death, but her mother said she’s pretty well back into her routine.”
“What did Brenda think when you asked so many questions about Hugh’s eating habits? Did she twig to the CJD angle?”
“She was relieved to hear that the pathologist found something in his brain that might explain —”
Zol threw his hands into the air. “Hamish!” he said. “You didn’t tell her about the amyloid plaques and the mad cow —”
Hamish flinched and drew back in his chair. “Of course not.” Red blotches sprouted on his neck. “I approached it like we agreed. I told her that the preliminary tests showed he had some sort of brain disease, probably an encephalitis.” He tos
sed his notebook onto the desk. “If you’re not going to trust me, I might as well —”
Zol caught sight of his huge, threatening hands and tucked them under his thighs again. He stared into the dark screen of his computer.
Hamish walked to the window.
Several moments passed. Neither man spoke.
In the dingy side yard of the Chinese restaurant across the street, plastic bags and cardboard boxes fluttered beside the overflowing garbage bins. A battered wheelbarrow lay on its side, its tire missing.
Zol broke the silence. “I’m sorry, Hamish.” He rubbed his temple with his fingertips. “It’s just that the implications of these cases have me spooked.”
Hamish turned from the window and forced a smile. “I know. We might be out of our depth.”
“You did dig up a lot of details in one short visit,” said Zol.
“Do you want to hear the rest?”
“Shoot.”
Hamish lifted his notebook from the desk and flipped it open. “Okay,” he said, “Brenda buys their meat only at Kelly’s SuperMart, never at butcher shops. Beef, lamb, pork, and chicken. No exotic meat or game. And Hugh loved a certain kind of smelly cheese. But I mentioned that already. He always bought it himself.”
Zol shrugged at the cheese; the British authorities swore that variant CJD couldn’t be transmitted in dairy products. On what seemed like a whim, a chef’s curiosity perhaps, he asked, “What sort of cheese?”
“Brenda said it smelled disgusting. She and her daughter never touched it.”
“What was it called? Limburger?”
Hamish checked his notes. “Head cheese.”
Zol clapped his hands and laughed from deep within his belly, his tension evaporating. “Oh, Hamish. You’re a riot.”
