Cold Silence

by James Abel

  “Well, we get tourists in town sometimes,” he said, sniffling. “But there’s nothing for them here. Usually they took a wrong turn. They stick around for ten minutes, come in for a beer, or soda if they have kids. And go. But those two stayed. Got here in the morning. I saw ’em drive in. Only thirty people live here, so when someone comes, you notice. The weird thing is, they stuck around.”

  “What did they do all day?”

  “I said I noticed ’em, not that I followed ’em!”

  He calmed down a little. “Sorry.” He scratched at his face, bad idea, and picked at a scab on his lips, another bad idea. But I didn’t mention it. I didn’t want to interrupt Gazarra’s chain of thought.

  “Oh yeah! They stayed for dinner. Joined the party right here.”

  Eddie said, “They knew the captain, you mean?”

  “No, they were just here when the food came out. Antelope Italian sausage. My family’s specialty. Turned out the parmesan cheese was at their table, so they brought it over, and got invited to join in. I shred that cheese myself. No factory cheese here!”

  “Do you have security cameras?” I asked.

  Gazzara broke out laughing. “Are you kidding? Look at this place? What do I need security cameras for?”

  “Someone must have taken photos at the party.”

  “Maybe.”

  Asked to describe the tourists, Gazarra vaguely recollected that the man was on the tall side with long sideburns, and the woman had cropped red hair like the model on the beer tray, but the model was prettier, he said, and the tourist was chubby and sunburned, the way people from up north get when they came to the desert.

  “This is a big help,” Eddie lied.

  “Mr. Gazzara, is there anything I didn’t ask about that you think we ought to know? Anything extra?”

  “Talk to Mrs. Mitterand. She’s in the last house on the left. She said something about those two. She said they were religious nuts.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t remember anymore.”

  —

  Denise Mitterand looked about ninety, tiny, wizened, pale, and as cooperative as if the day were normal and we were neighbors she’d invited over for a cold Coke. From the porch of her weathered bungalow, we could see, a half mile off, the concertina wire that sealed Galilee. Chris would be on the phone there hopefully, urging Washington to send out an alert about the tourists.

  “Do you want to take blood? Those other doctors did.”

  “No, ma’am. Just to ask questions.”

  She was not sick, not visibly. And her mental equilibrium seemed fine. She accepted our precautions as necessary. She was white haired, delicate looking. The skin was almost translucent, nose a button, mouth small, forehead narrow, shoulder blades pressing outward, as if her body had been tiny to start with, and time was shrinking it back into thin air.

  “The soldiers took away my neighbors, the Lawrences. Are they all right?”

  “I’ll check when I get back and let you know.”

  Inside, she offered us ice water and brownies but we explained that we had to decline. She understood perfectly well why. Whatever frailty age had brought her did not extend to her mental faculties. “I guess you can’t eat anything in our town just now,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. But thanks.”

  She sat knees closed on a stuffed sitting chair, in her air-conditioned living room. At her feet lay an old black Labrador retriever, who required a wheeled walker to raise its hind parts. The house was small, clean, and comfortable; an eclectic mix showing foreign travel: kilim throw rugs from Turkey, clay pottery from the Amazon, strung beads from South Africa, souvenirs of not just mileage but attitude and curiosity. She told us she was a retired high school music teacher. Her husband, Al, dead two years, had been a social studies teacher at Indian Springs High. They’d moved west from Saint Louis fifty years earlier, for the desert. Small town and broad-minded, I thought, liking her. Some people adapt to anything. Mrs. Mitterand was old, but she had the ability, that was clear.

  I wanted to ask about the tourists but held off at first. Good-hearted people can react defensively if they think you’re attacking someone not present. But a few minutes later the conversation swung naturally to that Friday. Denise Mitterand remembered the tourists quite clearly “because of the singing,” she said.

  “Singing?”

  She grinned, as if no emergency was going on. “I’ll show you. Sing something,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Anything. Christmas carol. Popular. Come on!”

  Eddie cleared his throat. His voice sounded muffled coming from the suit. He had terrible pitch. He could never carry a tune.

  “Jingle bells . . . jingle . . .”

  The dog rose quickly, tail wagging like crazy, and raised its head. “Ooooooooooo.”

  Denise Mitterand was up also, faster than I would have thought possible, and she kneeled by the animal, stroking his head. “Are you my boy? My Sinatra? Are you my one? See?” she said. “He does that every time! That’s why we named him Sinatra. Like he’s the reincarnation. My nephew said we should bring him on late-night TV to do those pet tricks. You try, Dr. Rush.”

  I sang, “Dashing through the snow . . .”

  “Oooooooooooooo.” The dog hopped around, spinning in circles, panting from happy effort. We burst out laughing. It was nice to know that something could still make us laugh. Sinatra looked sad when I stopped singing. He licked my glove, blessed with ignorance of contagion.

  Denise said, “That morning he started making those sounds. He can’t walk but he hears pretty good. He’ll start up if a car goes by with the radio on. I looked out. Saw the couple walking by. I couldn’t hear them but their mouths were moving. I thought they must be singing.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well! Afternoons, I take a walk in the desert. I can’t take Sinatra anymore because the wheels on the roller get stuck in rocks. So I leave him here. I can still do two miles. Exercise helps me sleep.”

  “The tourists were in the desert,” I guessed.

  “I was coming up a rise. I heard them.”

  “Singing.”

  “Yes, some religious song. When they saw me, they stopped.”

  “Why do you think it was a religious song?”

  “Why? Well! I didn’t hear all the words. I guess it was the cadence, slow, you know, like Gregorian Chants. Chanticleer. Adorate Deum. Beautiful, relaxing music. Calms you right down! I used to have my students listen to it. Not exactly what they were used to.”

  “They were singing Gregorian chants?”

  “No, it was like that but wasn’t. It was English. But it had that same somber, what’s the word? Repetition! Like a liturgy. What you’d hear at a mass, not exactly something hikers go around singing.”

  “A liturgy,” I said.

  “But different. I heard a few words. Something about prophets smiting evil.” She scrunched up her wizened face, trying to remember. “The first prophet . . . the sixth . . . then they saw me and stopped.”

  “Did you talk to them?”

  “They seemed nice. I asked what they were singing.”

  “What did they say?”

  “That’s funny! I don’t think they answered. They were very enthusiastic, though, asking about the town, the rocks here, the old mine. But they didn’t actually answer about the singing. A little spacey but nice. My husband, Al, used to say you get all kinds out West. Dissatisfied people. He called the highway to California the Charles Manson Trail.”

  “Did they happen to identify their church group?”

  “I didn’t ask. I like music, but I’m not big on religions,” she said. “My ancestors were Huguenots. Protestants murdered in France. Music is peaceful, but in the end”—she shuddered—“too much religion makes people fight.”

&n
bsp; —

  Outside, I turned to Eddie. Our phones were useless in town because of the jamming, so we had no idea if anyone had been trying to reach us while we were here, if Chris was having success reaching Burke.

  “Remember those two guys in Somalia, singing?”

  “Weren’t they singing about prophets, too?”

  “All religions sing about prophets.”

  “Chris should have been back by now,” he fretted.

  She’d been gone for forty-five minutes. And over the next ninety minutes she still did not return. But we were occupied, making rounds of houses, talking to a family of six: a postal worker, who looked healthy; a retired uranium miner, healthy; a Vietnamese immigrant, who was coughing; a brother-sister team, who lived together and gave me the creeps, because of the way they sat, hip to hip. The sister showed deterioration around her nose.

  Our notebooks filled with jottings, our recorders with frightened voices; a mélange of facts, figures, and impressions. Nothing in particular stood out.

  “Two hours,” Eddie said, yawning. “Where is she?”

  “More importantly, where’s Broad Street?”

  Broad Street was our shorthand for the London corner where the science of disease tracking began. It was the epicenter of the worst cholera outbreak in that city’s history, which ravaged it in 1854.

  At the time, the finest medical minds believed that illness came from vapors, bad air, which they called miasma. When cholera struck, bringing vomiting, leg cramps, rampant diarrhea, and fatal shock, bad air was, as usual, blamed.

  But a physician named John Snow wasn’t so sure about that, so he went door to door, asking questions, drawing maps of the spread. He asked locals about their eating and drinking habits, travel, hygiene, symptoms.

  Eventually he realized that every single victim drank water from the Broad Street public water pump.

  Snow’s idea about the pump was revolutionary. At first he could not convince authorities that the disease was spread by a well. But finally they grew so desperate that, at Snow’s urging, they removed the handle from the Broad Street pump, and the epidemic ground to a stop.

  Now Eddie and I sought the modern version of Snow’s pump handle. We trudged house to house, asking questions and answering complaints.

  —My kids like Fruit Loops, but all the soldiers are giving us is Cheerios.

  —My reading glasses broke.

  —No one is collecting our garbage!

  An exhausting three hours later, we’d confirmed that every initial victim had been in Gazarra’s on that Friday night. From there, the pathogen had spread to some people and bypassed others.

  “It breaks out in Africa first,” Eddie said, frowning. “Then here. You think there’s something in the drones themselves; some component, some chemical they’re carrying, maybe a drone crashed . . . what do you think, One? The drones?”

  “Something they ate or drank.”

  “Why?”

  “Two initial outbreaks in groups. But no contact between them, no supplies moving between the groups. In Africa, no air vents, no air-conditioning. But everyone eating the same food at the same time and in the same place every day. Here, people fell ill after a group meal.”

  “If it’s canned, there will be outbreaks. It could be anywhere.”

  I shook my head. “If it was randomly shipped, there would have been more outbreaks by now, I’d think.”

  “Who did it, then?”

  “Who has access to both places?”

  “Plenty of people hate the drone program.”

  It should have been a positive moment, an inch of progress at least, a theory. We’d reached the last home on the street. A hand-scrawled sign nailed to the front door read, SICK. GONE TO HOSPITAL. PRAY FOR US. We’d been spared another interview. I felt some relief.

  “Where the hell is Chris?”

  As if in answer, here came Humvees, three of them. Only one had been needed when we’d been brought into town.

  “Too soon for the next medical check,” said Eddie.

  “They’re coming pretty fast,” I said.

  When the Humvees reached us and the first small biosuited figure emerged, I saw it was Chris; but spilling after her from the other two vehicles came troops made beefier by combat biogear. Their weapons were held ready, and from the stiff, wary way the soldiers eyed us, with a sinking feeling I realized that they were not here for the citizens of Galilee, but for us.

  “Burke wants us out of here,” she said.

  There was no doubt that something fundamental had changed.

  “What’s wrong, Chris?”

  “Please put your notes and recorders in a ziplock. Hand them over to Sergeant Leachy. We’re out,” said Chris. “Me, too.”

  Eddie tried to make light of it, voice easy, but body stiffening. “Oh? Something we did?”

  Chris stared back, disconsolate. “Yes,” she said. “We’re all under arrest.”

  TEN

  The cell was five by eight and lacked a window. Meals—roast beef, boiled potatoes and milk, eggs and soggy bacon—were inserted through a metal slot but I had little desire to eat. Light came in two varieties, artificial glare and red nightlight. The guards were silent extensions of the cinderblock. No reading material allowed, no television or radio, no explanation of why we’d been flown to Camp Pendleton, California, kept separate, and buried in a brig.

  “Give me a hint. Why are we here?”

  The air smelled of regulation. Flesh and blood seemed out of place in this steel and concrete world, where rule substituted for reason, and the National Anthem, played over loudspeakers, for talk.

  “What the hell happened in Galilee?”

  But the only hints I got were buried in the nonstop questions rapped out by two sour-faced FBI agents who refused to let me call Ray Havlicek in D.C. Had anyone in Somalia mentioned Disneyland? Had I visited a certain Internet café in Nairobi? Had I ever experimented with strains of leprosy? Was I a Washington Redskins fan?

  Let’s go over your records and memories one more time.

  I’d locked up men myself over the years. Watched them pacing on closed-circuit TV as I softened them for interrogation. Now, worse than the isolation were the muffled announcements coming through the walls, barely audible and hinting at emergency. Leaves were canceled. Marines were being ordered to pack.

  “At least let Chris call her daughter!”

  The red light turned white. Was it morning? I heard Chris, out in the hallway, begging someone to, “Let me make one call? For God sake, she’s alone! She’ll be frantic! What’s the matter with you people? She’s a kid!”

  Did we stumble onto something someone wants hidden? Damnit, if someone would tell us the problem, we could help figure it out.

  The light turned red again, so outside, it was night. Or was it? Was it midday, the sun strong, yellow, hot?

  I marked time by counting times when I heard the National Anthem, with trips to the bathroom, by beard growth. I did exercises to maintain bodily rhythm. The workouts filled the cell with sweat and testosterone. I avoided the cot unless I wanted to sleep. When I did sleep, I dozed fitfully, and did not recall dreams upon waking. You measure victory in small increments, and in this case, that meant the illusion of some knowledge of time, some sense of control.

  Doing crunches, I went over events in Somalia and Galilee. I did push-ups on my fingertips and replayed interviews but nothing special came to mind. The guards refused to give me pen and paper so I filled in imaginary checklists in my head. I reached the story about the tourists in Galilee, singing. I heard boots stop outside my door and the lock clicked open.

  “Get up!” the guard barked. “Hands behind your back.”

  I blinked at a dazzling California sun as Eddie, Chris, and I were driven to the airport, where lines of Marines boarded a half dozen Gal
axy transports, huge jets capable of long-distance flight. Apparently we were finally permitted to talk. As we stood on the tarmac, a short, exhausted-looking major sauntered close, looked me over with disgust, and said, “So you’re the one who started this.”

  “Me? What are you talking about?”

  He moved off, shaking his head. Chris was staring at me now with something resembling fury.

  “What did you do, Joe, when I was making that call?”

  “We just talked to the old lady.”

  “Sure you did. Those Marines are carrying biogear,” she observed. Her face looked ragged, white, drawn, but her eyes still burned with fierce intelligence and frantic worry for her child. This is not a drill, a loudspeaker announced.

  I said, “Aya’s a smart kid. She’ll be okay.”

  “I hope so.”

  We were strapped by guards into a row of four out-of-place economy class–style airline seats bolted to the fuselage in back, amid chained-down Humvees, netted food crates and med supplies and ammunition. Our seatbelts had locks on them. Our handcuffed wrists lay in our laps. Eddie said, “I can’t wait to hear the safety announcement. What to do if we go down?” as the massive rear hatch groaned shut and four powerful jet engines roared to life, so we had to raise our voices to talk. At least we had a porthole, a view of sorts, natural light.

  Chris said, “I called Burke to tell him about the tourists. He never even came on the line.”

  They’d dressed us in quilted jackets against the chill. She smelled of sweat, cheap shampoo, and prison soap. Eddie smelled like a locker room. I probably did, too. Chris said, “Usually I talk with Aya every night. We’ve never gone more than four days without talking, and that time I was in Indonesia, in the jungle.”

  Eddie asked, “Does Aya have someone to stay with?”

  “My sister. In Reston. But Aya’s independent. She may stay at the loft in case I call. She’ll barrage Burke’s office with calls. She’ll be scared.”

  “She’s a resourceful kid,” I said.

  “Don’t even go there,” she snapped, and turned away.

  “How many days were we in there, Joe?” Eddie said.