Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  “Six new.”

  The honeymoon was over. He pictured yesterday’s hubbub in Erie Collegiate’s auditorium during the question period. With six more cases, he’d be facing it all again, only worse. Hitchin was still talking but Zol wasn’t taking any of it in.

  “How’re the parents coping?” he asked.

  “What parents?” Hitchin said.

  “From Erie Collegiate.”

  “These aren’t kids. They’re first responders. Paramedics and firefighters. Showed up this morning. Jaundiced as hell. Doesn’t look good for them.”

  “With the same thing as the students?”

  “Dunno. We’re assessing that now.” Hitchin was more breathless with every sentence. He did manage to say that all six new cases, four firefighters and two paramedics, were barely coherent. The only woman among them was a paramedic and in the worst shape.

  “What other details have you got for me?” Zol asked.

  “It’s trench warfare down here. You want details, you come see for yourself. Can you get that Wakefield guy in here? He’s got a nose for this stuff.”

  “One more question,” Zol said, remembering the bandage on Walter Vorst’s finger, and the lip lesions he’d noticed on several Erie Christian Collegiate students during yesterday’s meeting.

  “Gotta make it quick.”

  “Any scabby lesions on their lips or fingers?”

  “A couple have cold sores. Doozies. Can’t miss them. Haven’t looked at any fingers yet.”

  A siren went off at Hitchin’s end. “Gotta go. One of the guys is seizing again. Shit, he’s coding.”

  Zol was left with a dead phone in his hand.

  CHAPTER 13

  Hamish removed the dinner plates from the kitchen table, wiped it down, and spread out the sketches. He’d heard the feces had hit the fan today in Simcoe, and he’d gone to hell and back with a family of four in Caledonian’s intensive care unit. All of them — mother, father, and two pre-teen kids — were near death from the malaria they’d picked up in a school-building trip to Cameroon. A friend had told them that taking medication to prevent malaria weakened the body’s immune system and played into the hands of the multinational drug companies. And now they were on life support, circling the drain with multi-organ failure. He was desperate for thirty minutes of down time before the hospital called him with an update, and before Zol arrived to brainstorm over the latest developments in the liver epidemic.

  The sketches were preliminary, but impressive. The architect had transformed Aunt Gwen’s dumpy cottage into a Nantucket-style captain’s house. She’d left the place to him in her will, but probate had taken longer than he’d expected. Never mind, the design was perfect for the North Hamilton location near the lake, and it would be great to have a house.

  “What do you think, Al? Pretty cool, eh?”

  Al tossed the dish towel onto the counter and pressed his forearms on the table. His Bosniak eyes missed nothing and seemed capable of recording everything. He stepped back and eyed the sketches from a distance, framed the drawings with his hands as though viewing them through a camera. He dropped his hands and leaned in for a closer look, then frowned and rubbed his sideburn. “Not so sure.”

  “But don’t you love the front veranda? The way it wraps around on two sides? Tons of space on it.”

  “For what? Staring at the neighbours across the street?” Al pointed to the map the draftsman had drawn of the immediate neighbourhood. “See? The veranda is looking the wrong way. It should be facing in the direction of the lake.”

  The house occupied a corner lot, and the front door faced Ferrie Street. Bay Street ran along the west side. “But that would mean moving the front door ninety degrees.”

  “As I told you before, the best thing about that house is you can tear it down and build whatever you want.”

  “But if the front door got moved, the address would have to be changed. To Bay Street. Is that possible?”

  “Why not?” Al said.

  “Sounds like a lot of hassle.”

  “Not when you have friends at City Hall.”

  “Friends? Who’s got friends there?” As a staff reporter for the Hamilton Spectator, Al had exposed his fair share of back-room antics among city politicians. “Certainly not you.”

  “Hey. There are many people at the Hall who are grateful I got their stories out.”

  Hamish let that hang for a few seconds. “You mean? You’re friends with people who can . . . you know . . . ?” He dismissed the thought with a flick of his hand. “No, I couldn’t do anything illegal.”

  Al beamed his rakish smile. “Not illegal. Just efficient.”

  Hamish rotated the sketches and let himself imagine sitting on the veranda and admiring the harbour view. He pictured the morning sun sparkling over Lake Ontario, sails flapping on the bay. “The architect is going to have a fit. He seemed very proud of these sketches.”

  “He can swallow his pride. And hey — do we, two gay guys, really want to live in a house on Ferrie Street?”

  Hamish felt his cheeks flushing. He loved the sound of that we. He’d never been we before, not even as a child. “And . . . and the contractor?” he said, suddenly almost tongue-tied.

  “He won’t care as long as the architect doesn’t make the drawings too complicated.”

  “And the extra cost?”

  “What does it matter? You got the house for free. With a few more renos in that block, values are going to skyrocket.”

  The intercom buzzed from the front lobby.

  Hamish pressed the button on the speaker phone.

  “Hey, Hamish.” It was Zol.

  Hamish looked quickly at his bare legs. Al’s too. They had nothing on but tee-shirts and undies, matching Calvin Kleins. Low-rise, black bikinis. It was an intimacy Zol didn’t have to know about, and wouldn’t want to share anyway. Good thing the intercom didn’t have video.

  “Uh . . . Zol. Hi. Um . . . you’re early.”

  “Sorry. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

  “Of course not,” Hamish said a bit too quickly. He and Al exchanged glances. “We’re finished dinner.” Al smirked and rolled his eyes. Of course, it wasn’t dinner that Zol imagined he’d interrupted. Hamish returned Al’s silly grin and pressed the door release. “Come on up.”

  Half a minute later, Al returned from the bedroom zipping up his jeans. He tossed a pair to Hamish.

  Hamish pulled on the jeans, then scuttled around the living room, tidying what he knew was already a spotless apartment.

  “It’s okay, Choir Boy,” Al said. “I hid the condom wrappers.”

  “Very funny.” Their relationship had breezed safely past the condom stage months ago. “I should never have told you Wilf Dickinson called me that.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “From you, it’s fine. No . . .” He smiled. “Better than fine.” He leaned forward for a kiss. “But only in private, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  A second later, Zol was rapping at the condo’s door.

  “What’d you find out?” Hamish asked Zol once he’d poured him a drink. It wasn’t one of those single malt Scotches Zol liked so much. It was a Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey. Hamish never touched the stuff, but kept it on hand for Al.

  Zol took a gulp, then quickly took another and then practically fell into Aunt Gwen’s wingback chair. It seemed he’d drink anything Hamish offered tonight without even tasting it.

  Hamish sat beside Al on the small chesterfield Mother had nearly sent to the dump last time she redecorated. Al said the hodgepodge of old but respectable furniture was part of the charm of Hamish’s otherwise spartan apartment. It reminded him of Sarajevo before the siege: modestly dignified and comfortable.

  “God, Hamish. I wish you’d been there,” Zol said. “After I called you from Sim
coe Emerg, I tried to have a meeting with the families. It was a real struggle.”

  “Sorry. I couldn’t get away.”

  “It was impossible to get logical stories from six sets of relatives talking at the same time. Natasha’s going back to do a proper job of it.”

  “It couldn’t have been a dead loss,” Hamish said. “You must have got at least one useful tidbit.”

  Zol looked at Hamish, then at Al, then back at Hamish, frowning the whole time. He fixed on Al again. “Um . . . I’m not sure, you know, it’s a good idea for me to —”

  Hamish was in no mood for beating around bush. “You mean, discuss this in front of Al?”

  “This is a hot one,” Zol said. “Six first responders on the heels of those high school kids. Until we get this figured out, we can’t afford any leaks to the press.”

  Al stood up. “No problem.” He fished his car keys from his pocket. “I understand.”

  Hamish hated being tugged from two sides. It reminded him of his parents’ relentless bickering when he was a kid. “Don’t go, Al. Please. We haven’t finished checking out the sketches.”

  Zol set his glass on the coffee table. “I’m sorry. I know I got here a bit early, but . . .” He paused, his expression embarrassed. He grabbed his glass and gazed long and hard into it as though hoping its contents might provide a solution to his dilemma. Finally, he said, “Dammit, this outbreak is snowballing out of control, and more than anything, I need your help, Hamish.”

  It was nice to be flattered, but expecting Al to leave, just like that, was completely unfair. Al Mesic was discretion personified. His delicacy over confidential matters had bought him the respect of the denizens who stalked City Hall’s dark corners. And his insights were spot on, his perspectives fruitful and often surprising. Hamish picked at the lint of his tee-shirt and pictured the cases of liver failure piling up in Norfolk County. Today, the number had blossomed to twelve. “How about we speak off the record? We can do that, eh, Al?”

  “Of course,” Al said. He turned to Zol. “It’s your call.”

  Zol still looked worried. “You can do that?”

  “You mean, do we reporters have a secret pact like your Hippocratic Oath? A moral obligation to tell the world everything we see and hear?”

  Zol squirmed in his seat and flushed from his neck to his ears. His eyes sought Hamish’s, then darted to Al’s, then back again. After a while, the tension in his face settled. His shoulders sagged. “I’m sure the three of us agree . . .” He paused for a gulp of his Jack Daniel’s, then smiled as if tasting it only now. He coughed into his fist. “Agree that now, before we’ve put all the facts together, the situation would look alarming to the general public.”

  Al nodded. “No one will hear a word out of me.”

  “For sure?” Zol said.

  Al returned his keys to his pocket, then folded his arms over his chest. “For sure.”

  Zol looked relieved. “Thanks.”

  Al sat down, stretched out his legs, and leaned backwards into the chesterfield. He closed his eyes.

  “So, Zol,” Hamish said, buoyed at the unexpected détente between his only real friend and his lover, “what’s in that shopping bag?”

  Zol lifted the Kelly’s SuperMart bag from the floor and held it in his lap. “I did as you said. Examined the first responders for scabby lesions. Four firefighters and two paramedics.”

  “And?”

  “I found scabs on two of them. One of the firefighters and the female paramedic.”

  “Lips and fingers?”

  Zol nodded.

  “Tell me exactly what the lesions looked like.”

  “Large crusts. Round, about a centimetre across. Like giant cold sores, but thicker and tougher.”

  Old crusts all looked the same, no matter what their underlying cause. It was much easier to identify micro-organisms in fresh, fluid-filled skin lesions. “Any fresh vesicles?”

  “Nothing the least bit fresh. They’d had them for weeks. Thought they were cold sores that wouldn’t go away.” Zol dipped into the shopping bag. “I lifted them off with a scalpel and put them into sterile containers, exactly as you told me. Two from each patient.” He held up four small jars sealed in a sturdy plastic bag marked BIOHAZARD.

  “You labelled them clearly, like I told you?”

  “Of course.”

  Hamish took the bag from Zol and studied the specimens through the plastic. It was impossible to make an eyeball diagnosis by looking at a few pieces of crust and ooze, but they did look more or less like the lesions he and Wilf had examined under the electron microscope. Wilf’s latest manipulations hadn’t revealed anything new or definitive, but the guy was beginning to lean toward suggesting the matchsticks were fragments of plant virus. Surely, there was little sense in that. Of course, Wilf wasn’t a clinician. If he were, he’d know that plant viruses were not able to cause disease in humans or other animals. Only plants.

  “I’ll get Wilf Dickinson to put them under the EM tomorrow. See if they show the same particles we saw in the others. Even if they do, I’m not sure what that will tell us.”

  There was a major but to this. And Zol wasn’t going to like it. “Even if these skin lesions are caused by some new or mutant infectious agent,” he told Zol, “I can’t see any definitive link between a bunch of lesions in the skin and galloping destruction of the liver. Out of today’s six new liver victims, you found possible lesions in two of them. What about the other four cases? And most of the teens with liver disease had no blisters, either.”

  “But . . . hold on,” Zol said. “We’ve got two discrete populations — high school students and first responders — with simultaneous outbreaks of two unusual conditions — weird skin lesions and galloping liver failure. There’s got to be a connection.”

  “Then tell me about the questionnaires from Erie Collegiate.” Frank reporting by the students and their families was now the best hope for discovering the link between the ailing teens and first responders. “Or is Natasha still fiddling with them?”

  “She’s not a fiddler. You know that, Hamish. She finished a preliminary analysis half an hour ago.” Zol touched his briefcase. “Got it with me.”

  “Good. We can stop speculating and look at some hard evidence.”

  Zol lifted his briefcase onto his lap, but stopped short of opening it. Hamish had never seen Zol’s face look so dark. “Afraid not,” he said.

  Hamish exchanged glances with Al, who hadn’t moved a muscle since Zol had started sharing his evidence. What was Zol playing at? “Come on, Zol,” Hamish said, his frustration building, “we’ve been waiting all day for this.”

  “Truth is, there’s nothing to tell. A big fat zero.”

  “A computer glitch?”

  “I wish it were that easy.”

  He was happy enough to concede that Natasha was smart, but she wasn’t infallible. Not to the degree Zol liked to think. “Faulty questionnaire design? A confounding bias in her tool?”

  Zol stiffened. “Nothing’s wrong with Natasha’s investigative tool. Or her computer skills.”

  “Well then?”

  “The kids lied.”

  “You can’t be serious. When?”

  “On their questionnaires.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Zol explained how Colleen had found a teen hangout in the abandoned lot behind Erie Christian Collegiate. “Major drinking and smoking going on there,” he said. “Yet only two teens — one White, one Native — admitted to smoking on their questionnaires.”

  Al stirred for the first time. “Did the questionnaire ask about drugs and alcohol?”

  “Denied those, of course,” Zol said.

  “And solvents?”

  “Those too.”

  Al opened his eyes and took his hands off his chest. He leaned forward in his s
eat. “If they’re lying about beer and cigarettes,” he said, “what else are they hiding? Were there liquor bottles with the beer bottles?”

  “Colleen didn’t mention any,” Zol said.

  “And there really were tons of cigarette packs?” Al said.

  “Everywhere,” Zol said. “Mostly Hat-Tricks from the reserve. Why?”

  Hamish’s ears burned, his palms itched. Why were those kids — and their parents — being so stupid about the questionnaires? Didn’t they know how serious this was?

  Al rubbed his sideburns, first the right, then the left. For a long moment he stared at the opposite wall. Finally, his eyes began to glow. He pushed himself off the chesterfield and marched into the kitchen.

  “What . . . ?” Zol said.

  Hamish shrugged and flicked his hand. He wasn’t about to tell Zol that Al had run off for a Nicorette fix.

  Seconds later, Al was standing in the doorway tapping his foot on the hardwood. Hamish’s stomach lurched at the sight of his lover holding his nemesis, a cigarette in his hand.

  “Come on, Al. You promised —”

  “That these were only for show? A reminder that my former filthy habit was playing hell with my voice box?” He looked at Zol and explained, “It’s okay. I haven’t had a smoke in four months.”

  “Sounds great,” Zol said. “So, what gives?”

  “Watch.”

  Al put the unlit filter tip to his mouth and took a long pull. Then he waved the cigarette ostentatiously in his hand and pretended to exhale a huge cloud of smoke. He looked like a drag queen. Ridiculous.

  “What was I doing?”

  “Pretending to smoke a cigarette,” Hamish told him. “With far too much drama.”

  “But what exactly was I doing?”

  “Try it again,” Zol said. “And I’ll tell you what I see.”

  While Zol gave a running commentary, Al lifted the cigarette toward his mouth, pinched it between his lips, took a drag, then removed the cigarette by grasping it between the index and third fingers of his right hand.

  “Shit,” Zol said. “I get it.” He slapped his forehead with his palm. “Brilliant.”