I shook my head. “Nothing, nothing more than a wild and...elusive thought that doesn’t make any more sense at the moment than a red tide that’s made of cochineal. I have some thinking to do, and no one can help me do it. When I have a few truths, whichever way they may point...if they begin to make sense...”
Astrid said suddenly, remembering: “You said the Army doctors were giving a second opinion? Why the Army? What have they got to do with this?”
Fenrek told her gently: “As Cain says, my dear...when we have some truths. Meanwhile, resign yourself to doing nothing, because there’s nothing you can do, nothing at all.”
She did not answer. She was staring at the ambulance as it lumbered over the rough ground unsteadily up the steep track to the road. One of the policemen waved a casual hand at it and went back to picking his teeth. Soon, it hit the tarmac, and it went slowly, in not too straight a line, across the road to the wrong side and lurched to a sudden stop with one wheel in the ditch.
Fenrek said: “What the devil...”
He started to move towards it, and I held out an arm and said urgently: “No, wait.”
The driver was getting down from the ambulance, stumbling, being violently sick all over the road. The door at the back flew open, and the two medicos tumbled out, falling on the tarmac and rolling there as though they were in agony. I saw Fenrek moving, and I yelled again: “No!” Astrid ran towards them, and I threw myself at her and brought her to the ground with my momentum. I dragged her back, struggling, pulling her away from there as fast as I could, feeling her fighting me savagely.
She screamed at me: “Cain, for God’s sake, I’m a nurse, a registered nurse!” I held her down, and said: “No, there’s nothing you can do, nothing.”
She went on fighting me until Fenrek, his deeply-tanned face suddenly white, said quietly: “We’ve got to watch it, haven’t we?”
Holding tight onto Astrid, I said: “Yes, we do, and we stay upwind of them as well. Not an inch closer, none of us.”
She stopped struggling then, staring at the men on the road with something very close to horror on her face. She suddenly turned away and buried her face in my shoulder, and I could feel her body shaking. And then she pulled away from me and began trying to reach them again, and I held her tighter still. She screamed: “Let me go, damn you!”
I yelled back. “No, it’s hopeless, there’s nothing, don’t you understand? Nothing you can do, nothing any of us can do.”
One of the men was yelling a long stream of obscenities; it was the driver. The other two men, the doctors, lay still and I knew that they were dead. And then the driver made a convulsive movement, arching up his body and twisting it round, and then he too was suddenly still and silent and not in that dreadful pain any more.
Fenrek’s voice was hollow. He said: “They’re dead, all of them, and we watched them...God in Heaven, we stood here and watched them die.”
Astrid was staring at the three bodies lying there. The motor of the ambulance was still turning slowly, idling. She said, echoing his words: “We stood here and watched them die...”
There was a little silence. And then Astrid said, her eyes on me with all the anger and hysteria gone from them: “All right, perhaps now you’d better tell me. The Army doctors, you said. What has the Army got to do with all this?”
Fenrek said quietly: “Everything.”
CHAPTER 2
The little pieces of the inexplicable always fit together if you take time cut to examine them carefully enough and see where they’re supposed to go. Sometimes there’s an imponderable or two left over, so you think some more; and soon, they drop neatly into place as well.
I went to see the General.
His house was one of the old mansions built by the Marquis of Pombal in the eighteenth century, after the earthquake that leveled the center of Lisbon. On that terrible day, at half past nine on the morning of November 1st, 1755, nine thousand buildings were demolished in the space of six seconds, and thirty thousand people lost their lives. The violent winds carried the flames through the city, and by eleven o’clock the whole of its center had been obliterated from the face of the earth.
It was a fine old building, the General’s house, faced with painted tiles and wrought iron, that stood on the edge of the Alfama, at the top, standing like a highly-decorated fortress with its brick patio looking down over the Alfama’s rooftops and its deep, cavernous streets, so narrow in places that the tops of the houses seemed almost to touch, all piled close together up the sides of the hills. They all seemed to lean outward here; in one place, though the street below is eight feet wide, you can stretch your hand out of the upper windows, up on the fourth floor (which is the ground floor on the other side) and touch the walls of the house opposite.
On the steep steps below that were the main streets of this quaint little quarter, with bright pots of scarlet geraniums and pale blue ageratum everywhere, with honeysuckle trailing carelessly over trellises; kids were chasing each other in bursts of childish energy, racing up the stairs and down again, like ants scurrying in and out of their runs. A plump, well-fed woman was doing the day’s laundry at the public fountain in the miniscule courtyard there; and over the rooftops you could see the masts of the ships in the harbor, with the blue sea beyond and the grey hills across the broad river Tagus in the distance. A concrete Christ was up on the hill there, half hidden now in the mist that was rolling in from the bay, and the long, high Salazar Bridge (“the American Bridge”, they call it) sent its slender red steelwork like a ribbon across the water; you could fancy, without much effort, that it was swaying slightly, as any ribbon ought to.
The General was a politician, and though I’m not usually very high on politicians, he was a good one—or he wanted to be. General Jaime Dom Pedro Queluz had retired four years ago after a major tragedy in Angola, where he’d been sent to put down the guerrillas and re-impose the strict discipline the Portuguese have always demanded. It was a tragedy that was not his fault at all, except that he wasn’t the right man for the job there and had allowed a most unmilitary gentleness to intrude into a very rough situation. A commando of mercenaries had broken into his H.Q. and had blown up the whole installation while the General was attending a so-called “appeasement meeting” with the rebels.
In Angola, in those days, you weren’t supposed to talk with the enemy at all—especially while they were planning to kill off all your staff officers at that precise moment—and Dom Pedro had been brought home to face a court-martial which had resulted in his retirement.
I’d been home in San Francisco then, and a report of his speech to the Tribunal had appeared in one of the Spanish papers that I take regularly. He had said, at the close of his defense (which he conducted himself):
We will never realize the full potential of our culture, and nor, indeed, will any of the civilized Powers, until the world’s great armies can learn to build as efficiently as they can now destroy. When we use our understanding as expertly as we use our weapons, then we will at last be able to hope for peace on earth, and armies, perhaps, will become redundant...
I was deeply impressed by this little piece of philosophizing, coming as it did at a time when half of Africa was badly in need of understanding and wasn’t getting very much; though it didn’t do him much good in front of a Military Tribunal.
Now he was making a comeback, or trying to. He needed a coup, a dramatic triumph to put himself once again in official favor. And that’s why I was there.
A short, stubby sort of man, with gentle eyes and thinning white hair, a kindly man with an air of vague distraction as though his mind was forever playing with ideas that had nothing to do with the matter under discussion; a man who had the peculiar ability to stay absolutely still while he talked, frozen in the same posture for minutes on end, without the twitch of a muscle or the blinking of an eye. He would be moving around, and would suddenly stop still, and not move again, so that you felt you were talking to a statue; and then, he would suddenly come to life again and make broad, incisive gestures with his thick, muscular hands.
He had a good reputation in the Army. They said that in spite of his gentleness he was a terror to his officers, that he demanded from them a state of vigorous competence to match his own—something that was, very hard to come by in Colonial Africa, where lassitude and laissez faire are much more easily accepted characteristics.
I was late, two hours late for our appointment, but he waved aside my apologies. “I heard...I heard about Colonel Fenrek’s niece nearly getting herself killed.” He broke off and grunted. “A strange thing. We’ve had that damned red tide before, but it’s never before been contagious. Seven deaths, all within a few hours, and two more likely to die if we don’t find out what’s truly wrong with them. The SME’s very worried about it. And how are Fenrek and his niece?”
I said: “So far, no trouble. We were all of us very close to three of the victims, but there was a good strong wind blowing away from us.”
Standing there, immobile, he asked: “Inoculations?”
I shrugged. “Against what? We don’t know what it is that killed them. Fenrek insisted on being vaccinated, every vaccine the hospital could suggest. But his niece and I, we’ve both got more sense.”
He frowned. “The army doctors are inoculating everyone with a mild compound of...piperidylester, I think they call it.”
I said: “To be precise, ethyltripiperidyl cyclopen-tylphonylglycolate. But it isn’t everybody who can take that, even a very mild dose.”
The muscles galvanized themselves and he changed position and froze again, his eyebrows raised. “I didn’t know you were a medical man, Senhor Cain?”
“I’m not. But, as you may know, I read a great deal, I have a memory that can only be called freakish, and microbiology has always fascinated me.” I shrugged. “Put all that together, and...that’s why Astrid and I refused all those inoculations.”
“Astrid? The minena, the young lady? I’ve never met her, I’m told she’s extremely attractive, in a Nordic sort of way.”
