“The commissioner told you to render every assistance?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” said the rapidly wakening voice.
“Does that include tracking a phone number?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Can your guys tell me where a particular phone is at any given moment?”
“That’s tech stuff, sir. I think it depends on the phone. New phones are harder. But I got guys I can call.”
I gave Jamal the number, and he said he’d wake people up. No problem. Happy to help.
There was nothing else to do until morning. Then I’d have Jamal drive us out to the Brooklyn folk art shop. But morning was hours away. Jamal was a good cop and I liked him. The locals seemed more cooperative than Ray Havlicek, or perhaps they were just more desperate. Maybe, I thought, dozing off, we’d get lucky. Maybe an answer would come from the conjunction of a visit from a burdened D.C. bureaucrat and a phone call from a teenage girl. My eyes began to close. My breathing was becoming more regular. Izabel Santo’s smooth muscled leg twitched and moved on top of mine as she slumbered. Maybe she was chasing a suspect in a dream. Maybe she was running for her life.
What I suspected was that, at that moment, in Washington, men and women were getting ready to give a group of murderers whatever it was that they wanted, whatever goal they had been killing to get.
TWENTY
The driver carrying the shipment from Brazil was an Irish-born immigrant without papers named Sean Cross, a twenty-year-old high school graduate from Cork, who dreamed of someday being a doctor. He’d taken a vacation in the United States, fallen in love with a poet named Julia who he met in Washington Square, and stayed on for a year to woo her, and then another year, after she left. He was a bad driver, paid cash off the books, and was thinking, as he narrowly missed hitting a parked car in Park Slope, that he probably should not have come to work today, because his hangover was bad.
He was certainly not thinking about his high school health class until he spotted the fat gray rat dragging a half-eaten pizza slice across 6th Avenue ahead, backing the meal toward an open sewer grate.
“Fucking ugly rat!”
He swerved violently to try to hit it. In back, as a result, a box in which Amazonian pottery was packed slid three inches to the right on a wobbling pile and almost toppled. Sean hated rats. Several lived in the walls in his East Harlem tenement. They were dirty and disgusting and they carried disease. Watching the pizza slice flop into the sewer in the side mirror, he recalled the voice of his old high school public-health-class teacher in Ireland. He had no idea that the process the voice was describing was — at that instant — happening in the back of Sean’s truck.
“During the Middle Ages, a few tiny mutations in a bacteria,” said the voice, “killed two hundred million people, sixty percent of Europe. The equivalent number today would top a billion.”
Sean saw in his head the map of the ancient world that his teacher, Mr. Colgan, had unrolled over the blackboard.
“The year 1347,” Colgan said in his smoker’s rasp.
At the bottom of the map, a dotted line extended over land from China to Turkey, and with a sketch of a wind-driven merchant sailing vessel below, another dotted line showing the sea route from Constantinople through the Bosporus, and Black Sea, and into the Mediterranean.
“The rats on board carried fleas. And in the gut of those fleas lived a bacteria called Yersinia pestis.
“If the fleas bit a sailor, the man became infected,” Colgan said. “Within days, victims sprouted buboes the size of peaches in their groins and armpits. Then came high fever and violent vomiting of black blood. Terrified mariners named the disease Black Death.
“When the ship reached Genoa, the rats left, and with them, the fleas,” Mr. Colgan added in the hushed voice of a good Irish storyteller.
“Within hours of docking, probably a merchant was bitten by a flea near the waterfront. Peasants in a quayside market were bitten; maybe the woman who sold fresh fish, or a cook buying supplies for a count’s dinner; a gypsy fortune-teller, a passing knight, at an inn that the rats invaded,” Mr. Colgan said.
“A quarter of those infected began to die.”
On the map, the dots left Genoa and, like rats, branched out across Europe. More dots went east.
“In 1348, the disease reached Pisa, Italy. A year later, Marseille, Spain, Portugal. Germany by 1349. Russia in 1351,” Colgan said. “And then it got worse, because our little friend Y. pestis changed. And so did the flea.”
“How?” Sean asked, from the front row.
“Ah! A few tiny changes over time reconstituted the bacteria. Almost invisible alterations, so small you needed an electron microscope to get any idea that it was there at all. It’s funny. Ten million years can go by while something alters. But then one day the effect happens, and a year later thousands are dead!”
“Tell us the change!”
“Imagine the male flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, so fragile looking that it seems translucent when magnified. The microscope light shines through! And then, a few alterations and a common bug that lives in your gut morphs into one of the biggest mass murderers in history.”
Sean looked at the GPS on his dashboard. He was now only one mile from the drop-off point, a folk art shop. Someone named Tom was supposed to meet him there.
Mr. Colgan had been the one who inspired Sean — before he got distracted by love — to want to become a doctor. The ex-Jesuit spent summers volunteering in a TB ward in Manila before becoming a teacher. He kept the students on the edge of their seats with his tales. He’d said, “It was only in 2014 that Poinar discovered original plague bacteria in a twenty-million-year-old flea, trapped in amber. That ancestor of pestis is named Y. pseudotuberculosis, still around today. Catch it and you suffer thirty minutes of diarrhea, nothing worse. Pestis, on the other hand, kills in sixty hours.”
“What changed pseudo into pestis?” Sean had asked.
“Three small changes created a plague! One. Pseudotuberculosis in its original form killed fleas! Yes! Fleas could not carry it! So our first change was the elimination of a single protein, called urease, that kept fleas from carrying plague. A small genetic mutation stopped pestis from making that protein. With the protein gone, fleas became vectors. They could now carry the bacteria.”
“And the second change?” Sean had asked.
“Again a tiny mutation, this time to a gene that encodes a protein that dissolves blood clots. The gene is called pla.”
“Pla? What do blood clots have to do with it?”
“Before the change, even if a flea bit a human, even if it transmitted the bacteria, the body would clot blood by that bite, to stop the bleeding. This clotting trapped the bacteria, kept it from spreading. So although the flea carried disease, it could not damage a new host.”
“The mutation stopped the clotting,” Sean guessed.