She said, “Christine said to tell you to check out the bedroom closets, and leave the drawings in the kitchen.”
I heard more music, hip-hop now, over the kids’ show. The house was a madhouse of electronics. I heard children running, the tromp of socked feet, a small girl screeching in delight and a boy yelling, in a Dracula accent, “I em Mosquito! I vill BITE you!!”
Everywhere I go in outbreak zones, children incorporate death into play. “Ring Around the Rosie” was first sung by youngsters during the great London Plague, because victims had rings around their eyes. A pocket full of posies referred to flowers that warded off disease smells. Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down had those long-ago children imagining corpses burning as they held hands and danced.
“Christine said she and Alan won’t be back until late, from the gala. She’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Gala? What gala?” I asked, returning the smile.
THIRTY-FOUR
Dusk.
The hungry female mosquito rose on a column of warm air from the pond on which she’d been deposited, along with hundreds of sisters. All were capable of feeding on many mammals that lived near the golf course: raccoons, possums, dogs, or cats. But she detected something more attractive nearby — perfume — with her spearlike maxillary palp, which jutted out between her antennae.
Normally, dragonflies and bats lived in the country club woods and ate many times their body weight in mosquitoes each day. They were efficient insect control systems, but recent pesticide spraying had wiped most of them out, along with any mosquitoes that had lived here only weeks ago.
Now the sweet smells drew her and her sisters toward the lit-up building like metal filings pulled to a magnet. Their compound eyes had tiny lenses, ommatidia, capable of detecting movement. Propelled by sheer wings, they adjusted steering with smaller ones, called halteres.
She detected large forms ahead, outlined by bulky movement. The odors grew stronger as she closed the distance between woods and hot pools of electric light.
She was different than even the lab-created sisters around her. She was — in fact — the only one of her kind in the world. She carried in her proboscis a parasite representing the seed of global medical conflagration.
All she had to do for that to happen was feed, and pass the parasite on.
THIRTY-FIVE
“I can’t let you inside, sir. Sorry.”
My taxi had been stopped by the gate guard at the Druid Hills Country Club. He had orders to turn away anyone lacking an invitation, and did not look sorry at all. He shrugged off my claim that I needed to talk to someone inside, and he suggested in bored tones that I contact the lady tomorrow.
“Please call the clubhouse and check,” I asked.
“Can’t.” The guard shook his head, meaning, won’t.
I had no ID attaching me to any official investigation. He glanced at my Wilderness Program card by flashlight, but it meant nothing to him. He accurately gauged the extent of my frustration, because he told me in a firmer tone that if I did not turn around, he’d call the police.
“What if I buy a ticket to the gala?”
“Now?” The guard looked resentful.
“It’s a fund-raiser, right?” I said. “Why not?”
“Tickets cost a lot.” He looked me over. Was I important? His eyes flicked to the shiny parked Mercedes, BMWs, and upscale cars in the lot, as if the ticket expense would be prohibitive for me.
“It’s for a good cause,” I said.
He found my suggestion irritating. But he went into the guard shack — keeping the traffic bar down — and made the call. I could not hear what he was saying but had a feeling that it was not that a friendly gentleman had shown up. I had a feeling he was saying that a pest was at the gate, trying to weasel in, possibly with a bogus credit card.
The guard looked self-satisfied when he came out.
“All tickets were sold days ago. No more spaces, sir.”
It’s just a few more hours, I thought, disappointed, as the cab U-turned back toward Clifton Road. I came to see her face. I asked the driver if he knew of a motel nearby. I’d return to the Mahin house tomorrow, ring the bell, and try again.
“There’s a Comfort Inn a few miles away, sir.”
I told him to go there, but changed my mind. “Pull over, on the grass.” On one side of Clifton Road were lit-up houses, on the other, golf fairways beyond thick brush and trees and moonlight gleaming on a chain-link fence.
“I’ll walk to the motel,” I said.
“It’s far.”
“For exercise.”
“You’ll get lost.”
I tipped the driver and thanked him. Shaking his head… some people… he drove off as I pushed into the brush. Five minutes later I’d managed to rip my jacket on a thorn bush, and get my shoes wet in a stream. A thorn tore at my face. I felt a cut open. I gripped the fence and climbed.
Tom Fargo should leave, he knew, but he could not help watching. Anonymous, he gazed at the gala around him. Until now the damage he inflicted was always distant. He deposited vectors and left. Later, on TV, he watched victims from a distance. But this time he wanted more visceral satisfaction. There was a grinding sense of justice in his belly, and anticipation was a coppery taste on the roof of his mouth.
These people killed my family.
His name card… Seth Pryce… seated him at a periphery table, by the patio and open French doors. He’d be eating with food company executives who had flown in from out of state. He introduced himself to a bright young lawyer on his right from the legal division, and his wife, and to the woman on his left, from the Saint Louis beer division. Neither, they said, had taken antimalarials before coming. “I don’t want to risk the side effects,” the woman told him. “Besides, we’re only here for one night.”
People were going in and out of the doors, to the patio, to talk, to smoke, to look at the view.
A small salad sat before him, lush greens wrapped in carrot skin, topped by crushed onions, tomatoes, fresh Tuscan dressing that was the brown color of the sauce that had killed Tom’s wife.
On the dance floor, a smiling man in a tuxedo lifted a microphone. “Welcome to our annual gala to benefit Food For All. We are here to honor the doctors and workers who risk their lives overseas to feed the hungry. And to honor YOU, our donors, without whom there would be no FFA.”
Tom had never told Dr. Cardozo that his choice of targets was personal. This morning he’d called the gala reservations number, reached an overconfident voice, and been assured that “there’s not been a single case of malaria in Atlanta, so part of the evening will be outside if the weather holds.”
Tom had said, “I haven’t taken any medicines,” and the voice had assured him, “Many guests are also coming from uninfected areas. Besides, we saturated the grounds with pesticides a week ago. The only living thing out there will be a few last golfers at dusk.”
That’s what you think, he’d thought.
Now the MC said, “Throughout the evening, we will be showing slides of our work. Those tents you see are near Syria, set up to feed thousands displaced by fighting.”
A live band played oldies, and couples got up to dance. A few stylishly dressed women — bored with husbands talking sports — gyrated with one another.