We all fall down, p.3
We All Fall Down, page 3
As they head away from the water, the grand walls give way to the rolling hills above the city. Nico explains how Genoa is built like an amphitheater, rising steadily upward from the horseshoe-shaped harbor. Although he grew up in Rome, his pride in his adopted city is obvious. “In spite of our aging population, the economy here is booming again. You might say Genoa is experiencing a second Renaissance.”
“Seems like an appropriate locale for one,” she says.
“The site where Vittoria was working is particularly high-profile here. Controversial, too.”
“How so?”
“To begin with, Marcello Zanetti is behind it.” He waits for a glimmer of recognition, but she shows none. “You haven’t heard of him?”
“Why would I have?”
“Ah, Marcello is a local celebrity. He was mayor for six years. Many imagined him for higher office.”
“So what happened?”
“He retired from politics to return to his construction business. And this San Giovanni redevelopment is his most ambitious project. It will be the tallest apartment tower in Genoa, with spectacular views from the hilltop.”
“What’s so controversial about it?”
“There was an old monastery there before.”
“And the Church was okay with them tearing it down?”
“Marcello says the place was crumbling anyway.”
“Hold on. You know him?”
“Of course. Marcello is Isabella’s uncle.”
“Your wife’s uncle? That’s kind of coincidental.”
Nico shrugs. “Only to our advantage. Otherwise, how else would we access the site?”
He turns onto a dirt road lined with pylons. Dust flies over the windshield and the vehicle shimmies along for half a mile or so until a massive construction site materializes ahead of them. He pulls over into a gravel-lined lot and parks between a pickup truck and a tractor. They climb out into the warmer sunshine under skies marbled with benign clouds, with the smell of diesel floating on the breeze.
As they head toward a cluster of trailers, a diminutive man in a black robe approaches from the opposite direction. He is flanked on either side by two lanky security guards; the contrast in their relative statures is striking. Neither of the guards has a hand on the balding monk, but it’s obvious they are escorting him off the site. The monk smiles at Alana and Nico as they pass, and his bright eyes light with amusement, as if the three of them are in on the same inside joke.
Up close, the excavated pit is even more expansive than Alana had anticipated. It cuts deep into the hillside. Slabs of concrete foundation crisscross its base, interspersed with mounds of rubble, piles of lumber, and stacks of rebar. Men in yellow hard hats work in groups while bulldozers rumble back and forth. Saws hum and drills screech. The ground vibrates from the heavy machinery.
The door to one of the nearby trailers flies open and a young man steps out, haphazardly straightening his hard hat. He doesn’t make eye contact as he bustles past Alana, but his acne-riddled face is flushed and sweaty.
Two more men emerge from the trailer. One is dressed in construction gear, while the other wears a black suit. Trim, with silver hair, the older man possesses an air of easy authority. As soon he spots Nico, he bounds over with open arms and greets him with a hug and a kiss to both cheeks. Amid much laughter, they chat in rapid-fire Italian while the younger man stands off to the side.
Finally, Nico turns to Alana and extends his hand. “Marcello, please, Dr. Alana Vaughn.”
Zanetti clasps her hand in both of his. “It is a pleasure, Dr. Vaughn.” His accent is thicker than Nico’s. “Nico tells me good things. Such good things.”
Although she’s pleased to hear Nico has been discussing her with his wife’s uncle, she also feels irrationally annoyed, as if he’d disclosed an actual secret between them. “Thank you, Mr. Zanetti.”
He squeezes her hand once more before letting go. “Marcello. I insist. Only Marcello for someone of your reputation and your presence, my dear.”
“Alana.” She smiles, appreciating his Old World charm but wondering how many times the same line has passed his lips.
“Marcello, we were hoping you might tell us about Vittoria Fornero,” Nico prompts.
Zanetti’s face saddens. “I knew Vittoria for years. Her father, Bruno, was one of my original foremen. He used to bring her to the sites when she was just a girl. She apprenticed under him. As good as Bruno was, Vittoria was even better. The best. And it was never easy for her. Here in Italy, construction is still a man’s world.”
Alana nods sympathetically. “No one on the site had any inkling she was sick?”
Zanetti waves the suggestion away. “She never said a word. Not one. And she didn’t miss a moment of work until her . . . collapse.”
Alana still fails to understand how someone with active plague could slog through a day of construction work. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Perhaps three days ago.” Zanetti nods to the trailer. “Yes. She sat down with me and the architects. To review the plans.”
“Inside?” Alana frowns.
“Of course.” Zanetti glances over to Nico. “Where else?”
“How did she look?” Nico asks.
“The same as always. So serious, Vittoria. So focused.”
“You didn’t hear her cough?” Alana asks.
“No. Not at all.” Zanetti’s voice is calm, but his eyes are calculating. “You think she might have already been contagious?”
“No, Marcello,” Nico reassures. “Not if she wasn’t coughing.”
“We have asked everyone here. No coughing,” Zanetti says. “Vittoria was well one moment, and . . .” He snaps his fingers.
It seems appropriate to pause, so Alana waits a little while before she asks, “Marcello, have you heard of anyone else at the site falling ill? With a fever? A cough? Even just a rash?”
“Nothing.” Zanetti turns to the man in the overalls and converses with him for a few moments before reverting back to English. “No. Not so much as a sneeze. Paolo says he has checked with all of the crews.”
“Still, why not just stop work here for a few days?” Alana suggests. “A week at the most. Until we know the risk is completely gone.”
Zanetti squints at her. “The other doctors, from the government—”
“Public Health,” Nico offers.
“Sì! Public Health. They assured us there was no more risk. Besides, my dear, a week . . .” Zanetti flutters a hand up and over his head. “You have no idea what that might cost.”
Less than what an outbreak of the plague would. Alana keeps the thought to herself. “Marcello, on our way in, we passed a monk. He was being escorted away—”
“Brother Silvio! Such a character! Funny little man. He comes every day.”
“Why?”
Zanetti taps his temple and laughs. “He is losing his mind. Senile, yes? Sometimes he gets in the way. It’s not his fault.”
“Is that so?” Alana says.
“Do not worry about our little monk, my dear. He will be back tomorrow! That is one thing he never forgets!” He exhales again. “It’s such a shame, you know.”
She assumes he is still talking about Brother Silvio, but instead he motions toward the construction site. “We tried to save her. The old monastery. We were going to turn her into a beautiful museum. As part of the complex.”
“What happened?” she asks.
“The engineers. They took their magical measurements. They tell us she was—” He turns to Nico and switches to Italian again.
“Structurally unsound,” Nico translates.
“Unsafe. Yes. We had to take her apart. But we will build a memorial to the monastery right here on the ground floor. Something special. It will make even Brother Silvio proud.” He kicks at the loose soil by his foot. “Trust me, the spirit of San Giovanni will soon rise again.”
Chapter
Six
Today is the twenty-seventh day of January, in the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and forty-eight.
Had you asked me a week prior whether the suffering could worsen or the sorrow deepen, I would have told you it was not humanly or divinely imaginable. How wrong I would have been. No person is left unscathed, no family untouched. Death grows insatiable.
I barely have strength left to apply quill to parchment. The muscles in my arms throb. The stench of pus is embedded in my nostrils. I lanced buboes and applied fresh salves long after sundown.
The tempers run short in our once-great city. Earlier, the townspeople jostled violently for position in the queue to consult with me. More than once, the shouting led to fisticuffs. I had to banish one man, the local tanner, after he barged into my room demanding immediate attention even as my fingers were buried deep in the armpit of another.
People are not the only victims of this sickness. So, too, are common values such as decency, compassion, and even order. The spectacles I have witnessed in recent days would embarrass even the most seasoned of men. This pestilence has driven people to the extremes of deportment. I have seen panic on the faces of hardened soldiers and stoic acceptance in the eyes of young naïfs. Some say it has turned men either toward heaven or hell.
Many cling with blind zeal to prayers and rituals. They spend most of their time at church, and to demonstrate their sacrifice to God, some even shun the most basic comforts, including food or drink in the daylight hours and a bed after nightfall.
Others feel abandoned by God, and therefore freed of the obligation to live by His laws. They carry themselves with wanton disregard and, at times, shameless gall. They gamble on the street, drink themselves to stupor in the daylight, carouse openly with those who are not their wives or husbands. I have heard that several among them support their hedonism by looting the property of the newly dead or, even worse, that of those too infirm to resist.
Who am I to judge? We each carry our burden in our own way. Still, I must confess to being saddened to have learned that my former protégé has joined the ranks of the hedonists.
Lorenzo Mirandolo apprenticed under me for two years. The boy showed true promise. I once observed him reset a shattered ankle on a peddler whose weighty cart had rolled over his foot. Lorenzo aligned the deformed foot and ankle with such precision that, within three months, the peddler was walking again with only the slightest of limps.
Sadly, Lorenzo’s family served as the earliest of kindling for this newly lit bonfire of death. His mother died before the New Year arrived, and his father, two sisters, and youngest brother all succumbed in the following week. Lorenzo went nearly mad with sorrow.
One morning, early in January, he did not arrive at the appointed hour to help clean the surgical utensils. Punctuality was among his most consistent virtues, so I was concerned that he, too, must have fallen ill. When I told Camilla that I was going to seek him, she warned me to curtail my expectations. Her intuition proved correct. Camilla was prescient that way. I shall never forget the tears of sorrow she cried, two summers before, upon telling me that she was with child. She foresaw then that she would never carry the baby to life.
I found Lorenzo in the lowliest of the local taverns by the harbor. As I entered, a scrawny three-legged dog chased a piglet across the straw floor, stopping only to urinate against the leg of a table. Though it was not yet noon, revelers filled the tavern, which reeked of spilt ale and burnt meat. It took me a moment to sight Lorenzo on the far side of the room, where he tottered on his chair with a whore straddling his lap.
Rafael, he called to me, instead of his usual honorific of Signore Pasqua. Come drink with us, my good master!
You are already drunk, Lorenzo, I observed upon reaching his table.
And so should you be, he announced, causing the wench on his lap to cackle and raise her mug in agreement.
There is work to be done, I said. More work than ever.
Lorenzo laughed bitterly, and his voice grew louder still. The only work left for us is to bide our time until death gets around to claiming each of us, too.
Not all of the afflicted die, I said. There is hope for some. And it is our duty as surgeons to offer them the best opportunity for survival or, at the very least, a modicum of comfort in their dying.
Tell that to my mother, my father, my sisters, and especially my brother!
There are no words to soothe such losses, I said. However, no loss, no matter how great, permits us the luxury of abdicating our duty.
Lorenzo slammed his mug onto the table, spilling ale over it, and labored to his feet, toppling the harlot to the floor. You are a decent man and a good teacher, Rafael, he cried. But you are a cruel fool to confuse high-mindedness for hope!
Chapter
Seven
The long silences are the worst, Alana thinks, as she listens to her boss, Monique Olin, breathe on the other end of the secure voice-over-Internet line. She remembers the parting words of Gavin Fielding, her Scottish predecessor at NATO: “Don’t believe the fuckin’ Mother Teresa act! Monique can be one terrifying old cow when she doesn’t get her way.”
In the eighteen months since Alana assumed her role as director of biological surveillance for NATO, she has come to realize that Fielding was only half joking about their mutual boss. Alana respects and even admires the fiftyish Frenchwoman, who has risen to the level of assistant secretary general, one promotion away from the very top of the old boys’ club that NATO continues to be. Among other responsibilities, Olin oversees Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear Defense, or CBRN as it’s always referred to at headquarters. She can be collaborative in her approach, but once her mind is made up she demands absolute compliance. And God help anyone who thinks otherwise.
Olin finally breaks the silence on the line. “So you went to Genoa despite my explicit instructions?”
“Monique, it’s the first case of pneumonic plague Western Europe has seen in several hundred years!”
“And what does that have to do with you?” Olin asks quietly. “Or NATO?”
“How can the recurrence of the plague in Europe not represent a potential security threat?”
“This is an issue for Italian Public Health,” Olin mutters, her exasperation revealing traces of her usually nonexistent French accent. “If NATO were to get involved every time a European tourist brought something back from the developing world—”
“This isn’t some sex tourist lugging antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea back from Cambodia. It’s the fucking plague, Monique!”
“We only go in when we are invited,” Olin says, unmoved. “Not before.”
“You could get us that invitation,” Alana persists, realizing she would be wise to back off but was unable to stop herself.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Olin says. “But I won’t try. And you will return to Brussels. Immediately.”
“I need another day or so, Monique. Just to establish whether this case is—”
“I said no, Alana! Besides, the WHO is already on the way to Genoa.”
The words bristle more than Olin’s sharp tone. If Alana had stuck with the World Health Organization, she might have been put in charge of the mission herself. “Who is leading their team?”
“Byron Menke.”
Alana shakes her head but holds her tongue. She had never personally worked with the Canadian epidemiologist at the WHO, but she remembers his reputation for being heavy-handed and, at times, tactless—an ends-justify-the-means kind of investigator.
“Come back to Brussels, Alana,” Olin says coolly.
“First thing tomorrow morning.”
“Any longer and you might not have an office to return to.” With that, the line goes dead.
Alana remembers something her mother—an orthopedic surgeon who retired from the army with the rank of colonel—once told her: “The very first words out of your mouth were back talk, darling. How did you ever end up in the military?” It was true. Army brat or not, Alana wonders what self-destructive instinct would lead someone as headstrong as herself to join the most hierarchical institutions in the world, including the U.S. military, the WHO, and, perhaps worst of all, NATO.
Her shoulder aches again, and she rubs it to no real effect. How different life would have been if not for that friendly fire incident, eleven years ago, that leveled the field hospital in the Afghani province of Logar. Four surgeries later, Alana still suffers from chronic shoulder pain and permanent numbness in her ring and little fingers. Sometimes her shoulder spontaneously dislocates if she raises her arm too quickly. Were it not for the injury, she would have been an established trauma surgeon by now, instead of chasing microscopic phantoms across the globe. In her heart, Alana knows she was always destined for this work, but for reasons she doesn’t even understand, she still views the injury as a failure, and hides it from most people. Nico used to tell her that the scars made her look sexier. It was a testament to how deeply she trusted him that she ever allowed him to touch them.
The phone vibrates on the bed. Alana wonders if it might be Olin calling back to light into her a second time, but instead, Nico’s name pops up on the screen. His three-word text—“Hospital. Come now!”—sets her heart thumping.
Alana bursts through the doors of the Ospedale San Martino. Staff and visitors flow through the lobby as usual. A medical supplier has set up an exhibition in the middle, and several people linger to inspect the wares. But she isn’t fooled by the apparent calm.
Remembering her earlier long wait at the hospital’s elevator, she rushes up the stairs to Nico’s fourth-floor office. Inside, she finds only his receptionist, who speaks no English. The matronly woman tells Alana, through a series of hand gestures, that Nico has been called away. “Where? Dove?”
