She lifted her head. Her neck ached. She tried to focus, but the room was dim, and outside, the New York sky was murky metallic green. It felt as if an electric storm was imminent. She looked at her wristwatch and saw it was seven-fifteen in the evening.
Gradually, unsteadily, she managed to stand up. Her head pounded with pain. Still wrapped in the Indian blanket, she padded across the apartment and called, ‘Charles? Are you there, Charles?’
There didn’t seem to be anyone around. She crossed the dining-room, with a table that was now cleared of all dishes and decorations, and peered into the main bedroom. The bed was neat and unslept in. It was covered in grayish-brown reindeer skin, and on the wall was a painting of snow in Lapland.
She went back into the living-room. She called out again, and at that moment the front door of the apartment opened and Charles walked in, beaming and confident.
‘Esmeralda!’ he said. ‘You’re awake!’
She nodded. ‘I just woke up. I feel like hell. Why didn’t you wake me earlier? I have to be home at seven-thirty. Daddy and I are going out to dinner tonight, and he’s going to go crazy if I’m late.’
Charles kissed her. ‘That’s nothing,’ he said. ‘So you’re fifteen minutes late. That’s nothing.’
‘What do you mean – “that’s nothing”?’
Charles reached in his pocket and produced a small black something, a couple of inches long. Esmeralda tried to focus on it, but couldn’t.
‘What’s that?’ she said.
Charles tossed the black something in the air and smartly caught it again.
‘This, my lovely gallery lady, is a roll of film. I have just come back from the photo laboratories, where even at this minute they are printing me up sufficient copies for my needs.’
She stood there and stared at him for a long, long time.
‘Kalimba and me,’ she said dryly.
‘You guessed it.’
She dropped the blanket. She didn’t care that she was naked. She picked her clothes up from the floor and slowly dressed. Charles Thurston bobbed and fidgeted around, tossing the film from one hand to the other, and saying, ‘Well, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s life.’
Esmeralda finished dressing and tugged a brush through her tangled hair. She collected her pocketbook and got ready to leave.
Charles Thurston said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask what I want? I mean, us blackmailers always want something.’
She paused. ‘All right,’ she said tiredly, ‘what do you want?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘It might be, but I’d prefer you to spell it out.’
He looked at her almost coyly. ‘What I want, in return for these highly diverting negatives, is for your father to drop his patent action.’
That was when the reality of the whole day’s work fell into place. She looked around the sparse, Nordic apartment and said, ‘This is Sergei Forward’s place, isn’t it? I didn’t think it was your style. And what about Kalimba?’
‘Not her real name, I’m afraid. A hired gun, so to speak.’
She stared at his handsome, disgusting face.
‘You won’t take money?’ she asked, softly. ‘Five thousand to say the film didn’t quite come out?’
Charles Thurston shook his head. ‘A job’s a job, lovely gallery lady. I have a reputation to maintain.’
‘I see. How long do I have?’
Thurston looked at his watch. ‘It’s now seven-thirty. We would like to know how your father feels about the matter in twenty-four hours. Otherwise, every porn magazine in town gets these, along with Scientific American and every journal your father ever wrote for in his whole life.’
Esmeralda ran her hand through her hair. ‘Now I understand the adjournment,’ she said. ‘If Sergei Forward had gone into court today, he would have lost the whole case outright. So he decided to get a little help from his friends.’
‘I’m not his friend,’ protested Charles Thurston III, as Esmeralda waited for the elevator. ‘I just work for him. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a cheap Finnish fuck.’
Esmeralda slammed the concertina gates of the elevator and glared at Thurston through the bars. ‘Anything’s better than being a cheap American fuck,’ she snapped, as the elevator took her down.
By Friday afternoon – the same afternoon that Esmeralda spent in Sergei Forward’s West 81st Street apartment – the plague zone had officially extended to New Orleans in the south, and with the help of police, National Guardsmen, vigilantes and cadets from summer colleges, it was being held back on a ragged line that stretched northwards to Jackson, Mississipi, Tuscaloosa, Chattanooga, Charleston and Cumberland.
The President had appeared on television at lunchtime and had said ‘solemnly, and with a heavy heart’ that he had to instruct every American to take up arms to protect the disease-free parts of the nation. That meant anyone from within the plague zone must be shot dead if they attempted to leave it.
‘At all costs,’ said the President, ‘we must contain this threat to our national health and heritage, and urgently seek to find some kind of cure. At the present speed of plague within six weeks.’
A reporter from NBC News asked the President if some people were more susceptible to the plague than others. The President reported that interim figures indicated that adults succumbed more rapidly than children, and that certain groups of workers within the community appeared to be partially or wholly immune. These included some hospital workers, some employees of ConEd, some military and naval personnel, some merchant seamen, some dentists and doctors, and one or two assorted minor professions.
Was there any clue why these people might be less prone to plague? The President said no, but ‘our best scientists are working on it.’
The Medical Workers’ Union were still on strike, although in some of the worst devastated parts of Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina, there was radio, TV and telephone blackout, and it was impossible to discover what was happening. Even police helicopters were forbidden to take reconnaissance pictures in case the bacillus was airborne to operational height. The nation was
