‘All right. I’ll do the best I can.’
He nodded. ‘We’ll go up to the compound. You can dictate the descriptions in the car. I’m already having my men round up all the known regulars from this place, shrimpers, fishermen… it’s just possible…’
One of the others came up to him, awaiting orders.
Larsen said, ‘Get that blood up. All of it. We don’t need… Then seal the place.’ The man nodded. The blood, too? I thought. Larsen turned back to me. ‘Well, come on, then.’
I finished my drink and followed him towards the door.
Larsen grabbed my arm and maybe he said it to impress the urgency on me, or to frighten me, or maybe he just felt like saying it. He said: ‘None of us may get out of this, Harland… we may never leave this island. And, believe me, it won’t be a tropical paradise then…’
Drinking black coffee from a white mug, I sat behind a table in a small whitewashed room feeling depressed and sick and tired. I had described the men — and the woman — as best I could and, although the descriptions seemed pitifully inadequate to me, Larsen seemed satisfied. I expect he had a file on everyone who lived on Pelican. From time to time he nodded, as if in recognition. There was something almost intimate in our relationship as I confided in him in the back seat of the car. When I mentioned the woman, he said, ‘That’ll be Sally… salad girl on the shrimp boats… ship’s whore, to speak plainly,’ and he also put names to the bearded man and the long-haired philosopher… several others — I paid little heed; perhaps I did not want these men to have names, to label those I was betraying and thereby make them individuals. My information was slight. My memory for details had been blurred, knocked out of focus, yet Larsen drew from me more than I thought I knew in the shadowed intimacy of that moving car. I had exhausted my recollections by the time we entered the compound.
We drove up to the main building, a single-storey affair with wings on either side, and Larsen escorted me to the whitewashed room. His men had not been idle. They started bringing the locals in as soon as I had taken my seat. Larsen stood beside me, behind the table. There was a gooseneck lamp there and he kept his hand on the flexible shaft, tilting it up and down. The bulb was very bright, very white against the wall. Larsen leaned forward; his face sprang out with an albedo to shame the moon, lips drawn back, clenched teeth geometrical. Dark veins in his neck defied the lurid glare. Then he leaned back into darkness and his face receded.
They brought the locals in one by one, two guards to each man and another guard on the door. They were angry, bewildered men, roused from bed or rousted from bars without explanation. The Cuban counterman from the Fisherman’s Cafe was one of the first; he looked sullen and dejected. Others who had heard the news looked sly and cunning. They all stared directly at me and I felt the lowest form of traitor, but I neither flinched nor looked away, convinced that I was doing what had to be done, despite these secret police tactics. I recognised several of the locals, but not from the Red Walls. I spoke to no one and they just glared at me, their faces distorted by elongated shadows thrown up from the lamp. Perhaps they could not identify me as they looked into that glare. I shook my head each time and Larsen sighed. Knowing I had to identify the men who had been involved, I nevertheless felt satisfaction each time I was able to negate one.
Then they brought in an old man and my memory snatched his face from the crowd at the bar, moulding it to the frightened countenance that stood before me in this silent inquisition. It was the old man who had spoken fondly of the old days. I hesitated. I felt Larsen stiffen beside me. The old man was squinting in the direct beam of the lamp and I didn’t know if he could see my features, but I knew he could see my head, at least in outline; that he would know if I nodded.
Larsen sensed my hesitation; he tilted the lamp higher and the old man’s shadow sprang up the wall, crooked and distorted. The shadow seemed to have more substance than the man who cast it; there was a reality too dark to be illuminated in this room.
At last, I nodded.
The old man went rigid and Larsen’s head snapped around towards me. I nodded again. Larsen flicked a glance at the guards. They took the old man by the arms and led him out. He was protesting in a high-pitched whine. I felt truly treacherous now and Larsen must have known this, for he placed his hand on my shoulder reassuringly and, as if to certify the humanity behind the gesture, he took his spectacles off for a moment.
Then they brought the next man in.
Twice more, I nodded.
I must have confronted forty or fifty men and only three of them had been in the bar. The bearded man had not been found, nor the long-haired fellow with the political views. The woman had not been brought in, nor had the bartender, but in those cases the identification was definite and they may have found them without bringing them before me in my stark chamber. They the steady stream of — what? Suspects? Victims? Carriers?… whatever, the stream of unfortunates brought there to stand before their tortured shadows began to taper off. In the first stormtrooper round-up Larsen’s men had gathered up the unsuspecting and the innocent, but those who had been involved had already gone into hiding with, from their point of view, good reason — a man had been killed, one old, unarmed man had been stabbed to death by a mob and they had no desire to stand trial on that count. They were terrified by the bizarre aspects of the thing and, even discounting the murder, they knew that Nurse Jeffries had, under somewhat similar circumstances, been forced to go to the mysterious compound. They were not inclined to listen to the reasoning of authority and, even if they had, the time element was against that approach. I couldn’t blame them for going into hiding. But while they hid, the disease was incubating.
‘How long does it take?’ I asked.
Larsen and I were alone behind the table. The guard on the door had his back to us, hands clasped, looking down the corridor. No one had been brought in for the last ten minutes.
‘What?’
‘For the disease to take effect?’
‘That’s not. ’ He paused, leaning towards me so that his face came into the light as if he now were being identified, waiting for my dreaded nod. ‘Oh, hell, it’s a bit late in the game to play classified information, isn’t it? I appreciate your help, Harland. The time… it varies according to the subject’s weight and metabolism and, to a lesser degree, the body area where the… infection… was transferred. Say an average of… three hours.’
‘That soon?’
‘That soon,’ he said, playing with the lamp, manipulating the shadows, twisting the flexible neck from side to side in his strong hands. I felt the same need to do something with my own hands. I got my pipe out and began to fill it carefully. He twisted the lamp and I stuffed tobacco in the bowl and lit it. A great cloud of smoke billowed out and hung over us. I remembered how Larsen had spoken of the cloud of guilt that often enveloped him. The drifting smoke made filigreed shadows up the wall. The shadows moved; they were not as enduring as guilt.
He was fairly strangling the lamp.
‘It must be very virulent,’ I said.
‘Of course. Harland, it’s a disease such as the world has never known. A disease that never should have been known… and we created it here.’
‘What is it? Viral?’
‘Chemical.’
Chemicals that warp the fabric of the mind… I said, ‘Chemical? But how can that be contagious?’
Larsen dropped his head, twisting his own neck just as he’d twisted the lamp. He said, ‘I don’t know. But it is.’ The light, reflecting from his taut face, seemed to come from within his skull. ‘It’s directly infectious, by contact. It’s not… well, it’s not the Black Death, say. It won’t sweep across the world and decimate the population. Thank God for that. And yet, in its way it’s far more horrible. It’s so — ’ he sought the word ‘ — so personal! Yes, that’s it, exactly. Personal.’ The word itself seemed anathema to this bureaucratic man. ‘It goes beyond disease, Harland; it reaches into the realm of superstition and snatches up the stuff of legend, the dark fears that evolved with man. Werewolves, Harland… and vampires…’ His face rose and fell as if under heavy blows. He looked sick. He said, ‘These men… the man who contract this thing… officially, in the reports, they are termed subjects of Chemically Modified Behaviour. Informally…’ he looked at me. ‘We call them ghouls.’