The Touch of Innocents

So, the Duster was expensive, but what did they expect of the most technologically innovative piece of military hardware in a generation? So it was already a Cold War cowpat, a weapons system in search of an enemy, a huge and wasteful distraction in a world where the term superpower rang like a ghostly echo through the lengthening dole queues, bread lines and back-street abortion clinics of Middle America. But, after years of recessionary compromise and Congressional gutlessness, it was the last chance, the very last chance, to glue back together the design teams and production lines that had saved the West a hundred times over when the liberal pedlars of compassion had prematurely announced ‘peace in our time.’

The Duster would get built – had to get built. For Joe Michelini there was no alternative. No prospects, no job, no future, no understanding finance company, not for a forty-three-year-old planning director with a lifetime of service in an industry that would effectively cease to exist.

So it would get built. Even if it meant his kissing the backside of every procurement officer in the Pentagon and sucking the toes of anyone and his mother who had the vaguest connection with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

DC made him think of Izzy, home. If you could call it home, with a wife who – more often than not – wasn’t simply in some other city but on an entirely different continent. She didn’t even use his name.

He glanced at his watch. It was Sunday; over in Europe it would be early afternoon, surely she had to be home this time. Once more he picked up the telephone, listened to the ringing tone; once more it remained unanswered, another of his messages that seemed lost in space. Not just a different continent, another planet. The story of his married life. And this time she’d disappeared with the kids. Nothing, for more than a week.

‘Bitch,’ he snapped quietly, patience and cigarette finished. Through the open bedroom door he could hear the rustle of sheets and saw an elegant, bronzed thigh protrude from beneath the covers to hang limply over the edge of the bed. He shrugged. Somehow, here in California, there seemed to be no ill winds.

He dropped the phone back into its cradle and with the fingers of one hand rearranged his rumpled hair; it was thinning, a few years ago he would have needed to do battle armed with a brush. But so many things had changed in these last few years.

With his cigarette stub he made a slow, deliberate mess in the ashtray, taking a deep lungful of fresh air to fill his chest and flatten his stomach. Then he went back to bed.

They had laid her out on the bed in the far corner, where it was quietest, to die.

The mass of monitoring equipment suggested that the major body functions remained normal but the scan had revealed the problem. The offended segment of the brain had swelled, the white cells and the surrounding grey-coloured nerves which should have stood out sharp and distinct had become blurred, sucked into the neurological mire, and now even the lower physical functions were beginning to decay.

The teaching sister shone the beam of a pencil torch into the patient’s opaline eye; the pupil reacted, but insipidly, not as it should, and not as much as yesterday. She unclipped the pulse oximeter from the tip of the middle finger and pinched the soft part of the nail which would normally produce an irritated flexing of the digit.

Nothing.

The brain was no longer responding to the stimuli of shocks, commands, smells, noises, pressures, pains. The sister, Mabel McBean, a woman of middle age and generous girth whose hips rolled and shoes squeaked as she crossed the vinyl floor of the ITU, who had half a lifetime’s experience of the self-destructive tendencies of others yet who managed to retain the innate Tayside compassion of her childhood, glanced across at the student nurse and shook her head.

‘I wonder who she is,’ the student nurse, an Australian out of Wagga Wagga by the name of Primrose who carried her birthright with shy fortitude, mused for the fifth time that week.

‘Extraordinary. I’ve never known a lass like this to be so anonymous,’ the sister responded. ‘It’s no’ as if she’s a tramp or been living in a cardboard box.’ She picked up the hand once more. ‘Manicure’s expensive.’

She gave the nail another pinch. No response.

She replaced the oximeter and like a fussy mother hen readjusted the cuff which monitored the blood pressure, looking once more into the handsome face of the patient, a woman in her thirties with fine bone structure and rich, fox-red hair.

‘Bonny make-up job, too.’

The bruised lids of the eyes had turned a vivid purple and pink as though treated by a trainee beautician taking her first tentative steps at colour coordination, and there was a tiny nick below the left eye caused by the fragmenting windscreen which looked angry but had needed no stitches and would have left perhaps only the faintest of scars. If only it were granted the time to heal. Otherwise the face seemed at peace, resting, not dying.

It was a compelling face, handsome if a little too expressive for McBean’s traditional eyes, broad around the eyes and tapering from elevated and faintly oriental cheekbones to pointed chin with a finely carved nose and full, expressive lips. Loving lips. Contemporary cover girl rather than classical beauty, particularly with the carefully cropped hairstyle. The skin was fresh complected, out of doors, the orthodontics out of this world.

Yet there was also a suggestion of suffering, McBean thought, an overdose of experience that had etched a little downward crease at the corners of the mouth as though the woman had made a deliberate choice not to live off her fine looks but instead to compete, to join the daily struggle with the rest of the world. Beneath the battered eyes the skin had the stretched, pale mauve hue of fatigue and the red undertones which mark where tiredness turns to exhaustion and starts eating away inside. More than the strains of motherhood. Implying … what? Stubbornness? Pain? A certain lack of fulfilment? McBean sighed; it seemed they might never know.

Primrose interrupted the sister’s thoughts. ‘Can’t the police trace the car?’

The student nurse was seated at the head of the bed, brushing the hair as she had done every night of the last week, trying to remove fraction by fraction the large clot of blood which had matted and tangled and ruined its deep red lustre. They could have cut out the clot, of course, and destroyed the carefully created short style, but there would be so little chance for it to regrow. Even in death there should be dignity.

Sister McBean shook her head. ‘Renault. Left-hand drive. Could have come from any one of a thousand places in Europe. And the fire destroyed everything, even her identity, poor girl. Got out wi’ nothing but the clothes she was wearing and they were precious little help. Italian silk, American denims, a rainforest wristband and sneaker shoes they reckon might have come from somewhere east of India. Upper class Oxfam.’

‘What about the little boy?’ Primrose persisted.

‘Osh-Kosh. The bairn was wearing nothing but Osh-Kosh which is as common as an English Duchess. The poor mite’s too young to talk properly, they reckon no’ even three, and they can squeeze no’ a thing from him. May be suffering from shock, although he seems to understand English. And a smattering of French.’

‘And the baby?’

‘Perhaps I should try a little Gaelic on him. I wonder if they’ve thought of that?’

‘The baby,’ Primrose insisted, but found her answer in McBean’s sad eyes.

‘You’d have thought that the father or some other relative might have enquired,’ the student nurse murmured. ‘Surely someone must be missing them?’

‘If I had the looks of this lass I’d expect half the men I knew would be missing me.’

‘So where are they, then …?’

‘What the hell you mean, “she’s gone missing”?’ Grubb hissed down the phone. The foreign editor of World Cable News looked in agitation around the noisy Washington DC newsroom, anxious about who might be eavesdropping, uncertain what was hitting him. Excuses, for sure, but close behind excuses usually came a heavy shower of shit.

‘She left no number? No contact?’ Grubb couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It had never happened before, one of his foreign correspondents simply deciding to go walkabout, leaving no means of contact, simply gone missing from the most important foreign beat they had, covering the whole of Europe. Izzy was one of the best but now the stupid bitch had landed him right in it. Already he could hear the shower head beginning to splutter. And it was not the time to be smelling of anything other than roses, not with the cable news network on its financial uppers and looking for more cutbacks.

He groaned as the young producer, three thousand miles away in Paris, tried to explain. ‘Not those damned kids again? Chrissake, we gave her six weeks spawning leave and she’s only been back a few months. How much more blood does she want?’

The young producer was reassuring; it had been a difficult time for her, she had wanted to get away, clear her head; she was under a lot of domestic pressure, personal things to sort out. For just a couple of days. Yes, he knew it had been more than a couple of days, more than a week now, but he could handle everything, it was all under control. No need to panic.

Grubb, a short and fleshy man of uncertain middle European descent with razor burns on his dark cheeks and a chin that sagged like a feeding bag, demurred. He thought it was an excellent time to panic. When the piece he needed from London came over the following day fronted by the producer rather than their top foreign correspondent, there would be no hiding place, only retribution.

He decided to get his retribution in first. He glanced across at the managing editor’s door, which was ajar. The feeding bag shook, his voice rose to a shout.

‘I don’t put up with this sort of crap. Damn it all, I pay you to give me results, not excuses, and you don’t go letting her out of your sight without she gives you some means of contact. Jesus H. Christ, there’s a major Government reshuffle in Britain and you tell me she’s off changing nappies. What am I running here, a newsroom or a nursery? If you can’t find her in the next couple of hours you’re gonna have to do the piece yourself – you better make it good, boy, right on the button, d’you hear? Heavy-duty stuff, something that’ll sandbag those bastards over on the networks while they’re still checking their zippers and fiddling their expense sheets. My show’s the best in the business, and that’s how it’s gonna stay!’

Grubb glanced around furtively. His raised voice had attracted the attention of the entire newsroom and out of the corner of his eye he could see the managing editor standing at the door of his office, brow wrinkled and mouthing obscenities as he investigated the commotion. It was time for the full effect; he stood up, the full five and a half feet of him, to deliver his coup de grace.

‘And then you find her, pronto. Dig her out from under whichever stone or stud she’s hiding, and you tell her from me that she’s got her lily-white tits caught in a wringer this time.’

He slammed the phone down, not needing to act the role of outraged editor, before looking around the newsroom to wave away their rapt attention. He could handle this one. And if he couldn’t he’d made sure that everyone, and particularly the managing editor, knew it wasn’t his fault.

On the other side of the Atlantic the producer of WCN’s European bureau smiled to himself. He was twenty-eight and about to get his first break on screen. If he did well, really well, they might continue to let him fill in, avoid the unnecessary expense of flying over another foreign correspondent, at last recognize his true talents rather than condemning him to the mindless fetching and carrying of coffee cups and arranging satellite feeds for others. This was his big chance and he had no intention of letting it escape. Perhaps he ought to be contacting someone to report a missing person, making enquiries; on the other hand he had a job to do, a flight to book and not a hell of a lot of time. From their Paris base in a matter of hours she could have disappeared to any of a dozen countries; who was to know which? And he needed a haircut.

Already in his mind he was writing the intro to the piece he would deliver to camera from in front of the great black door at Ten Downing Street.

He didn’t mind if she never turned up.

Nobody had noticed the problem with the spleen. The buffeting caused by the pressure of the seat belts just below the ribs had caused the smallest tear in the soft surface tissue, no more than half an inch, and it had been oozing blood ever since. Not enough blood to cause a major physiological problem, indeed, scarcely enough to register any change on the monitors, just a slow, steady drain on the oxygen supply to the nervous system which had begun to degrade even the basic autonomic responses and which everyone attributed to the gradual dysfunctioning of a swollen and chronically damaged brain. But the bleeding had weakened the tissue surrounding the tear until, as spleens sometimes do, abruptly it ruptured. Spleens are the washing machines of the blood, designed to produce white corpuscles and break down the worn-out red corpuscles; they are not intended to haemorrhage and squirt blood into the abdominal cavity. When they do, patients normally have no more than a couple of hours to live.

Primrose was flustered. Less than forty minutes had passed since the grand parade of registrars, house officers, anaesthetists and physiotherapists had swept through ITU on the thrice-daily rounds, rushing around with their earnest faces and silly jokes, treating the nurses around them with as much consideration as uncomfortable pieces of furniture. Particularly student nurses. Yet now the anaesthetist, the one with the blond hair and salon tan, was on the phone, summoning her. She hadn’t even realized he knew her name. What did he want; had she fouled up?

The other nurses exchanged knowing smiles; after all, he had the tightest and best-known glutei maximi any of them had seen in or out of surgical trousers.

So that was it. An emergency, he explained, of a distinctly non-clinical nature. These emergencies she’d been handling since she was fifteen. Patiently she explained she couldn’t, not this week when she was working nights, trying to phrase her refusal so he wouldn’t be unduly deterred, wondering how far the tan went beyond the forearms, when the air-conditioned calm of Weschester General’s intensive therapy unit was shattered by the shrill insistence of an alarm. Alarms in ITU may sound if a patient rolls over and disturbs a sensor, or when a monitor is switched off for a bed bath or some other treatment. But patients in comas don’t roll over, and there wasn’t a nurse within twenty feet.

She cut off the anaesthetist without explanation and rushed for the bed, but already McBean was ahead of her and checking the monitor. Blood pressure dropping, catastrophically. The breathing, once so serene, abruptly shallow and rasping. Now the alarm on the ECG monitor joined in the drama as it detected a heartbeat beginning to race. The body was in shock; death was calling.