The Blue Death Read online

  4

  GILEAD, ILLINOIS: The next day

  Aloysia’s body began its river journey just north of Hannibal, Illinois, where they have the best catfish in the state.

  Europe is an upturned saucer; its rivers run down to the seas at its edges. The Mississippi scores America right down the middle, a furrow through the cheeks of a gigantic ass. Which is apt really because the river is shit-brown. Completely opaque. Midwesterners call it ‘The Big Muddy’, and it’s a superlative place to lose a corpse even though it’s so slow its surface looks like a lake. There’s lots of traffic on it, commercial boats, pleasure boats, barges, towboats. When any of these makes a sharp change in direction, it throws off a huge wake that collapses back into the water and boils deep down beneath. The Mississippi is different down there; it’s a maelstrom of sandbars, crags, hidden currents. The undertow that caught Aloysia managed to jet her seventy miles straight down here to Gilead in a mere twenty-four hours.

  A record time for any floating object without a driving force.

  5

  SPRINGFIELD: Monday after the reception

  At Municipal Center West, a soulless building in glass and concrete, an executive session of the City Council was about to begin.

  Six of Springfield’s ten representatives – a carefully chosen majority of its aldermen and alderwomen – sat around a table with Mayor Jimmy Zemanski. Behind him, the Stars and Stripes, the white Illinois state flag and the deep blue city flag shared the wall with a projection screen that read:

  The G.R.A.N.D. canal

  ‘Where’s La Gonzaga?’ he asked the alderwoman beside him.

  ‘Aloysia? God knows.’ The alderwoman gave him a crooked smile.

  ‘Allo . Who?’ An alderman asked her.

  ‘Allo-wish-ah. Aloysius Gonzaga was a saint.’ She turned to Jimmy again. ‘Our saint is being “unpredictable”, I bet. You’re not relying on her, are you? I’m told she has a new secret lover these days.’

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘Anybody know who this time?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘What about the last one?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Christ.’ Jimmy shrugged irritably. But he didn’t feel irritated. This was going to be fun, and Aloysia’s presence would only distract from it. He called the meeting to order, dispensed with the preliminaries. ‘You’ve all signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement,’ he began, ‘and since this is a private session, let’s forget protocol. Interrupt at any time. All of us need to know just where questions arise. Our subject’ – he gestured at the projection screen – ‘is the G.R.A.N.D. Canal, just the “Grand” for short. I know. I know. You’ve heard all about it. But I bet you don’t have any idea how it’s being built or why it’s getting built so quickly. And I bet you’d be surprised to hear that the reason you don’t know is that the entire project is covered under the US National Security and Patriot Acts and the Canadian National Security Law. That’s how come you had to sign those Non-Disclosure Agreements.’

  Official secrets: Jimmy had them in the palm of his hand already.

  ‘The Grand canal isn’t any ordinary canal,’ he went on. ‘It’s literally the greatest engineering project in the history of mankind. Panama? Suez? The ancient pyramids? Put them out of mind. The Grand dwarfs every one of—’

  ‘Remind me what the initials stand for,’ came the first interruption.

  ‘The Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal,’ Jimmy said. ‘Even sounds impressive, doesn’t it? For sixty years – more than sixty years – engineers have been dreaming of bringing water all the way down the east coast of Canada and deep into the United States. This dream is about to become a reality.’

  A huge body of water in bright blue flashed onto Jimmy’s screen, a Landsat satellite image taken at five hundred miles up. Jimmy pointed to a line – nothing natural looks so straight – that ran from one side of the water to the other, cutting off the lower half. ‘What you’re looking at here is the longest dyke in the world. It separates Canada’s James Bay off from Hudson Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Very soon James Bay in Quebec will be the biggest freshwater reservoir in the world.’

  ‘It’ll never work.’ The protest was querulous. ‘It’s got to be salt water if it’s off the Atlantic. We can’t drink that.’

  Ordinarily Jimmy wouldn’t have liked the tone. But for this question? Perfect. ‘The process is kind of magical. Dr Gonzaga promised she’d explain it, but since she hasn’t arrived, I’ll just have to do my best. Look at the rivers here and here and here’ – he gestured at the screen – ‘I can’t even remember how many of them empty into James Bay, but together they amount to enormous volumes of glacier water every single day. Only fresh water comes in. The overflow gets sluiced out into the ocean through a system of locks, taking salt with it. In a surprisingly short time, you have a freshwater reservoir. It’s not a new technique. It’s not untried. A hundred years ago, the Dutch cut off a bay named the Zuider Zee, and the rivers pouring in made a reservoir just like the one we’re making. Now the Zuider Zee is one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. Next to the Grand? Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Lilliputian. We’re making history here.’

  The excitement around the table was an audible rustle.

  Jimmy’s next images tracked the Grand canal down through Quebec to the Canadian border: canals, locks, pipelines, dams, power plants that carry the water to the Great Lakes, flush the fresh water through them and supply American states as far east as Pennsylvania and as far west as Arizona. ‘Since Illinois is at the tip of Lake Michigan, Illinois will be the first American state to benefit.’ Jimmy paused, then gave them a half-puzzled, half-worried smile. ‘And here’s something to surprise you: Springfield will be the first city.’

  The table erupted in a babble of consternation.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘We’re two hundred miles inland. Why not Chicago? It’s right on the lake. Or Kankakee? Or Bloomington? Look, guys, there always has to be bad news with the good news. And the bad news is the real reason why you had to sign that Non-Disclosure Agreement.’ He drew his breath in sharply. ‘Lake Springfield is dying.’

  Lake Springfield supplied the town’s water, had been purpose-built to supply it, had supplied it for nearly a century. This time the rustle around the table was fear.

  ‘But where can we get our water from?’

  ‘How can a lake just die?’

  ‘What are we supposed to do? Dig wells?’

  Jimmy held up his hands to quieten them. ‘Water levels go down every year. They used to come back up. Not any more. Everybody in the Midwest is in trouble, but nobody’s as bad off as Springfield. The simple fact is that right now we’re barely coping at all. The need for this Canadian water is absolute.’

  Jimmy had to hold up his hands again to quieten them. ‘Yeah, sure, there are huge amounts of money involved. But guess what? It turns out that men and women with spades and shovels are faster and more reliable than machines if you can get them properly organized. I know it sounds crazy, but the progress is phenomenal. Absolutely amazing. I’ve seen it for myself. And the government is subsidizing it. But as I say, there are huge amounts of money involved, and there’s no way we aren’t going to feel the pinch ourselves. But how? Tax increases?Vast hikes in water bills?’

  Jimmy knew that when questions like that came out as rhetorical, his audience belonged to him. This was how things worked when Becky Freyl kept out of it. It was how they should work. More than that: it was how they would work from now on.

  ‘The only acceptable solution,’ he said, ‘is to persuade private investment to bear the brunt of the cost. We have no choice, ladies and gentlemen. We sell our publicly owned utility to a corporation that’s going to pay us handsomely for it and then take over the burden of financing the Grand canal.’ He paused. ‘It’s either that or our town dies of thirst.’

  6

  TAZEWELL COUNTY, ILLINOIS: Friday of that week


  Twenty-five buses, all of them white, all of them scrubbed clean – all of them with the words ‘South Hams State Correctional Facility’ on their sides in jazzy, friendly looking letters – travelled in a convoy along one of those straight roads that score the cornfields north of Springfield. A few miles later they stopped at a razor-wire fence with an armed guard. A sign near the gate read:

  WARNING

  EXTREME DANGER

  Army practice range

  Guard dogs

  US Government Property

  NO

  TRESPASSING

  The guard at the gate checked each of the bus drivers and waved the convoy through. The tarmac turned into an unpaved road. The buses juddered on for half a mile, then pulled up in a stretch of cleared land and turned off their engines.

  The front door of the foremost bus opened. Two men in black climbed down, bodies padded out with bulletproof vests, truncheons, ammunition belts, knee protectors. Both of them carried 12-gauge shotguns; both led police dogs.

  ‘Inmates, move!’ the biggest of them shouted.

  The next person to emerge wore pyjamas in wide, horizontal black and white stripes just like the movies of olden-time chain gangs. He wore chains too, but not the kind that connected him to the next man; cuffs around both his ankles chained his legs loosely to a belt around his waist that incorporated an alarm and an electronic tag. Some forty men followed him, heads shaved, the insignia ‘1B’ – their work detail number, first bus, B shift – printed in foot-high letters across back and chest. They formed two lines. The other guard distributed hard hats.

  ‘March time. March!’ the guard shouted

  The inmates snapped into orderly rows, and the first in line began the chant: ‘Left. Left. Left, right, left.’ The others fell into lock step behind him.

  ‘Hell, yes, I’m dirty . ’ the chanter went on.

  ‘Hell, yes, I’m dirty . ’ The others echoed.

  ‘’Cause I piss dirty.’

  ‘’Cause I piss dirty.’

  ‘Got to get my life straight . ’

  As the prisoners marched forward, the door to the next bus opened. Its guards climbed out, followed by its prisoners and its march chant.

  The prisoners of Work Detail 1B continued across the open space to a set of wooden stairs that led down into a ditch as wide as a four-lane highway at the top, sides sloping downwards to a path at the bottom some twenty feet below ground level. The afternoon air was steam-bath hot, so clogged with moisture that five minutes’ exposure was enough to glue clothing to backs and legs with sweat; as they descended, other prisoners struggled up the steps, filthy, soaked through, stumbling with exhaustion, harried by their own guards and their own chanter.

  ‘Stuff our boots and mop our brow . ’

  ‘Stuff our boots and . ’

  ‘In line, inmate!’

  Work Detail 1B began in the depths of the ditch. Behind them, the excavation stretched as far north as the eye could see. To the south – in front of them – the ground rose in tiers up to the surface, each tier a yard or so above and a couple of yards wider than its predecessor, each as long as a football field. Within ten minutes of the buses’ arrival, the site was swarming with men – nearly a thousand of them – wielding picks, shovels, spades, pushing wheelbarrows, manoeuvring rocks out of the ground.

  Work Details 18B to 22B were at work on the top ground, where the earth was easiest to dig, although today the whole area was muddy from last night’s downpour. The excavation went only a metre deep, but occasional mudslides interrupted even here. Mud made the labourers slow. Their foremen – prisoners too, but skilled, privileged, wearing orange jumpsuits instead of black and white stripes – shouted at them to step it up, get moving. The guards in black were irritable, the dogs edgy.

  About halfway through the shift, one convict sat down abruptly on the ground. Police dogs barked, straining at their leads.

  ‘Up, shithead,’ one of the guards called out.

  The convict dropped his head into his hands.

  ‘You make me come over there and get you up, you’re gonna regret it.’

  The convict didn’t move.

  The guard slogged over to him, poked him with the butt of the rifle.

  ‘I ain’t feeling so good,’ the convict said.

  ‘You’re going to be feeling a fuck of a lot worse if you don’t—’

  The convict threw up, a projectile vomit that caught the guard in the crotch. The other inmates turned to laugh.

  ‘You motherfucker.’ The guard struck out with his rifle, catching the prisoner on the cheek, knocking him over. ‘Come on, motherfucker. Up!’ The guard kicked him. ‘Up, you fuck. Get up!’ The inmate pulled himself into a tight foetal position.

  ‘Hey, Quack, maybe you’d better take a look.’

  The inmate who clanked over was older than most of the others, slender build, a little stooped. He knelt down, checked the prisoner’s pulse, felt his forehead.

  ‘Get him back to work,’ the guard said.

  ‘I don’t think that’s very likely, officer.’ Quack’s voice was gentle, educated, respectful.

  ‘Sure it is.’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Come on, Quack, you telling me he’s not faking?’

  ‘Clammy skin, vomiting . oh, and some pretty serious diarrhoea.’

  ‘Jesus, is that what the stink is?’

  His voice was so loud that several inmates swung around to look. ‘Get back to work!’ the guard ordered. The inmates seemed puzzled, abruptly distracted by the sick man; they moved towards him as a group. The guard fired a warning shot into the air. Other guards snapped their rifles into position. The dogs’ barking was frenzied.

  7

  SPRINGFIELD & KNOX COUNTY, ILLINOIS: Sunday

  Helen had found an old garage to convert on Van Buren Avenue just beyond the fringes of Springfield’s rich west side, a rare artefact that still carried a weather-beaten sign:

  Otto’s of Springfield

  Auto Repair & Service

  at the right price!

  Otto had been out of business for over thirty years now, and the area had degenerated around him. Not that Van Buren Avenue had ever had any claim to sophistication; there wasn’t much of it, and it ended in the desolation of Route 54, a four-lane highway from nowhere to nowhere, with only the Irish Barrel Head Pub and the Saigon Café to keep it in business. All Otto’s windows had been broken for years. Dried weeds sprouted out of its stolid 1930s roof and its tarmac forecourt.

  Helen adored the seediness the way only the rich can adore what’s poor and ugly. As for David, he’d grown up on Springfield’s east side and saw no romance here, but he’d tried the west side for a while. Not a good idea. Van Buren Avenue provided a no-man’s-land between the two ways of living.

  Helen had cajoled him into supervising the reconstruction of Otto’s. She hadn’t had to cajole too hard. He quite liked the idea, and he wasn’t without experience. He’d spent his last years at South Hams trying to escape; he’d made it once, got close a couple of other times, spent many months in solitary as punishment. Attempts to find a way had involved learning everything he could about locks, alarm systems, electricity, plumbing, prison architecture and construction; he liked techniques. When he got out, Hugh Freyl had put all that learning to use; with Hugh’s backing, David became a designer and installer of security systems. He’d been good at it. Companies from Evansville in the south of Illinois to Rockford in the north hired him. That’s how he’d ended up owning a house on the town’s west side.

  All that screeched to a halt with Hugh’s death. Within days of it, the Springfield elite accused David of murder. They’d done it publicly too and hadn’t stopped until he’d found them somebody else to fit up for the job. That only made them hate him more; they were still certain he was guilty, and now he’d cheated them of watching him put away for good. Nobody within two hundred miles would hire him. He lost his house, his car, his bank account, bec
ame homeless, drifted across the country, not knowing what else to do but shut out the days and nights – black stuff, China white, Georgia homeboy, Mexican Valium – and wait for something to happen. That something had been Helen, and the life of luxury she offered.

  Only an idiot would turn it down.

  Besides, he loved her. Not that he’d ever tell her so.

  Nine days after the wedding party at Becky’s, he paced back and forth in front of Otto’s, waiting for Lillian, cigarette dangling from his mouth, smoke curling up into his eyes. Dumpsters were in place for demolition to begin tomorrow, scaffolds around the house-to-be.

  ‘David!’ Lillian pulled up beside him in a Toyota that Becky had given her. ‘You look like one of them wild cats at the zoo. What you doing pacing like that? It’s too hot. Where are them storms the forecasters keep talking about? Come on. Get in this car.’ He did as she told him. ‘Ain’t you gonna say “Good morning”?’

  He gave her an irritated glance, rolled down the window of the air-conditioned car, flicked the cigarette out into the road.

  ‘David, I sure do appreciate you coming with me today.’

  ‘I might not learn anything.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘If I do, you might not like it.’

  ‘Ain’t nothing I can do to help my boy when I don’t know what’s hurting him. How you gonna get inside? They don’t allow no ex-cons in there.’

  ‘I haven’t properly introduced myself, have I?’ He gave her a bow of the head. ‘I do apologize. My name is Gwendolyn. Richard François Gwendolyn. I’m Canadian.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Gwendolyn, huh? Like a girl?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘David, them guards is gonna know who you is.’

  ‘No they’re not.’

  ‘They ain’t gonna let you near the gates.’

  He shook his head. ‘They’re all new.’

  ‘You can’t know that.’

  ‘It’s in the papers.’