Chapter 11

The doorman stared at him, looking to see if he was needed to hail a taxi or carry a bag. He only smiled when there was a tip to be earned. Kreeger had stopped using his services two months ago, but he always looked, just in case.

The Majestic was an imposing castle, tall and gleaming, which scared back the surrounding chaos of tenements and hovels with their seething hordes of barbarians and vandals. It was his sanctuary, his haven; a place in which he could find normality in this alien city. Kreeger seldom ventured far from it without the help of Filcher or someone connected to his seminars, and this evening as he stepped away from its protective walls, he could feel the besieging army crush in on him, taking away his privacy, trying to steal his sanity.

To his surprise, the nearest telephones, well within sight of The Majestic, were free; but as Kreeger approached he could see why: they looked like a line of electronic scarecrows hopping along the pavement, with broken plastic hats and colourful wires sticking out of their ears. He checked each one with a cluck and a sigh; all were out of order.

Heads turned as the tall, white-suited figure in a Panama hat bobbed beyond the aura of The Majestic Hotel. The pavement was suddenly full, and the doctor had to weave in and out of streaming pedestrians. But he was far from agile and many times would jar his hip into a businessman’s side or swing his elbow into a grandma’s shoulder; and with each infraction he would instinctively turn to apologise for his clumsiness, only to find the person already skittering off at a tangent. In fact, he had noticed that he was not any more clumsy than the locals, who bumped along like shiny spheres ricocheting around a pinball machine; and he was the only one who ever seemed to notice. But he could never drop that instinctive apology.

He knew that there would be another line of telephones at the next corner and soon he would be talking to his wife. Unfinished sentences swam against the current of his mind, a drift that was flowing Southwest, towards an unheard-of destination. He stepped over the outstretched legs of a beggar but failed to drop a coin—he had stopped doing that on the advice of Filcher who had told him about the local gangsters and their scams.

The doctor had come to need his daily contact with home in the same way some of the other guests in The Majestic needed a gin in the evening or a cigar after dinner. At first it had been a duty: he had left his wife at a time when she needed him most, and he had felt obliged to call daily to apologise for it. But slowly he had begun to look forward to those few minutes every evening when he could hear about home—the garden, the neighbours, their friends. Hearing about the blooming of the azaleas or old Mr. Crompton’s back problems could usually help ease his plight. But today he was not expecting any relief.

The second telephone in the line was vacant, but the first was being manhandled by an overweight, middle-aged woman with permed hair and too much jewellery. She barked fiercely into the receiver, sending globules of spittle with each syllable, her voice strong enough to drown even the heavy flow of traffic behind her. A gentle chat with someone thousands of miles away across the ocean would be impossible next to this termagant. He waited for another phone to free up—time to complete those unfinished sentences, words that would break the news that he would not be back for at least another week. Maria might not have minded in the past, but things were different now.

The fat woman in telephone-one abruptly ratcheted down the volume and cupped her hand around the mouthpiece—an intimacy, Kreeger thought, or a lie. Whatever it was it did not last very long and she suddenly rammed the receiver back into its holder, turned on her slippered feet, and trundled off down the busy pavement. Kreeger stepped into the still-empty second booth and lifted the receiver, touching it as a lab technician would handle a test-tube of contaminated blood. He should have wiped it off with his handkerchief as he usually did but he was still puzzling over what he would say to Maria and forgot to do so.

He punched in the numbers and waited for his wife’s sleepy voice, which would croak on its first words of the morning.

‘Yes,’ came back a sharp threatening voice.

He must have input the wrong number. ‘I am sorry . . .’ he began to apologise.

‘James? Is that you?’ It was Christina; the threat had gone, leaving a lilting Spanish accent.

Kreeger was not surprised to hear his wife’s sister answering the telephone in his house. ‘Yes, it’s me. How are you?’

‘James,’ she began, ignoring his question, ‘Maria isn’t feeling very well right now. I’ll go and see if she wants to talk.’

‘Christina . . .’ She had already put down the receiver. His mind went through the possibilities, and after a very long wait he was brought back to the present by a faint and groggy voice. Frailty.

‘Jimmy, are you there?’

‘Yes, I am here,’ he replied, trying to cover his shock. ‘Maria, are you alright?’ He did not know what else to say.

‘Fine,’ came the distant voice, ‘Yesterday was awful and I had a bad night, but I feel a little better this morning. It’s good to hear you.’

‘Christina is staying with you?’

‘Yes, Jim. She’s been wonderful.’

‘Maria, are you sure you are alright?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. Now that Christina is here everything will be alright.’

‘Only . . . I am afraid that I might have to delay my flight back for a day or two. Something important has come up.’ He stopped then added: ‘A week at the very most . . . but if you . . .’ He stopped again.

Maria made no objections in words, she simply began to sniffle, a barely audible cry of hopelessness.

‘James.’ Christina was back on the line. ‘We were in the hospital all day yesterday. The doctors now think that Maria has fanasemia and not what they originally diagnosed. They found something in a swab but they are still not sure. One of them, Dr. Spina, seems convinced and he’s running more tests today.’

Kreeger was lost for a moment, fanasemia, fanasemia . . .

Fana . . . His heartbeat spiked as it hit him, at once washing his whole body with a cocktail of unknown chemicals. A rocket tore out of his chest. Next to disintegrate was his stomach, which knotted into a tangled mass of muscle and sinew. His legs held firm, but only after he had dropped most of his weight against the side of the phone booth. ‘Are you sure they said fanasemia?’ he managed to say at last.

His sister-in-law made him wait, giving him a moment to pull himself together, to drag his mind back into order; then she was back on, spelling it out for him. In a rolling accent, Christina confirmed his fear: Fanasemia, a nine-lettered death sentence.

Kreeger’s mind filled with fragments of information, facts acquired long ago in some gloomy lecture-hall or from a musty textbook—or from the slab in one of his morgues.

‘Christina,’ he said, as calmly as he could. ‘Have they scanned her pancreas, that is where the . . . yes, yes of course they have. Have they started her on Trioxulin?’ This time he waited for Christina’s answer.

‘Well, I don’t really know. She has so many different things to take, but I can check if you want?’

‘No, I am sure they have if she needs it. Did they say what it would mean if it is fanasemia that she has?’ Times had changed, science progressed—maybe now . . .

‘No, not really. They say, or at least Dr. Spina said, that they should keep doing the tests and try to make a more accurate diagnosis.’

‘And how is she doing? She is alright for now isn’t she?’ Kreeger heard a movement at the other end of the line then Christina came back on, whispering.

‘She’s deteriorating, James. She’s always tired; sleeps a lot; and if she manages to move a bit, she complains of feeling dizzy. And she looks so drawn, ten years older than she did when you last saw her.’

He stiffened and took a deep breath as he visualised the symptoms. ‘Listen, Christina, check up on the Trioxulin; she must start that immediately, or whatever drug has replaced it since I last came across anything like this. And make sure she takes plenty of fluids; keep her drinking all the time.’ He could not think of any more advice for the moment. ‘I have just told Maria that I might not be able to get back right away. Something urgent has come up and I have to go down to a place called Pei Lin to try and help. I might not be able to call for a day or two. I want you to take down this number and call it if anything happens; his name is Maynard Filcher and he will know how to get hold of me in an emergency.’

Christina took down the number without comment then refused Kreeger’s request to speak to Maria again. ‘She’s gone back to the couch ,’ she said.

They said goodbye and Kreeger hung up wondering why he was not on his way back already—just say no to Filcher and the Ambassador and go to where he was really needed. This was his perfect excuse.

A drink. He needed something cold and quenching. He looked around and saw a noisy hawker who was ladling out a crimson liquid from a large transparent drum, in which floated huge bergs of ice. He was tempted for a moment but quickly remembered those embarrassing interruptions to a morning seminar a week before and looked around for a convenience store.

After a few minutes’ of cluttered pavement in the direction of The Majestic, Kreeger came across what he was looking for. An automatic door slid open and a recorded message greeted him (one of the few phrases that he had managed to pick up). He stopped just inside and looked around; the locals seldom spoke to him, even assistants in shops would not dare utter a word to him. They stared but did not speak, which he liked just fine. Without help, he found a fridge at the back of the shop and extracted a bottle of cold water. He paid and scooped up the returned coins from the counter (more than there would have been if he had bought it off the street—he had realised that a long time ago). The cold water helped him to think.