Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

Just a few months, he said, when she asked him how long he would stay, and although she was sorry, she understood: of course he must return to his medical duties, those poor wounded men… If only she could leave her Adolf and serve alongside him as a nurse — and, yes, their sister Elizabeth in Berlin needed him too.

On the third day he caught a train into the foothills of the Blue Ridge. His older brother, Butzie, was waiting at the station and drove him in a gig along the twisting dirt highway to the farm, a memory round every corner, at the top of every rise; beautiful still, but sadder, as if his father had taken the spirit of the place with him to the grave. The old house had burned to the ground, family pictures, books, swords, medals, the piano they’d gathered round to sing of home, all lost, and the new place was Southern-style ordinary. The Army had purchased most of their fields for its own horses; what was left lay fallow, rain dribbled through the roof of the great barn, and the stone walls they’d bent aching backs to build were crumbling and choked with weeds. Even Butzie was going to seed, struggling to contain his stomach in his filthy overalls. The old man would never have allowed his son to dress that way.

‘He isn’t going to be able to keep the place up, Anton,’ his sister Emmeline confided after supper. ‘You know Butzie, he isn’t a clever one like you.’

Emmeline was weary of tending the family flame. Years of selfless fetching-and-carrying for her father, then her brother, were beginning to show in the lines of her face, and her crown of thick blonde hair — once so admired by the young men on the neighbouring farms — was streaked with grey. She was still attractive, with their mother’s large sad eyes, a German lady fading like the elegant blue silk fauteuil in the drawing room, a ghost of former times. ‘Come to Washington with me,’ he had said. ‘We’ll make new friends together and you will be close to Josephine and Adolf.’

Early the following morning he rode the bounds of the farm, a warm breeze in his face, swishing through the long grass. He sensed it was the last he would see of the hills that even his sister in Germany still talked of as home. Family should be home, he thought; only the war is requiring us all to choose another. At five, his father had taught him to ride in the paddock by the house, at the age of eight to jump the high stone wall in the valley; and before his son left for school in Germany, he had fought the Civil War for the benefit of Anton in the seven-acre, hard-riding his old mare like a man half his age. Dilger’s chest ached with memories and to outpace them he spurred his horse into a gallop that left them both shaking.

When he left the farm, Emmeline went with him. ‘Just for a few months,’ she promised Butzie, but by the time they reached Washington, she said she felt ten years younger. Josephine met them with the keys for the house in Chevy Chase. Her husband Adolf had clopped about the capital in a cart, collecting the pieces Dilger needed for his work.

‘For your surgery?’ Emmeline asked.

‘For my research,’ he replied.

‘Anton’s working on infections,’ Josephine explained.

‘It’s my hobby.’

‘More than that, Anton,’ Josephine added with the warmth that never left her voice when she spoke of him. ‘Helping the sick is God’s work.’

On their first night in the house they drank beer and laughed and told stories of Father and Mother and how it used to be. They were only sad when Dilger reminded them of the games he’d played on the farm with their nephew Peter.

‘You were like brothers,’ Josephine declared, drying her eyes with her tiny hankie.

‘Elizabeth says so too,’ he said quietly. They toasted Peter, they toasted their sister, they toasted Germany and ‘victory’, then Adolf sang a song of home and they joined him in the chorus.

The following morning Dilger rose early. He dressed in the velvet hunting breeches and jacket he used to wear on the farm, then crept downstairs to the cellar. Twenty-five feet by twenty-five, the size of a comfortable parlour, with a polished oak floor, plain white walls, sink, trelliswork bench, desk, and ever-obliging Adolf had arranged for a carpenter to fit some shelves. There was a door from the kitchen and one into the yard, and two windows high in the wall, a few feet from the ceiling. Adolf had found most of the things on his list: an incubation oven — tick, sterilising machine — tick, phials and Petri dishes, burner and a wire cage — the guinea pigs would be arriving in a couple of days.

‘Come up and have some breakfast, Anton,’ Emmeline shouted from the kitchen at a little before nine.

‘Were you feeling unwell?’ she asked when they were seated at the table. ‘I heard you on the stairs at five o’clock.’

Just an impulse, he assured her, scientists keep their own time. She smiled and patted his hand indulgently, but he wasn’t to forget they were taking tea with the nice couple across the street later. He said he wouldn’t, although he didn’t care much for tea.

‘Well, you’ll have to pretend,’ she laughed, wagging her finger at him. ‘Mustn’t offend our new neighbours.’

In the cellar, sunshine was streaming through the stained windows and shimmering on the floor beneath the workbench like bacteria on a slide. Dilger stood for a time at the foot of the stairs listening to his sister washing the dishes in the kitchen above. She was humming a lively tune, something by Mozart.

‘All right,’ he muttered, and taking a deep breath he reached for the white coat he’d left on the peg by the door.

The leather travelling case he’d nursed from Berlin was on the bench top. Slowly, very slowly, he opened the compartment in its side, took out the velvet padding and placed the phials in a tube rack: two marked B and two marked E. Thank God they had survived the journey. ‘All right,’ he sighed again, ‘all right,’ and he picked up a pair of surgical gloves. A crash in the kitchen above made him start. Emmeline must have dropped a plate. Damn it, he hadn’t locked the basement door. Gloves, face mask, Bunsen flame, culture dish, he was ready. Bacillus anthracis . The anthrax microbe was the most challenging of the two. He took a phial of B from the rack and held it up to the light. A pale-yellow gel to the naked eye, distinctive rod-shaped bacilli beneath a microscope; so extraordinary, so simple, so efficient, so resilient, so deadly. Carefully, he drew the stopper. He’d carried out the procedure at least a dozen times in Berlin but it still made his heart beat faster. Always in his mind’s eye at this moment, an image came to him of the man in bloodstained sheets he’d seen at the Charité Hospital.

‘That’s it.’

Placing the phial in an empty rack, he picked up a length of wire with a small loop at the end and held it in the Bunsen flame. When he was sure it was sterile, he dipped it in the phial, turning the loop once, twice, three times. With his left hand he lifted a Petri dish of growth medium from the shelf above. Then, removing the contaminated wire from the phial, he drew it slowly back and forth across the dish. He repeated the procedure with a second dish. Then he placed both of the new cultures in the incubator.

‘Shit.’ He smiled. God damn, he was shaking a little. Why? He knew what he was doing, it was simple. He dropped his gloves in the sink, soaped his hands well and selected another pair. Phial E for equus . Burkholderia mallei. The glanders microbe. A fresh wire and dish, a different growth medium for this culture — ox blood — but the procedure was the same. Infection, by inhalation or ingestion, or perhaps through an abrasion to the skin. The symptoms: coughing, fever, chest pain, followed by septicaemia and death.