Blood Count. Jack Batten

      “A stop at Pages if you don’t mind,” he said.

      “I don’t.”

      Alex took Genet’s leash and wound it around the last rung of a bicycle stand on the sidewalk. Pages is a bookstore with a nice range of magazines and a small specialty in books about jazz. I bought Mel Tormé’s autobiography in paperback. Alex loaded up on magazines. Mother Jones. Forbes. This Magazine. New Republic.

      “Magazine-wise,” I said, “you just defined eclectic.”

      “All they ever have on the plane is last week’s Time,” Alex said. We were back on the street.

      “You going away?”

      “After lunch,” Alex said. “Bound to be strange down there without Ian.”

      “Yeah,” I said. Alex and Ian had a cottage in Key West a couple of blocks from the old Hemingway house. “How long do you figure you’ll be gone?”

      “Whatever it takes to think and plot. A few days.” Alex shifted the parcel of magazines under his arm. “Feel like some caffeine?”

      “What about Genet?”

      “Don’t fret about him. He adores the passing parade.”

      Genet was resting his rear end on the sidewalk. His head swung back and forth to take in the street action.

      Alex and I went into the café next door to Pages. I nabbed a window table. Alex lined up at the counter and brought back two cappuccinos. I waited for mine to cool. Alex stirred his in an abstracted way.

      I tried a little prompting. “Anything more you want to get off your chest?” I asked Alex.

      “Perhaps something in the nature of enlightenment.”

      “Swell. I could stand some of that.”

      “Gaëtan Dugas,” Alex said. “Does that name signify anything to you?”

      “Who is he? One of your new suspects?”

      “Gaëtan Dugas’s story is about AIDS.” Alex had a schoolmarm air. “About AIDS but very early on, 1980, in that general period. You see, the first people doctors spotted with this new awful virus, what turned out to be AIDS, dozens of them seemed to have one thing in common. Amazing bit of research when one dwells on it, but some medical detectives worked out that these earliest victims had all had sex with one man. Or that they’d had sex with someone else who had sex with this man.”

      “What’s-his-name Dugas?”

      “Gaëtan Dugas. The Typhoid Marvin of AIDS.”

      “He spread it? Single-handedly spread it?”

      “Damn near.” Alex kept nodding. “What Dugas had specifically was Kaposi’s sarcoma —”

      “Right,” I interrupted. “Same disease Rock Hudson died of. Or maybe not died of, but he caught it.”

      “Oh, Crang, you straights are so predictable. Mention AIDS and Rock Hudson can’t be far behind.”

      “But I’m right about Rock and Kaposi’s sarcoma?”

      “Yes, yes. But more key to my sad little tale is that Gaëtan Dugas was afflicted, too. The Kaposi’s sarcoma was the signal he had it. AIDS. It meant his whole immune system was shutting down. It meant he was going to die.”

      “When did he die?” I asked.

      “Almost four years after he was diagnosed.”

      “Huh,” I said, “the guy seems to have lived a long time with the disease.”

      “Much longer than Ian, you mean?”

      “Well, yeah.”

      “Ian, dear God, he got one of the quicker brands. Isn’t that just dandy, different kinds of AIDS, slower and faster? Ian had PCP. Pneumocystis pneumonia. It can kill in a few months. Weeks even.”

      “That name comes trippingly off your tongue.”

      “Practice, Crang. I’ve repeated the damned words often enough in the past four months.”

      Alex made an impatient gesture with his hand. “But this is getting ahead of things,” he said. “Just please, Crang, drink your cappuccino and listen and absorb.”

      “Sorry.”

      “Now I’ll tell you what Dugas looked like. He was drop-dead gorgeous. Debonair, you know, vibrant, sensual. It was no wonder everybody wanted him.”

      “Pardon me, Alex, am I interpreting you correctly if I say it sounds like you personally knew Dugas?”

      “Not knew. Met. At a Sunday brunch one time, and my lands, he was a catch.”

      “Too bad for the guys who caught him.”

      “He’s supposed to have had twenty-five hundred lovers in his short life, or some such astronomical number.”

      “Couldn’t have left much time for hobbies. Stamp collecting and whatnot.”

      “Indeed,” Alex said. “As I told you a minute ago, some doctors tracked down Dugas, immunologists, epidemiologists, scientific people. Patient Zero, they called Dugas, and I’ve heard they warned him to stop having sex, ordered him. But he kept right on almost to the very day he died. The very month, at any rate.”

      “Lordy.”

      “Some people say he got downright callous,” Alex said. “They say he’d have sex with some poor soul in a bathhouse, and afterward, after the poor soul had his brains fucked out, Dugas would turn up the lights and point out his Kaposi’s sarcoma spots. ‘I’ve got gay cancer,’ he’d say. ‘I’m going to die and so are you.’”

      “Alex, that isn’t callous. We’re talking serious evil.”

      “And wouldn’t you know it, he was one of ours.”

      “Not of mine.”

      “Canadian. He was a nice French-Canadian boy from Quebec. Better, he worked for Air Canada. A flight attendant. That’s how he got around so much. San Francisco, New York, Florida, coast-to-coast. He had hundreds of lovers in every town you could book an Air Canada flight to.”

      “Infection in the jet age.”

      “There’s even a case to be made that dear Gaëtan was the initial carrier, the son of a bitch who brought AIDS to North America.”

      “From where?”

      “Paris. The route is supposed to be from some place in central Africa to Paris and from there to us lucky folks over here.”

      “Possibly via Gaëtan Dugas?”

      “Stunning what a job at Air Canada can do for a lad,” Alex said in his most brittle tone. “Anyhow, you get the picture.”

      “I get the picture, and something else, I have this terrible feeling I get the punch line, too.”

      “Punch line?”

      “Where you’re going with the Gaëtan Dugas story.”

      “Someone,” Alex said, “should have shot Dugas at the very beginning.”

      “That’s the punch line I had the terrible feeling you were going to deliver.”

      “Think of the lives that would have been saved.”

      “And next thing, you’re drawing an analogy between Dugas and the person who infected Ian.”

      “Don’t debate numbers with me, Crang,” Alex said. “Dugas might have been responsible for dozens of deaths, maybe hundreds. The bastard who killed Ian killed only Ian, as far as we know. But death is death, and a murderer is a murderer, never mind the quantity.”

      “Alex,