The Touch of Innocents. Michael Dobbs

crawl.

      He stood by the open window, a salt-brushed breeze snatching at the smoke from his cigarette as night gave way to the lighter, noisier tones of day and the dawn chorus of streetcars called for their first passengers.

      It was like no other city on earth, he thought; at the very frontiers of paradise. So relaxed, so uninhibited, so unlike the bureaucratic jungle of DC where the women didn’t even wait until winter to freeze.

      Over the Bay the early-morning flights were beginning to stack up; he’d be catching one back in a few hours’ time. It brought him yet again to pondering how long it would be before his own baby was up there with them. The MPAA. Conceived by computer, gestated in committee, and about to be delivered unto Congress. The lightweight Multi-Purpose Attack Aircraft, the state-of-the-art fly-by-wire variable-geometry radar-reflective Mach-3 aerial acronym that only required a pilot, so they said, to tell it when to go home. The collaborative brainchild of trans-Atlantic aerospace firms which was supposed to solve most of NATO’s and all of his own problems for the next twenty years. Project Sure Hit, as it had originally and less than tactfully been known. Project Shit, as it had been immediately redubbed.

      So the President, angered by the sniggers of a sceptical press conference and eager as ever to shower himself in righteousness rather than ridicule, had on the spot rechristened it Project Dust. ‘And Thine enemies shall lick the dust,’ he had thundered, not textually entirely accurately. But who amongst the reptiles of the White House Press Corps would ever know?

      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’