Why Do Birds

CHAPTER 37

Exploring the next day, she found a supermarket that still had some food on its shelves. The market was unattended; a few people were casually picking through the merchandise and carrying it away in carts.

One of the other shoppers, a woman in her fifties, told her about a warehouse near the waterfront where vast quantities of dried and irradiated food were stored, and after that she went there on her moped for serious shopping. The city was nine-tenths empty; people who met on the street smiled happily at each other and often stopped to chat. Within a week she had made as many friends and acquaintances as she had had in New York.

A surprising number of restaurants were still open in the central area, and the same was true of cocktail bars and nightclubs. She discovered that the bar she liked best was Johnny's, on the Avenida Corrientes near the Hilton. The night bartender was a cheerful Dane named Ekstrom, who told amusing stories in five languages, and who sometimes shut up the till, joined the customers and let them pour their own drinks. Several journalists came here every night after work; actors and impresarios from the Teatro Colon also turned up, and an odd assortment of city functionaries, teachers, defrocked priests, lawyers, and gamblers. Before long she had formed a circle of friends there, mostly men whose automatic gallantries were easy to deal with.

She had stopped taking phone calls from the North long ago; the message queue in her phone window had dwindled; now no one called her from anywhere but B.A. Out of boredom and curiosity, she began spending some time on a global service devoted to students of the paranormal, where she used a false name and never showed her face. Some of the other users were woo-woos, but some were more skeptical and intelligent. There were half a dozen of them that she liked best. One of them was a man who called himself John the Baptist. From the wry style of his posted messages, she imagined him as lean, almost skeletal, with a narrow bird-skulled face, dark eyes and paper skin, but the images he flashed from time to time were nothing like that. Sometimes he was the Beast in Cocteau's film, sometimes Darth Vader, sometimes Byron or Oscar Wilde sniffing a lily.

Al though she had no rent to pay, and food was free as the air, she needed money for some things, chiefly entertainment, and she was running short faster than she had expected. One of her new friends was a doctor, Enrique Monteleone, a dark-skinned man in his forties; one night she brought Wellafield's medical bag to Johnny's and showed it to him.

He opened the bag skeptically and looked at the forceps. "These are quite old," he said. "Where did you get them?"

"From a retired doctor."

"Yes? He must have retired a long time ago." He picked up two of the vials and looked at them. "These are fresh, however. Well, how much would you like me to pay you?"

"I don't know. Would a hundred thousand australes be too much?"

He smiled sadly. "They are worth something, of course, because these instruments are not being made now. There are many in warehouses, naturally, but they will wear out, and then we will have to make new ones by hand. I will give you the hundred thousand, on one condition."

"Yes?"

"That you have dinner with me tomorrow night at my house."

She looked at him. A hundred thousand australes was about five thousand dollars, enough for ten restaurant meals. "I'll have dinner with you on one condition," she said.

"Yes?"

"That you allow me to make you a present of the bag."

"Aha." He smiled in a different way, and looked much younger. "I accept with pleasure."

Monteleone, together with several other medical practitioners, had scavenged all the pharmacies in town, and also the pharmaceutical warehouses, arriving in most cases after they had been looted, but although the doctors had found very few opiates, they had retrieved a vast store of other useful drugs. Unfortunately the shelf life of most of them was a year or less. Insulin was no longer available. Penicillin and other antibiotics were in short supply. Vaccines for a dozen diseases were not to be had. Worse still, from Monteleone's viewpoint, ordinary anesthetics were no longer obtainable. They were forced to fall back on diethyl ether and chloroform, which could be produced with simple equipment, but with whose use in medicine nobody was familiar any longer; they lost some patients for this reason, and because of inadequate antisepsis.

A small band of volunteers worked to keep the garbage collected and the water supply safe. Lavalle toiled with the rest, but as early as 2006 there were outbreaks of smallpox and diphtheria.

After the cholera epidemic of 2008, which killed Monteleone and most of his patients, almost all the survivors left B.A., where the stench was becoming intolerable. Exploring on her moped, Lavalle found a three-story house in an abandoned town called La Paz, on the east bank of the Parana about four hundred kilometers north of Buenos Aires. Evidently the house had been fitted up as a survivalist refuge: there was a good deal of communication equipment, and a diesel generator in the basement. The house had its own well, with an electric pump.

There were scattered human bones in the house. She found five skulls, one of which was a child's, another an infant's. There were wild-animal droppings on the floor, and twice she glimpsed pumas in the neighborhood.

She cleaned out the whole house and scrubbed it until it no longer stank. She cut down two trees that grew too close to the house. Then she boarded up the front and back doors and all the windows on the ground floor; from then on, she went in and out through a second-story window, using a rope ladder. When she brought things home, she raised them with a pulley. In October she cleared a plot of ground and planted a vegetable garden.