CORONAVIRUS TIMES, continued.
Chemistry majors alert! The perpetrator of a despicable crime is speaking in italics here and there, and a lot of it is regarding laboratory work with pathogens. Bohjalian is one of those few authors that made the jump into a pandemic possibility just as it is happening globally in our real time. This book is not about a dystopian future; it’s a mystery about a romance gone off the rails, duplicity, and greed. Alexis is an emergency room doctor, a self-described adrenaline junkie; it’s a big city (New York) teaching/research hospital. One night she treats a man for a bullet wound in his arm, the result of a chance encounter with a crazed street person. The injured man is Austin, who works at the same hospital in the fundraising sector. Sparks fly, and they find much more in common than medical topics.
Months later they are with a small bicycle tour group in beautiful Vietnam. Austin, the expert cyclist, goes missing and is then found dead, the victim of an apparent hit and run. We know different ‒ but we don’t know much, except that an American had deliberately captured him, tortured him, and staged the dumping of his body. Alexis is devastated. But she learns that Austin lied to her about his reason for choosing Vietnam as a holiday destination, and she questions some of the trauma on his body. Determined to uncover the real story, she enters very dangerous territory where the lab specimens are rats. At least the Vietnamese cop Quang is alert on his end to a potential drug connection in the case. Local investigator Ken Sarafian in New York agrees to help her.
If we are not all at the mercy of Big Pharma, we can be manipulated by merciless political agendas and human greed. Not an easy read unless you have a science mind, nonetheless engrossing.
Alexis
▪ You just never knew when a stroke was going to leave you a stringless marionette on the dining floor beside the half-eaten remains of your supper. (31)
▪ Her mother was loving without being compassionate, caring without being kind. (73)
▪ Often, we were just trying to get ahead of the next pandemic and find the antibiotics that would work. (284)
▪ Her short sentence was a bombshell that seemed to suck the air from the room. (296)
Others
▪ (Austin) “Whatever you want, it can’t wait until I got home?” he asked. “Until I was back in America?” (46)
▪ Douglas estimated there were at least half a dozen places he knew where he could watch rats, but this was his favourite. Rats had the culinary tastes of a six-year-old boy. (181)
▪ He rather doubted that the other rats would wait for it to stop breathing before feasting upon it. (183)
▪ “That’s the wonderful thing about weapons like this, Oscar. They are unbelievably lucrative regardless whether they’re ever used.” (279)
▪ (Sarafian) He’d emerged from the plane at Can Ranh Bay, squinted against the sun, and felt his breath sucked from him like a vacuum by a wave of air so stinking hot it was like he’d opened an oven door. (318)
▪ “We can still get the plague. It’s on the Russian steppes, it’s in Madagascar. I told you it was found in the subways.” (366)
▪ “Tell her you want to talk about Austin. Share some memories. Share how traumatized you are by the guy’s death.” (388)
▪ (Quang) He had grown up with the stories of what both the French and then the Americans had done, and seen the damage wrought by the bombing and the napalm and the herbicides. By Agent Orange. He always had classmates with birth defects. (430-1)
▪ For all the fears people had of bird flu and avian-transmitted illnesses, it would be far more difficult to weaponize a pigeon than a rat. (455)
Know how we (I) often say after viewing a movie made from a book, oh ‒ the book was “better”? Not this time. Not in the sense that a film can lose the nuances of an author’s written language. I’d been transfixed by the 2020 cable-TV series; I wanted the “full” original treatment. Only to discover that the series had significant departures from the book. With visual images already implanted in my head, it was difficult to avoid becoming totally lost.
Khafadji is a former Iraqi intelligence agent who was demoted to the civilian police service, then out of a job entirely upon the American invasion of 2003. The Americans torture him (I am not clear what they wanted from him; there’s confusion about his identity) until he agrees to work for them. In exchange, they will provide medical care for his daughter Mrouj’s serious kidney problem. Khafadji’s job is to initiate the building of Iraq’s new civilian police force, thus reviewing countless archived files for candidates. Captain Parodi seems to be his supervisor but Citrone is the man who gives him orders. Also on Khafaji’s mind is the disappearance of his niece Sawsan, whose professor, Zubeida, had her working as an interpreter for the Americans.
The TV series replaced Citrone with someone else, they made Khafaji’s neighbours hostile, they reinvented scenes involving Zubeida, and so on, but ... the filmed story line was much clearer, although different. Was Khafaji being tortured because his son had been a traitor or because he himself was suspected of aiding the resistance? The book aptly depicts the chaos and uncertainty and casual brutalities amidst the invasive occupation. Khafaji grew up imbued in poetry, his family lived with it. Now fear is the overriding atmosphere as people try to resume their damaged lives or leave the country altogether. Khafaji idles his job, a somehow oddly passive figure dreaming of the past, until he’s called to investigate two murder scenes.
Baghdad Central bristles with complications and distrust on so many levels, without adding political or religious exposition. Human drama of our times.
Bits and Pieces
▪ “Wine, pure wine!” their father would call out whenever he heard a good line of poetry. It was the only bottle he ever drank from. (57)
▪ A dinner party. People talking about how nothing was changed, nothing ever will change. A familiar, coded kind of conversation about how nothing on the inside could ever unseat the regime, and how no one on the outside would be foolish enough to try it. (175)
▪ “We’ve got experts who are making sure that the whole criminal code is all in complete accordance with Sharia law. Iraq is going to be the economic powerhouse of the region.” (186)
▪ This man’s hands were so dirty you could see the shit on his elbows. (288)
▪ The bodies of young men lie scattered in the debris. The lucky ones were crushed under the wall. (428)
Khafaji
▪ His screams came out in muted heaves. There’s not enough air in this room to fill my lungs. (72)
▪ Sixteen years later, Khafaji stares at a picture, and it stares back, dragging behind it a mule-train of memories. (277)
▪ He is fifty yards away when the first explosion hits. In an instant, glass windows turn into bursting rainclouds. (343)
▪ Like a newspaper, he folds up each day and puts it aside for good. For the first time in weeks, Khafaji begins to rest. (409)
Zubeida
▪ (Z) “They got on a horse, but they don’t know how to ride. And now they’re just beginning to understand it’s more dangerous to get off than to keep riding.” (326)
▪ (Z) “Our problems have always been logistical. Not moral. Not financial. The Americans wanted the girls brought into them.” (354)
This clever, clever man is at it again: writing himself (“Tony”) into the whodunnit as the narrator. Tony is going to write a book about the enigmatic private detective called Hawthorne and that’s the book we are reading. References to Horowitz’s real life as a scriptwriter make it seem ultra-real. He’s done this before (The Word is Murder – see LL185), still unable to get a handle on his thorny companion. When highly respected lawyer Richard Pryce is murdered, the police call Hawthorne in as an expert consultant; Tony accompanies him on rounds of interviewing, desperate to glimpse the true nature of the man as well as solve the case. A resentful DI Cara Grunshaw makes every attempt to block their progress.
Pryce had just settled a rancorous divorce, his specialty, for his client Adrian Lockwood. Lockwood’s disgruntled wife, Akira Anno, is a suspect due to the public threat she made against Pryce. Another element in the story is the hobby or sport of potholing, which means exploring caves in the UK (the word pothole conjures a quite different image, of rough streets and highways, to Canadian eyes). Pryce and two old friends had enjoyed such an annual outing until disaster struck one rainy day. Throw in more characters and twists, and our Holmes-and-Watson-type team is nose to the ground. If only Hawthorne would share his insights with the frustrated Tony.
It’s a classic. And there will be another. Because Tony has a three-book contract to write about Hawthorne. The incredibly prolific Horowitz wins again.
Tony
▪ She was still holding me, pinning me to the wall with fists like cannonballs. (125)
▪ I was still quite attracted to the idea that I will be the one who made sense of it all and that when the suspects were gathered together in one room in the final chapter, I’d be the one doing the talking. (152)
▪ Kevin had been spying not just on me, but on my son. “You’ve hacked into my computer!” I exclaimed. (281-2)
▪ What did he know? And why didn’t I know it too? (330)
▪ This wasn’t, of course, the first time I’d been stabbed. (389)
Hawthorne
▪ He wasn’t being deliberately offensive. It was just that offensive was his default mode. (59)
▪ The trouble was, he was almost fanatical about keeping any personal or private details away from me. (71)
▪ I had never seen him wearing jeans or trainers. Did he even take exercise? I wondered. (165)
▪ Again, as so often with Hawthorne, I got a sense of a child playing at being an adult. (259)
▪ “And if you want my advice, you’ll steer clear of Hawthorne. He’s trouble. Everyone knows that.” (365)
▪ “Poor Cara,” he muttered. “She’s only gone and arrested the wrong man.” (367)
Others
▪ (Grunshaw) “If I find you’ve been undermining me, I’ll rip your testicles off and use them as conkers. Is that clear?” (48)
▪ (Akira) “He belittled me. He made it seem that I had brought nothing to the marriage but had used Adrian as some sort of emotional crutch.” (101)
▪ (Adrian) “It was only when we got back from the honeymoon that I discovered she was totally self-obsessed and boring!” (104)
▪ As she has often told me, only women know how to multitask. (207)
▪ (Tony’s wife) “You can’t keep ending your books with somebody trying to kill you,” she said. (391)
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