Children of Wrath Read Online Free PDF Page B

knife and fork. “The bacteria have been positively identified.” Chewing, he cast his wife a deferential gaze. “My dear, you truly have outdone yourself this time.”
    “You mean the E. coli?” Frau Klemper’s eyes fluttered in agreement. “He’s absolutely right, Irmgard. Your sauce ought to be declared a national treasure. Still, I’m quite certain a late edition retracted that declaration.”
    “The People’s Observer affirmed it’s definitely not E. coli.” Herr Klemper already had Irmgard’s national treasure all over the napkin on his chest. “It is salmonella. Are there no more potatoes? Are we back to war rationing?”
    Willi knew it was neither E. coli nor salmonella.
    “But why does it take so long to determine?” Frau Klemper opened her chubby fingers, unable to believe such a process could take more than an hour, at most.
    “Shocking. Shocking.” Irmgard Winkelmann came around, plunking more potatoes onto her brother’s plate. “That it could happen in Berlin.”
    That nothing could penetrate the ring of defenses protecting the city’s meat supply was not a notion entirely without merit, Willi now understood. In the short time he’d spent at the Ministry of Public Health today, he’d learned that the regime of controls established by them decades ago was formidable indeed, and, given the size of the industry, rarely breached. Even during the war, as Vicki had recalled, when four years of Allied blockade had left a million Berliners on the edge of starvation, there’d been no serious contamination of the meat supplies. In fact, there hadn’t been a really major contamination in Berlin since hundreds died in the trichinosis outbreak ninety years ago, which had prompted those public health measures to begin with.
    Until now. With all the controls.
    As usual, the city’s myriad newspapers had only gotten part of the story right. In this case, the number of victims, their ages, etc. But as far as pathogenic culprits, in their endeavors to outscoop the competition, the headlines all had it wrong. For once, though, it wasn’t their fault. The Ministry of Public Health, Willi’d learned, was intentionally song-and-dancing the public.
    Arriving at their big granite headquarters near the Wilhelmplatz shortly after his talk with Dr. Weiss, he’d sensed a real war fever in the air. Technicians flying down corridors. Typewriters banging. No one going home this weekend. His liaison there, head of the medical crisis team, Frau Doktor Riegler, all but pushed him in front of a microscope.
    “Big trouble.” She focused the viewfinder for him. “E. coli and salmonella are pussycats compared to this.”
    Willi’s vision had filled with jerking rod-shaped figures.
    “Listeria monocytogenes,” she whispered as if it were too terrible to say loudly. “Ten times deadlier than most food-borne pathogens. Those nasty little bugs thrive in the most outrageous heat and cold. Long after you think they’re gone … they’re back. You must keep cleaning. Testing. Cleaning. Testing.”
    Willi thought they looked harmless enough, though more than one killer he’d tracked had. The incessant flagellation fixated him.
    “What happens when they infect humans?”
    “Nausea. Vomiting. Diarrhea. In serious cases—high fever. In the worst, convulsions. We’ve seen it all the last ten days.”
    “Ten?” He looked away from the lens. The Frau Doktor offered him a tilted little smile. “How could that be? The first reports came out only yesterday.”
    “We don’t report what we don’t know for certain.” Her smile sank away. “Otherwise there’d be mass hysteria. You see what’s happening now as it is, Sergeant.” Her voice swelled with authority. “Like many bacteria, Listeria ’s ubiquitous. The main route of infection’s through food. But that could be anything from vegetables to meat, poultry, fish, dairy. It took us ten days to get a fix on the sausages.” She clutched her clipboard. “We