No one knows why the virus suddenly jumped across the species barrier in 2002 and began to infect humans in Guangdong province—at first, mostly chefs and workers in the wet markets—but by February 2003 doctors in Guangzhou found themselves trying to treat a disease they’d never before encountered.
Early symptoms—fever, chills, aches, cough, headache—mimicked those of influenza, but instead of easing after a week to ten days they grew suddenly more severe and were accompanied by difficulty breathing. At that point, pneumonia developed, proving fatal in about 10 percent of cases.
At Zhongshan Hospital, a teaching hospital recognized as one of the best in Guangzhou, perplexed doctors called in Dr. Liu Jianlun for consultation. At sixty-four, Dr. Liu, a pulmonary specialist, had essentially retired from both his teaching and clinical positions, but he quickly answered the call. Ten days after he’d started seeing patients with the disease, he started to experience symptoms of it himself. Dr. Liu would have strongly recommended complete bed rest for a patient feeling as sick as he was, but he had made a commitment to attend a nephew’s wedding in Hong Kong on February 22.
Liu and his wife traveled to Hong Kong on February 21 and checked into room 911 at the three-star Metropole Hotel in Kowloon. They set out on a sightseeing trip with his brother-in-law, but by then he was so ill that he had to turn back. At the Metropole, Liu took to his bed. Overnight his symptoms worsened dramatically. As his breathing became more labored, his wife called the nearest hospital, the Kwong Wah Hospital, to say he would be coming in, but that he was suffering from a highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that had not yet been identified. Liu himself got on the phone to say he should be placed in an isolation ward and that no one should examine or treat him without wearing full protective clothing.
Liu never left Kwong Wah Hospital. He died on March 4. His wife escaped infection, but his brother-in-law died a week later. Because of Liu’s insistence on being treated as dangerously contagious, none of the medical personnel who had contact with him were infected.
At the Metropole, however, Liu had neither taken nor urged such precautions. As a result, seven other guests, all with rooms on the ninth floor, contracted the virus. The method of contagion was never determined, but it could have been something as innocuous as Liu sneezing in the elevator or even simply pressing the ninth-floor elevator button after coughing into his hand.
The symptoms of SARS did not manifest themselves for three to seven days after the onset of the infection. Thus, feeling fine, the seven virus-bearers from the ninth floor of the Metropole continued on their ways. Three flew to Singapore, two to Toronto, and one to Hanoi. The seventh, a twenty-six-year-old airplane mechanic who lived in Hong Kong and had gone to the hotel only to visit a friend, went back to work.
By March 5, however, the day after Liu died at Kwong Wah Hospital, the mechanic was sick enough to be admitted to Prince of Wales Hospital. Unlike the doctors at Kwong Wah, no one at Prince of Wales had been forewarned of the special danger their new patient represented. He was placed not in isolation, but in a ward. When his breathing difficulties grew worse, he was treated with a nebulizer, thereby dispersing contagious droplets from his lungs throughout the ward.
The first sign of anything out of the ordinary came on the morning of March 10, when a dozen nurses and orderlies called in sick. By the end of the day another fifty members of the Prince of Wales medical staff—all displaying the same symptoms—had reported that they were ill. The next morning, March 11, Prince of Wales officials notified the Hong Kong Department of Health, which immediately contacted the World Health Organization representative in Beijing to report the onset of a possible epidemic.
Within twenty-four hours of receiving the information from Hong Kong, WHO issued a global alert about this unfamiliar and potentially fatal disease of unknown origin. On March 15, WHO put a name to it: severe acute respiratory syndrome. By then, the virus had been carried to Singapore, Canada, and Vietnam. One hundred forty-three patients and employees of Prince of Wales Hospital had been infected. And the virus had made its capricious way to block E of the Amoy Gardens housing estate, where it would trigger the largest SARS outbreak in the world.
One of those infected at Prince of Wales was a thirty-three-year-old Shenzhen man who came to the hospital regularly for kidney dialysis. He began to display symptoms on March 14, during an overnight visit to his brother, who lived in block E. His was one of the 20 percent of SARS cases in which the symptoms included diarrhea.
Amoy Gardens was a typical Hong Kong housing estate. It had been built more than twenty years earlier, and its twenty thousand residents were crammed into eight-to-a-floor, five-hundred-square-foot apartment units in a cluster of towers each thirty stories high. From a public health standpoint, it was not an ideal place for someone infected with the SARS virus to have diarrhea.
Later investigation showed that a design defect in the U-shaped water traps connected to the bathroom floor drains permitted sewage droplets contaminated with the virus to be sucked into the bathroom when the exhaust fan was used. The fan then blew the droplets into a narrow air well between buildings, from which they entered neighboring apartments through open windows. Within ten days of the infected man’s overnight stay, more than three hundred Amoy Gardens residents—most from block E and the neighboring block D—grew ill with SARS. At that point, the government of Hong Kong abandoned its attempts to downplay the seriousness of the outbreak and ordered the shutdown of all schools and day care centers within the territory.
That was enough for Rob Kissel. During the last week of March, he put Nancy and the children and Connie on a plane to New York.
12. HOMES SWEET HOMES
THEY HAD ONLY BEEN GONE A FEW DAYS WHEN ROB CALLED Bryna O’Shea in San Francisco.
“Bryna, I’ve got a problem.”
“Yes?”
“It’s my marriage. I’m afraid it’s falling apart. I need someone to talk to about it. I figured someone who knows Nancy would be best. That is, as long as I can talk to you in confidence. As long as you won’t tell Nancy what I say.”
“I don’t know, Rob. I’d be in a tough position. I’d feel weird keeping secrets from Nancy, especially about her own marriage. And suppose Nancy tells me something about you? I wouldn’t be able to share it.”
“I understand. Please, Bryna. I’m afraid I’m losing her and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Rob, I don’t think I’d be comfortable—”
“Bryna, please.”
Bryna worked in public relations in San Francisco. She was good at her work. But private relations were a different matter, especially relations between two people she knew as well as Rob and Nancy. On the other hand, over the years she had known him, she’d come to appreciate Rob more and more—his earnestness, decency, and genuine love for Nancy and his children.
“Please, just let me cry on your shoulder once in a while? I don’t think anybody else could understand.”
“Okay,” Bryna said. “But I’m not ever going to become a messenger between you two.”
Rob told her he was watching the marriage crumble before his eyes and he didn’t know what to do. He said Nancy was changing in ways he didn’t understand. Her words and actions were making it clear that not only didn’t she love him, she didn’t even like him anymore. He said this was breaking his heart.
Then he started on his list of complaints. Nancy had no interest in raising the children. He loved them and hated to see them being both neglected and spoiled when he wasn’t around. Then there was the matter of money. “Her spending is out of control,” he said. “But there’s more to it than that. It seems like an act of aggression, as if she’s spending primarily because she wants to piss me off. I bitch at her about it and she gets huffy and defensive. Then she accuses me of trying to control her, to show her who’s boss. I feel like she’s trying to manufacture reasons to despise me. Bryna, I don’t know how to reach her anymore. I don’t know how to bring her
back.”
Bryna couldn’t give him any answers. She’d already heard about the child-rearing and money problems from Nancy, who had rather a different point of view. According to her, Rob was a tight-fisted bastard who was humiliating her by treating her as less than an adult in money matters, an absentee father who burst onto the scene intermittently, whining that nothing was being done properly and throwing a fit for two or three days before rushing off again to the world he really cared about.
“I have no advice to give you, Rob, but I’ll be here if you really need to talk.”
He began to call her three or four times a week. For the first time in his life, he was facing a problem that money couldn’t fix.
The first thing Nancy did when she arrived in New York was to call her former pediatrician. He refused to examine the children, saying he could not risk having the SARS virus infect his office.
Nancy’s intention had been to put Isabel and Zoe in a private school in New York City for the rest of the term, while Connie took care of Ethan. But no private school would enroll them after hearing they’d just arrived from Hong Kong. She could see no alternative but to head for Vermont, where the schools were not so persnickety. She rented a Ford Explorer SUV—not at all pleased that she couldn’t rent a Range Rover on short notice—and drove to Stratton amid light snow on April 3. It snowed five more inches the next day and three inches the day after that.
The contractor had completed most of the interior remodeling, but the exterior work had just begun and could progress only as quickly as the fickle Vermont spring permitted. The house sat on a steeply canted hillside lot on Stone House Road, overlooking the Stratton Mountain Country Club golf course. A mason had persuaded Nancy that she needed an extensive new system of retaining walls. She’d also been sold on the idea of regrading the driveway to make it less steep. And then there was landscaping, a lot of landscaping. New trees and shrubs started to arrive by the truckload. Work on the multilevel rock garden began.
In Vermont, as was standard for April, the winter winds subsided only gradually. Snow still flurried from hostile gray skies. The air resisted the intrusion of warmth. Trees had not yet started to bud. But Nancy’s days were filled with talk of dogwoods that would flower in May, hemlocks, yews, and red-osier dogwood shrubs. She had to decide on the placement of the perennial gardens and the annual beds and choose plants. Did she want the traditional hostas and bleeding hearts for the shady spots? Pink impatiens or violet? As for lamium in the rock garden, wouldn’t ‘White Nancy’ be perfect? And would periwinkle suffice as ground cover to supplement the fine fescue grass, or did she want pachysandra as well?
Around the corner and up the hill, Andrew was spending a lot of time at his Stratton Mountain vacation home. But he was in no mood to socialize. Over the winter, members of the co-op board at 200 East Seventy-fourth Street had begun to scrutinize the transactions that Andrew, in his capacity as treasurer, had been making with residents’ money during the preceding six years.
He and Hayley had bought two apartments adjacent to their first and had renovated them into a $3 million duplex that was the building’s showplace. Andrew listed his net worth as $20 million. He drove a Mercedes so loaded with electronic gadgetry that neighbors joked about his national security clearance. He’d been calling himself “The King of Seventy-fourth Street” until a lawyer hired by the co-op board’s finance committee bearded him in his Stratton den in January to discuss discrepancies in the building’s accounts.
Andrew admitted he’d been stealing. He begged for mercy. He asked if there might not be some way for his two little daughters to avoid the trauma of seeing their father hauled off to prison. He paid a million dollars in restitution and resigned from the co-op board. He rented a $15,000-per-month house in Greenwich and put the Seventy-fourth Street duplex up for sale. But the co-op board didn’t think he’d come completely clean. They hired outside auditors who discovered that since 1996 Andrew had surreptitiously siphoned more than $4.5 million from co-op accounts.
During the first week of April, as Rob arrived for a short visit, Andrew found himself not in Stratton contemplating the onset of spring, but at 305 Madison Avenue in New York City, in the office of his new criminal attorney, Charles Clayman, of Clayman and Rosenberg, trying to negotiate a settlement with the co-op board that would allow him to escape prosecution.
Nancy saw Rob’s visit as an intrusion. Their phone calls had been curt and brief. She didn’t reply to his e-mails. He said he hadn’t seen his children for almost a month and he missed them. Nancy told him she didn’t believe that. She said she knew he’d come only to check on the renovation and, insofar as he could, on her spending. On his first morning there, she put a pair of white gloves on his breakfast place mat. “I’m sure you’ll need them for your inspection,” she said.
A few days later, on April 21, Rob turned forty. He felt it was a significant milestone. He waited all day, expecting a celebration, or at least some acknowledgment, from Nancy and the children. There was none. She never told the kids it was Daddy’s birthday, and she completely ignored it herself.
He returned to Hong Kong nursing hurt feelings. Nancy hadn’t kissed him hello or good-bye, she had not let him hug her, and, worst of all, she’d insisted that he sleep in the basement. He’d been too shocked and hurt even to argue about it. Once again, he told Bryna, he didn’t know what to do.
“I can’t keep shrugging this off as postpartum depression,” he said. “I’m sure some of it is my fault, but I’m starting to think it might be a good idea for her to see a shrink.”
“Don’t dare suggest that,” Bryna said.
“What can I do?”
“I don’t know, Rob. She hasn’t been in touch with me. I’m not sure there’s anything you can do. It sounds to me like she’s jumped the track.”
He was back in Hong Kong for only a week when he had to turn around and make another grueling sixteen-hour flight to JFK, because Merrill Lynch had summoned him to New York. But it was worth it: they offered him a job in Tokyo, supervising all of Merrill’s distressed-debt investing throughout Asia. It was by far the biggest promotion he’d ever received. It would make him one of the most important and influential investment bankers in the world. He was so excited he sped to Vermont to share the good news with Nancy. They would be leaving Hong Kong! He was sure she’d fall in love with Tokyo! But ten minutes after walking into the house on Stone House Road he decided not even to mention it. As he said late that night in an e-mail to Bryna O’Shea:
So I walk in from New York tonight and get crushed by the dog and all the kids. Jumping, screaming, licking. Very nice welcome. Nancy is sitting at the table, saying nothing. I didn’t see her when I came in. She says something to the kids and I turn around and saw her and said, “Hello, nice to see you.” I had to shake off the kids and get up and go over and give her a kiss. Not much effort on her part. Never much effort. Is she jealous that I get a big hello from the kids and the dog? Wouldn’t that be ridiculous?
Merrill Lynch had suggested that he keep himself available for short-notice meetings about Tokyo. He decided to spend most of May working from Vermont. David Noh, the brilliant and tireless assistant he’d brought with him from Goldman, could step in for him in Hong Kong. As in April, Rob slept in the basement. This so perturbed Connie that once she actually raised her eyebrows at him in puzzlement. He merely shrugged. He brooded his way through the nights. He worried that he couldn’t trust Nancy up in Vermont all alone. She told him nothing about what she did or whom she saw. But that was a problem he’d come prepared to deal with this time.
In Hong Kong, Rob had bought the Spector Pro and eBlaster computer spyware programs. They would allow him to monitor the Web sites Nancy visited, the search terms she used, and, more important, the e-mail she sent and received. He didn’t know what she was up to, but with Spector Pro and eBlaster he was going to find out.
The second week in May, as the renovation neared completion, Rob called Prime Focu
s Communications in Brattleboro. He’d spoken to them the previous summer about home theater installation. The owner, Lance Del Priore, and his brother, Mike, had come to the house to sketch out preliminary plans. Now Rob called to say he was ready to proceed.
Mike Del Priore came by the next day. He spent more than two hours with Rob, reviewing component choices and installation options. Rob decided on a $35,000 system. Two weeks later, on Thursday, May 22, Prime Focus phoned. They’d received all the components and would be able to install the system the following week. “I’ll be back in Hong Kong by then,” Rob said. “But my wife will have my phone numbers, so call me if something unexpected comes up. And don’t change anything without talking to me directly. My wife does not have the authority to approve any further expense. I want that to be absolutely clear.”
On Tuesday, May 27, the day after Memorial Day, Mike Del Priore called to say he’d be out to install the system the next day. Nancy said she looked forward to seeing him.
Wednesday morning was humid, with gentle rain falling occasionally on the newly landscaped hillside outside the house. The sky was only shades of gray, but the air was rich with the honeyed smell of spring growth and flowering. Nancy was finishing a cup of coffee in the kitchen shortly after 9:00 a.m. when she heard the Prime Focus truck come down the driveway.
Michael Del Priore rang the doorbell.
Nancy answered. She was wearing denim shorts that rode high and tight on her thighs and a sleeveless yellow top with a scooped neckline. She flashed her most dazzling smile.
“Hi, Michael,” she said. “Wow, you look terrific. You must have started really working out.”
Nothing would ever be the same.