“You must feel free to phone the hospital,” I said to Jack in the kitchen. He was taking some drugs from an icebox which they had carried with them and putting them in the fridge. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt and as he turned to speak he looked much less pale and frightened than he had when he arrived at the airport.

“How do you think Mart is now?” I asked.

“We were so worried about the fever and the vomiting that we put no thought into how we would handle the customs and the police. It was weird. I think we’re still going to have to find a doctor.”

He went upstairs and phoned Mart’s hospital in San Francisco. I was in the kitchen when he came back down.

“I think we’re in luck, if you can use the word luck about what’s going on. There’s an American doctor doing research here, he used to be attached to the laboratory in the hospital Mart goes to. I have two numbers for him, a home number and a work number. The doctor I spoke to knows him and says that he’d be happy enough to see Mart and check him out. He’s going to phone him first. His name is Cawley.”

Mart had fallen asleep on the sofa in the living room. Pablo had put a blanket over him. He put his fingers to his lips when we came in. Jack put his hand on Mart’s forehead.

“I think he’s a bit cooler,” he whispered. The three of us went out, closing the door soundlessly behind us.

When I phoned the work number Jack had been given I got an answer immediately.

“Can I help you?” the voice spoke in English. I said that I was looking for Doctor Cawley. As soon as I used Jack’s name he said that he was expecting my call, he had just received a call from the doctor in San Francisco. He seemed easygoing, ready to be helpful.

“It’s a matter of how we do this,” he said. “I don’t have a clinic here yet, so he would have to come to my office, and this would be slightly irregular, but I think we can manage it. And I think that I should see him as soon as I can, so if he could arrive here within the next two hours, then I’ll still be here.” He gave me the address, it was a side entrance to the hospital which fronted onto the street.

“He sounds like a nice guy,” I said when I went back downstairs and found Pablo and Jack drinking beers out on the patio.

“Yeah, they all get like that,” Jack said, as though what I had said had irritated him. “They know what’s in store for you, so they keep smiling and making polite, friendly noises at you. They’re going to watch you going blind, they’re going to have to tell you the news that your brain seems to be diseased, or you’ve got skin cancer, or you’d better tell your parents real soon. So they smile at you. When I meet an AIDS doctor who’s rude, I’ll know this plague is over.”