Bahama Crisis

"I thought you'd never ask."

So I took her to bed and we were married three weeks later over the protests of Jack whose open objection concerned the disparity in our ages, but he did not like me, something I knew already. Billy and, I think. Billy One were for it, but Debbie's brother, Frank, followed Jack's line. Various members of the family took sides and the clan was split to some extent on this issue. But none of them could say that I was a fortune-hunter marrying her for her money I had enough of my own. As for my own feelings about it, I was marrying Debbie, not Jack.

We married in Houston in a somewhat tense atmosphere and then went back to the Bahamas to honeymoon briefly at the new Rainbow Bay Hotel. Then we went back to Grand Bahama via Abaco where we picked up Karen who seemed dubious about having a new mother. Debbie and Karen moved into the house at Lucaya and I went back to running the Corporation. Two months later she told me she was pregnant which made both of us very happy.

But then things began to go wrong again because people who were coming to the Bahamas on vacation were going home to die.

Legionella pneumophila.

I learned a lot about that elusive bug with the pseudo- Latin name in the next few months. Anyone connected with the hotel industry had to learn, and learn fast. At first it was not recognized for what it was because those afflicted were not dying in the Bahamas but back home in the States or in England or Switzerland or wherever eke they came from. It was the World Health Organization that blew the first warning whistle.

Most people might know it as Legionnaires' disease because it was first discovered at the convention of the American Legion held at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia in 1976 where there was an almost explosive outbreak of pneumonia among those who had attended Altogether 221 people became ill and thirty-four of them died.

Naturally, Legionnaires' disease is bad news for any hotelier. No one is likely to spend a carefree vacation in a resort hotel from which he may be carried out feet first, and the problem is compounded by the fact that even those hotels which are well kept and disease-free feel a financial draught. Once the news gets around that a particular holiday resort is tainted then everybody gets hurt.

So it was that a lot of people, me among them, were highly perturbed to hear that Legionnaires' disease was loose in the Parkway Hotel in Nassau. I flew to New Providence to talk to Tony Bosworth, our Corporation doctor. He had his base at the Sea Gardens Hotel because New Providence is fairly central and he could get to our other hotels reasonably quickly, using a Corporation plane in an emergency. A company doctor was another of my extravagances of which Jack Gunningham did not approve, but he earned his salary on this, and other, occasions.

When I told him what was happening at the Parkway he gave a low whistle.

"Legionellosis! That's a bad one. Are you sure?"

I shrugged.

"That's what I hear."

"Do you know which form? It comes in two ways Pontiac fever and Legionnaires' disease."

That was the first time I had heard of Pontiac fever, but not the last. I shook my head.

"I wouldn't know. You're the doctor, not me."

"Pontiac fever isn't too bad," he said.

"It hits fast and has a high attack rate, about ninety-five per cent, but usually there are no fatalities. Legionnaires' disease is a killer. I'll get on to the Department of Public Health. Give me fifteen minutes, will you?"

I went away to look at the kitchens. I often make surprise raids on the kitchens and other departments just to keep the staff up to the mark. All departments are equally important but, to paraphrase George Orwell, the kitchen is more equal than others. Every hotelier's nightmare is an outbreak of salmonella. It was nearer half an hour before I got back to Tony and he was still nattering on the telephone, but he laid it down a couple of minutes after my arrival.

"Confirmed," he said gloomily.

"Legionnaires' disease. Suspected by a smart young doctor in Manchester, England, it was confirmed by the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre. The World Health Organization has identified a man dead in Paris and two more in Zurich; there's, a couple of cases in Buenos Aires and a rash of them across the States."

"All these people stayed at the Parkway?"

"Yes. How many rooms there?"

I had all the statistics of my competition at my fingertips.

"A

hundred and fifty. "

"What would you say the year-round occupation rate is?"

I considered.

"It's a reasonably good hotel. I'd say between seventy-five and eighty per cent."

Tony's lips moved silently as he made a calculation.

"They'll have to contact about 12,000 people, and they're spread all over the bloody world. That's going to be a job for someone."

I gaped at him.

"Why so many!"