In the last year of World War II the narrator of The Plague-Spreader's Tale is sent to a TB sanatorium near Palermo. The place is like a leper colony. People arrive but they never leave until they are dead, usually within a matter of months. The narrator is a young man straight out of the army who has been diagnosed with the fatal disease. The doctor is a lean rake of a man who, like most of the medical staff, has the illness in his cells. However, the sap of life cannot be stopped from flowing and the narrator falls in love with a woman patient. She was once a ballerina, and has not lost her grace. She leads her suitor a merry dance as her attitude varies from the come-hither to cloistered retreat. How much of a future can the pair build for themselves on these shifting sands?