Lost Goddess : A Novel (9781101554340)

by Knox, Tom

  The smell of garbage.

  He twisted to see Chemda. She was being led to the side, like she was special. Jake knew, with a shudder of quiet despair, precisely how his death was going to happen. He’d been to the killing fields of Cheung Ek. This is how they did it. This is how the Khmer Rouge slaughtered their countless victims, with a primitive and simple efficiency. Make them kneel down, swing the iron bar, crush the skull from behind. Next, please. Why waste a bullet on death?

  He could hear Chemda crying now, heavily. The soldiers murmured. The decision had been made, so they were just doing their job. Rittisak was staring at the sky. Jake stared at Pol Pot’s grave. The incense was still burning. A trail of ants led from the brushwood to the shriveled apples, to an empty bottle of chili sauce.

  The soldier approached with a rusty iron bar, a car axle, maybe. He was going to swing the bar and bash out their brains. Jake closed his eyes, waiting to die. Chemda sobbed in the darkness of his mind. He could hear the man giving orders. Yes, that’s it, kill them now. The world devolved to a still, silent point in the singularity of his life: here at the end of his life, he thought of his sister, and laughter, and his mother, and sadness, and Chemda, and Mama Brand Instant Rice Noodles gently rotting in the sun.

  29

  Monkey lab, thought Julia, what’s that in Russian? Didn’t she write that down somewhere?

  Grabbing her notebook, she turned to the middle-aged man with broken, taped-together wire-rimmed spectacles, standing in the desolate, carless parking lot of Sukhumi railway station.

  “Obez … yanii pitomnik.”

  The man nodded. “Da! Obez’yanii pitomnik.” His nylon shirt was greasy, his chin unshaven, his tie stained. His helpful smile was keen.

  The man was pointing down the road. Julia followed his gesture with a reflux of dismay: the streets in front of the station were potholed and syphilitic, the sidewalks cracked and weed-sprouted. This town seemed to be like every other town on this polluted eastern shore of the Black Sea, decaying, smelly, depressed, half destroyed by recent wars of irredentism and secession. A post-Communist, ex Soviet statelet at its worst.

  “Da!” The man pointed, once again: his hand firm and vigorous, his fingernails dirty. He seemed to be telling her to go straight, then right, then up a hill. “Obez’yanii pitomnik!”

  “Spasibo,” said Julia, putting away her notebook, quickly walking on.

  The weariness was lurking. She was very tired from the flight from Paris to Moscow, the flight from Moscow to Adler, and the train down the gray-drizzled waters of the Black Sea littoral. But Julia was nearing her goal, so a surge of adrenaline was masking that tiredness. She walked quickly into the town.

  The subtropical sea port was chilly and dank, and alienating. Julia wished Alex were here. In the end she had decided to tell him what she was doing, and she had been entirely unsurprised when he had declined to join her. He had said, “Sweetheart, you are mad,” and had tried to dissuade her, but she wasn’t to be dissuaded. And so here she was.

  Maybe he was right, she was mad. She was in Abkhazia. Even the destination was mad.

  What was she hoping to find? The truth? Yes, the truth no one else would try to uncover, the truth about the skulls, the caves, the bones, the cave art, the truth about Annika’s death. Perhaps she would find nothing.

  She passed a brace of cafés where women with ugly leggings sat in the grubby windows staring with expressions of grief at their own babies yowling in plastic strollers. A tramp was slumped in the shelter of a broken tram stop plastered with peeling adverts, its glass grimy and cracked. Office blocks that seemed too derelict and window-smashed to be useful nonetheless disgorged workers heading home for the night.

  Julia glanced at her watch. Would it still be open? She so wanted not to stay here for a night. The place was demonically gloomy and depressing.

  No. She had to grasp her fears, defeat them. Remember what the man had said at the station. Top of the hill. That’s what he said, in Russian. Or had he actually been speaking Georgian? Or Abkhazian? Who knew?

  Julia marched on, looking left and right as she did: wary, alone, conspicuous.

  The shame of the place, Sukhumi, was that it must once have been pretty: a crude, demotic but nonetheless charming spa resort, a place celebrated in those idealistic Communist summers of fifty years ago, the summers depicted in faded photos of the Khrushchev era, communism under the palm trees, where pasty white Russian workers with their fat, happy wives in big black bathing suits had their four weeks’ vacation in the sunny sanatoria of the Black Sea coast, in Yalta and Sochi—and Sukhumi.

  Now only the palm trees remained, trees diseased and old, trees dusty and sad, trees shredded by bullets, or trees just dying a slow death in front of a closed Constructivist cinema. Ice-cream stands were shut for the winter. The cold of evening approached.

  Her route was taking her straight uphill now, as she collected stares from Slavically pale shoppers and darker Muslim and Georgian faces. She paused on a cracked street corner. A noisome smell was emanating from somewhere. The smell of a badly run zoo?

  Her instincts were confirmed. A few yards later she was confronted by a chain-link fence, ripped uselessly in places, and a sign high up on it that said, in several scripts and languages, one of them English: Institute for Experimental Primate Pathology and Therapy.

  The gate was open. She went in. Lab workers in dirty white coats passed her as she entered; the staff were leaving the compound, going home for the night, and they gave the better-dressed Western woman a few suspicious glances, and then just apathetic glances.

  Julia was alone.

  The compound was huge: a large, lush, drizzly, and litter-strewn garden full of dusty cypress trees and rusty metal cages where apes and monkeys sat balding and fidgeting; some of the condemned and neglected creatures had numbers tattooed on their pale shaven chests; little monkeys, with the saddest eyes, stared up at the curious stranger, like neglected children discovered in a terrible orphanage.

  Julia remembered the feeling she got when she descended the steel ladder into the Cavern of the Swelling, in the Cham des Bondons. This was similar: a descent, physical, temporal, and moral, into one of the world’s darker places. And yet a descent she wanted to make. To find out the truth you had to go into the caves.

  She passed more cages and enclosures. One contained a pair of forlorn gibbons, another seemed empty—but then she saw, squatting behind a cardboard box, an orangutan, apparently sobbing. A mangy gorilla was hunched in a corner of another cage, next to a pair of wilted chimpanzees, quite inert with unhappiness, smeared with their own filth.

  A much smaller cage between these larger enclosures imprisoned a delicate little monkey, a rhesus, maybe. It was screaming and gabbling, running frenziedly from side to side, touching one row of bars then shrieking and running to the other side to touch the bars there, and shrieking again, like it was being electrocuted every time it touched the bars. Half its head had been shaved. It was surrounded by orange peel and scattered grain, and green-yellow pools of urine.

  “Jesus,” she said to herself, almost brought to tears. “Jesus Jesus Jesus.”

  This place was disgusting. Why couldn’t they just keep the animals clean, or let them go?

  For the money? Maybe. She had read in her research that the impoverished Abkhazians made money from it as a zoo in the summer: people came to laugh at the shit-flinging gibbons.

  The main door loomed. Julia reminded herself of her persona, constructed for the e-mail exchange with Sergei Yakulovich. She was a top archaeologist, a friend of Ghislaine. She was writing a paper about his career and achievements, following his tragic end. She would be very honored to meet an old colleague of Ghislaine, like the great Yakulovich.

  The e-mails had worked to a point, although she had elicited no direct information from the man. But he had eventually, after some persuasion, agreed to a meeting. If you really wish to know more about my work, come and see me. I am a busy man.
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  And so here she was, on the shores of the Black Sea, in a primate lab, in Abkhazia.

  A sign seemed to indicate the main entrance. She pressed a big Bakelite bell button and the door opened. A brassy blond secretary with blotchy skin and bad teeth sat in the reception area packing her handbag for the end of the working day; with a friendly shrug at Julia’s pitiful attempt at speaking phrasebook Russian, she showed Julia directly into the director’s office, a large room with peeling paintwork, a grand wooden desk, two big clumsy telephones, and faded photos and maps on the wall.

  The man himself was seated at the desk. Sergei Yakulovich. Onetime editor of the Journal of French Anthropogenesis. The director of the Institute for Experimental Primate Pathology.

  Yakulovich stood as she entered; he smiled shyly and tragically, shook her hand, and swapped pleasantries. His English was good, and he was proud of it. He spoke even better French and German, apparently, as he informed her. He invited her to sit, as he returned to his seat behind his desk. Julia gazed. With his grubby brown suit and wistful face, he looked like a pensionable version of one of his own monkeys.

  Julia attempted a question, but she was interrupted by the blond woman with the snaggly teeth—she was carrying a tray with two tulip-shaped glasses of black tea and a saucer of scarlet raspberry jam. The glasses tinkled as they were set down. Sergei Yakulovich tapped his watch and smiled at the receptionist, indicating she could go home at last.

  She put on her plastic coat and said goodbye.

  They were alone in the primate laboratory. A cold, rainy evening was falling outside.

  “So. Shall we begin?” The director was stirring jam into his tea as he spoke. “I am honored by the presence of an esteemed scientist from America. The reason I would not reply to your e-mails in more detail is that we get many mischievous requests. Journalists and so forth. I am not a suspicious man but our science here has been caricatured once too often. But you have the manners to come and visit us. So I shall respond.” A tiny, telling pause. “As you can perhaps surmise…” His sad old eyes looked briefly at the peeling paint of the room, then through a window, at the Abkhazian dusk. “We are not the place we were. We are not blessed with so many serious scientific visitors these days. Just sightseers, and those who willfully misrepresent our work. Work we are very proud of.” He smiled, suddenly, a pip of raspberry jam lodged between his yellow front teeth. “Now. You are writing a paper on my friend Ghislaine Quoinelles? That is correct? Poor Ghislaine. A good colleague. Killed by some … madman, I understand? I try to follow the news here, but it is difficult, we have so much to do … in our remote little fortress of science!”

  “Yes…” said Julia, and she paused at the memory of her friends. “So, you see … I’m writing about Ghislaine. As I mentioned in the e-mails, I am interested in many aspects of his life. How his research intersected with your work, what made you colleagues. Maybe you could tell us what you have been doing here.”

  Another monologue ensued. The director had a kind of spiel.

  “This was the very first primate testing center in the world. We were once the envy of the West. A thousand scientists worked here at our peak. As you can attest, our behavioral and medical experiments put us at the very forefront of the most groundbreaking medical discoveries. We even trained monkeys for space travel. Look.”

  The bald director pointed at one black-and-white photo pinned to the wall behind him. The picture showed a pair of fragile, gawky, long-limbed, nervous monkeys strapped into two airline seats, with big grim metal bars to keep them in place. The monkeys wore white headbands giving their names in Cyrillic.

  “Yerosha and Dryoma. Early pioneers of Soviet space flight. Yuri Gagarin’s direct predecessors!”

  His laughter was sad.

  “These were the glory days. But then we had … perestroika, and then the Georgian-Abkhazian war. The soldiers stole primates as mascots, some were killed in crossfire. They nearly destroyed us.” He exhaled wistfully. “Most of our scientists fled to set up a new center in Adler, in Russia. Many monkeys were killed. But I prefer to think of happier times.”

  The director waffled on about the palmy days of the institute, when Ho Chi Minh and Brezhnev and Marshal Zhukov and Madame Mao were regular guests, when the scientists would fly to Texas—in America!—to give lectures to the backward Westerners. Julia found her senses wandering. The smell of monkey shit was detectable even inside the office. The sound of screaming, of that mad little monkey in the farthest cage, was mercifully muffled.

  She nudged the dialogue along. “Tell me about the crossbreeding experiments?”

  Sergei paused for a moment and stared straight into her eyes, quite disconcertingly; then he continued his apparently well-worn speech.

  “Da. In the 1920s there was a plan to create a man-ape hybrid. Supposedly this would become a Soviet superman. The news said this … in their sensational way—but the truth is Stalin and the politburo just wanted a very reliable worker, with great strength and a less inquiring and distracting intellect, perhaps also a soldier who would be, as it were, devoid of conscience, therefore a better and harder soldier, therefore able to replace real men on the battlefield. Thus we could have saved human lives! The idea was humane.”

  “I see.”

  “It was a long time ago, Julia Kerrigan. The tests were conducted, originally, by Ilya Ivanov. You may know of him, eminent Russian biologist. Around 1900 he had perfected the technique of artificially inseminating mares; soon after this he produced crossbreeds between several different species. This is a picture of him here.”

  Julia stared at the wall: at another black-and-white photo. An old man with a white beard and a white mustache—like Sigmund Freud in his later years—smiled softly back. He had a wise and paternal face.

  “Professor Ivanov commenced these experiments in Africa, then in association with Albert Quoinelles, Ghislaine’s grandfather, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris…. Then the experiments were moved here to Sukhumi.”

  “How successful were they?”

  Yakulovich shrugged and sipped the last of his tea. “He took semen from human males, siphoned or collected from masturbation, and then he injected it into female chimpanzees, although nothing came of that.”

  Julia repressed a shudder.

  “And what then?”

  Yakulovich shook his head. A wary expression crossed his face. “This is a very detailed analysis of my work? I thought we were here to discuss Ghislaine?”

  “Er, yes, of course.” Julia was flustered. “I was coming to that.”

  The director gazed at her and said, “It is rather curious, yes? Just a year ago another friend of Ghislaine came to visit me.”

  “Who?”

  “Marcel Barnier.” His eyes had a certain sly brightness. “Yes, yes, another great French expert on crossbreeding, and a good friend of Ghislaine Quoinelles! Look, I have Barnier’s card here, he came to visit us just a year ago, to talk. I knew of him through Ghislaine’s work in China and Cambodia.”

  The director was proudly flourishing Barnier’s card. Julia took the card from his hand. She examined it. Her soul was sickening but she was determined to remain calm.

  “Do you mind if I write these details down, Mr. Yakulovich? Barnier would be an interesting person for me to talk to. About Ghislaine.”

  “By all means. Barnier is … a very clever man, a very clever man, a veteran like me, determined that the best of Communist science should not be discarded by history along with the less good aspects.”

  “OK.” Julia felt the time had come. “About Ghislaine. There’s one particular question I thought you might be able to help with. I mentioned it in the e-mails, but as you say, you needed to meet me to talk.”

  “And here we are. Please ask.”

  “The Journal of French Anthropogenesis. Do you remember it?”

  The director frowned, and shrugged, and said, “Not so much. A little. It was … just a … small journal, in the late 1960s, sympa
thetic to our Marxist-Leninist principles.”

  “But you were the editor!”

  “Was I indeed? Aha.” Yakulovich’s smile was still slightly stained with jam. “Yes, I believe I was the token Soviet! Da! I did no real work for them, it was an honorary position. I may have read some of the contributions.”

  She felt her hopes revive. Tentatively.

  “So you might recall a particular essay—something you might have selected, got peer reviewed—by Ghislaine Quoinelles, when he was very young. In the early 1970s. An essay on guilt and conscience?”

  A pause. A heartbeat of a pause.

  “Well now.” Yakulovich sighed. “I don’t know. We would have welcomed an essay from Ghislaine Quoinelles, of course, simply because of his name. His patronym? His surname, I mean.”

  “His grandfather?”

  “Yes, yes! Ghislaine was the grandson of Albert Quoinelles, who was a true comrade in arms! A Communist, and also a great scientist, a specialist in our field. So yes, if Ghislaine Quoinelles sent us an essay, maybe we would have read it with interest. This is true.” He hesitated, delicately. “But this magazine published many essays, I believe. And … I am trying hard, but I am afraid I cannot recall this particular essay.”

  “But—”

  “Please! Do not chastise me! I can barely remember my wedding anniversary, as my wife will confirm, let alone an essay written forty years ago. Hah. My friendship with Ghislaine developed later, in the later 1970s.” The smile was now entirely mirthless. “So is that it? Is that all you came to ask? It is perhaps a long journey for so few questions.”

  Julia sensed she was failing. And yet she also sensed, paradoxically, that she was clueing into something. Ghislaine’s essay was, for now, a cul de sac. But what was this about Barnier? Marcel Barnier was the man in the photo. Why had he been here?