White Eye

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  “And you put them in the garbage?” the jokey one said. “I’m going to charge you with public mischief. Do you know what it’s like, sorting through three-day-old garbage?”

  They were seated in a cream-painted room in the Kalunga police station; telephones kept ringing, and men and women in white overalls came and went.

  The serious one telephoned the Research to ask that the incinerator not be turned on, but he put down the receiver shaking his head.

  “See what you’ve done?” the smart aleck said. He found Diana very attractive. Her skin was the color of fine sand when a wave sweeps back, and her blood came and went beneath it like light playing through a cloud. Emotional, he decided, despite the drop-dead gray eyes. Her cheeks turned into a sunset when she spoke about the deceased coming to see her the week before. Was Miss Pembridge Dr. Williams’s dyke friend? he wondered. From what he had learned already, it seemed that Williams was the sort who liked it every which way, but he could not tell with this girl. She was stately and aloof and tried to give nothing away—but he knew she was lying about how she came to find the corpse. She was also stressed out: people often were after seeing a stiff. “Hey, I’m sorry. Joke? It was a joke,” he said.

  “But not funny,” Diana muttered. She felt feverish with exhaustion. After the autumnal heat of the weekend, a southerly change had come through around midnight, making her windows creak like a ship in a gale. She had been asleep only an hour when the wind woke her, and could not settle down again. She had lain awake listening to it, feeling as if the whole world rocked and she was back in that terrible autumn of 1973, when she and Carolyn became, as it were, blood sisters. She, Kerry, and Carolyn wanted to go onto the lake in the punt, while their fathers and the other men shot from the bulrushes around the foreshore. Her father had called out, “Hey, you kids! Help Carolyn load her gun.” Diana and Kerry both used twelve-gauge Winchesters, but Carolyn had a child’s gun. She sat looking bored while they were shooting. As soon as they took a break, she asked, “Would you like to see my tits, Kerry?” His blunt, freckled face turned red. “You’re a moll,” he muttered. She joined her thumb and forefinger and made quick thrusts through the circle with her middle finger. “I bet you’d like that!” She giggled. Kerry grabbed her by the throat, and she started to cry. “Stop fighting!” Diana yelled. Suddenly the guns on the foreshore were silent, and Carolyn’s screech sounded across the lake. Above, the sky was a vivid, cloudless blue, and a wedgetail eagle soared through it. The wedgie’s watching us, Diana thought.

  The beeping of the fax machine jerked her attention back to the present. A page of transmission slid out. After a few seconds the serious detective held up his hand, signaling Diana not to leave yet. Both men stood at the machine, reading and nodding. When transmission stopped, they took the fax and left the room.

  From the foyer of the police station Diana could hear the voices of people who had gathered, avid for gossip. Kalunga would talk about this for another twenty years, she knew—as the town still talked about what had happened at the lake in 1973, as if it were only last week that Doug Pembridge and Louise Williams had been murdered. The gossiping outside reminded Diana of her father’s funeral, when people who had never set eyes on him drove four hundred kilometers just to stand in the back of the church and stare. She decided to ask to leave by the rear door.

  When the detectives returned, she realized there was something in the fax that had changed their attitude toward her. The jokey one went to the kitchenette to make coffee, while the other one came and sat beside her.

  “What’s in the fax?” she asked.

  “I’d like to tell you, but I can’t,” he said. He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You would not, by any chance, have taken something from the site, would you?”

  The hairs on her T-shirt, Diana thought. Surely three hairs can’t count. “No.”

  “You’re positive about that?”

  “Yes.”

  An envelope of the photographs the security guards had taken the previous day was on the table. The detective shuffled through the eight-by-ten black-and-white prints, until he found the one he wanted. “I wonder if you would mind looking at this and explaining something to me and Goofy over there.…”

  It was a photograph of Carolyn from behind. “You said in your statement that when you saw the body the hands were tied and they resembled, you said, raptors’ feet. Would you mind, for a couple of non-ornithologists, saying a little more about raptors?”

  She almost smiled with relief. “I meant hunting birds.” She tensed her fingers into talons.

  “Is ‘raptor’ a veterinary term? Would only specialist people use that word?”

  “No.”

  He became thoughtful. “Does anyone else around here share your interest in rehabilitating these birds?”

  “Maybe Jason Nichols, the vet.”

  “He’s a local, like you?”

  She shook her head.

  When the detectives returned to the interview room, they sipped their coffee in silence for a while.

  “D’you reckon she knows a lot more?”

  “Dunno. But she’s taken something from the site. Did you watch her eyes?”

  “Yep, Lying about that too.”

  “Well, we needn’t have worried about the condom in the garbage. Poor bitch.”

  The preliminary postmortem that had come through on the fax reported that ten milliliters of seminal fluid had been found in the deceased’s vagina. DNA prints would not be ready for several days. The injuries and method of killing were something else again.

  “Bloody animals.”

  He picked up the fax and read aloud: “‘Death from myocardial infarction, caused by myocardial ischemia, caused by air embolism. Air in the cerebral and coronary vessels. An air embolism from an injection in the cubital fossa vein.…’ And she knew what was happening, because she struggled like hell to get her hands free, producing the cadaveric spasm.”

  “What do you reckon?”

  “I think we ask the vet where he was on Saturday night. Then we go through the list of everyone in New South Wales and Victoria who applied for a duck-shooting license this year, and we see if any of them are vets or have worked for vets.”

  When they arrived at Nichols’s house, Diana Pembridge’s van was parked outside. The receptionist said, “Jason’s fixing an eagle. You’ll have to wait.” They decided to check him out first and question him later. But by noon that day, the Homicide team working at the Research had discovered in Carolyn’s flat the letter that had been posted to her a week earlier. And then, in the Monday afternoon post, three more letters turned up, all threatening young women who were employed at the Research.

  “It’s what I thought when I saw the body yesterday,” Joe Miller told his daughter, Susan, on the telephone that evening. Susan was a sergeant in the Surveillance Squad of the Feds. “It had that look of an obsession. Know what I mean?”

  “Yuck.”

  “Two lasses gave notice an hour after opening their mail this afternoon,” he continued. “The director of personnel is tearing out her hair. It’s not easy to get staff to move to the bush, even during a recession.”

  He sounded animated. Normally, murder made him quiet. “What’s wrong, Dad?” she asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong, sweetheart. Girl been murdered, that’s all. Happens every day.”

  “C’mon,” she said. “You know what I mean.” The silence was so lengthy, she thought the line had been cut.

  Chapter Four

  John Parker had just checked into his hotel room when Sonja rang. His flight out of Sydney at nine o’clock that Sunday morning had landed at Bangkok airport at 3:00 P.M. local time, but he had not reached the city until almost five. By this time it was late evening in Australia.

  “What’s happened?” he asked in alarm.

  The telephone system at the Research, they suspected, recorded the number of every call, incoming and outgoing, and the time at which it was made; their arrangement
was that only in an emergency would she ring him in Thailand, when he was supposedly somewhere else. Sonja had biked to the staff canteen, where there was a pay phone, to ring John. While dialing, she considered the tone to adopt in breaking the news about Carolyn Williams: “My love, I have something horrible …” No. “Darling, do you remember Carolyn Williams from the rabbit fertility control program …” “Last night, darling, something distressing …” That was smoother. It sounded more serene. John once said, “The loveliest quality in a female is serenity.” They were in a restaurant in Sydney, where fast-talking women made calls on their mobiles. “Hens trying to be roosters,” he remarked.

  “What’s distressing?” he demanded.

  “While you were on the train to Sydney last night, Carolyn Williams, the girl from the rabbit fertility control program, was murdered.”

  He felt a bolt of adrenaline.

  “I was here on my own,” she added in a plaintive voice.

  “Good God! Who did it?”

  “They don’t know. But I’m concerned about …”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Unless they catch the person quickly, this place will be turned inside out.”

  He was silent.

  “Considering that, do you think you should go ahead with the new contract? Would it be better to wait until things settle down?” she said.

  Parker plunged his fingers into his long, thick hair. It had been chestnut-colored when he was young. Now it was streaked with gray. “Damn it! Silly bitch.”

  “John.”

  “She was a silly bitch. Wiggling her arse at everyone.”

  “I thought you liked her.”

  “I didn’t like her. I didn’t dislike her.” It never failed to irritate him that his wife judged the world and everything in it according to whether it pleased her or not. “Well—horrible news, but thanks for tracking me down and telling me,” he said. “This is bad publicity for the Research. I’ll tell the people here about it and …” He was distracted, suddenly, by the memory of Carolyn asking him one night, “Would you like to beat me?”

  “I can’t hear you!” Sonja yelled.

  “We’ll come to a decision,” he mumbled.

  After they had said goodbye, he stood at the window of his fifth-floor room, looking down into Rama IV Boulevard, feeling agitated but blank. The air outside was gray with exhaust gases from the motorcars and samlors that jammed the roadway, while along the pavements flowed a river of small, neat people. Bangkok was getting more overcrowded, like everywhere else. Except for the food and Patpong, he thought the whole place should be incinerated. “Go home!” he shouted at the people. “Home to your burrows!”

  At five-fifteen, a car arrived to take him to the Siam Enterprises estate, north of the capital, where on Monday morning he would choose a new chimpanzee.

  Siam Enterprises was the largest breeder of laboratory animals in Asia. It already dominated the fast-growing East and Southeast Asian scientific market and was moving to challenge the huge American firm Charles River with a promotional campaign on the West Coast of the United States. Siam was producing hundreds of thousands of mice, rabbits, dogs, and cats each year, and scores of modified species, but quality control was not yet as high as it should be. After a male chimpanzee arrived at the Research with his canine teeth still in, Parker had insisted on inspecting animals before they were dispatched to him—without clearance, to circumvent the nine-month quarantine period in Australia. He did not enjoy breaking the law. Nor did he enjoy paying the exorbitant sums that Kerry Larnach required to fly a chimp from Karatha to Kalunga. “But as they say in Boston, bad laws must be broken,” he liked to say. And anyway, he and his team were on the side of the chimps. The couple of dozen they had to sacrifice would help save the whole species.

  As a precaution, however, he did not reveal to people from other labs at the Research how often he went to Thailand, and he never mentioned the breeding farm.

  “If the worst comes to the worst and they discover we’re working on chimps,” he told Sonja, “your sister will do everything she can to hush it up. Not to save me. Not to save you. But because no politician can tolerate a family scandal.” Sonja’s sister, whom political cartoonists sometimes depicted as a rottweiler wearing a wig, was the minister for science, technology, and the environment.

  The managing director of Siam Enterprises had sent his own Mercedes and his after-hours chauffeur to drive Parker to the breeding farm in Saraburi that evening. The after-hours chauffeur was a different species from the day-shift driver, who twittered while he steered and embarrassed Parker with flattery and questions, even remarking on his passenger’s physical appearance. “Tall man!” he would say. “So taaall.” Parker was six feet three and carried himself high. He had remarkable cornflower-blue eyes and in youth had been considered an Apollo, but these days there was something dried out about him, an air of pessimism, as if from years of fruitless struggle. His eyes, their color fading now that he was approaching fifty, yearned out to other people, only to withdraw hurriedly when they met an answering glance.

  It amused him that these days Otto Grossmann sent him to Saraburi in the Mercedes and insisted that he stay at Siam’s expense in Bangkok in the Dusit Thani or some other opulent hotel. In earlier years, Grossmann had been happy for him to stay in the Golden Elephants Guesthouse in Banglampoo, where the tariff was twelve dollars a night, including breakfast. He could have slept on the pavement, for all Grossmann cared.

  Now there was always someone to welcome him at the airport, flowers in his room, a car at his disposal, and whatever he required in the way of physical relief. At first he regarded these luxuries with distrust. He accepted them, he told himself, so as not to offend his employer-host, and his treatment of the prostitutes Grossmann sent to his hotel—“Just a hand job, thank you”—was scrupulous. But one day a girl arrived who was so frightened, ugly, and stupid, he suddenly wanted her with a pigsty lust. It was a revelation, this predator within. A revelation. And a liberation. “My testicles seem to be connected to my frontal lobes,” he told Grossmann, who said, “Good. A man needs to relax.” In Thailand, Parker found himself distracted by thoughts he had not known it was possible for someone of his upbringing and education to have. To be a complete human, he told himself, one must be a complete animal first.

  One had to learn to think like the animals. That’s all they were—animals escaped from the prison of Nature, now turning Nature upside down. Parker had brooded long on the chaos of the world, the nightmare of history, and the looming cataclysm of ecological collapse. There was no future, he realized. Day by day his mind roamed the wasteland. By now he was working on a disease that, in twelve hours in 1985, had killed sixty apes and monkeys at Siam Enterprises. Next day, two keepers and a vet died, and in the evening, the company’s senior molecular biologist, driving back to Bangkok from Saraburi, ran his car into a klong and drowned. The deaths of neither the humans nor the primates were reported in the press, nor did news of the disaster escape into the scientific world. Had it done so, the company would have been ruined. Parker himself knew nothing of what had really happened when, late one night in 1985, he was offered, via telephone, thirty thousand dollars if he would come immediately to Thailand on a confidential basis to advise on an outbreak of influenza among laboratory apes. Grossmann said later they had chosen him because he had worked at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta before going to Australia. “We knew you were familiar with unusual bugs.” Parker was stunned. “We do our research,” Grossmann added.

  On the drive north on Sunday evening, Parker thought about Carolyn Williams and wished he had been able to ask Sonja for more details: who found the body, for example, and when? But his wife had a million antennae. Sometimes the mad idea occurred to him that she had hidden a tracking device in the heel of his shoe and could discover his whereabouts anytime she liked. He stared through the black-glass windows that made the vivid green world outside turn gray, and felt enveloped by a sense
of ease. He would no longer have to suffer Carolyn’s smirks in the canteen at lunchtime. I’ve got the last laugh, he thought—on her and all the other bitches. He gave a broad grin. I’ve got the last laugh on Grossmann too.

  He liked thinking things through in an orderly way, and he now turned his mind to the problem Sonja had raised. A murder investigation could mean police everywhere at the Research. They might want to examine his high-containment laboratory, U-1. How could Lucy, the chimp in U-1, be concealed?

  He imagined the situation, step by step. U-1 could not be entered without prior arrangement with the staff. That would give time to remove Lucy. They could anesthetize her, put her in the Land Cruiser, and drive around until the police had gone. But how to explain the large cages in the chimp room? We’ll say they’re for foxes, he decided.

  The second problem he foresaw was that the police would mount observation on people coming and going at the Research. At the front gate there were security guards. But the airstrip might be put under surveillance too. In that case the police would see Kerry flying in the new chimp. That is, they would see something being delivered at night to U-1. Kerry would have to land the chimp at the Kalunga airfield, and a couple of the boys would collect it in Sonja’s Land Cruiser. There would be no difficulty in taking it past the guards at the front gate if cardboard was stuck over the crate to make it look like boxes of wine. Even if the guards looked inside the Land Cruiser, which they never did, they would see nothing unusual. Then he remembered the stench of a chimp that has been crated up for five days, and how fearful and horror-struck they became—like humans—when they got feces on their skin. The boys will have to pull up somewhere, he thought, sluice out its crate, and shampoo it. In the forty kilometers of empty road from Kalunga to the Research there were dozens of spots where they could stop to give the animal a wash. Twenty liters of water would be plenty.