White Eye

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  He gave a sigh of pleasure. Now that he had got into the habit of clandestine activities, he found he was never at a loss for inventive solutions, and it struck him as tragic that for so many years he had believed himself to be a second-rater, one of those men who started with great promise—he was considered a budding genius at grammar school—but never lived up to early expectations. He had been in the wrong society, he knew. That English lower-middle-class restraint had been a straitjacket not only on his emotions but on his intellect and ambition. “Nothing in excess” was the dreary motto of his dreary childhood, crowded with a nag of women: widowed mother, pious maiden aunts. A tyrant invented the taboo on excess. Excess was all! From excess came vision. From excess he had learned to soar! Up there, he could look down upon the battered planet and understand it. But that sort of vision one could reach only by a passage through the extreme.

  Outside, night had fallen. The traffic was lighter than usual, and after another few minutes the car turned off the northern highway onto the leafy country road that led to the Siam breeding station. They swept under the arch of the gate, with its logo of an orchid, passed the animal houses, and drew up on the gravel outside the reception building. Behind it there was an artificial island made by a moat and an electric fence around an area of jungle. The chauffeur had telephoned from the car to announce Parker’s imminent arrival, and Grossmann was waiting to greet him. He advanced, arms outstretched, as Parker unfolded and straightened himself from the back of the car.

  Otto Grossmann was a glossy, physically compact man who always looked triumphant. He was freshly showered and cologned. His cream safari suit was made from silk.

  “John! Good to see you!” he cried. He was almost a head shorter than his visitor. Taking Parker by the arm, he led him inside. “We’ve got some other people here this evening.” He was pushing his guest toward a bedroom. “I need you to explain White Eye to them.”

  Parker stopped so abruptly, Grossmann collided with him.

  “To explain the work you are doing on a vaccine against it,” Grossmann said. “And the other business.”

  Parker said, “Are they scientists?”

  Grossmann was never quite sure when Parker was making a joke or when he was just being naive. “Scientists?” He laughed. “They’re financiers.”

  They entered a bedroom full of bright-colored cotton cushions. Grossmann closed the door and jerked Parker’s arm, making him bend down to hear. “These men want to put up capital for my new biotech company. Trouble is they don’t understand biotechnology. They’ve read about genetic engineering, but they don’t know what it is or how it’s done. They don’t know what gene shears are. They don’t know we can inhibit a bit here and add a bit there and … voilà! You see the problem I have? They’ll lose face if they have to ask me questions. But if you tell them …”

  “What will I tell them?” Parker said.

  “You say what you have said to me many times: that with a vaccine against White Eye, Siam Enterprises is poised to become the most successful breeding house in the world. You won’t, of course, tell them that White Eye is recombinant. How did you describe it to me that day? ‘A Legionella bacterium to which genetic material from gonorrhea has been added so that it attacks the mucous membranes. In addition it has the deregulated gene for botulism poison. These additions make it highly infectious plus extremely virulent.’ One of the most dangerous organisms you’d ever seen, you said.” Grossmann chuckled at the memory of how excited Parker was with his discovery. “I suppose you could tell them how dangerous it is,” he added.

  A thin smile moved across Parker’s mouth. “Should I point out that Siam’s success will depend upon the primates in other breeding houses—unvaccinated, poor things—somehow contracting White Eye?”

  “John! John! Your English sense of humor!” Grossmann’s drum-tight belly strained the buttons of his fine silk jacket. When his laughter was over, he said, “These are grownups. They don’t need you to tell them how to do pee-pee.”

  Parker was pleased to find himself outraged by the idea of industrial sabotage. If my sense of wrongdoing were dead, how would I be so excited by what I am involved in now? he asked himself. In order to break the moral code, one had first to know it, and without that scandalized Methodist inside his brain, Parker knew he would not have half the thrill he did in recognizing that Otto Grossmann was an evil man.

  His guests that night were a Thai general, a casino operator from Hong Kong, a man from Indonesia whom Grossmann introduced as being “in cement,” and two men from Bangkok, whose interests were left unspecified. One of them, Parker noticed, was wearing a gun. He took his cue. English wit and English high-mindedness inspired him. That great scientific demand Simplify! was at his beck and call. By the time the mangoes and sticky rice were served, the men around the table felt they could stride into a laboratory as confidently as they would stride into a boardroom or a bordello.

  Next morning, Parker woke to soft, tropical air and cries of the jungle coming from beyond the bamboo blind on his window. Chimpanzees on the artificial island were hooting and barking in trees just ten meters behind the guesthouse. He got up and looked out onto a lawn bordered by a vermilion cascade of bougainvillea. Smaller primates, lanky-armed monkeys and gibbons, were loping on the buffalo grass. The noise level was appalling, for added to the boisterousness of the apes, at first light thousands of invisible creatures applauded the appearance of the sun with shrill, buzzing, whirring, screeching voices. The trees drummed and roared as if a Lilliputian football crowd were hidden in the branches.

  Parker whistled a few bars of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as he went outside.

  All the keepers wore khaki uniforms nipped in at the ankles with tightly laced army boots, to protect them against leeches. The head keeper, a man in his sixties who used to train elephants, had the logo of a white orchid embroidered on his shirt. He listened impassively to Parker’s instructions as to the type of chimp required: a sexually intact male with a high tolerance for close confinement, familiar with and friendly toward Lucy, the female who had already been in U-1 for three months. Lucy was rather passive, but with estrogen injections she would become more assertive, so it would be helpful if her new boyfriend was a former sex partner, even better if he had already sired offspring on her. Sometimes, in confinement, the males wimped out.

  The head keeper returned with two chimps on leashes and went off to fetch one more from the island. The farm had two main categories of primates: caged and free, but even the caged chimps were allowed to spend some months each year roaming wild on the island. All three animals the keeper brought to Parker had spent their first years of life in cages and remained both tame and hardy for close confinement. They squatted on the floor beside their tethers and observed Parker like little old men, but after a few moments their concentration lapsed and they fell to fingering their hair and staring into space. Parker tested their lungs, blood pressure, hearing, sight, muscle reflexes, ejaculatory power, and playfulness. Japanese researchers had developed a good standard test for playfulness in chimps. Most laboratories preferred playful animals, for they recovered more quickly after a general anesthetic and their morale when in close captivity, which was how his animal would be living for the rest of its life, remained higher than in specimens of more phlegmatic temperament.

  By late morning Parker had found the chimp he liked, an exuberant young adult called Sailor, Lucy’s first cousin, who, according to the head keeper, had copulated with her at every opportunity when she still lived at the farm. Sailor had a long, droll face and a lively eye. He sat quietly, his gaze reaching out toward Parker as if he were yearning for something he couldn’t touch. He made soft, friendly noises while he was being examined, yelling only once. Parker suspected that as he got older, Sailor would become unmanageable unless castrated, but if things went well he would be sacrificed before then. “Knock his teeth out, will you?” he said. The keeper gave a slight bow.

  “And fi
x his noise box too.”

  The buildings at the breeding farm were long and low, like those at the Research, but only half were fully enclosed and air-conditioned. These were either for temperate-climate animals or they were for the acclimatization of tropical species that would be living in air-conditioned labs. The fifty chimpanzees and ten gibbons that had died in the epidemic of 1985 had been in an acclimitization house for the night. Had they been in one of the other buildings, there would have been a worse disaster—maybe a national disaster, maybe an international disaster. Parker had long since stopped wondering about what might have been. By the time he arrived with Grossmann that dark night when he first came to the breeding farm, the building with the dead primates had already been isolated and the air-conditioning system throughout the complex shut down. In the weeks that followed, the keepers dismantled and sterilized every air-conditioner. They scalded the water tanks and rinsed them out with strong disinfectant. Parker never asked what happened to the bodies of the people who died. The apes, after he had taken tissue samples, were cooked in an industrial autoclave that Grossmann had flown in from Germany. They were buried in sealed drums.

  But these precautions were not necessary, as Parker now knew. White Eye was phenomenally virulent, but it died within hours of its host’s death. As the tissues of the infected animal became saturated with toxin from millions of rapidly reproducing bacteria, the White Eye bacteria themselves began to disintegrate in their own poisonous soup. He had watched two cigar-shaped creatures on a slide swim toward each other, hesitate, back off, and fall to pieces. There, illuminated by the light and mirrors of a microscope, he had witnessed the death of a life form more vigorous and reproductive than any other on earth. He had had to wipe the tears of a strange excitement from his eyes.

  As he left the primate house, a mud-spattered four-wheel-drive pulled up outside the reception building.

  Grossmann was waiting on the veranda to greet the visitor, his weight shifting from foot to foot until the passenger in the muddy vehicle jumped down, then he rushed to embrace him. The young man was dressed in paratrooper’s camouflage gear, and he had dark, wind-ruffled hair, like the hair on a statue. Parker could only see him from behind, but he felt intimidated. Two small, hair-covered arms encircled the man’s neck and clung with tiny pinkish hands to his thick, dark hair. The driver of the vehicle, a Thai, began unloading aluminum cases, a tripod, and other bags.

  Grossmann introduced the newcomer: “Michael Romanus—Dr. Parker.”

  He was a Latin, slightly above average height, with a bar of black brows across his forehead and a straight Mediterranean nose. “G’day,” he said. The accent was Australian.

  Parker wanted to cut and run, but before he had a chance to do more than mumble “Howdoyoudo?” a fracas broke out.

  Grossmann’s after-hours chauffeur had come slip-slopping on plastic sandals around the side of the house and looked on as the bags were being unloaded. Grossmann gestured to him to lend a hand, but when he did so, Romanus spun away from Parker and grabbed the case. “Let go of that!” he said vehemently.

  The chauffeur replied, “Fuck you,” and dropped it.

  “Hey!” Grossmann yelled. He said something in Thai, and the chauffeur sloped away, giving a toss of his shoulder-length hair. “He’s hot-tempered,” Grossmann said. Turning to Michael Romanus, he added, “You young men!”

  The photographer looked sullen and made kissing noises to the baby orangutan hanging on his neck.

  They went inside. The orangutan continued to cling to Romanus, and Grossmann tried to coax it to come to him, all the while questioning his visitor about where and how he had acquired it. Parker’s agitation was growing. He found Romanus’s presence as unsettling as Grossmann found it energizing, and was reminded of a horrible experience from his childhood, when his uncle had taken him to a stud form to watch a stallion service a mare. His uncle and the other men were excited by the gleaming, quivering stallion, the way Grossmann was now, but Parker had wanted to flee.

  He had the weird feeling that he recognized Romanus.

  Grossmann said suddenly, “John, Michael is like a son to me. Siam is financing him and another photographer to take pictures of Thailand’s national parks. It’s good for them, it’s good advertising for us, and it’s good for the country. Eh, Mike?”

  “Sure,” Romanus said, as if he couldn’t care less.

  “What’s your specialty?” Parker asked. He knew these wildlife photographers often specialized. Sometimes they had science degrees. They usually knew a good deal of zoology.

  “Mostly primates. A few birds.”

  “Birds!” Parker said with relief. “I’ve seen your picture inside the jacket of a book of bird photographs. I live near a lake where there are thousands—tens of thousands—of waterfowl. I’ve used your book to identify them.”

  “Which country?” asked Romanus.

  Parker hesitated, but Grossmann gave him an encouraging nod. “Australia. Western New South Wales.”

  “Lake Kalunga,” Romanus said. “Raoul Sabea did those shots. I’ve never been there, but I’d love to see it.”

  “You must come and stay,” Parker said. “My wife has a house close to the lake, and there’s a guest room.”

  Romanus grinned. “You’re on.”

  Chapter Five

  The southerly had died away before sunrise on Monday, leaving a chill in the air and a sky that glittered with energy. Diana was alone at the back of the police station. She gazed at the sky to try to calm herself, sensing that the detectives knew she was lying, but she couldn’t tell them about Morrie. Whatever promises they made, in the end they would pull him off the mountain—with dogs again, if necessary—and he would go completely mad. They’re suspicious of me already—and someone is sure to tell them about Carolyn and Raoul, she thought. On certain days she remembered the exact smell of Raoul’s skin, how she had sniffed him in as if he were newly mown grass. It was here, on High Street, Kalunga, a bit farther along the road, that she first saw him—a tripod on his shoulder, a metal camera bag in one hand, and a red bandanna around his forehead. She had stared at his narrow, eagle nose. “Lady, please showing me where is the bird lake,” he’d said, his face pushed into the window of her van. “Are you Raoul Sabea?” she asked in wonderment. She owned all his books of bird photographs and had even ordered from London the expensive volume on primates to which he had contributed some transparencies. Other people took pictures of birds. Raoul’s birds were gods in a raiment of bright feathers.

  For the six months he lived in her house, she convinced herself every morning that today she would discover the beautiful man who took the miraculous photographs. But every day the man was just as he was: macho, vain, selfish. And the photographs were as they were: inspired. At night they made love, yet it was more a furious disappointment they shared. In daylight she shuddered at the memory of it: not love, she thought, but something dark that hid behind love.

  Finding him in bed with Carolyn could have happened yesterday: his curved nose lifting from her belly as an eagle lifts its head from prey—and she, Diana, standing in the doorway, just back from shooting foxes, with the slide-action rifle under her arm. “Diana! Don’t!” he had whispered.

  Kalunga was laid out like the vascular system of a narrow leaf. High Street ran down the middle, with branch veins to the Kalunga River and, on the lower edge, the railway line. Beyond the railway tracks were flat paddocks where mobs of merino sheep fled at a pernickety gallop each time a train went past. High Street and the north part of town had big, untidy peppercorn trees planted for shade along streets of sober wooden houses standing in half-acre blocks. The south side, where Jason Nichols and Kerry Larnach lived, was known as the “professional” part of town. Its houses were newer, built of brick rather than weatherboard, with small, neat gardens and pavements planted with jacarandas because, the Shire Council said, they gave a “more cosmopolitan” look to the town. Kalunga’s population was 1,100. Diana parked in t
he thin shade of a jacaranda.

  Now that she was at the vet’s place, she paused and reasoned with herself about the eagle. To expect such a bird to hunt after a broken wing was like asking an athlete to win a medal at the Olympics after a broken leg. Learning to fly at all was an enormous effort for any wing-broken bird—and hunting required the most powerful and agile flight. There were two possibilities: one was to find a nature park where the eagle would be left in the open and fed—but the parks were already overloaded with injured wedgetails, she knew, and there was nowhere on the eastern side of the continent with room for another cripple. The sensible course was to ask Jason to inject the eagle with Lethobarb. I should have shot her yesterday, Diana thought.

  The veterinary clinic was in a street of large, cream-brick bungalows. It was one of twins—Jason’s residence was the other—with a novelty letter box in the shape of Donald Duck. “Protected species, isn’t it?” he said when people remarked on it. Besides his remarkable letter box, Jason had a red Porsche, in which he raced to and from Sydney on weekends. In all other respects he was neat and ordinary. When he arrived in Kalunga three years earlier, Diana had tried to recruit him to the anti-duck-shooting campaign. “I don’t think I should be political,” he said. Only this year, when he was sure that public opinion was swinging in favor of the ducks, did he agree to help: he treated injured waterfowl from dawn to midday on Saturday and Sunday in a first-aid tent; and when the circus, en route from Adelaide to Brisbane, had arrived on Saturday morning at the camping ground on the outskirts of Kalunga, Jason inspected all the animals—the thin-hipped lion, the ostrich with a grubby frill around its neck, the chimpanzees, even the dogs—and reported them as suffering from malnutrition. The television news crews who were covering the opening of the duck-shooting season and the simultaneous anti-shooting campaign ditched their assignment and instead reported on the evening news that the campaigners had not only defended ducks, they had uncovered a circus full of starving beasts.