by M. G. Harris
Jackson hungrily ate the food and began on the tequila. Marie-Carmen had advised him to drink at least six shots to prepare for the minor ordeal of the stitching. By the time Marie-Carmen returned, Jackson was feeling almost mellow.
At her behest, he stretched out on her bed, wearing only his one-sleeved shirt and boxer shorts. She began with cotton wool pads which she soaked in surgical alcohol from a fresh bottle. Meticulously, she cleaned the wound. Jackson struggled not to flinch. Then she produced a metal tool in a disposable wrapper, which she removed from its sterile environment. She held it against his thigh.
“Staples,” she said wryly, “so you don’t have to make do with my crooked sewing.”
“Great,” he murmured. “Metal spikes being fired into my skin; that’s what this whole experience was missing.”
“Quit fussing,” she whispered, “and hold still.”
With the surgical stapler, Marie-Carmen fastened the three-inch tear in his leg with a rapid succession of four painful, tattoo-like movements.
Jackson looked down at her handiwork.
“There you go.” Marie-Carmen gave a smile of relief.
“You just keep amazing me.”
She tore open another wrapper and removed a large waterproof dressing, then pressed it over the stapled wound.
They looked at each other for a moment.
“How much do I owe you for all this medical stuff?”
“Since I’m just a beginner, I won’t charge for the labor. The parts, well, that will be five hundred pesos.”
Jackson sat up, leaning back on his elbows. Only inches separated them now. Watching him, Marie-Carmen’s expression was surprisingly tender, concerned. Jackson badly wanted to kiss her.
“And how,” he asked slowly, his words charged with meaning, “Can I possibly thank you?”
Marie-Carmen exhaled. “I haven’t even begun to think about that.”
They were staring into each other’s eyes and Jackson found himself wishing that he weren’t drunk. She might be receptive, but could well be beyond making an accurate judgment.
The moment was broken as the telephone rang. Marie-Carmen answered it, clearly perturbed to be receiving a call so late. Jackson watched the tension in her shoulders as she took the call, saying almost nothing to the caller, except, “Ay por Dios, no!”
Marie-Carmen replaced the receiver, her hand shaking.
“What is it?” inquired Jackson. He’d already guessed.
Still facing away from him, Marie-Carmen spoke in a low voice. She was barely audible. “That was my brother. The police found Pedro Juan. He was in the airport. In a bathroom. His eyes were shot out of him. He was dead. My aunt and uncle are completely devastated. They’ve just found out, from Pedro Juan’s wife. My niece Gabi is still alone. My God, Jackson…” She looked up at him, accusation in her eyes.
Jackson held rigidly still, afraid to move a single muscle.
“Marie-Carmen. . . I didn’t know. Believe me! PJ went off with some man I didn’t know…I thought he was being arrested. I don’t know why this is happening, I promise you. Remember what you said: you trust me because you trust PJ.”
Marie-Carmen stared at him. Her eyes filled with tears. She moved away, wiped her cheeks with the back of one hand.
“Start talking, Jackson. I want the whole story of you and Pedro Juan. From the beginning.”
“I met PJ three years ago, at a conference in Keystone, Colorado. Do you archaeologists ever get have meetings there, in the Rockies? That’s how I found out I wanted to be a scientist. When I left high school all I wanted was to be a snowboard bum. Pretty soon I was working as an instructor in Aspen. A lot of it was teaching idiot rich kids with more money than skill. But also, I spent some time working at the Keystone Symposia. It’s a series of real high-level biology meetings, always in mountain resorts. Sometimes I’d have a few beers with the scientist types. One of those scientists helped me to get accepted into a genetics program at UCLA, which is a real good school. About four years ago I started my doctorate, at UCSF. After a year, I got enough data together to present a paper at a Keystone Meeting. And there I was, finally, doing what I’d seen those scientists do back then.”
“Which was?”
“Spend all morning talking science. All afternoon on the mountain. Then back to the hotel for three or four martinis.”
“That’s your idea of a good time?”
“Pretty close to it,” Jackson smiled.
Marie-Carmen nodded, thoughtful. “I see.”
“So what do you archaeologists like to do?” he asked. Marie-Carmen ignored the cue. “Let’s get back to you and Pedro Juan.”
“PJ was this real eminent Mexican scientist, right? I offered to give him some snowboard instruction – actually he was already quite good, so he didn’t want to join in with all the beginners. I told PJ we could go right up to the top and I’d show him how to get down the black runs.”
“You’re very good then?”
“I know a few tricks.”
“I’ll remember that, if I ever want to take lessons.”
“I’ll offer you a lifetime of free lessons, right now.” He tried to stare into her eyes but Marie-Carmen smiled and looked away. “Continue.”
“Afterwards, in the martini bar, I guess we got a little carried away. We got talking and decided that our research projects were pretty compatible, and if things went well we could earn millions if not actually win a Nobel Prize.”
“Ah, you said you don’t like money.”
“I said I don’t like the kind of people with money who go to Aspen. I have no problem with money, per se. I just don’t have any.”
“What a relief, I thought you were a socialist.”
“You’ve got something against workers having rights?”
“No, but I dated a very earnest communist once, very dreary. Always wanted to pay his respects at Trotsky’s house, in Coyoacán. It got boring.”
Marie-Carmen wore a look of casual diffidence. Combined with the traces of sadness, it was somehow irresistible. Jackson could only think of how he might impress her.
“PJ and I really clicked. I phoned my boss and he agreed that I could try some experiments with PJ’s lab.”
Scientific protocol dictated that after that, the two senior scientists had managed the collaboration. Jackson, although he’d initiated the project, was relegated to junior partner. Even so, Jackson had enjoyed a couple of trips with his boss, to PJ’s lab in Temixco, which boasted a Biotechnology Research Institute of international fame, thanks largely to its co-founder, Mexico’s most famous molecular biologist, Francisco Bolivar.
Marie-Carmen poured them both a cup of coffee. “The real hook,” explained Jackson, “was that it turned out that Pedro Juan and I were working on something incredibly similar. Even though his gene was from a variety of maize, and mine was from a fruit fly. I saw his poster, where he’d predicted the structure of the protein which his gene would produce. I’d only just sequenced my own mysterious bit of DNA. Even so, I could tell that the way Pedro Juan’s protein folded, the DNA sequence had to be really, really similar.”
“How could you tell?”
“I sort of ‘see’ protein structures in my mind. I’ve read so many DNA sequences that I tend to know what sort of amino acid sequences they code for – and since amino acids sequences make up protein structures, well, I also tend to have a knack for knowing what kind of sequences fold in which way.”
Marie-Carmen looked impressed. Jackson grinned. “It’s more like a parlor trick, or like having a photographic memory.”
“I can see that – it’s the same way with the hieroglyphs; people like me who learned to read them the hard way can still do it without computers.”
It was Jackson’s turn to look impressed. “You’re not old enough to have started reading hieroglyphs before most of the texts were computerized.”
Marie-Carmen hid a modest grin behind her cup. “I didn’t wait until I was a do
ctoral student; I’ve been reading Mayan scripts since I was a teenager.”
“Ah, a child prodigy?”
“It isn’t so unusual. There are some smart people out there. Pedro Juan really is – was – the brilliant one in the family.”
Jackson gazed at her, warmly. “I’m not so sure.”
The memory evoked in her a sudden shift in mood. Tears once more appeared in her eyes, spilled over, rolling silently down her cheeks. Marie-Carmen seemed unable to speak, for several minutes just holding her fingers to her temples as very slightly, she trembled. Jackson could say nothing, he too was moved to silence, his breath held in check. He reached out tentatively to touch her shoulder, but at the last stayed his palm just millimeters away. She seemed lost for those moments. Her lips whispered inaudibly, in her eyes he caught a glimpse of a light flickering.
Neither of them spoke for what seemed like a long time. Marie-Carmen drew heavy, ragged breaths. Jackson found his gaze drawn uncomfortably to her rising breast, the tremble in her hands and shoulders. He longed to hold her, to comfort her, but he couldn’t quite get past the suspicion that his attention might be unwelcome.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“I just suddenly thought of him, when I was a little kid. He’d won some prize at college. And my aunty bought a special cake from Sanborns. The whole family was inspired by him. Growing up it was always, ‘you can be like your cousin!’ His parents, they worshipped him. They’ll never get over this, never. And my poor niece, Gabi . . . now she’s lost her father.”
Then, almost as if emerging slowly from a dream, she looked at Jackson. She focused, as though she’d only just noticed him.
“You were telling me about how you and he started to work together.”
“It can wait. You’re tired, you’re upset.”
Marie-Carmen smiled almost grimly. “Yes I am, but I don’t want to stop. Somewhere in what you know, there’s the key to why he died.”
“OK,” Jackson continued reluctantly, “If you’re sure. So, PJ and I began to collaborate, comparing our two genes; he called his maize gene phoenix, and suggested I call mine joust.”
“Strange names.”
“They’re Atari video games from the eighties. Fruit fly geneticists are like that; once someone starts a fashion, people follow on. For example, there’s a gene called sevenless, because when it doesn’t work properly, segment number seven in the fly’s body is missing. Then some guys discovered other bits of DNA, genes with similar sequences, and called them things like son of sevenless, bride of sevenless. There’s a ‘jumping gene’ in fruit flies, called frogger. PJ and I were following that tradition.”
“These pieces of DNA, are they the reason Pedro Juan is dead and why you’re here with me after someone tried to kill you?”
Jackson was pensive. “I thought maybe bringing the samples had gotten me into trouble with customs. It’s illegal to take genetically-modified organisms across a border without declaring them.”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“PJ’s been killed and I’ve been shot at. Would the government do that, do you think?”
Marie-Carmen shrugged. “In Mexico you can never be sure who might be on the payroll of who. I agree, it seems strange. Did you have another explanation in mind?”
“There was a chance that the samples could be very valuable. PJ’s protein, for example, seemed to help his maize resist a high salt content in soil. That could be worth a lot to the biotech industry.” Jackson stopped for a minute, thinking. “But what I think they were really after, was something that PJ gave me, along with your telephone number.”
“Which was?”
“A test-tube with something inside. I have a hunch what it might be, but we need to go to a lab to check it out properly.”
“Then it can wait until tomorrow. You and I need to get to bed.”
Jackson’s eye’s widened just a fraction, he felt the rush in his heart-rate, his mouth went dry. One second later, though, it all came crashing down as Marie-Carmen declared with a note of finality. “Well come on, help me to make up the sofa bed.”
The Poborsky Lab
Early the next day, they ate breakfast in a small coffee house on La Plaza Constitución of Tlalpan – a little square which Jackson noted contentedly, had all the charm of colonial Mexico; narrow stone alleyways lined with trees, venerable old houses painted in bright ochre and blues, heavy wrought iron gratings. Gazing at the large menu of Mexican-grown coffees – Jackson tried to distract his thoughts from Marie-Carmen.
By daylight she was even more attractive – dressed in tight-fitting jeans, cowgirl boots and a tailored, white linen blouse which emphasized her incredible figure only too well. In the evening, her long brown hair had been tightly pulled back, but now she wore it loose, tumbling across her shoulders in a manner that Jackson found entirely disarming.
When Marie-Carmen turned to fetch sugar and napkins, Jackson enjoyed the momentary freedom to rest his gaze on her particularly curvy, round ass. When she turned around, Jackson realized that he’d been a little slow to move his eyes. There was distinct amusement in her expression as she approached.
Even better, he thought. She wasn’t annoyed.
“This is really great coffee,” she said with one eyebrow raised. “They roast the beans in the shop. All from Mexico. You better not let me catch you drinking at Starbucks while you’re here.”
Jackson held up a conciliatory hand. “‘Made in Mexico’. That’s my motto when I’m here.” He gazed at her with warmth. “It’s a relief to see you smile again.”
“You did such a good job with me last night,” she said, letting the full weight of her meaning sink into the conversation. Jackson did his best to keep his expression even, and they almost stared each other down in a competition of earnestness. “Well,” he murmured. “It was mutual.”
“Your leg? That was nothing. But talking to me about Pedro Juan,” Marie-Carmen continued. “Telling me about his work, your friendship. In Mexico, that’s how we mourn; we remember our dead right from the first minute. No time wasted, we get right on with honoring them.”
“I’m glad I could help.”
Marie-Carmen took a sip from her steaming coffee cup. “My brother called again. The funeral is in five days.”
Jackson considered this. “You should go. You should try, as far as possible, to do everything that you would normally do. They’ll be watching for anything out of the ordinary to do with PJ.”
“You think they’ll be watching me?”
“At this stage, why would they? But if some close cousin doesn’t turn up at the funeral, it could be just the thing to put them onto us.”
Wordlessly, they drank coffee and ate Mexican breakfast rolls smothered in fine, powdered sugar. Jackson looked around the square. It would be so easy to believe he was now safe. The tranquility of the setting, with the raised central gazebo, the little park crammed with shrubs and flowers, tall trees casting a cool shade as the morning sun began to warm the air.
How could anything bad happen to him, he wondered, in a place like this?
After breakfast, they drove directly to the campus of UNAM – the National Autonomous University of Mexico at Mexico City. It was an immense campus, with its own parks, museums, highways and even security force. Marie-Carmen navigated expertly through the confusing maze of turnings, to the Biomedical Faculty.
“OK,” she said. “Let’s hope that my friend Magda feels in the mood to let us use her lab.”
Dr. Magda Poborsky was a Mexican-born child of Polish immigrants, in manner as Mexican a woman as Marie-Carmen knew, but in physique, a statuesque blonde woman with high, Slavic cheekbones and a no-nonsense attitude.
She looked doubtfully at Jackson, clad very casually in the cheap jeans, grey T-shirt and sneakers that he’d picked up at the supermarket that morning. To Marie-Carmen, she said nothing, but her eyes said it all: Where did you pick up this gringo loser?
“I need a s
pectrophotometer, an electrophoresis gel and maybe a bit of time on a DNA sequencer,” Jackson said. He and Marie-Carmen had agreed not to discuss the project in detail; instead he was claiming to have mixed up some samples and wanted to clarify the situation before he walked into the labs at a biotech company and lost all his credibility.
Clearly, to Magda he had already lost that.
“You got it. You can use this bench; it should have all the equipment you need. I’ll book you a slot on the DNA sequencing machine in an hour’s time.” She shot a pertinent look at Marie-Carmen. “Better be thankful you got friends in the right places.”
Marie-Carmen and Magda embraced. In Spanish Marie-Carmen murmured, “Thanks, Blondie, I owe you one,” as she kissed Magda goodbye.
Marie-Carmen watched Jackson remove the test-tube from his back pocket. He placed it carefully into an orange acrylic test-tube rack and began to prepare more test-tubes, labeling them with a black marker pen.
“You think it’s DNA?” she asked.
“Pretty sure. It’s in a water-based solution: I can see that from the viscosity. It’s obviously stable at room temperature, or else PJ wouldn’t have supplied it to me that way. Other biological molecules, like protein, or RNA, don’t tend to handle that kind of abuse too well. They just fall apart. Even whole organisms, like bacteria, or fungus should be looked after a bit better; at least refrigerated. DNA, on the other hand, can be incredibly stable. That’s why you archaeologists and the paleontologists can get useful information from DNA found in mummies. So, I’m betting that it’s DNA. I’m going to take just a tiny bit of it. . . “
He dipped the tip of a small pipette into the sample, and removed an almost imperceptible amount.
“. . . and see if it absorbs light at a wavelength of two-sixty nanometers; hence the spectrophotometer. If it does, it’s probably DNA. Then I’ll run a bit out on a gel, to see how long it is.”
“How long?”
Jackson concentrated on his work.
“DNA molecules have an electrical charge, which is directly proportional to their length – how many bits of code they have. If you separate them electrically in a gel-based medium, you can compare how far they’ve travelled in that gel with some other DNA molecules.”