I did.
CHAPTER 11
Dr. Drysdale resembled her picture on the web, an unadorned woman, fiftyish, a gray ponytail, no makeup, anonymous, loose-fitting clothes. In person she reminded me of a rabbit. She had puffy cheeks, a reddish nose (that I kept willing to twitch), small eyes with a touch of pink in them and an overall startled flush, a look that belied her crow’s feet. Above that, an overarching intellectual confidence, ready for anything, except maybe people. She was sitting with her bowl-shaped mug of frothy coffee when I arrived in the early afternoon. The line was long, so her coffee would have to rent this space for both of us. I joined her at a chipped table for two. The hard chairs threw us at each other in a way that shut out the outside world.
The Internet told me she was pure Oxford, starting there, obtaining her MSc in molecular biology. Her PhD thesis, still at Oxford, was on somatosensory belief systems. She did a two-year postdoc at Oxford, then another one at New York University, researching potassium channels and ion transmission. She accepted a position back at Oxford, after which she moved to University College London in 1989 as a Professor in Psychopharmacology before going back to Oxford in 1998 to join the Department for Molecular Biology.
We got the preliminaries over with. I leaned heavily on my “friendship” with Dr. Lifkin. My cover was that I was writing an article, freelance, on drugs and their dangers. From there I would go into a new trend: deaths from a combination of cocaine and methamphetamines that were popping up in London. Depending on how that went I would go further to a suicide around that combination.
“Somatosensory belief systems?” I decided to hit the ground running by warming the good doctor up on her subject.
She gave a light, where-do-I begin look. “We have more than five senses. Somatosensory includes the traditional one, touch, but extends to a sense of our body, what’s happening internally, a spatial awareness of where one’s arm is in relation to one’s body, body temperature. Many things. Brain damage, either stroke or trauma, can cause severe changes in such systems. For example, sometimes a stroke victim doesn’t understand that the arm lying next to him is his. He keeps trying to rid himself of it. One doesn’t realize how exactly we are aware of, in this case, one’s arm. Where it is, how it’s moving. In some undefined way this awareness reinforces our belief that, because I know all about it yes, this arm must be part of me. As is often the case with neurology, we learn more about how the brain works by what happens when it doesn’t work in the prescribed manner. This can also happen with drugs; not just hallucinogens, but treatments such as L-dopa. So how pervasive is this belief system? If it changes, what is the effect on the psychological whole?”
“An interesting phrase, ‘belief system’.”
“There is a certain sense of irony. Perhaps it emphasizes that there is more than pure science at work here. One finds this when one deals with stroke victims.”
“Irony.” There was a connection there. I couldn’t make it. A brief surfacing where the conversation needed a new direction.
“You’re thinking that there’s no place for that in a scientific paper? Well, that is true, of course. Okay for titles, I think.”
Finally, I had it. The IBA Alliance. My web trawling showed that Catherine Drysdale was a founding member. The I Believe in Atheism Alliance. I mentioned it. She considered this, or pretended to.
“Yes, more irony I suppose. You’re Christian, I take it?”
“Only when I need something.” When she didn’t pick up on that I continued, “Add to that some wishful thinking.”
“What is it that you wish for?”
“Certain folks I was close to who have died…I’d like to think of them rolling on into the night, into the Great Out There. It may not be all that scientific—”
“Death…” She went quiet, swallowed. “Can we get to what you’re here for?”
“You’ve already got it. Death.” Some raw instinct working here.
She looked into the table for a long moment. “You’ll have to excuse me; a good friend of mine died a few weeks ago.”
“I’m sorry.” I gave that comment some space. “I’m the same. A friend of mine. It doesn’t make any sense. Cocaine with a trace of meth.”
“What!?” My comment brought her up out of her chair. I watched her sit down again, resignedly. I kept quiet.
Dr. Drysdale took a sip of her coffee, off somewhere else, more contemplative than upset. I’d hit a nerve. Then I realized Francine was the same age and from the same university as my jumpy interlocutor. An instinct told me to take a chance. “You were at college together?” I paused then added, “You and Francine McLain?”
“Francine and I have known each other for, let’s see, thirty-six years?” Her look said “longer than you’ve been around.”
“Her suicide, it must be in the combination. One drug reinforces the other?”
“There are many possibilities…”
“What about generally, cocaine with meth. How dangerous is that? Is there a dose that makes it more certain?”
“You can overdose fatally on just about any single drug, let alone two.”
“But the autopsy…” A bluff; I knew nothing about Francine’s autopsy. I assumed, though, that Francine’s would be similar to Kirk’s.
“Yes, the dosages were light.”
“So what happens in an overdose, you know, chemically?”
“You would need to understand the brain-blood barrier; the chemical-electro criteria for normal access.” She sounded tired.
Well, let her rest for a moment. I surfaced to our surroundings. I could definitely do with some coffee. The line was even longer. Hovering students looked significantly at the lone empty cup on our table.
“Did you know Francine to take drugs?”
“Oh, not really,” she answered in that annoying equivocal British way. I waited her out.
“A group of us met about once a month, sometimes more often—dinner at various flats and houses. In London. A gathering of Oxbridge professionals; doctors, lawyers, city people, a few free spirits. BBC, theatre, what have you. Well, how shall I say, we had our bohemian element. I daresay every party I’ve ever been to has that Other Room. Francine may have gone to it a few times. I’m not all that certain. What I can say is that she was not a regular.”
Our conversation fell away again. For Drysdale, maybe parties were something from her distant past. Me, I knew all about that other room.
Drysdale confirmed that Francine had been in government when the dinner parties started, but was reluctant to talk about it. “She had studied Russian, had lived in Moscow for five years. She made no effort to deny any of this. She said Foreign Office. We all knew she was in Intelligence. She left that in the early nineties as her books became best sellers and she was increasingly sought out for comments, TV panels, and the like. Francine McLain the default Russian expert. Frankly, she lost her way a bit. Francine was an odd duck. She needed men, ideally lots of them, if only professionally.”
I tried to draw her out on her last comment.
“Oh, I don’t know. This is how I remember it, but…I just think she needed that anchor of a steady job, constant purpose and connection. Not alone in her study all the time.”
The rhythm of our short conversation hadn’t wound down to a denouement. This coffee place was humming, a symphony of tapped laptops, fingered cell phones, even a few conversations. She asked me how a general article on drug trends connected me to Francine. I explained I was a neighbor of Francine’s publisher, leaving any meeting between us implied.
Now to the nub. “So, cocaine and meth? How do you do light doses yet write a suicide note over it?”
Dr. Drysdale gave me a tight, weary smile, then shook her head as if trying to ward off the tired fact of her friend’s death. She stood up. “I’m sorry, it’s too soon. Sorry.” She bumped her chair, nearly knocking it over, in her rush to get out of our cramped corner.
I walked back to the train station in a heavy rain, my right hand frozen around the umbrella handle. The wind was gusting, so umbrella direction was crucial. I dropped in at the Old Bookbinders Ale House to warm up. In England you can almost always outwait heavy rain. I wrote up some notes over a pint of ale, emerged into a brisk drizzle. I tried to talk myself into playing tourist. My heart wasn’t in it. I walked briskly, happy to get out of there; suspecting that “there” would be following me back to London.
CHAPTER 12
I had been texting Sula for several days. She didn’t answer. I tried phoning, but was dumped straight into voicemail. Maybe plain dumped. A strange mix of anger and attraction pulsed in me. Anger was gaining the upper hand. It had been hard work, holding back yet going forward with her. All for this rash unfairness. No chance to explain; no chance to learn of my crimes. Damn it, this woman could enrage my heart in such a vital, fuming way. A hundred times I tried to work up enough conviction to say, “Fuck it, I’m outta here,” yet always that siren call swept me towards those rocks.
I thought about sending her a text message. “At least say good-bye in person” was my provisional one. With Sula, though, it wouldn’t work like that. I would have to go to her.
Just before I left for Imperial College I got a call from Lucian Gee. His contact in MI5 had been working on my putative spy. There was one name that fit, Constantine Lyubanov. He was one of the best operatives they had ever seen, so good, in fact, that it was possible he was still in England and they had simply lost track of him. He was no longer a spy in the same way as Russia was no longer Soviet.
Gee gave me a quick bio. Lyubanov came to London as military attaché, aka spy, in 1985. He stayed on after the Soviet Union collapsed, probably meaning he had been a double agent. To support himself, he started a business that laundered money for certain unsavory Ukrainians with connections in drugs and sex trafficking. He was arrested and convicted of keeping false accounts, tax evasion, and most seriously, drug dealing. There were rumors he had been set up on the latter charge. He skipped bail, but by a remarkable coincidence was involved in a traffic accident in Brussels serious enough that he was apprehended and extradited back to London. He spent six years in Wormwood Scrubs before being released in August 2001. He had not been in contact with his parole officer since early September, and was now presumed to have left the United Kingdom.
I wrote down the details; they felt right, something about the dates. Hardcastle had retired in September 1995, so would have been in the high echelons of MI6 (just) during the year in which Lyubanov was set up, then remarkably apprehended. The “after the summer” Moira kept talking about coincided with Lyubanov’s release. If Lyubanov was troubling Claudia by September of 2001, so quickly after he was released, then maybe he was troubling her in 1995. Maybe Francine got involved then, eventually going to her old boss for help.
I went back to the Physics Department at Imperial College to look for Sula. I walked down the now familiar hallway with its worn tiles and narrow, hemmed-in light. Was that the door she was sitting in front of that fateful time? I found Howell’s office, tried the door. It rotated open. I pulled back and knocked.
The professor was livelier this time, his health restored. He’d had an arrhythmia that responded to a pacemaker. He was a different man than before; more energetic, forceful, confident. I could just about connect him to a brother who could win an Ava Howell. I explained about Sula, the nature of my interest.
“So, have you seen her?” I asked. He didn’t seem all that surprised about my romantic aspirations with his pet pre-postdoc.
“I received a note from her. It said she’s in Greece. It didn’t go into the circumstances.”
“What, some personal emergency?”
He didn’t know, or so his shrug said.
Flying to Athens, demanding to see her wasn’t going to work. If someone so unremittingly honest ignored my repeated messages, what chance did I have pounding on her door, throwing pebbles at her window or sitting in a months-long vigil under a tree before her house like some practice prophet? Yes, I could sit there day after day chanting my mantra, the one that controlled my life: no one walks out on me again.
I found a convenient pub, the Rose and Crown—the name summoned up thoughts of thorns and blood. I decided over several Kirk Howell’s, that Guinness with Jack Daniel chaser, that a frontal assault on the citadel would only announce me and my intentions. No, I needed to insinuate my way to her. I would elevate this to opera, a wild, all-on-one-throw gesture. I would hire three fat ladies to sing the chorus; I would go on one knee for the second stanza, hands out, bellowing. I would send the dagger skittering across the floor, bare my chest. The Age of Chivalry. The noble gesture.
My imagination was overheating, spilling out ever more extravagant scenes. Soon I would be parachuting into her compound wearing a Venetian mask and a harlequin costume with a lute strapped to my back. Beer can do that to you.
The next morning, however, my Noble Gesture impulse still burned with the same intensity, except overnight it had settled into something near conviction. Was I in love with the gesture, with life lived large, or was I in love with its objective? To Athens!
There is an argument that all I was after with Sula was companionship. All? That’s a lot, isn’t it? I mean, anywhere? Then again there had been intimacy: holding hands in a frosted-over park, walking near her in a gallery, like some small moon sliding in her space-time, standing at a bus stop talking about that damned cat, Schrödinger’s. It was tentative, on again, more off again; but the former, the power of those soft moments, brought me back for more. I wanted more. She had left me with nothing. Even my father had left a note.
A plan came to me fully formed, simple, elegant, extravagantly expensive. I would sell Mr. Lamzaki a ship.
I found a London ship broker. Nigel Sparshott of Markby Lyon was tall, balding, with dark, luxuriant eyebrows and an energetic stoop, as if not wanting to be so tall. I told him my plan. I would buy the right ship (I needed to ask him about financing it) and offer it at a price that was attractive, yet not low enough to be suspicious, selling it at a loss. One of my conditions would be to finalize the deal with Lamzaki himself, thus gaining entrance to his citadel.
Sparshott came up with a more realistic plan. I didn’t need to buy a ship, just subsidize the sale of an existing one. It would have to be a large one to interest Lamzaki. A large one, as in VLCC, or very large crude carrier. If the seller’s lowest price was $90 million then we would need to go to about $85-86 million to do a deal. However, a counter offer of $87.5 million could probably get us a meeting in Athens to negotiate further. He went on from there with more details, but I couldn’t take them in. A sudden surreal wash overwhelmed me. When I shook my head back to clarity I wasn’t so certain about this project. I heard myself start to prevaricate, then back away.
I needed a drink. It was midafternoon on the eastern outskirts of the City of London, its financial center. On my walk back to the tube station I looked down a short and narrow alleyway and saw three boisterous businessmen, breaths misting in the cold, walking away from a shingle announcing Cooper’s Wine Bar. I’m a sucker for hidden-away lairs so I wound up in that cellar establishment, sawdust on old stones, upended wine barrels as tables. A last few hardy souls of the lunch brigade holding forth, bottles upside down in their buckets.
I ordered a large glass of Rioja. I needed to think. I sipped, pondered, then sipped and tried not to think. Instead I tapped into this vague feeling that this whole vessel scheme was a mistake. A mistake not about risking too much money, that was obvious. Something about a wrong assumption. In my rush to Sula I was hurrying past something that I needed to slow down going by.
Over one glass of wine, the whole thing fell apart. Certain fundamentals I had paved over started looming out of the fog. Would Sula really have run away due to the bust-up of some fledgling romance? If she went home for any other reason, why wouldn’t she return my
calls? At least text? Then I remembered the professor. That was the crux, the thing that had set my doubts going. Something that hadn’t felt right, that I had looked away from. He hadn’t been surprised at my romantic interest, so he must have known about it. What else had he known?
My anger with Sula was getting in the way. I switched tracks to my case. Nothing like using death, suicide and treachery to calm me down. I had a new character, like Claudia, Francine and essentially Hardcastle, one I hadn’t met. Was Lyubanov the answer to many of these mysteries? The consummate operative, killing Claudia and faking Francine’s death. They were completely different MOs; maybe that was his plan. But if MI6 could find him once in Brussels, would he have hung around the UK for the nearly three months between the two deaths? I began to wonder whether I should go to the police with this information, but what did I have, really? They were the professionals. They have access to records like Claudia’s and Francine’s phone calls, emails, text messages. They would be several miles ahead of me.
Messages? That took me back to Sula. Her message to the professor. That was it. The way he told me Sula was in Greece. It had been worked into a construct: it was the note that said she was in Greece.
Most of the way through my Rioja, a bit light-headed for lack of food, I sent Sula a text. I know you’re still in London. I don’t know why you’re avoiding me. Tell me. Please.
As I was finishing my message, two suits came and stood next to me, politely waiting for me to finish.
“Sorry to interrupt,” the taller one said in an American accent. “We have a bet. You’re Jim Shalabon, right?”
“It’s not such a great jump from rock singer to investment banker, is it?”
“One tall leap in a single bound.” This from the other banker, slightly sloshed.
They left me alone after a few stilted exchanges about the two concerts they had been to. I took a final sip of bottled Spanish passion. I needed to connect with my inner front man. I deleted my pathetic text message.
Little God Blues Page 17