The Violet Crow

by Michael Sheldon

  Fischer nodded in acknowledgement. “I suppose Mrs. Wales must also have said something about my relationship with Quentin Richards?”

  “As a matter of fact, she did.” Bruno raised his glass, as though toasting Fischer’s mind-reading abilities.

  Fischer barely noticed. He had the bit in his teeth and was off to the races. “I met Quentin during the Vietnam War. We served together in Fort Detrick. That’s in Maryland. Nice town, Frederick. Ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “You like soft-shell crabs?”

  “Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Then you’d like Frederick. And you know what goes on at Fort Detrick?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “USAMRIID,” said Fischer, pronouncing the word as if it were deadly. “The acronym stands for U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. It is our main facility for biological and chemical weapons research. Fort Detrick has the world’s most sophisticated containment facility, which makes it the ideal spot for the U.S. military to do most of its testing.”

  “But …”

  “You were about to say that the United States gave up producing bio and chemical weapons a long time ago?”

  “Right. I thought …”

  “You thought we discontinued our offensive weapons programs in 1969? You are most definitely right about that.”

  Bruno nodded. He was annoyed at Fischer’s interruptions and his habit of putting words in his mouth. He was about to take another sip, but all of this talk about biological weapons renewed his suspicions. Didn’t the drink have a strange chalky undertaste?

  “… but we continued our defensive weapons programs,” Fischer droned on. “You see, you can’t test your defensive capabilities without having some offensive weapons to put them up against. And where were we going to get the offensive compounds needed for the tests? Buy ’em on the black market?”

  Fischer sat down again. He was pleased with his joke, and that seemed to relax him. “Things were different when Quentin and I were there in the early ’70s,” he recalled. “The Fort was transitioning out of weapons production, but that was happening at a different part of the facility. We were involved with a program that continued a line of experimentation that had been going on since World War II. You see, after Pearl Harbor, there was a great need to learn more about fighting in the tropics: What kind of rations should you send up with pilots who might get shot down over the Pacific? Was it or was it not a good idea to drink seawater if you were stuck on a raft and that was your only option? These and a thousand other things you wouldn’t normally think of.”

  Fischer retrieved the bottles. Bruno assumed he was preparing to refresh his drink.

  “A critical issue was malaria.” Fisher held up the bottle of tonic water for Bruno’s inspection. “Quinine was the most effective remedy, and the Japanese controlled access to its principal sources. Thus, the U.S. military had to conduct extensive experiments on how to protect the troops from malaria. These experiments required human subjects and, believe it or not, people actually volunteered. They allowed themselves to be bitten by malaria-carrying anopheles mosquitoes. Now that takes courage, does it not?”

  “Who were these volunteers? Did they really know what they were getting into?”

  “Yes, they knew. Some of them were conscientious objectors, wanting to prove they weren’t cowards. Others were prisoners, hoping they’d get time off for helping out. It wasn’t like what happened in the 1950s, with MK-ULTRA and the radiation experiments. In those days, they’d even experiment on each other. Turn your back and they might put a huge dose of mescaline in your drink.” Fischer winked. “By the way, you look like you need your drink freshened up.”

  Bruno shivered and tried to pull his glass away. Nevertheless, Fischer refilled it. “They would have loved to experiment on you, back in the ’50s.” Fischer chuckled. “With your psychic powers. They’d want to examine your brain to see if they could understand how it works. But, I digress. Where was I?”

  “Malaria experiments.”

  “Correct. During World War II, two medical breakthroughs enabled us to save countless lives. Penicillin and DDT. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? DDT is very effective against mosquitoes. It enabled us, first, to protect our soldiers in the tropics, and then to virtually eradicate malaria in the U.S.”

  “But it is so carcinogenic,” Bruno protested.

  Fischer shrugged. “Drinking coffee is 50 times more so. Drinking one of these per day,” he held up his gin and tonic, “carries more than 2,000 times the cancer risk of DDT. You choose your poisons. Where was I?”

  “DDT.”

  “Right. They banned it. 1972. Nixon created the EPA and what’s the first thing they do—ban DDT? Don’t get me wrong. I remember walking by Logan Pond 25 or 30 years ago and seeing soapsuds blow across the surface like tumbleweeds. You could choke from the exhaust of unleaded gas. And people would throw cigarette butts and beer cans out of their car windows and not think twice about it. Things have clearly changed for the better. But malaria still kills millions of people around the world each year—and it’s preventable. That bothers me.” Fischer looked at Bruno. “Can I get you another drink?”

  “Do you have any … bottled water?”

  “Always the quick wit.” Fischer toasted Bruno and took another drink. “I’m sorry this is taking so long, but the story won’t make sense without the background: In the ’70s, one of the larger programs at Detrick was Operation Whitecoat. They had a whole contingent of Seventh-day Adventists who agreed to be subjects in experiments for a variety of infectious diseases. I was working in a parallel program. Since I’m a Quaker, they put me in charge of an experiment using Quaker volunteers. We were targeting malaria.

  “Basically, we had to resume where they’d left off back in 1945, and that’s where I met Quentin. He was a quiet man. One of the few black Quakers, despite the Friends’ longtime opposition to slavery and their championing of civil rights. Well, we don’t sing in church, what can I say?”

  “Amen.” Bruno raised his glass, but didn’t drink.

  “Quentin was a volunteer subject in my program,” Fischer continued. “I infected him with malaria. And the treatment I administered … did not work. He developed a fairly serious case, though he did recover for the most part. He still has relapses. And he experienced a loss of hearing that may get much worse as he gets older. Unfortunately, a man he met at Detrick, who later became his close friend, Bennett DeKalb, was much more seriously affected. The disease permanently weakened his heart and lungs. His capacity for work—and other things—has been seriously limited. As you may know, Quentin employs him at the school, but doesn’t expect too much from him in the way of duties.”

  He sighed deeply. “Quentin knew the risk he was taking in volunteering for the malaria program. DeKalb did too. Neither of them ever blamed me. But I blame myself. I swore to them that I would devote my life to medical research, curing infectious diseases, as a way to discharge my debt to them.

  “Once I got out of the army, I did a post-doctorate at Stanford and that led an to opportunity to do breakthrough work in recombinant DNA at Genentech. Several jobs later and a lot of hard work, I founded my own company. We were doing monoclonal antibodies. The bottom dropped out in the early ’90s. No one saw that the big breakthroughs were just around the corner. Funding dried up. We needed a new business strategy.

  “That’s when I met Serge. He and his backers were interested in making an investment in the U.S. Their expertise was agriculture, ours was medicine; we saw that as an opportunity, not an obstacle. We went public, changed the name to NewGarden Biosciences. That got local attention. For some reason, agricultural biotechnology gets the public stirred up, but medical biotechnology does not. People at our local Friends Meeting were disturbed. They accused me of tampering with God’s creation. And they did threaten to read me out.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I increased my financial stew
ardship. Quentin was skeptical. I said, ‘I’m like the Free Quakers during the Revolutionary War. I’m a pacifist but I don’t mind fighting for a good cause.’” He sighed again and grinned weakly. He seemed pleased with himself, with his confession. “So that’s my scandalous past. Honestly, I have no idea what this Wales girl is up to. College kids think corporations, and biotechs in particular, are the devil incarnate. In fact, we’re just trying to feed more people and keep them healthy.”

  “So, according to you, there’s nothing sinister going on at NewGarden?”

  Fischer looked stunned. “You don’t believe me? I’m telling the truth. We’re a serious research facility and a business.”

  “What about Dr. Jurevicius?”

  “He’s a brilliant scientist. We’ve had a successful business collaboration for more than a decade.”

  “You two get along great, see eye-to-eye on everything.”

  Fischer frowned, thinking about the argument over the annual report. He wanted to be careful how he talked about this. “Of course we have professional disagreements. Over business strategy, for example. We compete for resources, but that’s just budgeting. Nothing relevant to your case …”

  “You want more money for malaria, he wants to focus on seeds?”

  “Yes, that’s basically it.”

  “But the deal hasn’t worked out as well as you expected?”

  Fischer again was startled. “What makes you say that?”

  “That angel you were thinking about,” said Bruno. He looked intently at Fischer, who wore a horrified expression.

  “You …?”

  —“Yes, I really do know about that.” Bruno savored the opportunity to interrupt Fischer and finish his thoughts for him. “Don’t ask me how I do it, I really can’t explain it. Anyway, I was puzzled by that angel. Just now it hit me. It’s not a Jacob’s-ladder angel, or a cute little cherub. The kind of angel you’re thinking about is the one who gives you money without taking control of the company. Angel investors. You’d like to bail out of NewGarden, get rid of those French directors, and start over—wouldn’t you?”

  Fischer recovered his composure almost instantly. “I won’t deny I was thinking that. But that’s all it was, a passing reflection. As CEO, considering different ways to increase shareholder value is my chief responsibility.”

  Bruno was amused at Fischer’s transition into business platitudes. “I guess the social part of the evening is over. My advice to you, Manny, is to relax. If I were in your shoes, I’d want to get out from under those snooty Europeans too. Get out on your own. Kick up your heels a bit. Nobody looking over your shoulder. You really should do it.”

  “I appreciate the advice,” Fischer replied, leading him to the door. “Now I have a bit of advice for you: Go see Quentin Richards. Tell him what I’ve told you and see if he corroborates my story. Maybe he knows of some other scandal I’m not aware of. But I’m not the hypocritical murdering Quaker you seem to be looking for.”

  Chapter 58

  Quentin did corroborate Fischer’s story, in a sense. The next morning, Bruno found him in the hospital, too weak to talk. He’d had a relapse of malaria.

  It was a shock to see Quentin lying there, weak and disheveled. Whenever Bruno had encountered him before, he’d been well put together in his formal black suit and hair combed neatly back. Now he looked so different. Quentin was much smaller physically than Bruno had realized. Between his wild hair and all of the tubes and electronic gizmos, Quentin had the look of a madman under intense sedation.

  It was too bad. Bruno would have loved to ask Quentin questions about Fischer. A sense of unease, if not actual suspicion, lingered after the previous night’s meeting. Fischer’s apparent nervousness, compulsive drinking, and evasiveness made Bruno wonder what he might be holding back. He seemed like a man under a great deal of pressure. No doubt he was. It was no picnic running a public company these days. But what if something else was going on? Quentin’s perspective would have been helpful. On the way out, the nurse informed him that Quentin had relapses every few years. They lasted about a month, but Quentin might be well enough to talk in a week or two.

  Back at home, Bruno delved more deeply into the Kabbalah. Leaving behind the cheerful confines of Kabbalah for the Complete Shmegegge, he had made some sense of the ancient numerology in the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation. He’d dabbled in the kaleidoscopic delights of the Zohar, a candidate for the most eccentric book ever written. Now he was trying to fathom the mysteries of the Lurianic Kabbalah, which essentially taught about the flow of energy in the cosmos prior to Genesis. He had to admit, he was most intrigued by the terminology: the Ein Sof, or infinite nothingness; the tzimtzum, a cataclysmic cosmic contraction of the infinite; and Adam Kadmon, the primordial man who appeared in the wake of tzimtzum. He wondered if the physicists knew about any of this: the great searing light that had shattered the vessels, leaving divine sparks as part of every living being. How this cataclysm had shaken the foundations of the entire universe, causing the different realms of creation to sink down one level below their proper places—like your plumber’s pants when he’s trying to figure out what’s causing the leak under your sink.

  All of this talk of 10 sefirot, four worlds, five levels of the soul, and how they interact was starting to leave him dazed. Bruno found his thoughts drifting to the long, dark tunnel under the Lenape King and how he felt when he saw the sparks of light as he approached the meeting house. He could feel the fear of the runaways and the anticipation of freedom; their tentative joy at the thought of finally being able to live with their loved ones in a place where no one could tear them apart.

  That led to ruminations on his own ancestors, wanderers in the desert, who later wept in Babylon for the destruction of the Temple and the loss of home and freedom. Exiles across the centuries. Living in ghettos with actual walls of stone, within the greater, figurative ghetto—the Pale of Settlement. No wonder so many Jews had jumped at the chance to come to America. These immigrants started fresh in the New World and could barely tell you where they had come from. Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine? Political boundaries were always shifting: You lived in your town or village with other Jews; it almost didn’t matter who was in charge.

  Bruno knew only that his great-grandparents had come from Eastern Europe. They migrated to Jewish neighborhoods in New York and Philadelphia and followed the classic occupations: butcher, tailor, silversmith, scholar.

  His grandparents were born in America and he knew them. English-speaking, with some Yiddish, they were raised within the Jewish work ethic and its corollary, the paranoiac penny-pinching that seemed justified by the Great Depression.

  His parents recoiled at the rancid breath of the shtetl, which still lingered about their elders. They fled the cities for the more gracious suburbs. High-quality education propelled them far beyond the traditional trades. They advanced to the highest rungs, buoyed along by a rising stock market and a decades-long housing boom. With the Depression and the war behind them, life was fun. And they enjoyed it. Why not? They’d paid their dues.

  Then came Joey Kaplan and his cohort. Born into affluence and freedom, they quickly grew bored. They despised the beautiful suburban towns, with their neat gardens that their parents had sought out or created. “What’s not to like?” It was as different from the ghetto or shtetl as you could get. “Shame on you. How can you be bored? Remember, you have to work hard: Nobody owes you a living.”

  Joey’s generation. They ran back to the city. Sought out the ghetto and mimicked its mores—sex, drugs, music—at the same time as they succeeded beyond their ancestors’ wildest dreams. They decried gentrification—it lacked authenticity—yet they wanted to live in style and comfort. Successful capitalists by day; cynical revolutionaries by night. Who did they think was buying the warehouse lofts and the condo conversions: Kansas farmers? Texas trailer trash? Their parents?

  It was different than assimilation because you could consciously decide whi
ch elements of a culture to adopt. Your name’s Ben Glass. You’re from Newton, Massachusetts. You work at Citibank and drive a $70,000 German import. But you decorate your loft with bamboo and lacquer and watch anime on your plasma TV: so you’re practically a Zen master.

  It was like genetically engineered culture. Start with your basic Jewish chromosome; splice in a kente cloth gene here, a chopsticks gene there. What have you got? A meshugge.

  This was Bruno’s curse. It seemed to work for most people, but he just couldn’t handle the contradictions. The splicing was a failure. The grafts didn’t take. At the same time, the culture of his grandparents—or even his parents—wasn’t really accessible to him. He couldn’t speak Yiddish or Hebrew, except for a word here or there. His version of Jewish culture was Alan Sherman parodies and, “Did you know the Three Stooges were Jewish? Yes, even Curly. And from Philadelphia, too!” Where else could that lead but to ad agencies in New York? Looked at this way, his problems as a psychic weren’t all that significant. Even without them, he wouldn’t have fit in anyway.

  Same with the Kabbalah. It was part of his culture, yet he had to approach it as an outsider. He picked up his book and continued reading where he’d left off. Apparently, God was willing to clean up most of the mess left by the broken vessels, but he required human help. As a Kabbalist, Bruno would be expected to “struggle with and overcome not only the historic exile of the Jewish people but also the mystic exile of the Shekhinah.” The Shekhinah, of course, was the Divine Presence, generally represented as a female.

  Bruno saw that he’d also be responsible for performing enough good deeds to liberate the sparks and raise the universe back to its proper level.

  He put down the book. He wouldn’t mind getting next to the Shekhinah. She sounded hot. But the rest of the job description seemed like a lot of heavy lifting and he doubted the boss would have much of a sense of humor. Maybe being a psychic detective wasn’t so bad after all.