Chapter Eight
The three tickets for the Midnight Mass were increased to four to include Marta – this was accomplished on the day itself, Monday – but on the Saturday night we discussed Chaimchik’s last memo. The starting point for Ham’s own entry to the hall of fame had been, oddly enough, an early observation of Weizmann’s in the field of coal-tar chemistry.
In the far-off days when dyestuffs had been the thing, Weizmann and some assistants had systematically examined derivatives of coal tar, which later had been found to be cancer-producing. In investigating why this should be so, Ham had made his important discoveries about the nature of cancer cells. He had started with something totally different – such is the orderly march of science – while engaged on tar-sand research for an oil company.
It didn’t help much with Weizmann’s later brainstorms about petrol or Vava; but still, Ham knew the subject, and told me what he knew. He didn’t think that Cromer-le-Poyth(s), Le-Roy-Parma, or Coone Firth(s) were place names; they seemed to ring a distant bell with him, but he couldn’t think why. He also pointed out that the Bradford (which Connie and her assistants had been slaving away at) need not be Bradford, England. There were numerous Bradfords in America, the land where Weizmann’s processes had been most thoroughly exploited.
On his hosts’s bookshelves we found an atlas and gazetteer tracked down a long run of Bradfords in Arkansas, Illinois, Maine, and so on. There were ten, all told, in the U.S.A.
All this was naturally very uplifting. I made an unsteady journey back to the San Martin. Ham wasn’t very steady, either, after the evening of discussion and refreshment. Marie-Louise ran Marta home
I called Weiss next morning in Jerusalem.
It was his problem, damn it. He had been there at the Featherstone Laboratory while Vava had diverged and Chaimchik had proceeded in leisurely stages.
‘Cromer-le-what?’ he said.
‘Poyth. But I think it’s Poys.’
‘Cromer-le-Poys. It’s familiar. Well, I will make a note. They can look. Cromer-le-Poys.’
‘The next is Le-Roy-Parma.’
‘Ah, yes. That’s different. He was a chemist.’
‘Who was?’
He spelled it. It came out as Leroy Palmer. ‘An American chemist. He did various things.’
‘Did Weizmann work with him?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. No, no. Tsk!’ he said.
‘Well, why is he talking about him?’
‘Where is he talking about him?’
‘In his last memorandum.’
‘He discusses Palmer in his last memorandum? I didn’t observe it. Well, we’ll see. What else?’
Coone Firth drew a blank, and I paused before the next, wondering how to put it. ‘Could there be,’ I said, ‘any kind of process involving’ – I stumbled over ‘chutney’ and decided against it – ‘the name Greenyard?’
‘Greenyar, certainly.’
‘Eh?’
‘It’s a well-known process. What of it?’
‘How would you spell that?’ I said uncertainly.
‘How to spell it? G-r-i-g-n-a-r-d. Grignard. What is the mystery?’
‘What does it do?’ I said.
‘It’s a catalytic reaction.’
‘It is?’
‘Mr Druyanov, if you will tell me what you require – How do you come to the Grignard reaction?’ he said sharply.
‘Well.’ I was in such a spin I couldn’t recall for a moment how I had come on it. ‘It was the chutney in the margin,’ I said.
‘Chutney?’
‘There was a confusion with the name. They thought it was – Professor, did Weizmann do any work with the Grignard reaction?’
‘A great deal. I did some with him. So did Bergmann.’
‘When?’
‘When? I can’t give the exact date. Look up his published papers – from, let’s say, 1934, 1935. A great deal.’
‘Why?’
He spoke to somebody else. He said ‘Excuse me’ into the phone in between. Presently he came back very briskly. ‘Mr Druyanov, I have a tight schedule this morning. If you could give my secretary a list of your queries.’
‘I’ll ring back. I’m not sure of them myself at the moment.’
‘Very good.’ He hung up right away.
I put the phone down and looked across at Connie. I was in her room. Connie was looking back at me.
‘It isn’t chutney, it’s a reaction,’ I said.
‘I see.’
‘There are ten Bradfords in America.’
‘Well. That’s a lot, isn’t it?’
‘Leroy Palmer isn’t a place. It’s an American chemist he never worked with.’
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’ll have a cup of coffee, Connie. Have we got his list of published papers?’
‘Oh, yes, we’ve got those.’
‘Can I see the ones from 1934 onwards?’
‘Of course you can, Igor. You just sit there.’
Dan came in while I was sitting there.
‘Hello. Have you usurped me?’
‘No. I’m just sort of sitting here, Dan. I’ll go away if you like.’
‘It’s nothing, just a quick reference. Sit. What’s the matter, Igor?’
‘Well. Dan. A lot of names have suddenly flooded in on me that I’ve never heard before.’
‘Ah, footnotes. Dreadful things. They can be a real snare. The danger is not to get lost. You can spend weeks chasing a promising footnote. Is it something I would know?’
‘Oh, no,’ I said sadly. ‘Nothing to do with the triumvirate. It’s an American chemist that nobody ever heard of who was in some way involved with him.’
‘Mashed potato?’
‘I think so.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Leroy Palmer.’
‘Ah, the writer.’
‘What writer, Dan?’
‘A writer. He wrote.’
‘What?’
‘Books. A book, at least. It’s in the library below.’
‘How do you know?’
‘How do I know? I don’t know. I saw it. My eye lit on it. It’s an improbable name. Did they say, “We must call this lovely little cherub Leroy?” … I think it’s somewhere on the left,’ he said as I went down.
I pattered down the stairs, unlocked the library, moved to the left. On the left was the chemical library. There was a matched set of volumes: The American Chemical Library. Leroy Palmer. The Chromolipoids. (Cromer-le-Poyth?) I drew it out and opened it. The title page read:
The Chromolipoids
Carotinoids and Related Pigments
I skimmed quickly through the chapter headings. ‘Carotene.’ Oh, my God, it was all happening a bit fast.
I took the volume upstairs, and met Connie coming down with a cup of coffee.
‘Oh, I just took this up. I am just bringing it down. Where are you going to be?’
‘In Cromer-le-Poyth,’ I said, and showed her the volume.
We went slowly back upstairs together.
*
The shock waves rippled out from there. I had a look at his list of published papers from 1934 onward. There was suddenly, in 1935, a very large number to do with the Grignard reaction.
I had a rapid shuffle through the correspondence for the period.
Yes. It had started the year before. From the Featherstone Laboratory, September 7, 1934, to the Mallinckroot Chemical Works, St Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. He wanted at their earliest convenience 100 grams of specially purified magnesium metal for the purpose of making a Grignard reaction.
Other orders followed. I followed the other orders, and soon got lost, and recalled Dan’s warning.
Stop. Think. Define.
Up in his room, there was no doubt he’d had a big idea for solving Vava’s difficulty by means of carotene and the Grignard reaction. Carotene was evidently a basic substance and posed no problems. But what the devil was the Grignard reac
tion?
2
‘The Grignard reaction?’ Emanuel Beylis said, rather startled. He’d just returned from a lecture, to find me impatiently waiting. ‘But how have you come to this, Igor?’
Never mind how the devil I’d come to it! I wanted to say, ‘My eye lit on it.’ Or, ‘While in bed with Professor Tuomisalo, my attention was directed to …’ Far too many people were asking how I’d come on things. I didn’t know how I’d come on them. I didn’t know what they were.
‘References,’ I said briefly. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a mode of catalysis. Grignard employed magnesium.’
He did, eh?
‘What did he do with it?’ I said.
I couldn’t follow what he did with it, but he told me exactly what catalysis was.
‘If you want to transform one substance into another, you can employ a catalyst – some other substance – to help. You carry out the work in the presence of this other substance, the catalyst. The catalyst itself isn’t changed or consumed, but the other materials are.’
‘Yes. Emanuel – suppose I have this big jar of sweet-potato juice and I want to make it into really super petrol, do I just wave my magnesium catalyst over it, like Grignard?’
‘That sort of thing, yes. Of course, there’s a bit more to it. We’ll say we decide to do something with your butanol, yes? That would be one of the important products of your fermentation. Finster is getting a big reading in it, as a matter of fact. Well, you could heat butanol with critical quantities of, say, magnesium oxide, and get something else – yes, you could.’
‘What would be so critical about it?’
He laughed. ‘Well, everything. What degree of heat? How many times? What proportion of magnesium? There are hundreds of variables. That’s the trick, you see.’
‘Ah.’
‘So now you can tell me,’ he said kindly, ‘how you have come to the Grignard reaction.’
I told him about Weizmann’s papers on it, and of Leroy Palmer and carotene, which baffled him rather.
‘Palmer on carotene. Very odd.’
‘Why?’
‘Old-fashioned. The authority on carotene is Coone.’
‘Spell that,’ I said sinkingly.
‘K-u-h-n. Kuhn.’
‘You’d go to Coone Firth, would you?’ I said.
‘To Kuhn first, certainly,’ he said, looking at me rather queerly.
‘Yeth.’ Obviouth enough, without your teeth in. ‘Weizmann would have had Kuhn, would he?’
‘Without any question. We must have the stuff here somewhere. Kuhn was Willstätter’s assistant, you know. Later on he became director of the Max Planck Institute. He is the authority on carotene. He got the Nobel Prize for it.’
It was strange how everyone around Chaimchik seemed to come in for this Prize. It seemed to me I was doing quite enough to get in line myself.
Emanuel was still looking at me rather strangely. ‘I am not clear where the carotene comes in,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t make sense?’
‘Not with Weizmann’s Grignard stuff.’
‘He seemed to think it did.’
‘Well, if you can get his published papers for the period, we can look at them together, perhaps see something.’
I had the list of published papers with me, and produced them immediately. He was rather taken aback at this ready delivery. But he courteously dived in.
When he’d finished, he said, ‘Well, there is certainly a lot of Grignard. I see phthalic anhydride, ethyl … I don’t know what you expected of the carotene.’
‘It couldn’t have anything to do with it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What can he have meant?’
‘You must have misread it. Or someone did.’
‘Doesn’t it make any sense?’
‘The Grinard does. I’ve told you. It’s a catalytic process that he might easily have used to improve a fermented product. But carotene? There’s no connection.’
‘But – he goes on about it in the memorandum. He asked for this book about it. I am sure he did.’
‘Well, I don’t know what to say. Carotene is a pigment. It makes carrots the color they are.’
‘Does it make sweet potatoes the color they are?’
‘Those with orange flesh, yes. It does.’
‘Well, that’s the connection.’
He was smiling at me. ‘Igor – suppose you found in the notes of a chocolate manufacturer some mention of bootlaces. It doesn’t mean he is trying to make chocolate out of bootlaces. He is simply worried for some reason about his bootlaces. I couldn’t tell you why.’
‘Still, there could be a connection.’
‘We have no department of psychiatry.’ He was smiling. ‘All I can tell you is that Grignard and carotene definitely do not tango.’
So. A slight reversal of the situation. Grignard was all right. No nonsense out of him. But what can have gone on in the smiling land of carotene?
3
Meyer rang up. He said, ‘Okay, well, we got it.’
‘Well, that’s marvellous, Meyer. I’m terribly glad.’ I couldn’t think what he was talking about.
‘We sent a driver to the airport. It came in on the plane from Paris. Right away I took the label off. It’s in the safe. They are working with it now, in a plain test tube. What did you find out yet?’
What had I found out yet? Was it only yesterday morning we’d sat together with the geneticists while I’d looked out at the steamed-over greenhouses?
‘Not much. I am just sort of reading away, Meyer.’
‘What is this with Grignard?’
‘Now, how have you come to Grignard?’ I said, getting in the way of it.
‘I spoke with Weiss. What’s the matter there? You sound sleepy. Wake up.’ There was something rather brisk in his voice.
‘I have been working all hours. But yet I have nothing to tell you.’
‘You don’t, eh? So I’ll tell you something.’ Definitely a brisk tone. Rather a gleeful tone. ‘You know this bunch of African states that has nothing else to do but break off relations with Israel? They drop in the streets from starvation. But we are their only problem.’
‘Yes?’
‘You know we had many missions with them, teaching, helping?’
‘Yes?’
‘Many of them agricultural missions?’
‘So?’
‘What do they just love to eat out there?’
‘Oh.’
‘Aha. You woke up. If you can spare a moment in that busy life and be in the plant genetics laboratory sometime like about ten to three, you will find me there, and others there, including a young man just newly back in Israel. He has come back from Africa, Igor. They didn’t want any more relations with him. He was growing for them like fifty thousand different kinds of sweet potato to see which one they liked the best. Do you know what this nice young man just happened to find among his fifty thousand?’
‘Okay, ten to three, Meyer.’
‘Keep reading, Igor.’
*
The young man newly returned from Africa was not noticeably a son of the soil. He was a slim shy young man with slipping spectacles and a number of sores on his head. They were painted bright violet: a casualty of the bush. I wondered what they’d made of him out there. He seemed to have liked them himself, and shyly said so. He peered up to make a comment from time to time while reading from his folio of handwritten pages. They were his field records. He had some other records that had been made by others of his team, nutritional and analytical ones.
Though shy, there was not much stopping him. He just nodded at interruptions and kept going: stubborn. In his stubborn way, he seemed to have got through a mountain of work. He said his soil tests had shown the local varieties of sweet potato to be not the most suitable. He had introduced others and he had also done some large-scale seeding. (This was Meyer’s fifty thousand: he had raised fifty thousand seedlings.) He had sele
cted a few hundred with promising tubers and had sent them for analysis. From these he had reselected and cross-fertilized. He had spent years at it in the bush.
He was unhappy at having to leave, and looked forward to going back. He had brought cuttings of the most promising of his parent plants, to keep them in cultivation. Among them was one with an analysis that Vava had fantasized about while Chaimchik was having his trouble with the Humber. It wasn’t a very appetizing variety. The enormous knobbly thing apparently cracked as soon as it was dug up, and went bad: it was also very bitter and almost blood-red and strongly aperient. But it was a demon in poor soil, and this vitality promised wonders in genetic lines.
Meyer sat and smiled beatifically as the young man told of his work and of this particular beauty.
‘Very nice, Uri,’ he said at the end. ‘It’s a pleasure to listen to you.’
Uri had brought several of his cuttings and they were in shallow seed trays, labeled and waxed. They were just little slices of tuber. The particular one was like a piece of putrescent liver. A tiny waxy pimple, like a wart, glistened on it: the growing point. I looked at the wart. Given the laws of genetics, and also the facts of life, it did not seem strange that the fate of continents might be decided by what could come out of this wart.
Meyer was looking at it, too. His face was wreathed in the kind of smile associated with the season and its patron saint.
‘It makes you feel good just to look at that cute little thing,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t it?’
*
Sunday, December 23rd, that was.
I was going to be up half the following night in Bethlehem, so I went to bed early. There were two phone calls first. One was from Meyer, still full of good cheer.’ Is that baby going to change a few things out here!’ he said gleefully.
I hadn’t told him of the carotene complications yet, and he didn’t seem to have got the message from his other sources. There was no point in alloying such pure and quite delightful pleasure.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Listen, I was just talking with New York.’
‘I thought it was to be kept confidential.’
‘Not about this, for God’s sake. God forbid!’ he said, shocked. Of course confidential. It was other matters. When are you going back?’
The Sun Chemist Page 13