‘Not yet.’
‘Don’t worry. We’ll get the bastard.’ He asked me a good deal about the bastard on the way to the airport. It was the mysterious bastard from whom Ham had saved me.
London was strange and gray, too. I’d mainly dozed on the plane and hadn’t taken the meal. I felt empty as I got out of the cab in Gower Street.
My father was coughing over one of his cigarettes and he looked up in surprise as I let myself in. ‘Hello, my boy, what’s this?’ he said.
‘How are you, Father?’
‘Not so bad. I’ve been trying to phone you. You seem to have been out a lot lately.’
‘Yes. How’s Mama?’
‘She has a cold again. They started taking the windows out since the weather improved. They’ll get it right by next winter. Have some tea.’
‘Thanks.’
He went into the kitchen and attended to the tea and I went into the bedroom and attended to the wardrobe. I examined the back of it for a minute or two. There were two grooves in the dust now. Only one before. That was all that there was in the dust. Ah, well. Not a lot to show for what had gone on. It had gone on quickly. Barely twenty-four hours since I’d sat and read Verochka’s lament. Only Sunday that I’d got the Southern strawberry fluff in my lap. I remembered Ham walking back up the path before the Presidential tea party. He’d had the keys copied by then. The one to the House had been numbered and tagged, so he’d known which one to keep. He hadn’t known which of the others was my father’s, so he had sent the lot. With holidays in between, mail irregular, they couldn’t have arrived before yesterday at the earliest. Perhaps they hadn’t arrived until today.
‘Igor?’ My father had come into the bedroom. ‘What are you doing here? Are you tired?’
‘No. I only wondered if something of mine was here. It isn’t,’ I said sadly. I’d opened the wardrobe and now closed it. ‘You look tired yourself, Father. Are you getting out enough lately?’
‘I was never a fresh-air fanatic. Yes, I was out today. I gave a lecture, had lunch with the publisher afterwards. Do you know, I think I’m finished with that damned thing, my boy.’
‘Well, that’s marvelous,’ I said. ‘And did you manage to get out yesterday?’
‘Yesterday, not. I stayed in yesterday. I did the finishing. It was only a matter of looking over a few things. But it’s over now. I really think it is,’ he said with satisfaction.
This morning, then. While I’d dozed in the sky, and my father haggled with his publisher, and Ham had looked at the wall, another hand had scribed another groove in the dust. Only a few hours in it, really …
I absorbed it, during tea. It was quite an animated tea, my father unusually gay. He hadn’t haggled with the publisher. He didn’t even know the terms. Definitely an act of expiation, then.
*
It wasn’t till I let myself in at Russell Square that I realized there was nobody to tell. She was away with Willie the wine merchant. I stood with my bag and looked round the place. It had a rather forlorn and suspended look. I’d lost track of the various bodies who’d helped liven it up in the past. I’d have to get back on the track. No time like the present, in these matters. Still, I felt like a bath at present. I put my bag down and went in the bathroom and ran it. A few minutes later, I lay prone in it, hot water trickling, and thought over the situation.
I thought of the day I’d walked into this room and found Caroline where I now was, hot water also trickling. She hadn’t been able to hear me above the noise of the water. I’d been saying it was funny Hopcroft hadn’t called.
That had been – when? – the latter half of December. Only four months ago? A lot had surely been packed into four mondis. The British three-day week had come and gone (the bleeding lockout prophesied by Ettie in that bygone era?). So had a British government, and several other governments. Scene-shifting on a large scale had gone on all over the planet’s hoary old surface. I seemed to have done a bit of it myself. I felt flat as hell suddenly, and got up and poured myself a drink and took it back to the bath.
The scenery seemed to be in place now for a new kind of entertainment, an Arabian Nights one. The customers weren’t exactly lapping it up, though they’d accommodated fast enough to the topsy-turvy new logic. Yet an alternative production had been waiting – perhaps still was – in the wings: less fanciful, more humdrum, definitely still in need of a final touch to bring it to the peak of perfection. A spot of new blood among the performers couldn’t come amiss, either. Not all the old troupe, shuffling in the wings, had even known what they were performing in.
I got out of the bath and got another drink and got back in and thought over the old troupe: Chaimchik and Pickles, Vava and Olga, Kaplan and old Nancy, to name but a few, with a special guest appearance by the young man from Africa. I had another couple while thinking them over, then I pulled the plug and got out. I didn’t feel like dressing. I got into a bathrobe instead and padded down the corridor to pour another. I was putting a bit of ice in, at the fridge, when the latchkey turned, and a few seconds later Caroline was in the doorway.
She said, startled, ‘Igor?’
‘Hello.’
‘What on earth are you doing here?’
I had a distinct sense of déjà vu. Surely all this had happened before.
‘You’re supposed to be in Israel,’ she said.
Just as she said it, I realized it had happened before, but in reverse order. She had been the one getting the drink after the bath before; I had been the one appearing unexpectedly with my bag in the doorway.
‘How was the vintage?’ I said.
‘All right.’ She was staring closely at me.
‘Am I looking unusually saturnine?’
‘Unusually pissed, I’d have said.’
She was looking different herself. I tried to think whether this was because of the condition in me she had referred to or whether it was because she was looking different. She was certainly calm – unusual after jaunts with Willie. There must have been more going for him than she’d thought.
‘Is something wrong?’ she said.
‘Have a drink. Then you can stop interrogating me.’
We had the drinks in the living room.
I told her presently.
It didn’t seem to me as complicated as the carbon cycle. Perhaps my condition made it complicated. Or perhaps the meeting of minds with Willie had rendered her less quick on the uptake this time. It took her a long time to make the connection between tar sand and cancer, and cancer and my trip to the Crusader lady’s kitchen.
*
It had taken Ham a long time, too, to make all the right connections years before. He had been in charge of the tar-sand project for the oil company with which he had been a senior research chemist. There had been several proposals for the exploitation of the Athabasca sands, so all previous work on tars had been investigated. This included Weizmann’s, from the still earlier dyestuffs era, whose derivatives of coal tar had apparently merited special scrutiny.
Ham had duplicated these experiments himself, and it had been his successful isolation of cancer cells (produced in mice by some of the derivatives) that had caused him to switch disciplines, to biology, subsequently immunology. A bit later, with the aid of a research grant, he had left the oil company to embark on a purely academic career.
As Michael Sassoon had told me, his work had been plodding, and he had plodded steadily on, producing a stream of useful but unspectacular papers, until toward the end of the 1960s he had suddenly produced a massive and quite spectacular one. It was a reinterpretation of all he had done, but with additional material unpublished from his earlier experiments. For the first time he was able to produce a sizeable chunk of jigsaw, with a strong hint of what the overall pattern was likely to be.
This major breakthrough won him immediate acclaim, several gold medals, and an excellent position in line for the Nobel Prize. Since then he’d moved steadily up the line, to the point when he was ho
tly tipped to get it this year. Except that, as was now apparent, the work hadn’t all been his.
It hadn’t sounded specially lurid when he’d maundered on about it last night, and it didn’t now. An old colleague had phoned him one day, the senior research chemist (a junior one in the old days) of the oil company he had worked for. He said he had something of interest.
The company had long ago dropped work on the Athabasca sands, but proposed legislation to limit exhaust emissions from automobiles had made them review the work on tar again. One team, headed by a young computer expert, had worked on the ‘medical’ aspects.
This young man had spent weeks collating the last sixty years’ work in the field, and had then fed it to the computer. The computer had come back with, among other things, something very like Ham’s latest findings. He had been tickled by this and had fed these findings, too, into the computer, together with some wild flights of his own, until the game had got out of hand and it had been dropped.
The colleague had phoned because he had just read another paper of Ham’s; it uncannily bore out the computer’s predictions. He had read it, coincidentally, on reading that the young computer man had died in India.
When reading the computer print-outs (by this time some years old), Ham had said he felt as if he’d been ‘punched in the gut.’ The computer had been not only well up to the mark on his as yet unwritten work but also indicated where he had gone wrong in it.
‘Goddam it, I would have got it right. This happened to me fifty times. There are no easy answers. You have to struggle to all the dead ends. It’s a part of the process.’
Whether it was or not, he hadn’t had to struggle to these particular dead ends. The computer man, coming freshly to the problem and reading only what the computer told him, had been able to ask the machine some astute questions. The replies gave a wide survey, including many things that Ham had disregarded.
Ham had asked if he could have the work, and his ex-colleague had let him. It had only been a computer game, of no use to the company. However, it had provided the basis for the spectacular paper – and without acknowledgment, an omission made simple by the anonymity of scientific parlance (‘it was observed that,’ ‘subsequent investigation showed that’); and his live colleague had kept silent.
This lapse, if it was a lapse (for, after all, the young man had known little of cancer, and relations with the computer had been somewhat incestuous, Ham’s own work having gone in it, and the results making sense only to him), had affected Ham badly. It had inclined him in the direction of the booze, with the uneasier effect of putting him in the debt of the former colleague.
The man had rung him up at Rehovot at about the time that Bergmann was in America spreading the tidings of Vava’s batatas, the tidings at that time unknown to me. He had asked Ham what was this new thing with fermented oil. The story was by then all over Rehovot and no secret; in fact it had become a talking point of every coffee party. Olga, as sibyl of the sacred rolls, had become one, too. Ham had seen no harm in telling his friend about it, and the friend had asked where Olga lived these days. Later he had told him more of the unfolding serial of Olga’s marital troubles.
Obviously this friend, a distinguished enough man, had not gone about hitting people on the head; the thing had passed out of his hands. At some point, presumably, private detectives or better, or worse, had been employed by some department of the mammoth business. But when people did begin to get hit on the head, Ham had uneasily wondered if it could have anything to do with him. It was at this point that he could have spoken if he wanted, but he hadn’t. Despite the booze, despite his easy ways, he was a figure of towering eminence in his field; there was the Prize in the offing. Anyway, he hadn’t, and after that he couldn’t.
And then his terrible son Rod had made a re-entry into affairs; for a long time I’d had my ears bored off with his misfortunes. There had even once been a suggestion that I could be of help to him: this had been in his Maoist period. (The suggestion had been Marie-Louise’s, always a bit hazy on the political spectrum, and apparently had to do with my own early indoctrination in the workers’ fight.) He had been kicked out of Berkeley, in itself no easy thing (nothing came easy with this boy), although it turned out that his explusion had less to do with Mao than with heroin.
From then on, heroin was the word with regard to Rod. It was very like a Victorian tract on the wages of sin. He’d had to be pulled out of increasingly dire situations. Expensive legal work had got him off a charge of pushing the stuff, but his latest communiqué, of a few weeks before, was the most critical yet. He was in hiding, and frightened: a confused story to do with the takings of a pushing venture, of which he had been robbed. It had been a large sum of over a hundred thousand dollars, and little was left. He said that unless he repaid it, he would be found and killed, with or without police protection, and in or out of prison. The organization had a reputation to keep up in this respect. Alternatively, he wondered if his parents could get him to Israel, and what cover was available for him there.
This evil news sent Ham immediately to the bottle. Of the ideas canvassed, that of somehow raising the money seemed infinitely preferable, except that he had nothing like the sum. And then his colleague at the oil company rang up with a proposition. He said the company wished to commission a confidential and fully documented assessment of the Weizmann-Vava process. Though discreetly worded, it was plain that what the company really wanted was someone to dish the dirt, which it had failed to get.
Brooding on his problem, Ham had asked how much. His surprised colleague had named a large sum. Ham said he would let him know, and hit the bottle again. He sent his son a thousand dollars, told him to stay out of sight, and then wrote a cryptic note saying that he knew of someone for the job.
His idea, he had said, was to talk to me: he knew he could convince me of the moral duty of saving a life. Despite all evidence to the contrary, there was merit in this life. (It was this hard-to-define merit in Rod that he had been haranguing me about in Caesarea last night.) Over several bottles he had convinced himself of a couple of other things; he had brooded on my query of months before about the suppression of scientific knowledge. It seemed to him that if the process was economically viable there would be no need to suppress it; if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter if it was suppressed; a useful argument, not quite circular, which omitted a few mundane factors such as existing contracts, refineries, port installations in the wrong ports.
Anyway, he had supplied the information requested, principally about me and my movements. He had specifically demanded guarantees that I wouldn’t be harmed, which was very good of him and as satisfying as his arguments on suppression. But to his dismay he had learned he would be paid by result. The copy of the lab books taken from me at the airport was worth only a few thousand dollars; the original, if he could substantiate that there were no other copies, would be worth much more. He’d only get the full sum for the full process.
By this time, realizing the odium of his position, he hadn’t been able to ‘talk to me.’ He had come to the same conclusion that had later occurred to Marta on the car ride to Connie’s, that copies of the P.S. ought to be in the House – the P.S. that apparently contained the details of the process – which had suggested to him what he had better do next. He had been alert enough not to go to the Wix. He had seen me shuffling about with keys. The Southern strawberry fluff, his suggestion for seconds on dessert, had followed …
He had been more or less continuously boozed at the time, though the line had lately been pretty fine with him, accounting for Marie-Louise’s anxiety. Anyway, he had had the keys immediately out of my pocket and copied at a locksmith’s in the village while I stood under the shower, thus making a bid for the original lab books sitting behind the wardrobe in Gower Street. Yesterday afternoon, after phoning the House and assuring himself that I wasn’t there, he had gone for the full sum …
Thinking of the House standing in its glacial calm,
the whole thing struck me suddenly as a hallucination: what had these absurdities to do with the real world, with the boxes upon boxes of letters, the bits and pieces from Christie’s and Sotheby’s standing where they had been put in the silent rooms, relics of the couple lying in the grass? Or with the apartment canyons of Bat Yam, which had somehow resulted from the years and years of drudgery, committee meetings, fund drives, carefully arranged briefings of those temporarily in power – all that intelligent effort? It had more in common perhaps with a pogrom in distant Russia that had brought an excitable rally in Manchester, fortuitously attended by a young Liberal candidate. Or with an unlikely accident in an explosives works in Scotland that had resulted in a brisk train ride and a sudden glint of recognition between kindred spirits. There was a decidedly random quality about things as they happened. I looked into my glass and realized I’d been silent for a while and that she was asking me something.
‘How did Dr Patel know about the lab books here?’
‘Patel?’ He’d cropped up somewhere along the line. ‘He deduced it. He’s a deductive fellow, Patel.’
‘Have you told anyone yet that they aren’t here?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Hadn’t you better?’
‘There doesn’t seem such tearing urgency now.’ There wasn’t any comfort left in the glass. It had all gone. ‘Why don’t we just go to bed instead?’ I said.
‘Well, have you finished with all that? I mean, do you want to chat?’
‘I feel chatty as hell.’
‘I am sure this is going to be one of those major bombshells.’
‘How’s Willie?’
‘I have consented to be Mrs Willie.’
‘Well, congratulations,’ I said.
‘This isn’t the time to explain. I will, though.’
‘In bed.’
‘That would be a bit damned inappropriate, wouldn’t it? I came to collect my things.’
‘Afterwards you can collect your things.’
‘Igor, darling. It isn’t on.’
‘Droit du seigneur?’
The Sun Chemist Page 29