The Virus

by Stanley Johnson

  He noted, as he entered the castle, that the old boy who had been on duty on the previous occasion had disappeared. Well, there was nothing unusual in that! The man might have been replaced — or else, it might be his day off in which case Kaplan reckoned he might encounter him later in one of the taverns of the town. There was a pale-faced, unpleasant-looking young German on duty, instead, who looked as though he was a university student earning extra money by doing a part-time job at the castle.

  “I was here a few weeks ago,” Kaplan began. “Fräulein Paula Schmidtt who, as you must know, is Head of Medical Records at Marburg Clinic, came with me. We were looking for some old files in the basement. Fräulein Schmidtt told me,” Kaplan lied, “that it would be in order if I came back by myself to check on one or two things.”

  “Oh! Fräulein Schmidtt told you to come back, did she?” The pale-faced young German showed signs of interest. “But Fräulein Schmidtt has left the service of the University, don’t you know that?”

  Kaplan felt his anger flare. There would be time later to investigate the disappearance of Paula Schmidtt. For the present, he had only one concern. He leaned forward menacingly.

  “Look, young man, am I going to see those records or not?” A sudden thought struck him. “Better still, are you going to show me those records or not?” The last thing Kaplan wanted was to find himself locked in the dungeon of Marburg castle by an officious jailer.

  The student appeared to sense the note of authority in Kaplan’s voice. He removed some keys from his pocket. “This way,” he said.

  Kaplan remembered the route perfectly — the jinking staircase, the mediaeval armour, the instruments of torture strategically displayed so as to encourage the faint-hearted. His guide opened the door to the storage area and turned on the light at the same time.

  “No one’s been down here for a long time,” he said. “Not since Fräulein Schmidtt disappeared.”

  For a moment Kaplan half-expected to see the corpse of Paula Schmidtt among the débris of junk and rotting paper. Someone had shot her father, because he had talked too much. Maybe Paula had suffered the same fate. But, then, he saw that the room was empty. Wherever Paula Schmidtt was, it wasn’t here.

  Keeping an eye on the German, Kaplan went immediately to the filing cabinet which had contained the crucial records in the form of the dog-eared, floppy covered book. What he hoped to find, he wasn’t sure. Some evidence of forgery, he supposed — or, if he was very lucky, some indication of the true as opposed to fictitious origin of the green monkey which had infected the ill-fated Peter Ringelmann.

  He pulled open the bottom drawer and went through the contents. He was sure it was the bottom drawer. But he could find nothing. No book of the right size and shape; nor any indication, in the form of a marker or message, that someone had removed the book which had once been there.

  Working feverishly now, he went through the other drawers of the cabinet. Still he found nothing. He shut them again and looked around the room. Had he and Paula Schmidtt left the book out? No, he was certain it had been replaced. Paula Schmidtt, he recalled, had been very punctilious on that point.

  He turned to the student and pressed twenty dollars into his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said; “I’ve been wasting your time.”

  The young German pocketed the money. “Fuck all you Americans,” he said.

  Kaplan took a taxi to the Schmidtt residence. He didn’t go all the way to the door. Instead he asked the driver to let him off at the corner of the street.

  For a few minutes he observed the house from a distance. The front lawn, which had been so well-kept at the time of his earlier visit, now seemed distinctly untidy. The grass looked as though it hadn’t been cut in weeks and weeds were sprouting up through the gravel of the driveway. The house itself had a heavily-shuttered look. All the windows were closed. The letter-box was stuffed full with mail and periodicals.

  Kaplan was about to turn away when he thought he saw a curtain move in an upstairs room. Maybe there was someone there after all. He walked up the drive and rang the bell. There was no reply. Kaplan stood back and looked up at the front of the house. This time he was quite sure he saw the curtain move. He rang the bell again.

  “Hello,” he shouted. “Is anyone at home? It’s me, Lowell Kaplan.”

  He heard the shuffling behind the door and the noise of the chain being fastened. Then, with the chain in place, Heidi Schmidtt opened the door an inch or two.

  Kaplan could barely see her through the crack but he could hear her clearly enough.

  “Why don’t you go away? Haven’t you caused enough harm as it is?”

  “Heidi, I have to talk to you. It’s important. I can help you.”

  “No one can help me now.”

  “Do let me in!”

  Reluctantly Heidi Schmidtt opened the door to admit him. Kaplan stepped across the threshold and was immediately shocked by what he saw. The inside of the house was in total disorder. Papers were piled on the floor; the furniture was all awry; dirt had visibly accumulated in the corners of the hallway and on the carpets. But what struck Kaplan even more was the change in Heidi herself. The last time he had seen her she had been a house-proud wife and mother, neat in both manner and dress. Now her appearance was totally dishevelled; her hair, which before had been carefully pulled back from her forehead, straggled around her face; there were dark shadows under her eyes.

  “Why did you come back?” she hissed at him. “I don’t want to see you. Go away!”

  Kaplan pushed his way into the sitting-room, forcing her to follow him.

  “Where is Paula?” he asked roughly. “I have to know.”

  Suddenly, Heidi Schmidtt broke down. She sat on an undusted chair and the tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “Mein Gott! First they kill Franz. Now Paula! I am sure they have done something to Paula.” She sobbed uncontrollably. “There is nothing for me now. I live for nothing.”

  Kaplan walked across the room to stand next to her. He laid his hand gently on her heaving shoulders.

  “Who killed Franz, Heidi? What do you mean by they? I have to know. It’s important.”

  Heidi Schmidtt looked up at Kaplan. The hatred, the hostility seemed to fall away. She seemed to sense that Kaplan was, after all, a friend; and that her enemies were elsewhere. She blew her nose, rearranged her hair and sat upright on the seat.

  “Can you really help me, Lowell?”

  “Of course I can, Heidi.” He took her hand and held it. “Good God, I’ve known you for almost twenty years.”

  Heidi Schmidtt looked round the room nervously.

  “I hope it’s safe to talk. Franz died because he talked too much to you that evening. I’m sure of that.”

  Kaplan reassured her. “We’ll look after you. You can count on that.”

  She seemed to believe him. For a moment she paused as though wondering how to begin. When finally the words began to pour from her, it was almost as though she was engaged in an extended piece of self-justification, an apologia for her own and others’ conduct.

  “You have to understand what life was like here in Germany in the ’60s,” she said. “It was rough. It was tough. There weren’t a great many luxuries. Franz and I had been used to a certain level of comfort during our time in the States. It was a shock to come back to Europe to discover that things were very different.”

  She seemed to be appealing to him. “You do understand, don’t you, that Franz and I were never out and out communists? We were sympathizers. But with Paula, it was different. She had lived in the States in her early ’teens except for the time, back in ’61 when we sent her to Germany for the summer and she heard President Kennedy speak at the Berlin Wall. Then in 1966 we came back to Marburg. It was the height of the radical student movement. Rudi Dutschke was the hero of the younger generation. The Baader-Meinhof gang was beginning to form. Paula drifted towards radicalism, towards communism, and there was nothing Franz and I could do to
stop her. Irma’s influence was very important.”

  “Do you mean Irma Matthofer?”

  “Yes.”

  “You say she was a Communist?”

  “More than that. I say Frau Doktor Professor Matthofer was an agent of the KGB throughout her time in Marburg and that, to a greater or lesser extent, Franz and I, with our daughter Paula, were her colleagues or accomplices. The story Franz told you last time you were here was only partly true. There was a student duel; the infection was spread through the blood. There was a political scandal which was subsequently hushed up. But Franz told you that the Chancellor himself had been in Marburg that night. That wasn’t true and he knew it. He only told you that to throw you off the scent. The real reason for the cover-up was to prevent any further enquiries into the origin of the disease, for those enquiries might have uncovered what Irma Matthofer was really playing at all along.”

  Kaplan nodded. “We knew the Chancellor wasn’t present that night. We checked up on that.”

  Heidi Schmidtt shook her head. “Poor Franz. He was always making mistakes. He wasn’t much good at the cloak-and-dagger side of his work.”

  The German woman seemed to have brightened considerably during the course of the conversation and now seemed set to indulge in fond reminiscences about her late husband.

  Kaplan knew that he couldn’t afford to let her relax. He had to get at the truth now or he would never get at it.

  “And what was Irma Matthofer playing at all along?”

  Heidi Schmidtt turned to him and said matter-of-factly: “The cholera research programme which Franz told you about was real enough. But more than cholera research was involved. Irma Matthofer was also engaged in secret work on dangerous viruses. The health authorities didn’t know about this of course. When they sacked Irma after the Ringelmann affair and closed down the cholera programme, they were simply forcing Irma to go elsewhere.”

  “So, where did she disappear to?” Kaplan sensed instinctively that he was coming close to some vital piece of information. So much seemed to turn on Irma Matthofer’s whereabouts.

  “She went after the monkeys.”

  “The green monkeys? She knew where to go?”

  “Of course. Irma Matthofer always kept careful records of the provenance of animals used in her research. She was looking for a lethal virus all along and when Ringelmann and the others died, she knew she had found it.”

  For Kaplan, the moment of truth had come. “So where exactly did the real green monkeys come from? Where did Frau Matthofer go? Where is she now?”

  Without warning, the woman in front of him burst into tears.

  “Help me, Lowell,” she said. “I can’t stay here. I’m finished. Help me start a new life. Let me come to the States and begin again.”

  “Of course I’ll help you.” Kaplan’s voice was gentle. “But first you have to help me. I have to know where Frau Matthofer went. I have to track her down. It’s the last chance we have. We have only days left. Perhaps only hours. If we can find the green monkeys, we may be able to get enough serum from them to stem the outbreak of Marburg disease in the United States. If we don’t stem it, then the United States will go under and believe me, Heidi, the rest of the world will not be immune. So tell me what you know, and I’ll help you. If there’s any life left worth leading in the United States, you can count on me to get you there.”

  There was no mistaking the look of gratitude in the woman’s eyes.

  She stood up and went to a desk which stood to one side of the room. She opened a drawer and took out three picture postcards.

  She turned back to him, holding them up in her hand.

  “You realize of course that Paula faked the entry in the log-book?”

  “I know. I’ve been back to the castle to find the book. I wanted to have another look at it. It’s not there.”

  “Paula took it. It wasn’t safe to leave it. Anyone who examined it closely would have smelt a rat. Paula did what she was told. Somebody over there” — her hand gestured vaguely in the direction east of the Iron Curtain — “knew about the tribe of monkeys living in Eastern Zaire and about their remarkable similarity with the green monkeys. They told Paula how to alter the records and the precise entry to make. But Paula never knew what the real provenance of the monkeys was. That was Frau Matthofer’s secret. Right from the start she would never tell us where her source of supply was. All she would say was ‘somewhere in Africa’. That at least was all we knew until these postcards arrived.”

  “Can I see them?”

  Kaplan examined the postcards one by one.

  “When did you receive them?”

  “The first one came about two years after Frau Matthofer disappeared. The second one came in the early ’seventies.”

  “And the third?”

  “The third came just a few months back. We were very surprised. We thought we had completely lost touch with the old woman and then out of the blue we hear from her again.”

  “Is it her writing? You’re sure of it?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I would know Frau Matthofer’s writing anywhere.”

  Kaplan tried to read the thin spidery script. It was hard to decipher at the best of times. And the fact that the message was written in German didn’t help either.

  “What does she say? Take the last postcard, Heidi, and read out what it says.”

  Heidi Schmidtt took the postcard back from him. “It’s nothing very dramatic. It just says ‘Greetings from Frau Dr Irma Matthofer. I hope all the family is well and that Franz’ research is progressing.’ ”

  “What do the other two postcards say?”

  “The same kind of thing.”

  Kaplan turned the postcards over in his hand.

  “All three posted in the same place. Bujumbura, Burundi. Have you been there, Heidi?”

  “No. But I know where it is. We looked it up in the atlas when the first of the postcards arrived. We were curious to know where Frau Matthofer could have disappeared to.”

  “Show me.”

  Heidi Schmidtt fetched a large atlas from the shelf.

  “I’m afraid it’s a little bit out of date now,” she apologized. “The names and the boundaries of the countries seem to change so fast in Africa.”

  “It’ll do.” Kaplan poured over the atlas. He found Burundi. And he found Bujumbura. He realized with some surprise that he had come very close to Frau Matthofer’s retreat in the course of his own journey to Eastern Zaire. Only Lake Tanganyika and a few hundred miles of jungle had separated the “false” monkeys from the “true” ones.

  He closed the book with a snap.

  “So you know no more than that?”

  Heidi Schmidtt shook her head. “Isn’t it enough?”

  “I’m not sure yet. It may be.” He stood up to go.

  “You won’t forget your promise.” Heidi pleaded with him. “I can’t stay here now. Not after what they did to Franz. Not after what I told you.”

  “Won’t you mind leaving Paula?”

  Heidi Schmidtt shrugged her shoulders. “Paula has already gone. There is nothing to keep me here.”

  Kaplan realized then that time was running out. If Paula had already gone over, it meant that the end-game had begun.

  He looked at her with a sudden surge of pity. The poor woman’s world had come crashing down. Her husband was dead and her daughter had defected.

  “Don’t worry, Heidi,” Kaplan told her. “We’ll get you out of here by this evening.”

  This time, Kaplan flew from Cologne to Brussels. He couldn’t afford any further delay. He knew he was taking a risk in going back to see the Count — alone. But he could see no other way. He still needed more information. Burundi was not a large country. Even so you had to know where to start looking. The postcards had a Bujumbura stamp but that meant nothing. Probably all international mail coming from Burundi had a Bujumbura stamp.

  If Count Philippe Vincennes was surprised to receive a second visit from Lowell Kap
lan, he gave no sign of it. He was, ostensibly at least, as courteous and as gracious as always.

  He received Kaplan in the library.

  “You will stay to dinner, won’t you? A drink at least?”

  Kaplan declined both offers.

  “Monsieur le Comte,” he began formally, using the other man’s title even though once, in what now seemed the distant past, they had been on Christian name terms. “I’m sure you know why I am here?”

  The Count raised one eyebrow.

  “Should I?”

  “I think we should try not to waste each other’s time.” Kaplan spoke calmly and without any trace of exaggeration. “The last time I was here you tried to kill me. Why?”

  For a moment the Count seemed flustered. He moved towards the tray of drinks which stood beside the bookshelf as though to indicate that even though his guest had refused, he himself was not averse. Then, having regained his poise, he turned back.

  “Tried to kill you? My dear fellow, what ever makes you say that?”

  Kaplan was not to be put off his stride by any sort of aristocratic hauteur.

  “You knew I was on the track of the green monkeys. You thought your whole profitable trade in wildlife might be threatened and exposed if I probed too far.”

  In the event, the Count Philippe Vincennes decided he did need a drink. But he still sought to maintain a calm exterior.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I believe you do. Just look at this.”

  Kaplan passed over a copy of the report he had found months earlier when he visited the New York apartment of Diane Verusio. “This report,” he said, “tells the whole story behind the illegal trade in wildlife. It points the finger fairly and squarely at Belgium, at Brussels and, by implication, at you and your associates like Willy van Broyck whom I had the pleasure of meeting last time I was here.” Kaplan smiled sarcastically.

  The Count made as if to toss the report onto the fire that blazed behind him.