(1961) The Prize

by Irving Wallace

  Leah’s colour rose in her cheeks. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I explained. You will have the same suite, of course, but they are arranging to free an adjoining single bedroom. It will be ready in an hour. It can be made to connect with the drawing-room. Meanwhile, the original suite is ready.’

  ‘I can’t wait to unpack,’ said Leah. With Jacobsson and Krantz, she started for the elevator, then turned. ‘Aren’t you coming, Andrew?’

  ‘In a moment. I just want to pick up some reading.’

  ‘I’m afraid you won’t have much time for that,’ said Jacobsson with a chuckle.

  They continued to the elevator. Ingrid Påhl, steadying her floral hat, hastened from the information counter to join them, but Craig intercepted her.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought you had already gone upstairs.’

  ‘Miss Påhl, I—where can I get a drink here?’

  ‘Do you mean coffee?’

  ‘I mean a highball.’

  She did not disguise her confusion, and Craig understood this, knowing that it was only 9.40 in the morning.

  ‘Why, of course, Mr. Craig—’

  ‘It’s been a gruelling trip, and I’m still on Wisconsin time. I can’t think of anything more distasteful than Scotch before breakfast, but I’m afraid I need a bracer.’

  The explanation was satisfactory. ‘Here, let me show you,’ said Ingrid Påhl, taking his arm. ‘Do you mind if I join you? I could stand a hot cocoa.’

  They found a table next to the dance floor at one side of the Winter Garden. Except for a few other couples, the mammoth room—Craig had always thought that it looked like a college field house decorated for a prom—was devoid of life. At this hour, most guests were having breakfast in their rooms or off the lobby.

  Ingrid Påhl fiddled inside her embroidered handbag, until the waiter materialized. Craig ordered a cocoa and buttered toast for her, and a double Scotch-and-water for himself.

  ‘It was more awkward getting a drink when I was here last time,’ he said for conversation.

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Ten years ago.’

  ‘Yes, we had liquor control in those days and that horrible Bratt System. Well, there is no use lying about it, we are a nation of drunkards—well, heavy drinkers, anyway. It is the long winter nights, I think—the dampness, the gloom this time of the year—that makes men turn to strong brännvin. But Dr. Ivan Bratt—you know, his national law to control sales of alcohol went into effect way back in 1919—solved nothing, made matters even worse. To obtain a ration book for beverages, you had to tell the district system company your whole life story. It was a terrible, prying thing. And then you had to queue at the systemet, like sheep, to get three litres—less than a quart a month. Can you imagine that? And there were inequities. Married women were not permitted to have ration books at all. It created all sorts of evils. A black market in ration books. Bootlegging from Finland. Home distilleries. Evils Sweden had never known before. Having a drink in a restaurant was even worse. I am sure you remember, Mr. Craig.’

  ‘Vaguely. You couldn’t have a cocktail without ordering food, something like that.’

  ‘In the restaurants, wine and beer were unlimited, but did you ever try the beer in those days? Distilled water, I assure you. No drinks were served before noon. A woman could not really have a full drink of hard liquor until three o’clock. And then, as you point out, when you were served, you had to buy food with it, if you were hungry or not. No food, no spirits. Most restaurants became quite clever. They would serve you the drink with an old, old egg they used over and over again. And no matter what your needs, you were limited to what you might call four shots a day. It did not help a particle. In the ten years before the end of the war, there were a quarter of a million people here found guilty of misdemeanours induced by alcohol. Even the prohibitionists were against Bratt, though for different reasons. There was one temperance society, the Blue Band, that objected because the law made people waste valuable food to obtain drink, and this while half of Europe was starving. Well, we’re a rational country, and the people would not stand for it. It was our one national deformity. Bratt had been so personally abused that he had gone into exile in France. So, in 1955, the Riksdag abolished liquor control, overwhelmingly. And I am proud. You do not fetter an entire people’s thirst. I do not drink—oh, a medicinal sip or two at nights before bedtime, to keep me tuned—but I am proud. If you wish a bottle, you can now walk two or three blocks from here, to the first shop, and order whatever you like. No ration books, and no questions, although they will not sell to a customer who is obviously drunk. Of course, a new inequity has already arisen. The price of a bottle of alcohol, and the tax on it, makes it very dear. I do not believe that is fair, either. Pricing hard drink out of reach may be a means of creating a false temperance, but it only indulges the rich who can afford to drink as much as they please, and it deprives the labourer and the poor. Everyone who reads me thinks I am an eccentric old lady who lives in the country and thinks only of nature’s beauty and bird-watching, but I am more than that, Mr. Craig. I am concerned about all injustice. I abhor it on any level.’

  ‘I’m on your side,’ said Craig. He had read about Ingrid Påhl, but had never read her books, and had not known what to expect. Now, he liked her enormously.

  ‘Here is your drink,’ she said. ‘I am sure I have made you ravishingly thirsty.’

  The waiter served them, and after a short argument, Craig won the right to sign the bill.

  Ingrid Påhl lifted her cup of cocoa. ‘Down with Bratt and up with skål,’ she said.

  ‘Skål and down with Bratt,’ said Craig, and he drank.

  ‘I have your programme,’ she said, and touched the folded paper that she had found while fumbling around in her handbag, and had placed beside her saucer. ‘Do you want to see it now?’

  ‘I’ll read it later. What are the highlights?’

  ‘The first highlight is today, two o’clock, at the Swedish Press Club. You and the other winners will be formally interviewed by the world press. Tonight, at seven, cocktails and dinner in the Royal Palace with the King. It is full evening dress only for the nobility. Tomorrow, a grand tour of the city. Count Jacobsson and an attaché will be your guides. The day after, a formal dinner in the country tendered by Ragnar Hammarlund, our billionaire industrialist. It is optional, but as an author, I would not miss it. After that, all sorts of small events, until the final Nobel Ceremony at Konserthuset—Concert Hall—at five o’clock in the afternoon. Does your head spin?’

  Craig smiled. ‘A little.’ He consulted his watch. ‘Do you mean in only four hours from now I have to meet all those reporters?’

  ‘I am afraid so.’

  He shook the ice in his glass. I’d better stick to one drink.’ He looked at his companion. ‘How are these press conferences? Are they rough?’

  ‘Very.’

  He brought the glass to his lips. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’d better make that two drinks.’

  It was 2.10 in the afternoon, and the four press conferences of the Nobel laureates were already under way.

  With a sigh of relief, Count Bertil Jacobsson sat in the straight-backed chair behind the reception table in the seclusion of the second floor cloakroom of the Swedish Press Club. Under his direction and that of his secretary, Astrid Steen, the Club had been prepared earlier for these interviews. The immense hall, beyond the closed door of the cloakroom, had been partitioned by half-a-dozen screens into two separate and private rooms. The Drs. Marceau had been installed in one half, and Professor Stratman in the other half. Off the hall, the confined rear reading-room had been assigned to Dr. Farelli and Dr. Garrett. The nearest, larger lounge had been turned over to Mr. Craig.

  It had been planned that the different winners would meet one another formally this evening, during the cocktail period, at the Royal Palace. But since they were all assembling here in the afternoon, Jacobsson felt that their simultaneous presenc
e, without introduction, might be awkward. At the last moment, he had requested the participants to arrive at a quarter to two, instead of two, so that they might become acquainted informally.

  The fifteen minutes before the press conference, when the laureates had been herded together in the hall, introduced to one another, and served sherry and whisky with ice, had been curiously uncomfortable minutes for Jacobsson, and apparently for all concerned. Individually, each of them seemed sociable, even amicable, but together, as a group, they did not jell. It was odd, reflected Jacobsson. Perhaps it would have been wiser to invite their wives and relatives, who were at this moment elsewhere, being treated to luncheon by the wives of the various members of the Nobel academies.

  Except for Dr. Farelli, an overpowering and gregarious personality, none of the others had mixed or conversed easily. They had met as strangers, and they were strangers still, despite their common victory. Professor Stratman had taken several pills with his sherry and had appeared preoccupied. Drs. Denise and Claude Marceau had not exchanged a single word with each other—there was definitely some disagreement between them—and had been too strained to mingle with the others. Dr. Garrett, whom Jacobsson had introduced first and properly to his co-winner Dr. Farelli, had seemed to be struck dumb. He had stammered several inarticulate words to the Italian, and then left him as he might a leper, and he had thereafter been mute and unaccountably agitated. Mr. Craig, who had arrived last, had been disinterested in the others and had devoted most of his attentions to the waiter, consuming three Scotches with ice in the fifteen minutes. It had been with sincere gratefulness that Jacobsson had greeted the first press arrivals, and had ordered Mrs. Steen to take the laureates to their separate stations.

  Drumming his fingers nervously on the cloakroom table, Jacobsson wondered if the mistake had been his own. Perhaps he should have avoided their meeting until evening when the different winners, without the stress of a press conference ahead, mellowed by the spirits and food of the Royal Palace and the presence of His Majesty, would have been more receptive to one another. The idea of a simultaneous press conference, never before attempted, had been his own touch of showmanship. Several local newspaper executives had protested, for it meant assigning four reporters instead of one to manage full coverage. But Jacobsson had been adamant. He had felt that requiring more reporters in attendance this year would make the newspapers even more conscious of the importance of Nobel Week. Furthermore, he had assumed that the concurrent release of interviews with all six winners in the four categories would make a greater impression on international readers. Now he hoped that he had not been wrong.

  The turnout had been promising. The racks of the cloakroom were thick with coats, male and female, of every description and colour. The open guest book, at his fingertips, gave further evidence of a success. He scanned the four pages and estimated that over one hundred reporters were present. Representatives of all the Swedish newspapers and periodicals had signed in, and so had, he could see, foreign representatives of the great weeklies of the world, Der Spiegel of Hamburg, Świat of Warsaw, L’Express of Paris, Il Mondo of Rome, the Spectator of London, Life magazine of New York, and O Cruzeiro of Rio de Janeiro. Above all, there were present the foreign reporters of the important wire services, Associated Press and United Press International and Consolidated Newspapers of America, Tass of Russia, Reuters of Great Britain, Agence France-Presse of France, and so on and on.

  He was alerted by the hall door of the cloakroom softly opening. Mrs. Steen wriggled in and closed the door behind her.

  ‘How is it going?’ Jacobsson inquired anxiously.

  ‘Smoothly, as far as I can tell, sir.’

  ‘No trouble from the press members?’ asked Jacobsson. He did not object to good-natured raillery. (Along with the reporters, he had enjoyed the fun at the press conference in 1960 for young Dr. Donald Glaser, the American laureate in physics. Dr. Glaser’s trip to Stockholm had doubled for a honeymoon, and jesting reporters had inquired of Mrs. Glaser, ‘Did you know he was going to get the Nobel Prize—is that why you married him?’) What Jacobsson did object to was celebrity baiting. Every year, there proved to be several reporters who invited irritation by asking rude or personal questions, in order to create front-page copy.

  ‘The press seems tame enough,’ said Mrs. Steen, ‘but then, it is still the early stages. A few more drinks, and—’ She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘And our laureates—are they controlled?’ By this, Jacobsson really meant, had any one of them made any intemperate remarks. Only this noon, in an hour of divine privacy in his apartment, he had added a painful jotting to his Notes: ‘In September, 1930, in Paris, Eugene O’Neill, who would become a literary laureate six years later, told Nathan, the American critic: “I think the Nobel Prize, until you become very old and childlike, costs more than it’s worth. It’s an anchor around one’s neck that one would never be able to shake off.” Distressing.’

  ‘They are all being most moderate,’ Mrs. Steen was saying. ‘But the questions are still moderate, also. They are being asked their feelings when informed of winning the prize, and about their trips to Sweden, and about their first reactions to Stockholm. That sort of thing. I do not know what they will say, when the interviews become bolder.’

  Jacobsson lifted himself erect. ‘Perhaps I had better look in myself to see if the interviews are becoming bolder. Our guests may feel less uneasy, if they see a familiar face and an ally.’

  As quietly as possible, Count Bertil Jacobsson took his place on a vacant folding chair to the rear, and peered past a portion of the fifteen or twenty press members to see how Dr. Denise Marceau and Dr. Claude Marceau were performing.

  Claude Marceau was speaking to a reporter in the first row, measuring and doling out each phrase, brandishing his burning cigarette as he spoke. His full greying hair, serious Gallic countenance almost handsome, neat pin-striped dark-grey suit, offered the appeal of assurance and authority. In the opposite corner of the divan, at least four feet apart from him, sat Denise Marceau. She did not watch her husband as he spoke. In fact, she hardly seemed to be listening to him. She sat tensely, with her back straight and knees together, her hands working a white handkerchief in her lap. Occasionally, she jerked her shoulders, as if even the gently shaped green tweed suit she wore were too binding. She stared impassively ahead.

  Jacobsson wondered if anyone else noticed that she was unhappy. Perhaps, he hoped, he was wrong, and she was shy of public appearances and merely nervous. Chemists often were a peculiar lot. It was probably the result of too many hours among their glass stills, and heaters, and vacuum pumps. Perhaps their compounds and camphor, unbeknownst to themselves, depressed them. Jacobsson prayed that Madame le docteur would eventually say something amusing.

  On the divan, so composed and detached to the unprobing and insensitive eye, Denise Marceau was not entirely unaware of her husband’s monologue. He is hypnotizing them, she thought. He is impressing them favourably, the great genius offering the chiselled phrases and opinions from Olympus, she thought. And then she thought: I wonder what those reporters would say if I told them the old lecher’s condition when I informed him that we had won this damn prize. And I wonder how they would react if I suddenly stood up, and shouted at Claude, ‘Oh, merde!’ and walked off.

  The impulsive thought pleased Denise, and forced a smile to her lips, and she realized that her smile had been noticed by the ancient Swedish Count in the back row, and that he was smiling back. For a moment, her ordeal became less tormenting. She told herself that after all, if she divorced Claude (and, much as she detested the necessity, she could see no other course this afternoon), she would be a widow, no, not a widow but a divorcée, a single unit, and she would have to stand on her own feet. Her future would then be based on her fame as one Curie, not two. She must not allow Claude to leave her behind, floundering, helpless, dependent upon him. She must rise alone, and show the world that she never needed that skirt-chasing fool. In short
, she must be practical. And the time was now. The Nobel Prize was their stepping-stone to immortality. If she permitted him to dominate it, the world would think that the honour was his alone. Her duty was to make it her prize, too, as a safeguard against the near future.

  She pushed the fantasy of Claude and Gisèle on their future wedding night—how could he enjoy that bag of bones? but he had, damn him!—out of her mind, and became attentive to the opportunity at hand.

  ‘—and so we stopped our researches on coenzyme A,’ Claude was saying, ‘and we concentrated our full attention on this new possibility, which we had conceived, that of preserving and banking male hereditary semen.’

  ‘Did you tell them, dear, exactly how we came on this new project?’ Denise asked with a tight tiny smile.

  ‘Well, as you heard, I indicated that we had both become interested—’

  ‘Of course. But I mean the whole story, dear.’

  The Stockholm Expressen reporter in the front row was immediately interested. ‘What is the whole story, Dr. Marceau?’ he asked her.

  Denise abandoned Claude to his perplexity and firmly took over the reins. ‘I think it is rather amusing, an ironic sidelight, that this discovery of ours, for which we are being honoured, deals with the male spermatozoa, yet the project was initiated by a female. As my husband will generously corroborate, it was I, quite by chance—but who knows? perhaps nothing like this is pure chance—who first brought up the possibility.’

  The Expressen man sniffed his lead. ‘Pardon, Dr. Marceau, but are you saying that you, alone, hit upon the discovery?’

  Denise could feel the divan move beneath Claude’s angry quiver, and she was pleased. Still, it would win her no sympathy to let this get out of hand. ‘Oh, nothing like that, exactly. My husband and I worked closely, after I had brought up the possibility. Make no mistake about it, we are a team. We are ensemble. Our accomplishment, for whatever it be worth, cannot be divided in two, now or ever. All I have tried to say is—and I thought it would amuse you gentlemen—someone had to conceive the hypothesis, and, in this case, it happened to be I.’