(1961) The Prize

by Irving Wallace

  The invitation was for a formal dinner party, given by Ragnar Hammarlund, host, and Märta Norberg, hostess, honouring the visiting Nobel Prize laureates. The time was seven o’clock of the evening of December sixth. The dress was, in Swedish, smoking, which meant black tie and evening dress. To this was added O.S.A.—om svar anhålles—meaning R.S.V.P., and below that was listed Hammarlund’s private telephone number.

  While all twenty guests had responded to the invitations affirmatively, several hours before the dinner it appeared that the list might be reduced to nineteen. Emily Stratman had telephoned Hammarlund’s secretary to explain that her uncle was not well—nothing serious, simply fatigue—and that he wished to rest and begged to be excused. When informed of this, Hammarlund had personally telephoned Count Bertil Jacobsson at the Foundation and requested him to substitute for Professor Stratman as Emily’s escort. Jacobsson had been agreeable, and Hammarlund was satisfied that the guest list would once again number twenty.

  Now, it was 7.15 in the evening.

  On the Djurgårdsbrunns Canal, beyond the ornate metal gate and artificial lily pond, the first-storey windows of Hammarlund’s pillared Taj Mahal—Åskslottet—were ablaze with festive light. Since the Scandinavian guests had been bred on Swedish punctuality, and since the foreign guests had been forewarned about it, all twenty visitors were inside the huge and splendid main living-room.

  The last callers to arrive had just come through the living-room archway. This party consisted of Jacobsson, Emily Stratman, Andrew Craig, and Leah Decker. Their host and hostess waited inside the entrance to welcome them with handshakes.

  Ragnar Hammarlund, attired in faultless evening wear by Bond Street, seemed more featureless than ever. His white, hairless visage could hardly be discerned, so that his person resembled some eugenic cross between headless horseman and invisible man. Beside him, as fill-in hostess for the evening, a role she so often performed, was the legendary Märta Norberg.

  As they awaited their turn to be greeted, Leah whispered to Craig in the tremulous voice of fan worship, ‘My, doesn’t she look just like she did in pictures?’

  Indeed, Märta Norberg looked just as she had looked on thousands of billboards and magazine covers and in legitimate theatre and motion picture advertisements. She also looked at forty-two as she had looked at thirty-two and twenty-two, the perfectly preserved product of the most costly international beauticians. Despite the trademark slouch of her broad shoulders—that had long reminded awed audiences in London, New York, Cairo, and Bombay of disenchanted world-weariness and that had offered overtones of a sexuality both mystical and unique—Märta Norberg was tall, considerably taller than Hammarlund beside her. The other trademarks were also in evidence, the trademarks so endlessly celebrated in the fan magazines: ‘her mouse-coloured hair, to the shoulders, abandoned and recklessly uncombed . . . her sunken pool of grey eyes, bearing the unconquered enigma of all womanhood . . . her patrician nose that launched a thousand theatres . . . her maddeningly superior smile, the smile of a Valkyrian Mona Lisa . . . her insinuating voice, a husky throb caught in a swan throat.’

  Awaiting his introduction, Craig found himself almost as captivated as Leah. If he had passed her on the street, and she an unknown, he wondered if he would have bothered to turn. Technically, her features and physique were imperfect, the face too long and sunken, the bosom—breasts like matched oversized buttons—too flattened beneath the clinging silk crepe gown, with high front, bare back, and the body too straight. What made it all desirable was the world wide reputation that she wore like a royal cape.

  But then, when he was the last to take her firm, slender hand, he felt the electric current of her magnetism and understood the allure of her personality.

  ‘Craig,’ he said, introducing himself in the formal Swedish fashion.

  ‘I know,’ she said deeply. ‘I have been entranced by all your books. I am Märta Norberg.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I have been entranced by all your faces—Camille, Nora Helmer, Beatrice, Sadie Thompson, Lady Windermere.’

  Her lips curled ever so slightly. ‘You speak as well as you write, I see. Come, Ragnar will lead you to the guests.’

  Again, Swedish formality prevailed. The protocol of introduction had been given Leah by Mr. Manker, and Leah had passed it on to Craig. Apparently Emily, so delicate in her sleeveless silk jersey evening dress, had been well briefed by Jacobsson, for she was performing as Craig knew that he must perform.

  The fourteen guests who had arrived before stood waiting, some with cocktails, some with highballs, in an uneven semicircle, a formation almost identical to the one Craig had witnessed at the Royal Banquet. He moved awkwardly inside the circle, behind Leah and Emily. As he came face to face with each new guest, he introduced himself by surname, and the guest murmured back his or her surname. The ones he had met before—the Drs. Marceau, Dr. Farelli and his wife, Dr. Garrett and his wife, Konrad Evang, the Norwegian—these, Craig met again with spontaneous informality. But with the new ones, he conformed to strict etiquette. There were Baron Johan Stiernfeldt, a representative of the King, and the Baroness Stiernfeldt. There was Miss Svensson, the opera contralto. There were General Alexei Vasilkov, military attaché of the Russian Embassy, and his wife Nadezhda Vasilkov. There was Mrs. Lagersen, with the countenance of a monkey, whose claim to fame was that she had known the friendship of Mette Sophie Gad, Paul Gauguin’s bewildered Danish wife, in Copenhagen during 1905, and had recently published A Memoir of Mette and Paul. There was Dr. Oscar Lindblom, Hammarlund’s research chemist, who was thin and uncomfortable.

  The moment that the formal introductions were concluded, since it was known that these were the last of the guests to arrive, the semicircle of formality splintered off into conversational foursomes and pairs.

  Leah, who pretended to have forgiven Craig for their bad night and now had resumed her old relationship of domineering nurse and ever-present conscience to him, began to rave about the expensive living-room, decorated in late Georgian style, and for the first time, Craig became attentive to his surroundings.

  The great room, wainscoted from floor to ceiling, every panel featuring eighteenth-century engravings, was broken on one wall by an enormous fireplace faced in Carrara marble. At the far end, on top of a small platform, beside the French doors that led onto a terrace overlooking the botanical gardens, was a five-piece orchestra, definitely Parisian, that was playing muted standbys and operetta classics. A wispy, tiny French chanteuse, attractively anæmic, all gesticulation, joined them to sing unobtrusively, nostalgically.

  Against the opposite wall stood two Chippendale sideboards of mahogany with ornately carved legs, one magnificently laden with a peacock of sculptured ice and surrounded by cut hothouse orchids and a rainbow of smorgåsbord—pickled salt herring, salmon cutlets, marinated mussels, veal meatballs, Gotland asparagus, braised beef rolls, boiled potatoes, rye rusks and saffron bread, smoked goose breast, endless cheeses—which was served by two wholesome Swedish girls in Dutch aprons. The second table held glasses and bottles of drink, and was officered by two bartenders in red-and-black uniforms. Circulating through the room was Hammarlund’s liveried butler, Motta, an elderly Swiss with the face of an inebriated St. Bernard. Motta carried, and tendered, a large tray of hot-American-style hors-d’oeuvres. Behind him, with dishes and napkins, dainty in her starched dress, was the Finnish parlour-maid.

  Leah had become separated from Craig by Saralee Garrett, who felt safe with Leah, and now they were intently discussing Swedish shopping bargains. With relief, Craig turned away and sought Emily. He had not seen her all day. After Daranyi had left him at the hotel, Craig had tried to call Emily but learned that she was out with her uncle. During the drive to the Hammarlund dinner, Jacobsson and Leah had dominated the conversation, and Craig had been unable to do more than smile at Emily. Now he was impatient to speak to her.

  He beheld her at last. Jacobsson had her arm, and had brought her into a group that con
tained Baron Stiernfeldt and his wife, Mrs. Lagersen, and the Farellis. Craig knew that he could not extricate her, not yet. That left one immediate alternative.

  He made his way to the temporary bar and ordered a double Scotch on ice.

  Waiting, he observed on the end of the table a placard propped against an easel. It bore the legend Placering. Beneath the legend was the seating plan for dinner. Craig studied the table arrangement etched in pencil. He would be seated between Margherita Farelli and Leah Decker. He frowned, and studied the chart further. Emily would be seated between Jacobsson and General Vasilkov.

  Craig accepted his drink, and pursed his lips, as he glanced at the seating plan once more. It was unromantic. It would require one rewrite. He promised himself that he would take care of that later.

  Briefly, flanked by Lindblom and Märta Norberg, the evening’s host stood apart from his guests and surveyed the room.

  Every important Swede—that is, a Swede with social position—was expected to sponsor three formal dinner parties a year, usually in the dark winter season when life was monotonous and unbearably dull, but Hammarlund always preferred to exceed this requirement. Essentially, he was a lonely man. This, however, was not the motivation behind his formal party-giving. He hosted his expensive dinners because, from an Olympian height, he looked down upon smaller men, regarding them as being helpless as insects, and the antics of the species Homo sapiens amused him and later filled his reveries. This was Hammarlund’s ninth formal dinner of the year, but only the third time in his life that he had invited Nobel laureates as guests.

  The first two Nobel dinners had been, for him, disasters, because he had found the scientists dreadful and dogmatic bores. He had vowed to avoid another Nobel party, and limit his guest lists to the people that he enjoyed the most—fellow industrialists who spoke the common language of legalized piracy, and the foolish, crazy children of the entertainment world. What had changed his mind this year, and prodded him into one more Nobel feast, was the award of the prize to the Marceaus of Paris. He had seen, at once, how they could be valuable to him, in a way beyond their understanding or beyond the conception of ordinary beings. Knowing that it would have been unseemly to honour only the Marceaus in Åskslottet, he had taken on the responsibility of his third Nobel dress dinner. So far, he decided, all had gone well. Soon he must instigate the business at hand.

  Märta Norberg was speaking. ‘That author person, Craig, has a certain charm. I daresay he could be fun.’

  ‘Forget Craig,’ said Hammarlund curtly. ‘I have told you to devote time to Claude Marceau.’ He addressed Lindblom. ‘And as for you, Oscar, you know your duties.’ Hammarlund took Lindblom and Märta Norberg by their arms. ‘Come. Let us begin before they are involved.’

  The three advanced across the room to where the Marceaus stood together, moodily drinking, speaking neither to each other nor to anyone else. Irritation between the Marceaus had mounted in the past twenty-four hours. Claude chafed under the relentless new speaking schedule Denise had imposed upon him, through the Foundation. And Denise was tense because she had read of the arrival of the French mannequins in Copenhagen early that morning. Under these circumstances, the appearance of Hammarlund, with glamorous Märta Norberg and young Lindblom, was not entirely unwelcome.

  When he put his mind to it, Hammarlund was a master of social tactical diversion. With practised ease, he paired Märta Norberg and Claude Marceau, and pointed them towards the sideboard-bar to obtain a cocktail for Märta. Relieved to be free of his wife’s abuse, and, indeed, impressed by the attentions of the renowned actress, Claude had gone off too willingly to please Denise.

  Alone with Hammarlund, and his skinny, youthful employee whose name she could not remember, Denise decided to make the best of a bad thing. She imbibed her dry martini and left the burden of sociability to be borne by her repulsive host.

  ‘You met Dr. Oscar Lindblom, I believe,’ Hammarlund was saying.

  ‘Yes, of course I remember,’ said Denise. ‘He was the one who blushed when we were introduced tonight.’

  Now that Lindblom had once more been identified, Denise considered him objectively, as he stood beside his employer. Lindblom and Hammarlund were physical opposites—one an ectomorph and the other an endomorph—yet they seemed to blend because of one characteristic held in common. Both were supremely colourless. If Hammarlund resembled a mound of mash, Lindblom’s aspect was that of a blank human figure outlined in a juvenile colouring book, not yet filled in with crayon. Except for a mop of dark brown hair, and insomnia traces under his grey eyes, Lindblom’s regular Nordic features, thin but handsome, were bleached out by a personality that was tentative and and introverted.

  At once, Denise realized that Lindblom’s blanched face was tinged with pink, and she remembered that she had accused him of blushing, and here he was blushing again. He had started to say something gallant, stuttered, and then said to Denise, ‘It is not every day, Dr. Marceau, one can meet a genius in one’s own field whom one idolizes.’

  Denise inclined her head. ‘I thank you, Dr. Lindblom.’ She gave regard to Hammarlund’s pleased reaction. ‘You must be lax with him, Monsieur Hammarlund. When a chemist has time to learn pretty compliments, he cannot be giving enough time to his test-tubes and mice.’

  ‘Good,’ said Hammarlund. ‘Then you recall my telling you that Dr. Lindblom is head of my private laboratory?’

  ‘Certainly I remember.’

  ‘But you do not recall my telling you that he is one of the most promising chemists in Scandinavia? Mark my word, he will one day have the Nobel Prize like your husband and your—’

  Lindblom blushed once more, and his bow tie danced nervously on his prominent Adam’s apple. ‘Mr. Hammarlund, really—’

  Hammarlund brushed aside his protest with a gesture, even as he would brush aside a gnat. He continued addressing Denise intently. ‘You are quite wrong about the time he gives his test-tubes and mice. He gives all of his time to his experiments. He is on the verge of an important breakthrough in synthetic foods. Only now, just recently, he has become bogged down.’

  ‘I am sorry, but it happens,’ said Denise to Lindblom with fervent disinterest.

  ‘I do hope he will tell you all about his work,’ said Hammarlund energetically. ‘I know he wants to. And as for gallantry, you will find him charming.’ He looked off, as he had planned. ‘I see I am wanted by General Vasilkov. Excuse me for a moment, please. You will enjoy each other.’

  Quickly, Hammarlund left Denise and Lindblom. He had grafted them. He hoped the graft would take.

  Denise watched her host depart with a relief that she made no effort to disguise. But what she was left with was equally boring. She considered the straw man before her, a Swedish oaf, a science amateur, and she wondered how long it would be before she could gracefully escape from him.

  ‘I must apologize for Mr. Hammarlund,’ Lindblom was saying with some mortification, his bow tie jigging. ‘Everything he possesses must be the best, and he permits these enthusiasms to include his employees.’

  ‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ said Denise tartly.

  ‘I mean—I mean—his prediction that some day I may earn the Nobel Prize like your husband and you. I would not allow myself to imagine this, or let you think that I believed I was on the uppermost plane of science with two great laureates. I am relatively a beginner, a student almost, in comparison to your genius. It embarrasses me to have—to have my name brought up in the same conversation with yours. That is why I apologize for Mr. Hammarlund’s extravagance.’

  Denise’s eyes narrowed, and she considered her companion more keenly. His lean face, the grey eyes, not entirely unattractive, were sincerely abject, but the one thing that Denise could not bear in a male was weakness. ‘Never mind that,’ she said. ‘We each have our work, our place.’

  She knew that she would have to give an ear to his work, before she could be free of him. She might as well get it out of him and over wi
th as speedily as possible. She could see her husband, at the bar, speaking too animatedly to Märta Norberg, and standing too close to her. Now that Claude’s moral balance was gone, and he had sunk to the depths of philandering, there was no telling how far he would let himself slide. If he could not have Gisèle Jordan in Copenhagen, the old fool might try to have that overpublicized iceberg, Mèrta Norberg, right here in Stockholm. It would be just like that old roué, that pitiful Casanova, to feed his vanity with another affair.

  Denise bit her lip in resentment, and then knew that she was marring the lipstick, and quickly opened her evening bag to repair her face. She was not yet alarmed by Claude and the actress, but it would be foolhardy to let the flirtation go on at length. She would do her face, and finish her drink, and hear this oaf out, and then take herself to the bar and break that new thing up.

  As she worked with her lipstick, and then her powder puff, Denise said, ‘Mr. Hammarlund told me something of your work. Do you wish to tell me more? Of course, this is no place for laboratory talk—but a little might be interesting, just what are you up to, Dr. Lindblom?’

  Denise’s peevish tone inhibited Lindblom and, at the same time, made him venerate her the more. This female genius, so other-worldly, her head doubtless teeming with a hundred projects requiring talents beyond his mundane limitations, had actually encouraged him to speak of himself. He wanted to, desperately, and yet feared her impatience. What forced him to speak, at last, was a remembrance of Hammarlund’s command earlier in the day: ‘Oscar, when you are alone with her, interest her in your work—that is one of the main purposes of the party.’

  For an introvert, the assignment was as impossible to envision as daring to monopolize the time of a Marie Curie, but the necessity of reporting back to Hammarlund enforced a superhuman effort. ‘I am sure Mr. Hammarlund told you the motivation behind our research into synthetics?’

  ‘Yes. Personal aggrandizement.’