by Martin Suter
He nodded. ‘Everybody leaves now. We have to do some surgery.’
Slowly she got to her feet, looked back down at the baby elephant, wiped the tears away with the heels of her hands and looked at Harris. ‘You put her to sleep, didn’t you?’
He didn’t reply.
She turned around and was led away by the train guard to the group of passengers waiting a few carriages further on in the shade of the trees at the edge of the forest.
Harris took off his sweat-drenched shirt and replaced it with a green surgeon’s gown. Kasun clapped him on the back and handed him the disinfectant. Its glycerine content made it easier to put on the surgical gloves.
The vet listened to the little elephant through his stethoscope. After three minutes he nodded to Kasun, who was also now wearing sterile, disposable gloves. Kasun took the large scalpel from the instrument case and passed it to Harris.
Harris set the blade beside the eighteenth rib below the spinal column and opened up the lumbar region of the dead elephant.
5
The same day
Seat 11A had two advantages: there was no seat beside it and it was the furthest back in business class aboard this Boeing 787-9. Behind was room enough for the cool box carrying the baby elephant’s ovaries.
Harris had just managed to catch the Etihad 265, which would take him from Colombo to Zürich via Abu Dhabi in a little over fourteen hours. He’d drunk his way through the champagne, claret and liqueurs on the menu and was now on his goodnight beer. Perhaps he’d get a little more sleep in the remaining four hours of the flight.
Business class was only about half full. Most passengers were asleep, but here and there he could make out the pale flicker of a screen.
All of a sudden a light went on above one of the seats. A few moments later the curtain of the galley moved and an air hostess emerged, went over to the light, bent down, exchanged a few words with the passenger and left. Shortly afterwards she returned with a tray carrying a glass and a can of beer.
Someone else who couldn’t sleep.
Harris was pleased that this mission was coming to an end. He’d had enough of the tropics and was looking forward to Europe, cool nights and talking shop with colleagues. And to the recognition he’d receive – in the short term at least – for the project’s success.
He put on the headphones and selected the Country channel. ‘Lucille’ by Kenny Rogers was playing, the song that had acted as a soundtrack to the most difficult period of his separation.
He was awoken by the captain’s composed voice. They were entering an area of turbulence, he explained, and all passengers were requested to fasten their seatbelts.
In the past Harris used to suffer from a fear of flying. A pathological fear. Until the age of thirty-two he’d only got on a plane once. He was sixteen at the time and had won a round trip in a competition held by a cigarette firm. From Queenstown to Milford Sound in a Gippsland GA-8, a single-engine Australian aeroplane that seated seven passengers.
The aircraft got caught in a storm high above the rugged fjord and Harris swore he’d never get on a plane again if he survived this horror.
He made good on his promise right after the terrifying landing on the tiny Milford Strand airstrip. Harris refused to get back on board and made the five-hour trip back to Queenstown on the cargo bed of a timber transporter.
Harris took his next flight at the age of thirty-two, soon after separating from Terry. Air New Zealand from Christchurch to Perth via Auckland, and from there to Johannesburg and Cape Town, with South African Airways. His journey took almost thirty hours and not for a second did he fear for his life. He wasn’t so attached to it any more.
Ever since that second occasion he’d actually enjoyed flying. He put his unconditional trust in the aircraft and its pilot like a baby kangaroo would in its mother’s pouch.
And now, because of a spot of turbulence, this pilot was costing him the little sleep remaining to him before landing.
6
Zürich
26 April 2013
The rain had eased up and the sky had turned clearer. Roux could see the Etihad plane approaching. But the traffic hadn’t got any better. He’d be stop–start for another two kilometres till reaching the airport exit.
Roux was angry. Angry at the weather forecast, which was only ever right when you weren’t dependent on it. Angry at Zürich Airport, which was a permanent building site. And angry at himself, who couldn’t even be punctual for this long-awaited appointment.
Of course Harris would call and wait at customs until he arrived with the necessary papers. But Roux was impatient. He was desperate to take possession of the delivery. He’d waited long enough to get it.
The airport exit came into view; just a few hundred metres more until he could peel off from the traffic jam and put his foot down. Adele sang ‘Skyfall’. Roux’s hairy fingers drummed out the rhythm on the steering wheel.
The song was interrupted by a traffic report, warning of the congestion he was stuck in on the A51. ‘Oh really?’ he muttered. ‘Congestion?’
Roux was in his mid-forties. Although wiry and not particularly short, there was something squat about him, for which he had his large head and short neck to thank. He kept his sparse red hair shaved and his bushy eyebrows carefully trimmed, which emphasised the bulges above his eyes and lent a slight bull-like quality to his squatness too.
Finally he reached the place where the hard shoulder on the left opened up into the exit, but the gap between the road marker and the boot of the Volvo in front of him was too narrow for his BMW. If only the arseholes in front of him would move up a bit, he’d be at the airport by now.
Roux honked the horn.
Nothing happened.
He honked again, for longer this time.
The furthest car he could see up ahead moved forward a touch. The one behind closed the gap, and the next one and the next one. Only the Volvo stayed where it was.
Roux angrily pressed his horn, keeping his hand on it. The man behind the wheel of the Volvo responded by shaking his head slowly and deliberately. Then he started his engine and infuriatingly inched his way forward.
As soon as the gap was large enough Roux put his foot down and screeched off the motorway, still honking.
7
The same day
The customs area was a large room with stainless-steel counters. Passengers who’d chosen the green channel – nothing to declare – were streaming past the open exits. Only the odd person followed the red sign and entered clearance.
This is where Jack Harris had been waiting for twenty minutes now beside his wheelie case. He’d put the cool box onto one of the metal tables.
He wasn’t sure if he’d recognise Roux; he didn’t have a good memory for faces and had only met him once, on the fringes of an embryologists’ conference in London on combating infertility. The two of them had attended a lecture on allowing elephant egg cells to mature inside rats. Harris was hanging around the conference because he hoped to make contact with researchers looking for experts in fieldwork. Roux needed someone who could procure some elephant ovaries for him.
They had met after the lecture at Ye Olde Rose and Crown, a pub next to the conference hotel. Harris sensed later that the meeting wasn’t coincidental. Harris was sitting alone at the bar and Roux joined him with two pints of bitter filled to the brim. ‘No sadder sight than a man on his own in a pub,’ he said, in English tinged with a Swiss-German accent. By the second round – it was already Harris’s third – Roux knew that he was a vet specialising in elephants, and when they were on their next drink he asked Harris outright if he knew the best way of getting hold of ovaries from an Asian elephant.
Harris knew.
‘Sorry, Jack, traffic jam!’ said the man approaching him now with an outstretched hand.
Harris had in fact failed to recognise him. He recalled Roux being shorter and fatter.
He took Roux’s hand and shook it. It was clammy. T
hat’s right, he’d noticed this last time: sweaty hands.
Roux was already glancing past Harris at the cool box. Now he took his hand away and placed it on the lid of the container. ‘At last,’ he said. ‘Finally.’
A customs official sauntered up to them. Harris had already informed him that this was an organ transplant and he was waiting for the recipient who had the necessary documents for the import formalities.
Roux showed the official his identification and handed him a slim dossier. The cover bore the red and yellow logo, Gentecsa, and the slogan: Research for the Future.
The customs official slid his finger across the rubric and found the information he needed to complete his form. When he was finished he pointed his chin at the cool box.
‘Is that really necessary?’ Roux asked. ‘It’s vital that the organ stays between 0 and 4 degrees.’
‘I can’t let you through without an inspection.’
Roux sighed and gave Harris a sign to open the box. ‘No more than a second,’ he said.
‘As long as it takes,’ the official corrected, also in English.
Harris snapped open the clasps and flipped open the lid. A sterile box made of milky plastic sat between blue freezer elements. Harris made no move to open it until the official asked him to.
‘You’re endangering a scientific project,’ Roux grumbled.
‘You’re the one dragging this thing out,’ the official responded.
Roux nodded to Harris, who reluctantly took the lid off the container.
What they glimpsed was as small as a child’s fist, with a brain-like structure. It was grey and glistened damply.
‘Don’t touch!’ Roux ordered.
The official slipped a mobile phone from a pouch on his belt and took a photo.
And that was how Sabu arrived in Switzerland.
8
Zürich
28 April 2013
Reflected on the wet asphalt of the car park were a few vehicles and some lit-up windows in an office block that had formerly been a wire factory. The lights still on were coming from the Gentecsa offices on the second floor.
Roux and two assistants were standing around a stainless-steel table, bent over Miss Playmate, as one of the assistants had christened the laboratory rat.
The rat was called Miss Playmate because she was naked. She was a neutered nude rat adapted to the requirements of the elephant tissue, a laboratory rat missing her thyroid gland to prevent her from creating T lymphocytes, the cells responsible for rejecting implants. This meant that Roux could implant the tiny section from the outer layer of the ovary without the foreign tissue being rejected.
Miss Playmate was anaesthetised and lay beneath the blazing surgical light, all four legs splayed apart and fastened with rubber bands. An incision had been made in her abdominal wall and Roux was working internally with a scalpel and pincers. One of the assistants held the wound open with tiny retractors, while the other passed him the instruments he barked for and dabbed, at ever decreasing intervals, the sweat dripping from his trimmed eyebrows between the surgical cap and mask.
The aim of the operation was to implant into Miss Playmate a piece of the Sri Lankan baby elephant’s ovary with thousands of egg cells not yet capable of fertilisation. The cells would mature inside the rat’s womb and after six months Roux would be able to genetically modify them.
He’d done this operation often enough, as testified by the tree shrews, rhesus monkeys and rabbits glowing green, blue and red in the darkened rooms along the corridor. But this was his first elephant egg cell. And – if everything went according to plan – the elephant he was going to create with it wouldn’t just glow in the dark: the creature’s skin would be an intense pink even in daylight.
This was Roux’s great discovery, known only to his colleagues and, more recently, a silent partner – unfortunately. He’d managed to introduce into the egg cells a combination of luciferins and mandrill pigment!
Luciferins are the compounds that make fireflies glow, for example. And mandrill pigment is the compound that produces the colours in the face and backside of the mandrill. Roux had used the red of the nose.
The most beautiful result of these experiments was Rosie, a ‘skinny pig’, a hairless guinea pig. Roux had injected both genes into the egg cell, which he then fertilised and implanted into the womb of a normal guinea pig.
After two months the surrogate mother gave birth to two pink guinea pigs. One was dead, but the second, Rosie, looked as if she were made from marzipan and glowed in the dark like a moving neon sign.
And without needing any light of a particular wavelength to be shone at it, dear Nobel Prize committee! Rosie didn’t merely reflect, like the laboratory animals of Professor Dr Richard Gebstein.
Gebstein had been Roux’s employer. He was the manager and owner of a genetic engineering laboratory that, among other things, undertook research into gene marking, which often involved the use of fluorescent proteins or enzymes. Roux came to Gebstein straight after he’d finished his PhD and worked for him for almost ten years as an underpaid researcher.
During this time he managed – partly by chance, partly intentionally – to generate a faintly fluorescent green rat, but made the big mistake of showing it to his boss. Delighted by this result, Gebstein gave Roux a not particularly generous pay rise and freed him up to undertake further research into his discovery, on condition that he didn’t disclose it to anybody.
Roux worked day and night on his secret project, and in less than a year succeeded in repeating his experiment. His boss duly feted him, but only a few weeks after this triumph there was a spanner in the works. It began with a trifling argument, when Roux was caught by Gebstein eating his lunch – a sandwich, as always – in the laboratory. Eating in a genetic engineering laboratory with this level of security was an infringement of the regulations, but Gebstein had never commented on it before, except for the odd ‘Bon appétit!’ On this occasion, however, he snapped at Roux, and Roux snapped back.
It was the beginning of a rift that soon led to his sacking. And when Roux read Gebstein’s publication on the interim findings of his experiments, which didn’t mention Roux once by name, it confirmed his suspicion that his dismissal had been carefully orchestrated.
The publication caused a sensation in the scientific and journalistic world and was even cited in research by Roger Tsien, Martin Chalfie and Osamu Shimomura, who’d been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of fluorescent green proteins and their application. Roux felt great Schadenfreude at the fact that Gebstein’s name was absent from the statement issued by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explaining their decision.
Roux had been out for revenge ever since. He’d set up his own genetic engineering laboratory with a single objective: to compete with and outdo Gebstein’s. For years now this thought had given him the strength and energy to work through the night, genuflect before bank employees and keep inventing new ways to see off the competition.
The scientific success of his firm had become increasingly incidental and the commercial success ever more vital.
His project had the potential to make a double breakthrough, bringing financial reward and scientific acclaim. If he succeeded in creating patentable animals that didn’t just glow in the dark but also were spectacularly colourful in daylight, he would be made in every sense.
When Roux couldn’t get to sleep in his short nights, he’d imagine Gebstein’s face – his neat white beard, blow-dried white hair, feathery white eyebrows, gold rimless glasses, the entire face designed to look erudite – making him the takeover bid that would be so huge he wouldn’t be able to refuse.
9
Zürich
13 June 2016
Schoch’s hand wasn’t the only one trembling. Around this time almost all of them had difficulty holding their cups in the Morning Sun. It smelled of filter coffee, boozy breath and damp clothes impregnated with smoke. The air was terrible, but if a newc
omer stood in the open doorway for a moment, scanning the packed lounge for a free seat, those lucky to already have one would shout, ‘Oi!’ and ‘Close it!’
Most had spent the night outside or in an unheated shelter and were here to warm themselves both externally and internally.
Schoch normally came here to drink his second coffee every morning. He’d have his first at Presto, a shop in a petrol station that opened at six.
But this morning he’d overslept and had come straight to the Morning Sun. He preferred the second cup anyway. You could sit down here and the coffee was better. Although he’d taken a while to get used to the pious sayings that hung on every wall in this small, plain lounge, when facing the choice between pious sayings and expensive coffee, a homeless person didn’t have to think too long about it. Anybody who wanted to could get something to eat here too. But Schoch didn’t want to, not at this time of day. His stomach was still too unreliable. You could never be sure how you were going to react to solid nourishment. He needed to give it time. And a little coffee.
By noon his stomach had sufficiently settled down that he could give it something to eat. Depending on his financial situation he’d have his lunch either at Meeting Point, where people like Schoch came to shower and wash their clothes and could eat for four francs, or at the soup kitchen, where the food was free. If he needed something harder than apple juice to wash down his food, Schoch would dine at AlcOven, a meeting place for drunks, where you could also have a shower and wash your clothes, but were allowed to bring your own beer to accompany a cheap meal.
He usually took dinner at Sixty-Eight, where you could get a decent meal for free, but only in the evenings.
At this early hour – it was just after eight o’clock – most guests at the Morning Sun weren’t particularly chatty. But there were always a few noisy ones, those who’d already taken their first drink of the day. Schoch was one of the silent ones. He never drank before ten. And even when he’d had something to drink he didn’t say much. If he did speak, it was quietly, which lent him an aura of mystery. That and the fact that nobody knew anything about him. Everybody knew the stories of most of the others on the streets, knew what they used to be and what had made them end up here. But they knew nothing about Schoch. One day he just arrived on the scene with old Sumi. The two were inseparable, moved around together and supported each other when they were no longer able to stand up straight.