Quint was impatient. “But everybody’s been getting into that act lately. I even read about a Philadelphia dentist whose been transplanting teeth ever since 1959.”
“Doctor Mezrow?” she nodded.
“He takes a healthy tooth from someone whose mouth is too small to hold the usual quota and needs an extraction, and transplants it into the mouth of someone who’s had an extraction.”
Marylyn nodded. “But teeth are simple, compared with organs. Nicolas Ferencsik has been successful in transplanting, first in animals, and now in human beings, just about every organ in the body. Oh, others have done it too. American doctors have been successful in taking a diseased kidney from one person, and replacing it with a healthy kidney from another person. It works quite often between identical twins, but only in a few instances otherwise. You see, Quentin, the body has an… well, instinctive tendency to reject any foreign tissue that’s been grafted into it, unless it’s from an identical twin. But Ferencsik has startled the world by combating this body instinct. He utilizes azathioprine, a new immunity suppressor, actinomycin C, an antibiotic which is sometimes used against cancer, a cortisone-type hormone, heart stimulants, diuretics, and so forth. And he’s been successful in practically rebuilding people hurt in accidents. Of course, in the Iron Curtain countries, especially Russia where he did a lot of his work, they’ve gone further than we have in establishing banks of not just blood but hearts, kidneys, livers and other organs as well.”
“You’re getting beyond my depth,” Quint said. “At least beyond my depth with my head feeling the way it does now. However, I picked up the idea recently that he’s been able to even transplant brains. At least on an anthropoid ape level.”
She frowned, as though that went beyond either her belief, or at least her approval, but she said, “Yes, you mentioned that the other night.”
A new party was descending the brick steps which led down to the cellars from the restaurant proper on the ground level. There were four of them, all men, and one of the four was Bart Digby. Quint hoped the other wouldn’t recognize him, and then realized there was fat chance of that. The alleged former C.I.A. man’s eyes swept the ten or fifteen tables of the cellar dining rooms with a professional glance, landing on Quint immediately.
When the party had been seated by the captain, Digby evidently excused himself and came toward Quint and Marylyn Worth.
Quint came to his feet, without over-much trouble, and made introductions, which were routinely responded to, including an appreciative laying-on-of-eyes by Bart of Marylyn.
Without invitation, Digby took an empty chair and said to Quint, “Look, I wanted to talk to you some more.” His eyes went back to Marylyn.
Quint said, wearily, “Miss Worth is a teacher out at the Air Force school. She comes from Nebraska and is very sincere and probably very patriotic and believes in true values and things like that which I don’t understand. What her security rating is with the F.B.I., I don’t know, but I suspect you can talk in front of her at least as freely as you can in front of me. And besides, I’ve got a hangover, confound it. I would have said damn it, instead of confound it, but Miss Worth forbids me to swear.”
Digby looked at him. “Are you swacked?”
“Miss Worth calls it under the influence,” Quint said. “The answer is, yes. Mildly. I’m almost over it.”
“You must have kept going since I saw you at lunch,” Bart Digby growled unhappily. “Look, I want to talk to you some more. But it’ll keep until tomorrow.”
“About what?” Quint said.
Bart shot another look at Marylyn.
Quint said, “Oh, for crissake…”
Digby said, “Remember my mentioning Bormann, Mueller and Doktor Stahlecker this morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’ve done some backchecking on this Doktor Stahlecker who was evidently one of Hitler’s most fervent from way back when the Nazi party was first getting organized. Remember when the German generals tried to knock him off, planted a bomb in his bunker when he was having a staff meeting?”
“Yeah, Along in 1944. Half the general staff was in on it, even Rommel.”
“That’s right. Well, it was our friend Doktor Stahlecker who kept Hitler alive at that point. He was blown half to pieces, but the good doctor patched him up.”
Quint was irritated. He wasn’t up to much in the way of thinking right at this point. “So,” he said.
“So, it seems that Doktor Stahlecker was the top authority in Germany at that time on such items as organ transplants, grafting of limbs, and such like. There evidently is some evidence that one of Hitler’s arms was blown completely off, but Doktor Stahlecker was able to sew it back on. It’s only been in the past year or so that American doctors have been up to that sort of work.”
Quint Jones looked at him blankly. “Organ transplants? That’s Nicolas Ferencsik’s line.”
Digby grunted exasperation. “You begin to get the message, eh? Well, chew on this for awhile. Doktor Stahlecker was also one of the famed German doctors who butchered thousands of Jews, gypsies, Poles and Russian prisoners in the name of scientific research. The good doctor seemed interested in such supposed scientific items as how long could a woman live when her time for delivery was upon her and you tied her legs together, and how long could a Jew live with his skin completely flayed from his body? Or, how long could a man live in below zero water?”
Quint shot a look at Marylyn who seemed to have frozen in horror. He said, “Take it easy, Bart.”
Bart Digby said, “Well, at any rate, of all the Nazis still at large, Doktor Stahlecker is one of those most wanted. There’s a rope waiting for the good doctor in just about any country that participated in World War Two.”
“What’s the connection with Professor Ferencsik?” Quint said.
The former C.I.A. man came to his feet. “That’s what I’d like to know,” he said. “I’ll talk to you about it in the morning.” He looked at Marylyn. “Where’ve I seen you before?” he asked in puzzlement.
“At a police line-up in Chicago, probably,” Quint growled at him. “Good grief, get lost, Bart. Miss Worth was at the party last night. That’s where you saw her.”
Chapter Five
Quint Jones was awakened from no deep dream of peace by the brutal ringing of the phone next to his bed. He tried manfully to ignore it. It wasn’t to be ignored.
He grabbed it and snarled, “Yes?”
Mike Woolman said cheerfully, “Come on, come on. I can tell from your voice, you’re not out of bed. It’s eleven o’clock.”
Quint grumbled, “It got very drunk out last night.”
“Where’s all that gung ho energy you had yesterday? All that impressive column writing ambition?”
“Shut up,” Quint said. “What’d you want?”
“Look Quint, this case is pyramiding. Rumors are beginning to get around amongst the boys. I got a call from Paris headquarters of World Wide Press. They’re thinking of sending a special man down here to handle the story.”
That wasn’t so good from Mike’s viewpoint. He ought to be able to wrap a story up on his own, not depend on outsiders to come in and do his work for him when it got inportant.
Quint said, “So?”
“So, what’s the dope that you have that you wouldn’t tell me yesterday? Maybe you can reword it a little so you won’t be betraying any confidence.”
Quint was silent, scowling to himself. He shook his head in an attempt to achieve complete clarity.
Mike said urgently, “Especially, what’s the jazz about Martin Bormann and Doktor Stahlecker?”
The columnist shifted in his bed, uncomfortably. “Well, I was told a bit more about this Doc Stahlecker last night. It seems as if this is the doctor who patched Hitler up when he was blown to smithereens by the German generals in 1944. Sewed an arm on him and that sort of thing.”
Mike said nothing. Obviously digesting.
Quint said impatiently. “Evidently D
oktor Stahlecker is almost as big an authority on organ transplants and such as Professor Ferencsik. What do I have to do, draw you a blueprint?”
Mike said, “Jesus.”
Quint said sarcastically, “May I suggest you get your fanny over to wherever it is Nicolas Ferencsik is staying and interview him on the question of just why he’s come to Spain, of all places?”
Mike grunted, “Uh huh. Swell.”
“Well, what’s more obvious?”
“Nothing, except Ferencsik absolutely refuses to see all reporters.”
“Pull some wires. Get hold of Joe Garcia or somebody and make some hints. Put some pressure to bear on the guy. Lean on him. He obviously knows plenty.”
The reporter said, “I’ll let you in on a secret, chum. Nobody, but nobody, twists the arm of a guy with as big a name as Nobel Prize winning Professor Ferencsik. This is a nasty world we live in, but not even here in Spain would the public allow the authorities to give Nicolas Ferencsik a hard time. It’d be like lowering the boom on Einstein, or Albert Schweitzer. Any more bright ideas?”
Quint Jones scratched himself unhappily through his pajamas. His mouth tasted like last week’s crop of maggots. He said, “Listen, where is Ferencsik staying?”
“What do you mean, where is he staying? He’s staying at the Dempsey’s, of course.”
“The Dempsey’s. You mean Marty and Ferd’s? A man with an international name like that!”
“Friend, you must have come in late. How’d you think Marty and Ferd ever got him to come to a party at their place? He’s living with them. He’s old family friends of Marty’s people. Her old man, way back before the war, before Hungary went commie, financed some deal of Nicolas Ferencsik before he got famous. Staked him to a lot of dough for research materials and all. He’s got a soft spot for Marty, or something. Knew her when she was a girl.”
Quint pursed his lips, as though to whistle. He said, “Okay, Mike, I’ll see what I can do. Call you back later.”
Mike Woolman sneered. “Oh, you think you can get in to see him, where I can’t, hey? Let me tell you friend, when Ferencsik says he won’t see reporters, believe me, he won’t see reporters.”
“That’s because you reporters don’t bathe, don’t gargle your throats in the morning and are illiterate clods.” Quint told him earnestly. “Now a columnist is something else again.”
“Go marry your mother,” Mike told him and hung up.
Quint grinned at the phone for a minute before returning it to its place. He grunted and swung his legs over the side of bed and fumbled his feet around for his slippers. They weren’t in their usual place. He grunted again and made his way to the kitchen barefooted. At least he didn’t have a blockbuster hangover this time. Marylyn Worth must have spotted him right at the crucial time and got him there to Botin’s and some food into him.
Nice girl, if she wasn’t so square, he told himself as he fished a bitterly cold bottle of coke from his refrigerator. Coffee for others, but the morning after he’d been drinking, it was coke for him. As a matter of fact, he had read somewhere, in a consumer’s union report, or something, that there was three and half times as much caffeine in a bottle of coke as there was in a cup of coffee. Be that as it may, it settled his stomach and gave him a lift.
He finished the coke and started breakfast proper a-going. That was another bit of wisdom he’d accumulated over the years. To get over a binge, get hot food into your stomach as soon as possible. Once you’ve been able to hold two hot meals down, the hangover is through.
When he’d forced down two eggs and some Spanish bacon—which he despised—along with some toast, he felt moderately better. Bacon, he remembered all over again, was the one thing he wished he could get into the American PX for. Except for the Danes and British, the Europeans didn’t have the word on bacon.
Breakfast safely down, he went into the bathroom to shower, shave and brush his teeth. He wished the hell he knew more about Nicolas Ferencsik’s subject, organ transplants. He wondered if it would be possible—if he was able to get an interview with him at all—to bring Marylyn in on it. As a science teacher, she evidently kept up on all fields, including recent medical developments. He had her phone number out at the base, but, as he recalled, this was first day at school, and he doubted there was any way to get her away before evening.
Thinking of Marylyn brought back her conversation of the evening before. As he dressed, he thought about her. Who was he to call the girl a square?
Now that he thought of it, the very term irritated him. When he was a boy, the word square meant honest, a person of integrity. Now it had come to mean somebody who was stupid, not with it, old fashioned. What had happened to our civilization when a honest man was sneered at?
And maybe she was right about him. By modern criteria, he was a celebrity. He had it made. He earned more money than he knew what to do with. Could travel anywhere he wanted, or live anywhere he wished. He had made it.
Yeah?
He went back to the phone and rang the Dempsey phone number.
A maid answered. “Digame ?”
“For favor, senorita, deseo hablar con Senor Dempsey,” Quint told her.
“Un momento, por favor.”
Ferd Dempsey, his voice slurring, was on the line. “Hello, hello, hello. You must be selling something. Nobody I know’d be up this early.”
“Ferd,” Quint said. “This is Quint Jones.”
“Oh yeah, hi Quint. What’s the deal? Brother, it was rugged last night. A bunch of us were over the Hilton and guess who turned up? Remember that queer muscle man movie star, was here doing the lead in that show about Cortes and the Aztecs and all? Well, he’s back in town. Talmadge. Clark Talmadge. He’s going to do another movie with Clara Lucciola that wop star, with old Manny King directing. They were all there, and Bert Fix, the flack and Lonny Bait the photographer. Anyway, we started at the Hilton and then Manny said how about coming up to his place. He had some real Swiss absinthe. The real old stuff. So we took along a couple of bottles to last us till we got there. He’s got a hell of a big estate in Mirasierra. Big swimming pool and all. Christ did we laugh. We threw Clark in the pool and then we all stood around the edge and when he tried to get out, we’d give him a drink, but we wouldn’t let him out until he could prove he was too swacked to swim. It was a riot. Then about two o’clock in the morning, Marty decided what we needed was a weiner roast, but nobody had any weiners, so we all got back in the cars and…”
Quint listened for awhile, his face expressionless. He could have heard substantially the same report from Ferd Dempsey five days out of seven. Or from Marty, for that matter. Or from four out of five of his Madrid acquaintances.
He said, finally, when the other stopped for breath, “Listen, Ferd. What I wanted to ask you about. Professor Ferencsik is staying with you, right?”
The other’s voice went suddenly cautious. “The Professor? Oh, sure. Kind of keeps to himself, but the place is big enough, Lord knows.”
“Well, listen, I’d like to talk to him.”
There was a silence, then, “Damn it, Quint. He’s not giving out any interviews. He kind of wants to rest, or something. I don’t know what he came to Madrid for. Why’d’nt he go to some resort along the sea, or something? You can’t rest in Madrid. It’s always hopping.”
It’s not Madrid that’s always hopping, Quint protested inwardly, it’s the expatriate set, led by the Dempseys.
Quint said, “I’m not just a newspaperman, Ferd. This is a bit above the usual level.” He hated himself for trying to pull rank. In fact, he felt like a fool.
Ferd said, unhappily, “Gosh, Quint. There was a New York Times man around yesterday. The Professor wouldn’t even see him.”
Quint said, “I think you’ve got the wrong idea. I don’t want an interview. Tell him I was fascinated by what he said about World Government the other night, and wanted to talk to him about it.”
“Oh,” Ferd said dubiously.
�
�At least tell him, and call me back if he wouldn’t mind seeing me.” Quint hung up.
The return call, and invitation, came within fifteen minutes.
It was Marty who met him at the door of the penthouse. Marty looking distressed as Marty Dempsey always looked in the morning. Marty wearing a housecoat, bearing an enormous highball glass in her hand, and looking every year of her fifty odd years.
“Dahling,” she shrilled at him in her whisky tenor. “Whatever are you doing up and around at this time of day, you poor boy?”
“It’s practically noon.” He gave her a peck on the cheek. “I wanted to see Professor Ferencsik.”
“Oh, Uncle Nick. He’s an ogre. He won’t talk to anyone, dahling. It was all we could do to have him make an appearance at the party. And then he retired to his rooms and sulked before things hardly got going.”
“Ferd fixed it up for me,” Quint said easily. “What in the world’s Professor Ferencsik doing in Madrid, anyway? I’d expect him to wind up at UCLA, teaching. Or in Vienna, or Paris or someplace. Now that he’s left Hungary.”
Marty took a pull at her glass. “Oh, he came to see Ferd and me,” she said archly. “We’re old, old friends you know.” She frowned slightly, as though trying to remember something not especially important. “There was something else he wanted to do here, I don’t think I was listening very well. Have a quick one, Quint?”
He shook his head, “Recovering from last night,” he told her. “A hair of the dog doesn’t do me any good. I either have to take the whole dog, or nothing. And then I’ve started all over again.”
“Poor dahling,” she said vaguely, patting the side of his cheek. “I’ll take you to Uncle Nick. But don’t blame me if he throws you out.”
Ferd and Marty had done the Professor well. He had a small suite of his own. Room, bath and a sitting-room study. Possibly a bit on the garish side for a noted medical scientist whose clothes were a touch seedy and worn as though he couldn’t care less.
He shook hands hesitantly. “I recall you from the other night, young man,” he said. “You didn’t seem to have much to say at the time.”
Once Departed Page 7
