The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘I want his published papers up to 1910.’

  She got them for me. ‘Igor, sit down. For God’s sake, what is it?’

  I couldn’t tell her what it was. I didn’t know. I took the papers from her, several sheets of them. The list started in 1899 with a paper in German. I went carefully with my finger down the first page and stopped.

  ‘Organomagnesiumbromides.’

  It was at the end of a line, and I went to the beginning.

  The Action of Anhydrides of Organomagnesiumbromides.

  Samuel Shrowder PICKLES and Charles WEIZMANN.

  Proc. Chem. Soc, 1904, 20201. Chem. Zentr., 1905, I, 236.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Connie said, in something of a frenzy.

  ‘He wanted Pickles.’

  ‘What pickles?’

  ‘Samuel Shrowder Pickles.’

  ‘What? What?’ On her neat little legs she was now jumping.

  ‘He didn’t want chutney.’

  ‘You know he didn’t. He wanted Grignard.’

  ‘He wanted Pickles. He wanted the Grignard he’d done with Pickles.’

  ‘Igor, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, dear. Oh, dear me!’ I said, suddenly shocked. I’d just remembered something else, something absolutely incredible. I said, ‘Connie, we’ve got volume 3 of the published letters, haven’t we?’

  Connie silently picked the volume off a shelf and gave me it, and I opened to the index. Pickles, S. S. Page 342.

  I turned to page 342.

  Manchester, 13 September 1904

  Dear Verochka,

  I have as a matter of fact decided not to write any more but to wait until you get around to sending me a letter, as incidentally you promised in your last postcard. Since my return from Vienna I have been writing regularly, either every day or every other day …

  I looked up at Connie with staring eyes. I’d read this letter even before I’d left London. I’d not only read it, I’d written it, in Russian, for little Kaplan in Manchester.

  There remains little to write about myself. My days and weeks are very monotonous, consisting entirely of laboratory work, and this is progressing very well. The end of the vacation is already approaching and people are gradually coming back. Perkin’s assistant arrived the other day. His name is Pickles. It’s four days since we began working together, and I am very pleased. In the first place there is a human being with whom one can exchange a few words during the day. Secondly, I can talk to him in English, which is extremely useful …

  Connie read to the end, and looked at me. From my jumbled remarks, and from the letter, she had evidently made some kind of assessment. She reached for a packet of cigarettes, gave me one and herself one, and lit them.

  ‘Have we got anything on him?’ I said.

  ‘I doubt it.’ We were still staring at each other, and for some reason. talking in hushed voices. ‘I mean, why would we? Is that all he did with him?’

  I looked at the list again. There was another paper with Pickles.

  Halogen Derivatives of Naphthacenquinone.

  Samuel Shrowder PICKLES and Charles WEIZMANN.

  Proc. Chem. Soc., 1904, 20220. Chem. Zentr., 1905, I, 364.

  That was all. He’d done a couple of papers with Perkin’s assistant.

  ‘Well, I’ll see. Maybe – There’s a pile of old correspondence somewhere. It’s from when the researchers were looking into sources. They made a general inquiry for letters in Manchester. It was sometime like the early 1960s.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Well, let me think. There is old stuff in that storeroom next to Harold upstairs. I will look into it.’

  While she did, I looked into something else. I had an elusive impression: some other thing I’d read about Pickles, somewhere, at some time. Where? I hunted the shelves for Weizmann’s own autobiographical notes, found a copy, dog-eared, no index. I thumbed through his Manchester days, his first days at the university, with the place almost to himself. Yes.

  With this complete absence of distraction my work progressed rather well, and when Professor Perkin returned about six or seven weeks after our first interview, I was glad to have something to show him. He seemed pleased and was most encouraging. I had as my assistant a young demonstrator by the name of Pickles, a Lancashire boy with a massive North Country accent. He was an extremely likable fellow, whose only defect was his illusion that he could speak German.

  Connie returned just in time to see my expression. She didn’t say anything, but read where my finger was still placed. She didn’t say anything then, either.

  ‘Do you think his German would make a cat laugh?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I – I guess so.’

  ‘It’s him, Connie.’

  ‘But – we have been searching Bradford. This is Manchester.’

  ‘Connie, it’s him. I know it.’

  ‘Igor, stop shaking. Sit down. I’m having the storeroom cleared. If there’s anything there, we will soon know it. I will get you coffee.’

  While she did it, I phoned Emanuel. He took down the details and said he’d call me back. Then I went to Chaimchik’s room and concentrated on the memorandum.

  There was not now such an enormous area to concentrate on. With so many of the missing details supplied, the thing was beginning to read like a scenario, almost a comedy of errors. By only a small exercise of the imagination, it was possible to insert the stage directions.

  He’d started off in fine style, pointing out that Vava’s apparent or projected difficulties with carotene could be turned to good account, could even become the ‘trigger to tremendously increased yields’; but almost immediately had run into the snarl-up with Grignard and Pickles.

  No doubt confused by his grumbling over the milk, Miss Knowall had assumed he was still issuing general food directions. He had triumphantly remembered Grignard and Pickles, and she had triumphantly translated it into a short order – evidently for immediate execution.

  NEW PAGE:

  (Flourishes; summonses; enter Secretary.)

  Start. Where have you been?

  (She’d been to see Nurse.)

  We have had –

  (Enter Nurse on cue.)

  Nurse, I am busy.

  (Smiling Nurse archly dangles chutney before fractious Patient.)

  What do I want with it? Of course I don’t want it. Idiots.

  (Secretary throws look at Nurse; Nurse throws bigger one at Secretary, and exits.)

  So write …Certainly a very large conversion to methyl. He has the lab books himself. You will get the book for me … I will rest a little and tell you.

  (Confusion on part of Secretary. Has dreaded short order been mooted again? Exit Secretary, scratching head with pencil.)

  NEW PAGE:

  (Flourishes; summonses; enter Secretary.)

  There can be no doubt that with the methyl already present together with the carotene that it is the answer to the problem. There is no doubt. Later I will tell you … You will get me it … I have told you.

  Secretary’s eyes roll; head swims; tremulous enquiry session produces quick flurry of capitals: CROMER-LE-POYTH, LE-ROY-PARMA, COONE FIRTH

  Tell Nurse the teeth.

  (Exit Secretary, not knowing whether on knee or elbow, and returns with Nurse, who supplies, or makes adjustments to, Teeth; after which several coherent paragraphs.)

  NEW PAGE:

  (Enter Secretary.)

  I have been thinking.

  (Secretary studies Patient; enquires if thought to any purpose.)

  Of course, idiot. Write down.

  (Irascibility indicates further exchanges as to short order: petrified Secretary doesn’t know whether to write it down or not; doesn’t; awaits enlightenment.)

  Perhaps the Bradford people will be able to let us know … I will think again later.

  (Further musing as to present location of short order emboldens Secretary to further attempt; exits.)

&n
bsp; NEW PAGE:

  (Enter Secretary, nervously.)

  Write.

  (Enter Nurse, also nervously, with pot of authentic Greenyard’s to tempt capricious palate.)

  What? What is it with these lunatics? How many times?

  (Exit Nurse, throwing huge look at Secretary, who writes quick marginal note banning all short orders, and stoically disregards further requests. Maddened Patient retires into reverie.)

  That German would make a cat laugh. Never mind, he will prove the best internationalist of us all.

  Well, that must have been the way of it, and I was still musing when Connie came in with a dusty box file. It was marked ‘Manchester,’ and in it was a bulging mass of papers.

  The Manchester period had proved a knotty one for the researchers. With almost nine years of letters missing, a special effort had been thrown in. There were dozens of interviews with people who’d known him (including little Kaplan), recollections of old students. He’d shifted lodgings a good deal in his early days, and attics and cellars had been scoured with a little but not much result. A Professor G. N. Burckhardt, senior tutor of the university’s organic chemistry department, had undertaken to check all university documents, and a lengthy correspondence had followed.

  The chemistry department had been known as Owens College in Weizmann’s day, and there were various abstracts from annual college reports in which his name figured (as Dr Charles Weizmann, his nom de guerre at the university). Burckhardt had also, from other records, compiled his own list of all those who must have worked with him. Several question-and-answer letters showed him digging up further particulars on specific people, with whom the researchers had then established their own communications. But nobody had raised any queries about Pickles. He was there, however, modestly, in the middle of a list, unticked, unringed, unqueried.

  PICKES, S. S. B. 15 Apr. 1878. 1st Class Hons. Chemistry, Man U. 1903. M.Sc. 1906. D.Sc. 1908. Research assist. Prof. Perkin. Subsequent Career: Research Chemist to Spencer Moulton & Co., Bradford-on-Avon, Wilts. D. 12 Feb. 1962.

  ‘Bradford, Wilts?’ Connie said.

  ‘It’s another county, Wiltshire.’

  ‘Oh, well. That makes twelve of them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘D. 1962.’

  ‘Quite.’ As with Vava.

  We looked silently at the spare obituary, and I thought again of the empty university in the summer of 1904, and the pair of them working away in the basement, Chaimchik trying out his English, and the likable fellow his German. How differently their subsequent careers had gone: one embarking on the fierce tide that had carried him to a state funeral and the grassy plot below, the other on the quieter waters of the Avon to Spencer Moulton & Co. – and perhaps a grassy plot in Wilts.

  Connie’s phone rang. She answered it and called me.

  Emanuel’s voice at the other end was rather subdued.

  ‘Well, nothing doing,’ he said.

  ‘No carotene?’

  ‘Not a trace.’

  ‘And the other paper?’

  ‘Quite impossible.’

  ‘But there must be something –’

  ‘I agree,’ he said. Definitely something strange in his voice.

  I said, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Finster has found something. Something very odd.’

  2

  The three of us examined it. The fermented liquid wasn’t the colorless stuff I’d seen before, and it didn’t smell as nice. It looked like a jar of cider, and it smelled rank.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

  ‘This is not so easy to say,’ Finster said.

  ‘Hasn’t it produced what you thought?’

  ‘Far more than we thought!’

  The bacterium from Paris was a later generation of the one used by Vava, but anything its ancestor could do it could do better. It had practically torn the soul out of the potato. It had done it at ferocious speed, and had even tried to come back for more. (‘Traces of secondary fermentation’ was Finster’s explanation of the phenomenon.) In the process it had produced several unwanted and at the moment inexplicable properties, which had actually brought an abrupt shift downward in the octane number. With Vava’s batatas the shift would occur on a massive scale.

  I watched the puzzled frowns of the scientists in a mood of some serenity. On every point where it had been possible to check, Chaimchik had come up trumps. He’d said there was correspondence with Vava, and despite a baffling lack of copies, correspondence there had been. He had said the process depended on two stages. Evidently it did. He had foretold a problem with carotene. One had just surfaced. And he’d also said that the problem carried its own solution.

  That looked like the next, and last, operation.

  *

  I sat with Beylis a bit later while he pored over the work of Kuhn. He impatiently flipped papers aside after reading, and I glanced at them.

  Investigations into the Structure of Long-Chain Compounds Containing Conjugate Double Bonds: The Polyenes and Diphenylpolyenes Connected with the Chemical Nature of Carotenoids.

  Heavy stuff, Kuhn.

  All the same, the phrases that made any sense made cheering sense rather than otherwise. As he had got older and investigated his subject more deeply, Kuhn had come to the conclusion that he knew practically nothing about it. The honest man had said so:

  The fat-soluble yellow colouring materials, so widely spread through nature, and with a role evidently vital … A universality which seems to bespeak some basic but as yet unknown significance …

  Strange stuff, the stuff in carrots that helped you see in the dark; and more of it about, evidently, than folks knew.

  *

  Meyer slammed his phone down and looked at me. He’d scowled horribly to hear of such long-chain compounds containing conjugate double bonds.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ he said.

  ‘Well, you insisted on hearing. They don’t understand it.’

  ‘Do you understand it?’

  ‘No, I don’t understand it.’

  ‘So who understands it?’

  ‘Nobody. That’s the point. They’re all dead,’ I said. ‘Kuhn’s dead. He spent a lifetime trying to understand it. Vava’s dead. He never began to. Weizmann’s dead. He’d just begun to. And Pickles is dead. He wasn’t even aware of it. But the answers are in his lab books.’

  ‘Lab books,’ Meyer said, grasping at something concrete. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Perhaps the Bradford people will be able to let us know.’

  He looked at me sharply.

  ‘I will think again later,’ I quoted further.

  I couldn’t tell if he knew I was quoting. I couldn’t tell if he knew he was doing it himself when after a moment or two he spoke. He spoke briefly and meditatively. ‘It’s a funny world,’ he said with a sigh.

  *

  I did think later. I thought for most of the night. It was a noisy night. A man called Dr Foka Hirsch was having a Christmas party. He had it at his country home at Caesarea. Foka Hirsch was a bachelor, a rich elderly bachelor, the local agent for Vickers Armstrong, and he liked to keep in touch with the scientific establishment. I’d been to his parties before. I wasn’t a very convivial guest at this one.

  *

  I tied things up next day, and went back the one after. I made my farewells the evening before and spent half an hour with Meyer. He told me the young man from Africa was confident of the virility of his plant and knew it would respond to forcing. He anticipated taking ten cuttings from it within three months, and ten from each of these within another three. By next winter, he thought he would have several thousand for planting out.

  We had a drink on this, and then I went to Jaffa and had another with Connie and Marta. We dined at Jaffa, and afterward I bought a caftan. Connie ran Marta back first (a fond but decorous farewell), then she ran me back.

  It was December 18th that I had arrived in Israel, and the twenty-seventh that I left. In the air it suddenly
struck me that last week I’d never heard of Vava’s batatas, or ketones, or the Grignard reaction. If I was on the way now to becoming a world expert, it was only because there weren’t any others. It was in some ways a disturbing thought. The man next to me was reading a newspaper. The headline said, ‘ARABS WARN: NO INTERFERENCE.’

  Definitely disturbing.

  3

  The early-afternoon plane turned out, in the normal way, to be a late-afternoon one. It was nearly ten o’clock before I debouched wearily from the taxi in Russell Square. I went up to my seventh-floor eyrie, trudged along the corridor, put my key in the door, and paused. Someone was inside.

  My thoughts flew immediately to St Mary and St Joseph and to Terre Haute. I left the key in the lock and very carefully put my bags down. The memorandum and my notes were in the small executive case. At the end of the corridor was the fire cupboard, with its cylinders, buckets, and hose. I padded down to it, placed the case in concealment, and returned.

  Having done this, it occurred to me that with or without the case, eyes could still be made to cross. I cleared my throat, coughed, and, with my heart unpleasantly pounding, unlocked the door and, leaving it open, went inside. All the lights were on. The sound was coming from the kitchen, and I went there, my bag at the ready.

  She was just shutting the fridge door, having evidently got some ice for a long gin and tonic. She was in a dressing gown.

  ‘Caroline?’ I said.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, well.’ She’d had a bath, and also washed her hair. It was clinging damply to her head, giving her a rather furtive, not to say guttersnipe, look. She was looking guilty, anyway. She licked her lips. ‘I thought you’d put it off till tomorrow. It got late. I thought you weren’t coming.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at Willie’s?’

  ‘Things got difficult at Willie’s.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘I gave Antonia my flat, over Christmas. She’s got her bloke there.’

  ‘Oh. But won’t your parents –’

  ‘Well, I can’t go there. I’m at Willie’s.’