The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  A rather unreal discussion on wiretapping was continuing when Patel returned, and he said indignantly that it was not only unethical but ridiculous.

  ‘How could you tap all the phones in Rehovot? It would need a regiment of technicians. People would just not use the phone here.’

  ‘True enough,’ Ham admitted. ‘And anyway, he wouldn’t be calling his secret service – just some friend, with some kind of coded crap. You read about these things,’ he said, nodding.

  ‘If such a person exists here at all,’ Patel said with a smile. ‘Look, I am no expert, but another idea does occur. Didn’t you say the plane was half empty, Igor, and that you booked in easily?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What was to prevent him doing the same? If you were being watched, and seen checking in, couldn’t he have booked in after you?’

  ‘Followed Igor to the airport?’ Connie said.

  ‘Certainly, from his home, why not?’

  ‘Igor wasn’t home last night,’ Ham said.

  I said, ‘I was at a hotel.’

  Three of those present knew that this wasn’t the case, so a certain silence set in.

  ‘That gives even another alternative,’ Patel said. ‘If you had, so to speak, disappeared, mightn’t it have been supposed you were planning to fly to Israel? Someone might have been stationed at the airport. Not so? How prolific one becomes.’

  ‘And the initials on the case?’ Connie said.

  ‘Prepared in advance. Igor uses such a case. Quite feasible, don’t you think?’

  It was; all feasible, as he said. My head swam as the talk went on. I was watching the smoked salmon and the little parcels of perfume skidding endlessly across the floor. A natural enough accident, and at the same time disarming; as Hopcroft had been disarmed on stepping out of the lift at Tancred Court. The same operation, even: the case snitched at the last moment when papers were expected to be in it. Except that this time they had been.

  *

  The theory that someone might have waited at the airport and booked in after me didn’t survive the night.

  The airline in London reported that no tickets had been sold or reservations made after eight in the morning; that was even before I’d left the flat, never mind arrived at the airport.

  The overladen couple hadn’t made the flight, though they had been booked in. The details they had supplied were false.

  No; stage-managed from Rehovot, all of it.

  2

  Meyer wasn’t shaved when I breakfasted with-him in the morning. He’d had as little sleep as I. He said immediately, ‘Did you tell anyone about the lab books in London?’

  ‘Connie, Ham Wyke, Marta.’

  ‘Who are they gabbing to?’

  ‘They won’t be.’

  ‘You have to go and get the goddam things.’

  ‘Yes.’ I’d been worrying over this, too. ‘Well, I won’t be going, ‘I said.’ For one thing, I am being watched, so there is no point. For another, I’m not a hero.’

  ‘What about this girl of yours there?’

  ‘She hasn’t got a key. Also she’s probably being watched herself.’ I didn’t mention some other reservations.

  ‘Would your father hand the papers to anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Someone in authority, from the Embassy.’

  ‘He knows about people in authority at embassies.’

  ‘With a letter from you in your own handwriting.’

  ‘He knows about letters from people in their own handwriting, too. He knows all the wrong things, my old dad. Anyway, do you want him to know what he’s got sitting there?’

  He thought about it. ‘What, then – we hire burglars, agents, what?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Meyer!’

  ‘I know, I know. At my time of life, cloak and dagger,’ he said miserably.

  ‘The question is, am I going to get to your time of life? There is this spy in the Institute, keeping an eye on things.’

  ‘That I goddam refuse to believe.’

  ‘On me, in fact. I’m not moving anywhere till he’s been sprung.’

  He drank his coffee, gloomily watching me.

  ‘Is a wiretap impossible?’ I said.

  He put his cup down rather sharply. ‘Wiretaps. Where they play a recorder and listen in?’

  ‘Wyke’s idea, not mine.’

  ‘Well, it stinks! What is this – the Kremlin?’

  I got on with my breakfast.

  ‘I feel old today,’ he said.

  ‘So do I. I live more here. I stay awake.’

  ‘What useful things did you think of while awake?’

  ‘Volume 15.’

  ‘Screw volume 15.’

  ‘With pleasure. I’m sorry I ever heard of it,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve surely got copies of that stuff.’

  ‘Not of the last twenty or so footnotes. Complicated footnotes. I wrote them.’

  ‘So you’ll write them again.’ He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘A bastard sits here watching, reporting?’

  ‘If it’s any consolation, he can’t have reported much. What’s he got? Presumably not the batatas or Vava’s process. The single reference in the letter to Haber, perhaps – that was bandied around enough. And Pickles lab books. Well, the best of luck with those.’

  ‘Say, wait a minute,’ Meyer said. He was looking at me rather queerly. ‘Did Haber express further interest in that process?’

  ‘He never expressed any.’

  ‘Isn’t that the period of volume 15?’

  ‘Not exactly. Volume 15 only goes up to –’

  ‘Well, it goddam is!’ he said. ‘And he did express interest. He was very interested.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I will,’ I said.

  ‘Have a cup of coffee, Igor.’ The salty look was back in his eye again. ‘You know, already I feel younger.’ He started telling me what it was that I ought to see.

  *

  It needed a pass to get into the special greenhouse, and the man on the door still had to check by phone, even though I was with Finster. It was hot outside, but a great deal hotter in. The geneticist working there was in shorts and sandals.

  The plants due to change the world didn’t take up too much room. The original lump had been duly forced into supplying ten cuttings, and these had recently been forced into supplying another ten each. The sprigs were growing away in individual small pots, eight dozen or so of them, a little stick supporting each skinny vine. The hulk of Uri’s specimen was being grown on for experimental purposes; bits of it were going to Finster. It was a mass of greenery.

  Since first struck, the plant had made almost ten pounds of tuber, as well as supplying the shoots. There was a wigwam of sticks around it. The thing seemed to wax a little more as I looked at it. Pale green tendrils delicately felt their way around the wigwam in the Turkish-bath air.

  ‘This is some plant,’ the geneticist said. He was looking at it quite affectionately as he wiped his streaming face with his hat. ‘All it eats is the sun. A starch factory.’

  He brushed away the soil at the base. A surly-looking hump, something between the color of a tomato and a beet lurked dustily there. I thought I almost saw it move.

  ‘How much?’ he said to Finster.

  ‘A hundred grams.’

  The man produced a knife and sliced off a section with the dexterity of a butcher. He weighed it and puffed powder on the bleeding side of the tuber, while Finster placed the small steak in a plastic box.

  It was quite cool in the blazing sun after the greenhouse; and upstairs in the Daniel Sieff cooler still. Finster locked his steak carefully away before showing me the results of his latest fermentation. The liquid dripping out of the fermenter was of an ominous beerlike shade. He uncapped the jar and inclined it toward me.

  The rank smell was stronger than ever.

  The yield from Vava’s batatas, as I already knew, was something trem
endous. So was the carotene. Finster inclined his own powerful nose over the vessel before gloomily recapping it. Then he wrote out what was required. Incurious as ever, he hadn’t asked a single question. As Meyer had said, he’d be mute as a stone.

  There wasn’t anybody in the basement archives of the Wix, only Alizia. I sat in a corner and went through the boxes for October, 1933. The original of the letter to Haber was there, October 2nd. I recalled that there had been an exchange between them not long after, and hunted it down: yes, October 16th:

  Im bezug zu Rutherford die momentane Position …

  Rutherford was still trying. Approaches were still being made about the Nazi levy. More to the point, it was a one-pager: plenty of space for a P.S. However, there was no P.S.

  I wrote the P.S. myself, in Meyer’s study.

  P.S. You inquired after Vava’s results. His bacterium and the proposed constituents for the Ipomoea …

  I did it in German. The formula had been reduced to five simple lines, and Horowitz had made the few alterations that rendered it into intelligent nonsense. The formula itself gave no problem, but the required words in Weizmann’s handwriting took some finding in his German correspondence. I copied them through tracing paper, and had several shots before assembling the P.S. into a coherent whole. After a few tries, letter and P.S. were both copied on a single sheet.

  The effect was rather blurred and aged, curiously convincing. Large numbers of originals had been sent for safekeeping to Canada in the Second World War, and somewhat amateurishly photostated there. This looked very like one of them.

  It was still not one o’clock when the manufactured copy was back in the archives, and inserted in position, October 16, 1933. Trap set.

  Meyer had a tea party in the afternoon. I wasn’t at it, but at coffee at the Sassoons’ in the evening, a couple of people came up and commented on the P.S. that had been found in the archives. They hadn’t been at the tea party either. News traveled at Rehovot.

  3

  Events so soon became chaotic mat it seems a good idea now to get the order of them right. It was Wednesday that I’d picked up the lab books from Miss Greatorex, Thursday that I’d flown to Israel without them, and Friday when the bogus P.S. went into the files.

  I found I’d landed into a series of half-days and holidays. Friday was a half-day because it was the eve of the Sabbath. Saturday was the Sabbath. Tuesday was a half-day because it was the eve of Remembrance Day. Wednesday was Remembrance Day, followed by Thursday, which was Independence Day; followed once more by Friday, which was the eve of the Sabbath.

  Because of this flurry of ceremonial days, President Katzir was tied up in Jerusalem being the President. He was still a professor on the Rehovot faculty, and liked to get down once a week to keep an eye on his scientific team. He had a house across the courtyard from Ham; a military guard post was on it since he’d assumed the Presidency of the State.

  He had only a few hours available on Sunday this week. Meyer had been in touch with him about Kaplan’s desire for a letter of appreciation, and had told me he might want to see me and to keep Sunday free.

  Before Sunday, however, came Saturday (a rolling Saturday, spent in a now traditional manner in a former President’s bed), and before that the busy Friday. That was the evening I was at the Sassoons’ for coffee. I walked Marta back from there.

  It was a delicious night, the scent of late orange blossom in the air, and a bit of moon lying on its back in the different sky of Israel. The tryst had already been arranged for the following day. All the same, moon and bloom were at work, and the place was deserted. She felt like a trip into the orange groves.

  The groves were on private land and enclosed by chain-link fencing but her keen eye spotted a gap in it not far from the memorial plaza, so an entry was soon effected. Later on, we looked at the moon and strolled back to the Lunenfeld-Kunin. Among the subjects under review, however, one lingered later. Apropos volume 15, she told me something Patel had said to her.

  ‘He said that whoever took your case couldn’t be after your manuscript and it might easily turn up in the post. It’s true enough, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was thinking rather well last night, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Wasn’t he?’

  Patel had been thinking well. It struck me on reflection that if he thought volume 15 might turn up, it very easily might.

  *

  Whether it did or not, something had obviously to be done about it. For months a pain in the neck, volume 15 now rapidly became a major one. Though it was true that a copy of all the edited material was around, it was around in London. The burglars had left it in a mess, which hadn’t properly been put right by the time I’d left. An early call to Caroline produced first a silence and then profanity.

  ‘In Israel?’ she said. ‘You mean, you got the lab books?’

  ‘Partially.’

  ‘Partially! It was little old Kaplan, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘He rang, genius. Yesterday. Out of the blue. Asking how you were.’

  ‘Oh. Well, how was he?’

  ‘Don’t you trust me at all?’ she said wearily.

  I thought about this. The tone of surprise seemed genuine. On the other hand, whoever had stage-managed it from Rehovot had needed someone in London. It seemed as well to keep an open mind. ‘Darling, what are you talking about?’ I said. ‘I was worried for you. Remember Hopcroft and poor Ettie.’

  ‘Is that true? You really worried about me?’

  ‘Well, what else?’

  ‘You’re a user. I cried last night.’

  ‘Darling –’

  ‘What do you want?’ she said.

  I told her. The pages of edited letters, though a headache, didn’t add up to the mind-numbing kind provided by the footnotes. The uncopied ones had mainly been written in the last scrambled days at the P.R.O. However, the rough notes on which they were based ought to be kicking around somewhere. She said she’d look for them, and coldly rang off.

  I made this call before going to the House on Saturday (rolling Saturday); I had my own key to the place again, and I was there on Sunday when Caroline rang back. Her disposition wasn’t any more kindly, but it had not stopped her getting on with the job. She had expressed half the pages off to me, but parts of 1932 were still in confusion. ‘I’m trying to put it together,’ she said.

  ‘Are you in the flat?’

  ‘I’ve hardly left the pissy place. I was at it till midnight.’

  ‘Darling –’

  ‘Stuff that. I’ve been thinking. You could easily have said something to – well, I’ll save it, too. How do they say “au revoir” out there?’

  ‘L’hitraot.’

  ‘That’s it.’ She hung up.

  Sunday was trying, anyway. It brought the President, and the President an invitation to tea. Minutes later, Marie-Louise Wyke phoned to say they’d had one, too, and invited me to lunch. I was deep in 1932, but around one o’clock I biked there.

  It was obvious at a glance how Ham had been spending his morning. A massive Scotch came my way from the bottle he held on greeting me. He was in high spirits. A friend had written him that a paper was soon to appear refuting the findings of his dreaded Japanese rival for the Prize. ‘He’s going to get the shit knocked out of him,’ he said gleefully.

  ‘It’s a fine thing, the brotherhood of science.’

  ‘Certainly is. Did you work yesterday, too?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’d worked with Marta yesterday.

  ‘Dedication.’

  ‘We have our disciplines.’

  ‘Well, let’s drink to them.’

  ‘Oh, don’t have another,’ Marie-Louise moaned.

  We did have another. Rather late, we rolled over to lunch. Marie-Louise prided herself on her cooking, and wasn’t best pleased at the tough savory slab that her fancy veal had turned into. The dessert was a bigger success. It was her special, Southern strawberry fluff, and so
stiff with cognac that Ham enthusiastically called for another, and insisted that I join him.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I …’

  ‘Bottoms up,’ he said, and with bearish good humor ‘poured’ me one. The Southern strawberry fluff didn’t pour, and his aim looked uncertain. I got my chair back a second late. The contents of the bowl smacked wetly in my lap.

  In the small pause he said, ‘Oh, Christ.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Marie-Louise said. ‘Igor!’

  I was staring down at the stuff, now slithering through my legs It looked as if a dreadful accident had happened to me.

  ‘Jesus, I’m sorry,’ Ham said.

  Marie-Louise had run to get a cloth, but seemed reluctant to apply it. I dried myself. A large bloodlike stain had settled over my crotch.

  ‘Oh, the lunatic!’ Marie-Louise said. ‘Take him to the bathroom. Take them off, Igor. I’ll soak them.’

  ‘I don’t think you can wash these.’

  ‘Put on a pair of Ham’s.’

  ‘Well, I –’ He obviously took several sizes larger. I suddenly recalled, with a sense of providence, the pair I’d bought in Manchester.

  ‘He’ll get them for you. Take him to the bedroom – are you completely mad?’ she said to him.

  Ham was terribly contrite; but when I took the trousers off in the bedroom and displayed what had happened to my shirt and underpants, he leaned against me and laughed feebly.

  ‘Christ, Igor, you look like you had your – You’d better take a shower.’

  I went and took one while he went to the San Martin. He’d evidently told Marie-Louise about the shirt and the underwear, because she called to me to throw them out so that she could wash them and put them in the dryer. When I did this, she put a fresh towel and a dressing gown through the door; I finished showering and went out.

  She’d made coffee, and was in a long chair on the terrace, rather thoughtful.

  ‘What is there to say?’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘This drinking of his … His judgment has always been so good, but now –’

  I groaned inwardly. A chat was on the way: the drink problem, the dropout son. However, it wasn’t this. She said, ‘He so hates gossip, but – Igor, how well do you know Ram Patel?’