Cards in the Cloak

by Jeremy Bursey

  Chapter 3

  “Civilian Hunter”

  Norman Jenson was honorably discharged from the Army in 1922, and realized he had no idea what to do with his time as a civilian. Life in America had taken an uproarious turn for the exciting, and he was overwhelmed with opportunities. Capitalism was on the rise, as was industrialism, and he knew that somewhere in those growing movements, he could find his future. But what to choose, he had no idea.

  He enrolled at the University of Illinois to study economics, but even as he aced his tests and stayed loyal to his homework, he thought that he was somehow missing his calling. Getting top grades in all of his classes meant he was learning something, certainly, but his accomplishments were noticeably shallow. To him, they were just grades. He needed to get out and do something with his newfound knowledge.

  So, in 1925, at the start of his senior year at the University of Illinois, Norman applied to work as a cashier for Sears, Roebuck & Co. at its new retail store.

  Life was hectic in that first year at Sears. Because chain stores were popping up all over the country, it seemed everyone in America wanted a piece of the goods—jewelry, clothing, sewing machines, and more—and they didn’t have to wait by their mailboxes for days to get it. Norman, the point man between a suit hanging on the rack at the store and the rack in the buyer’s closet, was the facilitator of owning dreams. And he learned a valuable lesson in business: the customer is always right, except for when he’s being a jerk.

  It was that business experience that had reminded him that he needed not only to get these items of importance into the hands of customers, but he needed to get one item in particular out to them: that medicine that Maxie McWalter had invented. He had packed it in snow while he was still in France to preserve it, but then the Army had ushered him around so much that he had lost track of where he’d kept it.

  Even though he was making a meagre salary at Sears and spending most of it at the university, he was able to make a special trip to France to recover the frozen leaf he had left behind. Yet, even as he boarded the ship, he was worried about wasting his time and money, and a true student of business would’ve weighed the pros and cons of making this trip before taking it. But the factor that had convinced him to go anyway was that he had avoided sickness in the seven years since eating the Dafodil, and if the medication wasn’t what had protected him all these years, then he’d have to find that out for himself. And, if it were responsible for his uncanny run of good health, then the rest of the world needed in on it.

  When he found the leaf in the small container he had left in a hole deep in the snow all those years ago, now lying on a dry rock next to the marked tree he had used to identify its location, he immediately opened the container and untied the leaf to find it and all but one of the roots damaged from years of plant rot. And the root that had survived was nearly out of time.

  He raced back to the States to get the root in the hands of a botanist (his roommate at the university; well, the guy who’d always come over to hang out with his roommate, so someone who was like a roommate), and asked the botanist to track down the origin of the root. He also located an entomologist through a mutual friend to figure out which bug was crushed to form the insect powder, and a hematologist to identify the creature responsible for the dried blood. Unfortunately, his botanist friend was still limited in his research, so he couldn’t yet get information on the purple pollen. He would have to outsource that investigation later.

  All of the guys he had commissioned to help him (on the basis that he would provide them a finder’s fee should their research yield accurate results) went to work on their tasks, in between classes, of course, and would spend the next two months of their lives off and on tracking these mystery ingredients down. Norman, meanwhile, used his business insights to gain the interest of pharmaceutical companies to produce the medicinal form of Dafodil. He traveled to hospitals, spoke to doctors and pharmacy representatives, and grew his network from inexperienced college friends to hardened professionals who needed more than a handshake to get a deal in motion. He asked nearly every customer who came to his register at Sears if he had any drug experience—most customers were offended by the implication, and he had been disciplined by his supervisor several times as a result. He’d also accosted many random passersby on the streets of downtown Chicago to see if they knew anything. He’d gotten plenty of blank stares, slaps to the face, and punches to the gut. But he didn’t let any of it deter him. He had a business plan in mind that would make him rich and the world flu-free.

  It was a plan that was destined for greatness, provided that Nicholas Montgomery, the young botanist-in-training he had commissioned to identify the source of the root, could figure out what the hell kind of plant it had come from.

  “Just go to the Argonne Forest in France,” Norman had told him, when he asked him to explain where Maxie had found it. “It’s gotta be from there, or from somewhere in the vicinity. Honestly, I don’t care where you look. Just find it.”

  Nicholas Montgomery, botanist-in-training, agreed to find it. Then he lost the root somewhere between his apartment and the seaport. He’d gotten all the way to France before he realized it was no longer tucked away safely in his bag. When he came back a month later, he brought with him a root that looked similar to what Maxie had found, but not similar enough.

  “I stole this from a farmer’s flower pot,” Nicholas had told him when he got back. “Then I went to Paris and hit on some French women the rest of the month. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna be a father in eight months. You weren’t gonna pay me anyway.”

  It was a plan that was destined for greatness, provided that his entomologist friend, his hematologist friend, and his future palynologist friend (the guy who would study pollen) could find the origins of their respective species. His other friends gave him pretty much identical news as his former botanist friend, and he figured his future palynologist friend would screw him over just the same, so he decided to leave that guy out of the mix and not befriend him in the first place.

  Then he went back to the drawing board.