The Pigeon Project

by Irving Wallace

  “Casanova escaped it.”

  “Ah, Casanova. That one was something special. Now we speak of mere mortals.”

  “I suppose we do. Anyway, I appreciate all your information. I’d better be heading back to the main prison.”

  “And I’d better get back on duty,” said Dante. “See you soon.”

  Jordan watched the sturdy lifeguard leave. His thoughts went back to the plight of Professor MacDonald. He wondered whether MacDonald was still safely in the care of Dr. Scarpa. Then he was sure of it Few men in Venice were more trustworthy or loyal to their word than Dr. Scarpa.

  * * *

  In the huge, ornately furnished upstairs bedroom of Mayor Accardi’s Renaissance-style home, not far from the Rialto Bridge, Dr. Giovanni Scarpa had finished his examination of Margot Accardi and was tucking his stethoscope into his small leather bag.

  “Then you assure me I will live,” said Margot Accardi, rising with difficulty from the chaise longue, securing her tentlike dressing gown around her. “The last time I had the flu—”

  “It is not the flu, Margot,” Dr. Scarpa said somewhat testily. “I have told you. It is no more than a mild cold that has settled in your chest. You may have a little discomfort, but if you stay indoors, keep warm, drink plenty of liquids, you should be your old young self in two or three days.”

  “Are you prescribing anything?”

  “Not necessary,” said Dr. Scarpa. He did not believe in promoting pills, even as a placebo, when they were not warranted. He believed in the natural restorative powers of the human body, especially when it came to minor ailments. “Just avoid overexertion. And, I repeat, take liquids.”

  Dr. Scarpa closed his bag, observed Margot Accardi lumbering to the bell rope next to the bedroom door. He remembered when she had married the future mayor. She had been a big-boned, handsome young woman with some pretension toward a career in opera. She had been too lazy to pursue singing seriously and had settled into a soft life of eating, shopping, charities. In the last two decades she had gained two chins, and her person was a mountainous monument to uncounted eclaires and products of Perugina.

  “Speaking of liquids,” she said, “we will begin now.” She tugged at the bell rope. “I told Anna to have tea ready for us. Surely, it won’t hurt you to spare a few minutes for tea, Giovanni.”

  Dr. Scarpa sighed. Tea and gossip was the unfailing routine after every house call at the Accardis’. Dutifully, Dr. Scarpa brought a gilt chair to a position across from the chaise longue as Margot Accardi settled down on it and began to recount a rumor of Deputy Mayor Santin’s wife and her flirtation with a virile young assistant bartender twenty years her junior.

  In a few minutes, the tea cart was rolled in between Dr. Scarpa and his portly Scheherazade. He noted that the cart carried only a tiny pot of tea and a great heap of chocolate-covered cookies.

  As Margot Accardi concluded her first gossip, poured the tea, and then served herself a plateful of cookies, Dr. Scarpa decided it was time to divert the conversation to something more topical.

  “And how is your husband?” he inquired politely. “How is he coping with the emergency he declared?”

  “I was just coming to that. We must both have ESP.”

  “Well, it is a problem that has affected everyone in the city,” said Dr. Scarpa drily.

  Margot Accardi’s eyes brightened, and she came forward on the chaise longue, chins jiggling, and lowered her hoarse voice. “But the problem is not what everyone thinks it is,” said the mayor’s wife. “It is of much greater importance. Of world importance, really.” Her voice dropped another octave. “This is absolutely confidential, Giovanni. You are the only person on earth I’d confide in. After all, you are my doctor.”

  “You can trust me, Margot,” Dr. Scarpa said with a show of indifference.

  “And I do. I’m bursting to tell someone. Guess what?” She made a dramatic pause. “Venice has not been closed down because Cutrone and his police are trying to catch a spy.” Another pause. “In fact, there is no spy.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “No spy whatsoever,” Margot Accardi said with firmness. “They made that up because they can’t let the world know the truth. There is someone loose here they are trying to catch—and will catch—but he’s not a spy—he’s an internationally famous scientist.”

  Dr. Scarpa tried to appear surprised, knowing as he did from Tim Jordan that the fugitive he was harboring in his clinic was a scientist. At the same time, he was pleased to hear Jordan’s identification of the fugitive confirmed.

  “A scientist?” said Dr. Scarpa. “Not just any scientist,” said Margot Accardi. “Perhaps the most celebrated scientist of our time—greater than Pasteur or Ehrlich—once the word gets out about his discovery.”

  This was new. “Discovery?” repeated Dr. Scarpa. “Listen to me, Giovanni,” said Margot Accardi, “because you’ve never heard anything like it in your lifetime. This scientist, Professor Davis MacDonald—his real name—he’s a gerontologist.”

  “You don’t mean geriatrician?”

  “No, not someone who treats the diseases of old age. No, I mean gerontologist—someone who tries to prolong human life. Well, he’s done it, this Professor MacDonald. He’s made a discovery on how to prolong human life for each of us to the age of 150.”

  For the first time, Dr. Scarpa’s passive countenance cracked. He sat up. “Margot, I’m not sure I heard you correctly. Will you repeat what you just told me.”

  “About what? His discovery?”

  “About this man’s having found a way to make everyone five to the age of 150. It’s not possible.”

  Margot Accardi’s head went up and down, and her chins shook vigorously. “It’s the truth, the absolute truth. My husband confided it to me from the beginning.”

  “Who told him?”

  “The Russians. The discovery was made by MacDonald, an Englishman or American, while doing experiments in Russia. He wanted to keep his discovery from the Communists, and so he ran off with it. He came to Venice, and our Russian allies asked us to help catch him and take him and his discovery back to Russia, where it belongs. Of course, as comrades of the Russians, we will all be given priority in receiving these longevity shots.”

  Dr. Scarpa’s hand was unsteady as he tried to set down his teacup. “So now we have someone who is going to help us all live twice as long.”

  “As soon as we can catch him. My husband says he will. Won’t that be glorious?”

  “Won’t it, though,” said Dr. Scarpa bitterly. His agitation was so profound that he felt he must leave at once. He stood up. “Thank you for the—the news. I appreciate your confiding in me.”

  “You won’t repeat it to a soul?”

  “You know you can count on me, Margot. Now I had better hurry back to the office. I have an important—a very important meeting this afternoon.”

  * * *

  After leaving the motor launch that had returned them from the Lido to the pier near the front of the Hotel Danieli, Jordan had accompanied Alison past the police guards to the lobby of the hotel. She had wanted to take a shower and then take a nap before joining Jordan on his dinnertime visit to Professor MacDonald. He had wanted to check his mail slot to see if there was a message from Bruno before going out to buy some food for McDonald’s dinner.

  He had found three message slips in his box noting three telephone calls from Marisa Girardi. Each one told him, Please come to the office. Urgent.

  He had had no idea what office matter could be so urgent, unless this was Marisa’s way of telling him that her brother, Bruno, had some word on his bribe attempt with the captain of the carabinieri.

  Parting with Alison, he had promised to pick her up at five-thirty for their visit to MacDonald at Dr. Scarpa’s. Before shopping for dinner, Jordan decided that he had better get over to his neglected office and learn what Marisa considered so urgent.

  Now, on the second floor of the Assicurazioni Generali building, greeting
the guards in the anteroom, he entered the secretary’s office. “Gloria, tell Marisa I’m back and ready for her.”

  He had no sooner settled behind his desk than Marisa appeared. He made an instant comparison. She was sexier-looking, but less sexy to him than Alison. She was more familiar to him, more obvious, but less interesting than Alison. She came straight across the office to him, kissed him briefly.

  She stood over him, businesslike, and in a prosecutor’s tone of voice asked, “My God, where have you been?”

  “I was tied up with a few matters,” he said evasive.

  “But your job—there are some things I cannot handle, Tim. I haven’t seen you at all since the night I woke you up to tell you the police were coming to the Danieli.”

  “That’s it,” he said quickly. “My old college friend, the one I’m trying to get to Paris to meet with the separatists. I’ve been busy trying to find a place for him.”

  She considered him. “Is that true?”

  “Yes,” he said too quickly. “Now about all those ‘urgents’ you left at the hotel. I hope they have to do with Bruno. Has Bruno come up with something yet?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. That’s your private affair with Bruno. I want nothing to do with it. No, I haven’t seen Bruno for two days. We keep different hours. He’s chasing around with the police all the time.”

  “Then what can be so damn urgent?”

  She shook her head, momentarily wordless. “Tim, you have a job. You work for the Venice Must Live Committee. Things happen here. You have to be here some time.”

  Chastened, he softened his expression. “All right. What is it? What’s come up?”

  “Schuyler Moore,” she said.

  “The columnist?”

  “I’m told he is the most widely read journalist in the United States. I’m told that by him, anyway. Mr. Moore says he is with the American News Syndicate and because it is a wire service his column appears in 1,400 newspapers daily. He says he’s the biggest.”

  “That’s right. He’s the biggest.”

  “Well, he came in to see you this morning. You weren’t available, so I saw him. He had stopped in Venice for one day, on his way to Bucharest, and he got caught by the emergency. He’s still stuck, and he must keep up his daily column, to file the minute he gets out of here. He doesn’t know much about Venice, so he started asking around for some good story leads. Someone told him about the Venice Must Live Committee, how we are trying to save Venice from being flooded over or sinking into the sea, and that we had already installed an inflatable dam at the Porto di Lido to protect the city. This aroused his curiosity, so he came in to see us.”

  “You mean Schuyler Moore wants to write about our project?”

  “Exactly. It was not easy. At first, he wanted to see the real inflatable dam in action. I said that was impossible. It has not been tried out yet. He wanted to know why not. I told him he had better get that answer from you.”

  “You could have told him. You could have been honest on that.”

  “It should come from someone like you, Tim. Anyway, I was on my toes. I told Schuyler Moore that in one sense, the dam had been tested—in fact, many times. I told him that we had a mock-up or large miniature model of the area, especially the Porto di Lido, built so that we could test a reduced version of the inflatable dam. This fascinated him. I told him it was at an experiment station called Centro Sperimentale di Idraulica and that it was located at Voltabarozzo, not far from here near Padua. He wanted to know if we would run a test of the dam in the miniature for him, if he wrote about it. I said I thought so, if he wrote about it. I described it, and he became more and more enthusiastic and finally promised to devote two daily columns to it, maybe three.” She paused. “Tun, that would be our biggest publicity break of the year.”

  He agreed. “No question. One catch. What he wants to see is outside Venice. And the city is locked up. How do we get him out to Voltabarozzo?”

  “I anticipated that. I took care of it.” He eyed Marisa more warmly. “You’re really on the ball for a dawdling Venetian.”

  She smiled. “I’ve been Americanized by you. I even drink Cokes, eat hamburgers. What I did was phone Santin, the deputy mayor. I told him what we wanted to do and how important the publicity was for us and for the city. He spoke to Colonel Cutrone of the carabinieri. He called me back. They know you. They know me. They checked out Schuyler Moore and know him. They do give some special permissions to leave the city temporarily, and they gave us such permission.”

  Jordan’s heart leaped. He immediately saw that if he could take Schuyler Moore out of the city, he might manage to take Professor MacDonald out with them.

  Marisa was speaking again. “The one condition, for our getting this permission to leave, is that we must be accompanied by two guards from the carabinieri.”

  Jordan’s hope was dashed. No MacDonald.

  “Okay,” he said. “When does all this take place?”

  “The day after tomorrow. In the morning, at nine. I’ve arranged for a car.”

  Jordan frowned. “I had some other plans for tomorrow and the next day. It’ll be hard for me to get away. Look, Marisa, you know as much about the project as I do. I’m sure you can handle Shuyler Moore by yourself. You can take him out there. I’d appreciate it if you’d do it.”

  “No, thank you,” she said stubbornly. “I know the project fairly well. But I can’t explain and dramatize it the way you can. I can’t take the responsibility. You really know how to handle it. Remember, you were an engineer.”

  “But, Marisa—”

  She had put her foot down. “No. It’s you or no story.”

  He sighed. “Okay—day after tomorrow at nine o’clock. We’ll pick him up.”

  She bent over Jordan and kissed him. “I knew you’d do it.”

  “I knew you knew. Go back to work, Marisa. I’ve got some errands to do.”

  She started to leave, then snapped her fingers, seeming to remember something, and whirled around. “I almost forgot. Dr. Giovanni Scarpa called on the phone asking for you. He called twice. He says he must see you at once. It is urgent.”

  Jordan groaned. “More urgents. Did he say anything else?”

  “Only not to wait until dinner to see him. He would like you to come over to see him immediately. Do you have some ailment or problem?”

  “In a way,” he said with a forced smile. “Now beat it.”

  When she was gone, Jordan lingered, trying to imagine why Dr. Scarpa demanded to see him at once. Could the police have come by? Could Professor MacDonald be in further danger? Or what? Jordan had no clue, no imagined answer, and could only respond to Dr. Scarpa’s summons in person to learn what was going on. He decided not to lose time picking up Alison. He would go by himself, as fast as possible. After all, the word for the day was—urgent.

  * * *

  It was almost four-thirty in the afternoon by the time Tim Jordan arrived at the door of Dr. Giovanni Scarpa’s yellow plaster two-story combination office and dwelling.

  Inside, the nurse in blue uniform seemed to be expecting him, for she led him across the waiting room directly to Dr. Scarpa’s office. At the door, she said, “Sior dotor told me he would see you immediately. You may go right in, Mr. Jordan.”

  “Is he alone?” asked Jordan.

  “Just a few minutes ago, your friend woke up from his nap—the professor with the injured knee—and Sior dotor summoned him for a talk.” She opened the door. “Go right in.”

  Jordan entered apprehensively, closing the door behind him. He saw Dr. Scarpa behind his desk and Professor MacDonald seated on a pull-up wooden chair opposite him. Only one of them was talking. Dr. Scarpa, elbows on his desk, fingers locked before him, was speaking in a low, harsh voice. Neither one of them took any notice of Jordan. Dr. Scarpa was intent on what he was saying, and MacDonald was concentrating fully on the physician’s words.

  Jordan stood uncertainly by the closed door, listeni
ng, trying to comprehend exactly what Dr. Scarpa was saying.

  “… then the mayor’s wife told me they were not hunting a spy,” Dr. Scarpa was saying, “but a scientist—a fact I already knew but did not mention—a special kind of scientist, a gerontologist named Professor Davis MacDonald. I assume that is correct?”

  “It is correct,” said MacDonald.

  “And that you have made a discovery of how to prolong human life until approximately the age of 150 years. Is that true?”

  “It is true. I have discovered a formula I call C-98 that arrests or eliminates fatal diseases and restructures an essential part of the genetic system.”

  “You—you’ve really found this?”

  “I have. Beyond a question of doubt.”

  “And what do you mean to do with this formula?”

  “As soon as I’m free of Venice, I intend to give it to the world, for the benefit of mankind for all time.”

  “Benefit of mankind?” Dr. Scarpa echoed. Then his voice rose sharply. “Benefit of mankind?” he repeated.

  “Of course.”

  “Professor MacDonald, was the nuclear bomb invented for the benefit of mankind? Was the bubonic plague, the black death, for the benefit of mankind? Professor, if you release your C-98, you will be unleashing the greatest disaster ever visited upon the human race. You mark my word, your formula to prolong life will ultimately destroy life.”

  MacDonald’s voice also rose. “That’s absurd.”

  Taken aback by Dr. Scarpa’s accusation, Jordan made his way to the couch behind MacDonald and lowered himself onto it. He remained attentive, trying to comprehend what Dr. Scarpa meant.

  “Professor MacDonald,” Dr. Scarpa continued abrasively, “you listen to me. Perhaps I have a better picture of the consequences of your discovery than you have. I am a humanitarian, while you are a technician. I have devoted much of my adult life to studying the population explosion on earth and trying to confine the birthrate—this, this indeed for the benefit of mankind. But in one stroke you can obliterate my work and the work of all of us who are trying to contain overpopulation.”