The Pigeon Project

by Irving Wallace

  MacDonald had sat up on the edge of the bed, while Jordan and Alison pulled up chairs.

  Yes, he was comfortable enough, no complaints about that. But his nerves were edgy after all the recent running, and he was restless in confinement and eager for news about some escape hatch.

  Now, listening to him, Jordan was pleased that he could speak of two lights at the end of the tunnel.

  “I won’t say I have good news for you, Professor, not yet,” Jordan began, “but I do have slightly hopeful news. First of all, your own situation is better than it’s been since the police set out to catch you. No one suspects where you are. The contessa sympathizes with you—indeed, is thrilled to have you—and she is a trustworthy person. And she just told us you can stay here as long as is necessary.”

  “I appreciate that,” said MacDonald, “but I hope it’s not too long.”

  “Professor, if I can get you out of Venice tonight or tomorrow, I’ll do so. The important thing is that your staying here safely buys me more time to find a means of escape.”

  Alison interrupted. “In fact, Davis, Tim has already come up with another possibility.”

  MacDonald looked at Jordan. “Really?”

  “It’s an idea. I’ll have to see if it can work. To start with, let me bring you right up to date on where we stand. I got hold of our photographer friend, Bruno Girardi. He met with his carabinieri captain and laid out the proposition. The captain is, of course, interested. He can use the money. But he’s worried about the risk. It was left that he’s going to take it up with his wife. I can’t say what will happen. But if her response is favorable, you should be on your way out of here very soon.”

  “And if it’s not favorable?”

  “Well, then, as Alison mentioned, a second possibility presented itself earlier today.”

  Professor MacDonald was extremely attentive, waiting.

  Briefly, Jordan recounted his experience with the columnist, Schuyler Moore, at the Voltabarozzo Hydraulic Center in the early afternoon.

  “When I learned,” said Jordan, “he was accompanying a small tour outside of Venice the day after tomorrow, and I learned the guide would be my good friend Felice Huber—you remember her?—my mind started clicking. I phoned Felice after I got back to the city. I invited her to lunch tomorrow. That’s when I’ll find out if the second possibility can work.”

  MacDonald seemed lost. “I’m not sure I know what you have in mind.”

  “A group of American and English industrialists, businessmen, are being permitted to leave the city for a short time, go by bus to Mestre to tour some kind of new petrochemical factory complex. Well, Professor, if I can get you on that tour, out of here to Mestre, you’ll be free.”

  “Could we get away with it?”

  “I don’t know. This is a longer shot than the Bruno one. I have to talk Felice into letting you join her tour. If she agrees, I don’t see too much danger in getting you safely out of Venice. You’d be anonymous in a group. The group is not suspect, has high-level permission, and is, I’d guess, very VIP. The main problem presents itself once you get to the Mestre factory. There will be several carabinieri guards along to keep an eye on all of you. Somehow, you’d have to elude them, slip away without being seen, or hide somewhere in the factory until they were gone, and then make your own way to the Mestre railroad station or a car-rental agency. You don’t know your way around there, but I’d give you some directions before you left. And almost everyone in the vicinity speaks English. I’m not saying it would be easy. It wouldn’t. I can see endless dangers of being caught. Yet it is worth considering if Bruno’s captain fails us.”

  “Somehow it frightens me, attempting this alone.”

  Alison tried to bolster him. “You did make it out of the Soviet Union, Davis.”

  “That was different,” said MacDonald. “No one was looking for me when I left. Right now there are hundreds, maybe thousands, searching for me.”

  Jordan stood up and walked thoughtfully around the room. “One other thing occurred to me,” he said. “Taking the columnist, Schuyler Moore, into our confidence. I’m sure he could be trusted out of his own self-interest. If he got you or the story out, he’d have the newsbeat of the century.”

  “How could he help?” asked MacDonald, bewildered.

  “One of two ways,” said Jordan, thinking aloud. “If I let him in on the whole thing, he could join you in trying to escape the tour group. You wouldn’t be alone. You’d have a well-motivated, resourceful newspaperman to depend upon. Or if it proved impracticable for two of you to disappear from the factory tour, maybe Moore could do it alone. Then you need not even go on the tour. He would know about you, know the whole story of your discovery and the Communist hunt for you, and he’d be driven to make the escape on his own. He could get to the outside world, reveal what is going on, and half the world would be Venice’s doorstep forcing the Communists to release you. Does either of those ideas make sense?”

  “No,” said MacDonald with surprising firmness. “I don’t like exposing myself to a newspaperman. He might make a deal of some kind with the Communists, turn me over to them in exchange for getting his story out.”

  “That seems unlikely—”

  “No,” MacDonald repeated. “Leave the newspaperman out of this. I’d rather try to escape from the factory on my own, if I have to.”

  Jordan shrugged. “Whatever you say, Professor.”

  “I say let’s still wait for Bruno, and keep the Mestre factory tour as our alternative gamble.”

  Alison came to her feet, tapping her gold wristwatch. “And I say we’re going to be late for the contessa’s dinner if we don’t get right downstairs.”

  Jordan smiled at her. She was utterly captivating in her white silk blouse and challis print skirt, and with her he now welcomed an escape of his own from the maze that had occupied him all these days. “You’ve got a date, young lady,” he said, taking her arm. “And Professor, try to relax. I’m optimistic. I’ll report to you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  It had been a lively, satisfying dinner at an oblong table under an intricate, dimmed Murano chandelier. Contessa De Marchi’s food had been succulent: Parma ham with melon, small servings of pasta with clam sauce, delicate veal piccata, ice cream with delicious tiny cakes. The crossfire of talk—on world politics, travel to the Far East, the London literary scene, New York restaurants—had been ceaseless, largely dominated by the guest of honor, Cedric Foster, to whom the others deferred.

  She arose and insistently moved them on to a nearby sitting room. Taking Alison by the hand, Jordan followed the contessa into the richly carpeted room. Alison was overwhelmed by the furnishings and decorations, admiring the Louis XIV table and the oval inlaid Dutch table, pausing to examine a showcase of Meissen plates and a wall filled with oil paintings of various saints.

  As the guests chose their preferred places, Jordan sat with Alison on a divan. The servants were circling the room with trays of brandy, and Jordan took the opportunity to identify the guests in his mind once more. Unless a dinner party was given by a close friend, for mutual friends, Jordan found that he could never remember more than half the guests. At the moment, he could identify only six of the dozen persons. Besides the contessa herself, of course, there was the considerable presence of Cedric Foster, the bestselling novelist who had a penthouse in Manhattan and a twelve-room summer home in Maine. He was a tall, rather bulky man in his middle fifties. He had been handsome once, Jordan was sure, and was good-looking still, except that the advancing years had marked his features with folds and crevices, and blotches from too much drink. The brown hair on his head had begun to recede above his forehead. His carriage was erect, his attire natty, with Charvet shirt, Hermes tie, an English navy blazer, and sharply creased gray trousers. He appeared virile and wrote virile, but in the lilt of his speech, his movements and gestures, his overattentiveness to his younger male companion, there was a contradiction that definitely suggested the homos
exual.

  Right now, Jordan observed, as Cedric Foster took a snifter of Martell, he was plainly irked with his male companion seated a few feet from him. Jordan had noticed this irritation several times during dinner, and he saw it now. The companion, whose first name Jordan recalled to be Ian, was a slender, rather beautiful young man in his twenties, American and effeminate. And as at the dinner table, Ian was devoting himself to a darkly attractive, long-haired, vivacious young Italian publisher from Milan, a thirty-year-old named Sergio, who spoke charmingly broken English and flashed straight white teeth when he smiled, which was often. Less obviously, but most assuredly, he too was a homosexual.

  Jordan could see that Cedric Foster’s annoyance with Ian had deepened, and that he was jealous of his lover’s enchantment with a potential rival. Jordan wondered whether Alison was aware of this byplay, and then he realized that her attention was being given to Teresa Fantoni across the room.

  For Jordan, Teresa Fantoni needed no remembrance. She was famous. She was Italy’s gift to the cinema, a glamorous motion-picture actress whose intense sensual beauty had given her international renown for two decades.

  “God, isn’t she gorgeous,” Alison whispered.

  “Wasn’t she gorgeous,” Jordan corrected her with no unkindness to the subject.

  “She’s still something to look at,” said Alison. “I’d like to look like that at—what must she be?—forty, I’d say.”

  “You will, only better,” he said, adding in an undertone, “especially with a shot of C-98.”

  He feasted his eyes on Teresa Fantoni. She was, indeed, something. Reddish hair drawn back tightly into a chignon, which accented her gaunt face with its high cheekbones, small broad nose and generous crimson lips. She was wearing a close-fitting sequined dress, deeply cut at the bosom so that a portion of each breast overflowed and was visible. She was pouting or brooding—Jordan could not tell which—and only half listening to the guest on her right, who was trying to engage her in conversation. The guest addressing her was Jordan’s Venetian acquaintance Oreste Memo, the violinist in the Quadri café orchestra. When Jordan and Alison had been introduced to the guests, he had been surprised to find Oreste Memo among them. Working as a musician in a popular tourist café hardly seemed the ticket to attendance at a small, aristocratic dinner in a palazzo. Then Jordan remembered Memo’s special status. He was a gifted modern composer, recently working on a promising musical play, and while he had not yet made it in the big time, Contessa De Marchi believed in his gifts and was his patroness.

  These were the guests whom Jordan remembered by name, or who had some identity for him. The others in the room were blurs. One, Jordan knew, was Cedric Foster’s American literary agent. There was a marchesa from Mantova, who was top-heavy and spoke in superlatives. There was a couple named Albrizzi or Barozzi or Grimani—one of those important old-family Venetian names. The remaining three were wealthy shipping people.

  The servants had left the room and the guests were together, and now the contessa faced the social problem all rigid hostesses always faced. Had she allowed the guests to stay on at the dinner table, where they had become comfortable with their partners and were engaged in ongoing dialogues, the party would have stayed lively. But by uprooting them, stopping their conversations, marching them to a new setting, scrambling them into a new seating arrangement, she had stopped the party cold.

  But she’ll save it, Jordan thought. He had seen this situation a half a dozen times before at the contessa’s parties. Each time she had rescued her guests from the doldrums by dropping among them a sensational bit of gossip or posing a wildly provocative question that stimulated conversations to begin again.

  Jordan watched her with amusement and saw that the Contessa Elvira De Marchi was about to do it once more.

  “At the table, just before we left dinner,” the contessa began in a loud, high-pitched voice, addressing herself to Cedric Foster in particular and the rest of the room in general, “Cedric and I were discussing fascinating people we have met recently, and how few there were. Isn’t that right, Cedric?”

  “Too few, unfortunately,” said Cedric Foster sullenly, his attention still on Ian and Sergio.

  “Well, let me tell you,” the contessa went on, “a short time ago, within the last few weeks, I met the most utterly fascinating man I’ve met in years. What he had to tell me about himself, his work, has excited my imagination beyond belief. The man was an American scientist visiting Venice. A gerontologist, actually—that is, a scientist who is trying to prolong the human lifespan.”

  Je-sus, Jordan groaned inwardly, she’s not going to dare talk about MacDonald, is she? Even if her account was disguised, it carried risk. But he knew his contessa. Trustworthy and decent as she was, she would flirt with any danger if it helped her make a successful party. Jordan glanced at Alison worriedly, and she met his eyes with a bewildered and helpless look.

  The contessa, smiling sweetly at Jordan and Alison and the others, was going on.

  “This gerontologist told me, actually sat here and told me, that he was in the last phase of an experiment that if successful—and he believed it would be successful—would provide us with a formula that would allow all of us, here and everywhere in the world, to live to the age of 150 years in health and vigor. Would you believe that?”

  “I, for one, don’t,” said Cedric Foster somewhat nastily. “He was giving you a good dose of science fiction.”

  “But it’s absolutely true!” exclaimed the contessa, turning toward Foster. “This scientist is a man of unimpeachable integrity, the winner of many of the world’s great prizes. He told me it’s the biggest secret in science today, this breakthrough, this being on the verge of producing something that will extend each of our lives to 150 and keep us young and trim in all the decades before.”

  “You believe this will happen?” Teresa Fantoni inquired from across the room. “He was not teasing you?”

  “He was absolutely earnest, Teresa. He weighed every word he spoke to me.”

  “Did he speak to you of when this formula will be available?” asked Teresa Fantoni.

  “Yes, I asked him that very question,” said the contessa. “If his final experiment is successful, as he believes it will be, he says the formula will be available in the near future. It was my impression he meant it would be available to us in two or three years.”

  Cedric Foster had given his full attention to the contessa at last. He was showing more interest, less skepticism. “This man, Contessa—you really believe him?”

  “If you knew who he was, you’d believe him too.”

  “Well, I’d like to believe him. What’s his name?”

  Jordan held his breath, staring hard at the contessa. She caught his concern, and reassured him with the wink of a smile, and then addressed herself to her guest of honor. “Cedric, I wish I could tell you his name, but I’m pledged not to reveal it. He does not want his momentous achievement—or near achievement—made public until it is ready. The press would hound him, and overplay it prematurely, and even distort it. I’m sorry, Cedric dear, you’ll have to take my word and have to wait.”

  “You hear something good and there’s always a catch to it,” said Foster-sourly.

  “There’s no catch to this, Cedric. It’s simply secret, and it’ll be out soon, and that’ll be good news for all of us.” She paused. “Or will it be? That’s why I brought it up. To get your reaction to such a discovery.”

  Ian’s small hands fluttered for attention. “How would you expect us to react, Contessa De Marchi? It would be a divine gift to everyone happy to be alive on earth. Who wouldn’t want to live on and on and on?”

  “That, Ian, is one of the questions,” said the contessa. “I’ve given the possibility some thought. The social implications of almost everyone’s living until 150 are simply staggering. For example, I can see how prolongation of life would work to the disadvantage of young people.”

  “How?” asked Ian.
>
  “For one thing,” said the contessa, “the young people now have one thing in their favor—their youth—their good healthy looks, their strength, their vigor in sex, sports, careers. But if life were doubled, if middle-aged people remained healthy twice as long, they would give the young competition in sex, sports, careers, besides also having the bonuses of experience, possibly more wealth, surely more wisdom. In short, the young would lose their only advantages. But the young would be handicapped even further. With longevity, older people would not be quitting or retiring from their jobs to make way for younger ones. Older people would go on working twice as long. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for the upcoming young to find jobs.”

  Teresa Fantoni strained forward in her seat. “Forgive me, Contessa, but what you speak of are minor considerations. Every human on earth would celebrate the opportunity to live in health twice as long. The old would simply take longer to become older, but sooner or later, they would give way to the younger. There is no question. Prolonged life, without the—the signs of age, without infirmity, would be a blessing.”

  The contessa, Jordan could see, was happy. After-dinner sluggishness had evaporated. Her gathering had come to live. He could see her readying herself to take her provocation a logical step further. “Very well, a universal blessing,” the contessa said to the actress. “Suppose that is true. Then a second question invites itself. If this discovery comes to pass, what would any of you—any of you who choose to answer—do with this miracle, this guarantee to live at least 150 years on earth?” She looked inquiringly around the room at her guests. She held on Oreste Memo. “You, Oreste—I see you are thoughtful. Are you considering what 150 years of life would mean to you?”

  Oreste Memo passed his long fingers through his blond hair. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he said haltingly. “I quite agree with Miss Fantoni. It would be a blessing, especially for creative people. Imagine if Michelangelo, Bach, Beethoven, Shakespeare, even Picasso, Gershwin, had each enjoyed 150 years, with their powers intact, to develop their creations. How mankind would have benefited.”