The Virus

by Stanley Johnson

  “Look, Mr Delgrave. You’ve got to understand one thing. I am an epidemiologist. I’m only interested in the trade in live animals in so far as this trade proves to be the cause of infection that could have consequences for health in the United States. Enforcement of international treaties to which Belgium is signatory is your concern, not mine.”

  “The big men behind the trade won’t see it like that. If you pursue your enquiries, whatever your motive, they’ll see you as a threat. And then — watch out.”

  Kaplan pressed him: “Can you meet me later? Tonight? Somewhere we won’t be observed.”

  “Why? What more can I tell you?”

  “I want details of cargo movements in Zaventem at the beginning of June, especially June 5. I want to know, for example, if live monkeys from Africa were transiting through here at that time.”

  Delgrave was incredulous. “There are no records of this trade.”

  “Of course there are records.” Kaplan coaxed the man to his point of view. “There are always records. There will be false records for the international inspectors who exist only to be duped, and there will be true records for the men who run the business.”

  A shifty look crossed the Belgian’s face.

  “It may be expensive. I may have to bribe certain people.”

  As soon as the man mentioned money, Kaplan knew that he had him where he wanted him.

  “Funds will not be a problem. Believe me, when the United States wants some information, we are prepared to pay for it. And pay well.”

  Jean Delgrave smiled. The scraggy ginger moustache turned up at the corners.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Kaplan had one last request. “Delgrave, can you spare me your ID till this evening? You won’t need it until you come back on duty, will you? I’d like to have a look around.”

  Jean Delgrave’s initial reluctance was overcome when Kaplan pressed ten thousand Belgian francs into his hand.

  “That’s on account. For expenses. There will be more later.”

  Kaplan pinned Delgrave’s plastic ID to his lapel. The faces weren’t very similar. Delgrave’s — at least in the photo — had a narrow pinched look which Kaplan didn’t much fancy. But no one ever looked at the photos — not in his experience anyway. Having the badge was what counted.

  When Delgrave had left, Kaplan sat for a few minutes finishing his coffee. Then, looking quite plausibly like a SABENA official going home after night duty, he walked out of the building. Instead of making for the carpark, Kaplan turned left and made his way round to the perimeter gate. There was a guard on duty who showed absolutely no interest as Kaplan, wearing the badge and looking purposeful, strode on through.

  There was no one standing near the Air Zaire plane, as Kaplan walked straight up the steps. Fifteen minutes later, he came down them again. He had never felt so shaken in his life.

  Shortly after one p.m., Lowell Kaplan drove his rented Mercedes with the corn still stuck in the bumper and the bullet-holes still in the roof, inside the tall security gates of the U.S. embassy on Brussels’ Boulevard de la Régence. Seconds after that, he was checked through the security grill by the marines and escorted up to Tim Boswell’s office.

  Boswell, number two in the U.S. mission, was a tall lanky man who was occasionally mistaken for John Kenneth Galbraith. His and Kaplan’s paths had crossed in Washington once or twice when Kaplan had been at N.I.H. and Boswell, who was a career diplomat, had one of his periodical domestic assignments at the State Department.

  “Lowell, good to see ya” — the tall Bostonian drawled. “You seem to be in a bit of a scrape.”

  Kaplan sat on a leather sofa facing the U.S. flag. Behind the desk, the gilded bald-eagle crest and signed portrait of the President indicated that Boswell was a ranking foreign service officer. The diplomat stretched out his long legs across the rug and lit his pipe.

  “The cablegrams announcing your Marburg visit were copied to us,” he said. “But that was routine distribution within Europe. You had better bring us up to date.”

  Kaplan did so. It took him some time. When he came to describe the duelling scene which he had witnessed in the fraternity house in Marburg, Boswell let out a long whistle.

  “I knew that kind of thing still went on. I hadn’t realized it was the way you say.”

  “Yeah, it was really incredible.”

  “And Schmidtt was really the guy who was involved back in ’67?”

  “So he said.”

  Boswell shook his head. “That must have been kinda hard to live with.”

  Kaplan pulled that morning’s edition of the Herald Tribune out of his pocket.

  “Did you see this?” He pointed to the picture of Professor Schmidtt.

  Boswell gave another whistle.

  “I can’t believe our German friends would do that. Not to cover up an event that took place almost fifteen years ago. That’s going too far. Even for them.”

  “Schmidtt was frightened. He didn’t want to talk. Who else could have got to him?”

  Boswell was not convinced: “We may make some enquiries of our own.”

  They left it there. There was nothing to be gained from speculation. If it really was a cover-up, then they could be sure that any police investigation into Professor Schmidtt’s death would come up with precisely nothing.

  Kaplan turned to the events of the morning, giving a blow-by-blow account of his visit to Count Philippe Vincennes’ château, including his narrow escape from the ambush that had been prepared for him.

  Once again, Boswell was shocked. “Now that’s really going too far. Vincennes gets away with a lot. But he really can’t go around trying to eliminate honoured guests from the U.S. Do you want to bring charges?”

  Kaplan shook his head. “We couldn’t prove anything. He’s too clever for that. But I think you could make the wildlife thing stick.”

  “What do you mean?” Boswell removed his pipe from his mouth and looked at the other man with interest.

  “What wildlife thing?”

  Kaplan fished in his briefcase and produced Diane Verusio’s report. He described the damning indictment the report contained of Belgium’s role in the illegal trade in wildlife and his own suspicions of the activities of men like Philippe Vincennes.

  “What’s more,” he concluded. “I’m sure the Minister for Trade is in this too.”

  “Willy van Broyck?”

  “Yes. There has to be collusion by the authorities.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “I think I can.”

  Taking a deep breath, Kaplan told Boswell what he had seen when, a few hours earlier, he had gone aboard the Air Zaire 747 parked on the runway at Zaventem.

  “Tim, you simply have to understand; it was horrendous. There were leopards and cheetahs in there, two giraffes who couldn’t even stand upright, half-a-dozen antelope of one kind or another and I’d say two hundred monkeys. I don’t know the details of the Washington Convention but I’m damn sure those monkeys were all protected.”

  Kaplan gave the other man a full account and Boswell took it all in. From time to time he made notes. When Kaplan had finished, the diplomat rose to his feet and paced the rug in front of his desk.

  “Lowell, I can’t tell how grateful I am that you’ve been able to file this report. We are all grateful. We’ve suspected for some time that Belgium was allowing the convention to be breached. I can tell you that the U.S., as a major signatory, is going to lean very hard indeed. I’ll have a word with the Ambassador and cable Washington straightaway.”

  “What about Vincennes? Are you prepared to put him out of business?”

  Boswell was emphatic. “We’ll certainly try to nail him. It may be difficult. We need hard evidence. As you know he has many friends in the Government. Besides, this animal trade is only a side-line for him. He’s got plenty of other irons in the fire. He doesn’t need this to survive; it’s gravy to him.” He looked at his watch. “Talking of gravy, it’s lunchtime
. I’ll take you down to the Quai Sainte Catherine.”

  “Quai? I didn’t know Brussels was on a river.”

  “It isn’t any longer. They bricked it over.”

  Even though the river had disappeared, the little fish restaurants along the Quai Sainte Catherine were still very much in business.

  “The speciality is lobster or moules — mussels. The Bruxellois are very keen on mussels,” Boswell explained. “With chips of course. Moules et frites.”

  “I’ll stick to lobster.”

  Two hours later they were still at table and half way through their second bottle of wine.

  “You know, Tim,” Kaplan wiped away some crumbs of fish from his mouth, “I rather fancy living in Europe for a time. I think I work too hard. People over here know how to relax.”

  Boswell looked around the fashionable little restaurant. It was after three p.m., but the place was still half-full. “I’d say the Belgians certainly know how to eat. So do the French. You ought to make a quick trip to Paris before you go back.”

  “I’d like to.” Kaplan had a quick mental image of the photograph he had seen of Stephanie Verusio. Hadn’t Dr Reuben mentioned that she lived in France? Perhaps they’d tracked her down by now.

  Boswell folded his napkin and pushed back his chair.

  “I’ve got to get back to the office. We’ll put Washington in the picture, Lowell. There are a whole number of angles to this thing. We have to have the right people looking at it.” As they left the restaurant and entered the long black bulletproof limousine waiting for them at the curb, Boswell added: “What about your meeting this evening with Delgrave? Can we help on that? This Marburg business is now a priority of the U.S. Government and that means it’s my priority too.”

  Kaplan shook his head. “I think I’ll go alone. I don’t want to scare him off.”

  “We’ll keep you covered anyway. You won’t necessarily see us. But we’ll be there.”

  Kaplan felt reassured. He was not a hero, and had no wish to become one.

  Later that day, Kaplan was once more to be found in a Brussels restaurant. It was a small dimly lit place in one of the little streets near the Grand Place.

  Jean Delgrave was out of breath when he finally arrived ten minutes late for the appointment.

  “I came the long way round. Through all the back streets. I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t followed.”

  Kaplan handed back the ID. “Thanks. It was most useful. Did you have any luck?”

  Delgrave was cautious. He patted his inside vest pocket to indicate that the papers were there.

  Kaplan understood the gesture at once. He took out a brown envelope and laid it on the table.

  “There’s fifty thousand francs.” He had drawn it at lunchtime at the Embassy.

  Delgrave smiled. “That is most generous.”

  With a quick movement, they exchanged envelopes.

  Kaplan glanced at the information on the sheet. It was, as he had hoped it would be, a list of animals which had passed through Brussels Airport in the first days of June. Details were given of the number and type of animal contained in the cargo; of the places the animals had been caught and of their intermediate or final destinations.

  “Good! This is just what I was looking for.” With increasing excitement, Kaplan examined the material. He looked for any references to monkeys. There were several but one in particular caught his eye.

  “June 5. One green monkey. Caught Kugumba Region of Eastern Zaire, location approximately . . . latitude . . . longitude . . .”

  The information fairly leapt at him from the page. Kaplan wanted to shout. At last he had the cross-bearing he was looking for. For both the list he had seen in Marburg and now the list which he held in his hand had a reference to green monkeys caught in the Kugumba region of Eastern Zaire. Both lists gave the approximate location where the animals had been caught. In each case the latitude and the longitude were virtually identical! Here at last was the precise fix not just on the vector — the green monkey — but on its geographical origin!

  He finished reading the entry . . . “Longitude approximately . . . Found sick on arrival; gassed in cage and incinerated.”

  He said to Delgrave, making his voice sound as casual as he could in the circumstances:

  “This entry here. It speaks of a green monkey coming from Zaire. Apparently the animal was found to be sick on arrival. Is that very unusual?”

  “It’s not unusual for an animal to be sick on arrival. We often have to destroy them.” He looked at the list. “What’s unusual is to have a green monkey. I’ve never heard or seen of one myself. That must be something very rare indeed. It was probably destined for a zoo. Antwerp zoo perhaps. But don’t talk to me about animals. Talk to someone who knows. I’m just a cargo official.” Delgrave looked at his watch. “Nom de Dieu! I must get to work. I’m still on the night shift.” With a smile and a wave he was gone, patting his pocket to reassure himself that his reward for a day’s work was properly stowed.

  After Delgrave had departed, Kaplan was left there at the table with half a bottle of wine still to drink, wondering just how Diane Verusio had had contact with one sick green monkey at Brussels airport. Had she gone into the cargo shed, once the animals had been off-loaded? Had she, like him, bluffed it out and boarded the Air Zaire plane itself? Or had something else happened? How he wished he knew the answer.

  Beyond that, there was the question: what to do next? Just assume that a green monkey from the Kugumba region of Eastern Zaire was indeed, as he now supposed, the vector of the Marburg virus. What were the next steps to take?

  After finishing the wine and paying the bill, he took a taxi to Tim Boswell’s house in Kraainem where they had a quiet bachelor dinner together. (Tim’s wife, Lucilla, had already gone back to the States for the summer.) Kaplan brought Boswell up to date on the story.

  “Delgrave came through all right,” he said. “I don’t know where he got the information from but he found it somewhere.”

  Boswell puffed on his pipe. “We might take a look at Delgrave, anyway. I’d like to know exactly what kind of a job he does for SABENA.”

  The two men talked about different aspects of the case. Boswell had used the afternoon to good effect in spite of the amount of wine he had consumed at lunch.

  “You know, there’s something that puzzles me. Remember you told me this morning about the original duelling incident in Marburg, back in 1967, where the students were infected by, er, Ringelmann? Wasn’t that his name?”

  Kaplan nodded. “It’s a fact. Twenty-three out of twenty-three victims in the 1967 episode were Marburg University students.”

  “I’m not disputing that,” Boswell intervened quickly. “It’s something else. Didn’t Professor Schmidtt say that the Chancellor himself had been present?”

  “Certainly. That was one of the reasons for the cover-up. If that fact had come out, it could have brought down the government.”

  Boswell tapped out his pipe into the fire-place.

  “Well, here’s something curious,” he said. “I got on to our people in Bonn and they got on to the Chancellor’s office. The U.S. has pretty good cooperation with the authorities in the Federal Republic as you can imagine. They dug through the files and came up with the log of the Chancellor’s movements for the period in question. The official diary is negative, they say. There’s no mention of any visit to Marburg in April 1967.”

  Kaplan was not put out. “But you wouldn’t expect to find that kind of visit recorded in the official diary. This was a man having a night out at his old school.”

  Boswell smiled, a sardonic smile that illuminated his Bostonian features.

  “I’d agree with you, but for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The diary also shows that the Chancellor was on a tour of Latin America at the time. And that is a matter of record. There are press clippings and newsreel pictures to prove it.”

  Kaplan was bewildered. “I
don’t understand. Why would Franz invent something like that?”

  “I’m not sure,” Boswell replied slowly. “But we ought to find out.”

  6

  Paula Schmidtt delayed her journey to Berlin because of her father’s death. She was three days later than she had originally planned.

  Her mother, distraught with grief, pleaded with her not to go.

  “You’ve just been to Berlin. You’ve seen your friends. Why go again? Don’t leave me alone here. Not now.”

  The tension showed in the girl’s face but she was implacable. “It’s not for pleasure that I go, mother. It’s business. I have to consult some medical experts.”

  “But the investigating officers may wish to talk to you again. They may have some news about Franz’s murder.”

  “They must wait till I return.”

  Dressed in black, Paula caught a British Airways plane to Berlin from Frankfurt. (It was one of the anomalies of Berlin’s status that Lufthansa still had no flights to Berlin.) She took the bus into the city from the airport. The driver called out the stops over the public address system: “Templehof, Spandau, Potsdamer Platz. . .”

  She got out at the Potsdamer Platz and looked around. She was too young to remember the place as it had been before the Second World War. But her father had described it for her.

  “When I was a boy,” Franz had told her, “I saw the Zeppelin airship, the R3, making one of its last flights over the Potsdamer Platz. I remember the trams stopped in the square and all the people stood around looking up at the sky. That was in 1933.”

  She blinked back tears when she thought of her father. He had been a good man. He should never have talked so much to the American! “They” would have left him alone if he hadn’t talked. Sometimes she hated “them”. But it was too late. There was no turning back.

  Today, the Potsdamer Platz which had seen so much life and movement before the war was a bleak, forbidding place. It had been destroyed by allied bombardment and then, in August 1961, the infamous Berlin Wall was built across the square. The bleak grey concrete slab stretched away into the middle distance, dividing house from house and block from block. Someone had scrawled on the wall at one point the words HIER IST FREIHEIT GEENDET — Here Freedom Ends. Paula’s lips curled into a half-sneer as she took her place in the queue which had formed at the foot of the wooden platform. Freedom! They talked of freedom! What did they know of it? Had the men who wrote those words visited the Berlin ghetto where thousands of immigrant Turks — so-called Gastarbeiters or “guestworkers” — were crushed together under slum conditions? She shuffled forward a foot or two as the queue moved towards the base of the ladder.