by Ranjini Iyer
His shuttle arrived. The ride to the Hyderabad Royal Star Hotel was a short one. It wasn’t much better than staying at the Y, but it was a stone’s throw away from the Hyatt where Max and her boyfriend were staying.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Max put down the receiver. She had just informed Kevin that she and Julian had landed in Hyderabad.
See you in two hours, Kevin had said. Two hours was a long time. Her nerves were frayed and raw. She wanted and didn’t want to know the contents of the research. She wasn’t sure which desire was stronger. All she knew was that the two feelings were tearing her apart. She had pumped herself up about doing this, finishing what she had started, but part of her still wished she were back in her kitchen in Chicago.
Julian pulled her close. “We should be singing a Bollywood song and dancing around those beautiful trees. You’d look perfect in a wet red chiffon sari, gyrating your hips against mine—”
Max let out a grunt of irritation.
Julian held up his palms. “Okay, okay. They say we have to try the lamb biryani here.”
Max kissed his palms and nuzzled her face against his. “It’s frightening how well you know me,” she whispered.
Julian kissed her forehead. He said in a low, seductive voice, “Garlicky. Spicy hot. Meat that melts like butter in your mouth. Fragrant with saffron…”
Her mouth started to water. She moaned. “Oh, baby…how can I say no? And after, I want to buy the beautiful Indian outfit I saw in the hotel boutique.”
“Which you will wear and do a Bollywood dance with me on the lawn?”
Max leapt at him and smothered his face with kisses.
Seated by a small rock garden in the Hyatt’s Khazana restaurant, Max and Julian ate the spicy, savory lamb biryani with their bare fingers, just as the server had recommended.
After, they waited for Kevin in the lobby.
A plump, bearded man with a pleasant face entered and looked around. He was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. Upon seeing Max, his face broke into a huge grin. He strode toward her and held out both hands.
Max felt a sense of relief upon seeing Kevin. He was her father’s old acquaintance, even if he had been an estranged one.
Max extended a tentative hand toward Kevin. He grabbed both of her hands and encased them within his own. “Thanks for coming, Maxine. And thank you for trusting me. Helping you won’t wash away my sins as far as your father was concerned. But I’m hoping it might at least make them fade a little.”
Max nodded, not knowing what to say. “Dr. Forsyth, this is my…uh, this is Julian McIntosh.”
After exchanging introductions, they walked toward a sofa by a large window.
“You remind me of Hiram,” Kevin said to Max.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Max smiled. “Thank you.”
“Hiram was brilliant, but not a risk taker,” Kevin said in a conversational tone. “Perhaps he was too honest for the business world.”
“I think it’s only right to run a business honestly,” Max almost snapped. Normally she would have only thought such a thing. She was surprised the words had actually come out of her mouth, and with such force.
Kevin turned beet red. “Of course. I suppose I deserve that.”
“I’m sorry.” Max put a hand on his arm. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Kevin was perspiring. He took out a large handkerchief and wiped his face and neck with it. “Hiram always said it is unfortunate that kids have to bear the burden of their parents’ actions. He bore his father’s, and now you are bearing his. Which is why he chose to be ethical in all his dealings. There’s no gray area in ethics, he said.”
Max nodded with a sad smile.
“He once told me how strong he thought you are.” Kevin put a hand on Max’s shoulder.
She flinched a little. “It’s a fleeting strength, I’m afraid,” she said.
An awkward silence ensued. Julian nudged Max.
“Shall we look at the document?” Max said.
Kevin looked around. “Ah, there he is.” He raised his arm and waved. A young man glided towards them.
“You said you have the key,” Kevin said to Max.
“Well, we think so,” Max said with a glance at the young man at their side.
“This is Rishi, an encryption expert. He will help us.”
Rishi shook their hands and led them to an empty conference room in the hotel. He set up his laptop and looked at them expectantly.
“The research document is on this laptop,” Kevin said. “Shall we try your key?”
Max showed him the verse and its translation. She explained how they found the 11:32 and connected it to the verse in her grandfather’s diary.
“It would make sense,” Kevin said.
They typed the English translation of the verse into the computer. A while later, Rishi turned the screen toward them.
The document looked less like gibberish. Clear language started to emerge.
Kevin scrolled to the top.
“Hiram has written to you, it would seem,” he said.
Max peered at the screen.
My darling,
If you are reading this, it means I’m no longer in your life. It probably also means that Lars has failed.
I have made many mistakes, but leaving you alone is not one of them. I say that because I know that if I am gone, chances are you may never know why. The enemies I’ve made at Berliner are smart and they are cautious.
But now that you are involved, I wish you luck and send you blessings in this difficult journey. I hate that you are the one bearing this burden, but it seems there is no other way.
I want you to know this, sweetheart—if being your father was the only thing I accomplished in my whole life, believe me, it would be more than enough.
All other successes are miles behind you in their importance to me. And my failures meaningless and shallow compared to the joy of knowing you.
I cherish you more than anything. Now go, run with this, and change the world.
Max gave a shudder. Luckily she was able to compose herself and not give way to torrents of waterworks. “Did the verse decode the whole document?” she asked, filled with a renewed sense of purpose.
“Only partially,” Rishi said, “Seems we need a second key.”
Kevin smiled and shook his head. “Dr. P.S. Oup,” he said. “Hiram was a clown. Pea Soup!”
“What does that mean?” Max asked.
“Your father was a clown and a geneticist. Gregor Mendel is the father of modern genetics. His groundbreaking work was based on the common variety garden pea. Hiram and I often talked about the ordinary pea soup with much respect because of this.”
“So the key is pea soup?”
“Possibly. Or some combination of pea soup and Mendelian traits, another term we used often. There are a few different phrases that come to mind.”
Max shuffled her feet and looked around the room.
Kevin smiled. “It’ll take us a while to do this. Besides, I’ll need some time to make sense of Hiram’s research once we get it decoded.”
“Of course,” Max said. She and Julian left the room.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Hans considered his reflection in the hotel room mirror. There were deep lines under his eyes that had appeared as if overnight. His hair seemed to be thinning, too, or was he imagining it? He moved closer to the mirror and looked with a grunt of dissatisfaction. His roots were starting to turn their natural dirty brown. And he had neglected to bring his—some said unusual, but he maintained striking—shade of hair dye.
He rubbed his eyes. The dry Hyderabad heat was leaving him exhausted and irritated. At least his room in the Hyatt, three floors below Max’s, was air-conditioned.
Hans had left London and returned to Germany knowing that no matter what Max and Julian decided to do, he would be able to take action. Herr Schultz had hoped that with Lars gone, Max might call upon Kevin for help. Ern
st Frank couldn’t be useful to her other than serving as a sympathetic ear, they had decided.
Still, Hans hadn’t figured on Max making this much progress so quickly.
Hans left his hotel room, closing the door lightly behind him. He stepped outside the hotel and waited for his taxi to take him to the airport, where he knew Kevin and the others would soon be headed.
They would probably discuss the papers before they left for Karachi. There wasn’t enough time for much else; their flight was in a few hours. He didn’t need to listen in on their discussion. The content of the papers was well known to Herr Schultz.
Hans planned his moves with caution. The Pakistani and Indian police were known to be ruthless. Being thrown in jail to languish for months, even years, without a trial was not unknown in these parts. The last thing he wanted was to be arrested in a place where Herr Schultz’s influence held little value.
His wife had asked him how far he was willing to go for Herr Schultz.
Hans was starting to wonder about it, too.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Max and Julian waited for Kevin in the hotel lobby.
A couple hours later, Kevin came to them. “It’s done,” he said.
Julian, Max, and Kevin settled themselves in a booth in the hotel coffee shop. There were a few families scattered around. No blond men. No suspicious men in baseball caps, either. Max’s stomach did somersaults.
Kevin put his palms on the table and looked at Max. “Here goes. As early as the sixties, Hiram started thinking about going into genetics. It was cutting-edge work. He had his PhD, and he had worked at a couple major pharmaceutical companies. He told me he always kept Samuel’s work in the back of his mind. Hiram knew the facts about the bacteria in the pill—that it affected thyroid activity, resulting in lowered metabolic rate and, theoretically, longer life. Then there were the unexplained symptoms like the fevers.” Kevin raised a finger. “He also knew that the bacteria was contagious, that it caused elevated blood pressure in the lab animals, and finally, that there had been unrelated symptoms in the control group monkeys of high cholesterol, heart disease, weight gain, et cetera.”
“It worried Opa because animals showing high BP almost always have something else going on,” Max said. She became thoughtful. “Papa often asked Opa to go back to the lab—to work on what he had left unfinished. But Opa made excuses. Perhaps he was afraid of what he might find.”
Kevin nodded. “Samuel should have swallowed his fears and found out what he had unknowingly unleashed.”
Max stiffened. “Unleashed!”
Kevin held up a hand. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have used that word. I’ll come to it in a second.” He licked his lips a few times and shifted in his seat, finally settling on a spot. “Hiram started working on the genetics of heart disease in the mid-eighties. Our business,” he made a wry face, “was ancient history by then. For both of us. I started Allied, which took off in a big way.”
“That failed business did a lot of damage to my father.” Max tried not to sound accusing.
“Maxine, I admit I wasn’t very honest, but I did what I had to do to keep the company afloat,” Kevin said sympathetically. “Hiram preferred to let it go under rather than cut any corners. I even offered to do all the dirty work myself, but he chose to leave. When he left, I decided to end the business. Without him, we were severely handicapped. I begged Hiram to give it another shot, but he had lost faith in me. He went on to work at a safe and uneventful job after that. When Allied started doing well, I even invited him back, but he wouldn’t give me a second chance.”
They were all quiet for a while. Her father had not dealt well with failure. He was even less patient with others’ failures and flaws. Rather than trying to forgive Kevin, to understand why he had done what he did, her father had just lost faith in the ways of the world.
If things had turned out differently, Papa might not have taken refuge in alcohol. He might have been alive today. If Berliner hadn’t pushed Opa so much, he may not have been so blindly ambitious. Perhaps, he might have escaped Germany in time to pursue a career in another country, live a normal life.
Julian asked Max if she was all right. Max nodded. She looked at him with warm affection. If he hadn’t offered to help that night after dinner, would she have called him after Lars died? Would she have been able to come this far?
A waiter arrived at their table. They ordered a large pot of tea and a plate of cashew cookies.
Kevin looked at Max. “After we parted ways, Hiram really needed validation,” he said cautiously. “When the chance to work in genetics and heart disease finally came along, he was ecstatic.”
“Papa wanted to be a cardiologist, but ended up pursuing biochemistry and genetics. He hoped to understand the heart’s mysteries and find cures.”
“Turned out that one person in his group of test subject volunteers was an 80-year-old man who had been an inmate in the Krippenwald camp around the time Samuel was there,” Kevin said. “He had diabetes, but was otherwise healthy. Hiram found out that this 80-year-old man had gotten a fever at the camp after ingesting the Indus pill. But it had been a mild one. Some of them had mild fevers, others had high fevers. Some of his friends from the camp were not healthy. They had severe heart disease, fatty liver disease, some were obese, others had cholesterol problems and diabetes.”
“Is that significant?” Max asked. “These are all different diseases.”
“True. However, they are all diseases that result in people who show a certain set of risk factors. This group of risk factors is called metabolic syndrome. A person who shows at least three of the following risk factors is said to have metabolic syndrome.” Kevin counted them off on his fingers. “A large waistline, which is related to obesity; high blood pressure, high triglyceride levels—triglycerides are a type of fat found in blood; low HDL, which is your good cholesterol; and lastly, high fasting blood sugar. The term metabolic syndrome was not coined until recently. This set of risk factors was connected to a poor lifestyle and heredity. Hiram saw no real reason to link any of this to his work. So he filed the information away, and nothing more came of it. That is, until he got a phone call from a scientist who had worked for Berliner in the forties and fifties.”
Their tea arrived. Julian poured everyone a cup. The sweet fragrance of nutmeg rose from the steaming tea.
Kevin dropped his voice. “This scientist claimed to have worked on Samuel’s research in a secret lab until the late fifties. That was around the time Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize for their DNA double helix discovery. It was a time when the world started looking at the human body in a different light. Turns out this lab run by Peter Schultz made some disturbing discoveries about Samuel’s pill. They found diseases in lab animals that Samuel and Lars had perhaps not discovered. They also realized that the diseases were not random. They were related. They were all, as we know now, diseases under the metabolic syndrome umbrella. This meant that somehow the bacteria was causing a family of diseases. Before they could find out why, Schultz shut the lab down. He chose to bury it in order to avoid public embarrassment, rather than take responsibility. Because this former Berliner scientist had reached out to him, Hiram was interested once again in Samuel’s work. But he did nothing about it.” Kevin took a sip of his tea.
“What happened then?” Max said.
“Hiram finally plunged into Samuel’s work when a new member joined his group. A volunteer who happened to be from the Greek island of Ikaria.”
“What was special about him?” Max asked.
“Indeed,” Kevin said with a grin, “His origin was a random piece of demographic information, until Hiram discovered something strange.”
Max and Julian leaned forward.
“As part of his research, Hiram had conducted routine blood tests on all his volunteers. In these blood tests, Hiram found that the people in his test group all had memory cells showing a bacterium.”
Max frowned.
“And
because of the old concentration camp inmate, and the phone call from the Berliner scientist, Hiram thought of Samuel’s pill and its bacteria,” Julian said excitedly.
“Exactly,” Kevin said. “It was an odd coincidence. Hiram studied both bacteria—the one from his volunteers and the one in the pills. He found that they were the same.”
Max held up her hand. “One second, sorry. I’m losing you. What are memory cells?”
Kevin shifted his body a few times more. “Can’t sit for too long in one place at my age. When a body gets a disease—a fever for example—it develops antibodies and memory cells which stay in the body to deal with that disease at a later date. Lets say you get a viral fever, your body develops antibodies so you are better able to fight it if you should get it again. That is how a vaccine works as well.”
“Okay. So what did Papa do when he found that people carried memory cells of the bacteria that was the same as the one in the pill?” Max said.
“Hiram had started studying heart disease in the context of metabolic syndrome—or MetS as it is called—even before this term was officially coined. Among his volunteers were some people without MetS who turned out to not have any of this bacterium’s memory cells. And there were some who had the memory cells and mild-to-severe diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, et cetera—all diseases related to the metabolic syndrome risk factors.”
Julian looked baffled. “Does that mean the bacteria caused the MetS?”
Kevin shook his head. “The presence of the memory cells indicated only that the bacteria from the pill had invaded these people at some point in their lives. That meant that they had had the fever that Samuel had correctly associated with the bacterial invasion from the pill.”
