by Peter Høeg
She struggled out of bed and over to the window. In the light of the waning moon she saw the ape. It made its way out into the pen, supervised by Clapham, and made one slow circuit. It was wrapped in a blanket, its face was in shadow, it was limping and its exhaustion was five times greater than that of all five men put together.
And yet Madelene could see that whatever it was they had been trying to get out of it they had drawn a blank.
The animal made just the one circuit, then disappeared into the building, and Clapham closed the door behind it.
Madelene looked at the window frame, the park and, beyond that, across the city. From conversations overheard in her childhood home she had retained a vague and repulsive impression of what conditions were like for domestic animals on factory farms. She knew the meaning of such terms as spontaneous fracture, tongue rolling, somatotropin, urine drinking, manger biting, neighbor pecking and monotonization of mating behavior. Now, in these terms, she observed herself. Swaying from side to side, she saw herself and the city reflected in the animal kingdom. She had been inwardly devastated, as though it were emptiness she had ingested, emptiness Adam had discharged into her. She thought of all the protests she had refrained from making, the chances she had wasted. Guilt assailed her. Not a bad conscience, not some petty, unpaid mental account, no nickel-and-dime debt, but a suicide’s accumulated arrears. On the slippery slope that she herself had chosen she had slid to the level where lies remorse.
She thought of the ape. From her internal, alcoholic nature reserve to the reptiles of her hallucinations, across her family’s stockpiled swine, cattle and poultry, a link was established with the incarcerated ape.
And so Madelene came to the realization that she was no longer a tourist traveling through a series of fascinating, alcohol-induced landscapes. She was—and had been for some time—a permanent resident, confined to a chemical prison.
The moonlight, which a moment before had seemed so pallid, now streamed into the room, stark as an X ray. In this light Madelene saw her own weakness, saw it clearly, saw herself as the ape had seen her and then she gave up. She gave up hope, she gave up her role as a drunk, gave up the gentle, spirituous tailwind that had blown her through the events of the past few weeks. She gave up her martyrdom to the hard stuff, her alcoholic identity. She gave up drinking.
eleven
She woke to find that she was not alone. Beside her—in that spot from which Adam had fled during the night—lay the previous day’s acknowledgment of her own frailty.
Madelene sized it up. It seemed alarmingly undiminished and yet alien to her.
She got up. Shaking, she took the first steps across the room, turned around and walked back.
She seemed to be heading back toward the bed and the comfort of her carafe. But these she passed by, making for Adam’s worktable. There she rolled up a selection of the hundreds of large printed sheets he had carried upstairs from the garden room and slid them into her cardboard tube. From the top drawer of the desk she took two bundles of banknotes. Then she walked across the room and out. And with this action—modest in physical terms though it was—she put a part of her life behind her.
In the hall she cast a fleeting glance at the telephone, but all the phones in the house were connected to a switchboard in Clapham’s office. She forged on—out into the garden, through the little door in the wall and onto the pavement.
Before she had quite reached it, Johnny had the rear door of the van open.
* * *
Madelene had never resided at any address that did not boast at least eight thousand square feet of living accommodation plus full basement facilities plus grounds. Johnny’s mobile home contained a bed, a desk, a television, a minibar, a telephone, kitchen, hi-fi system, rugs, plush wall covering, lamps and built-in cupboards—all in an area measuring eight by ten feet. In the thirty seconds it took her to clamber in, collapse into a chair and drink the glass of water held out to her by Johnny, she formed a number of what were to be lifelong impressions regarding the relationship between social standing and territorial limits.
“I’ve stopped drinking,” she said.
From his childhood and from his own personal experience Johnny knew the power of the rush to be had from alcohol. He looked at Madelene with respect.
She drew the sheets out of the tube and spread them out on the table.
“Have you any idea what this is?” she asked.
Confronted by a mass of symbols Johnny froze.
“I had five years at school.”
Madelene nodded. Much the same as herself. Once you deducted all the absences.
She reached for the telephone and dialed a number.
Adam’s secretary had abandoned all thought of resistance, her voice was subdued, her tone resigned.
“He’s out of town. He’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Can I give him a message?”
Madelene hung up. Johnny watched her, blank-faced. She made another call. Was transferred twice before getting through, to Andrea Burden.
“Now that we’re confidantes,” said Madelene, “and have no secrets from one another, could you please tell me how much longer that thing’s going to be staying with us.”
“He hasn’t told you?”
“He’s trying to protect me.”
“They’ll be winding up tomorrow.”
“And where do you suppose it will go from here?”
Her response was all too snappy, all too slick.
“Oh, but the Institute has St. Francis Forest. Well out of the way and delightfully secluded.”
“That sounds wonderful,” said Madelene. “I feel much happier now.”
She hung up.
“We’ve got twenty-four hours,” she said. “Before they move it. How do you move animals?”
“It’ll be put in an ape box.”
“Where do they find those?”
“Bowen makes them. Bally always said, when it came to boxes Bowen was one of the best.”
“Bowen?” said Madelene. “And Bally?”
“The one who brought in the ape.”
Madelene looked at Johnny. At the cardboard tube. At the graphs. At Samson and his bandages. She looked out the window. At the morning light. At the man in the gray suit strolling down the street with a perky little cappuccino-colored wirehaired fox terrier on a leash, a man she was now sighting outside Mombasa Manor for the third time. She became aware of a vibration deep inside her body, apart from and different than the shakes of withdrawal. This sensation grew into a tremor that ran through her from top to toe, as if she had just had her first drink of the morning. But there had been no drink. What she was experiencing was something else again. It was the materialization, out of the blue, of the galaxy of intoxicating possibilities which present themselves to someone who has made up their mind to be creative and left all their options open.
She lifted Samson’s leash from a hook, clipped it to his collar, opened the van door and climbed down, with the dog, onto the pavement.
At the sight of Madelene the gray man tensed imperceptibly, wheeled about and began to walk away.
Madelene could have let him go. But a nasty migraine had started spreading throughout her body, working downward from the back of her head. Where there had always been a volatile energy—readily ignited and quick to burn out—to be derived from drink, she now found there was a destructive, brazen power in coming off it. She and Samson caught up with the man and his terrier.
“So how’s everything down at veterinary police headquarters?” she asked.
Until this moment she had only seen him sitting down, in the white car that time when Clapham had turned him away at the gate and on those occasions when he had been parked outside the grounds. On his feet and close at hand he proved to be tall, lean and tough, every inch of him born, raised and trained to be nobody’s fool.
He took his time, letting the dogs have a sniff at one another before replying.
“Well, of course, it’s qui
te a big place now. There used to be just four or five of us. Now we have the race meets, all the doping cases to see to. And the petnappings. We have twenty men checking the pet shops alone. With vets and blank search warrants.”
Madelene’s upbringing and her interest in men had taught her how to distinguish unerringly between those people, like Adam, who had stepped into the station to which they had been born and those, like the man facing her, who had worked their way up.
“Why,” she asked, “would a man armed with search warrants tolerate being turned away by our doorman?”
The man had given up following the dogs with his eyes. He now focused only on Madelene.
“Search warrants are fine for pet shops and small apartments where people keep protected reptiles in shoe boxes. But among the upper levels of society they can be risky bits of paper.”
People who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps fell, Madelene knew, into two subcategories: those, like her father, who had striven all their lives to distance themselves from their origins and those, like this man, who had found it simplest to adopt a white car, a suit and a mustache but who had remained steadfastly working-class.
“You wanted to ask about the ape?” she said.
The man did not answer.
“We could trade,” said Madelene. “I tell you where it is. You tell me why you find it so fascinating.”
The man said not a word.
“It’s in one of the wings,” said Madelene. “With a truckload of machinery. They’ve been studying it. They’re looking for something. Something they haven’t found yet. It’s worn out, but alive. Now keep your part of the deal.”
In the space that elapsed before he answered, Madelene was struck by a rare flash of inexplicable, intuitive insight into the character of another human being. All at once she knew that the man opposite her had gotten as far as he had through being hard-nosed and intelligent and that, in addition to these traits, he also possessed a formidable sense of justice—which explained why he had not risen any further.
“We’re not so much interested in the animal,” he said. “Our prime interest is in the skipper of the boat that brought it here.”
“Bally,” said Madelene.
The man nodded.
“If there’s such a place as an animal hell, then, when his time comes, Bally will make chief demon down there.”
“Deputy chief,” said Madelene. “The chief demon, that’s my father.”
The man extended an arm. Madelene thought he wanted to shake her hand, but it was his card he gave her.
“Smailes,” he said. “We fished Mr. Bally out of the Thames and are keeping him in custody. But we’ve nothing to go on. We’ll have to let him go soon. We had been wondering whether we should obtain a warrant anyway and just barge our way in and demand an explanation.”
“Give me twenty-four hours,” said Madelene.
“What do we get in return?”
“The evidence to nail Bally.”
Smailes started to lead the terrier away.
“Where did the boat come from?” Madelene asked.
“From Denmark. Like you.”
“What a lot you know. Considering you didn’t make it past the gate.”
“I’ve been taking the dog for walks in the neighborhood.”
Madelene looked down at Samson.
“I’ve always been a believer in that myself,” she murmured.
Smailes was almost out of earshot when he turned around one last time.
“Twenty-four hours,” he called softly. “And not a minute more.”
twelve
The Holland Park Veterinary Clinic invited unconditional surrender. Not only was it the most expensive, most up-to-date private animal hospital in London; it was also known as “the Smiling Clinic” because the people who worked there all wore a smile. The affable doorman smiled, the charming nurse in reception smiled, the helpful porter smiled and the clinic supervisor who lifted Samson up onto a low table smiled warmly and compliantly.
“I’d like to speak to Alexander Bowen,” Madelene said.
The woman’s smile was apologetic.
“You’d have to make an appointment,” she said.
Madelene plucked a scrap of white paper and a ballpoint pen from the desk, scribbled a line on the card, wrapped it in a fifty-pound note from Adam’s bankroll and handed it to the porter.
“The operation was touch and go,” she said. “Alex begged me to be sure and send for him. So he could see Samson personally.”
Three minutes later Alexander Bowen walked in, wearing a white coat and a smile.
It was a halfhearted smile. Despite his powerful position the vet’s life was a life spent on the edge and the situation he had just walked into was even more of a cliff-hanger than most.
On the paper Madelene had written “£1,000 as arranged. Lady Mortensen.” Alexander Bowen knew Debrett’s Peerage inside out, he could recall every animal he had ever treated and by far the greater majority of invoices written in connection with said treatment and he knew that he had never heard of Lady Mortensen or come across the woman in sunglasses and a duster coat with whom he was now confronted. But he also knew that this dog was the Doberman he had not dared to put down, out of fear of that driver—what was his name again?—the one who had done the carrying for Bally.
What had prompted him to come was the reference to the thousand pounds. What held him there was part fear, part curiosity.
In the prevailing behavioral vacuum he opted for an approach that was forceful but noncommittal. Briskly and solicitously he approached the dog.
“How is he?” he asked.
“Better,” said Madelene.
She held out the big sheets from her cardboard tube. In the same move she slid ten one-hundred-pound notes from her bundle onto the desk.
“I brought his X rays,” she said.
Madelene had grown up in a home where the women purchased the men with sex, the adults bribed the children with toys, the children procured concessions by means of tantrums or caresses and the whole clan had bought its way to a position in high society and a place in Danish history. From infancy she had been trained in the virtuoso techniques called for in the art of bribery. Had the vet’s face displayed the merest hint of resentment she could have placed a hand over the notes and blotted out this tiny slip-up. But his face evinced no suspicion. On the contrary, his features cleared and became more composed.
“These aren’t X rays,” he said. “They’re MRI scans. And that’s no dog.”
“Our chimpanzee,” said Madelene. “I must have picked up the wrong ones.”
The doctor shook his head.
“See that frontal lobe?” he said. “Seat of the higher cognitive functions. That’s a human being. Although obviously a very large human.”
He ran his finger out to a column of figures to the right of the picture.
“A volume of 2,700 cubic centimeters. Abnormally large.”
He flicked through the sheets and stopped at one particular frame. The colors were dazzling—ruby red, shimmering gold, royal blue.
“Him again. An EEG superimposed on PET. Not many people in Europe can do that. Where did you say these were from?”
“What’s PET?” Madelene asked.
“Positron-Emission Tomography. He’s been injected with radioactive water, which causes the brain to increase the cerebral blood flow. Then it’s just a matter of monitoring the level of radioactivity.”
Treading warily, Madelene fingered the bankroll and sneaked one more of Adam’s notes onto the desk.
“At least let me reimburse you for your time,” she said.
The doctor’s eyes clouded over. An insidious stream of distractedness, boyhood memories and titillated vanity had taken hold of him and swept him along in its wake.
“PET,” he said. “Excellent spatial resolution. Accurate to between three and five millimeters. But poor time resolution. Takes as much as ninety seconds. Which is why you
superimpose it on an encephalogram. That way you can see everything that’s going on in the brain, down to the last millisecond. It’s fantastic. And when you think that this is a piece of mobile equipment. They’ve put a helmet on him. That’s the latest thing. I didn’t think there was anyone but us who could do that.”
His finger slid down the column of figures.
“They’ve sent him around an obstacle course. Is there something wrong with his motor functions? Language tests, eye tests, various practical exercises. Anatomical localization, extremely detailed, thirty cross sections from all four angles.”
“What were they looking for?” Madelene asked.
She threw down yet another note. The doctor’s face had a faraway look, like that of someone in a hypnotic trance. Madelene knew she had him anesthetized. Now it was a matter of keeping his suspicions dormant but his mental faculties intact.
“Ah, yes, what are we looking for?” he said. “Can anyone answer that?”
“We?”
“I too have sought.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
The doctor’s eyes were fixed on some distant point, visible only to himself.
“Does one ever?”
“These pictures, did you take them?”
He shook his head.
“I think back on the old days,” he said. “Those golden days. Barely ten years ago. When one still dared to hope.”
Madelene stroked the arm of his white coat, probing.
“I think of them,” he said. “But I don’t speak of them. It’s better that way. As things stand.”
“Just say it,” Madelene urged gently. “The dog won’t understand a word anyway.”
Alexander Bowen was aware of a pleasant lack of clarity. His surroundings put him in mind of his own hospital, the scans implied that he was a speaker at a scientific symposium, the listening woman might have suggested a board meeting, the money pointed to an appointment with his lawyer. This situation seemed to reconcile all of the deeply incompatible sides of his character in the most delightful manner.
