The Immortalist (10 page)

“I will do as you ask,” she said drily.

“There's something else, Yolanda.”

“What?”

He opened a drawer and took out a legal-size paper, which he pushed across the desk. “This is yours.”

“What is it?”

“A deed. Signed and notarized.”

“Deed to what?”

“To one-half of one percent of the common stock of Eden Pharmaceuticals. Proceeds from the Methuselah Vector. I know it doesn't sound like much, but it'll make you a rich woman. You won't ever have to work again. Your children's future is secure.”

She was shocked. She jumped off the desk as though it were a hot stove. “I never asked for this.”

“Which is why it gives me pleasure to give it to you. I set it up a few weeks ago, but I wanted to give it to you today. Especially today.” He seemed surprised by the indignation in her eyes. “Look, it's independence I'm giving you. I don't ever want you to have to be with any man because of what he can give you.”

“Even you?”

“Especially me.”

She looked at the paper, with its gold stamp of a many-pointed star, and his big, flowing signature at the bottom. Something about it made her angry. “I'm not worthy of this,” she said through her teeth.

“Please, take it.”

“No.”

He gave her a perplexed look. “It doesn't matter whether you pick it up or not. It's yours. There's a registered copy on file. No one can undo it.”

“Are you sure?” She picked up the paper and ripped it in half. “Will this undo it?” She threw the pieces onto the desk.

“No, dammit. What's gotten into you?”

She had seen it before. This was how a rich man said good-bye to his
puta
. It seemed like a farewell gift. It promised bad luck.

She looked at the painting of Doreen Gifford above the fireplace. Doreen had been a beautiful woman, with smiling hazel eyes and skin with the soft rosiness of a white nectarine. A singer, a star of society, well-read, her hands never worn-out by typing or scrubbing floors or changing her own child's diapers. In the painting she seemed to be laughing. Was it the foolish Puerto Rican girl she laughed at? The slums of La Perla would never be welcome here. Never, except through the secret door.

“Keep your money,
querido
. I work for Jack and not you. But I will do as you ask.” She forced her mouth into a smile. “Your friend Cricket is most charming. There's much we have to talk about.”

Eight

LIKE A MAUSOLEUM
TO HER PAST,
Weiszacker House, with its three turrets and ten gables, loomed over Cricket at the top of the redbrick steps. In the light of sunset the white building took on a soft, gauzy orange hue. The opening strains of the andante from Schubert's D minor string quartet pulsed serenely through the open front door.

In her simple, all-purpose black dress, Cricket felt plain beside Yolanda's string of pearls and formfitting, red, backless evening gown. Cricket had never liked soirees. If Gifford hadn't sent Yolanda to escort her, she might never have come. It was all she could do to slap on some lipstick and mascara. Yolanda seemed to smile condescendingly at her more than once as her heels snagged on the cracks between the bricks—so unaccustomed was she to wearing them.

They made it to the top of the steps and crossed the broad wooden veranda. A doorman in an evening suit checked their names off a list. Through the entryway they passed into the two-story, oval Grand Hallway, floored in black and white marble, and brilliant with the light of a six-foot-wide chandelier. Fifteen guests in formal attire were scattered in small groups, the hum of their conversation echoing in the vast chamber, and vying with the music of the string quartet stationed on the landing.

Cricket's eye was immediately drawn to the portrait of Daddy at the bottom of the curved marble staircase—placed as though to welcome her home. He stood in full-length majesty, one hand on his hip, his white coat parted to show a vest and gold watch chain. Bald above, the sides of his face were framed by remnants of wavy, platinum-white hair cascading over his ears. His thin lips were set with determination. His eyes, violet-blue, were overhung with shaggy, white snowbanks. They were knowing eyes, loving eyes, their sparkle undimmed by the lines of work and care etched into his face. Her heart ached to see him so nearly alive again.

A white-jacketed waiter bumped into her with a tray of hors d'oeuvres—buttery, dark grayish blobs on toothpicks.

“What are they?”

“
Escargots de Bourgogne
, ma'am.”

As Yolanda made a gagging gesture with her mouth, Cricket waved the platter away. Looking around, she recognized Rick Beach, the actor, as well as the governor of California and one of the senators from New York. In the largest group, Niedermann was having an animated discussion with a man in a dark green military dress uniform. Next to him stood a writer from the
Wall Street Journal
who had interviewed her a couple of years ago for a book on AIDS in Africa. She looked in vain for local faculty, until she spied her old mentor Erich Freiberg pushing through the crowd on a beeline for her. He carried three glasses of white wine in his hands.

“My dear, dear Dr. Rensselaer-Wright.” He passed a glass to Cricket and hugged her with his elbows as he held the other two glasses aloft. Although his German accent was almost imperceptible, he had a Continental habit of keeping his upper lip almost rigid as he spoke. “Come out of the jungle, have you, to observe our own homegrown shrewdness of apes?”

Cricket chuckled when she noticed Freiberg's tie. Like the other men, he wore a tux and cummerbund. But his white bow tie, sprinkled with tiny black question marks, was not exactly regulation. “Yolanda, have you met Dr. Erich Freiberg?” Cricket said. “Long, long ago, I did a summer internship with him. He was the first investigator at Acadia Springs to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine.”

“Old news, Cricket. Old news,” said Freiberg, handing Yolanda a glass. “There will soon be two of us, I'm sure, once Charles receives his due.” Bypassing the hand Yolanda extended to him, he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek.

“Isn't it amazing what Dr. Gifford has done?” Yolanda exclaimed. “We can all be so proud of him.”

“Well, he's certainly made a splash today,” said Freiberg. “I guess this justifies handing the keys of the citadel to these moneygrubbing snakes of Eden.”

“It's too bad Eden employees can't enter the Lottery,” said Yolanda. “But I guess I can wait a couple of years for the commercial version. I'll still look young then.”

Freiberg looked shocked. “You mean you'd let them inject you with a filthy virus just to keep a few wrinkles off your face? You're too beautiful for that. You deserve to age gracefully.”

“Oh, it's not a virus,” Yolanda objected. “The Methuselah Vector is . . . well, it's a
vector
. Dr. Gifford explained it to me. I always thought a vector was something like a wild rat, you know, that spreads disease. But he says when they talk about a vector this way it just means a delivery vehicle. It carries the DNA for the aetatin gene to the cell.” She emphasized the name of the gene, as if it were something she had conscientiously memorized.

“And that, my dear, is exactly what a virus does,” said Freiberg. “In fact, most of the vectors used in human gene therapy today are modified viruses.”

Another waiter came by, this time with a tray of tiny slices of toast bearing shredded meat garnished with parsley. “
Rillettes de canard
. Shredded duck,” he announced. This time, Cricket took a slice. Freiberg took three, stacking them atop one another in his free hand.

Freiberg gave Cricket a confidential look. “The Cell Gate is MHC-1, you know.” He crunched a piece of toast in his mouth.

Cricket knit her brow. “MHC-1? You can't be serious.”

“A brilliant stroke, too, I must admit.” Freiberg turned to Yolanda, who was massaging her forehead as if she had a headache. “Young lady, what we are speaking of is the Type I major histocompatibility complex. It's a cluster of molecules found on the surface of nearly every cell in the body. Think of it as a tiny viewing screen by which the immune system can tell whether a cell is healthy or sick. If you wanted to distribute the aetatin gene everywhere, you couldn't do better than MHC-1.”

“Oh, I know about that,” said Yolanda. “The idea for it came to Dr. Gifford the night his wife died. I think her ghost gave it to him.”

“He told you this?” asked Freiberg.

“Mmm-hmm. Well, not about the ghost. That's just my guess.”

Freiberg cocked his head. “Well, ghost or not, it took buckets of sweat to make it work. After Doreen's funeral, Charles locked himself in his laboratory for months. His goal was to make an artificial form of CD8, the hooklike molecule white cells use to grab MHC-1. He wanted it to fit so tightly the connection would be unbreakable.

“He began by programming a bank of DNA synthesizers to make something like a trillion random variations of CD8. Then he set up a massive game of musical chairs, mixing all of the mutants together and letting them compete for binding space on MHC-1 complexes on the surface of a culture of human cells. Those that fit MHC-1 more closely stuck better to the cells; the rest were washed away. This gave Charles the seeds of a new library, with fewer but better quality mutants. A few billion, instead of a trillion.”

Cricket chuckled. “Only a few billion.”

“After the first round. The whole process had to be repeated over and over again. I checked in on him once. I could hardly walk through his lab, it was so crammed with incubator ovens—each of them growing hundreds of culture plates. Charles was sleeping in his office, scarcely eating at all. It seemed like he was in a trance. Finally, after thirty or forty rounds of screening, he had six mutants left. The best of these had an affinity a hundred million times stronger than the natural attraction of CD8 for MHC-1. I remember the day Charles emerged from seclusion, with the look of a conqueror who has just taken a city by storm. He placed a small vial into the hand of Wig Waggoner, his chief molecular biologist, and announced, ‘I give you the key to the Cell Gate.' ”

“I still don't like the idea of using MHC-1,” said Cricket.

Freiberg lifted an eyebrow.

“Is something wrong?” asked Yolanda.

Cricket eyed Freiberg intently. “How is it packaged? The Vector?”

Freiberg shrugged. “My dear, I have no idea. I've spent the last months trying everything short of suicide to avoid hearing so much as the name of that infernal Mephistopheles Vector.”

Cricket noticed Yolanda's pained look and assumed it was because she felt left out of the conversation. “It's like this, Yolanda. A virus can't go just anywhere it wants. Before it can infect a cell, it needs an entry key. That's called a receptor, and it's different for every virus. The reason a cold virus doesn't kill you is because its receptor is the CD54 adhesion molecule found in cells lining the nose and throat. It infects only these cells, and once the infection has burned itself out, you get well and live on until your next cold virus infection. There's a kind of truce that's been worked out between us and hundreds of innocuous little viruses like that. They agree not to kill us, and we provide them with a nice, warm home, where they can multiply and go on living as a species.

“But what keeps a virus in its place is its receptor. CD54 isn't a problem. It's a key that only opens one door. But MHC-1 is a
master
key. It exposes every cell in the body to infection. A virus that could target it would be lethal in the extreme.”

Yolanda's mocha-and-cream complexion seemed to turn a shade redder. “Why does everyone have to be so critical of Dr. Gifford? Don't you think he knows about this?”

Cricket drained her wineglass. “I'm sure it was the first thing he thought of,” she said drily.

In her glass, Cricket saw the distorted reflection of Jack Niedermann hastening toward her. “Dr. Rensselaer-Wright! How nice to see you again,” he called out as he drew near. “Have you found your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Does that mean you'll be leaving us?”

“Tomorrow.”

“A pity. I had hoped to get to know you better. I googled you, you know. I came up with a ream of scientific papers, most of which went right over my head. But there was one feature about you in the
New Yorker
, something entitled ‘Tomb Raider with a Microscope,' which I found quite fascinating.”

Cricket was annoyed to feel herself blush. “I was barely out of my fellowship when that came out. The photos are supposed to be of me as a nerdy microbiologist's sex symbol.”

“Yes, I can easily see that,” said Niedermann, smiling wolfishly.

To Cricket, Niedermann's come-on seemed fake, a balloon that needed puncturing. “Do you mind my asking you something, Mr. Niedermann? My ex-husband, Hank Wright, contributed to the Methuselah Vector project. Why wasn't he invited to this banquet tonight?”