Authors: Harry Stein
He cupped his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. This was always the part where it got to be
fun
.
He didn’t quite have it yet, but it was coming.
L
ogan awoke with a jolt, the telephone jangling in his ear. The room was still semi-dark. He fumbled for the receiver.
“Christ, Ruben, gimme a break. What time is it?”
But on the other end there was only silence.
“Ruben?”
He heard the click as someone hung up.
Instantly, the drowsiness was gone. He dialed Perez’s number—and woke him.
“Dan?” he asked, his voice heavy with sleep. “You just got back?”
“Late last night.”
“Why the hell you calling me now?”
“Ruben, listen to me. Something’s going on.” Suddenly, he thought better of it: what if his phone was tapped? “Wait, just stay there.”
“Where am I going?” asked Perez wearily.
Logan slammed down the phone and, wild-eyed, throwing some clothes into an overnight bag, dashed out the door.
“Ruben?” he said, ten minutes later, into the receiver of a pay phone.
“Logan, you’re totally fuckin’ up my life.”
“Stay there. I’m coming over!”
He caught the uptown A train at Canal Street and, sitting among the earliest of the morning commuters, hid behind an open
New York Times
. At this hour, the trip took less than half an hour. It was not yet seven when he pressed the buzzer in Perez’s building—and woke him again.
“Look, Ruben, I’m sorry,” he said, facing him across his tiny living room. “I know this is tough on you.”
In the far corner, the rats scurried in their cages; the tumors, induced a week earlier, were visible even from where Logan sat. In a few days, they’d begin dosing them with the drug.
Perez, in a bathrobe, leaned forward in his chair and rubbed his eyes with both hands. “What is it now?”
Briefly, in broad strokes, Logan told him about his experiences in Washington.
His friend took it in soberly, aware of the sharp decline of Logan’s emotional state in just two days.
“Listen, Dan,” he said softly when he was through, “I just want you to think about what you’re saying to me. Really
think
about it.” He paused, groping for the right words. “Look, I hear you. I know what the girlfriend told you must’ve been pretty scary. But think about where she’s coming from, all right? The guy she loved just killed himself.”
Logan shook his head emphatically. “No. It isn’t that. You don’t know these people, Ruben.”
“It’s the fuckin’ ACF, Dan! They don’t DO this kind of thing.” He threw out his arms imploringly. “Don’t you know what you did, man, you decked Seth Shein!”
“He’s part of it. He’s as bad as any of them.”
Perez sighed. This guy needed help, and he was no shrink. “Look,” he said, rising to his feet, “I gotta get ready for work. You do too.”
“I don’t think so, Ruben. Not today.”
“Jesus, Logan, you need this job! Even Severson can run outta patience.”
“I know.” But Logan remained where he was. “Would you mind if I stayed here? Just for a few days?”
Perez disappeared into the bedroom and returned with a key. He tossed it to Logan. “Your funeral. What’re you gonna do for clothes?”
Logan nodded at the overnight bag. “But I was kind of rushed. I only brought a couple of things.”
“Man, don’t you got any other friends?” He shook his head wearily. “Gimme the key to your place, I’ll pick up some stuff for you after work.”
Perez had been gone a half hour before Logan focused on it. Rummaging in his jacket pocket, he was unable to find the crumpled scrap of paper on which he’d written the day before. But there it was in the phone book: Forcheim G. 802 W. 190th St. Not many blocks away.
Logan showered and pulled on the clothes he’d brought in his overnight bag—jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. They would have to do.
He decided to walk, down Broadway and up a long, curving hill. The building was perhaps twelve stories high, opposite an old age home. The names on the panel in the entryway reflected the changing face of the neighborhood, a near equal mix of German-Jewish and Hispanic, with a couple of Russian names as well.
Forcheim. Apt
. 3C. He pushed the buzzer and waited.
“Yes?”
“Ms. Forcheim?”
“Yes?”
What now? “My name is Dr. Daniel Logan. I know this might sound strange, but I’m looking for—”
“Pardon?”
Feeling incredibly foolish, he began shouting. “I’m trying to find out about a man named Nakano—”
He heard the slight click that signaled she’d snapped off the intercom. “Shit,” he muttered, and pressed the buzzer again. No response. He pressed again. And again.
A resident of the building, seeing him standing there, muttering to himself, inserted her key and hurried quickly through the plate glass door, taking care he wasn’t able to follow.
“
Damn
it,” he said, aloud, and was about to turn away, when through the glass he saw the elevator door in the lobby open.
Coming toward him was a woman—probably in her
mid-sixties, wearing a baggy housedress, but possessing one of the most beautiful faces he’d ever seen: jet-black hair, lustrous skin, dark eyes slightly crescent shaped. As she got closer, he saw the eyes were astonishingly bright.
He knew it even before she opened the door. “He was my father.”
Twenty minutes later, he sat on her faded couch, a cup of tea on the low table before him, as she wound up her story. It seems she was less than a year old when she came to America with her aunt and uncle, her mother’s younger brother. The plan was that eventually her own parents would join them. “But my mother’s parents, my grandparents, were too old to leave, they didn’t want to. Someone had to stay with them, and I suppose everyone thought because my father was not Jewish …”
“It would be safe.”
“I don’t think anyone had any idea then how bad it would get.” Momentarily, she looked as if she might cry. “I was lucky, actually. I had my aunt and uncle. They adopted me. I was never alone. My aunt just died last year. I took care of her.”
Logan glanced about the room, busy with colorful fabrics, plants, framed photos. His gaze fixed on the small portrait in a wrought iron frame on the window ledge beside him. It showed a youngish Oriental man wearing black-rimmed glasses and a serious expression. “This is him?”
“Yes.” She smiled. “But I have others where he doesn’t look so stern—one where he’s playing with me. When it became clear they weren’t getting out, they sent us an album.”
“He was a very gifted man,” said Logan, trying to nudge the subject in another direction, “a very great scientist.”
“Would you like to see it?”
“Of course.”
“I keep it right here.” She reached into a shelf beside
her and withdrew an album with a faded fabric cover. “This is how they used to make them then, to last.”
Opening it, Logan was instantly transported to another time, the Frankfurt of pre-Hitler Germany. That vanished world was the backdrop of many of the black-and-white pictures, carefully mounted and labeled in an elegant hand; elegant little shops and well-tended parks and peaceful streets. But, above all, he picked up a sense of the young family in the foreground. Mikio Nakano, usually in a business suit, but occasionally showing a mischievous or even a silly side; the woman before him, as a chubby infant; her darkly pretty young mother.
“What was your mother’s name?” asked Logan.
“Emma. Isn’t she pretty?” It was apparent this was important to her even now.
“Very.”
“She was a piano teacher, did you know that? That’s how they met. With all his work, he decided to take up the piano.” She laughed. “I have all the details. My mother also sent over her diary. Would you like to see it?”
“I would.” For, in fact, the particulars of this family’s life were starting to engage him.
“Actually, it’s four volumes. She wrote down everything.”
She went to a closet across the room and carried them over. For the next quarter hour, as she hung over his shoulder, commenting, he perused the pages of flowing script.
“It’s remarkable,” he said finally, gently closing the book, “what a treasure.” He paused. “I was wondering, by any chance did your father also keep a diary?”
“My father?” She shook her head. “Not really, I don’t think he had the time.”
“I mean about his work.”
“Ohh.” She thought a moment. “Actually, yes, I think there is something, a journal of some sort.…”
Getting up, she went to a closet across the room and began rummaging about. “Most of it I can’t make heads or tails of, of course. All those numbers and letters.” She
stood on tiptoes and gingerly pulled down a box from the crowded top shelf. “I think it’s in here. Yes, here it is.”
In her hands she held a black-and-white marble composition book, similar to those Logan himself had used in school. “I hope you’ll excuse the disorder. But I usually find what I’m looking for.”
She handed it to him. Casually, as if simply perusing another interesting artifact, he opened it. What he saw on the first page sent a shiver down his spine. A rendering of the precise compound with which Logan had been working.
“I hope it’s helpful,” she was saying.
He flipped to the next page and then on to the one after that; then, more rapidly, scanned perhaps ten more. What he was seeing was a series of brief entries, three or four to the page. Occasionally an entry was accompanied by a sketch of a chemical model, annotated and dated. The story being told here was riveting—that of the evolution of a brilliant scientist’s thinking as he struggled, over the course of more than two decades, with a problem of almost unimaginable complexity.
Excitedly, apprehensively, Logan skipped to the back of the notebook. The final dozen pages were blank. But on the one that preceded them, there it was: the fully realized compound!
Logan quickly deciphered the German words above it.
“Es funktioniert!” It works!
It was dated 26/10/38. Two weeks before
Kristallnacht
.
“Would you mind if I borrow this?” asked Logan, trying to maintain a veneer of calm.
She looked suddenly concerned. “It’s very important to me.”
“I understand. Of course.”
How to put this?
“I just think you should know your father did some remarkable work here.”
“Really?” She lit up. “That’s wonderful to hear.”
“Only for a day or two, I just want to make a copy of
it.” He began fumbling in his jacket for his wallet. “I’ll leave you my driver’s licence, my credit cards …”
With a sudden laugh, she relented. “Never mind, of course you can. I never imagined anyone would ever be interested.”
S
omeone else might have dreaded this confrontation. Seth Shein relished it. In his long tenure at the ACF, never before had he had such an opportunity, and there’d surely never be one like it again.
He had to make the most of it—even if that meant winging it.
“Say, Stillman,” he said, strolling into his rival’s office unannounced, “haven’t seen much of you lately.”
Gregory Sillman looked up from the paper he’d been working on, his lip instantly curling in a sneer. “Who the hell let you in here?”
“Just wonderin’ what you been up to.” He noticed Stillman had slipped his forearm over the page before him. “Colleague to colleague.”
“Get the hell out of here!” Stillman snapped the button on his intercom. “Martha!” There was no response. “Martha, goddamn it!”
“I think she might be downstairs in the cafeteria,” offered Shein, innocently. “I think that’s where I just saw her.” He took a seat. “So … you wanna tell me what you been workin’ on?”
Stillman rose to his feet. “I’m in no mood for your idiocy, Shein.” He started moving toward him. “Now get out!”
“Maybe that’s the wrong question. What I mean to ask is—who’ve you been treating with Compound J?”
He stopped in his tracks, less angry now than seemingly bewildered. “What?”
“Simple question. I looked at the records down in the
pharmacy. It seems you’ve checked out fifteen grams of the stuff. Who for?”
“For research purposes, of course,” he said. But, knowing who he was dealing with, he wasn’t able to manage complete conviction. “I’ve never denied Compound J seems to have some activity.”
Shein snorted. “Don’t insult my intelligence,” he said, his voice taking on a dangerous edge. “You can do anything else—all right?—but don’t insult my intelligence. We’re talkin’ fifteen fuckin’ grams! How many mice you planning to dose, a hundred thousand?”
“Shein, that’s the most irresponsible kind of speculation!”
Shein hesitated a long moment, appearing to consider this. “You know what Logan thinks?” he picked up, his tone almost conspiratorial. “He thinks you murdered his lab animals. He thinks you were so desperate to discredit his research, you poisoned his fuckin’ lab animals! So that you could take over.”
“You’re throwing Logan at me? A guy who faked his data? He’s got his head up his ass.”
Shein nodded decisively. “You’re right, I agree with you—Compound J-lite is incredibly toxic stuff. No way you killed those lab animals.” He smiled; it was impossible to tell he was operating on pure intuition. “Just the women.”
“What? What the fuck are you—”
“Simple enough with these new poisons, Greg. Was it chrisanthetoxin—
that
destroys the liver. All you’d have to do is get a thousanth of a microgram into the IV line. Or, better yet, into the chocolates the Italian babe was always slipping her patients.”
Stillman came back with a brittle laugh. “Compound J killed those women, Shein. It’s an established fact.”
“No, Greg, Compound J doesn’t have that kind of toxicity. You know that. Why else would you take the chance of feeding it to someone else?”
The other man hesitated, his face suddenly drained of color.
Jackpot!
“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” said Stillman finally.
“Greg, you already have.” Shein smiled confidentially. “She must be pretty big stuff for you to go to so much trouble. I figure none of the conventional stuff worked, right? So what were you gonna use—
your
stuff, that’d had zero responses? Compound J may be hit and miss, it’s had some problems, but at least it’s active.”