The Sun Chemist (23 page)

He was actually on the doorstep, waiting. He’d heard the car pull up; white mane of hair, Red Indian face. ‘Well, goddam it,’ he said. He had both hands out – I thought to shake mine, but it was to take the case.

‘It’s in here?’

‘Yes.’

‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’

‘Goddam it,’ he said, and trotted into the house.

We followed him.

‘You had no trouble?’

‘No. Well, I had to be –’

‘Tell me later. It’s locked?’

‘Yes.’

‘
Nu?
’

I got out my keys and turned the lock. The damned thing had jammed.

‘What the – What are you doing, torturing me?’

‘It got – squashed – against my knee,’ I said, screwing away.

‘So break it – what? Give me a knife!’ he yelled.

We got a knife, and then a screwdriver, and wrenched it open to find the
Daily Telegraph
and two packets of paper and the Bible. I stared at it and looked at the lid of the case. ‘I.D.’ My initials. Not my case, though. Somebody else had got my case, and the copy of the lab books and volume 15. I had got somebody else’s, with the
Daily Telegraph
and two packets of paper and the Bible. Switched.

I went over to the San Martin in something like a state of shock. Connie went with me, and presently Ham looked in, and Marta, and a bit later Patel. The penthouse was occupied this time, and I’d got another room. It was the room next to Patel’s. I was still almost speechless. I’d traveled two thousand miles with the wrong case.

I knew it hadn’t been the wrong case when I’d gone into the departure room at London airport – the security man had just checked it. It had been the wrong one when I’d come out. The change had been made in that room – obviously when the woman had fallen over my feet and I’d momentarily put it down.

The unpleasant implications were not slow to sink in.
Whoever
had done it had known I’d be on that flight – indeed, to have got into the departure room, must have been booked on the flight himself. But who could have known? I hadn’t known myself until last night. I had made only the single call to Rehovot. The information could have come only from Rehovot.

Even so, the operation had been conducted at mind-boggling speed. I’d rung Connie after ten. She’d had people with her. The people could have rung others. Between then and the morning, anyway, somebody had set arrangements in hand: booked tickets, duplicated the case, staged the elaborate ploy.

‘Isn’t it possible there’s a quite normal explanation?’ Patel said. ‘You put your case down and someone picked up the wrong one – someone with a very similar case.’

‘Very similar,’ Ham said. ‘With the same initials.’

‘Possible, though.’

‘Possible,’ Ham said, and poured me another drop. He had brought the bottle. Marta hadn’t spoken much, and she held her
glass out, too, though she drank little. She said quietly, ‘It’s ghastly about your book, Igor. I’m so sorry.’

‘Which book?’ Patel said.

Marta told him about volume 15.

‘What was it – a year’s work?’ Ham said.

‘Almost.’

‘Oh, that is dreadful,’ Patel said. ‘I am really – Perhaps I will have something to drink. Is there orange juice?’

There wasn’t, so he went next door to get some of his own.

‘Thank God you left the lab books at your father’s,’ Connie said.

‘Yes.’ It had slowly sunk in on me, amid other shocks, that I shouldn’t have mentioned the lab books. I’d already told the other two, but it had obviously better go no further. I said so.

‘Well, of course not,’ Ham said. ‘Couldn’t they put a wiretap on the phones to try and catch this bastard?’

A rather unreal discussion on wiretapping was continuing when Patel returned, and he said indignantly that it was not only unethical but ridiculous.

‘How could you tap all the phones in Rehovot? It would need a regiment of technicians. People would just not use the phone here.’

‘True enough,’ Ham admitted. ‘And anyway, he wouldn’t be calling his secret service – just some friend, with some kind of coded crap. You read about these things,’ he said,
nodding
.

‘If such a person exists here at all,’ Patel said with a smile. ‘Look, I am no expert, but another idea does occur. Didn’t you say the plane was half empty, Igor, and that you booked in easily?’

‘I did.’

‘What was to prevent him doing the same? If you were being watched, and seen checking in, couldn’t he have booked in after you?’

‘Followed Igor to the airport?’ Connie said.

‘Certainly, from his home, why not?’

‘Igor wasn’t home last night,’ Ham said.

I said, ‘I was at a hotel.’

Three of those present knew that this wasn’t the case, so a certain silence set in.

‘That gives even another alternative,’ Patel said. ‘If you had, so to speak, disappeared, mightn’t it have been supposed you were planning to fly to Israel? Someone might have been stationed at the airport. Not so? How prolific one becomes.’

‘And the initials on the case?’ Connie said.

‘Prepared in advance. Igor uses such a case. Quite feasible, don’t you think?’

It was; all feasible, as he said. My head swam as the talk went on. I was watching the smoked salmon and the little parcels of perfume skidding endlessly across the floor. A natural enough accident, and at the same time disarming; as Hopcroft had been disarmed on stepping out of the lift at Tancred Court. The same operation, even: the case snitched at the last moment when papers were expected to be in it. Except that this time they had been.

*

The theory that someone might have waited at the airport and booked in after me didn’t survive the night.

The airline in London reported that no tickets had been sold or reservations made after eight in the morning; that was even before I’d left the flat, never mind arrived at the airport.

The overladen couple hadn’t made the flight, though they had been booked in. The details they had supplied were false.

No; stage-managed from Rehovot, all of it.

Meyer wasn’t shaved when I breakfasted with-him in the morning. He’d had as little sleep as I. He said immediately, ‘Did you tell anyone about the lab books in London?’

‘Connie, Ham Wyke, Marta.’

‘Who are they gabbing to?’

‘They won’t be.’

‘You have to go and get the goddam things.’

‘Yes.’ I’d been worrying over this, too. ‘Well, I won’t be
going, ‘I said.’ For one thing, I am being watched, so there is no point. For another, I’m not a hero.’

‘What about this girl of yours there?’

‘She hasn’t got a key. Also she’s probably being watched
herself
.’ I didn’t mention some other reservations.

‘Would your father hand the papers to anyone else?’

‘No.’

‘Someone in authority, from the Embassy.’

‘He knows about people in authority at embassies.’

‘With a letter from you in your own handwriting.’

‘He knows about letters from people in their own handwriting, too. He knows all the wrong things, my old dad. Anyway, do you want him to know what he’s got sitting there?’

He thought about it. ‘What, then – we hire burglars, agents, what?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Meyer!’

‘I know, I know. At my time of life, cloak and dagger,’ he said miserably.

‘The question is, am I going to get to your time of life? There is this spy in the Institute, keeping an eye on things.’

‘That I goddam refuse to believe.’

‘On me, in fact. I’m not moving anywhere till he’s been sprung.’

He drank his coffee, gloomily watching me.

‘Is a wiretap impossible?’ I said.

He put his cup down rather sharply. ‘Wiretaps. Where they play a recorder and listen in?’

‘Wyke’s idea, not mine.’

‘Well, it stinks! What is this – the Kremlin?’

I got on with my breakfast.

‘I feel old today,’ he said.

‘So do I. I live more here. I stay awake.’

‘What useful things did you think of while awake?’

‘Volume 15.’

‘Screw volume 15.’

‘With pleasure. I’m sorry I ever heard of it,’ I said.

‘You’ve surely got copies of that stuff.’

‘Not of the last twenty or so footnotes. Complicated footnotes. I wrote them.’

‘So you’ll write them again.’ He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘A bastard sits here watching, reporting?’

‘If it’s any consolation, he can’t have reported much. What’s he got? Presumably not the batatas or Vava’s process. The single reference in the letter to Haber, perhaps – that was bandied around enough. And Pickles lab books. Well, the best of luck with those.’

‘Say, wait a minute,’ Meyer said. He was looking at me rather queerly. ‘Did Haber express further interest in that process?’

‘He never expressed
any
.’

‘Isn’t that the period of volume 15?’

‘Not exactly. Volume 15 only goes up to –’

‘Well, it goddam is!’ he said. ‘And he did express interest. He was
very
interested.’

‘I see.’

‘You do?’

‘I will,’ I said.

‘Have a cup of coffee, Igor.’ The salty look was back in his eye again. ‘You know, already I feel younger.’ He started telling me what it was that I ought to see.

*

It needed a pass to get into the special greenhouse, and the man on the door still had to check by phone, even though I was with Finster. It was hot outside, but a great deal hotter in. The geneticist working there was in shorts and sandals.

The plants due to change the world didn’t take up too much room. The original lump had been duly forced into supplying ten cuttings, and these had recently been forced into supplying another ten each. The sprigs were growing away in individual small pots, eight dozen or so of them, a little stick supporting each skinny vine. The hulk of Uri’s specimen was being grown on for experimental purposes; bits of it were going to Finster. It was a mass of greenery.

Since first struck, the plant had made almost ten pounds of tuber, as well as supplying the shoots. There was a wigwam of 
sticks around it. The thing seemed to wax a little more as I looked at it. Pale green tendrils delicately felt their way around the wigwam in the Turkish-bath air.

‘This is some plant,’ the geneticist said. He was looking at it quite affectionately as he wiped his streaming face with his hat. ‘All it eats is the sun. A starch factory.’

He brushed away the soil at the base. A surly-looking hump, something between the color of a tomato and a beet lurked dustily there. I thought I almost saw it move.

‘How much?’ he said to Finster.

‘A hundred grams.’

The man produced a knife and sliced off a section with the dexterity of a butcher. He weighed it and puffed powder on the bleeding side of the tuber, while Finster placed the small steak in a plastic box.

It was quite cool in the blazing sun after the greenhouse; and upstairs in the Daniel Sieff cooler still. Finster locked his steak carefully away before showing me the results of his latest fermentation. The liquid dripping out of the fermenter was of an ominous beerlike shade. He uncapped the jar and inclined it toward me.

The rank smell was stronger than ever.

The yield from Vava’s batatas, as I already knew, was
something
tremendous. So was the carotene. Finster inclined his own powerful nose over the vessel before gloomily recapping it. Then he wrote out what was required. Incurious as ever, he hadn’t asked a single question. As Meyer had said, he’d be mute as a stone.

There wasn’t anybody in the basement archives of the Wix, only Alizia. I sat in a corner and went through the boxes for
October
, 1933. The original of the letter to Haber was there, October 2nd. I recalled that there had been an exchange between them not long after, and hunted it down: yes, October 16th:

Rutherford was still trying. Approaches were still being made about the Nazi levy. More to the point, it was a one-pager: plenty of space for a P.S. However, there was no P.S.

I wrote the P.S. myself, in Meyer’s study.

I did it in German. The formula had been reduced to five simple lines, and Horowitz had made the few alterations that rendered it into intelligent nonsense. The formula itself gave no problem, but the required words in Weizmann’s handwriting took some finding in his German correspondence. I copied them through tracing paper, and had several shots before assembling the P.S. into a coherent whole. After a few tries, letter and P.S. were both copied on a single sheet.

The effect was rather blurred and aged, curiously convincing. Large numbers of originals had been sent for safekeeping to Canada in the Second World War, and somewhat amateurishly photostated there. This looked very like one of them.

It was still not one o’clock when the manufactured copy was back in the archives, and inserted in position, October 16, 1933. Trap set.

Meyer had a tea party in the afternoon. I wasn’t at it, but at coffee at the Sassoons’ in the evening, a couple of people came up and commented on the P.S. that had been found in the archives. They hadn’t been at the tea party either. News traveled at Rehovot.

Events so soon became chaotic mat it seems a good idea now to get the order of them right. It was Wednesday that I’d picked up the lab books from Miss Greatorex, Thursday that I’d flown to Israel without them, and Friday when the bogus P.S. went into the files.

I found I’d landed into a series of half-days and holidays. Friday was a half-day because it was the eve of the Sabbath. Saturday was the Sabbath. Tuesday was a half-day because it was the eve of Remembrance Day. Wednesday was Remembrance Day, followed by Thursday, which was Independence Day; followed once more by Friday, which was the eve of the Sabbath.

Because of this flurry of ceremonial days, President Katzir was
tied up in Jerusalem being the President. He was still a professor on the Rehovot faculty, and liked to get down once a week to keep an eye on his scientific team. He had a house across the courtyard from Ham; a military guard post was on it since he’d assumed the Presidency of the State.

He had only a few hours available on Sunday this week. Meyer had been in touch with him about Kaplan’s desire for a letter of appreciation, and had told me he might want to see me and to keep Sunday free.

Before Sunday, however, came Saturday (a rolling Saturday, spent in a now traditional manner in a former President’s bed), and before that the busy Friday. That was the evening I was at the Sassoons’ for coffee. I walked Marta back from there.

It was a delicious night, the scent of late orange blossom in the air, and a bit of moon lying on its back in the different sky of Israel. The tryst had already been arranged for the following day. All the same, moon and bloom were at work, and the place was deserted. She felt like a trip into the orange groves.

The groves were on private land and enclosed by chain-link fencing but her keen eye spotted a gap in it not far from the memorial plaza, so an entry was soon effected. Later on, we looked at the moon and strolled back to the Lunenfeld-Kunin. Among the subjects under review, however, one lingered later. Apropos volume 15, she told me something Patel had said to her.