The Sun Chemist (25 page)

‘I suppose they’ll have improved the process since,’ she said.

‘Well, obviously.’

‘But it would have been enough to go on, if you hadn’t found the other papers?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Is the carotene thing so very important?’

‘Apparently.’

‘What luck you’ve got the originals in London.’

To me, every word she uttered was an absolute proof of
innocence
, but from a slight stiffening of backs in the front it was painfully obvious that it wasn’t so evident to all. Maddeningly, she wouldn’t leave it alone.

‘I don’t understand how a letter as important as this could be overlooked, if he gives the whole process in it.’

‘It wasn’t overlooked. It’s a known letter. I’m using it. It’s just that the P.S. on it was never transferred to the carbon copy.’

‘Do you work only with carbons?’

‘No, I check with the originals if political points seem
involved
.’

‘And they weren’t here. It was just an ordinary little letter.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So now you’ll be able to use the whole thing.’

‘Oh, I don’t know if –’

‘But you’ll have taken copies of the P.S., naturally?’

‘Isn’t this the turnoff for Bat Yam?’ Ham said, rather too loudly.

Marie-Louise switched the conversation, and we got there, and were greeted, and had our sober meal. It was very sober. Connie seemed to have been forewarned, and there wasn’t much to drink, which made Ham restless.

Connie had managed at the last moment to get me a ticket for the Independence-eve concert the following night at Caesarea; a party was going from Rehovot. As a special effort after the punishing war, Menuhin, Barenboim, and Stern were appearing,
with Zubin Mehta leading the Israeli Philharmonic and pitched choirs. The local Caesarea magnate, Foka Hirsch, whose party I’d been to at Christmas, was making his own special effort by throwing another party afterward, and we were going to that, too.

There was some discussion about this. Ham asked me to look in and have a drink at six-thirty before setting off, and I said I’d probably be around and about by then.

‘You’re surely not working all tomorrow?’ Connie said.

‘No. I’m tired with it. I’ll knock off early.’

We knocked off early that night, too, everyone a bit under par with the general gloom. The streets had been silent all evening.

Marie-Louise sat with Marta going back.

There was no Patel again at breakfast. He was either keeping me under observation or simply fasting. Well, damn him; I had my own breakfast, picked up a packet of sandwiches for lunch, and set off to the House. I left the bike in the shrubbery beyond the grave, crossed the lawn, and went up the three flights of steps.

I gave Chaimchik’s bronze head a brief nod as I let myself in, and locked the door behind me. There was a fusty air about the place. With all the half-days and holidays, I’d had it to myself for days. I was beginning to dislike Verochka’s dream house. There seemed something different about it today; some slight change in atmosphere that I couldn’t quite place.

The curtains were still drawn in Chaimchik’s room. I’d worked till dark the previous day. I opened them a slit. The sun was piercingly bright, too bright for the dim dead world awaiting disinterment here. Ah, well. Back to bloody 1933.

None of Caroline’s material had turned up yet, and assembling the missing footnotes, not knowing which were missing, had proved such a hideous as well as baffling bore I’d been tempted once or twice to drop it, in the hope that Patel was right and the stuff would turn up. I was glad I hadn’t now. With the
information
supplied by Caroline I had a pretty fair idea of what was
needed, and had luckily laid hands on it; so I assembled my materials and buckled to once more.

I’d worked for an hour or two before the sense of unease brought me to a total halt. What the devil?
Something
was different. The massive Remembrance Day silence, perhaps? It was unpleasant, almost palpable, in the empty House; yet it didn’t seem exactly that. Had someone been in – a security guard, perhaps – and made some slight change I’d subconsciously registered? Time for a cup of coffee, anyway. I thought I’d go below to have one and check at the same time.

I went down the marble staircase, whistling to keep my spirits up, and put the kettle on in the kitchen. Back door locked; kitchen and morning-room windows locked. I went and checked the other rooms. Library, salon, dining room – all in order and keys turned in locks. The front door was as I’d left it. I stood there for a while, looking round the hall to see what could have disturbed me. The limed oak gleamed coldly back, everything else in place. The feeling was still strong, though, as strong as the day I’d gone into the room with the Christmas tree in it in Stockholm. But that had been an anticipatory feeling.

I had a sharp urge to leave it for the day. But tomorrow was Independence Day, and no one was coming in the day after, either … The sudden blast of a whistle sent me almost full length under the hall table. I collected myself, went and turned the kettle off, took the coffee upstairs, and returned doggedly to work.

*

Sir Montague Burton,
64, Kent Road,
Harrogate, Yorks.

He was drumming up funds; and there was a missing footnote here from material gathered years later, 1950s. I went through to Connie’s room and lugged the boxes back with me.

I worked on, with a break for sandwiches, till sometime after four when I stopped with a headache. Desk, floor, and bed were well scattered with files. It was early to knock off yet, so I shifted the files off the bed and stretched out there, with the notion that I’d put in another hour and sign off at six. I knew I wouldn’t sleep, but the next thing was that bells were jangling, and I started up in alarm to find the room in semidarkness and all the phones ringing.

I chased them about the House until they stopped, and looked at my watch and saw with astonishment that it was half past six. I’d slept a couple of hours. It was probably Ham, anyway; time for the promised drink. So I returned to Chaimchik’s room and switched on the desk lamp and began repacking papers. His death certificate fell out and I popped it back in again. In the last hour of work I’d drifted a bit – Hopcroft’s old complaint – to pore reminiscently over the old lion’s last winters of
discontent
. They had certainly been very bleak, all his triumphs well behind, the historic achievements over, and only the last bitter dregs left.

There were plenty of those, however. As a last kick, he had done some prodigious things: had swung American policy in a complete volte-face in favor of the establishment of the new State, had won for it the Negev and a loan of a hundred million dollars. While he’d done it, the new young lions had wisely let him get on with it and had played themselves in at home. By the time he rumbled what was going on and was homeward bound himself, he was too late: they had elected him President, stripped him of all political power, and made him, as he savagely said, ‘the prisoner of Rehovot.’

Here were all his last rages, to the ‘government of upstarts,’ of ‘provincials’: that they must surely have some use for his knowledge of affairs, his international reputation. But they hadn’t; nor for the ‘consultative capacity’ he more humbly pleaded with them to use before arriving at decisions. To keep him quiet, Ben-Gurion sent the Cabinet secretary once a week to read him the list of decisions already reached. And so it passed for him, until the clock stopped at six, and the lifelong flow of papers stopped, too.
His
papers, anyway. After the death
certificate
came other papers, funeral arrangements, copies of the letters of tribute and condolence.

I stuffed them away in handfuls, came on other papers, and paused. Verochka’s papers. I’d never seen them in order; only the ones I’d asked for. Here they were, following his death.

Time was ticking on, and I knew I should be going, but I sat down and looked at them, all the same.

She’d been stunned, evidently, for weeks: piles of unanswered letters, invitations. She’d accepted an invitation eventually, a memorial meeting in America (Chaimchik still, from his grassy plot, drumming up the funds). And here was her diary entry as she’d left.

But alas, they did. Not long after returning from the trip, she was going through the files and meeting herself when young (Verochka, Verunya, Verusenka, darling and joy), and also, in later boxes of correspondence, some other young. Life had kept a couple of things back for her, too; at about the time that I was seven.

I was musing over this when a door gently blew to below, evidently from a draught. I wondered idly where the draught came from, since no doors or windows were open, when another thought occurred. If no doors were open, how could they blow to?

Odd. A moment later, it got odder still, and without knowing why I switched the desk lamp off and sat there, absolutely still, except for something throbbing in my throat, perhaps my heart, which seemed to have leaped there, because someone was moving below.

There were footsteps, evidently a man’s, rather slow and cautious. He was walking about the hall. I heard a door tried, and the scrape of a key in the lock; then it was-relocked and another door tried.

I sat with my heart thudding and thought over this. Through the slit in the curtains the sky was still luminous, a greenish-blue afterlight. Not much of it was getting into the room. With the lamp off, I could almost feel my pupils enlarging in the aquarium-like gloom. The sound, now I came to recollect it, had been the quiet snick of the front door. Who the devil had keys to it?

Meyer and Julian had, Harold, Connie, Nellie; perhaps Ze’ev. Could it be Ze’ev, come to see if I wanted a lift? But I hadn’t heard the car or the clang of the lodge gates. Anyway, if he knew I was here, he’d have called to me. Whoever was below evidently didn’t know I was here. The desk lamp would scarcely have shown up in the sharp afterlight. Intuition, or premonition, had been right. Or could it be a security man, checking that all was well?

I rose and tiptoed through to Nellie’s room and peeped through the open door to the landing. Dark below. As I watched, a faint reflected glow flickered in the stairwell and turned away again. Flashlight. Someone was poking about with a flashlight there. Wouldn’t a security man turn on the lights for a proper inspection?

The thudding of my heart unpleasantly increased. It was accompanied by a general shaking in every limb as another thought occurred. It might be that the person below did know that I was in the House. This alert person might have been watching the House; perhaps from the garden, or from a position where the bicycle, hidden in the shrubbery, was in view. There was
no other way for me to leave. The gates were locked at the lodge.

But why should he come looking for me at the House? Perhaps he hadn’t planned to meet me at the House but in the garden. Falling darkness and the possibility of missing me might have brought him here. But why should he want to meet me at all? Perhaps because he thought I had grounds for suspecting him, or to gather some information from me? Both possibilities carried such grave auguries of my subsequent unavailability for further information that I scuttled back into Chaimchik’s room and stood there, my pupils enormous as an owl’s, peering about in the deepening gloom.

What was needed was something in the nature of a hammer. There wasn’t even a bottle. There was the small candlesnuffer and the desk lamp. Far better, altogether more inviting, there was the wardrobe, with dozens of suits to hide behind. Except that a certain doggedness in the researches below suggested that the wardrobe wouldn’t go unchecked either. He seemed to be trying every door to see that it was locked from the outside. He would shortly be working upward.

It suddenly struck me that I shouldn’t have run back in here but upstairs to Harold’s lair. Apart from allowing more time, it had the advantage of opening onto the flat roof. I remembered the rain bouncing there when I’d run about looking for a heater in December. There must be some way off the roof – a drain-pipe, at least, in some corner of the House.

I scampered immediately back to Nellie’s room, and had got to the doorway when I saw the flashlight’s beam, no longer
reflected
but coming steadily upstairs. Christ!

Back to Chaimchik’s room, where I stood and wondered what to do. Put the lamp back on and jolly the whole thing out? ‘Hello, old chap. How very nice to see you.’ Yes … ‘Broke in, did you? And what would you like to do, apart from murdering me?’ He
might
be a security man, of course, the flashlight a badge of caste or profession. He hadn’t broken in, anyway. He’d let himself in, with a key, through the front door.

While considering these niceties, I found that I was standing by the other door out of Chaimchik’s room – the locked one that
led out to the landing. It was the first door on the landing, facing the stairs. It was locked on the inside. Anyone familiar with the House would know this, and would either make for Nellie’s room or start methodically from Julian’s at the other end and work down. The thing to do was to let him enter Nellie’s room, or pass it, and then unlock the door and get the hell out of it.

I felt for and found the key, while holding my other hand poised over the knob, and as I did this, it turned under my hand. The skin on my scalp crepitated as two thoughts surfaced. One was that he couldn’t be a security man, and the other that I hadn’t heard him, although I was only inches away and couldn’t have been listening harder. He knew I was here.

He pushed the door very gently a couple of times, and then let the knob go. I felt it reverse under my palm, and kept my eye on the open door to Nellie’s room, and saw the glow of the flashlight there, and very delicately, with my heart in my mouth, turned the key. Miraculously, it wasn’t stuck, didn’t creak, just solidly moved. I turned the knob, opened the door a few inches, and peered out. There was a dim glow, the reflection of his
flashlight
from Nellie’s room. Not breathing at all, not even thinking any more, I slid out, closed the door behind me, and went
tiptoeing
down the stairs like a pantomime robber.

It was almost pitch black in the hall. The front door was over to the right, the area between well stuffed with
objets d’art
. I felt my way between them, arms out like a sleepwalker. I found the door, and the latch, opened it, and thank God was outside. I took an enormous breath of fresh air, and lit off round the House in the general direction of the bike.

Although a lifetime had passed, it couldn’t have been more than four or five minutes since he’d entered the House. All the same, the greenish-blue afterlight had already turned to an unearthly mauve. Nothing was quite real in it, flowers and trees straining forward as though poised for some new experience in the approaching night. The bike was in the shrubbery beyond the sunken lawn below. I went down the three flights of rock steps to it, and almost immeditely realized that this was not such a good thing to do. The grave glimmered pallidly in the lawn below, easily visible from Chaimchik’s window. So would
I be. A quick look confirmed that this was the case. As I peered up, his face peered down through the slit in the curtains. I had an impression of a very tall figure hunched over the table in the dark. He saw me and immediately went. I had such a good idea where that I took the last flight in one jump and scuttled for the shrubbery.

I was in such a panic that I couldn’t remember where I’d left the damned thing. It didn’t seem to be where I thought I’d left it. No time for investigation now. I took to my heels again, and in the deepening violet light went haring down the straight
approach
lane from the grave to the plaza.

The enormous marble plaza was empty, except for the stark monument to the perished six million. I flew past it, to the long flight of ceremonial steps that led to the main avenue.

There was not a soul in sight. As I tore down the steps, I heard him pounding behind me, rubber shoes squeaking on the marble. There was something extraordinarily unnerving and desperate in the sound. He was intent on stopping me before I got to people. Breath sobbing, barely conscious of my legs, I took the steps without noticing, made the empty avenue, and decided to get off it fast.

There were trees on both sides. I suddenly remembered the hole in the chain-link fencing that bounded the orange grove to the right. At the same moment, the streetlighting came on, and I saw the hole, a ragged gap below a tree, and was through it, and had to slow in the blackness at the other side, and then had to slow a lot more, tall grass, old spreading trees.

Once I’d slowed, I had to stop, couldn’t go on any longer, had never run faster in my life. I didn’t seem able to take in enough air, breath painful and choked in my throat, my legs like lead. I stood in deep foliage and tried to control my breathing and wondered how I’d got into this insane situation. I should have left hours before, as soon as I’d felt the first tremor of alarm; have pedaled away in good broad daylight, instead of being caught here, in the dark, paralytic with fright.

I heard him suddenly, first some fumbling and then the swish of tall grass. He’d found the gap, had deduced what I’d done, knew I was here. This was a thinker, in a place that specialized
in them. He came on for a moment, and abruptly stopped,
realizing
I’d stopped. He stood stock still and looked slowly round: a black indistinct figure, fifty yards away. Then he flashed his light, evidently had second thoughts, and put it off again.

Silence.

He did something strange. He went away, back to the fence. I heard him for a while, and then couldn’t.

I was slowly realizing what an idiot I’d been. Beyond the fence, a network of lights now glimmered, a couple of hundred yards away, at the other side of the avenue. There was another development of faculty villas there. The Sassoons lived in it. A few minutes more of running would have taken me there. It suddenly struck me what he was up to. He had stationed himself between me and the villas, had put enough distance between us to spot any movement of mine back to the fence.

The last light had vanished from the sky; stars visible now. The hard glossy leaves exhaled the scent of oranges in the warm night. The new crop hung tightly like marbles, a clutch of them against my sweating head. I looked at my watch and saw it dimly shining at a few minutes to seven. Ham would be wondering why I hadn’t turned up. Just then a car came up the avenue, and I wondered if it was him, going to find out where I was. A moment later, in its headlights, I saw the man – at least where he was.

He was standing quite still against the fence, facing into the grove. The car turned in to the villas, and darkness fell again. I tried to remember the topography of the pplace. The next
building
on this side must be the Institute of Nuclear Science. It stood in a landscaped area, set well back off the avenue, with a network of paths behind. Was it possible to get at it by going
into
the grove?

Very cautiously, I got down and began to crawl, brushing the ground in front of me to avoid the crackle of twigs. There were various unpleasant messes from old rotted oranges. I passed
several
lines of trees and looked back. No movement. Away to my left now I could hear the soft thud of the heavy-water plant. Far enough. Time to turn.

I crawled for six or seven minutes before I heard the rustling,
and immediately froze. It wasn’t from behind. To the front and a bit to the left. Was he outflanking me?

I kept absolutely still, and listened, heart thudding. The
rustling
was rather deliberate and investigative. Suddenly I got the lot, all at once. A growl, a rush. A dog! It had scented me, was on to me, with a series of rushes, a little snarling thing. I heard a clattering, well behind, and knew he’d heard it, too, and at once rose and gave the little bastard a heartfelt booting before taking off.

On my feet, I could clearly see the upper stories of the Nuclear Building, coolly and discreetly lit, and the return line of the fence silhouetted against it, not fifty yards away. As I neared it, I saw how the dog had got in. Building work was going on beyond the fence, and the bottom of the wire mesh had been cut and rolled back to facilitate the digging. I took a running dive
underneath
it, kicked the dog back to keep the approaching brain busy, and spent a few seconds pulling the rolled-up fence down. A couple of boulders helped with this, and then I was off.

A dangerously exposed road led to the frontage of the building on the avenue. It was quite empty. Service personnel might more reasonably be expected to be at the back – a prospect enhanced by a soft roar, evidently from a turbine house there.

I took off in that direction, and found the turbine house. Hot air was venting from exhaust grilles, and its steel doors were firmly closed. I ran past it into a lane of service sheds. There were armies of oxygen cylinders and steel bottles, a network of piping, the odd engine roaring away, lights blazing: not a soul in sight. I kept to what shadow there was, rounded the back of the Nuclear Science Inistute and a complex of adjacent buildings. Still nobody.

There was presently a great gap of churned-up earth and a rocketlike structure surrounded by cranes and tractors. A lit-up poster on stilts showed what it was going to be: the Koffler Accelerator. It was the skeleton of an advanced atom-smasher that would go nineteen stories high. Its roots were somewhere in an enormous hole. On all sides there were small mountains of spoil.

I paused awhile, breathing heavily, and peered about. There
was no obvious way out of the place, once in it: it offered plenty of cover, though. I thought of something else as I panted into this desolation. I suddenly recalled having seen the tops of these mountains of spoil before, also the cranes at work on the
accelerator
tower: I’d seen them through the windows of the plant genetics lab. It couldn’t be far away; and at the special
greenhouse
, at least, a guard was on duty day and night.

I looked for a way through the mess, and heard the dog
yelping
from the direction of the sheds; which was cheering. In giving him the dog and a reliable early-warning system, I’d shown thinking as fast as his – faster, probably, if he hadn’t yet assassinated the dog, which would have been an early project of mine.

There didn’t seem to be a way through the mess. The thing was simply an immense crater, rimmed for more than 180 degrees by the spoil. I took an uphill track between two mounds, sinking in the sandier soil, and reached the top drenched in sweat. I saw him from there; saw the dog, at least, snapping and jumping at an elusive shape in the shadow of a tractor. I sank down on my haunches and looked around.

The greenhouses were a couple of hundred yards away on an opposite hilltop, and streetlighting was shining right through them. In the valley between was a road, and a building that I vaguely remembered but couldn’t identify. Puzzling over it, I thought of something else. The moment it occurred to him where I was trying to get to, he could easily run round by road and cut me off.