The Sun Chemist (31 page)

The man had rung him up at Rehovot at about the time that Bergmann was in America spreading the tidings of Vava’s
batatas
, the tidings at that time unknown to me. He had asked Ham what was this new thing with fermented oil. The story was by then all over Rehovot and no secret; in fact it had become a
talking
point of every coffee party. Olga, as sibyl of the sacred rolls, had become one, too. Ham had seen no harm in telling his friend about it, and the friend had asked where Olga lived these days. Later he had told him more of the unfolding serial of Olga’s marital troubles.

Obviously this friend, a distinguished enough man, had not gone about hitting people on the head; the thing had passed out of his hands. At some point, presumably, private detectives or better, or worse, had been employed by some department of the mammoth business. But when people did begin to get hit on the head, Ham had uneasily wondered if it could have anything to do with him. It was at this point that he could have spoken if he wanted, but he hadn’t. Despite the booze, despite his easy ways, he was a figure of towering eminence in his field; there was the Prize in the offing. Anyway, he hadn’t, and after that he couldn’t.

And then his terrible son Rod had made a re-entry into affairs; for a long time I’d had my ears bored off with his
misfortunes
. There had even once been a suggestion that I could be of help to him: this had been in his Maoist period. (The
suggestion
had been Marie-Louise’s, always a bit hazy on the political spectrum, and apparently had to do with my own early indoctrination in the workers’ fight.) He had been kicked out of Berkeley, in itself no easy thing (nothing came easy with this boy), although it turned out that his explusion had less to do with Mao than with heroin.

From then on, heroin was the word with regard to Rod. It was very like a Victorian tract on the wages of sin. He’d had to be
pulled out of increasingly dire situations. Expensive legal work had got him off a charge of pushing the stuff, but his latest communiqué, of a few weeks before, was the most critical yet. He was in hiding, and frightened: a confused story to do with the takings of a pushing venture, of which he had been robbed. It had been a large sum of over a hundred thousand dollars, and little was left. He said that unless he repaid it, he would be found and killed, with or without police protection, and in or out of prison. The organization had a reputation to keep up in this respect. Alternatively, he wondered if his parents could get him to Israel, and what cover was available for him there.

This evil news sent Ham immediately to the bottle. Of the ideas canvassed, that of somehow raising the money seemed
infinitely
preferable, except that he had nothing like the sum. And then his colleague at the oil company rang up with a proposition. He said the company wished to commission a confidential and fully documented assessment of the Weizmann-Vava process. Though discreetly worded, it was plain that what the company really wanted was someone to dish the dirt, which it had failed to get.

Brooding on his problem, Ham had asked how much. His surprised colleague had named a large sum. Ham said he would let him know, and hit the bottle again. He sent his son a
thousand
dollars, told him to stay out of sight, and then wrote a cryptic note saying that he knew of someone for the job.

His idea, he had said, was to talk to me: he knew he could convince me of the moral duty of saving a life. Despite all
evidence
to the contrary, there was merit in this life. (It was this hard-to-define merit in Rod that he had been haranguing me about in Caesarea last night.) Over several bottles he had
convinced
himself of a couple of other things; he had brooded on my query of months before about the suppression of scientific
knowledge
. It seemed to him that if the process was economically viable there would be no need to suppress it; if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter if it was suppressed; a useful argument, not quite circular, which omitted a few mundane factors such as existing contracts, refineries, port installations in the wrong ports.

Anyway, he had supplied the information requested,
principally
about me and my movements. He had specifically
demanded
guarantees that I wouldn’t be harmed, which was very good of him and as satisfying as his arguments on suppression. But to his dismay he had learned he would be paid by result. The copy of the lab books taken from me at the airport was worth only a few thousand dollars; the original, if he could substantiate that there were no other copies, would be worth much more. He’d only get the full sum for the full process.

By this time, realizing the odium of his position, he hadn’t been able to ‘talk to me.’ He had come to the same conclusion that had later occurred to Marta on the car ride to Connie’s, that copies of the P.S. ought to be in the House – the P.S. that
apparently
contained the details of the process – which had suggested to him what he had better do next. He had been alert enough not to go to the Wix. He had seen me shuffling about with keys. The Southern strawberry fluff, his suggestion for seconds on dessert, had followed …

He had been more or less continuously boozed at the time, though the line had lately been pretty fine with him, accounting for Marie-Louise’s anxiety. Anyway, he had had the keys
immediately
out of my pocket and copied at a locksmith’s in the village while I stood under the shower, thus making a bid for the original lab books sitting behind the wardrobe in Gower Street. Yesterday afternoon, after phoning the House and assuring
himself
that I wasn’t there, he had gone for the full sum …

Thinking of the House standing in its glacial calm, the whole thing struck me suddenly as a hallucination: what had these absurdities to do with the real world, with the boxes upon boxes of letters, the bits and pieces from Christie’s and Sotheby’s
standing
where they had been put in the silent rooms, relics of the couple lying in the grass? Or with the apartment canyons of Bat Yam, which had somehow resulted from the years and years of drudgery, committee meetings, fund drives, carefully arranged briefings of those temporarily in power – all that intelligent effort? It had more in common perhaps with a pogrom in distant Russia that had brought an excitable rally in Manchester,
fortuitously
attended by a young Liberal candidate. Or with an
unlikely accident in an explosives works in Scotland that had resulted in a brisk train ride and a sudden glint of recognition between kindred spirits. There was a decidedly random quality about things as they happened. I looked into my glass and
realized
I’d been silent for a while and that she was asking me something.

‘How did Dr Patel know about the lab books here?’

‘Patel?’ He’d cropped up somewhere along the line. ‘He deduced it. He’s a deductive fellow, Patel.’

‘Have you told anyone yet that they aren’t here?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Hadn’t you better?’

‘There doesn’t seem such tearing urgency now.’ There wasn’t any comfort left in the glass. It had all gone. ‘Why don’t we just go to bed instead?’ I said.

‘Well, have you finished with all that? I mean, do you want to chat?’

‘I feel chatty as hell.’

‘I am sure this is going to be one of those major bombshells.’

‘How’s Willie?’

‘I have consented to be Mrs Willie.’

‘Well, congratulations,’ I said.

‘This isn’t the time to explain. I will, though.’

‘In bed.’

‘That would be a bit damned inappropriate, wouldn’t it? I came to collect my things.’

‘Afterwards you can collect your things.’

‘Igor, darling. It isn’t on.’

‘
Droit du seigneur?
’

‘You aren’t the
seigneur
. This isn’t the first night.’

‘We could anticipate,’ I said.

We did, anyway, and Independence Day passed. It had been a long one – rather mixed, on the whole, like Remembrance Day.

April, that was. I had a lot of work. May, June, July, and so forth, followed. I was in the history, not the oil, business.

Batatas grew, Finster fermented, Professor and Mrs Wyke returned to America. Connie sent me a cutting from the
Jerusalem
Post
, though I’d already seen it in the
Times
. It was headed ‘
THREE SHARE NOBEL PRIZE FOR HUMAN CELL RESEARCH
.’ ‘Stockholm. An American, a Briton and a Belgian yesterday shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for their research on lysosomes. American George Emil Palade, British-born Christian du Duve and Belgian-born Albert Claude shared $124,000 for their work in “creating modern cell biology”; the “disposal of worn-out parts” and “defence against foreign organisms.’”

Well, jolly good. The Jap had been spectacularly dished, as foretold by Ham’s jubilant friend. Ham had been quietly dished by other agencies. Cancer wasn’t on this year. Bully for Palade, du Duve, and Claude, then, and their disposal of worn-out parts and defense against foreign organisms. We all needed help there.

I knocked off volume 15 and attended to volume 16.

Caroline left me during this. There wasn’t much for her to do, anyway, and it seemed to her safer.

Ettie left the service as well, for less complicated reasons. ‘Things were going up.’ She needed a full-time job. The ‘
bleeding
lockout’ had proved not the peak but the foodthills of
problems
. Things were getting steadily madder.

Everybody I’d started with had now left me: Hopcroft,
Caroline
, Ettie. Still, I soldiered on. Friends gathered. The Sassoons turned up from Israel, Michael on a sabbatical to Cambridge. They filled me in on what had been left out by other sources. (There had been other sources: Meyer rang from time to time. So had Marta, once, on her way back to Finland, her sabbatical over. ‘Perhaps we will meet again,’ she said brightly, and we agreed it would be a very fine thing.)

With regard to Ham, the story had been kept up to the end, Patel nobly cooperating. He had been allowed to depart with dignity. He’d harmed the place, of course, might even have harmed millions; still the story hadn’t been designed for his
protection
. It had been designed to give me some leeway in case the keys hadn’t yet turned up in London and a collaborator was still around on the campus (impossible to check, all at once, if he had told all the truth, or if some sympathetic sick-visitor might yet
gather he had been ‘blown’ and rapidly pass on the news). But the keys had arrived before me, and there had been no
collaborator
.

Vava’s process had been costed out. It was quite workable. Spread out over enough million barrels, it could provide
high-grade
oil at a dollar or two under the current price. Finster had worked marvels but the ‘unwanted substances’ still proved the headache. A good deal of the cost went into getting rid of them. Trying out the stuff on a commercial scale, it seemed, would at once produce a graceful curve in the price of commercial oil to cope with the threat. It would have to come a good deal under the ‘dollar or two’ to be a workable alternative.

With the carotene converter it would certainly come
dramatically
under the dollar or two; but they didn’t have a carotene converter. So the chaps in the starch belt might have to wait a bit longer. I took a bus to the embankment one morning and walked for miles through Chelsea and Victoria, watching the sluggish Thames and thinking of the two young men beavering away in the Manchester basement an unimaginable seventy years before. They had found a solution before the world knew it had a problem. There was a Yiddish proverb of Meyer’s that seemed to cover situations like this: ‘
Gott shickt die refuah far der makke
.’ God sends the remedy before the affliction. Well, maybe. Perhaps the affliction hadn’t shaped up well enough yet. The remedy was around somewhere, though.

I tried to convey some of this to little Miss Margalit, the Pitman expert, who plodded along the embankment with me. But she was an uncomplicated person and she made short work of such nonsense. Problems cropped up. One dealt with them.

She had cropped up, not long after the Sassoons. She had phoned me, strangely enough from the Y.W.C.A. in Great
Russell
Street. She had come to England for a trip before her military reserve duty. She wondered if I knew of a job for her. I did, of course.

She did an excellent one on volume 16, and since, as she said, there was no sense in paying good money to the Y.W.C.A. if other accommodation was available, she took up residence with me on the seventh floor. She was an economical and efficient
body, only extravagant along the lines slightingly alluded to by Caroline as being to my taste in the long ago, and she fitted perfectly into the establishment. The departure of Ettie had been no disaster to her; she wondered why I’d needed anybody at all.

My father didn’t think as highly of her as he had of Caroline, but then she didn’t think much of him, either. Old revolutionary persons weren’t so thin on the ground in her part of the world, and his defection had seemed to her a bit of a frost when I’d explained it. She was fantastically, marvelously ignorant. Every day was a new day. History had stopped two thousand years ago. Because of some events touched on in volumes 15 and 16, it had tended to start again in 1948. Listening to her explaining to my mother passages of everyday interest from the Bible, I wasn’t sure it hadn’t.

For all these reasons I was sorry about her and her martial duties. Still, they were some way off, and meanwhile we finished volume 16. I gave a final flick-through to the neatly typed pages, and paused a moment over one of them, comparing with the original. It was for October, 1933. It was October 2nd.

Was den guten Vava betrifft, er ist unverbesserlich. Er hat mit mir letztens …

As to the good Vava, he is of course incorrigible. He has been
working
with me lately …