08.20.2008 / EP. 32
A Quick Scheme
Carrie wondered if the world was going crazy. She tells an intelligent man that bizarre events are occurring and hammers the message home by adding that they don’t make sense. Not 30 seconds later, while she is describing the irrational occurrences, the intelligent man asks her to make sense. How (Carrie wanted to scream this but instead said she’d call back) can events both be bizarre and make sense? She wasn’t suffering a breakdown. Carrie settled on the assumption that the intelligent man was sleep-deprived or having a bad day.
Another possibility existed, however, namely the figure-ground phenomenon. Was Carrie looking at events the wrong way? The burglary and killing might be peripheral and not at the centre of the frame. If they’re not at the heart of this business, something else was. She could find the key if she knew what was odd and out-of-joint in all this. The personal element, was an answer. Not the only one certainly, nor the least ramifying. Milly herself was a case in point. Departmental assistants aren’t normally at the heart of a maelstrom. And me, for another. I have confidence in Milly vastly out of keeping with her experience. She doesn’t belong in an investigation that could affect who becomes President. Not that Milly isn’t smart, but there must be a reason why the evidence was arranged to point at her. If I had the answer, I might understand what the case was about. Neither of which are remotely within my radar screen at the moment. Which is embarrassing. There, that’s why I hung up on Andreas: embarrassment.
Carrie dialled Andreas again. It’s what Kerry would do, she told herself, take a deep breath and quick march. “The real news is Milly,” Carrie told Andreas. “I’m not sure what to make of her. The criminal evidence circles her like stars around a black hole. Events involve her. She’s everywhere in the kaleidoscope. It’s as though she has emerged, a brilliant moth, from a drab cocoon, and no one can keep his eyes off her. There’s a confidence that wasn’t there before, adroitness and depth. Or maybe I’m seeing for the first time what was always there. Whatever she is doesn’t fit an assistant legal adviser. Something is out of focus. Plus the events themselves that I told you about.”
“Give me a minute,” Andreas said. Carrie watched the seconds tick by. It was exactly a minute before he spoke. “Become her closest friend,” Andreas said. “See if Milly says anything that explains what’s going on. I’ll work at it from the French side.”
“What are you going to do?”
In a soft tone of voice: “Nothing that interferes with your work. Keep in touch.” And he was gone. Andreas replaced the receiver. He had something in mind for New York, something that would bring Milly, if she possessed a second identity, into the open.
He stared out the window. Carrie was an uncertain, hesitant instrument. RED made her unreliable. How to tease his plan into existence and who to use, therefore, these questions revolved and passed through each other like waves through an opening in a reef till Andreas held a picture in his mind. The prelude would seem like a minuet. The 17th century Dominican monastery still stood nearby, he noticed, together with the second-hand bookstore where a hardworking Lebanese immigrant, now deceased, had collected a group of fervent acquaintances. There was something familiar in what Carrie had described, something that echoed lightly in the reaches of his mind, a word or phrase, but Andreas couldn’t give a name to it. He called Antoine. They met at the usual bar near the Buttes Chaumont.
Heads swivelled as Andreas entered. “The myth has it wrong,” Antoine said. “It was Orpheus who made Eurydice’s head turn.” They started with a Bourgogne (Christophe Buisson, 2002). Andreas told him what Carrie had said. Antoine leaned back and shut his eyes. He appeared to fall asleep, save that periodically his hand like an automaton’s would lift the glass to his lips.
Andreas came equipped with a mop of unruly black hair. It was the first thing people noticed and women loved to run their hands through it. Tall, broad shouldered, armoured with an impish grin – friendliness can be an effective defence – and invariably coherent, he dominated most conversations without trying. Vigour, quiet confidence, courteous irony, and an unfailing smile, plus dark soulful eyes as the coup de grace, were other personal weapons at his disposal. All these acted as social magnets and opened the door to a political career, but Andreas had other goals. Morality, to him, was a cultural artefact, flexible before the winds of patriotism. Which was why Antoine liked him. Antoine used Andreas unashamedly in the advancement of French policy objectives, and Andreas exploited his masters with the same careless ease.
“Work at the Curie Institute,” Antoine had told him five years ago. It wasn’t hard to forge a resume and Andreas had impersonated molecular biologists more than once. He had the technical background and intestinal fire. Andreas quickly made himself useful to Walter Emerson, senior emeritus at the Curie. Walter was struggling to prolong the life of cells. He’d spent twenty years searching for an emulsion that replicated the ancient seas, where proto-bacteria and plants combined to form symbiotic hybrids. These plant-animals evolved into the complex particularised modern cells that make up human beings. But Walter’s emulsion boosted the reproductive dynamics of the cell’s telomeres, the ancient bacteria whose DNA depletion over a human’s lifespan creates what we call old age. Walter delivered more energy to the telomeres, catered to their chemical demands, in hope that these cells would live longer. That was the plan. And in the view of Andreas, there was no reason it shouldn’t succeed.
Andreas joined the Curie when Walter Emerson turned 79. Walter’s wife had died the year before and he’d adopted the halting gait of frail pensioners, the kind that patrol nursing home corridors, stubble cheeked, limbs wracked with tremor, wrapped in stained bathrobes, scuffing low grade carpet with down-at-heel slippers. He looked nothing like the galvanizing force behind the premiere research institute in France. Was it coincidence that Andreas was present when Emerson stumbled on the precise composition of a fluid that prolonged human life? Walter never knew. He cared only that it was too late for himself. He faced lonely years, waning strength, heightened pain and debility, near blindness, the loss of friends and inability to replace them, and a new enemy – dementia. Who wouldn’t, rather than prolong this predictable agony, opt for a quick exit? Sensible decision, Andreas conceded. But Andreas tempted Emerson with promises of fame and fortune, renewed lust and vigour. Walter believed him and Andreas, to everyone’s amazement, delivered on the lure. Walter appeared to recover his youth. No two people could agree, but that’s what it seemed – a revival, rebirth. On the cellular level, other laboratories duplicated Walter’s results. The emulsion worked. Walter gave Andreas second billing in the crucial peer reviewed publications and permitted him to handle the business end of the project, which quickly mushroomed into the pharmaceutical discovery of all time.
Andreas contracted out the manufacture of the life extending drugs to his family in Germany, the Rineharts, famous for science over centuries. The Rinehart group was poised to become fabulously wealthy, though it’s equally true in fairness that Emerson would have died on the eve of his discovery without Andreas to draw him forward. And it was Andreas who made Emerson an international celebrity.
Their drug, Rejuvenation, allowed people to live 200 years and remain healthy. Rejuvenation, Andreas said, would be copied. Nothing could prevent it. He proposed to Emerson that they produce their own underground knock-off. Why let drug lords take all the profit from the inevitable generic duplication? Walter agreed. Andreas neglected to inform Walter that Immortality, their low-cost formula, made in India and South Africa, also contained a robust stimulant, hallucinogen and addictive carbon ring.
Immortality was what Lin drew to Milly’s attention, in an unexpected phone call one Saturday evening. “I can prolong your life, increase your profit, and tweak your toes with pleasure,” he said. “You have the wrong number,” Milly replied.
