Bite (11 page)

‘It was an accident she was in the way. Sure, I wanted to get the big guy, to defend myself. This guy with the orange hair was giving him a gun. I couldn't let that happen.'

‘No-one else saw that, Carver,' Stokenbrand said. ‘But then no-one else can see into your twisted lying mind, which is the only place that weapon exists.'

‘Did you ask Lisbeth de Laan?'

‘We will, when she's in a state to talk,' Voos said. ‘This kind of thing makes me very angry.' She tossed a Polaroid across the desk. It was Lisbeth, her delicate face sliced, swollen and bloody.

‘Nothing you say is going to make me feel any worse about it than I already feel. She was the last person I wanted to hurt,' Max said.

‘Why didn't you leave the club when the owner asked you?'

‘I never met the owner. Just this gorilla who hates me since I started talking to Lisbeth.'

‘Janus Pretzcik
is
the owner. We have a number of witnesses who said you were told by him to leave but refused. When he tried to guide you to the exit, you resisted and started fighting.'

Max shook his head. ‘It wasn't that way at all. Lisbeth will tell you.' He started to tell his version of events, but Voos stopped him.

‘You say you knew Lisbeth de Laan already. But you also say you have never been to Amsterdam before this week. From where do you know her?'

Max kept his promise to Lisbeth. ‘She came to my art show yesterday.'

‘She came to your art show. Yesterday.' Voos stared at him. ‘So that's the first time you met her. And what is your interest in her?'

Max hesitated. ‘She asked me to go to the club with her, that's all.'

‘Were you attracted to her, is that it? A beautiful girl like her must attract many men.'

‘It's not exactly that,' Max said.

‘Not any more,' Stokenbrand snarled. ‘With a hundred and seventy five stitches in her face. If you couldn't have her, then nobody could, right?'

Max shook his head vigorously.

‘Do you hate women?' This was from Voos.

‘What?'

‘First you come to Amsterdam to meet your girlfriend. Then you report her missing. Ms Stroud-Jones has not been seen since. Then you change your appearance, dye and cut your hair. Then you meet this other woman, and you attack her with a broken bottle. Should we be now looking for your girlfriend's body?'

‘You suspect
me
?' Out of the corner of his eye Max saw the tattoos on Stokenbrand's forearms tighten, the fists clench. ‘It is
you
guys that don't care about Erica. It was
you
guys that tried to convince
me
it wasn't serious, that Erica had found new friends, or gone for a little trip or some other bullshit.'

‘That was before we knew what you are capable of.' Voos opened a thin folder and curls of shiny densely inked paper bounced up. ‘I got this faxed to me by the American embassy in The Hague, it's pretty interesting, this portrait of the artist as a young man.'

Max knew what would be there. A past he had tried to escape, catching up with him once again. Bald crimes, devoid of context or emotion, stripped of the nuance of trying to do the best thing you can with only a second to think.

Voos scanned the pages. ‘Let's summarise Max. 1982, assault and affray…'

‘Hey now. These two guys were dealing coke to school kids. Does it say that? No, sure it doesn't. They went down to gladiator school. I got probation.'

‘And 1984. Carrying a concealed weapon.'

‘You had to live in Brooklyn to know how bad it was. I'd made a few enemies.'

‘Seems to be a talent of yours, Carver,' Stokenbrand sneered.

Voos continued. ‘Then in 1994 a dishonourable discharge from the U.S. Coast Guard Service, following a court martial over a civilian death. The embassy says they can get that file tomorrow, but why don't you tell us what happened?'

‘Sure. I killed a drug smuggler during a boarding. I thought he was armed, he wasn't. The shot that killed my buddy didn't come from him, but from one of our own guys who got jumpy. Coast Guard command needed some fresh meat to throw to the Congressional oversight committee, and I was it.'

Voos smiled. ‘They let convicted felons join the Coast Guards?'

Max smiled back. ‘No they don't. It was only probation so I thought what the hell and didn't tell them. I guess for some reason they didn't check. Until the Samuel Ng case. That gave them all the excuse they needed to throw the book at me.'

‘Hasty man, bad temper, violent,' Stokenbrand said gleefully. ‘I could read it in your face. Now I see it in black and white.'

‘That's pretty rich coming from you, buddy,' Max said, then turned to Voos. ‘What you don't see here are the five years freezing my butt off in the international ice patrol, you don't read about the thirty-seven peaceful boardings I did out of Seattle, or hear the testimony of the two yachtswomen I dragged out of the water off Portland, or taste the seven hundred fifty pounds of coke my crew intercepted on one raid without a drop of blood lost.'

‘There was a lot of blood lost last night, Max,' Voos said.

‘Listen. I'm trying to find my girlfriend. Nothing more. If you guys had taken me seriously none of this would ever have happened.'

Voos nodded and steepled her hands. ‘I can assure you that we take you very seriously now, Max.' She had an austere attractiveness, with a hint of grey in her short dark hair. The wedding band was fat, the engagement ring sparkled with a hefty rock. There was an aura of self-containment, even smugness about her. This was a woman who knew love, but saw none of it in front of her.

‘Inspector Voos, why would I kill the person I am in love with?'

‘We hope you can tell us. And then tell us why someone in love spends the evening chasing another woman, why someone who claims to be frantic with worry about their missing girlfriend goes drinking and listening to rock music.' Voos rested her chin in her hand, head quizzically cocked.

‘You've got this all wrong….' Max was shaking his head emphatically. ‘There's a witness, right, who saw Erica with a man in a bar on the night she disappeared. Has Van der Moolen interviewed her yet?'

Voos ignored the question. ‘Let us suppose you are correct about a kidnapping. Why would anyone do this? Is she wealthy? Is her family rich?'

‘Comfortable, not rich, so far as I know.'

‘She is a scientist earning a moderate salary, in an obscure field. There is no ransom note, nothing. It just doesn't make sense, does it Mr Carver?'

‘Erica was on the verge of a scientific discovery, possibly a big step towards a malaria vaccine…'

Stokenbrand leaned towards Max. ‘Bullshit. And not even good quality bullshit. Do yourself a favour. Show us where your girlfriend's body is.'

Max folded his arms. ‘Maybe I should get a lawyer who does something instead of sitting there like a dummy.'

Haan leaned forward, his schoolboy's moustache twitching. ‘Mr Carver, I am only here to ensure your rights are protected. I'm not here to defend you.'

‘So does all this mean you guys are not doing anything to find Erica?' Max looked around the room.

‘Apart from having you in here, you mean?' Voos responded. ‘We have made routine inquiries, circulated her description, contacted the British consulate so that we can trace her family and so forth. Of course I have no intention of justifying or describing to you what we may or may not do.'

‘But you're happy to have me. What about the other guy? Janus. Got him in a cell?'

Voos shook her head dismissively. ‘Why would we? There is no evidence he committed a crime.'

‘And this is nothing, right? And this, and this.' Max pointed in turn to his broken nose, split lip and swollen ear. ‘Not vicious and unprovoked assault or anything, just a traditional warm Dutch welcome.'

‘Of course we will investigate your allegations, but the witnesses' accounts we have so far are very different from yours.'

Max hadn't realised how bad he looked until Henk was shown into the interview room. The art dealer recoiled at the sight of his face, and sagged on the chair as Max retold the story. Henk listened impassively, refolding and fiddling with the spare clothes and shaving kit he had brought. Finally he looked up.

‘Max, Max, Max. I thought I knew you, really I did. But the person sitting in front of me is a stranger.'

News from Kinshasa is not good. Jarman has his wife's death certificate with him. When Georg was shown it, he shook his head in disbelief. The cause of death was given as malaria. We were appalled, and Amy voiced the opinion that it was probably just another Kinshasa misdiagnosis. We all hope so. After all, the nuns had chloroquine and mefloquine in their dispensary, but because the malaria test was negative no-one thought to use it. No-one dares say it. But Sophie probably died for nothing.

(Erica's Diary 1992)

Shaun Miller was a salesman for Biomedical Supplies of New Jersey, and it was his turn to man the stand at the International Parasitology Forum. Shaun regarded it as dead time. The stand had plenty of visitors, threadbare scientists and scruffy doctors looking over the microscopes and diagnostic tests his company made, but no buyers. Parasites meant low budget hospitals, no corporate buyers and penny-pinching third world governments looking for freebies.

As he paced up and down he knew where he should have been. Las Vegas for the World AIDs Convention, or Rio for the oncology bash. That's where the money was.

Shaun was just cursing his regional sales head for allotting him this graveyard when a scrum of people approached and swarmed onto the stand. ‘Gentlemen, what can I…'

‘I am Professor Cornelis van Diemen of the Randstad Medical Centre in Amsterdam.'

‘Glad to meet you, Professor. I'm Shaun Miller, can I…'

‘We need to borrow that microscope,' said Professor van Diemen, pointing to the most expensive item in Biomedical's range. ‘Just for a few minutes.'

‘The model 2010. Sure, take a seat. It's got multi-planar focusing, and you can see…'

‘Where is the light switch?'

‘Here. Now on this model…'

‘Please stand back young man. You can try selling it to me once I've used it.'

Soon Saskia was standing at the edge of a press of eager scientists and officials, watching the pecking order develop as Van Diemen invited delegates to look at the slide of Erskine's blood. The best known experts, like F. Bruce McKilliam of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and Kathryn Delaney of Walter Reed Army Institute got their own slide to take away and examine at their leisure. Others had to take their brief turn at the lens.

The hierarchy was trumped the moment Professor Jürgen Friederikson arrived. The experts parted to let the great man take his place at the microscope, and waited in silence for his verdict. Van Diemen stood with one proprietorial hand on the microscope and one on Friederikson's chair.

Friederikson tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘Yes, Cornelis. Definitely.'

A beatific smile lit Van Diemen's features as he waited for the rest of Friederikson's comments.

‘It is, definitely, something new,' Friederikson said. The two stepped away from the stand, other delegates following in their wake, listening to history in the making.

Turning around to remove the slide, Saskia saw the microscope salesman peering down his own instrument at the sample. She laughed, and Miller looked up, startled and perplexed. ‘Can you tell me what I'm looking at here?'

‘It is a new form of malaria. So new, in fact, that it was discovered only this morning.'

‘Wow. And by that guy?' He pointed at Van Diemen.

She smiled. ‘I expect that is how it will be recorded.'

Shaun peered back down the instrument. ‘Is it dangerous?'

‘All malaria is dangerous. But this might be the worst kind.'

‘Why?'

‘Simply because we don't know where it came from, we don't know where the patient caught it and we haven't a clue if our drugs will stop it. All we know is that it progresses very, very fast.'

Shaun flinched back from the microscope. ‘Jeepers.'

Saskia's beeper began to sound. ‘Got to go.' She took the slide and put it in a plastic wallet. ‘Thank you for loaning us your microscope.'

‘You're very welcome.' Shaun said offering her his business card. ‘Let me know how it goes, okay? If history was made right here, today, on our model 2010, I'm gonna have it plastered all over the sales brochure.'

Saskia took the card and smiled at the speed with which glory was being grabbed. ‘I'll call you if I have time. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a sick patient to see.'

It was almost midnight when Professor Jürgen Friederikson slipped his 1964 midnight blue Bentley into his reserved parking bay at the research campus of Utrecht Laboratories. From the passenger seat he took a pile of medical journals and a polythene bag containing a plastic vial, and hauled himself laboriously out of the vehicle.

Friederikson nodded at the night receptionist, who greeted him by name and wished him a good evening. At his office he dumped the journals on a bulging in-tray and tutted at the flashing ‘memory full' light on the answering machine. Letters, phone calls, e-mails, everything could wait another week. It was not very often he could take science into unknown territory.

His hands trembled as he held the vial to the light. This was 10cc of very special blood. More would have been better, but it was all he could get for now.

He took the lift to the basement. In a storeroom he donned a white coat and picked out tubes, boxes and receptacles which he put on a plastic tray. At a door marked ‘Restricted' he pressed his magnetic card against a sensor. The door slid open and a wave of humid warmth slid out into the corridor.

The professor turned on the light and looked around the room. On the floor was a cage of white rats, and on the shelves two dozen rectangular fish tanks, each wrapped in fine netting. At first glance the tanks appeared to contain nothing more than a shallow dish of water. But as the professor peered in to each tank in turn, they became alive with mosquitoes, dancing into a frenzy as if they had been longing for his return.

Today I finally discovered the secret of the monkey colony. Jarman and I were sheltering in his hut while the rain machine-gunned the zinc roof when I just came out and asked him. He was lounging on a hammock under the knotted mosquito net and he lifted his head and squinted at me with those sad brown eyes. For a long time he didn't say anything, then he began the story.

In 1978 Sophie was working through the storage area of the university laboratory in Graz when she found a fifty-year-old monkey head and organs preserved in formaldehyde. They were labelled as those of a colobus monkey. She had worked on colobus and she was certain this monkey was no colobus. But what was it? It looked like nothing she had ever seen. Then in a zoological journal from 1953 she came across a fuzzy picture and brief description of a small, and very shy nocturnal monkey from the northern forests of what was then Congo. The article was by a David Fowler of Cambridge University. Intrigued, she contacted Cambridge University. They said Sir David, as he now was, retired long ago, but they believed he was still alive. Eventually she made contact, with him at a nursing home in Wisbech, on a crackly phone line. He must have been in his late eighties, but he was still lucid, and her description convinced him that what she had was indeed a Fowler's monkey.

There were no Fowlers in captivity anywhere in the world, and Sophie as a relative unknown found it hard to raise the money for a trip to Zaire to study them in the wild. It was 1980 by the time a sponsor was found, a private Swiss firm called Tetro-Meyer which offered one hundred and fifteen thousand Swiss francs in exchange for regular reports. Sophie was happy enough to agree without asking any further questions, and Jarman who had been studying tropical mosquitoes was now able to do so first hand.

The trip began disastrously. Sophie and Jarman spent three months in Zaire and found not a single Fowler's monkey, despite offering hefty rewards for live specimens. In the next six months they travelled to the Central African Republic, Sudan, Cameroon, Rwanda and Burundi with no success. In Sudan they both contracted dysentery. In Cameroon driver ants devoured Jarman's mosquito colony while he was sick with hepatitis A. In Burundi, without even knowing she was pregnant, Sophie miscarried.

Finally, exhausted and dispirited they returned for a last week to Zaire. They were in Zizunga on the last night before they were due to leave when a village woman knocked on their door at about midnight. She had for sale a young and terrified monkey in a sack. It was a Fowler's monkey.Sophie bought the animal, which appeared to be just a few months old. She named it Sam and tried to feed it on mashed bananas and figs while Jarman improvised a big cage out of chicken wire and wood. At first Sam pined away, screeching all night and refusing to eat. Whenever either of them came to the cage Sam would hide. It was a month before he began to eat properly.

They told Tetro-Meyer of their success, and the firm extended the grant on condition a sample of Sam's blood and a throat swab were sent back to its Swiss headquarters.

One night he and Sophie were awoken by animal screaming, coughing and grunting. They looked out and found a group of Fowler's monkeys laying siege to Sam's cage. Two large males were jumping up and down on the roof, tearing at the wire, others were trying to dig underneath. One female was running up and down outside the cage, her movements mirrored by Sam on the inside. At one point they nuzzled and groomed each other through the mesh. When the cage roof started to give, Jarman ran outside and scared the monkeys away. They scampered noisily into the trees. After a few minutes the screeching and branch shaking ceased, and Jarman started repairing Sam's cage. Just when he assumed the troop had gone, he felt a warm spattering of monkey urine on his shoulders and far above heard a little grunt of triumph.

Sophie was delighted at the monkeys' group bonding and altruism, but it made her uneasy about establishing the cage colony that Tetro-Meyer had in mind. They had sent on the samples, but no money came for a while, and their telexes went unanswered.

Finally they were summoned to a meeting in Kinshasa with Bruno Zilkich, a young and very excited scientist from Tetro-Meyer's headquarters. He said Sam's blood and saliva samples showed a remarkable immune system, parallel with that of man, a far closer similarity that that between man and his otherwise closest living relative, the chimpanzee.

He told them Tetro-Meyer made extensive use of primates to test promising new drugs on behalf of other companies, and the Fowler's monkey would be an invaluable addition. There would be no question of harming the monkeys. Only when drugs had passed their toxicity tests would they be used on Sophie and Jarman's monkey colony, to see how effective they would be on man.

Zilkich was quite open about the problems Tetro-Meyer faced. A growing animal rights lobby had tried to close down the company's chimp colony in Berne. They had failed, but the public relations image was suffering. People failed to understand that curing human disease required testing on human-like animals. His only misgiving about Fowler's monkeys was that they were even more visually appealing than chimps. He said his ideal would be a primate with a face as repulsive as a bat's. In any case, all new primate experiments would then take place in Kinshasa, well away from prying eyes, using monkeys supplied from Zizunga. Sophie and Jarman would of course have to sign a confidentiality agreement as part of continued funding, and arrange for the capture of many more monkeys.

Somewhat stunned, Sophie asked what kind of drugs would be tested. The scientist checked his notes and said the first candidate compound was a slimming aid.

(Erica's Diary 1992)