Scorpion's Advance (17 page)

'Circumstantial.'

'When the acid fell on me, Cohen was the only other person in the lab
and
I caught him back there afterwards removing the evidence.'

'You
assumed
that was what he was doing. The facts say that he saved your sight if not your life.'

'Yes, but . . .'

'No proof, Neil! No proof!'

Mirit
gave Anderson time to digest what she had just said, before continuing. 'Have you considered that Cohen's death might not have been an accident?'

Anderson confessed that he had not.

'He may have been murdered,' said Mirit.

Anderson considered the possibility in silenc
e. The reason for Cohen's death had seemed so obvious at the time that neither he nor Strauss had looked for any other. Cohen had cut himself while working with the plasmid. Was Mirit suggesting that someone else had cut Cohen with a contaminated blade to make it look accidental? But there had been no sign of a struggle in the lab, and death would not have been instantaneous. There would have been time for Cohen to fight back . . .

In dismissing
Mirit's suggestion, Anderson had exposed the flaw in his own and Strauss's assumption. If Cohen had cut himself why had he sat still, waiting for death? He had not even bothered to remove his glove and wash the wound. Why not? Why hadn't he raised the alarm? There would have been time . . . Death would not have come instantly. Blood would have washed most of the toxin out. But death
had
been instantaneous and it
had
been due to the toxin. Anderson struggled to fill in the bottom line. The Klein toxin had been introduced to Cohen's body, but not through the obvious cut. That had been put there afterwards to make it look accidental. By Cohen's murderer? So how was the toxin administered? For it to act immediately an injection would have been necessary! If he were right, somewhere on Cohen's body would be the tiny mark left by a hypodermic needle. ‘Tell me about Jewish funerals,' he said.

A
s night fell in the desert and the Fiat's headlights illuminated a monotonous ribbon of tarmac, Anderson made plans for the morrow. He would return to the university and ask Strauss if Cohen's body was still in the mortuary and, if it was, ask permission to examine it. No, he wouldn't. Shit! He couldn't do that. He couldn't ask Strauss anything, for if it were true that he had been guilty of assuming Cohen guilty he may have been equally guilty of considering Strauss innocent. He voiced his fears to Mirit.

'You’
re right. Trust no one.'

'But Strauss wants the plasmid destroyed,' argued Anderson.

'It could be said that he wants
you
to destroy it,' said Mirit. 'If he were guilty that would make sense. After all, he wouldn't want anyone else to have the weapon, would he? So he tricks you into destroying your source while pretending to have destroyed his own.'

Anderson bit back a comment about Israeli minds and corkscrews and saw that she was
right . . . yet again. If he was going to examine Cohen's body he'd have to make his own arrangements. 'Can we stop?' he said.

Mirit
slowed the car and pulled off the road. 'Want to stretch your legs?'

'No, I want to talk.'

The Fiat's lights were off but the desert around them was still bright in the light of the moon.

'We've talked of nothing but the Klein affair since the thing on the boat. I want to talk about us. I want you to know that the two days I've had with you were the best and happiest I've ever known. Every word I said to you I meant. I love you now, I'll love you always. I'm not going to ask you to marry me right now because I think you'll say "no", but I am going to ask you to think about marrying me. That's all I ask, just think about it.'

'I will, Neil. I promise.'

'Good, because now I can forget about it for the moment and concentrate on keeping my arse in one piece!'

Mirit dropped Anderson off at his apartment block in Einstein while she herself drove on the further forty miles or so to her parents' house in Jerusalem. She had invited Anderson to go with her but he had declined, saying that he had to be alone for a bit to get his thoughts together. The Americans were singing folk songs on the lawn as he climbed the stairs. 'Bloody noise,' he murmured under his breath. He locked his door using both locks and then snibbed the window, deciding that discretion was the better part of ventilation. He'd make do with the small grid up on the wall. No one could climb through that.

He
slept badly but hadn't expected anything else and was glad when the sun came up and chased away the darkness which always seemed to exaggerate doubts and fears . . . by a factor of 2.7. He smiled as the figure came to mind. When he was a medical student he had once said to a tutor that things always seemed three times as bad in the night. His tutor had said, 'Two point seven,' and when asked why had confided the advice, 'Never use round numbers. People will think you made them up. Use fractions and they'll think you an educated man.'

Deciding to brass it out, Anderson got up early and went into the lab, planning to arrive before anyone else. He was successful and donned a crisp, clean white coat with which to play out his con. The mortuary was on the ground floor and situated near the back of the building, giving him plenty of time to concoct a story on his elevator descent and subsequent walk through the corridors. It was time wasted; the attendant didn't speak English. Anderson got a blank look when he launched into his spiel. Oh well, intimidate him, he thought, beginning to act as if he were very important and very annoyed. He wasn't too sure how successful he'd been, but the words 'Cohen . . .
Arieh Cohen' elicited some reaction. The blank-faced man rose off his stool and limped through the back. Anderson followed. Strange, he thought, mortuary attendants were like hotel desk clerks - they all looked the same. They didn't all have hunchbacks and answer to the name of Igor, but they weren't that far removed.

'Cohen,' said the attendant, pointing to a refrigerated drawer.

'Good,' said Anderson pompously and pointing to an examination table. 'Here!' he said. The attendant looked at him for a moment without doing anything and Anderson felt the game slipping away from him, but then, with a shrug of the shoulders, the man opened the fridge and locked on the transporter trolley. The body, covered in a white sheet embossed with a blue Star of David, was slid out on rollers and settled with a metallic thump on to the trolley. In common with all trolleys the transporter was fitted with three wheels that wanted to go one way and one that didn't, making it difficult for the attendant to manoeuvre it towards the table. Anderson gave the rogue wheel a helpful kick and Cohen moved serenely across the floor. The attendant gave him a look that said the same in any language.

Cohen had been a big man. The attendant grunted with the effort of heaving his corpse on to the table, top half,
and then bottom half. He disappeared for a moment before returning with a box of disposable gloves which he slapped down in front of Anderson with an open-hand gesture that said, 'All yours'. Anderson donned a pair of the gloves and started his examination. Having no idea how to mime 'magnifying glass', he didn't bother going to look for the attendant but searched instead through the drawers until he found one.

'Not a bloody thing,' he concluded after ten minutes on Cohen's front. He heaved the cadaver over on to its face with more than some difficulty. At the last moment the body slipped from his grasp, slamming face first down on to the table with a sickening crack as Cohen's head caught the edge. An alarmed apology flew to Anderson's lips before he realized that Cohen was in no position to care. There i
t was, high up on the left hip, the unmistakable mark of an injection. Anderson examined it closely under the glass and found it still possible to tell the direction of entry. He concluded that someone had come up behind Cohen and stuck the needle in with a strong downward thrust. Mirit had been right. Cohen had been murdered.

Anderson felt guilty. He had disliked Cohen so intensely that it had been easy to assume anything bad of him. He felt worst about the incident with the hydrochloric acid because, having thought Cohen responsible, he had been very sparing in his thanks when Cohen, at great risk to himself, had saved him from serious injury. 'Sorry, old son,' he said as he pulled the sheet up over the body. Anderson nodded to the attendant on his way out. The man
looked up from his paper then resumed reading.

Anderson left the medical school and sought the shade of a tree in the grounds that had become his favourite. Its thick, foreign foliage gave complete protection from the sun and its relative isolation from pathways allowed him to think in peace. What he needed was perspective, vision . . . the very qualities he admired in Jacob Strauss,
he thought, seeing the irony. Just how did he go about investigating an internationally distinguished academic like Strauss on his own patch? The experience with Cohen should have taught him to be absolutely dispassionate but gut feeling fought hard. He liked Strauss. If Strauss turned out to be guilty he'd never trust another living soul.

After half an hour of contemplation, Anderson decided that his best chance of success lay in Martin Klein's secret notebook. He could almost hear
Mirit say, 'You've no proof it exists!' But still, he felt confident that it did. Chances were that Strauss had it hidden somewhere, possibly in his office, probably locked away in his desk. He would have to search the room. Having decided on a definite course of action, Anderson felt better.

Strauss went to lunch each day at 1 p.m. Anderson had noticed the ritual donning of the Panama hat and the collection of the cane from the corner outside his office door and had remarked on it to Myra in the past. She had told him that Strauss had lunch every day with his old friend Max
Jungman, professor of surgery. The rest of the lab staff usually went between one-fifteen and one-thirty. Anderson reckoned that the lab was nearly always empty between one-thirty and two. That should be enough time, he thought, to get into Strauss's office and find the notebook.

At one thirty-five he
took the elevator to the sixth floor of the medical school and, as he'd hoped, found the labs empty. The door to Strauss's office was locked, but he'd expected that and knew that his secretary kept a spare key in her desk drawer. He'd seen her use it before when Strauss was out. He found the key without difficulty and let himself into the room. His pulse was racing with the panic of the amateur criminal and all his fingers became thumbs in his haste to complete his mission as he rifled through the contents of the oak desk. One drawer was locked, encouraging Anderson to think that must be the one.

He began attacking the lock with a heavy ornamental paperknife. It had just slipped off the brass tongue of the lock for the third time when Anderson got a grip on himself. Calm down. Take it easy. Do things slowly, deliberately. Take your time. But there was no denying the sweat on his brow. All Tel Aviv was about to burst through the door. The continued stubbornness of the lock made Anderson put too much pressure on the paperknife. It flew out of his hand and clattered across the room, hitting, to Anderson's way of thinking, every
conceivable echoing object in it. He stared at the knife as it came to rest and saw malice in an inanimate object.

One more try, Anderson decided, and that would be it. His nerves could not stand it. The lock yielded. Personal letters . . . bank statements . . . chequebook . . . old photographs . . . nothing else. There was no sign of Klein's lab book. He was looking at one of the photographs, a young man in uniform, when a voice said, 'My son, Dr Anderson. He was killed in the war.' Anderson looked up to see Jacob Strauss standing in the doorway, waiting for an
explanation.

Anderson felt the blood rush to his face. He'd been caught red-handed wit
h his fingers still in the till. Oh, Christ! Please let the ground open up! 'I had to know, Professor,' he said, feeling shame wash over him like oil.

'To know what?' said Strauss quietly.

'If you were the one who was involved in the cloning of the Klein gene.'

Strauss looked at him for a few moments before saying, 'So you thought you'd find secret stocks of cultures in my
desk?'

'No,
I was looking for Martin Klein's other lab book. When I saw his official book I recognized a compulsively neat character who would have had to write everything down.'

'I understood
you to have thought Dr Cohen guilty,' said Strauss, still in a very soft voice.

'I did,' agreed Anderson, 'until this morning.' He told Strauss of the injection mark on Cohen's body.

'So that left me,' said Strauss.

'That left you,' repeated Anderson.

‘I follow the logic, young man,' said Strauss with a sigh, 'but alas, as in so many things connected with this affair, there is no place for logic. I am innocent.'

'I rather think you are, sir,' said Anderson, still feeling awful.

Strauss sat down in his swivel chair and pushed his desk drawers shut, one at a time, pausing briefly to look at the photograph of his dead son before dropping it into the last one. 'I think in similar circumstances,' he said, 'I might have done the same thing. We'll say no more of this.'