The Investigation (14 page)

“Yes, yes, I know that, but I wanted the autopsy done right away and there wasn’t time to get a vet. Now how about it, Doctor, what did the cat die of?”

“Starvation, cold, exposure. He was such a pathetic, skinny little creature.”

“How’s that?”

King, without knowing why, was annoyed by Gregory’s astonishment.

“What did you expect? Poison? Believe me, there was none. I made all the usual tests, but it was hardly worth the trouble. There was absolutely nothing in the cat’s intestines. You look disappointed.”

“No, no, you’re right, of course. Nothing else?” Gregory asked, staring at some instruments spread out in the sink. Lying next to a pair of forceps was a scalpel; some scraps of fur still adhered to its blade.

“I’m sorry,” said Gregory. “Uh, thank you for your trouble, Doctor. Good night.”

Gregory turned and walked into the corridor. A few seconds later he was back. Dr. King, busy with his papers again, raised his head.

“Excuse me, Doctor … was the cat very young?”

“No, not at all In fact, it was rather old. Don’t let the small size fool you—it’s a characteristic of the breed.”

Though he sensed that he wouldn’t get anything more from King, Gregory, resting his hand on the doorknob, continued to ask questions.

“Uh … is there any chance that the cat died from something unusual?”

“What do you mean by ‘something unusual’?”

“Uh, maybe some kind of rare disease … oh, never mind, you already told me the cause of death, I’m just talking nonsense. Excuse me…” Noting the derisive expression on King’s face, Gregory was genuinely relieved to get back to the corridor. He closed the door and stood next to it. Before long he heard the sound of King whistling.

“Well, maybe I put him in a good mood,” he thought, “but I’ve had it.”

Gregory ran down the stairs and into the street. The lights in the building were already on for the night, but outside it was still only early evening. A strong southerly wind was drying the sidewalks. Gregory strolled along whistling, but stopped as soon as he realized he had picked up the tune from King. There was a slender woman walking a few steps in front of him. Gregory noticed a stain of some kind on the back of her coat. No, it was a feather, or maybe a shred of cotton. Catching up with the woman to tell her about it, Gregory opened his mouth and began to raise his hand to his hat in greeting; inexplicably he returned his hand to his pocket and quickened his pace. It was only a little while later, when he had given some thought to the incident, that he realized why he hadn’t said anything. The woman had a pointed nose.

“I shouldn’t worry about such stupid things!” he told himself angrily.

Entering a subway station, Gregory boarded the first northbound train. He leaned against the side of the car, glancing through a newspaper and mechanically peeking over it from time to time to check the names of the stations rushing past outside the windows. He got off at Wooden Hills. The train pulled away noisily and sped into the tunnel. Gregory stepped into an unoccupied telephone booth and opened the directory. Carefully sliding his finger along the column of names, he found what he was looking for: “Sciss, Harvey, Ph.D., M.A. Bridgewater 876-951.” He picked up the receiver and dialed the number carefully, closing the booth door in anticipation. No more than a minute later he heard the even buzz of the ringing signal, then a short clicking and a woman’s voice:

“Hello?”

“Is Dr. Sciss in?”

“No he isn’t. Who’s calling?”

“Gregory, of Scotland Yard.”

The woman hesitated for a moment, as if uncertain what to do. Gregory could hear the sound of her breathing.

“The Doctor will be back in fifteen minutes,” she said at last, a note of reluctance clearly discernible in her voice.

“In fifteen minutes?” he repeated.

“Probably. Shall I tell him you called?”

“No, thanks anyway. Maybe I…”

Gregory hung up without finishing and stared glumly at his hand, which was pressed against the telephone book. Noticing the flickering lights of an approaching train, he left the booth without further thought, glanced quickly at the illuminated platform sign to find out the destination of the waiting train, and got into the last car.

During the twenty-minute trip to Bridgewater, Gregory kept thinking about the woman who had answered Sciss’s phone. He knew Sciss wasn’t married. Could it have been his mother? No, the voice was too young. Housekeeper? He tried desperately to remember its sound, flat yet melodious at the same time, as if it were a matter of extreme importance, but he was well aware that he was only trying to keep from worrying about what to say to Sciss. Their conversation, he was afraid, might eliminate his only remaining lead.

In Sciss’s neighborhood the subway line ran outdoors on an elevated structure. Gregory descended from the station and, with the noise of passing trains rattling overhead, walked along a broad avenue lined by stores. Sciss lived nearby on a dimly lit, deserted street; a bright green sign advertising a peep show glowed in the ground-floor window of the house next to his.

It was hard to see much of Sciss’s building in the darkness. Gregory noticed some masses of concrete protruding over the sidewalk from the upper stories; they could have been ledges or balconies. The building’s entrance lobby was completely dark, except for some light reflected from a neon sign across the street; the stairway was dark also. Gregory pushed an illuminated button for the self-service elevator and rode upstairs. Sciss would probably use that damned logic of his to make fun of him, he brooded; Sciss never lost a chance to demonstrate his superiority to everyone else, and he’d probably leave Sciss’s apartment feeling defeated and convinced of his own stupidity.

The hallway on Sciss’s floor was almost totally dark, but a thin crack of light revealed that his door was open slightly. “I should ring the doorbell anyway,” Gregory said to himself, gently pressing his finger against the button. The door swung open without a sound. Gregory walked in; the air in the apartment was warm, dusty, and very dry, and there was a peculiar odor, a cool subterranean odor of decay, something like the stench of a tomb, he thought. The odor was so out of place that it startled him. Wrinkling his nose slightly, Gregory stood in the foyer for a few moments to get accustomed to the darkness, then began feeling his way toward a line of light visible some distance in front of him.

Before long he came upon a slightly opened door which led into a larger room. Near the wall, and partly blocked from his view by the open door of a closet, a desk lamp stood on the floor. A huge triangular shadow was moving on the ceiling, looking something like a gigantic bird flapping its wings one at a time.

At the other end of the foyer, behind him, Gregory heard the hissing whistle of a gas burner and the dripping of a water faucet. Except for these two sounds, the apartment was absolutely silent—no, not quite, for he could hear someone breathing laboriously.

The room was large and square. At one end a dark curtain partly covered a window. The walls were lined with books. Gregory stepped inside and spotted Sciss; the scientist was sitting on the floor next to the desk, surrounded by bulging folders which he was apparently trying to put into some kind of order by the light of the desk lamp beside him. The room felt even warmer than the foyer, the air exuded the dryness characteristic of apartments with central heating; the unpleasant musty odor became even more discernible.

The situation was peculiar, and Gregory stood at the door not knowing what to do. While he waited, the minutes dragged on … and on. Sciss, sitting with his back to Gregory, continued to work on his folders, which apparently had been removed from the open drawers of his desk. He carefully brushed the dust off some, blew it off others with a disgusted snort, waving them back and forth. Somewhere behind Gregory, probably in the kitchen, the gas hissed continually. He thought he could hear someone moving around, probably the woman he had spoken to on the phone. Gregory took another step into the room; the floor creaked, but Sciss didn’t notice. Finally, yielding to an admittedly senseless impulse, Gregory knocked loudly on the open door of the closet.

“What’s that?” Sciss said, turning his triangular head with its disheveled hair in the detective’s direction.

“Good evening and … please excuse me,” said Gregory a little too loudly. “I don’t know if you remember me, I’m Gregory of Scotland Yard. We met each other at Headquarters, at Chief Inspector Sheppard’s… Your outer door was open, and—”

“Yes, I remember. What can I do for you?”

Sciss rose to his feet, accidentally kicking over the nearest pile of folders, and sat down on his desk, wiping his fingers with a handkerchief.

“I’m in charge of the investigation in this … case,” Gregory said, finding it difficult to choose the right words. “Chief Inspector Sheppard told me about your letter. You said you don’t foresee the possibility of further … further incidents. That’s what I came over to ask you about…”

“Indeed. But I said in my letter that I can’t provide an explanation right now. I’m working alone and I don’t know if…”

He cut himself off in mid-sentence, revealing an uncertainty that was not at all typical of him. Shoving his hands in his pockets and taking long, stiff steps, Sciss walked across the room, passing in front of the detective, who was still standing in the same spot. Near the window, he swung around, sat down on the radiator with his arms clasping his knees, and stared into the light of the lamp on the floor.

Sciss remained silent for several minutes; then, without any preliminaries, began speaking. “Anyway, maybe even that’s not so important. There’s been a change in my plans … quite a radical change.”

Gregory stood with his coat on, listening, but realizing at the same time that Sciss was thinking out loud, hardly aware of his presence.

“I went to the doctor. I haven’t been feeling well for a long time, and there has been a significant drop in my productivity. On the basis of averages determined from the ages of my parents, I calculated that I had thirty-five years more. I forgot to consider the effect of intensive intellectual work on my blood circulation. It seems that I have … a lot less time. It puts a new complexion on things. I still don’t know if—”

Sciss stood up so abruptly and with such decisiveness that it looked as if he intended to terminate the visit by abandoning Gregory and leaving the room. Such behavior from Sciss wouldn’t have surprised Gregory at all. He didn’t doubt the truth of what Sciss had told him, but he hardly knew what to make of it. The peaceful, lifeless composure in Sciss’s voice was completely at odds with his impulsive movements: he jumped to his feet, took a few steps, sat down here and there like an irritated, exhausted insect—there was something poignant about him, and it was reflected in his tired, almost despairing tone of voice. In the end, Sciss didn’t leave the room after all. Instead, he sat down on a couch along the wall opposite the window. Just over his birdlike head, casting a slight shadow on the ragged gray hair around his temples, there hung a picture, a print of Klee’s “The Madwoman.”

“I had made plans for the next twenty years. The ten years after that I was holding in reserve. Now I have to change everything, I have to go over all my plans and drop everything secondary, everything that isn’t original research. What isn’t secondary—when you have to carry a bottle of nitroglycerin around! I don’t want to leave any of my work unfinished.”

Gregory remained silent.

“I don’t know whether I can continue on this case. In the long run the problem is trivial—the hypothesis needs a few minor adjustments, that’s all, but I don’t like that kind of work, it doesn’t interest me. Furthermore, a complete analysis of all the relevant statistical data would take weeks—maybe even months if the right computers aren’t available.”

“Our people—” Gregory began.

“Your people would be useless,” Sciss interrupted. “This isn’t a criminal investigation, it’s a scientific study.” He stood up and continued, “What do you want—an explanation? You’ll get it, don’t worry.”

He glanced at his watch for a moment.

“And I was about to take a rest,” he said. “This case has nothing at all in common with criminology. No offense of any kind was committed, no more than when someone is killed by a meteor.”

“You mean that the operative causes are … forces of nature,” Gregory asked, immediately regretting it because he had resolved to keep his mouth shut and let Sciss do all the talking.

“I don’t have time for discussions, so please don’t interrupt me. Can you define those ‘forces of nature’ you mention so glibly? I can’t. The problem in this case is strictly methodological. Its aspects from the criminal point of view don’t interest me at all, they never did.”

Without interrupting himself, Sciss went over to the wall, turned on the ceiling light, and glanced at the lieutenant. A smile appeared on his thin lips.

“Please look over here.” He pointed toward the open closet. Gregory moved closer. There was a map of England hanging on the door, its surface covered with what looked like a fine red rash, but the blood-red speckling wasn’t uniform in intensity: in some places it was denser; here and there towns were completely encircled; the lightest areas were on the right-hand side of the map, along the Channel coast.

“Since this isn’t really a problem for you or your department, you’ll probably find my explanation useless, but I assure you it’s the only answer,” Sciss said, smiling faintly but coldly. “Do you recognize the lightest area over here?”

“Yes. That’s the area of Norfolk where the bodies were stolen.”

“Wrong. This map shows the distribution of deaths from cancer in England for the past nineteen years. The region with the lowest death rate—that is, less than thirty percent, using an average based on a half-century—falls within the boundaries of the area in which the corpses disappeared. In other words, there is an inverse proportion; I have formulated an equation to express it, but I won’t go into that now because you wouldn’t understand it.” Sciss’s almost imperceptible smile was beginning to take on an abusive quality.