The Prize (67 page)

Now, after a diversion in Berlin, she was approaching Stockholm in a soundless jet, sitting beside an actual Nobel winner who quaked in her presence, and now Cheyenne was far away, and her future almost secure. This would be the final rung to fame.

With a start, she realized that Garrett was beside her once more, continuing his apologies, but flushed and pleased by his interlude of attention. She tried to remember: what had he asked her before the interruption? What had ignited her inner exploration? Yes, she recalled it. He had inquired about the kind of Nobel stories that she intended to write.

He was chewing his cigar, rather than smoking it, and she was grateful and decided to handle him tenderly.

‘As I told you, Dr. Garrett, it’s going to be a big series. After all, there is no bigger subject. Everyone wants to know about the machinery of the awards, and the great people who are honoured, and I want to tell it all. It’ll be highly favourable, of course. Why not? We’ve researched in depth on all you winners, because we want to transmit complete portraits of human idols, not empty paragraphs about stone gods. I wouldn’t write a thing about you that you wouldn’t be proud to have your children read.’

Garrett did not hide his pleasure. ‘I’m happy that’s your tone. It can be a useful work. It’ll inspire a lot of potential scientists. What can I tell you? Do you want to know how I came on the discovery?’

‘Another time, perhaps. We can go into it in detail. There was something about a truck driver named—named Henry M.—?’

Garrett leaped at this and, on safe, old ground, began to relate, in sentences smoothed by their frequent repetition, the drama of the historic night. Sue Wiley half listened, poking pencil listlessly at her pad, and surreptitiously following the second hand of her watch. Six minutes and twenty seconds.

The mammalian heart had just been transplanted, and he beamed, and she moved quickly. ‘Very interesting. I’ll want to review all that with you again.’ Then, almost casually, she laid before him the earlier lead that he had inadvertently given her. ‘By the way you and this Italian Farelli, you’re cutting up the medical pie, aren’t you? How come? Is he a collaborator of yours?’

Garrett was sorely tempted, but this was not Dr. Keller’s group. He shook his head. ‘No. We’ve never even met.’

‘Oh, and I thought you worked closely together.’

‘Absolutely not. I made my discovery alone. In fact, some days ahead of his, if I do say so.’

Casually, Sue’s hand hooked the shorthand ciphers to her pad, while her blinking, receptive eyes held his own. ‘Before, you were saying there are people who feel you should have won the prize yourself. Do you think so?’

‘It would be improper for me to say.’ But his prejudice was clear in his face.

‘Of course, you will be seeing Dr. Farelli in Stockholm—’

‘I would presume so. At least on official occasions.’

‘Do you intend to—to work out some sort of future research with him? I mean, since you’re both—’

‘I doubt it,’ Garrett interrupted. ‘I have my work and methods, and he has his. However, I do plan to see others in my field, on this trip. One doctor in particular, at the Caroline Institute, in Stockholm. Dr. Erik
ض
hman. A marvellous young researcher, who is doing transplantation of hearts, and whose ideas are compatible with my own. In a sense, you might say he’s a disciple of mine. He was attracted by my papers and corresponded with me, voluminously. He has since successfully accomplished seven cardiac transplants—by the “Garrett method”, he likes to tell me—and I was recently advised by him that he has three more cases under observation, I’m eager to see what he has done, first-hand, and to make any suggestions I can. As a matter of fact, if you are hunting for material about me, Dr. Erik
ض
hman’s your man. I think he can speak, with less inhibition, about my work than I can myself. You understand.’

Sue Wiley was in no mood to be sidetracked by Dr.
ض
hman. Perhaps this was evasive action on Garrett’s part, although she doubted if he was that clever. Farelli was her boy, and she meant to know more about him, about him
and
Garrett, or him
versus
Garrett. ‘Very interesting, very interesting,’ she said. ‘To get back to Farelli, for a moment. He fascinates me as, apparently, he does the rest of the press. How did he get into your act, anyway? As you said, as I think everyone knows, you were the first to make a successful heart transplant. Isn’t it as true in science as in every other field—first come, first served—or, should I put it—first come, first honoured?’

‘One would think so. But I’m sure, with all your research, you’ve read Dr. Farelli’s statements. He’s not given to—to hiding his light.’

‘You mean, he may have influenced the judges?’

He pretended horror at the thought. ‘I wouldn’t even imply that. It’s just that—that his kind of personality—uh—makes itself felt. He’s a very colourful man.’

She decided to goad him. ‘You’re too modest to defend yourself. I can see that. I can also see that, in these times, the quiet, self-effacing, dedicated scientist, doing his job, doing it magnificently, is often not enough. People are apt to overlook a man like that. They are apt to be swayed by another scientist who is self-seeking, vocal, full of histrionics.’ She did not ask him if this was so. Brazenly, she assumed that they were in agreement. ‘It’s a shame—isn’t it?—how often the public is fooled.’

Garrett smiled modestly, warmed by this remarkable young woman’s perception. ‘Yes, it is a shame.’

The tin static of the public-address system intruded. They both looked up. One of the hostesses was speaking. ‘We will arrive in Stockholm in five minutes. Please put out your cigarettes. Please fasten your safety belts.’

There was a rustling among the passengers of the plane. Garrett lifted the palms of his hands helplessly to Sue Wiley. ‘I guess we ran out of time.’

She had what she wanted, and it was enough. In Stockholm, she would learn more, and drive the wedge deeper. ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she said. ‘Every little bit helps. This gives me a wonderful start. Your first case, that truck driver, will make wonderful telling.’

‘You’re kind,’ he said.

‘And discreet,’ she added, binding them more closely.

He rose. ‘I’ll see you in Stockholm then.’

‘I should hope so.’

Garrett returned to his seat, and secured his belt. His wife was bewildered at his cheerfulness and good humour.

When the Caravelle touched down on the long runway of Arlanda Airport, braking noisily, a male voice came over the intercom.

‘This is your Captain. We have just landed in Stockholm. The local time is exactly twelve thirty-six.’

The Garretts were almost the last to leave the jet aeroplane. They descended the steps, behind the other passengers, and merged into a swarm of people. They shook hands with Count Bertil Jacobsson, with Ingrid P
ه
hl, with Carl Adolf Krantz, and Saralee was effusive over the bouquet of flowers Miss P
ه
hl handed her. They posed for the photographers, while Jacobsson dealt firmly with the Swedish reporters.

They were about to leave for the limousines, when Jacobsson suddenly realized that someone was missing. ‘Mr. Andrew Craig? Where is he?’ Jacobsson tugged Garrett’s arm. ‘The Nobel laureate in literature was on the same plane. Mr. Craig. Did you meet him?’

Garrett shook his head. He had met no one. He did not mention Sue Wiley.

While Krantz and P
ه
hl led the Garretts through the gate to their limousine, Jacobsson rushed among the other passengers, searching for Craig, without any success. At last, he intercepted the ship’s Captain, and a hostess. They produced the passenger list. With Jacobsson, they went carefully down the list of names. There was no Andrew Craig, and there was no Leah Decker.

Utterly baffled, Jacobsson made his way to the waiting cars. He was an old man who lived by plan. Everyone always said that his organizational ability could not be surpassed. This talent was one of his greatest gratifications. The last report, received hours before, had been that Craig was arriving by Scandinavian Airlines, in Copenhagen, at nine this morning. Flight 912, he remembered. The connection for Stockholm was to have been on this plane leaving Copenhagen at 11.20. Could Flight 912 have been delayed? He was certain that he would have been informed. This was a mystery, indeed. It was the first time, in memory, that he could recall a laureate’s not arriving as scheduled.

He’ dismissed the second limousine, and then climbed into the first, taking the jump seat beside Krantz, determined not to worry the renowned Dr. Garrett and wife with his problem.

But all the way back to Stockholm, he wondered what had happened to Andrew Craig.

It was nearly 4.30 in the afternoon when Count Bertil Jacobsson had the answer to his mystery.

Alone of the members of the reception committee, to which a Foreign Office attaché had now been added, he had been impatient during the slow lunch for the Garretts in the Grand Hotel. His anxiety centred on returning to his office at Sturegatan 14, and commanding the telephone, and locating the missing Nobel laureate.

Now, driving his cane nervously into the green carpet of the Foundation reception corridor, he made his way to his telephone. The muffled thud of the cane heralded his arrival, and his secretary, Astrid Steen, materialized in the doorway of the reception office. She held aloft an envelope.

‘Telegram for you, sir.’

He took it from her, tore it open, and held the message before him. The origin, he saw at once, was Copenhagen.

He read the message:

DUE TO CIRCUMSTANCES BEYOND CONTROL HAVE CANCELLED FLIGHT TO STOCKHOLM STOP MUST REMAIN IN THIS CITY ENTIRE DAY STOP AM TAKING NORD EXPRESS TONIGHT AND WILL ARRIVE WITH MY SISTER IN LAW AT EIGHT FORTY FIVE TOMORROW MORNING STOP SORRY IF I HAVE INCONVENIENCED YOU STOP BEST REGARDS ANDREW CRAIG

He heard Mrs. Steen’s inquiry. ‘Anything wrong, sir?’

‘No—no—nothing. Mr. Craig has been delayed. He’ll be with us in the morning.’

He went on into his office, removed his overcoat, and forgot to greet old King Gustaf on the wall.

He settled in the swivel chair behind his desk, flattened the telegram on the ink blotter, and read it again. The mystery had been solved, and yet it was not solved at all. ‘Circumstances beyond control’ had made Andrew Craig cancel his flight. What circumstances? And what kind that were beyond control?

What in the devil had happened to Andrew Craig, anyway?

Count Bertil Jacobsson had the uneasy, indefinable feeling that things were not going as evenly this year as the last or, for that matter, the year before. The programme had not yet begun, and already it was out of line. Jacobsson did not like it. He did not like it at all.

3

THEtelegram that Count Bertil Jacobsson read in Stockholm at 4.30 had been sent almost five hours earlier, at 11.43 in the morning, from a Danish modern bedroom on the sixth floor of the Tre Falke Hotel in Copenhagen. Although it was signed by Andrew Craig, he had had no part in its creation. It was written and dispatched by Leah Decker, his sister-in-law.

What awakened Andrew Craig from his slumber was Leah’s intense, high-pitched voice, in another room, reading the telegram aloud to someone unknown. She read the contents for approval, and the contents were approved. Eventually, Craig would deduce that the person unknown was Mr. Gates, the First Secretary of the United States Embassy in Copenhagen.

Fully aroused from his sleep, Craig tried to familiarize himself with his surroundings. He lay on the black quilt of a divan, his feet dangling over the edge, in a strange, overwhelmingly citron-coloured room, surrounded by severely angled, teakwood furniture, obviously produced in a factory teeming with cubists. The room was efficient, spotlessly clean, lifeless. His suit jacket, he realized, had been removed, and his shoes, also. His head throbbed, and his tongue had the leathery consistency of the tongue of a hunting boot. He had been drunk, he supposed, and now he was not quite sober, but sobering badly, and he was thirsty.

He listened to the two voices that came to him through the abbreviated hall connecting the next room.

A page arrived, and was given the telegram, and instructed to send it off posthaste. Leah worried that, having cancelled the flight, they might not obtain a train reservation. Mr. Gates assured her that the train reservation would be forthcoming, and if it was not, there was always another flight. Leah did not want to risk another flight. It was too quick. It would not give her brother-in-law time to rest. He required rest above all else. She implored Mr. Gates to try the Central Railway Station again, and Mr. Gates obliged her. He reminded the reservation desk that he was a representative of the American Embassy, and that two compartments on the Nord Express were sorely needed. There were several pauses, half-uttered phrases, and then it appeared that the compartments had been obtained.

The conversation next door was indistinct, and Craig did not strain to hear it. Suddenly, he heard light footsteps—Leah’s, he guessed—and he made an instant decision. He turned his face to the wall, closed his eyes tight, and feigned sleep. As a touch of realism, he simulated laboured breathing. Momentarily, he was aware of Leah’s unseen presence above him. He heard her sniff twice, clear her throat, and at last, he heard her leave.

When the voices in the next room resumed, this time more distinctly, he opened his eyes once more and listened again.

‘He’s out cold,’ Leah was saying. ‘He’ll be out for hours.’

‘Then we can go?’

‘I’m sure it’s safe.’

‘Very well. We’ll pick up the tickets at the Central Station. Then we’ll lunch at Oskar Davidsen’s. If there’s time, we can drive out to Elsinore. It’s no more than two hours round trip. You’re sure Mr. Craig wouldn’t want to come along?’

‘He’s got to sleep this off. Nothing else concerns me. This afternoon, and tonight on the train, will hardly be enough. I just hope the Nobel Foundation won’t be put off by the delay.’

‘They’ll be delighted to have you both at any time.’

‘I hope so.’

There was more indistinct talk, and finally movement, and the sound of the door opening and closing.

Andrew Craig lay still. He would give them plenty of time to leave, he decided. Besides, he was too enervated to rise. He wanted the beating in his temples to cease. Given time, it would. Of course, the thirst was distressing. Nevertheless, he would display willpower. He would wait ten minutes. He tried to moisten his tongue against the roof of his mouth, but that was no good, and at last he did so by rubbing his tongue along the inner lining of his cheeks. Ten minutes. He waited.

The couple of weeks in Miller’s Dam, before departure, were difficult to recall. The Nobel notification had caught him at the outset of his cycle. After Harriet’s death, when he had been recuperating, he had not drunk heavily, no more heavily than when she had lived. It was afterwards—all dressed up and no place to go—wasn’t that the old expression?—that whisky had made each day possible. In the first year, he had drunk blindly, all the time. When the pain had been replaced by conscious emptiness, he had fallen into the cycle. Lucius Mack had told him that it was a cycle. Or had it been Leah? Two weeks drunk and two weeks sober, well, mostly sober. In the last year, it had been three weeks drunk and one week sober, and he had added no more than twenty pages to the meagre pile that was entitled
Return to Ithaca
. He had been on his three-week drunk when the notification had come, and he was still on it, he guessed.

It was impossible to recapture more than fragments of the past, no matter how recent, when you had been steadily drinking. The whisky bottle was the all-inclusive holdall. Into it you could stuff writing, and sex, and hope, and memory, and soak and dissolve them beyond recognition. From the night of the telegram to the morning when he had been driven to Chicago, he could remember almost nothing. Somehow, certain faces were visible, those of Lucius Mack and Jake Binninger, buffers between himself and the outside press; that of Leah, fussing, nursing, complaining; that of Professor Alex Inglis, down from Joliet College, mutely worshipful, mutely imploring.

Yesterday morning—yes, yesterday—Lucius Mack had driven them to Chicago in his station-wagon. Leah had been in the best of spirits. She had worn a moss-green jersey suit, new, and the black broadcloth coat, new, that Craig had given her as a
bon voyage
gift and her due. (He had not actually bought it himself, but sat in a Milwaukee tavern while Lucius did the shopping and even laid out the money, an advance against the Nobel cheque.) Not the least of her good cheer was the promise Leah had extracted from Craig the night before, the promise that he would not drink, except socially, until the Nobel Ceremony was ended. These gifts, and the excitement, had served to relax Leah’s clenched, Slavic face, and her inflexible body. Her aspect was more feminine, and her pride in him—in the past he had resented it as a subtle pressure—gave him fleeting pride in himself, briefly, briefly, in the way that Harriet had so often given it to him.

The lunch in the Pump Room had been a farewell feast worthy of Lucullus—steadily enlivened by Lucius Mack’s moody speculations on the advertising inches he must sell in Miller’s Dam to pay for each course—and afterwards they had driven to the airport and entered the Boeing 720 for New York City. What had made the two-and-a-half-hour flight bearable to Craig were the two drinks that he had been permitted in the Pump Room and the two more on the plane. Upon landing, they had been met by Craig’s publisher, his agent, and his favourite book-review-page editor, and whisked to a candlelit restaurant, an expensive celebrity haven, and Craig had been miserable. He had been interested neither in the literary talk nor in his future, but only in his desperate need for refreshment. He had been allowed one double Scotch-on-the-rocks, and the mechanics of the occasion made the necessary second and third drinks impossible to obtain. The conspiracy against him was enforced by a publisher who did the ordering and who was determined to see him turn over a new leaf, an agent who had ulcers, an editor who regarded one sherry as daring, and a sister-in-law who hovered over him like an Alcoholics Anonymous convert.

The 7.30 night flight, on the Scandinavian Airlines System jet, the DC-8C, gave more promise of sustenance. Because Leah was satisfied and mellowed, she had joined him in one champagne over Canada and another over Newfoundland, and he had gallantly pressed a third on her (refusing a third himself, and disarming her completely) somewhere early over the Atlantic Ocean. She had taken it and immediately gone off to sleep in her reclining chair, and Craig was saved.

Craig’s renown and his mission had preceded him to the aeroplane, and when he made his way to the lounge to converse and joke with the hostess, the
maître de cabine
, and several of the passengers, he was accepted as the party’s guest of honour. While the majority of the passengers slept, some fitfully, some soundly like Leah, Craig mounted the cycle. Waving aside the champagne—a come-on for tourists, he announced—he concentrated on Scotch. Through the joyous night, he drank. Into the dawn, come too soon, he drank. Over Scotland and England, he drank.

The fullness of the new day, ashen and remorseful outside the fogged window, found him in his seat, blinds successfully drawn against Harriet and his art, ready for the welcoming oblivion of sleep. The intercom brought the plane, and Leah, awake. Leah hurried to the washroom, and returned with her hair combed back in place, her face stencilled in, and her jersey suit unwrinkled.

When she sank down beside him, restored, she asked, ‘Did you sleep?’

‘Won’erfully,’ he mumbled.

She stretched her neck to the window. ‘That must be Denmark down there, through the clouds.’ Without turning from her country watching, she asked, ‘Isn’t it thrilling?’

‘Won’erfully.’

When the stewardess announced that there would be no more smoking and that seat belts would be fastened, Craig lighted his pipe and forgot to lock his belt. No one noticed.

They had landed—Leah congratulating herself that they were safe on earth again—and he was shuffling behind her to the plane’s exit. As he stepped out on the mobile platform, and tried to find the first step in descent, his jellied knees collapsed. He pitched against the rail, saved from a critical fall by Leah, blocking the way ahead of him, and the strong arms of two passengers.

As she and another assisted him down the stairs, Leah smelt his breath. Her face hardened; the armistice was over.

The rest was sketchy in Craig’s memory. Someone, dressed like a butcher on Sunday, had been there to meet them. Black coffee at a counter in the airport. A snatch of Leah’s dialogue to their host. ‘He never drinks. He’s not used to it. Everyone’s driving him crazy, wanting to treat, celebrating, he doesn’t know how to say no. It was too much.’ And again, at the cash register. ‘We can’t take off in two hours. I can’t let them see him in Stockholm this way. He’s not like this at all. It would be a disgrace.’ Then the phone booths, and the host emerging. He had found hotel rooms for them. They had ridden endlessly in someone’s automobile. A glossy hotel, with a curved driveway that took them to an entrance that resembled a carpark. A busy lobby reservation counter to the left, elevators to the right. Sixth floor. Right this way, please.

All else, details, were bottled in alcohol. High spirits equal low recall, he told himself. Simple equation.

He sat up on the divan. More than twenty minutes had elapsed since Leah had left him. He slipped on his shoes and tied them. He found the bathroom and doused his face with cold water, and wet his hair and combed it. He undid his tie and made it over again. He pulled on his dark grey suit coat and went into Leah’s room. It was an identical twin to his own. One suitcase was open and the rest, still strapped, on the floor.

He returned to his room for his trench coat, and then realized that there was a note pinned to the chair beside the divan. He yanked it free and read it:

ANDREW. In case you should wake up before I return, I have gone out for lunch with a man from the American Embassy. We had to cancel the aeroplane to Stockholm because you were drunk. We rented rooms in this hotel for you to rest, and are taking a train to Sweden tonight for the same reason. I’ll be back by five. Do behave. LEAH.

He studied the letterhead. He was a guest of the Tre Falke Hotel, 9 Falkoner Alle, Copenhagen.

He crumpled the note into a ball, dropped it into the wicker waste-paper basket, and went out to the elevator. After pressing the button, the wait was interminable. He took out his briar, and by the time it was smoking, the elevator door had opened. It was self-service and carried him downwards without a stop.

He inquired of a page for the bar, and the beardless young man led him through the lobby, bearing left, and pointed. The curved horseshoe of a counter, before the dining-room, was uninhabited except for the blond, chinless young man, in black suit and white apron, behind it.