The Sun Chemist (3 page)

‘Oh.’

‘That’s what I wanted to tell you. Sorry to drag you out here.’

‘Don’t be silly, Hopcroft. I was worried about you.’

‘It
was
a bit of a clonk,’ he said, cautiously touching his skullcap. ‘Thudding slightly. They insisted on keeping me in. We had the lot, you know – police, ambulance. The porter got them. Incredible, really. What else was there? There was
something
else, damn it.’

His eyes were crossing very slightly.

‘I don’t think you ought to be talking, Hopcroft.’

‘That’s all right. My mother will be here soon. Not much
chance of getting that case back,’ he said ruefully. ‘Worth more than the six quid. My initials were on it. Rotters. Oh, yes. I know. Olga. She’s sending you the stuff. I told her you were going to Israel and that they were mustard keen, so she’s posting it. I said make it express, because of the Christmas mail and so forth, so you’ll get it there. She’s popping down the day after tomorrow; her husband won’t be there.’

‘The originals?’

‘Oh, sure, the genuine thing.’

‘You told her to make a copy.’

‘Did I? Oh, crikey, I didn’t. I don’t think so. Oh, gosh, sorry.’

It’s all right. I’ll go and see her myself.’

‘Yes, well, you can’t.’ Hopcroft was looking very unhappy. She was going off after lunch to stay with this friend in Frognal. I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know who the friend is.’

‘She can’t be reached anywhere?’

‘Well, no. She’s staying with her. She can’t sort of stand being on her own. She’s a bit cut up, just at the moment.’

‘Could we perhaps get in touch with the husband? He might leave her a note.’

‘Oh, she wouldn’t like that.’

‘What time is she going to Wimbledon, when she goes?’

‘I don’t know. I mean, there was no reason to ask her. Gosh, what an idiot I am.’

‘Don’t worry about it. It’s a piece of luck she didn’t have the papers. They’d have taken those as well.’

‘Yes. They must have spotted me coming out of the bank. There’s a Barclay’s just below. I’d topped up a bit on my way in, got five quid out on my credit card. I mean, with that spiffy case and everything I might have looked a bit important. They
probably
hung around waiting for me to come down. There were people around when I went in, you see. I told the police that. They thought there was something in it. A bit cool, eh?
Mid-day
!’

‘Lousy luck. I
am
sorry, old chap. Stop talking now, though.’

‘It is thudding a bit,’ he said on a fainter note, and looked slowly round as a simultaneous titter came from the three other occupants of the room. They were grinning at each other. A tiny
batlike shrieking and a crackle of twigs were just audible from their headphones. ‘Well, I think I will dry up,’ he said. ‘Have a good time in Israel, et cetera.’

‘Thanks. Rest, Hopcroft,’ I told him.

I was walking in Central Park South (this was the previous year, not long after my book on the 1930s had appeared) when from the opposite direction another figure came walking: a dapper small figure, white mane of hair, Red Indian face, hands clasped behind him. Our eyes locked some distance off, and he stopped as he came abreast and said, ‘Hey – Igor Druyanov?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, nice to see you, Igor.’ He was giving me a most
charming
smile, and also his hand, which I shook. ‘Isn’t this the damnedest thing?’ he said. ‘I am Meyer Weisgal.’

‘How are you, Mr Weisgal?’ I was having my hand shaken a good deal lately by very affable once-met folk. I racked my brains.

‘So what are you doing in New York, Igor? I saw you were at Harvard.’

‘I’m doing a couple of lectures.’

‘Well, it beats everything. Here I take a walk and turn over in my mind
The Betrayed Decade
, and who walks along? You know, you don’t have to make things happen.’ He was doing a kind of shuffle, salty eyes smiling up from under his brows. ‘They just happen. They happened so often in my life!’ (So they did. Interested readers may turn to his autobiography,
So Far
, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.) ‘Quit worrying, we didn’t meet yet,’ he said.’ I am from the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel.’

‘Ah.’

‘It’s a very good – even an excellent book.’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘I don’t know if I would have passed the title. It takes the teeth out if you have to say it: I’m a good editor.’ The salty eyes were still radiating away.

‘You are – an editor at the Weizmann Institute?’ I said in some confusion.

‘Well, no, I’m not. I’m really the Chancellor there – whatever the hell that happens to be. Say, Igor, why don’t you and I take a stroll?’ He turned and we strolled back the way he had come.

‘How’s your father?’ he said.

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘That’s Maxim Druyanov, right?’

‘Right.’

‘What’s he doing now?’

‘He’s lecturing at the School for Slavonic and East European Studies in London.’

‘Do they guard him yet?’

‘No, no. That was years ago.’

‘Your mother is Jewish, right?’

‘Perfectly right.’

‘Well, hell. Goddam it,’ he said. The accent was a rich
mixture
of Brooklyn, Russian, Yiddish. He told me why he thought we were so well met.

A large letters project was under way – the collected and annotated letters of Chaim Weizmann. An editorial committee had been set up some years before consisting of Lewis Namier, Isaiah Berlin, and Jacob Talmon, all very top-class; also R. H. S. Crossman, the British ex-statesman, who was doing the big biography of Weizmann.

Most of the volumes had been allocated and were being worked on by political specialists, but a certain hole had appeared for the years 1931–35, Weizmann’s period out of office. For this
correspondence
, which apparently reflected well the
Zeitgeist
of that dismal era, it had not proved easy to think of the right editor. The appearance of
The Betrayed Decade
, with what was considered quite an intriguing name on it, might have solved one part of the problem.

‘The other part is up to you. How about it, Igor?’

We were in his apartment by that time – a
pied-à-terre
just off Central Park South, which is where our stroll had led – and his wife, Shirley, was pouring coffee.

‘Well. It’s sudden, Meyer.’ We were both now on first-name terms.

‘It would be two volumes, of the greatest historical
importance
. It is kind of the prehistory of the State of Israel. He was in touch with almost everybody. Day after day, in a thousand ways, you see the moral collapse of Europe coming. You’d have running footnotes, a long introductory essay to each volume. It’s yours, I see it, I have a feeling.’

His feeling was why I was now where I was, having mine.

*

It was the penthouse suite in the San Martin Clubhouse on the Weizmann Institute campus. Dignitaries usually got it. There weren’t any at the moment, which accounted for my occupancy. The plane had been hours late – a bomb scare in London – so I wearily sat and admired the glory and had a drink with Connie.

More than ever, she reminded me of a small South American hummingbird – a confectioner’s model, perhaps. She had very neat little legs and feet. Her eyelashes flickered. Her name was Nehama, but the nuns in the convent school in Maracaibo (where she had been born) had had some trouble with this, and asked what it meant. She had told them it was consolation in Hebrew, so they had renamed her Consuelo, shortened in class to Suelo. When the family had moved to New York, the teachers there had asked what Suelo meant, and she’d told them it could either be Nehama or Consuelo, and everyone had settled for Connie.

I said, ‘So what is the panic with Vava?’

‘Oh, you are too tired for these complications.’

‘What is the complication?’

‘Let me put it this way.
I
don’t understand it, and I’m an expert. He was a cousin of Vera’s, you know.’

‘Vera Verochka. Vava was?’

‘Your genius Hopcroft didn’t find this out from Olga?’

‘He didn’t tell me. Perhaps it was his bang on the head.’

‘Bergmann knew him in London in the thirties. He’d
forgotten
about it. Vava came from Vera’s hometown, Rostov. He didn’t leave Russia till after the Revolution. Then he went to Germany, until the Hitler thing started, and Weizmann got him out. He was one of his refugees. He stayed with the Weizmanns
for a short time and Chaim started him off with some work at the Featherstone Laboratory.’

‘The Featherstone Laboratory.’ Through the echoing
longueurs
of the day and of the jet, I remembered somebody telling me something about this laboratory. What?

‘The Featherstone Laboratory in London. Weizmann’s
laboratory
. The one he started when they threw him out of the
presidency
of the organization in 1931. When he returned to science.’

‘Ye-es?’

‘Well, that’s it. So Vava stayed with them a short while, and then he got himself the job with the oil company, and found someplace to live, and they lived happy ever after, he and his wife and the little girl.’

‘Olga.’

‘Olga,’ Connie said.

None of this seemed to answer the question, and I was too weary to grapple with it anyway, so I ate one of the oranges she’d picked for me, and listened while she told me what was going on at the Institute and who was still around. Most of the old faculty people were still around, the Sassoons, the Beylises; also a good egg from Harvard called Hammond L. Wyke.

I said, ‘Anything further about his Nobel Prize?’

‘Well, fingers are crossed. There is an upstart in Japan who has his backers. That Nobel committee – I would seek to influence them in subtle ways, like financial. The unworldly scientist says you can’t. Then, Professor Tuomisalo of Finland is still with us.’

‘The professor of higher mathematics.’

‘That one. Well.’ She yawned. ‘Bat Yam is some kilometers away, with my bed in it. In the morning, you’ll ring when you want to come to the House. Ze’ev will drive round and fetch you.’

I saw her down to her car and returned, dog-tired. It was very quiet; just the soft thud of the heavy-water plant from near the nuclear science complex a few hundred yards away. I stood at the open window and took in the scent of oranges from the dark. My eyes were jumping. I thought I saw something in rapid, jerky motion. It wasn’t an animal, or a vehicle. It seemed to be a running man.

I watched the figure for some time, and went to bed, and tossed and turned there for hours, vaguely uneasy, sleepless.

Next morning, in the dead of winter, birds sang, sun glittered, trees shone with fruit, and God was back in business – all
welcome
after the London that Caroline had so pithily described. From the window I looked at the undulating grounds,
magnificently
undulating away in all directions. Along the paths people were ambling on bikes between the temples of science discreetly embowered here and there – all very seemly and inspiriting.

I showered and shaved and topped off with a bit of the heavenly talc and descended for breakfast. There was only one other person in the restaurant, an Indian carefully feeding
himself
olives and cream cheese as he read the Jerusalem
Post
. I filled up a tray, and bought a paper for myself and took it near the window.

Armies still locked together on the west bank of the Suez Canal; a very nice picture of Sheik Yamani, the Saudi Arabian Oil Minister, seraphically describing his regret at the unfortunate economic condition of West Europe; a mysterious shortage of rice among the wholesalers of Israel, portending an imminent rise in the price of the product.

‘Excuse me. You are Mr Druyanov?’

The Indian was smiling tentatively down at me. Extended, he was a long, sinewy figure, slightly hunched.

‘Yes.’

‘Connie said you would be here today. We are good friends. Forgive me for intruding. I just wanted to say how much I admired your book. There were one or two things I would love to discuss with you, the role of Gandhi in 1939– Oh, please don’t let me disturb you.’ We shook hands, I half on my feet, and a pickled cucumber fell on the floor. He shot after it like a python. ‘There. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t eat it. Although the floor is very clean. Well, I don’t want to disturb you. I am working here; we will meet again, I am sure.’

‘I’ll look forward to it.’

The first signs of trouble in Arcadia.

I finished breakfast and rang Connie, and a few minutes later was being driven by Ze’ev, the chauffeur, to the House. We went out of the Institute and turned left into the main road of Rehovot, and then left again and up the avenue for half a mile till we reached the gatehouse. This had been the guard post in the days when Chaimchik had been President of Israel. We sped through it and along the winding path between orange groves, to pull up in the drive outside the House.

The biggish white place sat like a swan in the beautiful
morning
. The semicircular green awning was down over the window of Chaimchik’s old room, the wooden bird tray still attached to the balcony railing outside. He’d sat and fed the birds there while looking out to the Jerusalem hills, visible at this moment as a mauvish stain in the distance. I followed Ze’ev up the entrance steps and he unlocked the door.

‘You remember the way up to Mr Meltzer?’

‘Of course.’

The wide marble staircase spiraled up from the hall: a spacious hall, quite light, quite bright, quite stately. A certain glacial
quality
sat upon it, the product of much limed oak. Limed oak had been the thing in the London of 1937 when Verochka had superintended the building. She’d become something of a magpie at the time. The results of her raids upon Sotheby’s and Christie’s were all around: chests, ornaments, lamps, rugs. She’d long outlived her lord; had slipped in her bath at the Dorchester on a visit to London at the age of eighty-five, and had returned in a coffin.

I went up the stairs and along the corridor to her old bedroom; it was now Julian Meltzer’s office.

‘Well. So they put a bomb on the plane for you,’ he said.

Something about old Zionists kept them like Peter Pan. He was sixty-nine and looked ten years younger: big, bland, calm, all in order. Some way above his mustache a pair of innocent eyes cannily gazed.

‘You didn’t happen to bring a token from your old friend Fidel?’

I carefully opened my case and presented him with the token.

He looked at the little cabinet for a bit and his mouth opened. Then he opened the box and looked at the cigars.

‘Oh, my word! I didn’t mean it. Where did you get these?’

Caroline had got them. Her friend Willie was a gentleman cigar merchant, also a wine merchant; his father, the Earl, was.

‘Merry Chanukah, Julian.’

‘And a merry Christmas to you. Igor, these must have cost a fortune.’

I agreed. ‘Perfectly correct. As it happens, I have a rather extended little tab for you to sign. We can go into it later. What is the mystery with Vava?’

‘Oh, well, Vava.’ He was still looking at the cigars with some disbelief. ‘I doubt if we’ll see anything from Vava.’ He very carefully put the cigars in a cupboard. There was another box of cigars in it, and a pile of books and files. ‘Wait a minute. I don’t think I ought to put these here, they aren’t in tubes. Might take the smell.’ He pondered a moment uncertainly. The cupboards had numerous fitted drawers. Verochka had kept her underwear here. As the correspondence showed, she had made very careful specifications for this range of cupboards. She’d driven the
celebrated
German architect Mendelsohn half mad. Verochka had become something of a madam as her Chaimchik had risen in the world. ‘I know.’ He went to another cupboard at the far end of the room and lovingly enriched it with the precious casket. ‘That chap wasn’t attacked for his money. They were after the letters.’

‘What chap?…
Hopcroft?
’ ‘I said, amazed.

‘I’ll smoke one of those tonight. My word, that’s very
handsome
, Igor,’ he said. ‘Yes, we’ve been having some nonsense here. You haven’t picked up any science from these letters?’

‘I haven’t got any scientific letters. Bergmann has them.’

‘You’ll pick up a bit.’ An accent of somewhere – London, N.W., perhaps–slightly asserted itself. He’d come to Palestine in 1920, had been the
New York Times
correspondent for years, associated with Meyer for even longer. ‘They have got keen here on Weizmann’s acetone process,’ he said. ‘It cropped up when Bergmann was in America during the oil crisis. You can make petrol from it.’

‘From acetone?’

‘Vava turned it into ketones. Do you know about ketones?’

‘No.’

‘They put the kick into petrol. That’s what that letter was. The one to Fritz Haber that you sent to Connie.’