Her lips tightened until they were white. “That’s a lie, and anyway, you have no way of proving it.”
“No, of course not. It didn’t occur to me to take some photos with my phone in order to persuade my cousin’s wife not to sleep with one of our bosses. Although if you like, you can prove to yourself that Jairo hasn’t turned into a saint who’ll wait for you forever. Every Friday he ends up in a foursome with three women. If you just go out on the town that night or ask around out there, you’ll know that I’m not lying. It’s a fact, and he doesn’t hide it much.”
“With three at a time?” she repeated, turning pale. “How can you have such a twisted mind?”
“Me, twisted? You haven’t seen anything yet with Jairo,” I said, shaking my head.
Elisa put her impossibly high heels back on and got up from my armchair with all the dignity she could muster.
“I refuse to go on listening to you. Will you or won’t you stay with my kids tonight?”
“No, of course I won’t.”
She opened the door and went out, slamming it behind her with a force that reverberated throughout the entire floor. It sounded as if her heels were crushing little crustaceans as she made her way down the corridor.
I was left staring at the empty space she’d left behind in my armchair. Should I call Marcos? To tell him what? That his wife was going to be unfaithful that night? Elisa would deny it, and anyway, I was already poking my nose far too deeply into their marital affairs. But there was something that was worrying me even more. Why was Jairo throwing all his heavy artillery at Elisa now, at this very moment? After four years of nothing more than prowling, he’d started his definitive campaign of relentless pursuit and takedown precisely on that very Sunday. It had to have something to do with what had taken place on St. John’s Eve with me and Iago. There was nothing happenstance when it came to Jairo. What was he up to?
I spent the rest of the morning in the Interpretive Center, trying not to think about what had happened. What’s the most complicated thing that needs doing? I thought, looking around the untidy space. The panels. The panels about the itinerant camps were driving me mad. Fine. Then that was what I was going to do . . . to stop thinking about Jairo, about Elisa, about my useless cousin who’d be analyzing stud bulls three hundred miles away not even suspecting his wife was going to be spending that night with a three-thousand-year-old Scythian.
50
IAGO
Mother Moon Day, the sixteenth day of the month of Duir
Monday, June 25, 2012
I checked my watch before ringing the doorbell of the little red-and-white house. Twenty-two hours before I am back with Dana. The rest would be over and done with soon. Flemming’s discovery wouldn’t be important, or defining. Just another stage. It was midmorning, and I anticipated that Flemming would still be at work, so I reckoned that Rebekka would be on her own.
But it wasn’t Rebekka who opened the door but her father, who looked as stunned as I was, standing at the entrance to his house. We silently examined each other with the same look of incredulity. Flemming had lost all his hair. Where before he’d had a mass of blond curls, there was now just a shiny bald head. His untamable eyebrows had also disappeared. His skin looked tired and sallow, and he had deep bags under his eyes.
“What the hell have you done to yourself?” I cried in horror.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in turn.
“That’s not as important as my question. I thought I was always welcome in the home of a friend,” I answered coldly while my brain sifted through theories that would explain what I was seeing.
“Come in,” he said, turning around and heading off into his house. “You weren’t supposed to see me like this.”
“Yes, he was!” shouted a birdlike voice from the ice workshop.
Rebekka came out in her gloves and padded jacket, looking more serious than ever. “Tell him what you’ve done. He, at least, ought to know,” she said, crossing her arms as best she could, given her bulky clothing.
Flemming sat down on a small chest of pale wood that took up most of the passage. He looked tired—no, exhausted. I realized I didn’t want to go on treating him harshly, despite the fact that he’d committed the biggest idiocy a father could on his daughter’s behalf.
“How many chemotherapy sessions have you had?” I asked him, modifying the tone of my voice.
“Five, but each one is worse,” he replied, resting his hands on his knees. “When you were here a few weeks ago, I’d already had two, but I didn’t say anything to you. I lost my hair in the car when I was returning from my third session. My seat looked as if two cats had been fighting on it.” He attempted a weak chuckle.
I didn’t laugh. I didn’t find the image amusing.
“The last one left me feeling so tired that I spent three days in bed, and then there was the vomiting.” He looked at his arms as if he’d never seen them before. “I’m losing my muscle tone, and I haven’t got the strength to go on the damn walks my oncologist recommended.”
“Let’s go to your lab,” I said, interrupting him. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”
I took him by the arm as you would an old man and helped him down the hallway. When we walked past Rebekka, I had the impression she was also looking older. Everyone in that house had aged several years in a few weeks.
“What have you injected yourself with?” I asked after I’d sat him down on the bench.
“Have you heard of HeLa cells?”
“Of course. What scientist hasn’t?”
HeLa cells were in 99 percent of cell-biology labs around the world. They’d originally come from an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, who had died in the fifties from an exceptionally aggressive carcinoma. Her doctor had removed a tissue sample without her permission, and for the first time in history, human cells could be cultivated outside the body. The cells had continued to divide at an extraordinary rate, and since that time they’d been used to discover and test all sorts of things, from the vaccine for polio to helping clone Dolly the sheep.
“Based on what I discovered about my daughter’s short telomeres, I’ve been studying everything I could about telomerase. Did you know that in 1989 they found telomerase in the HeLa cells? It made sense. Those cells have kept multiplying for more than sixty years.”
I closed my eyes and bit my lower lip. I’d imagined something like this, something stupid and desperate.
“I thought that the solution for progeria had to do with injecting each organ with cultured cells with telomerase so that they could compensate for the shortened telomeres with which genetics has punished my daughter, but I didn’t dare to experiment on her.”
“So you injected yourself with cancerous cells?”
“Yes, but I did it into a kidney, an organ I could do without, should the experiment turn out badly. And as a matter of fact, what I’d expected happened. The tests immediately detected that I had a carcinoma in my kidney. They gave me an appointment to have it removed that same week, but in the tests they performed prior to the operation, the oncologist discovered that it had metastasized into all the adjacent organs: the lungs, the stomach, the colon. There was no longer any point in operating on me, so they’re giving me chemotherapy, but only to prolong my life for a few months. I’m doomed, Isaac, but I need the time to find the cure for progeria.”
He turned toward the microscope, which had been left with its light on for who knew how long.
“Do you think this is what Rebekka needs—a sick father who can’t look after her during her last years?”
“My daughter has less than a year to live. I’ve already told you about her coronary attacks. The doctor said she wouldn’t survive the next one.”
“Does she know that?”
“She’s an adult. I’ve never hidden anything from her.”
 
; “She’s a child, for heaven’s sake, or at most an adolescent!” I shouted at him, getting up from my stool. “And you are as guilty as the illness of robbing her of her childhood.”
But there was no going back where that was concerned. Twenty-one hours before my return. Just settle this. Don’t get involved, I ordered myself. But it was useless. When a man needs to remind himself what he mustn’t feel, it’s because he knows he’s lost the battle.
“You thought that by cultivating cells that were a hybrid of yours and HeLa, you’d create cells with long telomeres to inject into Rebekka.”
“Yes, and that’s what I’m doing.”
“Suppressants, Flemming. You forgot the suppressants,” I said with despair.
“I didn’t forget, but if you could give me a clue as to how I could get hold of them . . .” he said with a smile, but there was no amusement in his voice.
“Well, I certainly could have, if you’d consulted me sooner about your brilliant idea.”
He looked at me in astonishment. “How, if you don’t mind telling me?”
“You didn’t do a good research job, damn it. INO, the National Institute of Oncology in Spain, has created mice with active telomerase but no cancer. They injected them with a tumor suppressant, p53. They’re cancer-free.”
And then a flash went off in my brain. The truth, clear and lucid, that had been buzzing round and round in my head these past few months without ever revealing itself.
They’re cancer-free, I repeated to myself. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?
They’re cancer-free.
The revelation left me dumbstruck, and I had to put on my best poker face so that Flemming wouldn’t notice how shocked I was. But my friend was also in his own world.
He raised his hands to his head, a broken man, and then he gradually shut down until he was left looking as if he’d fallen asleep. Worried, I went over to him and touched his shoulder with my hand.
“It’s too late for me now,” he said, staring at the microscope, his mind elsewhere.
Yes, it was. Foolish man . . . My practical side took over, as it usually does when my emotional side is jammed. It might seem coldhearted; no doubt Freud would have had some interesting explanation for it.
“Show me all the samples you’ve got,” I requested in the most neutral tone possible.
Flemming got up and walked to the fridge. He opened it and started listing the contents: his own organic samples, those of his daughter, and HeLa cells. Some that he’d manipulated, and some that he’d left untouched. Then I asked him to show me the process he’d followed. As so often happens in the world of science, the huge leaps in knowledge, the qualitative ones—the ones that transform a theory into a certainty, a new discipline, a new era—usually arise from lateral thinking. Insomnia, states of consciousness altered because of a misfortune, or work carried out under unbearable pressure—those are the circumstances that give rise to strokes of genius.
Despite the fact that Flemming had given himself one of the slowest, most painful, and unnecessary suicides that science might record for years to come, assuming that it ever came to light, this man had taken not one but several giant steps in working out how telomeres behaved in a normal human body. Right at that very moment I glimpsed a double theory that I’d begun to sketch out that night in San Francisco, although my hands and feet continued to be tied, because I couldn’t use Kyra’s lab for my research.
Two hours later my brain was saturated with data. Flemming had gone into a state of feverish activity and seemed determined that I have a precise understanding of everything he’d been investigating over the past few months. Then his energy started to fade, and I sat him down on a small settee he had under the window that looked out onto the garden. He finally fell asleep still reciting a litany of proteins, and I covered him with a blanket decorated in ethnic Viking motifs I found next to the cushion. I imagined he’d slept there half the nights of his life since the tests had announced the progeria of his two-year-old daughter.
That would be the last time I saw him. I knew it as certainly as others knew that the London Stock Exchange would fall, or the grape harvest in a particular year would lack sugar because the sun wasn’t providing much heat. I knew it because there’s a point of no return with every illness that a longevo like me has had to witness so many times, and with the same result. There’s not the tiniest space for doubt, a miracle, or hope.
“What will happen with Rebekka when you’re gone?” I had asked him a few hours earlier.
“She’ll have to move to her mother’s place, with her new family, although my ex-wife won’t be very pleased. She’s made a new life for herself, and her life is devoted to her new son.”
“Could I help in any way?”
He looked at me, caught somewhat unawares by my offer, but then I could see genuine gratitude in his eyes.
“A bachelor globetrotter like you? I doubt it, my dear friend. Rebekka will have to adjust to her new life without me, but it’s very generous of you.”
“Fine, but ask me for whatever it might be, if I can be of any use.”
Once he’d fallen asleep, I went into Rebekka’s refrigerated workshop. She was still working on the mermaid but had progressed considerably.
“I’m delighted that you called me,” I said to her back.
“I thought you should know,” she answered without abandoning her saw.
When she’d completed the curve of the flipper, she switched it off and turned toward me. She wasn’t smiling.
“I’d like to ask you a favor.”
“Anything.”
“That you continue to investigate what my father will leave unfinished,” she said.
“I can’t. I don’t have my own lab.”
She looked down, frustrated, as if she’d run out of options.
“Well, that’s a pity,” I think she whispered.
Then I said good-bye and left the house, as I’d left so many others before, knowing it was unlikely I’d ever be back. I was leaving behind another identity. Isaac would die soon, too.
I checked the time as I leaped across the garden. Eighteen hours to Dana. The night in the hotel was going to be unbearable, never mind the slight but persistent worry that I might have another blackout, though I knew that Héctor and Dana were on the case. If something happened to me, they’d come and get me.
I called the precious number, and Dana’s voice reached me right there, on a bench near Flemming’s house.
“How’s everything going?” she asked. I could sense her concern, but I could also detect something in her voice that troubled me, although I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“Not very well. Anything new at your end?”
She sighed. “It would take some time to tell you, Iago, but I’m not sure I can explain it to you over the phone.”
“Can it wait till tomorrow?”
She thought about it for a moment. “Yes, I think so. When do you get back to Santander?”
“Early in the afternoon, around one o’clock,” I lied.
I actually had something to attend to in Madrid, and I didn’t know how long it would take me. I was going to resurrect my identity as Winston Zeidan, and use the “son of a former colleague” routine again. I had to visit a certain Mercedes Poveda and exchange her photograph for a digitally altered one where the faces of Lür and Lyra would never again be identifiable. I withheld that information from Dana because I still didn’t know how sensitive she was about matters that verged on breaking the law.
“What about your trip? I don’t want to ask too much, but you sound very serious.”
“I’ll tell you about it in greater detail tomorrow, but it’s to do with a friend who’s very ill. In fact, I’ve just pronounced the euphemism of the century. He’s dying, and I don’t think I’ll ever see him again. I really need to talk t
o you tonight. I’m in no hurry to get to my hotel, so just talk to me about anything.”
“The museum, prehistory, work, personal memories, sexual fantasies—?”
“I’ll take personal memories,” I said, interrupting her, “but I’ll take note of the sexual suggestion for when I’m in the right mood.” I smiled to myself. “It would be deemed very odd here on a public street.”
I briefly considered what might dispel my mood. “Tell me, how did you manage to get a horse to split your eyebrow?”
I got up and started walking to where I’d left the rented car while I allowed Dana to talk to me about her adolescence. Iago had taken control again, while Isaac Castle remained seated forever on that bench on Strandvejen Avenue.
Seventeen hours till my return.
51
ADRIANA
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
I walked into BACus at lunchtime and headed to the table where Elisa and her flock were grazing on that day’s pinchos, as I usually did on the days when neither Iago nor Héctor was about. I hung my bag over the back of an empty chair and was about to sit down when Elisa got up with her beer and, without saying a word, switched to another table. The interns exchanged glances, bowed their heads, and hurried to sit down with her at the other table.
Terrific. I had gained a high-level enemy—or maybe she always had been, and what had happened yesterday was just an unmasking ceremony. I had my first pâté pincho with all the calm I could muster.
It was delicious.
Then I decided to attack my serving of squid, while colleagues seated at the counter furtively stole glances at me and gossiped among themselves. The squid were fresh, soft, and tender. They really were the best calamari in Santander.
Elisa was staring at me from behind her beer, muttering nasty things about me to her interns. I noticed a slight tremble in her hands and a somewhat haunted look in her eyes. She had huge bags under her black eyeliner, and for once she looked as if she hadn’t done her hair.