The Prize

2

IT was a crisp, sunless, silvery early afternoon in Stockholm, the temperature 15° C., this first day in December, when Count Bertil Jacobsson, formal in his silk hat and overcoat, brown cane tucked under his arm, pearl-grey spats on his shoes, emerged from the Nobel Foundation at Sturegatan 14 and walked to the Cadillac limousine awaiting him at the kerb.

The Swedish Foreign Office had furnished the limousine for the occasion. Now it stood in splendour, its rear door held open by a blond, liveried chauffeur. As Jacobsson approached, the driver inclined his head respectfully, and saluted. Jacobsson answered with a nod, and entered the car. He settled into the nearest corner of the cushioned rear seat, already amply filled by Ingrid Påhl and Carl Adolf Krantz. On the return trip, he and Krantz would sit on the jump seats and allow their guests to join Ingrid Påhl on the softer rear seat.

‘Good afternoon, good afternoon,’ said Count Bertil Jacobsson. ‘A lovely day for our beginning.’

‘Hello. Yes, lovely,’ said Ingrid Påhl nervously.

Krantz, who always appeared preoccupied, muttered, ‘Count,’ in greeting, and no more.

The chauffeur had slammed the front door and was behind the wheel. Jacobsson leaned forward, slid the glass partition open, and said, ‘ Arlanda Airport, please.’ He consulted his watch. ‘We are early. You may make this a leisurely drive.’

He closed the glass partition, as the car started and moved away from the kerb, eased himself back into his corner, and turned his head to his companions.

‘Why so solemn, my friends?’ he asked. ‘I always find these first meetings refreshing.’

‘I never know what to say,’ said Ingrid Påhl.

‘We are privileged,’ Jacobsson went on. ‘We have the opportunity to receive, and intimately acquaint ourselves with, the geniuses of the world-’

‘Whom we have made famous,’ Krantz interrupted acidly.

‘Not so, Carl, not at all. They have their fame, all of them, before we recognize and crown it.’ He considered this a moment, objectively, and then revised his judgment. ‘Well, not always, but usually, often enough.’ He regarded his companions for a moment. ‘I hope neither of you regrets participating with me on the reception committee? It was not only my judgment, but the various academies-’

‘We are honoured,’ said Krantz curtly. He stared out the window a moment, and then he added, ‘Perhaps I’m still smarting at the vote. Except for Professor Stratman-’

‘You’re surely not objecting to Dr. Garrett and Dr. Farelli? Their findings electrified the entire world.’

‘The press, the press,’ said Krantz. ‘We were swept away. I think we should be more judicious. Perhaps their heart transplant, limited as it is may be the great medical discovery of our time. On the other hand, it may be a circus stunt. I think the Caroline committee should have waited another year or two, for more experiments, more results. As to the Marceau team, I am still not impressed. Sperms in cold storage. Who cares? There were half a dozen more worthy findings to be honoured. The literary award to the American, I won’t even speak of-’

Ingrid Påhl’s chins quivered with indignation. ‘Var snäll och-please, Carl, do not mix in again. You are a physicist, not a literary critic. I am sure you have not even read Mr. Craig’s books-’

‘I read one. It was enough.’

‘Well, you simply have no judgment in such matters. I do not meddle when you make your decisions in chemistry and physics, and I do not think you should interfere with those of us in the Swedish Academy. Every year, the same. You made the same comments when we selected Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Ernest Hemingway. Why is it always the Americans you object to? Why is it that you were only happy when Eucken and Heyse and Hauptmann, your darling Germans, won?’

Krantz’s lips were tight. ‘On this level, I will not discuss the matter further with you.’

Krantz turned back to the window. Ingrid Påhl opened her beaded handbag with irritation and sought cigarette and holder for solace. Jacobsson, who had been listening with concern, determined to remain detached.

By the time they had reached the suburbs of northern Stockholm, the first portion of their twenty-two-mile drive to Arlanda behind them, Jacobsson realized that he could not remain detached, at least not within himself. It was his task, as senior head of the Nobel reception committee, to see that they presented a united and gracious front. For ten days, from this afternoon until the Ceremony on the afternoon of December tenth, the three of them would be living together, and living with their distinguished guests who had won the prizes and come long distances to receive them. Any note of discord or dissension among the three of them, before their guests, the press, the public, would be disgraceful. Jacobsson decided that should another such argument occur, he could not remain above it, outside it, but must act to put a stop to it at once.

He blamed himself for influencing the academies to let Krantz and Ingrid Påhl join him on the reception committee. In his absorption with the preparations that had been in his hands the sixteen days since the telegrams had been sent to France, Italy, and America, he had forgotten their antagonism to each other. As always the preparations had been hectic. There had been the detailed letters sent off to the winners. There had been the schedules and programmes. There had been the reservations for choice suites at the Grand Hotel. And there had been the reporters.

In the midst of all this activity, it had fallen on Jacobsson to recommend to the academies two of their members to join with him in receiving the winners. Because there had been no time to give it lengthy consideration, Jacobsson had hurriedly suggested the names of Krantz and Ingrid Påhl. His choices had been automatically approved. At the time, several weeks before, he had thought the choices excellent ones, regarding them as separate individuals, and not as collaborators with one another and himself. Both were eminently qualified in their fields, or so it had seemed.

Now, casting a sidelong glance at his companions, as if to support his earlier judgment, he tried to see them as the foreign guests would see them. Ingrid Påhl, beside him, was puffing away steadily at a cigarette in the ebony holder. A floral hat covered most of her greying hair. Her enormous face, with flat, fat features, was like a pinkish mound of unkneaded dough. Beneath her loose chins hung many strands of necklaces of varied coloured stones. A great pudding of a woman, her shapeless body was encased in a tentlike blue dress. She resembled, Jacobsson often thought, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, the Russian theosophist with whom his father had been photographed in London near the end of the last century. Although her face was now grim, aggravated still by the disagreement with Krantz, she was ordinarily pleasant, almost bland, exuding naïve Swedish simplicity and sweetness.

Because Jacobsson had wanted one member of his reception committee to be conversant with literature, as a gesture of respect to Andrew Craig, he had selected Ingrid Påhl with no hesitation. Not only was she well-read, but she was also Sweden ’s only living Nobel Prize winner in literature. This laurel constantly made her a useful showpiece. On the other hand, this same wreath, Jacobsson shrewdly perceived, too often made her shy, even miserable, in the company of notable visiting authors who had been awarded the prize more recently. For Ingrid Påhl, who had been unanimously voted the prize over a decade earlier, had always felt unworthy of it. Her novels, gentle prose poems dedicated to her beloved Sweden, lush word landscapes without people or life, had been honoured before more thunderous and memorable works of vitality by international greats. The award, Jacobsson knew, had embarrassed her, and she had never rid herself of the sense that she was being paraded before the world under false pretences.

The dangers of national nepotism, Jacobsson thought. Sometimes we are unfairly criticized, but sometimes quite justly, and then both giver and taker are the victims. In literature, a dozen Scandinavian writers, besides Ingrid Påhl, had received the Nobel Prize-while Marcel Proust, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad lived and did not receive the prize. Poor Ingrid, Jacobsson thought, and now she dreads meeting Andrew Craig, whose creativity she worships and whose cause she so vigorously championed.

Jacobsson shifted his gaze to the third member of their party. Carl Adolf Krantz was Ingrid Påhl’s opposite in every way. Physically, he was a gnome. Mentally, he was a giant. Personally, he was an irritant, grudging, troublesome, disagreeable, contrary, brimming with acerbity, but stimulating, interesting, brilliant. When seated, as now, he seemed more dwarfish than usual. His thin strands of hair, dyed black, greased, lay flat on his squarish head. His eyes were tiny pinholes, his nose a miniature snout, his mouth puckered as if a cork had been pulled from it. His neat brush moustache was black, as was his short pointed goatee. His suits were always too tight, all buttons buttoned, and he wore bowties at his collar and lifts on his heels.

There was an air faintly stiff and officious, entirely Germanic, about Krantz, which was what he intended, although he had been born in Sigtuna, Sweden. His pride was that his father, a minor government diplomat, had raised and educated him in Germany, a nation and people he admired-through all regimes-beyond words. His happiest memories were of his student days at Göttingen University and Würzburg University. Returning to Sweden with his parents, he had felt alien, a feeling which had never fully left him. After a decade in private industry as a physicist-several of his papers had earned him minor renown abroad-he had been offered a post in the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Uppsala. Eventually, he had begun to teach, and he aspired to the chair of physics at the University. With the advent of Hitler, his mind had turned from physics to politics. His native country’s abject neutralism made him ashamed, and he had identified himself with a resurgent Reich. On every pretext, he had visited Berlin, staying at the Kaiserhof Hotel, and mingling socially with Keitel, von Ribbentrop, and Rosenberg. During World War II, in Stockholm, he had preached for and written in favour of the German cause-to countrymen who had not known war in almost a century and a half, and whose survival depended upon neutrality. In those tense years, Carl Adolf Krantz had become a controversial and embarrassing figure to his fellow Swedes. The Reich’s fall was, in a way, his own.

In the cooler halls of science Krantz’s worth was not damaged. But in higher circles he had fallen into disrepute. During the decade before the war, he had been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, and had been one of two members with the right to vote for both the Nobel Prize in physics and the Nobel Prize in chemistry. After the war, his rôles on the Nobel committees had not been altered. However, at the University, the situation was different. When, finally, the august chair of physics had been open, Carl Adolf Krantz, despite seniority, had been passed over for a younger man. This slap in the face, this public reprimand, he could not forgive. He had resigned from the school at once. And, in the several years since, he had devoted himself part time to the Institute of Radiophysics in Stockholm, and given more and more of his days to his Nobel activities.

Despite Krantz’s checkered past and his erratic personality, Jacobsson had settled upon him as the third member of the reception committee because of his breadth of knowledge. Almost single-handedly, at least at first, Krantz had disregarded political differences to lead the inner fight to get Professor Max Stratman the Nobel Prize in physics. And although Krantz had opposed an award to the Marceaus, his position as a judge in chemistry made him eligible to converse with them as intelligently as he would with Stratman. Jacobsson had considered requesting the Caroline Institute to offer one of their own staff to the reception committee, but a fourth member would make the group unwieldy, and this seemed unnecessary since Krantz’s knowledge spilled over into physiology and medicine, too. And so finally, it had been Krantz, to join with Påhl and Jacobsson. But observing the crusty and embittered physicist now, Jacobsson had brief misgivings.

With an inaudible sigh, he straightened and saw his own countenance reflected in the glass partition. Examining his shimmering, ghostlike image, he was suddenly aware that he was probably no more qualified than either Krantz or Påhl to represent the will of Alfred Nobel, or, at least, that they were no less qualified than he. Hypnotically, his eyes held on his image, trying to see what the approaching new laureates would see of him. What? A very old man. An outdated aristocratic head. Sensitive scholar features. Face like wrinkled parchment, whitish-bluish, almost transparent. The body’s frame less tall now, limbs brittle, swathed in heavy garments to appear fuller, stronger, formidable. ‘I am a misanthrope, but exceedingly benevolent’, Nobel had written of himself. Perhaps, thought Jacobsson, a description of his own self, as well.

Jacobsson closed his eyes, and the image was gone. He had not been young since the previous century, he remembered with surprise. The world of this afternoon was the world of tomorrow’s people. Did he belong here now? Yet, truly, who belonged here more? He told himself that he represented continuity. After all, how many alive could bridge the long years, from those first winners in 1901, Roentgen, van’t Hoff, Behring, Prudhomme, Dunant, Passy, to this year’s winners, Stratman, the Marceaus, Garrett, Farelli, Craig? And who else could quote the spoken words, heard in person, engraved on memory, of Alfred Bernhard Nobel?

As an impressionable adolescent accompanying his father on a royal liaison mission, he had been privileged to be in Alfred Nobel’s presence at least a dozen times, first in Paris, and then in the lonely villa at San Remo during 1896, the last year of Nobel’s life. In view of the fact that Jacobsson had been blessed with an inherited competence, he had been able to make the Nobel Foundation his vocation since 1900, the year preceding the first awards.

In recent years, because he had begun to place a value on his unique position and because he felt that he owed something to posterity, Jacobsson had begun his Notes. These were his memories of the past, jottings of the present, relating his knowledge of the secret voting sessions of the Nobel academies, impressions and anecdotes and activities of the various laureates, descriptions of the events and ceremonies, in all a priceless rag bag of history. Jacobsson had begun the Notes-there were now seventeen green ledgers filled in his crabbed hand-not many years past. The first entry had been made late the night following that November day when the Swedish Academy, in closed session in the Old Town, had voted the literary prize to an obscure Sardinian authoress, Grazia Deledda, instead of to Gabriele D’Annunzio, because the majority of members had privately objected to D’Annunzio’s amorous exploits and to his swindling a Danish widow of her home, Villa Carnacco, in Italy. That had been 1927. Since then, except when he was ill, Jacobsson had entered something, some fact, some gossip, each day. He had always supposed that it would be a book, a large, handsome published book, to justify his life somehow. But in recent years, he had realized that he would never write the book. For him, the contribution of the raw Notes would be enough. Someday, someday, some other would write the book.

Abruptly, Jacobsson shook himself free of self-absorption and re-entered the present moment, again a part of Ingrid Påhl and Carl Adolf Krantz and the limousine. The authoress was dozing lightly beside him. Krantz concentrated on the task of undoing a metal puzzle; he always carried several new ones in his pocket.

Idly, Jacobsson looked out of the car window at the Stockholm suburbs unreeling before his vision. Beyond the highway, the soft sloping hills were defiantly bronze-green despite the cold. Here and there, in sight and then gone, the rural barnlike wooden houses, most of them beige-coloured but cheerfully red-roofed. How he enjoyed this land, with its shiny lakes and birch trees and clusters of primeval forest and gaping open spaces filled only by Scandinavia ’s cerulean sky endlessly welded to the verdant earth. Actually, he thought, this was Ingrid Påhl’s dominion. In her slender volumes, she had staked out her possession by adoption and love. Essentially, Jacobsson knew, he was a city being. He left the cocoon of the city only in December, on these occasions, and was forever surprised at the visual wonders of the surrounding countryside and his pleasure in them. Annually, each December, he vowed to return, for an outing, a vacation, but by January all resolve had evaporated and he was part of and one with his metropolis again.

‘Bertil.’ It was Ingrid Påhl’s voice that brought him out of his trance.

He swung around, attentive. She was fully awake now, inserting a fresh cigarette in her holder, and then lighting it. He waited.

‘Bertil,’ she repeated, coughing smoke, ‘here we are, and I do not even know our schedule. Is it strenuous?’

‘You mean our receptions? Not at all.’ He dug inside his overcoat, and then inside his suit jacket and removed a folded sheet of onionskin paper. As he opened it, he saw that Krantz was also interested. ‘Here it is,’ said Jacobsson. ‘Shall I read it aloud?’

‘Please,’ said Ingrid Påhl. ‘I cannot read in a moving vehicle.’

Jacobsson brought the open sheet closer to his face. ‘December one. That’s today. Two twenty-five, afternoon. Dr. Denise Marceau. Dr. Claude Marceau. By Air France at Arlanda Airport. This evening. Seven o’clock. Dr. Carlo Farelli and Mrs. Farelli. By Scandinavian Airlines. Also Arlanda. December two. That’s tomorrow. Eight in the morning. Professor Max Stratman and-’

‘Eight in the morning,’ groaned Ingrid Påhl.

‘He is worth welcoming at any hour,’ Krantz snapped at her.

‘-and his niece,’ Jacobsson read, hurrying on. ‘By train from Göteborg. Central Station. Twelve thirty-five tomorrow afternoon. Dr. John Garrett and Mrs. Garrett. By Scandinavian Airlines. Arlanda Airport. On the same flight from Copenhagen, Mr. Andrew Craig and his sister-in-law.’

Krantz snorted. ‘Sister-in-law. Now, we pay for them, too?’

‘He is a widower,’ Ingrid Påhl answered angrily. ‘Do you want him to come alone?’

‘Please,’ interjected Jacobsson. He studied his sheet, then lowered and folded it. ‘As I said, Mr. Craig will be on the same flight with the Garretts. That will make all of them. So you see, Ingrid, the reception part of our duties will be done with and over by early afternoon tomorrow.’ He returned the paper to his inner pocket. ‘Of course, after that, there will be our other little duties. But I am certain they will be stimulating. And, as usual, the Foreign Office is loaning us several energetic attachés to help out when you and Carl wish to nap.’

‘The French couple we are going to meet right now, I do not know a thing about them,’ said Ingrid Påhl. ‘What should we know, Bertil?’

Jacobsson shrugged. ‘What is there to know? They are renowned and dedicated chemists. Despite Carl’s dissent, their discovery has met with universal acclaim. Except for the cuttings from the Paris newspapers-mostly features and interviews about their work-I know nothing of them personally.’ He nodded across the seat. ‘I think that is more Carl’s department.’

Momentarily, Krantz’s stubby fingers ceased working the metal puzzle. ‘They were proposed last year and this year, among five hundred others. There was the general weeding out, and then our committee of five recommended the Marceaus along with half a dozen others. I heard the lengthy investigation reports of our chemistry experts, and they were highly favourable, as you know. But there was little in these reports about the personalities of the winners. As far as I have been able to learn, they are both in their forties. He is older by several years. They have been married a dozen years or more. They have been dedicated to the idiot sperm project six or seven years, I think. They work in the Institut Pasteur, although not officially connected with it. They do not seem to have any interests, outside their work-like most of us in science. I would suppose, being married to each other, and their work, they will be inseparable and of the same mind. Somewhat dull, I predict.’

‘Oh, I wonder about that,’ said Ingrid Påhl. ‘I am perfectly fascinated by married couples performing outside their marriage as collaborators. It happens so often in the sciences. I wonder why it does not happen in the arts. Can you imagine a play by Anne and William Shakespeare? Or a novel by Catherine and Charles Dickens? Or a painting by Mette Sophie and Paul Gauguin? I suppose this does not happen because creativity in the arts is more individual.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Krantz.

Again, Jacobsson sought to prevent conflict. ‘No matter what the reasons, the sciences have seemed to produce some remarkable married teams.’ His mind went back to the Notes. ‘I think immediately of Madame Marie Curie and Pierre Curie. They shared the physics award in-when was it?-yes, 1903, with Professor Henri Becquerel. That was for their joint researches on radiation phenomena. As I recall, the Curies each got one-quarter of the prize, and Becquerel got one-half. I remember my disappointment when we learned that the Curies were too exhausted from overwork to attend our Ceremony. The French Minister to Sweden picked up their award.’

‘Is that not against the Code of Statutes?’ asked Ingrid Påhl. ‘I thought you had to attend in person or forfeit-’

‘Yes, within ten months-“should the prize winner fail, before the first of October in the calendar year immediately following, to encash the prize awarders’ cheque for the amount of the prize in the manner laid down by the Board, then the amount of the prize shall revert to the main fund”-that is the regulation,’ said Jacobsson. ‘However, the Curies did appear, the following summer for their money, in time to remain eligible. Eight years later, as you know, when Marie Curie was a widow, we gave her a second award, this time in chemistry-I believe she was the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes.’

‘Her second winning,’ said Krantz, ‘was for the greatest discovery in chemistry since oxygen. It could be said that she gave us the atom, as we know it.’

‘In any event, this second time, ill as she was, Marie Curie did attend the Ceremony,’ said Jacobsson. ‘Do you remember her visit, Carl? No, that was before your time. She was in her forties, a lonely woman, but lovely and devoted to her career. She arrived here with her sister and daughter, and told me that she was most impressed with the Ceremony.’

‘We gave that daughter a prize, too, did we not?’ asked Ingrid Påhl.

‘Yes. Actually the daughter and her husband. Irène Curie had married one of her mother’s junior assistants at the Institute of Radium, an impoverished young man named Frédéric Joliot, who had graduated from L’École de Paris. There is one more married couple for you. Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. They won the chemistry award in 1935.’ He paused. ‘I am trying to recollect if there were any other married couples-’

‘The Coris in 1947,’ said Krantz promptly.

‘Ah, yes,’ Jacobsson agreed. ‘Gerty and Carl Cori. Medicine. They came from St. Louis in Missouri, and received half the award, and we gave the other half to the Argentinian, Houssay. Something to do with hormones-’

‘They discovered how glycogen is catalytically converted,’ said Krantz with precision.

‘At any rate, we do occasionally bless the fruits of marriage,’ said Jacobsson. ‘I look forward to meeting the Marceaus.’

‘I think it is odd,’ said Ingrid Påhl.

Jacobsson seemed startled. ‘Odd? What is odd?’

‘To be a married couple winning the Nobel Prize,’ explained Ingrid Påhl. ‘In fact, to be a married couple winning anything that has to do with work. It gives marriage only one dimension. The laboratory is the home, and the home is the laboratory. No variety, no change of pace. And too much harmony. Besides, what does this do the male’s rôle? He has gone out, club in hand, to kill a bear for supper, and bring it to his admiring mate, but instead his mate has been out with him, and deserves as much credit for killing the bear as he. Where does that put him? And her?’

‘I am sure the Marceaus never think of such things for a moment,’ said Jacobsson primly. He considered his watch and then looked out the car window. ‘We’ll be just in time for them. Twenty more minutes.’

The three sat in silence now-Krantz who had been wedded and divorced long ago, and Påhl and Jacobsson who had never been wedded at all-thinking their own thoughts about marriage and the prize…

They had hardly exchanged a full sentence or a civil word since they had left Paris for Stockholm.

Reclining in her leather seat beside the blank window, uncomfortable in a black-and-white wool tweed suit, tailored at the last moment to fit her newly trim figure, and unrelaxed because of her enforced proximity to her husband, Denise Marceau let her gaze rove disinterestedly over the aeroplane’s elegant interior. For a while she watched the two young French hostesses, blonde hair swept daringly high, confident in their white blouses and tight blue skirts, treading up and down the aisle among the passengers, followed sometimes by the uniformed steward. Then she was conscious of Claude, slumped low in the seat beside her, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette as he turned the pages of an Émile Gaboriau novel. She did not look at him fully. She could not trust herself to do so. She had not bothered to bring along any reading of her own, because she was too occupied with her seething mind. It was enough.

She extracted an American filtered cigarette from her bag as unobtrusively as possible, for she did not want Claude to light it or want any of his attentions. Hastily, she snapped her lighter and applied it to the cigarette, so maintaining another small victory in her remote independence.

Not many hours ago-three, four, five at most-they had been brought across the smooth highway from Paris to Orly Field by a convoy of Institut colleagues and pompous government officials. They had boarded the Air France jet, Flight 794, at 10.40 in the morning, amid a noisy fanfare and demonstration from their friends and the circle of newspapermen. As they climbed into the plane, there had been shouts below for one last photograph. She had permitted Claude to hold her arm-the possessive façade of marriage-as they posed. The second that they were inside the jet, she had shaken her arm free.

In the noiseless, capsuled period since they were airborne, there had been only monosyllabic exchanges between them. Are you comfortable, Denise? Oui. Champagne? Non. Like one of my books? Non. Beautiful plane? Oui. The translucent barrier between them, like the one separating two male Siamese fighting fish, was made more bearable by the fact that they were, indeed, in an aquarium, watched, peered at, attended, thankfully not alone. Other passengers, informed of their fame and destination, drifted by to make conversation with Claude. Either a hostess or the steward seemed to hover constantly, awaiting command. Several times, one of the pilots came back to inquire if they were comfortable.

Now, Denise Marceau was aware that the taller hostess was addressing them on the intercom. She spoke first in French, then in English. ‘It is exactly two o’clock,’ she announced. ‘We will put down in Stockholm on schedule, in twenty-five minutes. Thank you.’

Watching this hostess, whose small brassière cups were outlined behind her white blouse, Denise was unaccountably enraged. Or accountably, for she associated this anonymous girl with Gisèle Jordan, and hatred of her husband filled her throat. She had almost spoken up in Copenhagen during the brief stopover when they had not left the plane, but had finally sat without progress or purpose. Now her resentment and wrath were even greater. Blindly, she twisted towards Claude.

‘Why in the devil do you not put down that goddam book and say something for yourself?’ she demanded, fighting to keep her voice low.

Claude recoiled instinctively from the harshness of her sudden outburst, then slowly, controlled, he placed the bookmark between the pages, shut the book, and sat up. ‘What do you want me to say?’ he asked. ‘I have tried to make conversation a dozen times. But you insist on punishing me with silence.’

‘I should not have come on this damn trip at all. I do not want be seen with you. You were with that bitch the night before last, and do not try to deny it.’

His composure broke briefly. ‘What do you mean? Denise-’

‘I mean you deliberately went to see her, dined with her, went to someone else’s apartment and slept with her.’

‘You are upset. You are imagining-’

‘Stop it, stop it. I know.’

She would not reveal to him exactly how she knew, even though he had probably already guessed, but still, she would not tell him outright. She would not discuss this part of it or any other details of her humiliation of the three weeks past.

‘Your horrible affair was bad enough,’ she was saying. ‘How I can even look at you again, I don’t know. But to lie to me after-deliberately lie-promise me, pat me on the head-a passing indiscretion, a mistake, no more-and then brazenly resume-’

‘Denise,’ he said with difficulty, glancing off to see if they were being overheard, ‘nothing more passed between us. I simply had to see her once more to-to tell her-’

‘You saw her more than once more, and you slept with her. You have lost all your pride and prudence. You do not give a damn about me, us, our reputations-you are going on headlong-like some schoolboy in the Place Pigalle, in love with a prostitute.’

She was uncontrolled, he saw, surprisingly wild and capable of anything. He did not wish a scene now or here, especially not here. ‘Denise, please,’ he pleaded. ‘Wait until we get to Stockholm and we are alone. I shall explain everything. This is a problem between us. We will work it out privately.’

‘No-now-’

‘I have tried to speak to you a dozen times in the last weeks,’ he said with exasperation, ‘but you were playing the great wounded-the sufferer. I could not get a word from you. Now you want to stage it here, in a crowded plane. Look, people are watching us right now. Where is your sense of respectability-decency? We still have a marriage-’

‘Have we?’ she demanded. ‘I love that. Look who speaks of decency-respectability-with a kept whore on the side.’

‘Denise, I beg of you. Everyone’s listening.’

This time, his plea reached her. She bit her lip, surreptitiously observed the passengers around them, and then sat back in sullen silence.

‘We will find a solution,’ he added lamel desperate to placate her. ‘Soon as this Nobel affair is over with-’

‘To hell with Nobel,’ she said, ‘and to hell with you.’ With a violent wrench of her body, she turned her back on him, curling in the seat, arms folded, pretending to sleep.

But Denise Marceau did not sleep. The play in her head was this, and the Chevalier von Sacher-Masoch had lent his name to it: act one, the discovery; act two, the confirmation and confrontation; act three, they lived unhappily ever after.

Act one. She let the players perform. She did not direct them. She was the leading lady. To avoid illusion, to highlight reality, her mind took her from the present and placed her on the stage of the past.

After the reading of their paper had secured their triumph, Claude’s restlessness began, and she had understood it for she felt as he did. The cluttered apartment was particularly empty after the busy, crowded years in the laboratory. Yet she adjusted quickly, occupied herself with women’s work, and was soon more satisfied.

Claude remained unsociable and moody, and when he took to protracted periods away from the apartment each day, she did not mind. People varied in their needs and ways to find their balance. She was correct in her tolerance, she believed, for soon Claude’s natural enthusiasm and vitality returned. Life became tolerable, even fun, again. Although his need for her body was less, she excused him. Six years of exhaustive labours had taken their toll. Moreover, he was affectionate and thoughtful, which was pleasing. One day, she surmised, he would be completely rested, and then be able to give her more. Sometimes, evaluating his returned good humour after evenings at restaurants or the club with other men, she decided that he was weighing a new project, a fresh undertaking, and this she hoped for more than anything else. While she could not articulate it to herself, her instinct told her that in scientific collaboration they succeeded in a union closer, more passionate, more successful, than those of other mortals who had only the lesser union of flesh.

She tried to pick up the slack strands of old friendships more and more, having some of the women whom she had so long neglected to the apartment for cakes and conversation, going shopping with others, and forcing herself to make luncheon dates. She was not surprised, therefore, when a friend, with whom she had long ago attended the Sorbonne and had recently revived old times, telephoned to invite her to tea the following afternoon at Rumpelmayer’s in the rue de Rivoli. She had tried to delay the engagement a few days, for she was absorbed in selecting new dining-room furniture, but her friend’s beseeching insistence forced her to capitulate.

The following afternoon at exactly four o’clock, Denise met her friend, Madame Cecilia Moret, before the sweets counter in the foyer of Rumpelmayer’s. Cecilia Moret, an energetic thin woman who wore sunglasses, filled in her pocked cheeks with powder, and carried an introverted miniature white poodle in the crook of one arm, led the way through the tables crowded with stylish French and English matrons, to a relatively isolated corner in the rear. They found an unoccupied table. Cecilia tied the leash of her poodle to a chair leg and fed him a sugar cube and baby talk. Divesting themselves of their coats, lighting cigarettes, they ordered tea and toast for Cecilia and coffee and small éclairs for Denise.

Cecilia carried the conversation, ecstatic about a Bombois oil that she had found in the rue de Seine and handbags she had found for the holidays in the rue La Boétie, and Denise listened dully, wondering why she had neglected her dining-room furniture for this. The moment they had been served, and the waitress was out of earshot, Cecilia’s tone changed from the frivolous to the conspiratorial.

‘What is Claude up to these days?’ she inquired, squeezing her lemon peel into the pale tea.

‘Nothing much. Trying to dream up a new project, I suspect.’

‘Are you doing anything together?’

‘Not really. I think this is a vacation for both of us, after six years’ collaboration. I am catching up with domesticity. He is out a good deal, seeing if he has any men friends left.’

‘Mmm,’ said Cecilia Moret, with subtle scepticism that made Denise, sensitive to semantic nuances, study her with sudden interest.

Cecilia touched her lips with a paper napkin, thoughtfully, and when she dropped the napkin, she removed her dark glasses as if to reveal a nakedly sincere and intimate face.

‘Denise, I have something to tell you. No one else will, I am sure. And I feel, in good conscience, I must. It is for your sake, it is you I am thinking about. If I cannot be honest with you, then who can, and what is friendship for anyway?’

Denise crinkled her eyes, puzzled.

Cecilia continued. ‘Have you any reason to suspect Claude of-of-oh, misbehaviour?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean.’

‘I will be frank with you, because I am not ashamed of being frank about my own problems-well, to you, in this case. Eight years ago, my dependable Gaston, reaching your husband’s age, had a-a most shameful affair with a Lido girl. I learned about it in this room, this way, from an older woman who was a friend of mine, and I thank the Lord for her. You can be sure I put an end to the stupid affair immediately. It was not pleasant, I assure you, but today Gaston and I are more in love than ever, and it is as if the other never happened. I owe our present happiness to the fact that I was able to stop his aberration in time, before he went too far.’ She caught her breath, and then went on. ‘Now, in your case-’

Denise felt the heat high on her cheeks. ‘Cecilia, what are you saying?’

‘I think your Claude is playing it fast and loose. I have reason to believe this-’

‘What a terrible thing even to imagine!’

‘Hear me out, Denise. Last Friday night, I was burdened with showing some Americans-friends of friends-life on the Left Bank. We decided to walk a good deal, so that they could see more. I was on my way to show them St.-Germain-des-Près. We were in the rue du Bac, going slowly, chatting. A taxi pulled up across the street, beneath the lamp. I hardly paid attention, until I saw Claude step out of it. He was facing me. He did not see me, but I saw him. He was under the light, and there was no mistake. I almost called out to him-but just then someone else emerged from the taxi. A young lady. I could not see her well, except that she was tall, young, extremely smart in her grooming and clothes. Claude paid the taxi, and it left. He put his arm around the girl’s waist, and kissed her cheek, and they went into the apartment building. I even noted the address-53 rue du Bac. I cannot tell you how upset I was for the remainder of the evening. It was so difficult to believe-Claude, so conservative, and famous now-taking such risks. And then I thought of you, and what I had been through. I tell you, I had quite a weekend trying to reach a decision. Should I tell Denise? Shall I not? Now you know my decision, and you can act as I once acted.’

Denise had sat paralysed with shock and disbelief throughout the recital. She was still unable to find her voice.

‘It was about nine o’clock Friday night,’ Cecilia added. ‘Was he out then?’

With uneasiness, Denise peeled back the days. Nine o’clock Friday night. Callaux’s stag party. No. That was Thursday evening. Nine o’clock Friday night, Friday night. Yes, yes, Pavillon d’Armenonville in the Bois de Boulogne. A late dinner and reunion with a former colleague from Lyon who was doing work in the structure of proteins.

‘Yes, he was out then,’ said Denise, hardly hearing her voice. ‘He-he had a meeting. With a chemical researcher.’

‘Well, we must be fair. Maybe this girl I saw him with was the chemical researcher.’

‘No. His friend is an old man with a beard.’

‘This friend had no beard, I can tell you.’

‘I cannot believe it, Cecilia,’ Denise said brokenly. ‘Claude’s never been like that. We are happy. He-now that he is so well-known-why, there is always loose talk about famous people, that they are adulterers or homosexuals or dope addicts. People have to do that. They cannot stand idols too long. They have to tear the famous ones down to their level.’

Cecilia saw that her friend was distraught, and Cecilia was not offended. ‘Denise,’ she said levelly, ‘this is not secondhand gossip. I was a witness. My own eyes saw it.’

Denise suddenly pushed her chair back. ‘Let us go from here. I want some air.’

They walked, the poodle preceding them, under the arcades of the rue de Rivoli to the rue de Castiglione, and then turned right and walked to the Place Vendôme. Denise remained unseeing, unhearing, totally unaware of the expensive shops, the pedestrians in the streets, or her friend’s monologue about Gaston and the deceit of men in general and the traps of marital life.

In the Place Vendôme, circling towards the Ritz Hotel, Denise felt her legs giving, and knew that she could not continue. She wanted to be alone, in her bedroom, and she wanted to think.

‘I had better get home, Cecilia,’ she said. ‘It is the maid’s day off. I have to make dinner for Claude.’

‘Well, you just remember the man’s name, he’s a marvel,’ said Cecilia.

Denise looked at her without comprehension, ‘What man’s name?’

Cecilia shook her head. ‘You haven’t been listening at all. Poor darling. I do not blame you. I remember how I felt that day. I was trying to tell you that before I had it out with Gaston, I got facts and data, so that he would have no comeback. I located this private detective. Monsieur Jean Sarraut. He is off the Étoile in the Boulevard Haussmann. Very discreet and expert. He used to be with the Sûreté Nationale. It is costly, of course. Somewhere about a hundred and fifty new francs a day, as I remember. I hired Monsieur Sarraut for two weeks. The results were a revelation. When I brought out Monsieur Sarraut’s portfolio of reports, Gaston was unable to utter a word. I advise you to hire this man, learn the facts, and then confront Claude. You will win, I assure you. A few years from now, you will thank me.’

They had reached the taxi stand. ‘Cecilia, I cannot hire a detective. I mean, it is all right in the cinema-but Claude-he’s my husband.’

‘You do as I say, or perhaps he won’t be your husband.’

When Denise returned to the apartment, it was cold, and she put on the heat. She was too shaken to cook. For an hour, she moved restlessly around the living-room, searching the recent past for clues to support Cecilia’s fanciful story, and finding some so circumstantial that she had to reject them. At seven o’clock, after changing her clothes, she determined to start dinner. Before she could proceed, the telephone rang, and it was Claude. He was sweet and apologetic. He told her that he had, by chance, run into an old acquaintance from Toulouse University, and the man was doing some remarkable work in a new area of genetics, and it would be valuable to spend the evening with him. Pretending scientific interest, Denise wondered who this man was, and Claude said that he was someone she had never met, a Dr. Lataste. Casually as possible, Denise wondered where they would be dining. They were going directly to the Méditerranée, said Claude, where they had a reservation, and then they would retire to Dr. Lataste’s hotel suite for further talk. With effort, Denise forced herself to ask what hotel, and Claude replied promptly that it was the California in the rue de Berri.

Denise waited one hour, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and then another half-hour to be certain, and then she telephoned the Méditerranée, not at all sure what she would say if Claude was brought to the phone. When someone at the restaurant answered, she inquired if they held a reservation for Dr. Marceau or Dr. Lataste for this evening. She was told there were reservations for neither one. Allowing for a chance of error in the reservation, she requested that Dr. Marceau be paged. She waited. At last, she was informed that no Dr. Marceau was present.

Still, she said to herself, this was not evidence enough. Often she and Claude, at the very last moment, had changed their minds about the restaurant at which they intended to dine. Now she waited another hour, smoking incessantly, and then, with trembling hand, she lifted the receiver and dialed the California Hotel. She asked to be connected with Dr. Lataste’s suite. There was an interminable wait. She listened for the hotel phone to ring the room, tempering her fears. It did not ring. The operator’s voice came on shrilly. There was no person named Dr. Lataste registered in the California Hotel. Denise said thank you dully, and hung up.

Her next act was directnd simple. She took down the telephone book for the eighth arrondissement, leafed through it, returned it to its shelf, and then she dialled M. Sarraut, private investigator, and was not surprised to be put through to him even at this hour. She asked for an appointment in his office the following morning, and it was granted.

All of this took place the day and the evening of November eighth. One week later, almost exactly to the hour, on November fifteenth, M. Sarraut telephoned. He said, in his neutral bass, that he possessed the goods she had ordered and wondered if she was free to accept delivery within the next thirty minutes. With thumping heart, she said that she was quite alone this evening and would eagerly await the delivery.

In twenty minutes, the thin manila envelope, securely gummed and sealed, was delivered by a sallow-faced young man, whom Denise tipped 200 old francs. The moment that he was gone, she shut and latched the front door, made her way unsteadily to the coffee-table where her half-finished whisky waited, sat down on the edge of the sofa and ripped open the detective’s envelope. There were three pages of type, neatly single-spaced, terse and ineloquent, yet the raw material of ten thousand novels.

She read, and reread, and reread once more, the pitiless report, rocking silently on the sofa like an old lady suddenly widowed and bereft, until only phrases came up at her like daggers. ‘Shadowed by four operatives in relays… on two occasions in six days met and dined with the same young lady at the restaurant, Le Petit Navire, in the rue des Fossés-St.-Bernard, and on both occasions retired later to the young lady’s apartment on the third floor at 53 rue du Bac… The first occasion was November 10. They met inside the restaurant at 7.22 P.M. They emerged at 8.47. They walked on the Boulevard St.-Germain for 17 minutes, holding hands. The man in question summoned a public vehicle. They arrived at the rue du Bac at 9.21. They proceeded inside together. The man in question emerged at 11.43 in the evening. He walked to a kiosk, found it closed, and returned to his dwelling by public vehicle…

‘The second occasion was November 12. The man in question arrived at Le Petit Navire at 7.50 P.M. The lady arrived eight minutes later. They emerged together at 8.59. They talked in the street. He kissed her. They walked, his arm about her waist, to the corner of the Quai de la Tournelle, where they waited four minutes until they found a public vehicle. They arrived at 53 rue du Bac at 9.16. The door was locked. She rang for the concierge. They waited and embraced. They entered the building at 9.19. The man in question emerged alone at 12.04 A.M. Apparently a public vehicle had been summoned by telephone. He waited, and when the vehicle arrived he proceeded directly home…

‘For future reference, our operatives have superficially investigated the young lady in question… Name: Mlle Gisèle Jordan. Birthplace: Rouen. Age: 27. Occupation: Mannequin. Place of Employment: Balenciaga, Avenue George-V near the Alma. Hair colour: Blonde. Height: 5 feet, 7 inches. Weight: 112 pounds. Other dimensions, bust-32 inches; waist-23 inches; hips-34 inches. Marital status. Never married. Miscellaneous: Leaves work daily 5.05, takes bus No. 63 from the Pont de l’Alma, departs bus corner of Boulevard St.-Germain and rue du Bac, arrives home generally 5.25. Has long-term lease on flat subdivided from landlady’s quarters. Rental 580 new francs per month. Apartment consists of living-room, bedroom, one bath, no kitchen. Hot-plate on premises. Décor Louis XV… If client wishes more information on lady in question, it can readily be obtained.’

The threat of these cold facts froze Denise into a state of stupor. It was as if she had suffered concussion of the brain. Until now, she had gone ahead protected by a safe sense of unreality, somehow certain that it was all a low Gallic comedy of errors, and that in the end all would be well in this best of all possible worlds. But here before her, as vitrified as the sperms that she and Claude had worked upon so long, were the facts. The other person was real, young, glamorous, with dimension. The assignations were real, time, place, with sensual intervals implied. A superior enemy named Gisèle. Her own Claude!

Denise’s emotions ran the usual cycle of this unique grief: she was in turn revolted, appalled, horrified, agitated, intimidated. As Denise sat shivering, the cycle had run its course from amazement to mourning to fear. There was not yet self-pity, and so she did not drink. She merely sat in a comatose state, unmoving, unthinking, as stone.

How long she sat, she did not know. Much later, when she realized that the buzzer was sounding, she tried to rally, expecting Claude and preparing defences. Beyond the door, when she opened it, stood an elderly, well-dressed gentleman-she thought he had worn a pince-nez-carrying a bouquet of red roses and a telegram. He was, he said, the Swedish Ambassador to France. He had come, he said, as the bearer of good tidings.

She found sufficient social instinct to allow him into her living-room. She took the telegram and read it, and half heard his profuse congratulations. She remembered little else. The rest would remain a blank to history. Had she replied? Had she offered him a liqueur? Had she shown happiness? All was amnesia. Perhaps he had stayed five minutes. Surely he had mistaken her speechless state for one of ecstasy usually seen in the stigmatic. A proud, kind man, he had disappeared with understanding.

No sooner had he retired than the telephone had begun. Figaro. France-Soir. Match. New York Herald Tribune. They were telephoning not for information but to learn if she and her husband were home. They were on their way, a half-dozen or more, reporters and photographers. And she was alone.

The self-possessed Dr. Denise Marceau of the laboratory would never have made the next decision. But she was disoriented, in a home not fortified. She found the telephone book, and in it the hated name. When she heard the other’s voice, and identified herself, her sensitivity travelled with the sound waves. She knew that he was there. And then his own voice, that of the trapped schoolboy, confirmed his infidelity…

It was half an hour before he appeared. When he arrived, she was in the centre of the sofa, sufficiently drunk to make her regal and assured, surrounded by a semicircle of reporters and photographers. She had been mouthing the litany of the laboratory, which required no concentration, but the questions were now getting more personal, more alarming, and her poise teetered. Claude came in time, like the uniformed cavalry in those dreadful American western films, and she was rescued from indiscretion.

She refused to meet her husband’s eyes, knowing that he was watching her, anxious to gauge her mood, her probable reactions. She stood still for the nauseating instant his lips brushed her cheek, a salute to their victory for the photographers. Magnetically, he drew all attention to himself, replying to a new outburst of questions with vigour and colour. During this exchange, she touched her forehead, murmuring headache, over-excitement, and slipped off to the bedroom. She secured the door from the inside, and an hour later, when he tried it, he found that he was locked out.

She slept not well but soundly, and in the early morning, when she emerged fully clothed in sweater and skirt, she saw that he had spent his night on the sofa. She came upon him in the dining-room having brioches and coffee, and prepared with his rehearsed speech. While dressing, she had thought that she could maintain complete control when she saw him, but throughout the short, sharp scene which began immediately on her entrance, she clung desperately to the civilized line to keep above hysteria. Her accusations reflected her hurt, all infinite shame, and loss of pride. He reduced what had happened to a lapse of good sense, pressed and squashed it down to a minor masculine flaw, an accidental fall. There was little that he could say under the circumstances, yet he said a good deal, self-probing, self-analyzing, his failure, his weakness, and what he said was what she had hoped to hear. But hurt had damaged her deeply. He understood this, and aching at her distress, he blurted the promise that the outer involvement was ended, that it was through this day, that if she believed him, she would not regret it. She had gone to the bedroom red-eyed, and he had gone out, and the scene was done.

In the following few weeks, it was their Nobel award that made life possible. During the afternoon hours, it seemed, they were never left alone together. Their living-room teemed with welcomed guests. One day, their colleagues. The next, government officials. Another, faculty. Another, press. The nights were saved by their deliberate timing. Every night when he returned, she was asleep, drugged with pills. Every morning, when he awakened, she was already out in the city, devoting these early hours to preparations for Stockholm.

For Denise, the report delivered every third day from M. Sarraut was the focal point of existence. There were four such reports in all, before the departure for Stockholm. The first and second showed that Claude had kept to his promise. He had not seen Gisèle. With the third, Denise’s hopes swelled. He had still not seen Gisèle. Obviously, it had been a foolish masculine aberration to use Cecilia’s description. And it was over. The fourth and final report was delivered to Denise two evenings before she was to leave for Sweden. This report exploded in her face.

As ever, M. Sarraut’s log of infidelity was terse. It left so much between the lines, so much to the imagination, Denise wanted to scream. In the three days past, Claude had broken with asceticism not once, but twice. No longer Le Petit Navire, but two different obscure bistros in Montmartre. No longer 53 rue du Bac, but an apartment borrowed from a friend of the lady in question. In each instance, the man in question had been with the lady in question, in the apartment, over three hours.

If Denise’s wound had been healing, it was now ripped savagely open again and lay raw and throbbing with pain. Denise could see clearly through her tears this time: the alcoholic was unable to keep his hand from the bottle, no matter what the consequences. Familiar grief made her reasonable, questioning. Was it sex alone, or sex and love? In either case, the answer provided no consolation. If it was Gisèle’s sex alone that drew him-and the vivid pictures this conjured up made her almost ill-then her own inadequacy was heightened, and her failure impossible to surmount. She shuddered at this animal defeat. Yet, it was always said, this was the lesser defeat. Eventually, a male might tire of the act, as it lost its variety, and tire of the actress, and return home chastened.

But the defeat was primitive and deep, nevertheless. If it was love as well as sex that drew him to Gisèle, then Denise knew that she had no armour of resistance at all. If his affair was emotional, encompassing sex as only one part, and including all other affections, she was lost. Did she know which it was? Perhaps not, not yet. She feared his learning. Here she was, and here they were, and what should she do? Challenge him with the threat of immediate divorce? What if he took up the challenge, scandal or no scandal? What if she lost? To abandon so quickly the field of combat, to give him up after all these years, to that young, tall bitch, reinforced her anger. To be left alone, alone, sterile in the damn laboratory, an appendage severed, was impossible to contemplate. Yet to remain like this, wife in name only pitied by that bitch and by him and by herself, was equally unthinkable. What to do? For the moment, sheer hatred of the two of them sufficed. That, and then added to that, a word that carried limited pleasures of its own-retribution.

Later, sluggishly disrobing for bed, the pills taking their effect, she knew that she was too ineffectual to exact immediate retribution. Somehow, somewhere, something would occur to her. How could this nightmare have come about? They had been so close, worked so well together, day and night, so many years, enjoyed so much, laughed in secret, accomplished such wonders. Imagine, Nobel Prize winners. It had gone wrong because they had run out of work, finished with their thing in common. Where do you climb after Everest’s summit? The hidden pitfall had been victory, itself a Pyrrhic victory that meant the end of goal, a sink of inactivity.

Once in bed, drowsy, welcoming the approaching false death of night, she tried to envision the enemy. What had trusty M. Sarraut’s first report said? Balenciaga model. Five feet seven. A thirty-two-inch bust. A rail, a board, a thin plank of wood. How could Claude abandon her for that? And it was then, before sleep, that she determined to find out for herself.

Claude was still asleep the next morning when she made the arrangement with a friend-not Cecilia, whom she could never bear to face again, but a friend who was extravagant and knew about clothes-to get an invitation to Balenciaga. The friend agreed to assist her in choosing a formal gown there for the Stockholm ceremony. Denise knew that she did not require a gown, since she had recently bought one, but she desperately needed to scrutinize and disparage the enemy.

In her anxiety, Denise arrived ten minutes early for the afternoon appointment. Restlessly, she considered the Indo-Chinese figures, studded with semiprecious stones, in the windows of Balenciaga. To her dismay, they gave what lay ahead an aura of being the mysterious unknown. At last, Denise went inside, wandering among the Empire tables, with their scarves, gloves, hose, explaining to a black-garmented salesgirl that she required nothing from the boutique, that she was waiting for a friend.

The moment that her friend arrived, Denise entered the elegant rose-leather padded elevator. On the third floor, an elderly, respectful vendeuse, the saleslady assigned to Denise by the house of Balenciaga and evidently aware of her customer’s prominence, eagerly greeted the pair, and led them into the showroom, inquiring after Madame’s exact wishes. Madame’s wishes were for a formal evening gown.

Seated on a gold chair before the large mirror, exactly where she had sat last summer when she had been here with the English visitors, Denise awaited the appearance of the mannequins. The suspense was unbearable. She had lost eleven pounds since her troubles began, and felt more presentable because of it, but still she felt awkward and uncomfortable and increasingly nervous.

She tried to instil within herself the confidence of the mistress of the mansion, who has summoned before her the wretched and erring upstairs maid whom the master had been discovered pinching. But now, as the distant curtains parted, and the exquisite mannequins paraded across the salon towards here-with each one’s approach she inquired of the vendeuse, in a whisper, the name and price of the modelled garment and, ever so casually, the name of the celebrated mannequin wearing it-her confidence ebbed.

It was the fourth girl who made a stylish entrance now, and the saleslady’s whisper told her that this was Mademoiselle Gisèle Jordan, so popular in the fashion periodicals. Denise stiffened and waited as the tall figure, tiara, skin-tight white satin décolleté, pastel gloves drawn above the elbows, strode nearer and nearer. By some curious trick of vision, Denise saw only the girl’s breasts, unbound by any brassière beneath the gown. Perhaps she had unconsciously focused upon this first, because here she felt definite superiority.

From the first day of their marriage, Claude had made much of her breasts-measuring a formidable 38-and she felt that he could not appreciate a flat-chested 32 half so well, not honestly. It surprised her that the nearing, gently shimmying breasts were as large as they seemed. They were extremely large around, and the dimension reported by M. Sarraut had deceived, for it had only reported fullness. The breasts were flat, yes, small in lack of depth, but round and young.

Disconcerted by her loss of this one imagined superiority, ashamed of her focus, Denise concentrated on the entire form of the young creature who gyrated before her. At once, her heart sank. The animal was beautiful. The ash-blonde hair, pale blue eyes, high cheekbones, the damn moon breasts, the long thighs and legs, were breathtaking perfection. Before the creature could leave, Denise advised the vendeuse of an interest in the satin gown. Gisèle was ordered to circle the showroom again, and stand before Madame.

Gisèle, too remote for contact, stared coolly above her customer into the mirror, her mind far away. Denise, feeling the blood in her own face, examined her adversary. She tried to be laboratory objective. She had a microscope and before her the living cells. What did Claude see in this microscope? Youth, for one thing. The flesh was taut and young and little used by time. But, Denise told herself, she, too, was young. On several occasions young research assistants had propositioned her. And then, with a twinge, she remembered that those occasions had been fifteen years ago, and that she had not been young for more than a decade. She applied her eye to the microscope once more. The cells swam off. The flesh remained. The specimen was magnificent in every way, and she was not. The specimen was exotic, and she was not. Still, what did the specimen have that she herself lacked? She stared: two arms, two breasts, two legs, one vagina, and as scientist and student of sperms, she knew that the last did not vary much from female to female, differences were technical, minute, infinitesimal. Scientifically speaking, what could this specimen do in bed for Claude that had not already been done? There were only so many words to utter, so many gasps of pleasure, so many movements, so many positions, and finally, it came to the sperm, and she had seen thousands and all different but all the same in the feelings their giving evoked.

Her eyes left the microscope and fastened wholly on what M. Sarraut discreetly termed the lady in question. The mystery of sex, the eternal enigma. Why, Denise asked herself, is her offering better than mine? Because it is younger? Newer? Different in feeling? Or is the seat of captivity her total entity and not localized in her organ? Is she more interesting, more amusing, more vivid, more energetic, more flattering, more passionate?

She stared at the outlines of the lengthy, lovely limbs pressed against the satin sheath of gown, and the hateful image superimposed itself-Claude luxuriating in that superior female body, Claude lost, lost forever. Denise was crushed, routed, and another second of this would be unendurable.

She signalled that she had seen enough of the gown, and she did not bother to watch her conqueror leave.

She heard a voice. It was the vendeuse addressing her. ‘What does Madame think? Is it not enchanting?’

‘Oui,’ she was saying, ‘but it is not for me. Merci.’ She felt thick and graceless and old. She felt the unwanted orphan in the rear. She turned to her friend. ‘Je ne veux rien acheter maintenant. Let us go.’

Suddenly the painful memory was interrupted, and she realized that she was not in the salon of Balenciaga but in the cabin of a jet headed for Sweden.

The amplifier crackled. A hostess was speaking, first in French, then in accented English.

‘We are landing in five minutes. Please refrain from smoking. Please fasten your seat belts. Please fasten your seat belts. Thank you.’

Denise uncurled from her chair, and sat up, patting her suit where it had wrinkled. Outside the window there was no motion. Only a monotonous expanse of iron-greyness, like her mind. She found the belt straps, and after fumbling a moment, she hooked them around her waist.

She saw that Claude had closed his novel-damn him, able to read at a time like this-and was grinding out the butt of his cigarette. Now he, too, locked himself in his seat belt.

He looked at her. ‘Did you get any sleep?’

‘Like an innocent child,’ she said viciously.

He said no more, but stuffed his book into the Air France bag, zipped it, and pulled it between his feet.

Sitting erect, waiting, she again despised the whole idea of the trip, with its enforced togetherness. A year ago, the honour would have been the greatest event of their lives. Today, this afternoon, the honour was empty-no, not empty, but something that leered and mocked. There would be little more than a week in Stockholm. It would be tolerable, possible, only if they were endlessly occupied. This would keep her from being alone with Claude, and give her time to regain her poise and to think out the immediate future. In two weeks they would be home, and they would be three, and the decision that was her own would have to be made.

She felt the slight lurch of the jet in descent, and felt also momentary panic at what lay ahead. She tried to imagine what would be demanded of them. She wondered if she and Claude would have to undertake all the rituals together. She dreaded the ordeal of their single celebrated face, the required oneness of happy marriage and happy collaboration that the world expected to see. Marie and Pierre Curie were what everyone wanted. The irony was not amusing to her. Marie and Pierre and Gisèle Jordan.

There was a crunching, grating noise, as the jet touched down and began the noisy process of braking to a halt on the 11,000-foot cement runway. Outside the window she saw a streak of forest, of parked aeroplanes and trucks, of modern buildings, and a hangar with futuristic upswept roofs, of people in dark clusters. It was the people that frightened her the most. They had invented a certain celebrated chemist named Dr. Denise Marceau, cool, detached, dedicated, profound, when really she was entering their lives as a cheated middle-aged wife named Madame Claude Marceau, befuddled, unsettled, angry, broken. Which of them would dream that Nobel could have been erased by Balenciaga? The test would be her reservoir of strength. Could she survive this week of exposure without precipitating a scandal?

‘Come on,’ Claude was saying, ‘we have arrived.’

When they came down the temporary stairs to the runway, they were engulfed at once in a mob of howling people. Claude had her arm, holding her against the crush, and somehow she found a bouquet of flowers in her hand. Indistinctly, she heard the names of the reception committee, Count Something Jacobsson, Ingrid Something, and Something Krantz.

The Count Something Jacobsson was between Claude and herself, saying, ‘We announced the press conference for tomorrow. We wanted it orderly. But somehow they find out-try to catch you here anyway. You do not have to answer the questions-not now.’ He was pushing them through the crowd, as cameras, lifted high, captured them, and reporters shouted at them in four tongues.

Hurried along, pressed and guided by the committee, with the pack close behind, she found herself stumbling through the gate towards a limousine. Count Something Jacobsson was speaking in her ear. ‘Accommodations-Grand Hotel-rest until tomorrow-then-’

Breathless, she reached the open door of the limousine. As she stooped to enter it, she heard one reporter’s voice, more raucous than the others. ‘Dr. Marceau!’ he cried out to her. ‘Do you recommend all married couples have work in common-more in common-more-?’

The voice trailed off as she buried herself in the interior of the car, fighting the urge to weep and scream. Claude was beside her, and Somebody Something beside him, and two Somebody Somethings in the jump seats. The automobile was moving, only to Denise Marceau it did not feel like an automobile but like a ferryboat, the one driven by Charon, across the ‘Abhorred Styx’…

By the time the Nobel reception committee had deposited the Drs. Denise and Claude Marceau in their Grand Hotel suite-‘I am sure they were happy to see us go, they seemed so exhausted and nervous,’ said Ingrid Påhl-and assigned a Foreign Office attaché to attend their wants, there was barely time to dine and return to Arlanda Airport to greet the seven o’clock Caravelle jet bringing Dr. Carlo Farelli and his wife Margherita from Rome.

The three committee members were finishing their dinner in the Cattelin Restaurant, behind the Royal Palace in the Old Town, but their conversation was not of Farelli.

‘What time does Professor Max Stratman’s ship arrive in Göteborg tonight?’ Carl Adolf Krantz wanted to know.

‘I am not certain,’ Jacobsson now replied. ‘I know it will be late. In any event, we are to expect him at the Central Station by eight tomorrow morning.’

‘I hope he had a good crossing,’ Krantz mused into his beer.

‘Why all this fussing about Stratman?’ Ingrid Påhl was addressing herself to Krantz. ‘I have not seen you this excited about a physicist since the year Heisenberg came here from Leipzig.’ She smiled with malicious innocence. ‘After all, Stratman is only an American.’

Krantz took the bait. ‘He is a German.’

‘He is a Jew,’ said Ingrid Påhl, having a wonderful time.

‘He is a German,’ repeated Krantz doggedly.

‘Well, he certainly scurried off to America the first chance he had,’ said Ingrid Påhl happily.

Krantz frowned. ‘I see. You are pulling my leg. Personally, I do not care where he is from-only what he is-and he is, today, the world’s foremost physicist. Do you have the least idea of what he has done?’

‘I read the papers,’ said Ingrid Påhl. ‘He has discovered the sun has more uses than giving a suntan.’

‘You are hopeless.’ Krantz finished his beer, and devoted himself to Jacobsson. ‘I hate to think of Professor Stratman arriving in Göteborg without any kind of special reception. After we have dispensed with Farelli, I think I should like to telephone Professor Stratman in Göteborg. Do you have any objection?’

‘Whatever you wish,’ said Jacobsson.

‘Yes,’ said Krantz. ‘I will welcome him by telephone.’ He fingered his goatee. ‘I do hope he had an agreeable crossing.’

Later, and for a long time after, Emily Stratman would remember 6.18 of the evening of December 2 as a crucial moment of self-revelation in her mature years. Curiously, whenever she would think of it, she would also remember reading somewhere that most dummy clocks used for advertising by American jewellers were set, or painted in, at about 8.18 in the belief (incorrect) that this was the moment that Abraham Lincoln had died. The persistent association of these two ideas, she would finally decide, was because both had signified the end of life.

But the moment of self-revelation, while near, was not yet at hand. It was slightly past four o’clock of December 2, and the magnificent white vessel of the Swedish-American Line had, an hour ago, left behind the dim coast of Norway and was now cutting through the choppy sea towards the Swedish port of Göteborg. Emily Stratman, a suede jacket over her chartreuse wool shirt, relaxed contentedly in a wicker chair beside the cane table on upper A Deck. Through the glass enclosure, silhouetted against the brooding horizon, she could see a lone fishing yawl with three sails. The sky above was murky and ominous. Despite the threatening weather, she was not yet ready for port. The nine days at sea had been her most glorious experience in years, and she wanted more days, to prove herself.

Inevitably, her mind had turned to Mark Claborn. She expected him. They had made no date, but she was sure that he would come. Still, she wished that they had made an appointment. She had even put off ordering a drink until he appeared.

When she heard footsteps directly behind, she twisted quickly, her face smiling to greet Mark. But her visitor was Uncle Max. Her reaction did not hide the disappointment.

‘You were expecting someone younger, Liebchen?’ asked Professor Max Stratman with a smile.

‘Younger, yes. Handsomer, no.’

‘Ach, you are learning the pretty words.’ He settled in the wicker chair across from her. ‘I have been speaking to the purser. We are almost there.’

‘What time do we dock?’

‘Ten tonight. The Stockholm train leaves at eleven. There will be plenty of time.’ He looked off. ‘Miserable weather. I hear it is raining in Göteborg. Why do they have the Nobel Ceremony in December?’

‘The anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death,’ Emily answered.

‘I am glad somebody in this family reads history.’ He shivered. ‘Brr. Cold. Will you join me in a drink?’

‘We-ll-’ She considered, and then decided that she could have another if Mark came. ‘Yes Schnapps.’

‘Schnapps? I see you are really going the Swedish way. Do you know what it is made of?’

‘Yes, alcohol and alcohol-flavoured with caraway. Two schnapps and they bury you at sea.’

‘If my niece can have it, I can, too.’ He waved until he caught the eye of the deck steward, and then he called out his order.

When the drinks were served, Emily drank hers not in a gulp, but gradually, to nurse it. Stratman studied his own glass with a feeling of misconduct. He had seen Dr. Fred Ilman several times before the trip, and Dr. Ilman had been flatly against it. Too much commotion, he had warned, too many people, too much exertion and food and drink. Stratman had explained that a condition for receiving the Nobel money was that you picked it up in person. Dr. Ilman had pointed out that several persons, notably John Galsworthy and André Gide, had got their prize money without travelling to Stockholm, because they were ill. Nevertheless, Stratman had been insistent. For several reasons, he had not wished his heart condition thus made public. News of it would disturb Emily, in a way that might be dangerous. She had suffered enough insecurity without this. Furthermore, the Society for Basic Research might become alarmed, and severely curtail his allotments and assignments. He did not want to be restricted when there was so much to be done. And so, on his honour, he had promised Dr. Ilman that he would behave-no agitations, no galloping about, no drinks.

He lifted his glass. ‘Skål,’ he said.

‘Half skål,’ Emily replied indicating that her own glass was now only partially filled.

They drank, then sat quietly, as they so often did, lulled by the gentle roll and pitch of the ship. Watching Emily in repose, he was pleased with the accomplishments of the sea change. A recluse, she had desired it and feared it, he knew. But somewhere, and at some time, between their arrival at Pier 97 on the North River in New York on the morning of November 24 and their entrance into their adjacent bedrooms on B Deck, Emily had seemed to make some sort of resolution about herself.

Cupping the schnapps in his hand, he wondered how she had worded the resolution to herself. He had never tried to find out, never sought to intrude upon her private world, but in nine days at sea, he had observed how she had implemented her decision. Ever since he had rescued her, his brother’s only child, from Buchenwald at the end of the war, she had remained distant from healthy, normal men. He could not recollect a single exception. By his side, she would attempt to be civil with a man, or more often, men in groups, but never once had he known her to be alone with a member of the opposite sex. Knowing the source of her abnormality, Stratman had never tried to correct it. If this defect was to be overcome, Emily would have to overcome it herself. On this Swedish ship, apparently, she had tried to do just that.

From the first night, she had, with effort, refused to confine herself to her cabin. She had been determined to be as social as any of the other 950 passengers. Every morning, she had participated in the ship’s sweepstakes. Every afternoon, she had answered the bugle call to horse-racing on the deck, and six times had held winning numbers. Every dinner, she had sat at the Captain’s right, to his enchantment, and had the white wine and the red wine and shared the wonders of the portable smorgåsbord. Every evening, she had played bingo in the music room or attended the movie in the dining-room. Every night, she had joined others in after-dinner coffee on the deck and again, later, at eleven o’clock, for the inevitable smorgåsbord.

With enforced gaiety, no less enjoyed, she had celebrated with ship’s companions the passing of Cape Sable Island on the third day, the sight of Cape Race, Newfoundland, on the fourth morning, the view of the Orkney Islands and Scotland on the eighth day, and this morning she had enjoyed the outlines of Norway with friends.

For the most, Stratman had observed, his pride and relief mingled with worry, the friends she had made were young men near her own age, early thirties, or somewhat older, early forties. She was nervous with them. She was reserved with them. Yet, bravely, unaccustomed as she was to this stimulation, she stood her ground with them. Not unexpectedly, the males on board pressed her hard for privacy. Her lovely face, with its Far Eastern cast, her fleshy, abundant, tapering breasts beneath tight sweaters, her curved hips, wrought fantasies among the eligible males. Her virginity, although she could not know this, had been widely discussed. Her retiring and shy manner, the being in the crowd but not a part of it, influenced the male consensus strongly. The consensus had been almost unanimous: virgin. And so, her appeal had been greater than ever.

Stratman was proud of his niece’s achievement. It might rightly be called, he thought, her coming-out party. He was the ship’s celebrity, but she was the ship’s success. Perhaps, he thought, from this time on, it will be different.

Now, across the table from her, he sipped his drink, and enjoyed her sweet profile, and decided that Walther and Rebecca would have been gladdened. She was staring out to sea, at the whitecaps and the mist, and he wondered what she was thinking.

Emily’s thoughts, this second, were not far removed from her uncle’s musings. She too, had been reviewing her nine days aboard the ship. She was not displeased with the results of her effort to attain some degree of normality. At the same time, she was not entirely satisfied, either.

Her resolution had been to prove to herself, and to anyone, that she was a woman like any other woman alive, a paid-up member of her sex, as normal and as female as her contemporaries. She had succeeded partially, but not wholly, and this was her only source of dissatisfaction. This was why she had come on the deck at this hour, when most of the others were resting or dressing. She wanted to be alone with a man who wanted to be alone with her. To what exact purpose, she did not know. But somehow, the accomplishment would be a mighty one. And again, her mind turned to Mark Claborn.

She had met him, or rather been aware of him, for the first time on the first afternoon at lifeboat drill. Tardy, she had arrived after the opening few minutes of instructions. As she squeezed into line, she tried to adjust her cork jacket properly but became impossibly entangled. The dark young man beside her had laughingly lent a hand, and soon she was prepared against disaster. Only when the drill had ended, and she had seen him walk off, had she realized that he was handsome.

Thereafter, she was frequently aware of him, sometimes playing table tennis or shuffleboard with other young men, sometimes strolling with Swedish and Danish girls, and twice he had nodded to her with courteous indifference. Of the lot aboard, she had decided, he was easily the most attractive. He was of medium height, wavy hair as black as her own, straight features on a square face, with prominent jaw and muscular neck. His shoulders and chest were athletic, narrowing to flat hips. He was given to wearing expensive casual sport shirts and sweaters, with his denim trousers.

She wondered if they would meet, and on the fifth day, they did. She was seated on the deck beside the green horse-racing mat, clutching her tickets, watching the two women passengers shake the dice, one for the number of the wooden horse, the other for the number of moves. Someone gripped the empty chair beside her, and then pulled it into line and sat down.

‘Do you mind?’ It was he.

She automatically tensed, as she always did, and was less cordial than she had intended. ‘Public grandstand,’ she said, indicating the other passengers.

‘I’m Mark Claborn,’ he said. ‘Attorney-at-law. Chicago.’

‘How nice.’

She considered introducing herself, but before she could, he had solved that problem. ‘You are Miss Emily Stratman. Atlanta. En route to Stockholm to help your uncle cart off the loot.’

‘Well, I would hardly put it that way-’

‘No, no. I’m kidding. I’m very impressed with your uncle. He’s the only authentic genius I’ve ever seen close up, though once, when I was a boy, someone pointed out Clarence Darrow driving past. But your uncle-I always try to stand near him, when he’s surrounded, just to glean a few words of wisdom.’

‘How did you know my name?’

‘I asked the purser. It’s a long trip-my first time on a ship, to tell the truth, not counting the Great Lakes cruise I took two years ago. Is this your maiden voyage, too?’

She considered her reply. ‘In a way, I suppose so. Actually, I was born in Germany -’

‘Really? I would never have guessed it.’

‘Because I was brought to the United States when I was very young.’ She smiled. ‘Oh, I’m true-blue American by now. I’ve been through the Age of Truman, of Tennessee Williams, of Stan Musial-Rodgers and Hammerstein, Dr. Jonas Salk, Rocky Marciano, Joseph McCarthy-you see?’

‘You’ve just passed with an A-plus.’ He paused. ‘Where are you going after Stockholm?’

‘Home.’

His face reflected disappointment. ‘Too bad. I won’t be in Stockholm, but I’ll be in Copenhagen, Paris, Rome. Vacation. I was hoping we’d run into each other again.’

‘I’m afraid not.’

He nodded off. ‘You’ve lost this race. May I buy you a ticket on the next? What number will it be?’

After that they saw each other regularly, always in the proximity of others, but regularly. They had drinks in the bar. They attended a movie. They toured the ship. They played bingo. They shared the late night smorgåsbord. She found him flattering and amusing. He had defects, of course. He had read little outside of Blackstone. He was rarely serious. He lacked depth and sensitivity. But he was attractive, and he was fun. Now, this final day, she wanted to be alone with him.

Across the table, her uncle suddenly gulped the last of his drink, and pushed himself to his feet. ‘I must fill out papers,’ he said vaguely.

Intuitively, she sensed the reason for his leaving, and turned to see Mark Claborn approaching.

‘You don’t have to go, Uncle Max.’

‘I was only warming the seat for the young man, anyway. See you at dinner.’ He waved to Mark, and waddled off.

Mark Claborn came around the table and took Stratman’s chair. ‘Hello, Emily. I wondered where you were. What’ve you been doing?’

‘Staring at the ocean, hating to think I must leave the ship. I like it the way it is out there, the way I like rainy days and night time.’

‘You’re not exactly a bundle of cheer.’

‘But I am. I also like winter. Have you ever read Cowper?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘He liked winter.’ She hesitated, then recited, ‘ “I crown thee king of intimate delights, Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness” and so forth.’

‘I’m not with your man. To me winter means nose-drops.’ He looked off. ‘I took the liberty of ordering drinks for us. What are you drinking?’

‘Schnapps.’

‘That’s what I ordered.’

‘Telepathy.’

‘No. Empathy-despite winter.’ Then, he added, ‘Because we’re getting in so late, they’re having a full-course dinner. There are some extra tables. Think you can join me at one?’

‘Why, I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be rude?’

‘The Captain never comes down the last night. You’ve been eight dinners at that table. Surely you can spend one with me?’

‘All right. I’d be delighted.’

The deck steward brought the Schnapps.

Mark Claborn took his glass. ‘Let’s do it the way the Swedes do it. Remember?’ She remembered. The bartender had taught them. They solemnly held their glasses rigid before their chests. Mark toasted their next meeting. They looked into each other’s eyes, and then swallowed their drinks all at once. They brought their empty glasses down to their chests again, eyes still meeting, and then set the glasses on the table.

‘Great custom,’ he said. ‘One toast is worth one thousand words.’

‘Only because it leaves you speechless,’ said Emily. ‘Must be a plot of the Schnapps cartel.’ She felt the heat of the drink in her temples, and now expanding through her chest and breasts.

In the next hour, they each had two more drinks, and then Emily called a halt.

‘I’m not drunk,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t know you brought along a friend. We’d better call it quits. I don’t want you to carry me in to dinner.’

‘I’d like nothing more.’

‘I prefer to stand on my own feet.’

‘I’m sure you do. The question is-can you?’ he said teasingly.

‘Always,’ she replied, squinting to see him better. ‘Watch.’ She rose, and stood at attention.

‘I bow to your sobriety,’ said Mark, ‘but not to your independence.’ He grinned. ‘Damn the Nineteenth Amendment.’

He left several notes on the table, then took her arm. He walked her to her cabin on B Deck. Neither spoke, until they reached the door of the cabin.

‘I’ll pick you up here at seven,’ he said.

She leaned against the door, lightheaded. ‘I suppose I should treat you to something before dinner. Southern hospitality.’

‘You should indeed.’

‘I have a bottle of bourbon in the room. Somebody sent it to the boat. Will it mix with Schnapps?’

‘This is the Swedish-American Line.’

‘Come at six. Will that give you time to change?’

‘Too much time.’

After Emily had gone into her cabin, she remained uncertainly in the centre of the room, feeling the rhythmical heave of the ship beneath her and listening to the creak of the wood. She was not drunk at all, she decided, but then she was not sober. She tried to evaluate her feeling. The feeling was one of well-being and irresponsibility. The feeling was weightlessness, mind and body both. She kicked off her sandals, and threw herself on the bed. Sprawled on the blanket, she tried to tie her mind to a thought. There was not one to grip. She let go and slept.

When she awakened, it was with surprise that she had been asleep at all. She sought the wall clock. Seven minutes to six. In seven minutes, she would not be alone. The logical act was to change quickly into her dinner dress and apply fresh makeup. She felt illogical, defiant of risk, daring. She wanted a shower, and she would have it.

Swinging her weight off the bed, she stood, pulled off her shirt and unzipped her pleated skirt. She unhooked her nylon stockings and rolled them off, and then took off her suspender belt and threw it on the chair. She weaved into the bathroom, considered locking the primitive metal latch, decided that was foolish, then went to the bathtub and turned the knobs until the shower was going full force. Next, she undid her brassière, and pulled off her pants and dropped both on the wooden stool. Starting for the bathtub, she saw herself in the full-length mirror of the partially open door. This was not narcissism, as you always read in those novels, she told herself, but a form of reassurance known only to herself. Her nudity was without blemish. Any man, Mark or any, seeing her thus, would have agreed that this was purity.

She stepped into the bathtub, drawing the ringed curtains around her protectively, and then moved all but her head under the powerful spray. She revelled in the punishment of the water, and began to sober.

She did not hear the cabin door open, and she could not hear her name.

Mark Claborn had knocked and, receiving no reply, had tried the door and found it open. Emily was nowhere to be seen, except in the evidence of her clothes, which lay in disarray. He called out for her, and there was no reply. And then he heard the shower. He walked to the bathroom door, and peered inside the steamed room. He saw her outline behind the wet curtain, and and that was invitation enough.

With a grin, he returned to the bedroom. The clock told him that it was five past six. She had asked him for six. She had promised to treat him to something. The hint had been broad enough. Here was something. The invitation stood. He pulled off his jacket, yanked off his tie, and began to unbutton his shirt. He was a young man of considerable experience in novelty. This would be memorable.

Once he had stripped, Mark’s excitement accelerated. She was waiting. He pictured her. He then hurried into the bathroom, closed the door, slid the latch, and strode to the bathtub. He could hardly contain himself. He groped for the shower curtain, found the end, and ripped it aside.

Emily stood nude, her back to him, streams of water chasing the soap down her limbs. At the noise, she wheeled around, almost losing her foothold. What she saw, through the steam, petrified her: Mark, his lascivious grin, his huge, hairy chest, the horrible, blatant torso.

‘Sa-ay, now honey,’ he was saying, ‘I knew you were beautiful, but-’

She reached to cover her breasts first, and then darted one hand below. She had lost the power of speech. Her eyes widened with disbelief, as he climbed into the bathtub.

Her voice surfaced in a shrill cry. ‘Are you crazy? Get out!’

‘And miss the fun?’

He stepped beneath the shower, reaching for her. With a tremor, she tore away from him, and leaped out of the tub. Landing on the bathroom floor, her wet feet gave way, and she fell on the bathmat. Rolling off it, her slippery body on the tile, she clutched for the mat to cover herself.

As she tried to pull the inadequate mat around her waist, she felt Mark’s hand on her shoulder, pinning her to the floor.

‘Let go of me!’ she cried. ‘What’s got into you?’

‘Cut it out-stop the act.’

His hands were on her breasts. Horrified, she released the mat and tried to grab his wrists and remove his hands. With ease, he pulled one hand free of her wet fingers, and tore the mat aside and threw it against the wall.

‘There now-now-’

Panting, she pressed her thighs together, as he loomed above her.

‘Honey,’ he was saying, ‘be a good girl, honey. We can’t get anywhere with your legs like that. Come on, now, relax, enjoy yourself-’

‘No, damn you, I don’t want that!’

One hand was on her thighs, as the other fended off her fists. ‘Sure you want it, sure you do-you wanted it all this trip-you kept telling me without words.’

She held his defensive arm, and began to plead. ‘No, Mark, no-I can’t-’

‘Listen to you, the way you’re breathing-’

‘I’m scared!’

‘Stop that stuff. You’ll love it, I guarantee you, you’ll want more. We’ve got hours-’

Suddenly, he freed one arm, slipped it around her back, so that it came around to cup a breast. She snatched at the invading hand, trying to sit up, trying to push herself upright, and as she did so her legs and thighs came apart. In an instant, he rolled between them, above her.

She was exhausted, her heart against her ribs, and the decision was now, relent or fight. She was conscious of the suspended second. To lie back and let the muscular naked body above enter and consume her or to beat off and repel the ugly menace of its offering?

With all her strength, she smashed both fists against his chest. For a moment, he tottered above her, then reeled backwards on his haunches in genuine surprise and bewilderment.

She sat up. ‘Get out, or I’ll scream!’ she shouted.

He sat blinking at her a moment, awkward and foolish. ‘You mean it.’ It was a flat statement. He climbed to his feet. ‘You don’t have to scream. And stop shaking like a frightened rabbit. Rape isn’t my line. But you sure had me fooled. I’ve never been wrong before-’

‘You’re wrong now!’ She had recovered the bathmat, and, still sitting, shielded her lower parts. ‘Please go!’

With some remnant of dignity, he turned, unlatched the door, and went into the bedroom.

Trembling, Emily stood up, edged to the door, and held the knob. She could hear him dressing. She started to close the door, when he spoke.

‘I still say I wasn’t wrong. I just wonder what happened between the time you said yes to yourself and no to me. Something happened.’

‘Nothing happened,’ she said through the door. ‘I was a little drunk, and you-you misinterpreted it.’

‘Maybe. Honey, tell me one thing. Between us.’

She waited.

‘Are you a virgin?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that explains a little.’ He paused. ‘I’m leaving now. I’m sorry for both of us. No hard feelings. See you at smorgåsbord.’

She heard the door slam, held back, then peered out, and saw that the cabin was empty.

Emotionally spent, she turned off the shower and then dried herself. After tidying the bathroom, she went into the cabin and mechanically dressed in the garments that she had recently discarded. Closing the zip of her skirt, she felt dizzy. She lowered herself to the bed, and finally fell back on the pillow, hands covering her eyes from the overhead light.

Twenty minutes later, passing to his room, Max Stratman thought that he heard her sobbing. He placed his ear to her door, confirmed his suspicion, and hastily opened it and went inside.

‘Emily, um Himmels willen, what is the matter?’

‘Nothing, Uncle Max, nothing-I swear.’

‘Why are you crying like this?’

She tried to contain her sobs, and finally reduced them to a soft whimper. ‘I’m not crying-see?’

He pulled the chair up beside her bed, and perched forward on it, like a kindly country doctor. ‘Something has happened. We have no secrets.’

She rolled on her right side, studying the hedge of hair on his oversized bald head, the worried eyes behind the steel-rimmed bifocals, the concern in his wise old red face. Here was one of the great minds of the world, a genius cherished and honoured, and she, a neurotic nobody, was troubling him with her petty problems.

‘It’s nothing,’ she repeated without conviction.

‘Please tell me. I will not go until you tell me.’

She tried to visualize her father, and could not, and suddenly there was only Uncle Max, and she wanted to tell him. Haltingly, avoiding his eyes, she related the events of the past hour or more, from the time Mark had escorted her to the door to the time he had left her nude on the bathroom floor to dress and leave.

‘That is all?’ asked Stratman, when she had finished. ‘You are not leaving out anything?’

‘He didn’t touch me, I swear-’

‘No-no assault?’

‘Uncle Max, I’d know.’

Stratman rose, agitated. ‘It is terrible, anyway. No one is safe. I will go to the Captain at once-’

‘Oh, no!’ She sat up and swung her legs off the bed. ‘I don’t want him in trouble-’

‘You care for him that much? Is that it?’

‘I don’t care for him at all,’ she said vehemently. ‘He means nothing to me. But I’m just not sure he’s all to blame.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Only-I had too much to drink-I invited him-he misunderstood. It is something that happens every day.’ She softened her tone. ‘Let’s not make a fuss, Uncle Max. I don’t want to go through that. It would embarrass me. It would be easier to forget it. We’re almost there. We’ll leave the boat soon and not think of it.’

‘You are sure it is that simple?’

‘Oh, yes. I was upset, naturally. But I’m all right, you can see. I don’t want an incident, that’s all.’

He looked at her. ‘Maybe I can get the ship’s doctor. To give you a shot, calm your nerves-’

‘Not, not even that. Just let me rest, and an hour before we get in, come and get me. I’ll be ready.’ She tried to change the subject. ‘Do you think there will be a reception when you get to Göteborg?’

‘I doubt it. Everything is in Stockholm.’

She feigned enthusiasm. ‘I can’t wait. It’s really been a marvellous trip.’

She dropped back on the pillow. He waited until she was comfortable. ‘I’ll be next door if you need me.’

‘What about dinner?’

‘I’m not hungry. I’ll have the steward bring a sandwich. I’ll come back soon. You rest.’

He went to his cabin, disturbed. In a way that he could not define, he felt that he had failed Walther. What had happened to Emily must never happen again. He had over estimated her. In Stockholm, he would not leave her alone. Pacing past his bed, he heard his heart. In all the years before, he had never heard it, had ignored it as he had his inhaling and exhaling. But now, too often, it demanded to be heard. There was a heaviness in the right side of his chest, not pain but pressure. He opened the overnight case located the bottle of pills that Dr. Ilman had given him, and took two with half a glass of water.

He rang for the room steward, ordered a cheese-and-ham sandwich. Presently, when it came, he gave the steward two envelopes, each with a fifteen-dollar tip in it, and requested that the second envelope be given to the stewardess. Stratman knew that the tips were generous for his budget, but he also knew that the serving people depended on these tips for their livelihood, especially on the run from New York to Göteborg. Too, since the Nobel Prize included a highly advertised sum of money, more would be expected of him, as one of the winners. He allowed the steward to remove his suitcases. After the man had gone, Stratman settled down and nibbled at his sandwich.

Presently, because his mind was on Emily, he returned to her cabin. She was still on the bed, as he had left her, eyes closed, dozing. He sat in the chair beside her, extracted a pocket-sized German edition of a biography of Immanuel Kant from his coat, and resumed reading. When he reached Heine’s description of Kant, he reread it: ‘The life of Immanual Kant is hard to describe; he has indeed neither life nor history in the proper sense of the words. He lived an abstract, mechanical, old-bachelor existence, in a quiet remote street in Königsberg…’

Stratman considered this. There, he thought, but for the grace of Emily, go I. By her sharing of his life, she had infused her guardian’s ‘old-bachelor existence’ with an element of normality, yet, ironically, had been unable to retain an element of normality for herself. The terrible incident of the evening underlined for him, in a way he had found impossible to explain to Dr. Ilman, Emily’s dependence on him. Without his support, after he was gone, she would have been forced into the turmoil of the working world. Any notion that this necessity would have given her strength had been dissipated by the night’s events. As he had long ago guessed, she would not have survived. One cannot expect a person without arms to feed himself. How fortuitous had been the Nobel award. Once he had the cheque in hand, Emily would have her buffer against the future.

He read more about his beloved Kant, drifted off into numerous speculations, even nodded off several times, hardly aware of the passage of time or of the fact that the ship had ceased pitching and was now rolling less.

The rapping on the door brought him up sharply, and awakened Emily, too.

The steward put his head in. ‘I’ll need the rest of the luggage, sir. We’re just outside Göteborg. It’ll be less than an hour now.’

No sooner had the steward gone with the suitcases, than a young boy in white uniform, wearing the telegraph-office arm band, appeared. There were four long-distance calls from Stockholm. Stratman asked if he might take them here in Emily’s room. The boy went to the telephone and contacted the officer’s room. In a few moments, he handed the receiver to Stratman, gratefully accepted his tip, and rushed off.

The first call, and the two after that, were from Swedish newspapers. There was static on the wire, and Stratman had difficulty in hearing. He answered the questions that he understood, briefly, precisely, and promised each correspondent that he would give lengthier interviews in Stockholm.

The fourth call was from Dr. Carl Adolf Krantz. Stratman recognized the name and was friendly. He thanked Krantz for his effusive congratulations and welcome. Yes, the voyage had been pleasant and restful. Yes, he and his niece would arrive at eight in the morning. Yes, they looked forward to meeting the reception committee and to participating in the programmes and ceremonies.

During all these calls, Emily, having washed and applied light make-up, stood at the porthole, half listening, staring out into the rain-crossed night. Spotlights on the water had picked out the pilot boat, and the launch that followed shortly after. The ship was progressing slowly, among what seemed to be dozens of islands, and growing larger in sight was the framework of lights that must be the wharves and the city of Göteborg.

At 10.20, Emily was brought away from the porthole, to join her uncle, by the noise at the door. At once, it seemed, they were surrounded by visitors. The purser was on hand to introduce a First Secretary of the Swedish Foreign Office, who had driven down from Stockholm and would ease their way through customs to the train. Four or five city officials, representing Göteborg, were introduced, and after mumbling their formal greetings, gazed upon Stratman with the awe they had once accorded Wilhelm Roentgen.

For Emily, never leaving her uncle’s side, what followed was a continuous flow of movement. Led to the music-room, where two Swedish men and two women were stamping passports and checking money declarations, Emily and her uncle were met with silent respect and quickly passed through. From the rail of the open top deck-the downpour had slowed to a drizzle-she watched the ship ease alongside the huge wharf, seeing clusters of Swedes waiting with flowers and from somewhere hearing the strains of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’.

Following the First Secretary and her uncle downstairs, trailed by the Göteborg officials, she wondered if she would see Mark Claborn again. She hoped not, and she was relieved when they arrived at the head of the gangway, and he was nowhere in sight. With the others, she descended the gangway, pushing through the customs shed jammed with visitors, porters, officials, and arrived at the counter under a huge ‘S’ that held their five suitcases. The customs examiner was smiling. He had already sealed the cases without opening them. A Nobel winner, his smile seemed to say, could not be suspected of smuggling.

‘We had better hurry now,’ the First Secretary was insisting to Stratman. Two porters carried their cases, and followed them down the stairs to the street. It was raining harder again. The First Secretary’s Mercedes, guarded by two policemen, was a few yards away. Emily and Stratman gave their thanks to the city officials, hurried through the increasing rain, and fell into the back seat of the vehicle.

The First Secretary took the wheel, and they were moving. In the rain, Emily could form no impression of Göteborg. The port at the mouth of the Göta River had a population of 400,000. This seemed incredible. The wet, cold streets were deserted. This was the street known as Södra Hamngatan, and that was Milles’s Poseidon Fountain in the Götaplatsen, and over there the Röhsska Museum of Applied Arts. While her uncle voiced his appreciation, Emily could make out nothing except two parks that seemed attractive but abandoned in the rain, and the rows of lights about the business district.

They reached the first of the two Stockholm boat trains seven minutes before its departure.

The First Secretary was all efficiency. He guided them to their adjoining compartments. He counted their luggage. He spoke in an undertone-obviously of Max Stratman’s importance-to the conductor who wore a black-and-yellow arm band reading ‘Sovvagn’. He shook their hands, first Stratman’s, then Emily’s, and said that he would see them late tomorrow at the Grand Hotel. Then he charged off, and almost instantly the train shook and began to move.

Before Emily and Stratman could leave the aisle, the black-uniformed conductor reappeared.

‘Your berths are made,’ he told them in careful English. ‘There is no private toilet as in America, I am sorry. The one toilet is at the end of the carriage. We do not have a porter in each carriage, but if you ring, I will come swiftly. There is a pull-down basin to wash your hands. I hope you are comfortable.’

By the time Emily had entered her compartment, the noisy train was catapulting along at breakneck speed. The compartment was tiny but, she was sure, luxurious by Swedish standards. Everything seemed wooden, except the gleaming steel lever that secured the door.

She was more tired than she had realized. She snapped open the overnight case on her berth, removed her toilet articles, then opened the washbasin. The hot and cold water taps were both cold. She did not mind. With a tissue, she shed her makeup. Then she brushed her teeth, washed and found a towel on the berth to dry. Lifting the basin back into the wall, she searched for a comb, and pulled it through her short bobbed hair twenty times.

She undressed with haste, slipped into her white pleated nightgown, placed the overnight case on the floor, and slid between the tight covers of the sleeping berth. When she laid her head on the pillow, she found no comfort. It was both hard and too high. Poking behind the mattress, she found a second pillow, a hardpacked maroon roll, underneath. The Swedes are Spartans, she thought. She decided against removing the red roll. She would be a Spartan, too.

About to dim the lights, she heard her uncle through the compartment door. ‘Emily-wie geht es dir?’

‘Yes? Come in.’

He entered, tentatively, glanced about. ‘Are you comfortable, Emily?’

‘Perfectly,’ she lied.

He balanced himself against the wall. ‘It is going very fast.’ He squinted at her. ‘You are not sorry you came?’

‘Of course not, Uncle Max. Whatever gave you that idea? I can’t wait to get to Stockholm. Can you?’

He tried to reinforce her enthusiasm. ‘I think it will be an unforgettable week. Not so much this Nobel Ceremony, but the excitement, the new faces. My main wish is that you have a good time.’

‘I will. Don’t you worry. Get some rest.’

‘Yes.’ But he was reluctant to leave. He looked down at his niece, so small, so childish, on the large berth. ‘Emily, I am sorry about what happened tonight.’ He shrugged. ‘It happens. It is life. Only it should not happen to you.’ He hesitated. ‘I was wondering. Is there-is there anything more you want to tell me?’

‘It’s out of my mind, Uncle Max.’

‘Good, Liebchen, very good. You think you will sleep?’

‘I took a tablet.’

‘Good night. The conductor will wake us in time.’ At the door, he halted again. ‘Fix the latch when I go.’

‘Yes, Uncle Max. Good night.’

After he was gone, she did not bother with the latch. She dimmed the lights, and rested on her back, one arm behind her head. The train bounced beneath her, but that was not what made sleep difficult. For the first time in years, she thought of her past, the time before America, her girlhood. Then she thought of the curiously arid, placid period of growing up in the new country. Her mind touched on her resolution, made when she had gone aboard the ship, the determination to become a complete woman, and her consequent failure. The resolution illuminated the events of this night.

That poor young man on the boat, she thought. He was only my guinea pig, and he did not know it. She could hardly remember his name now. But anyway, he deserved more. He would never know how he had been used, and to what extent her experiment had been unsuccessful. She had known psychiatrists, and she had read Freud and Adler, and sometimes she had the objectivity to point their perceptions inward on herself. It was crystal-clear to her now that, unconsciously, she had fully provoked the incident. The drinking had been deliberate. The invitation for six o’clock. The being stark-naked in the shower at six with both doors open. She had invited the ultimate act, not knowing that she had, and expected that he would come as he had, not knowing that she had done so. At the same time-how confusing-her saner conscious ego had not wanted it at all, had feared and despised it. The result had been inevitable. It would forever be inevitable, she knew.

The body, the lie of a body that provoked, the figure stretched below her, detached from her meditations, was her body and she could not disown it, she knew. She did not like it this night, nor any other night in memory. It was crippled inside and soiled outside, and she wished it was not her body, as she had often guessed in Atlanta that some blacks had wished to be white and could not understand a God that had so shown his displeasure. Like them, she resented the curse of Ham, and wanted normality-whatever that was-well, normality, that meant belonging, acceptance, no fears.

It had been 6.18 when the young man had gone from her stateroom. No one would understand, but that had been the exact time that the last of Emily Stratman had died. Did the Nobel people know that their laureate in physics was arriving with a corpse? The celebrated Professor Max Stratman and corpse. Stockholm. She played the word-association game. What does the word Stockholm mean to you, Miss Stratman? Quickly, now, what? And she replied, quickly, trepidation, dread, anxiety, fear, men. All one and the same, all finally-men.

My crazy mind, she thought, wandering. Wonderful, drugful tablet, work, go on, work. When will I sleep?…

On the sunny, late morning of December 2, Carl Adolf Krantz, Count Bertil Jacobsson, and Ingrid Påhl were once more, the second time this morning, the fourth time in two days, seated in the rear of a Foreign Office limousine, en route to the Arlanda Airport. Because two winners and their relatives-Dr. John Garrett and his wife Saralee Garrett, and Mr. Andrew Craig and his sister-in-law Leah Decker-were arriving at 12.35, on the same flight of the Scandinavian Airlines System from Copenhagen, another Foreign Office limousine had been dispatched half an hour earlier to the air terminus.

To make this seventy-minute ride more bearable, Jacobsson had deliberately placed himself between Krantz and Påhl. He wished no more bickering. He wanted unity before the final reception duty was performed.

Carl Adolf Krantz, however, was in no mood for bickering this late morning. His spirits were high, his beady eyes bright, his goatee bristling, as he continued the monologue he had begun after they had finished breakfast with Stratman and his niece and left them in the Grand Hotel.

He had been praising, without restraint, Stratman’s findings in the field of solar energy, and now he was extolling the winning physicist’s background and character.

‘Did you ever meet a more remarkable man?’ he asked, and did not wait for an answer. ‘Wisdom shines in his face. And his true modesty. So rare to find in a famous man. One of the marks of greatness, I would say, a humility that confesses, “Yes, I have gone so far, but there are more curtains to lift, let us go on, let us go further.” I tell you both, I cannot recollect another laureate who has impressed me more.’

‘Obviously,’ said Ingrid Påhl.

‘Yes, I liked him,’ Jacobsson agreed. ‘I hope he did not mind our staying for breakfast.’

‘I am sure not,’ said Krantz.

‘I wonder. I had the feeling he was weary-’

‘He is not a youngster,’ said Krantz, ‘and he has had a long trip. Besides, it was not weariness I detected so much as a sense of a genius whose mind is still on his work. After all, as he told us, he is continuing with his solar investigations. He has only begun. We have just come along and interrupted-’

‘He seemed perfectly fine to me,’ said Ingrid Påhl. ‘It was his niece-I thought she was a little strange.’

‘How so?’ Jacobsson wanted to know.

‘Remote-and-oh, scared.’ Ingrid Påhl considered the judgment. ‘To begin with, at the depot. She was separated from him for a moment when the photographers closed in, and she appeared frantic. I saw her face. That was just one thing. For the rest of the time, she was withdrawn. I do not know-as if she were not part of the group, a stranger-’

‘She is a stranger,’ said Krantz.

‘At any rate, an interesting young lady. I studied her face. Flawless. She is going to create quite a stir in our little social whirl.’ lngrid Påhl leaned across Jacobsson. ‘And she does not look a bit like Dr. Stratman,’ she added to Krantz.

‘No reason why she should,’ said Krantz. ‘She is his brother’s child.’

‘What happened to the brother?’ asked Ingrid Påhl.

‘How the devil should I know?’ said Krantz testily.

Ingrid Påhl opened her voluminous handbag and brought out her cigarettes and holder. ‘Well, they are settled, thank God. Now, Bertil, what about this noon’s visitor? I know all about Andrew Craig. But this Dr. Garrett-’

‘You read the typescript I gave you, did you not?’ asked Jacobsson.

Ingrid Påhl had the light to her cigarette, shook the flame off the match, and dropped it to the floor. ‘I read it twice. It was all about his work. What about the man? What are we to expect?’

‘There is little I can tell you,’ said Jacobsson. ‘He lives in this city near Los Angeles, California, and has three children. He had no reputation in academic circles until he and Dr. Farelli made their heart transplantations. I do not think he is wealthy, but I believe he is well off. I have read excerpts of his speeches in the press. They seem fairly routine. I have the picture of a rather single-minded, dedicated man, with few outside interests-’

‘Dull, you mean,’ said Ingrid Påhl.

Jacobsson’s face looked pained. To him, no winner of the Nobel Prize could possibly be dull. ‘I would prefer not to characterize him in that way. Rather, I would say that he is a man whose work is his world. Perhaps he is not so colourful in personality as Dr. Farelli, but more the typical, businesslike American scientist who has collaborated in producing a marvel for humanity.’

Ingrid Påhl’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Collaborated? I did not know he and Farelli worked together-’

‘No, no.’ Jacobsson hastened to amend his statement to lngrid Påhl. ‘I used the word only in its broadest definition. They researched separately, and made their discoveries, of an identical nature, quite apart but at the same time. Not unfamiliar in science, as Carl will tell you. You may recall that Dr. Farelli confessed he and Dr. Garrett had neither met nor corresponded.’

‘Then this meeting in Stockholm will be their first?’ Ingrid Påhl savoured the drama. ‘I wonder what they will have to say to each other.’

‘They will devote hours to discussing immunity mechanism,’ said Krantz, ‘as well as organ banks for the heart, pancreas, and liver. Appetizing.’

‘In any case, you may both have an opportunity to hear what they discuss,’ said Jacobsson. He bent across Krantz for a view through the window. ‘We have not far to go. I presume Dr. Garrett and Mr. Craig have had an opportunity to become acquainted in this last hour since Copenhagen. I rather hope so. It’ll save us the formal introductions…’

The French-made Caravelle jet, that had taken off from Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen at 11.20 in the morning, had been airborne fifty-five minutes and was twenty minutes out of Stockholm.

It was now precisely 12.14, according to Saralee Garrett’s platinum wristwatch, a gift of John’s on their recent fifteenth wedding anniversary, and she wished desperately that it were 12.25 and that they had already landed. She wanted them to be swept up in a busy social programme, so that her husband would have no more time alone with his ulcerating obsession. Tiny and thin as a hummingbird, Saralee’s outward appearance belied her inner resilience. But the last hour with John had proved almost more than she could bear. From the corner of her eye, she espied her husband once more studying the three Copenhagen newspapers, and she knew that he was fuming.

Dr. John Garrett was, indeed, fuming. He would not even allow himself the comfort of sitting back and enjoying the soft leather seat in the aeroplane. Instead, he leaned forward tensely, in the attitude of a pugilist stalking a formidable foe and awaiting an opening. He jabbed nervously at the three newspapers in his lap, as if they were the embodiment of his opponent, and, indeed, they were, for Dr. Farelli’s smiling, cocky Latin countenance mocked him from a photograph on each front page.

Ever since that afternoon seventeen days ago-when he had been lifted to the heights by the announcement that he had been honoured by the Caroline Institute of Stockholm for his achievement, and then dropped into the deepest pit of disappointment by the further knowledge that he had to share this achievement with an arch-enemy he did not know-Dr. John Garrett’s mental and pathological state had been one of simmering resentment.

The high regard of his colleagues in Pasadena, Los Angeles, the entire nation, the celebrations that followed, had not been enough to calm him completely. Everywhere, praise had been tempered by acknowledgement that his victory was a joint one. True enough, Life Magazine had published separate half-page photographs of Farelli and him, but Time and Newsweek, while giving him fifty per cent of the text of their stories, had run photographs of Farelli alone. Worse, by far, were the long accounts in Science News Letter, Scientific American, and Science. They had all assigned special correspondents to interview him at the Rosenthal Medical Centre in Pasadena. The correspondents had been courteous and patient. Garrett had been voluble and winning. He had felt positive that his visitors had been dazzled. Yet, when their stories appeared-so important to him in these, his popular trade papers-between seventy and eighty per cent of the stories were concentrated on the specific accomplishments of Dr. Carlo Farelli. In each account-although possibly he had been over sensitive-he had the definite impression that he had been permitted to tag along as the poor cousin.

Over and over again, he had asked himself-why? Objectivity about his own position was almost impossible, yet he had tried to analyze the results with an investigator’s dispassionate appraisal. First of all-an insight of candour injected, perhaps, by his analyst, Dr. L. D. Keller-he was physically less interesting than his rival. He was simply too conventional, too average, too close to the median in his appearance. His brown hair conspired with his rimless spectacles to create the illusion of Undramatic Man. On the other hand, as photographs gave ample evidence, Carlo Farelli appeared the representation of the eccentric genius. His pitch-black, curly, tangled hair hung down over his broad wise forehead. His piercing, fanatical eyes, classical Roman nose, carefree, white-toothed smile, Hapsburg jaw were all made more distinctive by the faintly pitted cheeks and olive complexion of his broad face.

In the second place, Garrett’s background had seemed too homegrown and too familiar. Born in Illinois, educated in Massachusetts, he had accomplished his researches in California. On the other hand, Farelli had been born in Milan, educated in Geneva, London, and Heidelberg, and had conducted the majority of his experiments in Rome. This background, Garrett had reasoned, was too cosmopolitan to resist. Finally, all of Garrett’s brilliant transplants had been made on unknown, middle-class patients. Almost half of Farelli’s twenty-one heart transplants had been successful on patients who were, in the vernacular of the day, ‘newsworthy’-one a cardinal of the Roman Church, one an Austrian statesman, one a French actress renowned at the turn of the century, one an elderly British playwright. If Garrett saw himself as William Harvey and Joseph Lister, or at least Ambroise Paré, he saw Farelli as only a pale carbon copy of himself made legible, even gaudy, by the methods of Phineas T. Barnum. The fact that the world, or the world’s press, at any rate, did not see this so clearly as he, made Garrett a study verging on the paranoiac.

Before his departure for Sweden, he had paid one more visit to his therapy group in Dr. Keller’s office on Wilshire Boulevard. What he sought, that day, was not illumination but corroboration of his own current beliefs. On this, his only visit after his Nobel Prize had been announced, his reception had been gratifying, to say the least. For once, Miss Dudzinski had left her mother in peace, and Mrs. Zane had confined her account of her gymnastics with Mr. Zane’s employer to ten heated minutes, and Adam Ring had been unnaturally mute and respectful (having decided, no doubt, that his one Academy Award nomination had finally been matched and surpassed by a member of the group).

Unusually agitated, Garrett had accused the Caroline Institute of Stockholm of bias in subtracting half of his honour and giving it to an Italian mountebank. He had railed on against Farelli’s self-serving publicity tactics, his unethical standards, his brazen egotism in agreeing to share a citation that was not rightly his to claim. Dr. Keller, so rarely vocal, had been superhuman in his effort to soothe Garrett with calm reason. The analyst had pointed out that if Farelli had drawn upon Garrett’s creative genius for his own discovery, he would one day be found out, and in the eyes of the world, Garrett would be properly credited. Meanwhile, he had gone on to say, the best experts of the Nobel Committee had made their studies and had determined Farelli’s worth. As a sensible man, it was Garrett’s duty to accept the verdict sensibly. This year, he had been honoured above all men of medicine on earth. Certainly, at this summit, there was room for another to stand beside him. The accomplishment was no less his, and he should be proud of a contribution to the betterment and longevity of the human race.

And Adam Ring, from deep in the easy chair, had capped it in his own terms: ‘When you take the Oscar, you don’t ask questions, Dr. Garrett. It’s the gold medal for life. For the rest of your days, you’re the Nobelman, like being knighted. Nobody’ll give a damn if there were two winners or ten. All they’ll know is you hit the jackpot. Better than an annuity. From now on, no waiting in line, no having your credit checked, no having to pay for it with hookers, no proving anything to anyone. You can’t go higher than up, and you’re up. Be happy. I’ll trade places with you, flat deal, no cash, no questions, right now.’

Garrett had departed from the session somewhat mollified.

By the time he and Saralee had entered the Scandinavian Airlines’ DC-8 jet at Los Angeles International Airport at 11.30 yesterday morning-despite the well-wishers from Pasadena who had come to see them off-Garrett’s temper had again settled into one of controlled resentment. The lulling monotony of the transpolar flight, as Saralee had hoped, had done much to pacify him. The thirteen hours over Canada, Labrador, Iceland, and Norway, broken by only one brief stop for refuelling, had been occupied with reading, conversation, lunch, dinner (roast lamb), supper, bourbon, and martinis.

They had slept fitfully, had enjoyed an early breakfast, and had made a roaring landing on the cement strip of the Kastrup Airport at 8.59 Copenhagen time. An undersecretary of the United States Embassy, a beaming, collegiate gentleman not yet middle-aged, had been on hand to welcome them. Since there remained a little over two hours before a Caravalle jet would take them the last lap to Stockholm, the Embassy had arranged an extremely brief tour of the city and environs for them. They had visited the Raadhuspladsen, and then, from the centre of the city, had driven through the crowded thoroughfare known as Strøget. They had seen the statue of Christian V in Kongens Nytorv, and later the Nyhavn canal, the Rigsdag, the Rosenborg Castle, and finally, at the end of the Langelinie promenade, rising from the water, the life-sized sculpture of Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘Little Mermaid’. The last treat, before returning to the airport, had been smørrebrød sandwiches in the festive terrace café of the d’Angleterre Hotel.

Garrett, a receptive sightseer, had been considerably soothed by his initial impression of bustling Copenhagen. For almost the first time, he seemed cognizant of the fact that he was on a journey and in a foreign place. When they had returned to the Kastrup Airport, ten minutes before takeoff, he had almost forgotten the existence of Carlo Farelli. But then, just as he was about to go through the door to the runway, passing a newsstand, Garrett’s eye was caught by the front page of the Danish morning newspaper, Politiken. The photograph, three columns wide, showed Farelli alighting from an airliner, his olive face wreathed in a smile, his right arm raised aloft in greeting.

The United States Embassy escort, over Saralee’s weak protests, purchased the newspaper for Garrett, and two others besides, both of which also featured the visage of Carlo Farelli on their front pages. As they strode to the waiting Caravelle, Garrett requested the Embassy man to translate the captions and stories, and, innocently, he did so. Listening to the language of the Danish correspondents in Stockholm-‘Italian Saviour of Human Hearts’, ‘The Genius Who Has a Heart’, ‘Nobel Laureate in Medicine Arrives in Stockholm in Triumph’-Garrett blanched, and Saralee suffered, seeing the wrath in his twitching features.

Before boarding the jet, Garrett snatched the newspapers from his host, barely remembering to thank him for his kindness, and soon lost himself in his seat. In the hour that they had been aloft since Copenhagen, Saralee observed, he had never once let the newspapers off his lap, and constantly he had returned to them and to Farelli’s hateful countenance.

Now Saralee determined to break the spell. ‘John, you haven’t looked around the plane once. Isn’t the décor divine? I adore pastel.’

Petulantly, Garrett did not lift his head. He had no interest in pastel at the moment.

Saralee would not be put off. ‘We’ve still got twenty-five minutes. Why don’t you have a drink? I’ll have one, if you will. Let’s have real French champagne.’

‘If you insist.’

‘I’m only thinking what’s good for you. Besides, this is an occasion. We’re almost there. You’re going to get the Nobel Prize.’

‘All right, Saralee, please. In fact, it’s a good idea.’

She rose from her chair. ‘You call the hostess. And no flirting when my back is turned. I’ve seen them. I’m going to the washroom. I want to look fresh.’ She crossed into the aisle, bumping his knees, and knocking the newspapers to the floor. ‘Be right back.’

Garrett collected the newspapers, and folded them on his lap once more. He took a cigar from the inside of his coat-cigars were a recent habit, in keeping with his new station-moistened and bit off the tip, and applied his lighter. Puffing discontentedly, he stretched his neck to see what lay outside the window. Nothing met his sight but azure sky. They were at 28,000 feet, he remembered. It only proved that you could be as unhappy close to heaven as on the ground.

He thought that he had heard his name spoken, and rotated his body towards the aisle, past the ball of smoke he had exhaled. He found a serious young lady standing beside his seat, inspecting him. Except for her outlandish hairdo, severe bangs, too girlish, with the remainder of her auburn hair piled vertical in a manner indescribable, she was not unattractive. Her face was young, twenty-five to twenty-eight, he reckoned, and the immediate total impression was that of a hatchet. The bright brown eyes were narrow, the nose an instrument for pecking, the mouth thin and small. Her neck seemed inordinately long, and the effect, created perhaps by the cowl collar of her tweed suit, was that of a woman peeking out of a manhole. The thick suit hid her figure entirely.

‘Dr. John Garrett?’ she repeated.

‘Yes,’ he replied, shifting, not sure if he was to rise or not.

‘I’m Sue Wiley of CN-Consolidated Newspapers, New York.’

‘How do you do?’ he said politely.

‘I came into Copenhagen this morning. I was in Berlin on the Spandau Prison story. I’d been assigned to head in your direction-’ She indicated Saralee’s empty seat. ‘May I sit down a second?’

‘Please do. Wait-’ He stood up and moved into Saralee’s chair, and allowed Sue Wiley to take his own place.

‘I’m doing the big CN Nobel series. I’m sure you’ve seen the exploitation.’

He had no idea what she was speaking about, but he nodded vague assent.

‘Fourteen articles, one thousand words apiece,’ she said. ‘It’ll run for two weeks in fifty-three papers. It’s a big one, breaking right after the ceremonies. You’re from L.A., aren’t you?’

‘ Pasadena,’ he said correctly.

‘No difference. We’ll have outlets in L.A., Frisco, Chicago, New York, anywhere you turn your head. Anyhow, when I got on this plane, I figured a bunch of nothings and wasted the last hour manicuring my nails. But when the steward was getting me a drink a little while back, he tipped me that there was a Nobel winner on the plane. I could have fallen over. I thought all of you were in Stockholm already.’

‘No, not really, as you can see,’ he said cautiously. ‘As a matter of fact, it is my understanding we’re arriving early, as these things go. In past years, most winners came in a few days before the final ceremony. But I’m told, this year, they wanted us earlier. They have a big programme.’

She blinked her eyes, which he soon learned was with her an unconscious and disconcerting habit, and went on merrily. ‘My luck, is all I can say, having you cornered here. I wasn’t going to get out pencil and pad until tomorrow. But you can save me a lot of time.’

‘We’ve only fifteen minutes, Miss Wiley. Wouldn’t it be sounder to wait?’

‘Mr. Garrett-forgive me, Dr. Garrett-I don’t want to boast, but I can make fifteen minutes do like fifteen hours. And it’s painless, I assure you.’

‘What sort of thing do you want to know?’

‘From the day one. Not the usual hackneyed platitudes. My byline’s going to be on this one, and like I told you, it’s a biggie. I want to turn all of you inside out. After all, you’ve nothing to hide. You know the angle, the Gods as mere mortals. And I’m doing the same with the Nobel crowd. What gives in those smoke-filled rooms? I mean to find out.’ She unsnapped her handbag, preliminary to locating pencil and pad. ‘Let’s plunge.’

But, in his own mind, Garrett had made his decision. An unimaginative man outside the laboratory, he was not given to breaking rules. The long letter from the Nobel Foundation, signed by a Count Bertil Jacobsson, had listed precise instructions on handling of the press. While he could speak to the press freely in his native land, it was hoped that once on his way to Sweden, and while inside Sweden, he would avoid individual contact with the press as much as possible. If forced to reply to questions while unescorted in Copenhagen or Stockholm, it was hoped that he would make his comments noncommittal and brief. The reason for this advice was that, in past years, statements made carelessly, in unsupervised press interviews, had led to sensationalized stories. With these experiences fresh in mind, the Nobel Foundation had scheduled a series of formal press interviews, for the present winners, in Stockholm on the afternoon of December third. These would be supervised, and the results could be better guaranteed to be favourable.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Miss Wiley, but I’m afraid I’m not allowed to talk right now,’ he said.

Her head swivelled towards him. The eyes blinked furiously. ‘Are you kidding? Since when are scientists prima donnas?’

‘Don’t misunderstand me, Miss Wiley,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s just that I don’t want to break the rules.’

‘What rules?’ she challenged.

He tried to explain the strictures placed upon him and his colleagues by the Nobel Foundation.

‘Gestapo nonsense,’ she exploded, when he was through. ‘They just want to muzzle everyone so the Swede newspapers can get the big breaks. We’re Americans-you and I-and we have different principles, don’t we? I’ll be bending your ear a dozen times. Why not start now? Of course you will-’

Her persistence annoyed him. ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘I’m afraid not. Tomorrow at the official conference-’

‘To hell with that circus.’ She stared at him. ‘You really won’t co-operate?’

‘You make it sound awful.’

‘It is awful. What happened to freedom of speech? Now, come on, Dr. Garrett, just conversation.’

‘No.’

She snapped her handbag shut, too loudly, and sat back, narrow eyes still levelled at him. ‘You’re sure you understand what you’re doing? I told you this wasn’t the usual handout story. This is a big one, important, personal, behind the scenes.’ She paused dangerously. ‘I’d hate to continue going to other sources, sources other than yourself, for information about you. I have already, you know. Our bureaus all over the country have pitched in. Quite an eyeful. But I don’t like to get it all like that, secondhand. I like to get it straight from the horse’s mouth. That’s good reporting. That’s the way Nellie Bly used to operate.’ She paused a second time. ‘You want me to keep getting my material from other sources?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know what more to say. I’ll co-operate when I can, but not now.’

‘Okay, Dr. Garrett,’ she said. She stood up. ‘But you know, I’ll bet Dr. Keller and your group therapy gang wouldn’t approve of your behaviour.’

She smiled a thin smile, wiggled into the aisle, and was gone.

Garrett sat with the disbelieving look of a man who has been handed a grenade two and a half seconds after the pin has been pulled, and has no place to throw it. His inability to function was total. His brain tried to unscramble the message it had just received. Dr. Keller was a secret. The group therapy sessions were a secret. Garrett had never been sufficiently liberated to discuss his treatment with a soul, except his wife. Who on earth knew of his group therapy? His physician, who had referred him to a psychiatrist, who had referred him to Dr. Keller. And Saralee, of course. But who else? Then he realized that the secret was shared by many: Mr. Lovato, Mrs. Perrin, Mr. Ring, Mrs. Zane, Mr. Armstrong, Miss Dudzinski. Which of them had talked? In what mysterious way had Sue Wiley, or her journalistic network, ferreted out this private information?

He tried to handle the predicament rationally. What did it matter if his group therapy attendance was published? Apparently it had mattered to Sue Wiley and to himself. She had thrown it at him as a threat, a form of blackmail. And he had fielded it as something explosive and destructive. Was it destructive? How would the research staff in Pasadena regard their star, once they knew that he was in group therapy? What would the Nobel Committee think? And the public? Worst of all, what would his arch-enemy, Carlo Farelli, think? Somehow, it gave Farelli the upper hand by disqualifying Garrett’s competence through mental illness-it reduced Garrett’s infallibility-it made him less than genius. Would Paré or Harvey or Lister have been in group therapy along with an errant wife, a half-potent actor, and a suffering homosexual? Unthinkable.

He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes remained before Stockholm. He was craven now, and knew it, and did not care, and he was ready for surrender, if that was the price of discretion. He jumped to his feet, just as Saralee came down the aisle from the washroom.

‘Where are you going, John?’ she asked.

He had no patience for her. ‘There’s a reporter-I promised-I want to talk to her. Sit down and wait.’

He brushed past her, trod up the aisle, oblivious of the other passengers, and found Sue Wiley idly staring out of the window. She was in the last seat, and, not unexpectedly, as if reserved for him, the chair beside her was vacant. He took it, and she met him with the thin, reptilian smile.

‘How sweet of you to come,’ she said.

‘Where did you hear that thing about me?’ Garrett wanted to know.

‘Group therapy? Oh, we have our sources.’

‘But where?’

‘Now, that’s not fair, is it? You know the old adage-newspaper people never reveal the sources of their information. If they couldn’t be trusted by informants, they’d never learn half as much as they do. Matter of fact, Mr. Garrett-Dr. Garrett-I was once a cause célèbre in that respect. Right in your fair city. I went to a marijuana party, chock-full of movie stars, and reported it, no names. Your narcotics squad hauled me in and asked for names. I said I’d been invited under the condition no names, and I was sticking to it, and I did. The judge gave me a month, but Consolidated Newspapers and every sheet in the country were up in arms, and I was released after five days. There’s your answer.’

Garrett substituted self-preservation for pride. ‘You’re not going to publish that-that gossip about my therapy-are you?’

Sue Wiley’s reaction was all ingenuous surprise. ‘I thought most people in psychiatry like to talk about it. That’s a signpost of improvement, isn’t it? What are you ashamed of, Mr. Garrett?’

‘There’s nothing I’m ashamed of,’ he said animatedly. ‘First of all, it’s private, my own business and no one else’s on earth. Secondly, it might be misunderstood. The public isn’t oriented. They think anyone on the couch-and I’m not on the couch, by the way-anyone like that-is, well, more or less unbalanced, sick.’

The wide eyes. ‘But aren’t you?’

‘Of course not! I needed some-some advice-that’s all. But if you blow this whole thing out of proportion-’ He was at a loss for words.

She had the words. ‘Readers might think you were a screwball? Maybe not to be trusted with that heart transplant routine? Less worthy of sharing a Nobel Prize with Dr. Farelli?’

‘All right, something like that, and it’s not fair, and you know it. As for Farelli, no one thinks I’m less worthy to share the award than he is. In fact, in many circles, it’s believed I should have won the prize myself.’

As she listened, Sue Wiley’s eyes were more gleaming than before. She smelt something far better, and she wanted to pursue it as quickly as possible. Hastily, she donned a new guise of personality. This one was softer, understanding, all co-operation. ‘Look, Mr.-Dr. Garrett-what do you think I am, Madame Defarge or something? I’m not out to hurt a great man like you or anyone else. Certainly, I won’t mention your private medical history, if you don’t wish me to. I only threw it at you to-I guess to show you how thorough we are in our work. If you don’t want me to write about your therapy, I won’t.’

Garrett wanted to kiss this suddenly lovely young lady. ‘I’d be obliged if you’d forget it.’

‘Righto. Forgotten. Okay?’

‘Thank you.’

‘I only hoped for a few minutes of your time, to make my stories more accurate.’

‘I’d be glad to help you in any way, that is, if you don’t tattle on me to the Nobel Foundation.’

‘I told you-we respect our sources.’

‘Well,’ said Garrett expansively, relieved, ‘what kind of stories are you going to write?’

For a fraction of a second, she was tempted to tell him. She was bursting to tell someone. She was proud of the idea, her own, but some inner signal, which she usually ignored, warned her to slow down, take care, and this time she observed it. The success of her series might depend on this crop of Nobel winners. A mistake with one of them, Garrett for instance, might turn them against her, and then her assignment might all be uphill. If she handled the first of them right, it might be her calling card to all the rest.

Her instincts about an assignment, almost infallibly correct, told her that this was the crucial one of her career. But before she could reply to his question about it, she realized that Garrett was on his feet, being introduced by a hostess to two Swedish gentlemen, fellow physicians, who were eager to have the laureate meet their wives. With an apologetic gesture to Sue Wiley, Garrett asked her leave for a moment, and followed the Swedes down the aisle.

Precious as was their remaining time, Sue Wiley did not resent the interruption. The importance of her new assignment had turned her mind inwards, and now she welcomed the interlude to review the circumstances-the triumphal procession through recent years-that had brought her to this turning point.

Sue Wiley, born and raised in that doubtful oasis called Cheyenne, Wyoming, had been the product of loveless parents and their hate-filled marriage. She had grown to adolescence in an atmosphere that was niggardly and penurious. At home she had been unwanted, and at school she had been ignored. Not until her senior year at school, when she had revealed a gift for composition and journalism, had she known praise and attention. In that period, also, perhaps not by chance, she had read the life of Nellie Bly. Like herself, Nellie Bly had been the product of a small town and had embarked upon a career as a means of self-support. She had exposed the horrible sweatshops of Pittsburgh, had pretended insanity to enter and write about the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island, had found notoriety and $25,000 a year, attired in ghillie cap and plaid ulster, by making a 24,899-mile journey around the world (in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg) in seventy-two days for The New York World. For Sue Wiley, encouraged by the success of her high-school compositions, Nellie Bly became her mother, her father, her Deity. For Sue Wiley, the die was cast.

There had been a handful of dim years, hardly remembered any more, as stringer, reporter, rewrite girl, and feature writer, and there had been the opening on Consolidated Newspapers. Here, Sue Wiley had risen almost overnight. She was still only twenty-eight. Her formula had not been unique, but had represented the perfect outgrowth of her character and of the press of her time. Her formula had been juvenile simple: shock by saying nay when all say aye. It would have bewildered her to know that she was less interested in truth than in sensation.

To Sue Wiley, insensitive to all about her, and with her eye on the main chance, the truth was undependable. If you dug for truth, you would uncover no treasure, but instead have dull hard facts, proving nothing, accomplishing nothing. She had been blind to the value of truth, because its rewards were unpredictable. Readers had seemed not to appreciate truth, had even seemed to be discomforted by it. Illumination was not a virtue in itself. It bored and offended. And in the end, who gave a damn? Yourself? Your subject? Yes, perhaps-but the measuring stick for accomplishment was the obscure mass of readers. They wanted variety, gossip, excitement, no matter how superficial. ‘Make ’em say “Gee whiz.” ’ She had once read the command on the bulletin board in a Hearst editorial room, and that was it really, and the devil take the facts. A sound rumour, an apocryphal anecdote, a distorted quotation, a whispered scandal, even if one-half true, or less, was to be preferred to nothing-but-the-truth, if nothing-but-the-truth was an anaesthetic. The point was to excite, create talk, sell newspapers.

Sue Wiley was not immoral, but amoral. She was too self-absorbed to anticipate hurt inflicted or wonder about it afterwards. She was not inherently ill-intentioned, even though her technique was often harmful. She was the sum of her culture, and her public, which encouraged and rewarded her and warped her by its own mis-shapen values.

Sue Wiley perfected her technique by reading biographies. Previously, she had been little addicted to reading, beyond newspapers, but in biographies she tested herself, underlining and copying out what arrested her attention. Her delight was not in learning of Julius Caesar’s campaigns but in learning that he wore a crown of laurel to hide his increasing baldness. Napoleon’s victories left her cold, but the information that he possessed exceptionally small ‘reproductive organs’ fascinated her. She was not interested in the fact that Francis Scott Key had written ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, but in the fact that he had no ear for music. And one day was made when she learned that Daniel Webster had been sued for not paying his butcher’s bill. In this period, she had also read Dr. William Lyon Phelps’s complaint, ‘Instead of selecting a subject, modern biographers pick a victim. It’s getting so that good men are afraid to die’. Dr. Phelps’s complaint had left her unmoved. She decided that he would have made a poor newspaperman.

Like her idol, Nellie Bly, she had discovered her way-to create news, not wait for it. To electrify the public, and gain its attention. In a thousand editorial rooms, ten thousand reporters, chained to mediocrity and rotting on low salary, bad beer, stale sandwiches, stewed in their daydreams of great beats, and novels, and plays that they would never write. Sue Wiley would not be one of them, and at Consolidated she set out to prove her worth.

The International Red Cross was a sacred cow. Sue Wiley seized upon the one per cent of it that was defective, to condemn the entire organization. The Boy Scouts of America were inviolable. Sue Wiley spanked them. Mother’s Day was a holy institution. Sue Wiley defiled it. Gradually, she convinced Harold Finnegan, managing editor of Consolidated, to let her expand her target range. On a trip around the world she exposed the lechery aboard luxury cruise vessels, the inadequacy of American embassies, and the graft of numerous customs officials. She also found fault with Tahiti, Israel, Ghana, and Lourdes. On this same trip, she made her best mark. She misused her letters of introduction to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, in Lambaréné, French Equatorial Africa, entirely ignoring the brilliance and selflessness of le Grand Docteur during the two hours she spent with him. When she described him later for Consolidated readers, she revealed him solely as an egotistical Teutonic tyrant who inefficiently conducted an unsanitary jungle hospital.

Her salary was larger now, and her reputation with it. What she wanted was one more enormous international killing that would earn her a contract for a syndicated column of her own. ‘Lowdown on the High-ups’, she would call it. And one day after her trip, filing away her Schweitzer notes, she realized that the ex-Olympian had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. This set her mind to thinking of the possible frailty of other Nobel winners and the mysterious aura of sanctity surrounding the prizes in general. Here was humanity’s highest reward to its own. The public accepted the judgment of immortality, conferred by a handful of Swedes and Norwegians, without question. The public looked upon the winners themselves as divinities. Yet, had the scalpel of journalism ever been ruthlessly, unsentimentally, applied? Had the judges and the judged ever been thoroughly dissected? Had this hagiolatry ever been defied? What was the truth-Sue Wiley version-behind the Nobel awards?

Bursting with excitement, Sue had bullied the harassed Harold Finnegan into lunching with her in a fashionable bar on Forty-seventh Street. Eyes blinking, words tripping over words, Sue threw out her idea, and Finnegan saw the possibilities at once. He gave her access to Consolidated’s bureau heads throughout the nation-within two weeks their copy on the Nobel winners, past and present, filled her New York desk-and he gave her a large expense account and packed her off to Sweden.

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 Öhman. 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 Öhman’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. Öhman. 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 Påhl, with Carl Adolf Krantz, and Saralee was effusive over the bouquet of flowers Miss Påhl 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 Påhl 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.