Perfect People (13 page)

‘The wrong embryo?’ John echoed.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You are saying that’s the only way it could happen?’

‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ Dr Annand said. ‘I have to rush – I’m really late.’

‘Sure, appreciate your time, thanks.’

‘Call me later if you want to talk this through further,’ she said.

‘I may do that. So – just to get this right – the wrong embryo – that’s the only way? The entire wrong embryo?’

‘Yes. That would actually be more likely than getting the sex wrong.’

Somehow John got through his lecture. He fielded the barrage of questions from students that followed, answering them as briefly as possible, then hurried back to his office and closed the door. He sat down and checked his voice mail.

There was a message from Naomi. Her voice sounded tearful and panicky. ‘Call me, John,’ she said. ‘Please call me as soon as you get this.’

He put the phone down. What the hell was he going to tell her?

He called Dr Rosengarten, insisting to the secretary he
had
to speak to him right now.

After several minutes on hold, listening to Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, Dr Rosengarten came on the line, sounding his usual hurried, irritable self.

‘The diagnosis you gave us about the sex of our baby,’ John said. ‘How certain are you that it is a girl?’

The obstetrician put him on hold again while he checked his notes, then came back on the line. ‘No question about it, Dr Klaesson. Your wife is having a girl.’

‘You couldn’t have made a mistake?’

There was a long, chilly silence. John waited, but the obstetrician said nothing.

‘In your diagnosis,’ John added, a little flustered, ‘is there any margin for error?’

‘No, Dr Klaesson, there is no margin for error. Anything else I can do for you and Mrs Klaesson?’

‘No – I – I guess. Thank you.’

John hung up, angered by Rosengarten’s arrogance. Then he tried Dettore once more. Still the voice mail. He rang both of Sally Kimberly’s numbers again but this time left no message. Then he rang Naomi.

‘John.’ Her voice sound strange, trembling. ‘Oh God, John, have you heard?’

‘Heard what?

‘You haven’t seen the news?’

‘I’ve been giving a lecture. What news?’

He heard the rest of her words only intermittently, as if he were catching some bulletin on a badly tuned radio station.

‘Dr Dettore. Helicopter. Into sea. Crashed. Dead.’

‘We have this eyewitness report from a yacht off the coast of New York State earlier today.’

John stared at the newsreader with his sharp suit and solemn face. Naomi sat beside him on the sofa, gripping his hand tightly. The camera cut to a static picture of a Bell JetRanger helicopter, identical to the one that had flown them to Dettore’s clinic.

A man’s voice, a clipped New England accent, came through, crackly and intermittent on a ship-to-shore radio.

‘Watched the . . .’ Sound lost then restored. ‘Flying low, just below the cloud ceiling . . .’ Sound lost again. ‘Just erupted into a ball of fire like a flying bomb . . .’ Sound lost again. ‘Then it came back and, oh God . . .’ His voice was choked. ‘Was horrible.’ Sound lost again. ‘Debris in the sky. Came down about three miles away from us. We headed right over . . .’ Sound lost again. ‘Nothing. Wasn’t anything there. Nothing at all. Just the eeriest feeling. Horrible sight, I tell you. Just gone. Gone.’

The picture of the helicopter was replaced with a photograph of the
Serendipity Rose
, which now became the backdrop behind the newsreader.

‘The billionaire scientist was returning to his offshore floating research laboratory and clinic, where he offered the prospect of designer babies for those able to afford his six-figure prices. Dr Dettore had this past weekend delivered a no-holds-barred paper to a Union of Concerned Scientists conference in Rome, in which he denounced the Vatican’s latest call for international regulations against experimentation on human embryos as a crime against humanity.’

The newsreader paused and the backdrop changed to a recent photograph of Dettore on a podium behind a bank of microphones.

‘No stranger to controversy, Dr Dettore has had his work compared to Hitler’s eugenics programme, and had featured on the front cover of
Time
magazine.’

John hit the mute button on the remote and stared grimly at the screen, feeling in a state of shock.

‘What do we do now, John?’

‘I called the clinic six times today, hoping I could speak to someone else – his colleague, Dr Leu. I got a
number not in service
message. I emailed twice. Both times the emails got bounced back, not able to be delivered.’

‘We have to get a second opinion.’

‘I spoke to Dr Rosengarten.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He was adamant he had not made a mistake.’

‘He’s hardly going to admit it, is he?’

‘No, but—’ He hesitated. Naomi, white as a sheet, looked terrible. How could he tell Naomi what Dr Annand had told him? That Dettore had most probably made a mistake, but not over the gender – over the entire embryo?

How could he tell her she might be pregnant with someone else’s child?

‘Why would a helicopter explode, John?’

‘I don’t know. Engines can go wrong – jet engines can blow up sometimes.’

‘The man said it was like a bomb.’

John stood up, walked the few paces across the small room to the Deco fireplace and looked at a photograph of Halley sitting in a toy police jeep, beaming happily. One of those rare moments of respite in his short little life. He felt angry, suddenly. Angry at Dettore for dying – irrational, he knew, but he didn’t care. Angry at the loss of the chance of the funding for his own research that Dettore had discussed with him. Angry at Dr Rosengarten. Angry at God for what he did to Halley. Angry for all the shitty hands he seemed to be picking up in life.

He heard what Naomi was saying; the implication was loud and clear.

Bomb.

There were plenty of crazy people out there. Fanatics who hated progress, who believed only their way was right. And irresponsible scientists, too, who believed the whole world was their laboratory and that they could do what they wanted, blow up small Pacific atolls, design generation after generation of biological weaponry, tamper with the germ line of the human species, all in the name of progress.

And in between were people who just wanted to live their lives. Some of them innocents like Halley, born into a living hell.

Science could prevent the tragedy of little children like Halley. Progress could one day eliminate diseases like his. Dettore was right when he said that preventing scientists from being able to do their research on embryos was a crime against humanity.

‘Don’t ever forget why we’ve done this, Naomi,’ he said, his voice raised in anger that was spawned from utter, helpless frustration.

Naomi stood up and walked over to him and put her arms around his waist. ‘You’ll love our baby, won’t you? Whatever happens, you’ll love her?’

He turned and kissed her lightly on the lips. ‘Of course.’

‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I love you and I need you.’

She looked so scared, so vulnerable. His heart felt wrenched. ‘I need you, too.’

‘Let’s go out tonight – some place cheerful.’

‘What do you feel like? Mexican? Chinese? Sushi?’

‘Nothing spicy. How about that place Off-Vine?’

He smiled. ‘That was the first place I ever took you to eat in LA.’

‘I like it there. Let’s see if they have a table.’

‘I’ll phone.’

‘Do you remember something you said to me there? Sitting out in the courtyard? You said that love was more than just a bond between two people. It was like a wagon-train circle you formed around you that protected you against all the world threw at you. Do you remember?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘That’s what it is going to have to be like from now.’

Shortly before midnight, Naomi was violently sick. John knelt beside her in the bathroom, holding her forehead, the way his mother used to hold his when he was a child.

She had thrown up everything inside her, and now it was just bile coming out. And she was shedding tears.

‘It’s OK,’ he said gently, struggling hard against the smell not to retch, too. ‘It’s OK, darling.’

He wiped her mouth with a wetted towel, dabbed her eyes, then helped her back to bed. ‘Feel better?’ he asked anxiously.

She nodded, eyes open wide, bloodshot, expressionless. ‘How much longer’s this bloody sickness going to go on for? I thought it was meant to be
morning
sickness?’

‘Maybe it was something you ate?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

John turned off the light and lay still, feeling the damp heat coming off her body, his stomach still queasy from the smell of vomit.

‘What do you really think it was?’ she asked, suddenly.

‘Think
what
was?’

‘What made the helicopter crash. Do you think it was a bomb?’

There was a long silence. John listened to her breathing; it was steadily becoming less jerky, more rhythmic. Then, just as he thought she was deeply asleep, she spoke again.

‘He had enemies.’

‘A lot of scientists have enemies.’

‘Do you have enemies, John?’

‘I’m not well enough known. I’m sure if I was, there’d be a bunch of fanatics violently opposed to my views. Anyone who dares to stick their head above the parapet and be counted is going to have enemies. But there’s a big step between disliking what someone does and blowing them to pieces.’

After some moments she said, ‘What do you suppose is going to happen to his lab – ship?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There must be someone there dealing with admin. They’re going to have to cancel new patients – there must be someone you can get hold of who can look at our records and find out what’s happened, surely?’

‘I’ll try again in the morning. I’m going to try to speak to Dr Leu – he seemed pretty on the ball.’

He closed his eyes but his brain was racing. Dettore would have kept detailed records of exactly what he had done to every foetus. It would all be there in his files. Dr Leu would have the answers; of course he would.

‘Maybe it’s God’s way.’ She spoke so gently, like a child.

‘
God’s
way – what do you mean?’

‘Perhaps He’s angry about – you know – about what we did – about what people are trying to do. And this is His way of balancing things up.’

‘By making you sick and by killing Dr Dettore?’

‘No, I don’t mean that. I mean—’

There was a long silence.

John climbed out of the bed. He needed more water, tablets, sleep. He desperately needed more sleep.

‘Maybe God decided we should have a girl, not a boy,’ Naomi said.

‘What’s this talk about God, suddenly? I thought you weren’t too impressed with God?’

‘Because – I’m wondering – maybe Dr Dettore didn’t make a mistake. Maybe God intervened?’

John was aware that pregnancy messed around with a woman’s hormones and they in turn could mess around with the brain. Maybe it was that. ‘Darling.’ He sat down on the bed. ‘Dettore screwed up. I don’t think this is God intervening. This is a scientist doing something wrong.’

‘And we don’t know how wrong?’

‘We don’t know for sure it’s wrong at all. I still think Rosengarten is an arrogant man and he could have made a mistake that he won’t admit to. We’ll get a second opinion. I don’t think we should worry too much at this stage.’

‘Why don’t we have its –
her –
entire genome read?’

‘Apart from the cost, it’s not just getting it read, it’s the analysis that’s complex. There are over twelve hundred genes responsible for the prostate; seven hundred for breasts; five hundred for ovaries. It’s a massive task.’

‘If Dr Dettore was able to do it, surely – I mean, how could he have done it so far ahead? And kept it quiet?’

‘Happens in science all the time. You get someone way ahead – sometimes so way ahead people don’t appreciate the discovery. He is – was – awesomely smart. He had unlimited money to throw at it.’ And, he thought, but did not tell her, not wanting to worry her more, Dettore very definitely had some kind of a hidden agenda. He wasn’t covering his costs of running the floating clinic – and that was without his own fees. Let alone the huge time commitment.

Altruism? For the good of mankind? Or—

He drifted into troubled sleep.

It seemed only moments later that the phone was ringing.

John woke with a start, feeling groggy and confused. What the hell time was it?