The Virus (12 page)

Kaplan understood the gesture at once. He took out a brown envelope and laid it on the table.

“There’s fifty thousand francs.” He had drawn it at lunchtime at the Embassy.

Delgrave smiled. “That is most generous.”

With a quick movement, they exchanged envelopes.

Kaplan glanced at the information on the sheet. It was, as he had hoped it would be, a list of animals which had passed through Brussels Airport in the first days of June. Details were given of the number and type of animal contained in the cargo; of the places the animals had been caught and of their intermediate or final destinations.

“Good! This is just what I was looking for.” With increasing excitement, Kaplan examined the material. He looked for any references to monkeys. There were several but one in particular caught his eye.

“June 5. One green monkey. Caught Kugumba Region of Eastern Zaire, location approximately . . . latitude . . . longitude . . .”

The information fairly leapt at him from the page. Kaplan wanted to shout. At last he had the cross-bearing he was looking for. For both the list he had seen in Marburg and now the list which he held in his hand had a reference to
green monkeys caught in the Kugumba region of Eastern Zaire.
Both lists gave the approximate location where the animals had been caught.
In each case the latitude and the longitude were virtually identical
! Here at last was the precise fix not just on the vector — the green monkey — but on its geographical origin!

He finished reading the entry . . . “Longitude approximately . . . Found sick on arrival; gassed in cage and incinerated.”

He said to Delgrave, making his voice sound as casual as he could in the circumstances:

“This entry here. It speaks of a green monkey coming from Zaire. Apparently the animal was found to be sick on arrival. Is that very unusual?”

“It’s not unusual for an animal to be sick on arrival. We often have to destroy them.” He looked at the list. “What’s unusual is to have a
green
monkey. I’ve never heard or seen of one myself. That must be something very rare indeed. It was probably destined for a zoo. Antwerp zoo perhaps. But don’t talk to me about animals. Talk to someone who knows. I’m just a cargo official.” Delgrave looked at his watch. “Nom de Dieu! I must get to work. I’m still on the night shift.” With a smile and a wave he was gone, patting his pocket to reassure himself that his reward for a day’s work was properly stowed.

After Delgrave had departed, Kaplan was left there at the table with half a bottle of wine still to drink, wondering just how Diane Verusio had had contact with one sick green monkey at Brussels airport. Had she gone into the cargo shed, once the animals had been off-loaded? Had she, like him, bluffed it out and boarded the Air Zaire plane itself? Or had something else happened? How he wished he knew the answer.

Beyond that, there was the question: what to do next? Just assume that a green monkey from the Kugumba region of Eastern Zaire was indeed, as he now supposed, the vector of the Marburg virus. What were the next steps to take?

After finishing the wine and paying the bill, he took a taxi to Tim Boswell’s house in Kraainem where they had a quiet bachelor dinner together. (Tim’s wife, Lucilla, had already gone back to the States for the summer.) Kaplan brought Boswell up to date on the story.

“Delgrave came through all right,” he said. “I don’t know where he got the information from but he found it somewhere.”

Boswell puffed on his pipe. “We might take a look at Delgrave, anyway. I’d like to know exactly what kind of a job he does for SABENA.”

The two men talked about different aspects of the case. Boswell had used the afternoon to good effect in spite of the amount of wine he had consumed at lunch.

“You know, there’s something that puzzles me. Remember you told me this morning about the original duelling incident in Marburg, back in 1967, where the students were infected by, er, Ringelmann? Wasn’t that his name?”

Kaplan nodded. “It’s a fact. Twenty-three out of twenty-three victims in the 1967 episode
were
Marburg University students.”

“I’m not disputing that,” Boswell intervened quickly. “It’s something else. Didn’t Professor Schmidtt say that the Chancellor himself had been present?”

“Certainly. That was one of the reasons for the cover-up. If that fact had come out, it could have brought down the government.”

Boswell tapped out his pipe into the fire-place.

“Well, here’s something curious,” he said. “I got on to our people in Bonn and they got on to the Chancellor’s office. The U.S. has pretty good cooperation with the authorities in the Federal Republic as you can imagine. They dug through the files and came up with the log of the Chancellor’s movements for the period in question. The official diary is negative, they say. There’s no mention of any visit to Marburg in April 1967.”

Kaplan was not put out. “But you wouldn’t expect to find that kind of visit recorded in the official diary. This was a man having a night out at his old school.”

Boswell smiled, a sardonic smile that illuminated his Bostonian features.

“I’d agree with you, but for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“The diary also shows that the Chancellor was on a tour of Latin America at the time. And that
is
a matter of record. There are press clippings and newsreel pictures to prove it.”

Kaplan was bewildered. “I don’t understand. Why would Franz invent something like that?”

“I’m not sure,” Boswell replied slowly. “But we ought to find out.”

6

Paula Schmidtt delayed her journey to Berlin because of her father’s death. She was three days later than she had originally planned.

Her mother, distraught with grief, pleaded with her not to go.

“You’ve just been to Berlin. You’ve seen your friends. Why go again? Don’t leave me alone here. Not now.”

The tension showed in the girl’s face but she was implacable. “It’s not for pleasure that I go, mother. It’s business. I have to consult some medical experts.”

“But the investigating officers may wish to talk to you again. They may have some news about Franz’s murder.”

“They must wait till I return.”

Dressed in black, Paula caught a British Airways plane to Berlin from Frankfurt. (It was one of the anomalies of Berlin’s status that Lufthansa still had no flights to Berlin.) She took the bus into the city from the airport. The driver called out the stops over the public address system: “Templehof, Spandau, Potsdamer Platz. . .”

She got out at the Potsdamer Platz and looked around. She was too young to remember the place as it had been before the Second World War. But her father had described it for her.

“When I was a boy,” Franz had told her, “I saw the Zeppelin airship, the R3, making one of its last flights over the Potsdamer Platz. I remember the trams stopped in the square and all the people stood around looking up at the sky. That was in 1933.”

She blinked back tears when she thought of her father. He had been a good man. He should never have talked so much to the American! “They” would have left him alone if he hadn’t talked. Sometimes she hated “them”. But it was too late. There was no turning back.

Today, the Potsdamer Platz which had seen so much life and movement before the war was a bleak, forbidding place. It had been destroyed by allied bombardment and then, in August 1961, the infamous Berlin Wall was built across the square. The bleak grey concrete slab stretched away into the middle distance, dividing house from house and block from block. Someone had scrawled on the wall at one point the words HIER IST FREIHEIT GEENDET — Here Freedom Ends. Paula’s lips curled into a half-sneer as she took her place in the queue which had formed at the foot of the wooden platform. Freedom! They talked of freedom! What did they know of it? Had the men who wrote those words visited the Berlin ghetto where thousands of immigrant Turks — so-called
Gastarbeiters
or “guestworkers” — were crushed together under slum conditions? She shuffled forward a foot or two as the queue moved towards the base of the ladder.

As she passed the tacky souvenir shops which sold sepia-tinted postcards of Berlin in the good old days, Paula Schmidtt recalled the time when, in her early ’teens, she had joined the vast crowd in the Potsdamer Platz to listen to President Kennedy telling the crowd: “Ich bin ein Berliner”. Her father had still been in the States but they had sent her back to visit relations in Berlin. She remembered that Chancellor Adenauer had been there with Kennedy on that cold day in January 1963. So had Willy Brandt, then Mayor of West Berlin. After the speeches, men had mounted the platform as she was about to do now, to look out sternly onto a different world. Sixteen years later, President Carter had done the same thing. By then Paula’s political preferences were inalterably set.

She climbed up the steps with some Australians in front of her and some Japanese behind. At the top, she spent some minutes looking into East Berlin across the cleared area covered with barbed wire and concrete traps. There were mines there, too, she knew; and sensors of every kind. Down here, men had met their deaths trying to escape. Some of them had been shot down in cold blood and left to die where they fell. There was a time when she might have sympathized. Not now.

She stood pressed up against the wooden railing and checked her watch. It was exactly one p.m. She opened her handbag and took out a packet of Marlboroughs. Then she rummaged again in the bag and produced a lighter. She let the flame flare for three full seconds before lighting the cigarette.

Two hundred yards away, in the top left window of one of the grey forbidding blocks of houses that bounded the eastern edge of the cleared zone, a “Vopo” — an East German frontier guard — was watching through powerful binoculars. He noted the time the black-clad woman arrived on the wooden platform, the brand-name on the cigarette package and the play with the lighter.

“Fritz,” he called out to his companion (the Vopos were never trusted by their superiors to stand guard duty alone; they always performed in pairs), “she just showed up. You had better ring through and tell them.”

By then, Paula Schmidtt had climbed back down the platform and was walking along the wall towards the centre of the city. She walked briskly, concentrating on her business.

When she reached the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s main shopping street, she turned east. Her pace slowed to that of an afternoon shopper. From time to time she looked at the window displays in the big stores. She didn’t wish to appear conspicuous.

Almost at the end of the Kurfürstendamm are the blackened remains of Berlin’s Memorial Church. The building has never been repaired. It stands as mute testimony to the destructiveness of war. But part of it is still in use today as a place of prayer. There is a roof of sorts over the south transept and the pews are still in position.

Paula entered the church and went to the seventh pew from the front on the left hand side. For a few minutes she knelt in prayer. Before she left, she pinned a small white envelope containing a full report on Lowell Kaplan’s visit to Marburg to the underside of the ledge in front of her. Later that day, an old woman, also dressed in black, entered the Memorial Church and knelt in prayer precisely where Paula Schmidtt had knelt. The old woman was remembering, no doubt, a husband or a son killed in the war. When she departed, the small white envelope had disappeared.

7

José Rodriguez, the fat and swarthy Brazilian who had served as the Director-General of the World Health Organization for the past three years, was in his most expansive mood.

“Have a cigar, my dear Lowell,” he said, welcoming the American to his light and airy office on the top floor of the WHO’s new gleaming glass-fronted building overlooking Lake Geneva.

Kaplan declined. “I see you have not yet launched your personal anti-smoking campaign, José,” he joked, “in spite of WHO’s worldwide efforts in that area.”

Rodriguez laughed. He leaned back in his armchair, clutching the eight-inch Havana in one hand and waving the other as he talked. Smoke wreathed upwards.

“I never believe in practising what you preach. I can’t see what one thing has to do with the other. Besides, we never got very far with that anti-smoking campaign. We put it on because we thought we might keep you Americans interested in the work of the organization. But then you had the change of administration in Washington and nobody on your side seemed very much interested in the tobacco problem any longer. So we’ve more or less dropped it.” He looked wistful. “The trouble is this organization has been too damned successful on the whole. We had the anti-malaria campaign and got rid of the mosquitos. Then we had the anti-smallpox campaign. ‘WHO licks mankind’s oldest enemy: smallpox!’ That’s what the headlines said in 1977 and the funds poured into our coffers. But now we’re running a bit low on enemies and the organization’s finances are suffering.” He took another puff on the cigar.

The trend of José Rodriguez’ remarks encouraged Kaplan. He had wondered, as he flew into Geneva that morning from Brussels on the eleven o’clock plane, about the best way to inform Rodriguez about the Marburg virus. Rodriguez’ complaints of the lack of “sex-appeal” in WHO’s routine everyday work provided the opportunity.

“In my view, José,” he said, “and please don’t take this as a criticism, you spend too much time in this organization thinking about the classic diseases — polio, typhus, tetanus, smallpox, malaria, cholera and so on. The third world majority has been getting at you. The Africans and the Asians and even the Latin Americans are trying to turn the WHO into just another development agency. You won’t keep the organization going that way, José, because you won’t keep your major donors interested. And it’s the major donors who count, and the people in those countries who make up the aid lobby.

“No,” Kaplan continued, “what you’ve got to give them is drama, excitement, intellectual challenge. Take the Marburg virus, for example. Is there a greater single threat to mankind than Marburg?”