The Virus (8 page)

“You are modest about your country’s achievements.”

“Perhaps. But let me go on. Professor Matthofer was in full cry. It was in her nature to put maximum pressure upon her people. Inevitably, there was a slip-up. The monkeys were caged in the lab. One of Irma Matthofer’s research assistants, a young chap called Peter Ringelmann, made some elementary error while handling an animal and got himself bitten. Shortly after, he fell ill. We believe that the source of his illness was the monkey bite. Five days later he died, exhibiting the symptoms which you, Lowell, have described and which you know only too well.”

“What happened after that?”

“Twenty-two other people died, every single one of them infected by Ringelmann. There was a positive contact in each case.”

“Good God! How can you be so sure?”

“Ringelmann had scars on his cheeks, freshly made scars. It was perfectly clear how they had been acquired; he was a member of a duelling fraternity. What only became clear later was that each and every one of the twenty-two other casualties had been present on the occasion of Ringelmann’s initiation. Three of them had actually been his seconds. The rest must have been involved in one way or another. Perhaps they had handled the blood-stained clothes, or had been contaminated by sputum. There might even have been airborne transmission — we don’t know.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Kaplan. “So you didn’t rule that out?”

“No, we couldn’t. Anyway, the long and the short of it was that we had a potential scandal of the first magnitude on our hands. It wasn’t just the deaths themselves that mattered, although, God knows, twenty-three out of twenty-three was — and is — pretty horrific . . .”

“To the best of my knowledge, an unprecedented medical phenomenon,” Kaplan commented.

“Exactly. But the extraordinary circumstances which surrounded the deaths were in a way more alarming. For, you see,” (he leaned forward in his chair), “on the particular night that Peter Ringelmann fought his duel, the Chancellor of the Republic himself and two members of his cabinet were among the audience. Once a Hessenkraut, as I told you, always a Hessenkraut. If that had come out, think what the student revolutionaries would have made of it. The government would have been brought to its knees overnight. God knows what would have ensued.”

The Professor leaned back in his chair and was silent for a time. Then he continued: “That was why, when you mentioned the Marburg virus this evening, I pretended not to know. As far as Germany is concerned, we have buried the Marburg story and the Marburg virus. It didn’t happen.”

“You didn’t wholly succeed. I told you we had Marburg data on our computer file in Atlanta.”

Schmidtt shrugged the objection aside. “I agree there were one or two references in the medical literature of the time. But these were purely concerned with the pathology of the incident. There was never any mention in the press of duelling or of the fact that the Chancellor was present on the fatal evening. We’ve kept the lid on the story for fifteen years.”

“Does it really matter if the story comes out now?”

A frightened look passed across Franz Schmidtt’s face.

“I’ve already said more than I should. I had better keep quiet. But I beg you, Lowell, now that you know what happened, to keep it to yourself. Of course the story must not come out. In Germany, old politicians never die; they don’t fade away either, they stick around. I said the Chancellor and two of his colleagues were there that night. That’s not strictly true. Half the cabinet, and I mean today’s cabinet, were there. It was a Gala occasion, the 400th anniversary of the Hessenkraut fraternity. They had all come down from Bonn for the occasion.”

“How the hell did you limit the outbreak?”

“We were lucky to be dealing with a controlled situation. We knew the names of everyone who had been in the fraternity house that evening. We took them all into preventive isolation. It stretched our facilities to the utmost, I can tell you.”

“Even the Chancellor?”

“Yes, even the Chancellor. We had him under observation for a fortnight. We gave out the story that he was indisposed with ’flu of a particularly severe kind.”

A thought suddenly occurred to Kaplan. “How do you know all this, Franz?”

“My dear Lowell, I was there.”

“You mean you were a spectator at the duel.”

“No, I wasn’t a spectator. I was a protagonist.” The words seemed to cost him an immense effort. “I was the other man involved. I was the maestro that evening; Ringelmann, the novice. Do you remember when we were at Yale together that I represented the University at the sabre? I . . .”

Schmidtt seemed to have difficulty in completing his sentence.

Kaplan got up and went to stand beside the other man’s chair. For the first time, he noted the scars which were three-quarters hidden by the bushy sideburns.

“I’m so sorry, Franz,” he said quietly. “So very sorry. If our computer hadn’t thrown up the trace, I would never have come here to remind you of all this. And Heidi. It must have been terrible for her.”

“It was. For years we have lived under a cloud. Of course, in the most practical sense I didn’t suffer, professionally speaking.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that when Professor Irma Matthofer was dismissed from the University, I received my promotion to be Head of the Toxicology Unit at the Clinic. That was the lucky break
—
for me, anyway. I felt sorry for Irma. It was yet another injustice coming on top of the first one. She didn’t deserve it. She was just the sacrificial lamb. They cooked up some story about the unreasonable requests she had imposed upon her staff, leading to a breakdown in laboratory discipline.”

“Didn’t anyone follow up the monkey lead? Wasn’t any attempt made to find out which of the monkeys infected Peter Ringelmann and where it came from?”

“I told you ‘no’. We had instructions from the highest political authorities that any follow-up of whatever sort would be regarded as treason.”

“Treason!” Kaplan was incredulous.

“Not just treason, but high treason!”

Kaplan lapsed into silence, trying to absorb what he had just heard. That the politicians had played the game with a heavy hand didn’t surprise him, though the efforts at concealment struck him as somewhat exaggerated. He wondered fleetingly if there were some person or persons in high places with a reason, apart from the Hessenkraut affair, for keeping a tight lid on the Marburg incident.

“And that’s where matters have rested for over fifteen years?” he asked at last.

“Until you came along, the file has been dead. I beg you, Lowell,” (he leaned forward), “leave it that way. I fear I have been dangerously indiscreet. If you start stirring things up, no good will come of it.”

Lowell Kaplan’s voice was gentle. “Franz, you know I can’t leave things the way they are. There was one outbreak of Marburg virus back in 1967. You were lucky and got it under control. There was a second outbreak this year in the United States. This time
we
were lucky; we got it under control. But one thing I promise you, Franz, if there’s another outbreak, we will not be lucky again.”

“Third time unlucky?”

“You said it.”

Schmidtt saw Kaplan to the door. On the step, Kaplan paused for a moment.

“By the way, what happened to Irma Matthofer after she was dismissed?”

Schmidtt hesitated for a fraction of a second. “I just don’t know. It was a great mystery. She just disappeared from one day to another.”

“And the cholera vaccine programme?”

“We dropped it like a hot potato. From the moment that monkey bit Ringelmann, the vaccine programme was doomed. We leave cholera to the World Health Organization.”

Kaplan walked back to his hotel through the sleepy streets. The floodlights on the Schloss had been turned out. The roistering students had gone home. The river Lahn ran quietly beneath the bridges of the old town. It all seemed so peaceful. And yet how much had gone on beneath the surface.

Tomorrow, he would begin digging.

He arrived at the Clinic early the next morning. Thinking about the problem overnight, Kaplan had decided that it was worth, even after such a lapse of time, trying to discover more about the source of Ringelmann’s infection. Had a monkey really been responsible? If so, where did it come from? Was there any surviving documentation on shipments of monkeys brought to Marburg from Africa in the late ’sixties? Another reason for heading in the direction of the University was the fact that the Schmidtts’ strange but attractive daughter, Paula, was now Head of Medical Records at the Clinic. It seemed too good an opportunity to be missed.

Paula Schmidtt, when he finally located her office, seemed surprised to see him.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you up bright and early this morning. I hear you and father had rather a late night.”

“Yes. It was late. We were talking.”

“And drinking!” She smiled. “I saw the glasses when I came down this morning.”

As they sat together in the cramped but well-ordered room, Kaplan looked at his old friend’s daughter appraisingly. As he had already had cause to observe, young Paula had grown up into a handsome woman. Her dark hair, like her mother’s, was pulled back from her forehead and tied neatly behind. Her brown eyes looked at him steadily. Her expression was composed; almost, Kaplan thought, too controlled. It was as though she had learned to discipline herself to the exclusion of all frivolity. He could sense that she was a woman of strong convictions, though he was not so sure that they were convictions of a kind he would wish to share.

“Tell me,” she said. “How can I help? My father told me at breakfast today that he tried to dissuade you from looking into the question of the Marburg virus, but that you are not inclined to be discouraged.” She looked at him frankly. “My father is frightened, Lowell. He truly believes it is better to let sleeping dogs lie.”

“And do you believe that?”

She was silent for a while. The expression on her face indicated that she was pondering a particularly difficult question.

“No,” she finally replied. “The past is the past, and the present is the present. After fifteen years, you are trying to track down the source of the original Marburg outbreak. You think it may help to understand what happened in this recent outbreak. I’m prepared to help you, Lowell, because I believe in the truth.”

Lowell Kaplan did not doubt the conviction with which the young woman spoke. He wondered, nevertheless, whether Paula Schmidtt, a product of West Germany’s radical ’sixties, would ever truly take sides with someone like himself, whose bags and baggage were so clearly marked with the stamp of U.S. Government. Brushing these reflections aside, he expressed his gratitude for her cooperation and came straight to the point:

“Franz told me that the student Ringelmann was bitten by one of the laboratory animals — a monkey — during an experiment. Apparently there was a lapse in the handling precautions. From what Franz told me the presumption has always been that the monkey was the original vector of the Marburg virus. My question is: were any tests done on the animal and do you have records of those tests?”

She shook her head. “I’ve talked to my father about this in the past. Yes, we think a monkey was responsible. Ringelmann, before he lapsed into insanity, said he thought he might have been bitten, though we were never able to find any skin punctures.”

“Did you do an autopsy?”

“No. We ruled that out straightaway as being too dangerous. Ringelmann’s body was incinerated without autopsy.”

Kaplan nodded. “We had a similar problem in New York. Mind you, I couldn’t get the people to do the autopsy anyway. They just refused point blank.”

Paula Schmidtt smiled in sympathy. “In Germany, workers never refuse to work!”

She resumed her story. “So we never knew if Ringelmann had indeed been bitten by a monkey. And, if he had, we certainly never knew which monkey. In view of the nature of Ringelmann’s illness, we thought it best to take no chances at all. It was decided to gas every single monkey being held for research purposes at the Clinic at that time. They were gassed without being moved, in their cages or wherever they were to be found. Their bodies were disposed of under safe and sterile conditions.”

“How?”

“All the research animals together with any materials associated with them were incinerated at temperatures of over 1000°F. A whole wing of the Clinic was closed down, and it didn’t reopen for six months.”

Kaplan sensed that this enquiry was leading nowhere. He could see that Paula Schmidtt was trying to be helpful, but they weren’t moving in the right direction.

“So you have no records of any tests performed on the monkeys themselves.”

“No.”

“Do you know where the monkeys came from?”

Once more she shook her head. “I thought my father told you that the whole issue was shoved under the mat. There were no enquiries. We came through in 1967 by the skin of our teeth. Nobody was going to start rocking the boat by instituting enquiries which had been expressly forbidden on the highest authority.”

He pressed her. “But you say you had wished to make enquiries? Would you have been able to? Back in 1967, were proper records kept of the movement of animals, of the arrival and departure of monkeys, and so on?”

Paula Schmidtt drew herself up proudly. It was almost as though he had issued a challenge. “In Germany, we always keep records.” She gave a wave of her hand. “In this building, we have records going back for the last ten years. Every single patient who has passed through this clinic, every single experiment which has been conducted, has been fully documented, and you will find the details here on microfilm.”

“What about fifteen years ago and more? Do you still have those records?”

She shook her head. “Not here. Not at the Clinic.” Then she appeared to remember something. “There’s just a chance that there are some old records at the Schloss. We used to store them there before the new Clinic was built. In the old days, most of the medical department was up by the Landgraf Schloss. They may still have some files there. Although I believe they’ve begun a programme to clear most of the old stuff away because they need the space for a tourist cafeteria.”