The Age Of Zeus (44 page)

"I feel sorry for him."

"You should. I do. Poor lad. My God, I loathed my own parents sometimes. Uptight, restrictive pair of cretins, they were. But I'd still rather have had them there than not. So many times I wished them dead, but equally I knew I would have been devastated to lose them. My mother smothered me, my father was a passive-aggressive bully. And then there was our rabbi, who seemed to be constantly around at our house, like a third parent. A pox on them all, but I wouldn't have done without them, even without Rabbi Rabinowitz, a kindly man in person but wrapped up in his Torah.

"And Xander had no one like that. No one he could rely on to the point where he was heartily sick of them. He had just me, absentee dad, whose chequebook was always open even if his appointments diary was not. And still he forgave me. Still he loved me. Small children do that. They have that capacity. They will love you boundlessly, unconditionally, whatever your faults and your shortcomings. And if you are good and attentive and you nurture their love, it will last. But if you aren't and you don't... don't..."

"Take your time."

"Thank you. This is pure self-pity. That's the only emotion that can still choke me up. I can go on now. Awkward moment over. Is this like one of your criminal interrogations, Sam? Am I like a suspect you need to crack?"

"I already cracked you, Mr Landesman. This, now, is just paperwork. Tying up the loose ends."

"Maybe I should ask for my lawyer."

"Only the guilty ask for their lawyers."

"Then I should definitely ask for my lawyer! Especially with 'bad cop' over there glowering at me. I hope we're not in for some of that police brutality one hears so much about."

"Just keep going, Mr Landesman."

"So, Xander continued to be my number one fan until he was about eight or nine, even if often he was adoring me down the phone or during a scant hour or two of together time that I could snatch on a Sunday afternoon."

"You'd even work on Sunday?"

"I was a driven man, Sam. Beyond workaholic. My job was me. I was my job.
Forbes
profiled me once. 'Captain Industrious' they called me in the headline, 'the hands-down most dedicated employer in the business world,' next to a ten-year-old publicity still that was the most up-to-date picture of me they could find. They weren't actually terribly flattering in the article itself, but that was mostly resentment because I kept refusing them an exclusive interview. I hate all that stuff, as you know. Always have, always will.

"But back to Xander. Our problems began - or rather, I began to be aware there were problems - when I started getting calls from his prep school headmaster. Xander was in trouble. Fighting other boys. Being disruptive in class. Stealing. He'd take money from the bursar's office. Break in, raid the petty cash tin, then trot off to the local village shop and splurge on sweets. I thought, 'Oh, this is harmless enough, it's a phase, it'll pass,' though I had a few stern talking-to's with him and pointed out to him that if he needed money as he had to do was ask. The Bank of Dad was never shut. Which, of course, was completely missing the point. Xander wasn't stealing because he needed money. He was stealing because he needed attention. My attention. It was the classic cry for help, and I in my stupidity and blinkeredness was completely blithe to it.

"Then he went to public school, and things just got worse. I sent him to Eton, naturally. What else do you do when you're filthy rich? The most expensive school in the land, where a year's fees set me back, oh, half a day's income, if that. Xander lasted four terms - 'halves,' I should say - before he was, ahem, invited to leave. After that it was a succession of schools - Harrow, Bedales, Charterhouse - working down the list until we were in the second division, and it was a miracle if Xander saw out a full term in any of them.

"And then even the second-division ones started refusing to take him, which is remarkable in that within the independent system there are usually no conditions of entry other than making sure the parental cheque doesn't bounce! But headmasters were talking to headmasters, and frankly Xander was getting such a bad reputation that nobody wanted him as a pupil. If it wasn't smoking, it was drinking, and if it wasn't drinking it was thieving, and if it wasn't thieving it was disruptive behaviour.

"One time, he stole a teacher's moped and rode it through the dining hall during lunch. Another time, he set fire to his desk in a history lesson - poured lighter fuel over it, struck a match, and chucked textbooks onto the flames to stoke them. He punched a French teacher who awarded him an F for a dictation - gave the man a lovely
oeil au beurre noir
- and nearly gassed an entire chemistry class by emptying a vat of sulphuric acid on the floor. Naturally I was able to soothe furrowed brows by offering handsome donations. I daresay there are several new science blocks and music faculties up and down the land that ought to have plaques on them bearing my name. And all the time, I was trying desperately to convince myself that Xander would grow out of it, that he was not a bad boy, beneath it all he was just hurt and misunderstood, he would come good eventually."

"And we all know how that turned out."

"Until you have children yourself, Sam, be slow to judge the parenting abilities of others. Xander ended up at an international academy in Geneva. His notoriety, thank heaven, hadn't extended beyond British shores. They took him in, and I braced myself for the inevitable explosion - and it never came. Something about the school, the environment, the Swiss climate, the polyglot peer group, I don't know what, seemed to have a calming influence on him. Maybe it was just being in a different country, putting some distance between him and all he was used to. It gave him perspective. That was what I thought, anyway.

"Xander knuckled down to his studies. He proved to have a great aptitude for the sciences, and in particular biology. He passed his International Baccalaureate in that subject with flying colours. I allowed myself a sigh of relief, letting out a long-held breath. The worst was over. We had weathered the storm. A place at Oxford beckoned for Xander. His future looked bright, and mine looked, well, certainly a little less vexing. I'd been right, I felt, to give him time, to let him work things out in his own way. My wait-and-see approach had paid off. This, as you might gather, was me justifying my own inaction to myself. I believed Xander cured of what was plaguing him..."

"Whereas in fact the problem had just gone deeper inside."

"Exactly! He'd figured out that acting up wasn't going to get him what he craved."

"Your full attention."

"Which equated to my love. He wanted me to show him I loved him, and to show it in ways that didn't involve shovelling cash at him, and he'd come to see that misbehaving only got him more of the latter and none of the former, so he adopted a different tactic. He decided to challenge me. I deduced this after the fact. If he couldn't get love from me to fill the void in his life, how about respect instead? He would make himself formidable, my rival, perhaps my better. He would become someone I couldn't fob off with money, someone I simply couldn't ignore. He resolved to excel in a single discipline and use it to compete with me and win. We had argued about many things, Xander and I."

"All those slamming doors."

"Yes. At first, as an adolescent, he would mouth off at me and I would scold him and we would row about that and also about how much or how little freedom he had, how I was trying to restrict him, how much he hated the schools I kept sending him to. Typical teenager stuff, really. All parents go through it. It's expected,
de rigueur
at a certain age. Adolescents stretch their wings, and their parents teach them the limitations of flight. But once all that was over the arguments turned ideological. Xander found that he didn't like what I did for a living. He thought it morally indefensible. Any number of times, I rehearsed the reasons why I have no problem with the arms trade - dirty job but someone's got to do it, and so forth. I also pointed out that my making weapons put food on our table and clothes on our backs. Would he rather we starve and go naked?

"But he wasn't having any of that. His riposte was that I was a clever man, I could have made my fortune in any of dozens of industries that didn't lead directly to murder, mayhem and maiming. Why arms? Why did death and devastation have to be my trade? And I would say to him that I personally did not pull the trigger or press the launch button, that was other people's doing. All I did was provide them with the means. It was their choice whether to use it or not."

"I bet that convinced him."

"You're right. It didn't. Not one jot. But I doubt any case I'd made would have. Xander had determined that I was in the wrong and that my career, my entire existence, was predicated on death. Worse, that I somehow relished death. That I was pleased to create the things that destroyed. He'd satisfied himself that the matter was that cut and dried, and nothing I said was going to shift him from this entrenched viewpoint. He simply dug himself more deeply into it as time went by.

"He was doing extraordinarily well at Oxford, flourishing there. His tutors, whom I made a point of being in personal contact with, reported astonishing progress. It seemed to them they had a budding genius on their hands, one of the biology greats, possibly a future Nobel winner. His discipline was terrific. He was attentive in his tutorials, thorough in his practical work, a regular habitué of the lab. In fact their only concern about him was that he seemed a little too devoted to his researches and experimentation, a little too fixated on work. They were worried that he lacked a social life. He was never at the pub or the JCR, he never attended 'ents' events at his college, he didn't do sports, he was the undergraduate least likely to be found parading around with a traffic cone on his head or dressing up in women's clothing as part of some rag week stunt or generally doing any of the oafish student things that so endear 'gown' to 'town.' He focused on work, nothing else. It was as if he had something to prove."

"And he did. To you."

"Indeed. By his final year at Oxford, Xander was specialising in pure genetics. That was his core interest. His obsession, one might say. He was using the facilities at the biology faculty to pursue various theoretical avenues that he kept his administrators mostly in the dark about. He'd tell them just enough to pique their interest and assuage their curiosity, the things they needed to hear in order to convince them to let him get on with it unmolested and unsupervised. He handled them cunningly. The budding genius got all the solo lab time he wanted and all the supplies and material he required, and not too many questions were asked.

"Which is why a senior professor had a hell of a shock one night when he walked in on Xander and found him in the process of trying to euthanase a lab rat. Not such a strange occurrence, you might think, only Xander wasn't attempting to put the creature down humanely by gassing it in a carbon dioxide chamber or injecting it with an overdose of barbiturates. He was chasing the thing round the room with a fire extinguisher, doing his best to club it to death with the base of the cylinder, and looking somewhat frantic about this too.

"Because the rat would not die. The rat took the fiercest blows he would deliver with that fire extinguisher and came up smiling. He was bashing it hard enough to crush every bone in its body, and all he got in return was an indignant squeak and a baring of fangs and a rodent that scurried away ever keener to escape the lab and its would-be executioner.

"Finally, still unaware of his professor staring incredulously from the doorway, Xander managed to imprison the rat under an upturned plastic sink bowl, which he then had to stand on to keep it in place while the captive rat hurled itself at the bowl's sides, desperately trying to break free. And almost succeeding. It had prodigious strength. It was able to shove the bowl along the floor even with Xander's full weight bearing down on top of it, nearly knocking him off-balance. The sides of the bowl were starting to bulge outwards, such was the force with which the rat rammed against them. It was only a matter of time before it burst through. This was not, the professor correctly intuited, any ordinary laboratory creature."

"Xander had done something to the rat."

"Very much so. The professor later confided to me that the animal's strength and resilience had been amplified tenfold, perhaps twentyfold. Xander had boosted its toughness at a cellular level, through manipulation of its DNA."

"Super Rat."

"Ha! Yes. Now, I'm a technology man myself. Engineering, physics, things that can be built from scratch out of manmade materials, things that are solid and fixable and that have predictable effects - these I understand. These are my métier. The organic world, nature, flora, fauna - simply not my sphere. Xander applied himself to biology precisely because of that, I'm sure. Because it was the antithesis of his father's forte.

"And so I can't give you chapter and verse on what Xander actually did to the rat. His professor barely could either, and he was supposedly one of the leading experts in that field of knowledge. Isolation of genes of interest, molecular cloning, transgenesis between unrelated species, prokaryotic vectors to aid transformation of the target organism, and a whole lot of other terminology was wheeled out by him to explain to me what Xander had achieved, or at any rate what the professor thought Xander must have achieved. He theorised that Xander had inserted genetic material from some other creature famed for its durability - he suggested a cockroach or an ocean-bed tubeworm - into the rat, in viral carrier form, and had used advanced restriction enzymes to facilitate the spread of the new genetic material through the rat's body. He'd managed to overcome one of the main obstacles to genetic transformation, rejection by the immune system.