The Moth (22 page)

And so that seemed okay. That seemed a reasonable explanation, and I got on with my career, and I became an Oxford professor, then a departmental chair. Then they knighted me, and then I got a Nobel Prize a few years ago. So that’s all hunky-dory.

Then in 2003, I decided to come to New York City. Both my parents had died. They lived into their eighties and nineties. And I came with my family to New York City to be president of Rockefeller University, on the Upper East Side.

And a couple of years ago, I thought I should try and get a green card. Have you ever seen those poor bastards queuing up at the airport when you come through immigration? They’re all people like me, who have to wait there for an hour and a half and have their fingerprints done. But if you have a green card, you avoid that.

So I applied for a green card. Huge amount of paperwork. You have no idea how complicated it is. Sent the thing off, waited a number of months.

Came back. And I was rejected.

I thought,
How come I’m rejected? I’m a knight. I’ve got a Nobel Prize, and I’m president of Rockefeller University, and they reject me for a green card? I know Homeland Security has high standards, but I mean, this does seem more than a little ridiculous.

So I looked through all the paperwork, and I eventually found out they did not like the documentation I’d sent with my application. They particularly didn’t like my birth certificate.
So I got my birth certificate out, and it was a so-called “short birth certificate,” which we have in Britain, which names who you are, where you were born, the time you were born, your citizenship, and so on. It doesn’t name your parents, but it’s a perfectly official document.

And so I thought,
Well, I can go and get the long certificate.
I knew the registry office would have it. So I phoned up London and said, “Please send that in the post.”

I told my secretary in my office, “When it arrives, bundle it all off again. Send it off to those silly jerks in Homeland Security.”

I went on holiday for a couple of weeks. Went to New Zealand. Came back. Was undoing all the mail, looking at my e-mails, and so on. Several people in my room—my secretary, her assistant, my wife, my lab manager. So quite a few people around.

And then I remembered that I had told my secretary to get this package sent off. So I asked her, “Did you manage to do that?”

And she turned to me, and she said, “Well, I didn’t do it because the certificate arrived. I looked at it, and I thought, um, maybe you got the name of your mother wrong.”

I said, “Of course I didn’t get the name of my mother wrong. Don’t be absolutely ridiculous.”

So she hands me the certificate, and everybody starts to look at me, you know? It’s a bit of a strange conversation to have. So I open it, I look at it, and there is the name Nurse, my mother. And I think,
Well, you know, not a problem there.
And then I look at it again, and the name is
Miriam
Nurse.

And that was not the name of my mother at all. It was the name of my
sister
.

So I’m looking at this, thinking,
Oh my god, the people at the registry office have cocked up again
, you know? And then I look a bit further, and where it says “Father,” there’s just a line. Just a dash. No father.

And then my wife comes up and says, “You know what this might mean, Paul?” And I was a bit slow, actually. I really didn’t quite realize what it might have meant. And then slowly the clouds rolled away.

My sister was eighteen years and one month older than me. Both my parents, who were actually now my
grandparents
, had died, but so had my sister, who was really my mother. She had died early of multiple sclerosis. So I had nobody to confirm if this story was true.

However, on the birth certificate was the place where I was born, and it was my great-aunt’s house, about a hundred miles from London, in a city called Norwich. And my great-aunt had a daughter who was eleven years of age when I was born.

So I phoned her up, and said, “Do you know anything about this?”

And she said, “Yes, I do.”

She said, “Your sister became pregnant at seventeen, and she was sent to her aunt’s in Norwich.” This is like a Dickensian novel, as you can see. “And she gave birth to you. Her mother, your grandmother, came up and pretended that the baby was hers. And she sent your real mother back home, and several months later she took you back, pretending that she was your mother.”

And we all lived together in this two-bedroom apartment for two-and-a-half years, and then my real mother got married and left home. And there’s a photograph of me in this wedding. And my mother, my
real
mother, is holding the hand of her
husband in one hand and my hand in the other. Because you realize, this was her leaving me with her parents. She never told her husband, so the whole thing was kept secret for over half a century.

Now, at the same wedding, I crawled under the table, a gateleg table, which had the wedding cake. And I managed to move the leg, and the wedding cake fell off the table and smashed into pieces. I wonder whether I was revolting at the thought of my mother being taken away.

But I was brought up happily. A little dully, maybe, by my grandparents, but this was only a tragedy for my mother. She had three other children, and she kept four photographs of babies by her bed. I only learned this after her death. Three were her legitimate children, and I was her fourth, illegitimate child.

Well, the final irony here really is I’m not a bad geneticist. And yet my rather simple family kept my own genetic secret for over half a century.

Paul Nurse
is a Nobel laureate and is president of the Royal Society of London and director of the Francis Crick Institute, where he also continues to do research in cell biology. He is the former president of Rockefeller University and chief executive of Cancer Research, UK. In 1999 he was knighted in Great Britain for his contributions to cancer research.

STEVE OSBORNE

H
ow you doin’? My name’s Steve Osborne. I was a New York City cop for twenty years. Now, a few years back, I was a sergeant in the Fugitive Division. Our job was to go out and hunt and catch the most wanted fugitives. This was the greatest job in the world. I loved this stuff. I used to love hunting these guys down, tracking ’em to wherever they would try and hide.

We’d find ’em, catch ’em, jump ’em, handcuff ’em, and drag ’em in. It was loads of fun.

I once tracked a guy down to the maternity ward while his wife was giving birth. Now, before you go “Ooh” and “Ahh” and all of that—he shot five people. When you start shooting that many people, I’ll get you wherever I can get you, you know? All’s fair. We would start work at four-thirty in the morning. We did that because we wanted to catch them in bed, sleeping. They were tired, they were groggy, and they were less likely to go for a gun or a knife or something else stupid.

Now, when we would come into work, I’d grab my coffee and sit at my desk, and there’d be a stack of warrants—five, six, seven of them, the guys that we were going after that day.
They’d usually be in priority order—the worst guy would be on top.

Now, the guy on top this day was this kid by the name of Hector. At the age of twenty-six, Hector was already a hard-core bad guy. He had been locked up a whole load of times, for everything from smoking weed to assault, robbery, criminal possession of a weapon, and his latest collar, an attempted murder. That was the one that I was concerned with.

Turns out he got into a beef with a guy, pulled out a gun, and shot him. The guy didn’t die, so
attempted
murder. Hector gets arrested and goes through the system. He goes to his arraignment, and the Bronx being the Bronx, the judge lets him out on bail with a return date of thirty days later.

Well, surprise, surprise, thirty days comes and goes, and Hector’s nowhere to be found. Judge gets pissed off and issues a warrant for his arrest. Now he’s my problem. I gotta go find him and bring him in.

Every warrant comes in a package. There’s the warrant itself, signed off by the judge. There’s the arrest report. And stapled on top is a mug shot.

Now, you’ve all seen police mug shots. You know, a guy standing there with the numbers across his chest? It’s the worst possible photo that anybody could ever take. I don’t think Pamela Anderson topless could take a good mug shot. Well, you know, maybe her, but, really, I don’t think anybody else.

So I’m looking at this kid’s photo. He’s sitting there, and he’s looking out at me, you know? He’s got the numbers across his chest. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve made hundreds and hundreds of arrests. And I can just tell by looking at this kid’s face that he is going to be a pain in the ass. He has these black beady eyes, high bony cheekbones, a pointy chin, a
scraggly goatee, and a pockmarked face. And he has a scar under his eye, like he got cut in a fight.

Believe me, it was a face that only a mother could love.

Now it’s time to get to work, so I go through my checklist. I got my vest, gun, backup gun, handcuffs, flashlight—all the tools of the trade, everything you need for hunting down bad guys. I get my team of six detectives together, and we head out the door.

And I got that spring in my step. I love this stuff.

We head over to his building—real bad building. I’ve been there a couple times before. Every time we go there, there’s a problem. Either they’re throwing bricks and bottles off the roof at us, or perps are fighting with us.

But it was early in the morning, and everything was quiet, so I was hoping to slip in, get this guy, and get the hell out before anybody even knew we were there. We go through the front door and into the lobby, and it’s a dump. There are bullet holes in the wall and graffiti everywhere. There are crack vials on the floor, empty beer bottles, urine in the corner. The place is a mess.

He lives in apartment 4B. We figure out the “B” apartments face front.

So I tell two of my guys, “Cover the front window.”

Now, you might think, like,
Who would jump out a fourth-floor window and try to escape?
But I’m telling you, desperate men do desperate things. And I guarantee you if he jumps out that window and kills himself, his family’s gonna be on the six o’clock news that night, swearing to God that I threw him out the window, trying to sue the city for $50 million. So two guys covering the window might save me a little bit of aggravation.

We go up to the apartment, and it’s like it’s choreographed.
We do this every day. I take one side of the door, one of my guys takes the other side of the door, and we listen. We’re listening for anything—voices, a TV, a radio playing, kids, a dog barking. Anything that might give us a clue about what we’re walking into.

We listen for a minute. Nothing. Everything’s quiet. So it’s time to hit this thing.

Now, the last thing I do before we hit a warrant is I always take the mug shot out, and I study it. I look at that face and commit it to memory. ’Cause a lotta times you go into these apartments; it’s dark, and there’s a lotta confusion. The family may be fighting with us. Somebody could be going for a gun or a knife. And there may be a brother, a cousin, an uncle, a nephew—somebody that looks just like him. So you want to know exactly what your bad guy looks like.

I take out the photo, and I’m studying it. And I see the little black beady eyes staring at me and that pockmarked face and that goatee and the bony cheekbones and that bony chin and the scar under his eye. I take the photo, and I hand it off to the next guy. He does the same thing. Everybody passes it around, and then I stick it back in my pocket.

And it’s time.

Now you might think that we knock the door down, but we really don’t. We knock. If I have to, I got a battering ram and sledgehammers and stuff in the car, and I’ll go down and get them, and I’ll knock your door down. But usually knocking works. So I knock on the door. We’re listening. Nothing. I knock a little louder.

Finally I hear a woman’s voice on the other side of the door. “Who is it? What do you want?”

We tell her, “POLICE! We got a warrant. Open the door.”

I hear on the other side of the door,
click, click, click, click, click
. You know, she’s got like, twenty locks on this door. As she’s doing that, we’re turning on our flashlights, unholstering our guns, and getting ready.

The door opens up, and there’s this little Hispanic woman standing there, with this pink fluffy robe and these little pink fluffy slippers. She’s in her late forties or early fifties.

And I say, “Police. We got a warrant. We’re coming in,” and we push our way past her.

So we go into the apartment, and we do our thing. We’re going from room to room flipping up beds, pulling clothes out of the closets. The reason that we do this is because these guys will hide in the tiniest, most unbelievable places. So you gotta be thorough.

So we’re tearing the place apart looking for him. No sign of him. I go back out to the living room, and I grab Mom.

I say, “Ma. Where’s Hector? I gotta talk to him.”

She has this confused look on her face, and she says to me, “My son is dead.”

My first reaction is:
Bullshit. Don’t lie to me.

You might think that I’m being a hard-ass, but I’m not. Believe me when I tell you, I’ve had little old ladies with rosary beads and Bibles in their hands swearing to God that they haven’t seen their little Johnny in months. Meanwhile, the prick’s behind the bedroom door with a butcher knife, waiting for us to come in.

It’s dangerous work, and I trust nobody.

So I tell her, “Look, you’re not helping him. Tell me where he is. Don’t make me hunt him down out in the street. That’s how bad things happen. Tell me where he is, or get him to turn himself in.”

With that, the daughter comes out of the bedroom. She grabs her mother, and they interlock their arms and hug each other. They’re scared. And it’s understandable; the cops are busting in their house early in the morning, tearing the place apart.