The Teleportation Accident (27 page)

‘Doesn’t matter. Not about the play, this job. Look here: gave a million dollars for that theatre. Enough to get invited to the banquets at the Athenaeum Club, all that horseshit. But doesn’t get me any closer to the scientists. Need to find something out about this man Bailey. Met him, but he’s zipped up. Need a party on the inside. Scrape up some intelligence.’

‘In other words,’ said Woodkin, whose telephone call had summoned Loeser to the mansion, ‘Colonel Gorge hopes that if you are accepted into the community of the Institute, which is only three miles from here, you may have a good chance of harvesting some information about Professor Bailey and his activities. Colonel Gorge is very interested in these—’

But then Gorge jumped from his seat with a roar and ran out of the room. Before Loeser even had time to give Woodkin a puzzled glance, he had returned carrying a double-barrelled shotgun with an engraved bronze stock.

‘No, sir!’ cried Woodkin.

Gorge stopped, raised the weapon, and took aim. Loeser dived to the floor. There was an explosion and the bear’s head tumbled from the wall.

‘Got the fucker!’ said Gorge in triumph, barely audible over the ringing in Loeser’s ears. Then he looked at the perforated trophy on the carpet and blinked several times in confusion. Motes of cotton stuffing swirled in the air. The wall above the fireplace was speckled with a halo of buckshot. One of the bear’s glass eyes lay like some sort of ominous cocktail olive in a puddle of pink foam where Gorge’s half-drunk milkshake had been knocked over. ‘How do you think he got in the house?’

‘That was not a live bear, sir,’ said Woodkin, calm again. ‘That was merely the head of a bear that you shot once before in Montana.’

‘Head! Right. Beg your pardon.’ He looked at Loeser, who was returning tremulously to his seat. ‘Should have explained, Krauto. Noggin’s gotten worse. All sorts of trouble. Tell him, Woodkin.’

‘Colonel Gorge’s condition has deteriorated further. Some of the doctors are now calling it an “ontological agnosia”. As well as confusing representations with the objects of those representations, he now has difficulty distinguishing, for instance, the living from the dead.’

‘Won’t even tell you what happened at McGilligan’s funeral the other day. Almost as bad as the time I met that fellow with all the tattoos.’

‘I can only apologise, sir,’ said Woodkin. ‘It should have occurred to me to remove all items of taxidermy from the house the moment the doctors informed me of your condition’s progress.’

‘Well, matter in hand: what say, Krauto? Want to take on this play?’

Loeser didn’t. But although he’d had dinner with Gorge regularly since moving into the house near by, he still hadn’t reached the level of intimacy with his landlord where he could ask about Gorge’s collection. And he still missed
Midnight at the Nursing Academy
like a lost love. He’d experimented with literally hundreds of different publications borrowed from Blimk’s shop, some of them with contents that alarmed/baffled even him, but nothing had ever satisfied him in quite the same way. If he did this job for Gorge, then perhaps he could finally ask for the reward he really wanted.

The California Institute of Technology

Explore this university in a few thousand years’ time like the narrator of Lovecraft’s ‘The Nameless City’, thought Loeser as he approached on his bicycle, and you might take it for a grand complex of temples and mausolea: although he knew from Woodkin that almost no part of CalTech was more than two decades old, these buildings were the first he’d observed since he’d come to Los Angeles that one could plausibly imagine as ruins. The laboratories and libraries and lecture theatres – delineated with the clarity of architectural drawings under the noon sun by the hard black shadows of their own cornices and pilasters, lushly interspersed with paths and lawns and fountains and rows of cypresses – had a gravity that made them seem far more sacral than, say, the typical Californian Methodist church. Also, the campus, like most of the surrounding city, felt almost deserted, except of course CalTech did not have the excuse of everyone being locked up in their cars, and the proportions of its halls seemed to redouble its emptiness. No necropolis was ever so quiet. If it was term time, where were all the students? Not working, surely?

Loeser had arranged to find Marsh at the entrance of Throop Hall, an imposing domed administrative building in the local Spanish Colonial style. The breeze nuzzled an American flag on a tall pole not far from its portico, and the sky above was full of ribbons and ruffles and loops and bows and threads and all the other clutter of a dressmaker’s table. He waited in the shade next to his bicycle for twenty minutes before giving up and going inside.

‘I’m looking for Dr Marsh,’ he said to a woman behind a desk. ‘I’m supposed to be meeting him here.’

For a moment she looked reluctant to answer. ‘I’m afraid Dr Marsh isn’t available.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s missing. He didn’t show up for his eight o’clock budget meeting this morning. We called his wife, and she said he never came home last night. We think he may still be somewhere on campus. There’s a search going on. What did you need him for?’

‘My name is Egon Loeser. I’m going to be directing a play at the Gorge Auditorium. Dr Marsh was going to give me a tour of the university.’

‘Well, in the circumstances, I’m sure we can find another member of the faculty who’d be happy to show you around. In fact . . .’ She waved to somebody behind Loeser. ‘Excuse me, Dr Ziesel? Do you have a minute?’

This time, Loeser wasn’t even that surprised. Although his duties as the only ‘Jewish’ committee member of the Cultural Solidarity Committee of California had turned out to be pleasantly non-existent, he still went to receptions at the Muttons’ house about twice a year, and every time there were half a dozen anxious new arrivals from Berlin, most of whom he recognised. He’d almost resigned himself now to this toxic seepage of his old life into his new one. Still, Dieter Ziesel – that was going too far. Loeser noticed that he’d put on even more weight.

‘Egon!’ said Ziesel, before continuing in German. ‘What a delight. I’d heard you were in Los Angeles but I wasn’t sure when we might meet.’ He switched to English. ‘This is my colleague Dr Clarendon.’ Loeser shook hands with the scientist at Ziesel’s side, who was a tall gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves. His hair was steel grey and his palm was very smooth and cold. ‘What brings you to the Institute?’ asked Ziesel.

Loeser repeated what he’d told the woman at the desk.

‘I wondered if you might fill in for Dr Marsh, if you have time,’ said the woman.

‘I have always time for an old friend. Would you like to join us, Dr Clarendon?’

‘I’m afraid I ought to get back to the lab.’

‘Oh, shucks,’ said Ziesel, confusingly. He said goodbye to Clarendon and then switched back to German. ‘Now, Egon, is there anything in particular you want to see?’

Loeser didn’t want to take a tour with Ziesel, but he could hardly turn round and demand that the woman at the desk find him a less odious replacement. ‘I need to see the Gorge Auditorium. Obviously. And—’ Loeser hesitated. He couldn’t be too obvious about Gorge’s agenda for sending him here. On the other hand, Ziesel was probably too doltish to be suspicious. ‘I’d very much like to meet Professor Bailey.’

Ziesel grinned. ‘I bet I know why!’

‘What do you mean?’ How could he possibly know?

But Ziesel just winked and then led Loeser back out of Throop Hall. ‘Up here’s the Athenaeum Club,’ he said, pointing, as they walked north along the path. ‘It’s supposed to look like something out of an Oxford or Cambridge college – a bit pretentious if you ask me. Over there’s the Dabney Hall of the Humanities. And that’s the Guggenheim Laboratory of Aeronautics.’

‘How long have you been in America?’ said Loeser.

‘Nearly a year. Back in Berlin I published a paper on the subatomic properties of thorium that caused a bit of a stir – perhaps you came across it?’

‘Funnily enough, I did not.’

‘Well, anyway, I owe my job to that paper. They offered me a research fellowship out here and naturally I jumped at it – you of all people don’t need me to explain why! It’s supposed to be temporary, but they’ve told me in confidence that I can stay as long as I like. I would rather have gone to Princeton, but the weather here is better, and of course if I’d gone to New Jersey I never would have met Lornadette.’

‘Who’s Lornadette?’

‘We do have a lot to catch up on! Lornadette is my wife.’

Loeser stopped dead. ‘Your wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re married?’

‘Yes.’

‘To a living, human woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she physically or mentally deformed in any way?’

‘Quite the opposite.’

‘Did any money change hands? Was it anything to do with a visa or a work permit?’

‘No! We met and we fell in love and . . . it all just happened very fast. I’ve never been so happy in my life.’

‘Does she let you have sex with her?’

Ziesel blushed. ‘Egon, I mean to say—’

‘You’re married. You’re actually married. I, Egon Loeser, haven’t got laid in half a decade and you, Dieter Ziesel, come out here and straight away you find a wife.’

‘Been a bit arid lately, has it?’ said Ziesel, and chuckled. ‘Well, we’ve all gone through periods like that.’

‘Firstly, Ziesel, it is not funny. I know that, to people who have regular sex, the thought of someone else not having sex always seems like an amusing trifle incapable of inducing any genuine sympathy, but if I tell you that the closest I’ve come to sex in seven years is half undressing an erogenously narcotised maiden aunt, you should react as if I’ve just told you I’ve got stomach cancer. All right? Because that’s what it’s like. It’s the worst thing in the world. It attacks you on every level of your being. It is not fucking funny. And secondly, “we” haven’t “all gone through periods like that”. Don’t say that as if we’re the same. We are not the same. I deserve to be having sex. You, on the other hand, should be grateful you’ve ever had sex in your life. You must have got used to chastity a long time ago. I am not used to it and I never will be.’

Ziesel pursed his lips. ‘Look, Egon, do you want to go to Professor Bailey’s laboratory or not? I should have thought you’d be excited. Especially after what you’ve just said.’

‘Meeting some physicist is not going to make up for this fucking unspeakable injustice, and I don’t see what it’s got to do with anything I’ve just said. But, all right, we may as well hurry along. Lead the way, uxorious Dieter. Oh, by the way, did Heijenhoort come with you?’

‘No, he stayed in Berlin.’

Bailey worked in the Obediah Laboratories. This was a building, Loeser’s favourite yet, that resembled a sort of stone dam built by Aztecs trained at the Bauhaus.

‘Where are all the white coats?’ said Loeser as they went inside.

‘That’s chemistry,’ said Ziesel. ‘Physicists don’t wear white coats.’ He led Loeser down a corridor to a room that was labelled only ‘11’. The door was ajar, so he knocked softly and then pushed it open. ‘Professor Bailey? May we come in?’

‘He just just just left.’

Loeser looked inside. The man who had spoken was standing at the laboratory’s sink, soaping the taps with a washcloth. Loeser could see him in profile, except that he didn’t have a profile, which is to say, his face was a flat plane – his chin and forehead murally vertical, his nose squashed back against his skull, his mouth lipless, his eyes pasted on so far forward that they could have winked at each other sideways. The configuration was unnatural enough that it could surely only have been the result of some grim natal mishap involving a steel table or a concrete floor. He wore baggy grey overalls and had straggly black hair that looked as if it had spent a few days hexagonally loomed across a shower drain before he even grew it.

‘Oh, hello, Slate. Do you know where he went?’

‘Him and Miss Miss Miss Miss Miss—’

‘His assistant, yes.’

‘They went to the the the the basement to get get something from a supply cupboard.’ Slate didn’t look up from the taps as he spoke. Around him, the laboratory seemed surprisingly neat – lots of electrical instruments, lots of notebooks, and a large shape in the centre of the room concealed by a dust sheet, but none of the clutter that Loeser associated with science – except that on one of the desks there was for some reason a toy steam engine.

‘Thank you, Slate,’ said Ziesel.

‘Christ, he’s the sort of person that haunts your dreams,’ said Loeser in German as they went downstairs.

‘He’s a decent fellow, really.’ They turned a corner. ‘Oh, yes, here is Professor Bailey. Are you forgetting your keys?’ Ziesel asked in English.

‘No, the door’s jammed.’ Bailey must have been around forty, but he already had the tinge of late middle age: short, balding, and pot-bellied, he also swayed a little on his feet, reminding Loeser of one of those round-bottomed wooden toys that it is impossible to knock over. He wore a bushy moustache and the lenses of his glasses were so thick that, like an astronomer observing Neptune, he was probably seeing several minutes into the past. ‘Thankfully some younger, nimbler hands have taken over.’