The Tenth Chamber (36 page)

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’ll do us good to distract ourselves with a bit of science. Have you ever heard of the FOXO3A gene?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘How about SIRT1?’

‘Not in my lexicon, I’m afraid.’

‘Not to worry. It’s a bit specialised. I’m not an expert either, but I’ve been reading up since your sample lit these targets up on our test panel like Piccadilly Circus.’

‘You’re saying there was additional activity beyond the ergot alkaloids?’

‘The ergots were only the beginning. Your broth has quite a few interesting properties. I’d describe it as a cornucopia of pharmacology. Had that phrase on one of my PowerPoint slides, actually. Thought it was apt.’

She wanted him back on track. ‘The genes . . .’

‘Yes, the genes. Here’s what I know. They’re called survival genes. SIRT1 is the Sirtuin 1 DNA-repair gene. It’s part of a family of genes that control the rate of ageing. If you activate it by revving it up with a chemical activator or, curiously, by calorie-depriving an animal, you can achieve remarkable longevity results. They work by repairing the damage done to DNA by the normal wear-and-tear of cellular processes. You know how it’s said that red wine makes you live longer?’

‘I’m a devotee,’ she chuckled.

‘There’s a chemical in red wine, especially Pinot Noirs: resveratrol.’

She nodded. ‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘Well, it’s an activator of the SIRT1 gene. Hard to do the experiment in humans, but give enough of the stuff to mice and you can double their life spans. And it’s not even all that potent a chemical. Presumably there are better ones waiting to be discovered. And by the way, as a plant person, you’ll be interested in knowing that the Japanese knotweed root is a richer source of resveratrol than wine.’

‘I’ll stick with my wine,’ she scoffed, but he had her attention. ‘And the other gene, FOX something?’

‘FOXO3A. It’s another member of that family of survival genes, maybe a more important one than SIRT1. Some describe it as the holy grail of ageing. There aren’t too many known activators of FOXO3A other than polyphenols in green tea extracts and N-aceytlycysteine so there haven’t been any direct experimental studies done manipulating the gene. But there’s some interesting epidemiology. A study of Japanese men who lived to ninety-five or over compared to chaps who popped off at a normal age showed that the old boys had extra copies of the FOXO3A gene.’

She squinted in thought. ‘So if you could boost this gene artificially, you could achieve longevity.’

‘Yes, perhaps so.’

‘Could a man live as long as two hundred and twenty years?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe if he took your broth!’

‘Okay, Fred,’ she said with rising excitement. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘As I told you, the broth lit up these genes on our screens. It’s not like I’m a genius for testing for SIRT1 and FOXO3A. Our robotic screens test hundreds of potential biological targets all in one go. Once I had that result, I did serial dilutions of the broth and retested for activity, and this is the really exciting thing, Sara: whatever chemicals possess the gene-activating properties, they are extremely potent. Many, many times more potent than resveratrol. And forget about green tea extracts. Not in the same league. Whatever’s in the broth is really extraordinary.’

‘You don’t know what it is?’

‘Heavens no! Our screens only detect activity. It will probably require a small army of smart organic chemists to identify the chemical or chemicals responsible for activating SIRT1 and FOXO3A. These structural elucidations can be devilishly difficult but the academic and commercial interest will be immense. What I would have given . . .’ His voice trailed off.

She stroked his good shoulder again. ‘Oh, Fred . . .’

‘My lab, gone. Everything, gone.’

She fished a tissue from her handbag and he daintily dabbed his eyes with it.

‘Do you think it’s coming from the redcurrants? The bindweed?’

‘There’s no way of telling without an awful lot of grunt work. Maybe there’s one compound activating both genes. Maybe two or more compounds. Maybe the molecule or molecules don’t come from either plant but from a chemical reaction involving heating all the ingredients in the soup, as it were. Maybe the ergots from the
Claviceps
play a role too. Really, it might take years to sort it all out.’

‘So let me understand all this,’ Sara said. ‘We’ve got a liquid rich in hallucinogenic ergot alkaloids which also has unidentified substances which could cause extreme longevity.’

‘Yes, that’s right. But there’re other wrinkles. Two more of my screening targets lit up.’

She shook her head and cast her eyes upwards as if unprepared to absorb any more information. ‘What were they?’

‘Well, one of them was the 5-HT
_2A
receptor. It’s a serotonin receptor in the brain which controls impulsivity, aggression, rage, that type of thing. Something in your broth was a very potent agonist, or stimulator of that receptor. Not much positive to say about the medical uses there. You might make someone quite nasty with that kind of pharmacology. The other target was rather more salubrious.’

‘And that was?’ she asked.

‘Phosphodiesterase type 5,’ he said with a glint in his eye, as if she’d get his drift.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘and that does what?’

‘PDE-5 is an enzyme involved in smooth muscle activity. Something in your broth was an exceptionally powerful PDE-5 inhibitor, and you know what they’re good for?’

‘Fred, this is so not my area.’

He grinned like an embarrassed schoolboy. ‘It would be something like a super-Viagra!’

‘You’re joking!’

‘Not at all. This broth of yours could conceivably make you higher than a kite, turn you into a sex machine with a very bad temper and make you live for a very, very long time.’

Luc watched her channelling Prentice’s pithy summation. An image of the priapic bird man in the tenth chamber flashed in front of his eyes, replaced, with a sad pang, by the thought of the gentle scientist who wouldn’t live to see another morning. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that Fred was gone. He needed her to stay strong.

‘And then you left?’ he asked.

‘Not right away. I stayed until they found a bed for him in the wards, then went back to the hotel to collect my bag. There was a knock on my door. I answered it and two men rushed in. I wasn’t even able to scream. One of them choked me.’ She started crying. ‘I blacked out.’

Luc held her again while she sobbed and told the rest of the story heaving into his chest.

‘I woke up in the dark with tape over my mouth. It was hard to breathe. I must have been drugged because time was way off, all screwed up. I think I was in a car trunk. I’m not sure. They could have taken me on one of the car ferries. I don’t know how long it took but when I got here I was a mess and I was dehydrated. Odile was here. She took care of me, if you want to call it that. It’s a prison. What do they want, Luc? They won’t tell me what they want.’

‘I’m not sure.’ He held on to her shoulders at arm’s length so he could look her squarely in the face. ‘If they wanted to kill us, they could have done it already. They want something from us. We’ll see, but you’ve got to believe me, we’re going to be okay. I’m not going to let them hurt you.’

She kissed him for that. Not a passionate kiss, a thankful one. She held both his hands, then inspected his left arm. ‘Your infection’s improving.’

He laughed. ‘What a small thing to notice.’

‘I was worried about you,’ she clucked.

He smiled. ‘Thank you. The tablets are working nicely.’

The bolt clunked and the door opened. Bonnet was there with his pistol again. ‘Okay, it’s time,’ he said.

Luc moved Sara behind him and took a truculent and threatening step forwards. ‘Time for what?’ he said. ‘What do you want from us?’

Bonnet’s eyes were dull. He looked like a man who was tired and weary but determined to stay awake. ‘You’ll see.’

They were in a cool windowless chamber the size of a primary school gymnasium or a town cinema. It was far too large to be the simple basement of one of the cottages. If they were still in the village, as Luc suspected, then the chamber had to be under the street, an excavation accessible from several cottages. It appeared that a number of corridors ran off from various points along its perimeter and he thought it possible that each might lead to a cottage.

The walls were the ubiquitous limestone block, but the floors were wood planks, smooth with age and covered with a patchwork of rugs, most of them large, fancy orientals in various shades of greens, blues, reds and pinks. The room was lit with cheap industrial fluorescent fixtures affixed to the plaster ceiling. Copper water pipes ran down the walls.

Luc and Sara were seated beside one another on wooden chairs up against one of the long walls. His right wrist and her left wrist were handcuffed to a couple of the copper pipes.

On the opposite wall a vintage phonograph was turning a vinyl record. The room was filled with tinny, old-time
bal-musette
– dance-hall, accordion music with an urgent tempo.

In the centre of the room there was a sturdy folding table. Bonnet and Dr Pelay were fussing over a huge aluminium pot on a large electric coil that glowed red-hot. The pot was the kind of model an army cook would use to make stew for two hundred men and the ladle was also out-sized. Steam was rising from the vessel filling the room with a sweet, almost fruity kind of fragrance.

Luc and Sara had smelled it before in the kitchen of their campsite.

Bonnet kept up a slow-paced monologue, talking loudly across the expanse of the room, over the music. The scene had the incongruous air of a chef doing a cooking show before a handcuffed audience.

‘I don’t have to tell you that these plants aren’t available all-year round,’ Bonnet said. ‘We have to harvest them when they’re abundant and store them for the winter months. It’s nice and cool down here so they keep well as long as we keep them dry. The berries and the bindweed, they’re dead reliable. Never a problem. It’s the barley grass that’s tricky. If they don’t have those black or purple lumps they’re no good. What do you call those lumps? I always forget.’

‘Sclerotia,’ Sara replied automatically, her voice dry with fear.

‘I can’t hear you. Speak up,’ Bonnet said.

‘Ergot bodies,’ Pelay told him.

‘Yes! That’s it, ergot bodies,’ he replied. ‘Without those, it’s rubbish. Unusable. So we’ve got to find the grass with the purple lumps on their spikes. Then we’re in business. You’ve got to cook it through and through but not to the boil. Simmer it, like a good cassoulet. You do it for as many years as Pelay and I have, you get a feel for it so it comes out perfect every time.’

Luc called out, ‘How old are you, Bonnet?’

The mayor stopped stirring and rubbed at his stubble. ‘I always have to think,’ he replied. Pelay chuckled at his show. ‘I’m not the oldest, you know. That fellow Duval, the pig farmer, he’s the oldest. I’m two hundred and forty-two but my wife says I don’t look a day over one hundred and eighty!’ Pelay found this hilarious and cackled like a woman. ‘I learned how to make the tea from my father, Gustave. He learned from my grandfather, Bernard. And he learned from my great-grandfather, Michel Bonnet, who, I’m told, was a monk in his younger days in Ruac Abbey before he left monastery life in 1307, the year the Templars were wiped out. That’s not bad, eh? Only four generations of Bonnets in seven hundred years!’

There was a plastic carrier bag on the table. Bonnet removed a red-leather book, the Ruac manuscript.

Luc shook his head at the sight. ‘Having trouble reading that, Bonnet?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes, except for the little Latin passage the fellow wrote in 1307, which goes with the family date I just mentioned. Maybe we’ll persuade you to tell us what it says. But never mind if you don’t. I think I know well enough what’s in it. The pictures tell a thousand words. This Barthomieu who was two hundred and twenty – I expect he and my great-grandfather were well acquainted.’

‘How often do you drink it?’ Luc asked.

‘Our tea? Once a week. Always late, in the middle of the night, when we won’t be disturbed by some idiot wandering through the village. Maybe we could take it less often but it’s a tradition and frankly we enjoy it. I’ve used it well over ten thousand times and it doesn’t get old. You’ll see.’

‘There’s no way we’re going to play along,’ Luc said.

‘No?’ Bonnet responded, shrugging. He dipped a finger into the pot and it came out red. He licked it clean and declared, ‘There, it’s ready. Proper Ruac tea. What do you think, Pelay?’

The doctor tasted some from the ladle. ‘I can’t remember a better batch,’ he laughed. ‘I’m sorry I have to wait.’

‘Well, you and me, old friend. We’re the keepers tonight. Special keepers for special guests.’ He looked around the chamber. ‘Jacques!’ he yelled. ‘Where the hell are you?’

His son appeared from one of the corridors.

‘We’re ready,’ Bonnet told him. ‘Let them know.’

Luc and Sara held each other’s free hands. Her hand felt limp and cold. There was little he could say to her except, ‘Everything will be all right. Stay strong.’ Soon, there was the muffled sound of a clanging bell. It persisted for no more than half a minute then ended.

The villagers began to arrive in knots of threes and fours.

None younger than twenty or so, by appearance. Mostly men and women well on in years, exactly how old, Luc could only guess. Odile arrived, looking guiltily at the handcuffed pair along the wall. There were maybe thirty or forty people her age. People tended to congregate with their peer groups, milling around, whispering, seemingly uncomfortable with strangers in their midst. All told, there were at least two hundred people but Luc lost count as the room filled.