“Of course it is,” she said. Her temper got the better of her. She pointed at him with the rolled-up Genetico brochure she was still carrying. “But this investigation is very important to me, and you’d better believe that anyone who lies to me about it is going to be fucked over, but good, before I’m finished.”
“Please leave,” he said.
The security guard took her by the left elbow.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “No need to hold me.”
He did not release her. “This way, please,” he said.
He was a middle-aged man with gray hair and a pot belly. In this mood Jeannie was not going to be mauled by him. With her right hand she grasped the arm he was holding her with. The muscles of his upper arm were flabby. “Let go, please,” she said, and she squeezed. Her hands were strong and her grip was more powerful than most men’s. The guard tried to retain his grasp on her elbow but the pain was too much for him, and after a moment he released her. “Thank you,” she said.
She walked away.
She felt better. She had been right to think there was a clue in this clinic. Their efforts to keep her from learning anything were the best possible confirmation that they had a guilty secret. The solution to the mystery was connected with this place. But where did that get her?
She went to her car but did not get in. It was two-thirty and she had had no lunch. She was too excited to eat much, but she needed a cup of coffee. Across the street was a café next to a gospel hall. It looked cheap and clean. She crossed the road and went inside.
Her threat to Dick Minsky had been empty; there was nothing she could do to harm him. She had achieved nothing by getting mad at him. In fact she had tipped her hand, making it clear that she knew she was being lied to. Now they were on their guard.
The café was quiet but for a few students finishing lunch. She ordered coffee and a salad. While she was waiting, she opened the brochure she had picked up in the lobby of the clinic. She read:
The Aventine Clinic was founded in 1972 by Genetico Inc., as a pioneering center for research and development of human in vitro fertilization—the creation of what the newspapers call “test-tube babies.”
And suddenly it was all clear.
34
JANE EDELSBOROUGH WAS A WIDOW IN HER EARLY FIFTIES. A statuesque but untidy woman, she normally dressed in loose ethnic clothes and sandals. She had a commanding intellect, but no one would have guessed it to look at her. Berrington found such people baffling. If you were clever, he thought, why disguise yourself as an idiot by dressing badly? Yet universities were full of such people—in fact, he was exceptional in taking care over his appearance.
Today he was looking especially natty in a navy linen jacket and matching vest with lightweight houndstooth-check pants.
He inspected his image in the mirror behind the door before leaving his office on his way to see Jane.
He headed for the Student Union. Faculty rarely ate there—Berrington had never entered the place—but Jane had gone there for a late lunch, according to the chatty secretary in physics.
The lobby of the union was full of kids in shorts standing in line to get money out of the bank teller machines. He stepped into the cafeteria and looked around. She was in a far corner, reading a journal and eating French fries with her fingers.
The place was a food court, such as Berrington had seen in airports and shopping malls, with a Pizza Hut, an ice-cream counter, and a Burger King, as well as a regular cafeteria. Berrington picked up a tray and went into the cafeteria section. Inside a glass-fronted case were a few tired sandwiches and some doleful cakes. He shuddered; in normal circumstances he would drive to the next state rather than eat here.
This was going to be difficult. Jane was not his kind of woman. That made it even more likely that she would lean the wrong way at the discipline hearing. He had to make a friend of her in a short time. It would call for all his powers of charm.
He bought a piece of cheesecake and a cup of coffee and carried them to Jane’s table. He felt jittery, but he forced himself to look and sound relaxed. “Jane,” he said. “This is a pleasant surprise. May I join you?”
“Sure,” she said amiably, putting her journal aside. She took off her glasses, revealing deep brown eyes with wrinkles of amusement at the corners, but she looked a mess: her long gray hair was tied in some kind of colorless rag and she wore a shapeless gray green blouse with sweat marks at the armpits. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in here,” she said.
“I’ve never been here. But at our age it’s important not to get set in our ways—don’t you agree?”
“I’m younger than you,” she said mildly. “Although I guess no one would think so.”
“Sure they would.” He took a bite of his cheesecake. The base was as tough as cardboard and the filling tasted like lemon-flavored shaving cream. He swallowed with an effort. “What do you think of Jack Budgen’s proposed biophysics library?’
“Is that why you came to see me?”
“I didn’t come here to see you, I came to try the food, and I wish I hadn’t. It’s awful. How can you eat here?”
She dug a spoon into some kind of dessert. “I don’t notice what I eat, Berry, I think about my particle accelerator. Tell me about the new library.”
Berrington had been like her, obsessed by work, once upon a time. He had never allowed himself to look like a hobo on account of it, but nevertheless as a young scientist he had lived for the thrill of discovery. However, his life had taken a different direction. His books were popularizations of other people’s work; he had not written an original paper in fifteen or twenty years. For a moment he wondered whether he might have been happier if he had made a different choice. Slovenly Jane, eating cheap food while she ruminated over problems in nuclear physics, had an air of calm and contentment that Berrington had never known.
And he was not managing to charm her. She was too wise. Perhaps he should flatter her intellectually. “I just think you should have a bigger input. You’re the senior physicist on campus, one of the most distinguished scientists JFU has—you ought to be involved in this library.”
“Is it even going to happen?”
“I think Genetico is going to finance it.”
“Well, that’s a piece of good news. But what’s your interest?”
“Thirty years ago I made my name when I started asking which human characteristics are inherited and which are learned. Because of my work, and the work of others like me, we now know that a human being’s genetic inheritance is more important than his upbringing and environment in determining a whole range of psychological traits.”
“Nature, not nurture.”
“Exactly. I proved that a human being is his DNA. The young generation is interested in how this process works. What is the mechanism by which a combination of chemicals gives me blue eyes and another combination gives you eyes which are a deep, dark shade of brown, almost chocolate colored, I guess.”
“Berry!” she said with a wry smile. “If I were a thirty-year-old secretary with perky breasts I might imagine you were flirting with me.”
That was better, he thought. She had softened at last. “Perky?” he said, grinning. He deliberately looked at her bust, then back up at her face. “I believe you’re as perky as you feel.”
She laughed, but he could tell she was pleased. At last he was getting somewhere with her. Then she said: “I have to go.”
Damn. He could not keep control of this interaction. He had to get her attention in a hurry. He stood up to leave with her. “There will probably be a committee to oversee the creation of the new library,” he said as they walked out of the cafeteria. “I’d like your opinion on who should be on it.”