Irving Wallace - The Prize

‘I wondered where you were,’ she said to Claude viciously.

Claude’s social smile froze. ‘Miss Norberg was interested in spermatozoa-’

‘ Quelle surprise! ’

Märta Norberg appeared not to have overheard her. She was searching off for someone in the room. ‘Well, I’ll leave you two together,’ she said formally. ‘Your charming husband, Dr. Marceau, made me entirely forget I was the hostess. I must circulate.’ And then to Claude she added, ‘It was divine. Now, remember, my dear, keep one frozen sperm for Norberg. I may need it one day, if I don’t find a man soon.’

Gracefully, she inclined her head, and slouching, long-striding, she was gone.

‘ “Keep one frozen sperm for Norberg,” ’ Denise mimicked. ‘The shameless bitch. I will wager this is the only time she has been vertical all year.’

Claude showed pain. ‘Denise, is this continuous vulgarity necessary? Miss Norberg is a decent, utterly captivating lady.’

‘Like someone else we know?’

He affected not to have heard her. ‘How was your Dr. Lindblom?’

‘A hotheaded Don Juan,’ she said savagely. ‘I had to fight to keep from being raped… Now get me a natural drink, you synthetic husband.’

‘What does that mean? Are you going to be difficult tonight?’

‘You may be sure of that, mon brave ,’ said Denise Marceau.

All through the cocktail hour, Andrew Craig had been trying to catch Emily’s eye. Now, with his second double Scotch in hand, he succeeded. She turned her head in his direction, knowing that he was staring at her, and he made a movement of his head to invite her to join him, but she replied with a quick, helpless shrug.

He understood. Her circle had enlarged. Baron Stiernfeldt and his wife, Mrs. Lagersen, and Margherita Farelli were still there, although Dr. Carlo Farelli had disappeared. And to this group had been added, since the last time Craig had looked, the persons of Ragnar Hammarlund, Konrad Evang, and General Vasilkov and his wife. It was the largest circle in the room, and it irritated Craig that the men were being attentive to Emily. Inevitably, he thought. She was irresistible to the male. Wherever she shone, the moths would bat about the flame.

At last, he conceded to himself that she could not escape from the others. He was on his own. He wheeled slowly to take in the remaining occupants in the room. Leah was still involved with Saralee Garrett and another woman, Miss Svensson, the opera singer. Craig saw that Leah kept glancing at him worriedly, and this posed a minor threat, for she might make up her mind that he was lonely. A second threat, too, was gradually drawing nearer. The actress, Märta Norberg, appeared to be approaching him. For a time, she had been with Claude Marceau, but twice he had caught her studying him. She had left both Marceaus at the other end of the bar, and by a circuitous route, first briefly engaged with Dr. Lindblom in conversation, then exchanging a few words with the butler, Motta, and now, after looking in on Leah and her ladies, she would undoubtedly be headed for him. He was next. There could be worse fates, he knew.

As a younger man, watching Norberg’s unapproachable enlarged image on countless motion-picture screens, enchanted by her gifts behind the footlights, Craig had shared in common with millions of other males certain wish fantasies. The years had been kind to Norberg, he told himself now. She was ageless, and still a lithe symbol of all desired and unattainable. Yet through some perversity, now that he had an opportunity to converse with her on intimate terms, as an equal almost, he was reluctant to do so. He was in no mood for banter about the entertainment world. He was in no mood to listen to her glories. His mind was on Emily Stratman, only Emily, with an occasional bewilderment about Lilly.

He gulped down the last of the second drink, and suddenly felt stifled in the overheated room. He wondered where he might cool off, in isolation, free to sort out his thoughts. His gaze passed along the exits from the living-room, and held, finally, on the French doors near the indefatigable orchestra. One of the French doors was ajar. It was all the encouragement that Craig needed.

Giving his empty glass to Motta, and rejecting a refill, he walked to one French door, and, hoping that he was not being observed, edged through it and closed it behind him.

The cold night air, not so bitter as other evenings, braced him. For the eternity of a minute, he stood motionless on the flagstones, inhaling the night and peering up at the clear navy-blue sky with its infinity of miniature stars like erratic strands of gay Christmas-tree lights. After a while, he drew back into himself, and strolled around the veranda, romantically and dimly lighted by antique English coach lamps. He considered Emily, and then Leah, and then Lilly, in that order, and tried to relate them each separately to Miller’s Dam and Lucius Mack and Joliet College and Return to Ithaca .

He had reached the low stone balustrade that partitioned the veranda from the gardens, and absently he looked below, at the bush clumps and intersecting paths, and the hothouses in the distance. That moment, he realized with surprise he was not alone. Two male figures, directly beneath him, were moving across the lawn from the veranda stairs to the nearest garden path.

By straining his eyes, he made them out at last. The bulkier one, progressing with fluid ease, was Carlo Farelli. The other, progressing in fits and starts, nervously, jumpily, was John Garrett.

Briefly, Craig speculated on what the two winners in physiology and medicine, who were comparative strangers, would have to say to one another. His writer’s mind wrote. Would they exchange shop-talk, medical talk? But why out here in the cold night? Why not inside the warm house? Or was it something else? Something private?

‘Because it’s something private, that’s what,’ said John Garrett belligerently, in reply to Farelli’s question, as they reached the gravel garden path.

Farelli good-naturedly protested once more. ‘But in this frozen weather? I am a Latin, do not forget. My blood is thin.’

‘I know, I know about your blood,’ said Garrett with a rasp. Whenever he drank excessively, and tonight he had, his voice grew hoarse. Now it was not only hoarse but strained with hatred long repressed.

‘If what you must tell me is so private, we can ask Hammarlund for his library. We can enjoy the civilized amenities as we converse. Shall we?’

Farelli halted and looked hopefully at Garrett’s unremarkable face, now flushed. Garrett halted, too, and swayed.

‘No,’ he said. ‘What I have to say-there should be no one around.’

‘You are certainly enigmatical, Dr. Garrett.’

Garrett pulled himself together, trying to attain his full height, trying to match his enemy in strength and power of physique. It had been after the meeting with Dr. Erik Öhman, on his return from the failure at the Royal Caroline Medico-Chirurgical Institute, that he had come to this decision, the decision to have a showdown with Farelli. He could no longer postpone the inevitable. Farelli’s promoter tactics were steam-rolling him. Farelli’s trick at the Caroline Institute, taking advantage of Öhman and him, using Sue Wiley, crowing to all the world that he alone was the medical savant, that Garrett did not exist. Well, at least in one intrigue, Farelli had tripped. Now Dr. Öhman knew that Farelli was a charlatan, and a disgrace to the profession and the Nobel honour roll. Now Dr. Öhman knew that Farelli had used him badly.

Garrett’s intensity, overlaid on Öhman’s debt to Garrett and worship of Garrett, had converted the Swede into a dependable ally, if one were needed. But now, Garrett did not need an ally. He had looked forward to this night’s truth session with Farelli. Once Farelli realized that Garrett had his number, once Farelli understood that Garrett was on to his manipulations, the Italian would cease and desist. He would not dare to continue as he had. Then, and only then, would Garrett be free, at last, to receive the full credit for discovery that was rightfully his own.