Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'Amanita caesaria,' he said. 'Not what you think,' he added when he saw the look on my face.

'I know what an amanita is.'

'Not all amanitae are poisonous. This one is harmless.'

'What is it?' I said, taking it from his hand and holding it to the light. 'A hallucinogen?'

'No. Actually they are good to eat – the Romans liked them a great deal – but people avoid them as a rale because they are so easily confused with their evil twin.'

'Evil twin?'

'Amanita phalloides,' said Henry mildly. 'Death cap.'

I didn't say anything for a moment.

'What are you going to do?' I finally asked.

'What do you think?'

I got up, agitated, and walked to my desk. Henry put the mushroom back in his pocket and lit a cigarette. 'Do you have an ashtray?' he said courteously.

I gave him an empty soda can. His cigarette was nearly finished before I spoke. 'Henry, I don't think this is a good idea.'

He raised an eyebrow. 'Why not?'

Why not, he asks me. 'Because,' I said, a little wildly, 'they can trace poison. Any kind of poison. Do you think if Bunny keels over dead, people won't find it peculiar? Any idiot of a coroner can '

'I know that,' said Henry patiently. 'Which is why I'm asking you about the dosage.'

'That has nothing to do with it. Even a tiny amount can be '

'- enough to make one extremely ill,' Henry said, lighting another cigarette. 'But not necessarily lethal.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean,' he said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, 'that strictly in terms of virulence there are any number of excellent poisons, most of them far superior to this. The woods will be soon full of foxglove and monkshood. I could get all the arsenic I needed from flypaper. And even herbs that aren't common here – good God, the Borgias would have wept to see the health-food store I found in Brattleboro last week. Hellebore, mandrake, pure oil of wormwood… I suppose people will buy anything if they think it's natural. The wormwood they were selling as organic insect repellent, as if that made it safer than the stuff at the supermarket. One bottle could have killed an army.'

He toyed with his glasses again. 'The problem with these things – excellent though they are – is one, as you said, of administration.

Amatoxins are messy, as poisons go. Vomiting, jaundice, convulsions.

Not like some of the little Italian comfortives, which are relatively quick and kind. But, on the other hand, what could be easier to give? I'm not a botanist, you know. Even mycologists have a hard time telling amanitae apart. Some handpicked mushrooms… a few bad ones get mixed in the lot… one friend gets dreadfully ill and the other…?' He shrugged.

We looked at each other.

'How can you be sure you won't get too much yourself?' I asked him.

'I suppose I can't be, really,' he said. 'My own life must be plausibly in danger, so you can see I have a delicate margin to work with. But still, chances are excellent that I can bring it off.

All I have to worry about is myself, you know. The rest will take care of itself.'

I knew what he meant. The plan had several grave flaws, but this was its genius: if anything could be relied upon with almost mathematical certainty, it was that Bunny, at any given meal, would somehow manage to eat almost twice as much as anyone else.

Henry's face was pale and serene through the haze of his cigarette. He put his hand in his pocket and produced the mushroom again.

'Now,' he said. 'A single cap, roughly this size, of A. phalloides is enough to make a healthy seventy-pound dog quite ill. Vomiting, diarrhea, no convulsions that I saw. I don't think there was anything as severe as liver dysfunction but I suppose we will have to leave that to the veterinarians. Evidently '

'Henry, how do you know this?'

He was silent for a moment. Then he said: 'Do you know those two horrible boxer dogs who belong to the couple who live upstairs?'

It was dreadful but 1 had to laugh, 1 couldn't help it. 'No,' i said. 'You didn't.'

'I'm afraid I did,' he said dryly, mashing out his cigarette. 'One of them is fine, unfortunately. The other one won't be dragging garbage up on my front porch anymore. It was dead in twenty hours, and only of a slightly larger dose – the difference perhaps of a gram. Knowing this, it seems to me that I should be able to prescribe how much poison each of us should get. What worries me is the variation in concentration of poison from one mushroom to the next. It's not as if it's measured out by a pharmacist. Perhaps I'm wrong – I'm sure you know more about it than I do – but a mushroom that weighs two grams might well have just as much as one that weighs three, no? Hence my dilemma.'

He reached into his breast pocket and took out a sheet of paper covered with numbers. 'I hate to involve you in this, but no one else knows a thing about math and I'm far from reliable myself. Will you have a look?'

Vomiting, jaundice, convulsions. Mechanically, I took the sheet of paper from him. It was covered with algebraic equations, but at the moment algebra was frankly the last thing on my mind. I shook my head and was on the point of handing it back when I looked up at him and something stopped me. I was in the position, I realized, to put an end to this, now, right here. He really did need my help, or else he wouldn't have come to me; emotional appeals, I knew, were useless but if I pretended that I knew what I was doing I might be able to talk him out of it.

I took the paper to my desk and sat down with a pencil and forced myself through the tangle of numbers step by step.

Equations about chemical concentration were never my strong point in chemistry, and they are difficult enough when you are trying to figure a fixed concentration in a suspension of distilled water; but this, dealing as it did with varying concentrations in irregularly shaped objects, was virtually impossible. He had probably used all the elementary algebra he knew in figuring this, and as far as I could follow him he hadn't done a bad job; but this wasn't a problem that could be worked with algebra, if it could be worked at all. Someone with three or four years of college calculus might have been able to come up with something that at least looked more convincing; by tinkering, I was able to narrow his ratio slightly but I had forgotten most of the little calculus I knew and the answer I wound up with, though probably closer than his own, was far from correct.

I put down my pencil and looked up. The business had taken me about half an hour. Henry had got a copy of Dante's Purgatorio from my bookshelf and was reading it, absorbed.

'Henry.'

He glanced up absently.

'Henry, I don't think this is going to work.'

He closed the book on his finger. 'I made a mistake in the second part,' he said. 'Where the factoring begins.'

'It's a good try, but just by looking at it I can tell that it's insolvable without chemical tables and a good working knowledge of calculus and chemistry proper. There's no way to figure it otherwise. I mean, chemical concentrations aren't even measured in terms of grams and milligrams but in something called moles.'

'Can you work it for me?'

Tm afraid not, though I've done as much as I can. Practically speaking, I can't give you an answer. Even a math professor would have a tough time with this one.'

'Hmn,' said Henry, looking over my shoulder at the paper on the desk. 'I'm heavier than Bun, you know. By twenty-five pounds. That should count for something, shouldn't it?'

'Yes, but the difference of size isn't large enough to bank on, not with a margin of error potentially this wide. Now, if you were fifty pounds heavier, maybe 'The poison doesn't take effect for at least twelve hours,' he said. 'So even if I overdose I'll have a certain advantage, a grace period. With an antidote on hand for myself, just in case…'