The Sun Chemist by Lionel Davidson Read Free Book Online Page A

phone, because she knows nobody will be ringing her at Wimbledon.’
    ‘That crossed my mind, too.’
    ‘Has anything cropped up?’
    ‘It isn’t really as urgent as it was.’
    ‘I see. That’s why you’re ringing me, is it?’
    ‘What would you like me to bring you?’
    ‘I’ve just been seeing Hopcroft,’ she said. ‘He’s yarning away, perfectly all right, only his eyes keep crossing. Would you like me to go to Wimbledon and tell her all this – I mean, on the off chance of her being there?’
    ‘No, I wouldn’t. Don’t do that, Caroline.’
    ‘Igor, are the Russian secret police after you or something?’
    ‘That’s it, darling. Connie says there are some stunning caftans around. Would you like one?’
    ‘Well, I’d love one … When are you coming back?’
    ‘The twenty-ninth or thirtieth. If you do manage to contact Olga, could you call me?’
    ‘Because it is so unurgent. I do see,’ she said.
    ‘Reverse the charge, of course. If not, Happy Christmas.’
    ‘Quite.’ She hung up right away.
    I pondered this a moment, and jiggled the phone rest and got Meyer.
    ‘You didn’t bring it,’ was his gloomy greeting.
    ‘No, well –’
    ‘Okay, I heard. It’s serious. You’ll have dinner with me tonight . Today you will be busy. There are many things to find out.’
    ‘Chemical things?’ I said.
    ‘What else?’
    ‘But I’m no chemist. I haven’t the faintest –’
    ‘Persevere. They’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. Waste no time,’ he said, and clicked off.
    ‘Yes, well, our friend got it nearly right,’ Julian said with satisfaction, coming in at that moment. ‘I’ve just been speaking to Finster, who is handling the thing here. Mashed potato! It is a botanical species called Ipomoea batatas .’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘Finster says it is in fact a kind of sweet potato.’
    ‘Is he mashing it?’
    ‘To tell the truth, I’m not absolutely on top line what he is doing with it. You’re finding out, I understand.’
    ‘Am I?’
    ‘Meyer said so. Finster works for Beylis at the Daniel Sieff. Ze’ev will take you. Ze’ev!’ he yelled from the doorway.
    A response came from below.

Chapter Three
    ‘It is really a very simple problem of carbon chemistry,’ Dr Finster said. ‘There’s little of what you would call higher interest any more. It’s work, after all, from fifty years.’
    He didn’t look very pleased with it himself; he was wearing a pullover instead of a lab coat, perhaps as a mark of displeasure. Some hint of the reason for it had been given me by Professor Beylis, on whom I’d looked in first. The Weizmann Institute is a very high-class institute, and like its peers, the Rockefeller, Princeton, M.I.T., and so forth, is interested in distant advance on the frontiers of knowledge. The hall of fame and the name of Nobel hang in the air. In this climate, teasing out some further application of an ancient process long chewed over by commercial chemists was like asking for improvements to soap powder: very small potatoes.
    I was in Weizmann’s old lab; he’d worked here a bit soon after it was put up in the thirties. It was now Professor Sprinzak’s lab, and he’d ushered me over to the corner where Dr Finster was muttering at a small fermenter. There was that unsettling smell of a strong gas leak and of chemicals that had always instilled such dread on entering the school laboratory. The place had a cluttered, old-fashioned look: shelves crammed with jars, benches with retorts and Bunsen burners; numerous experiments seemed to be under way.
    I sat on a high stool and looked at disaffected Dr Finster and his fermenter. It was a cylindrical affair of stainless steel, electrically heated. Tubes and retorts issued from it to a glass jar. In the cylinder was Dan’s mashed potato – ‘We first must make a mash of our raw starting material’ – and in the jar what seemed to be a lot of water.
    ‘That’s it, is it?’ I said.
    ‘Yes. This is the product of