“Yes…” said Julia, and she paused at the memory of her friends. “So, you see… I’m writing about Ghislaine. As I mentioned in the e-mails, I am interested in many aspects of his life. How his research intersected with your work, what made you colleagues. Maybe you could tell us what you have been doing here.”
Another monologue ensued. The director had a kind of spiel.
“This was the very first primate testing center in the world. We were once the envy of the West. A thousand scientists worked here at our peak. As you can attest, our behavioral and medical experiments put us at the very forefront of the most groundbreaking medical discoveries. We even trained monkeys for space travel. Look.”
The bald director pointed at one black-and-white photo pinned to the wall behind him. The picture showed a pair of fragile, gawky, long-limbed, nervous monkeys strapped into two airline seats, with big grim metal bars to keep them in place. The monkeys wore white headbands giving their names in Cyrillic.
“Yerosha and Dryoma. Early pioneers of Soviet space flight. Yuri Gagarin’s direct predecessors!”
His laughter was sad.
“These were the glory days. But then we had… perestroika, and then the Georgian-Abkhazian war. The soldiers stole primates as mascots, some were killed in crossfire. They nearly destroyed us.” He exhaled wistfully. “Most of our scientists fled to set up a new center in Adler, in Russia. Many monkeys were killed. But I prefer to think of happier times.”
The director waffled on about the palmy days of the institute, when Ho Chi Minh and Brezhnev and Marshal Zhukov and Madame Mao were regular guests, when the scientists would fly to Texas — in America! — to give lectures to the backward Westerners. Julia found her senses wandering. The smell of monkey shit was detectable even inside the office. The sound of screaming, of that mad little monkey in the farthest cage, was mercifully muffled.
She nudged the dialogue along. “Tell me about the crossbreeding experiments?”
Sergei paused for a moment and stared straight into her eyes, quite disconcertingly; then he continued his apparently well-worn speech.
“Da. In the 1920s there was a plan to create a man-ape hybrid. Supposedly this would become a Soviet superman. The news said this… in their sensational way — but the truth is Stalin and the politburo just wanted a very reliable worker, with great strength and a less inquiring and distracting intellect, perhaps also a soldier who would be, as it were, devoid of conscience, therefore a better and harder soldier, therefore able to replace real men on the battlefield. Thus we could have saved human lives! The idea was humane.”
“I see.”
“It was a long time ago, Julia Kerrigan. The tests were conducted, originally, by Ilya Ivanov. You may know of him, eminent Russian biologist. Around 1900 he had perfected the technique of artificially inseminating mares; soon after this he produced crossbreeds between several different species. This is a picture of him here.”
Julia stared at the walclass="underline" at another black-and-white photo. An old man with a white beard and a white mustache — like Sigmund Freud in his later years — smiled softly back. He had a wise and paternal face.
“Professor Ivanov commenced these experiments in Africa, then in association with Albert Quoinelles, Ghislaine’s grandfather, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris…. Then the experiments were moved here to Sukhumi.”
“How successful were they?”
Yakulovich shrugged and sipped the last of his tea. “He took semen from human males, siphoned or collected from masturbation, and then he injected it into female chimpanzees, although nothing came of that.”
Julia repressed a shudder.
“And what then?”
Yakulovich shook his head. A wary expression crossed his face. “This is a very detailed analysis of my work? I thought we were here to discuss Ghislaine?”
“Er, yes, of course.” Julia was flustered. “I was coming to that.”
The director gazed at her and said, “It is rather curious, yes? Just a year ago another friend of Ghislaine came to visit me.”
“Who?”
“Marcel Barnier.” His eyes had a certain sly brightness. “Yes, yes, another great French expert on crossbreeding, and a good friend of Ghislaine Quoinelles! Look, I have Barnier’s card here, he came to visit us just a year ago, to talk. I knew of him through Ghislaine’s work in China and Cambodia.”
The director was proudly flourishing Barnier’s card. Julia took the card from his hand. She examined it. Her soul was sickening but she was determined to remain calm.
“Do you mind if I write these details down, Mr. Yakulovich? Barnier would be an interesting person for me to talk to. About Ghislaine.”
“By all means. Barnier is… a very clever man, a very clever man, a veteran like me, determined that the best of Communist science should not be discarded by history along with the less good aspects.”
“OK.” Julia felt the time had come. “About Ghislaine. There’s one particular question I thought you might be able to help with. I mentioned it in the e-mails, but as you say, you needed to meet me to talk.”
“And here we are. Please ask.”
“The Journal of French Anthropogenesis. Do you remember it?”
The director frowned, and shrugged, and said, “Not so much. A little. It was… just a… small journal, in the late 1960s, sympathetic to our Marxist-Leninist principles.”
“But you were the editor!”
“Was I indeed? Aha.” Yakulovich’s smile was still slightly stained with jam. “Yes, I believe I was the token Soviet! Da! I did no real work for them, it was an honorary position. I may have read some of the contributions.”
She felt her hopes revive. Tentatively.
“So you might recall a particular essay — something you might have selected, got peer reviewed — by Ghislaine Quoinelles, when he was very young. In the early 1970s. An essay on guilt and conscience?”
A pause. A heartbeat of a pause.
“Well now.” Yakulovich sighed. “I don’t know. We would have welcomed an essay from Ghislaine Quoinelles, of course, simply because of his name. His patronym? His surname, I mean.”
“His grandfather?”
“Yes, yes! Ghislaine was the grandson of Albert Quoinelles, who was a true comrade in arms! A Communist, and also a great scientist, a specialist in our field. So yes, if Ghislaine Quoinelles sent us an essay, maybe we would have read it with interest. This is true.” He hesitated, delicately. “But this magazine published many essays, I believe. And… I am trying hard, but I am afraid I cannot recall this particular essay.”
“But—”
“Please! Do not chastise me! I can barely remember my wedding anniversary, as my wife will confirm, let alone an essay written forty years ago. Hah. My friendship with Ghislaine developed later, in the later 1970s.” The smile was now entirely mirthless. “So is that it? Is that all you came to ask? It is perhaps a long journey for so few questions.”
Julia sensed she was failing. And yet she also sensed, paradoxically, that she was clueing into something. Ghislaine’s essay was, for now, a cul de sac. But what was this about Barnier? Marcel Barnier was the man in the photo. Why had he been here?
It seemed the pieces of the puzzle were scattered, but they were somewhere here, or hereabouts.