Elefant

Roux and two assistants were standing around a stainless-steel table, bent over Miss Playmate, as one of the assistants had christened the laboratory rat.

The rat was called Miss Playmate because she was naked. She was a neutered nude rat adapted to the requirements of the elephant tissue, a laboratory rat missing her thyroid gland to prevent her from creating T lymphocytes, the cells responsible for rejecting implants. This meant that Roux could implant the tiny section from the outer layer of the ovary without the foreign tissue being rejected.

Miss Playmate was anaesthetised and lay beneath the blazing surgical light, all four legs splayed apart and fastened with rubber bands. An incision had been made in her abdominal wall and Roux was working internally with a scalpel and pincers. One of the assistants held the wound open with tiny retractors, while the other passed him the instruments he barked for and dabbed, at ever decreasing intervals, the sweat dripping from his trimmed eyebrows between the surgical cap and mask.

The aim of the operation was to implant into Miss Playmate a piece of the Sri Lankan baby elephant’s ovary with thousands of egg cells not yet capable of fertilisation. The cells would mature inside the rat’s womb and after six months Roux would be able to genetically modify them.

He’d done this operation often enough, as testified by the tree shrews, rhesus monkeys and rabbits glowing green, blue and red in the darkened rooms along the corridor. But this was his first elephant egg cell. And – if everything went according to plan – the elephant he was going to create with it wouldn’t just glow in the dark: the creature’s skin would be an intense pink even in daylight.

This was Roux’s great discovery, known only to his colleagues and, more recently, a silent partner – unfortunately. He’d managed to introduce into the egg cells a combination of luciferins and mandrill pigment!

Luciferins are the compounds that make fireflies glow, for example. And mandrill pigment is the compound that produces the colours in the face and backside of the mandrill. Roux had used the red of the nose.

The most beautiful result of these experiments was Rosie, a ‘skinny pig’, a hairless guinea pig. Roux had injected both genes into the egg cell, which he then fertilised and implanted into the womb of a normal guinea pig.

After two months the surrogate mother gave birth to two pink guinea pigs. One was dead, but the second, Rosie, looked as if she were made from marzipan and glowed in the dark like a moving neon sign.

And without needing any light of a particular wavelength to be shone at it, dear Nobel Prize committee! Rosie didn’t merely reflect, like the laboratory animals of Professor Dr Richard Gebstein.

Gebstein had been Roux’s employer. He was the manager and owner of a genetic engineering laboratory that, among other things, undertook research into gene marking, which often involved the use of fluorescent proteins or enzymes. Roux came to Gebstein straight after he’d finished his PhD and worked for him for almost ten years as an underpaid researcher.

During this time he managed – partly by chance, partly intentionally – to generate a faintly fluorescent green rat, but made the big mistake of showing it to his boss. Delighted by this result, Gebstein gave Roux a not particularly generous pay rise and freed him up to undertake further research into his discovery, on condition that he didn’t disclose it to anybody.

Roux worked day and night on his secret project, and in less than a year succeeded in repeating his experiment. His boss duly feted him, but only a few weeks after this triumph there was a spanner in the works. It began with a trifling argument, when Roux was caught by Gebstein eating his lunch – a sandwich, as always – in the laboratory. Eating in a genetic engineering laboratory with this level of security was an infringement of the regulations, but Gebstein had never commented on it before, except for the odd ‘Bon appétit!’ On this occasion, however, he snapped at Roux, and Roux snapped back.

It was the beginning of a rift that soon led to his sacking. And when Roux read Gebstein’s publication on the interim findings of his experiments, which didn’t mention Roux once by name, it confirmed his suspicion that his dismissal had been carefully orchestrated.

The publication caused a sensation in the scientific and journalistic world and was even cited in research by Roger Tsien, Martin Chalfie and Osamu Shimomura, who’d been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of fluorescent green proteins and their application. Roux felt great Schadenfreude at the fact that Gebstein’s name was absent from the statement issued by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explaining their decision.

Roux had been out for revenge ever since. He’d set up his own genetic engineering laboratory with a single objective: to compete with and outdo Gebstein’s. For years now this thought had given him the strength and energy to work through the night, genuflect before bank employees and keep inventing new ways to see off the competition.

The scientific success of his firm had become increasingly incidental and the commercial success ever more vital.

His project had the potential to make a double breakthrough, bringing financial reward and scientific acclaim. If he succeeded in creating patentable animals that didn’t just glow in the dark but also were spectacularly colourful in daylight, he would be made in every sense.

When Roux couldn’t get to sleep in his short nights, he’d imagine Gebstein’s face – his neat white beard, blow-dried white hair, feathery white eyebrows, gold rimless glasses, the entire face designed to look erudite – making him the takeover bid that would be so huge he wouldn’t be able to refuse.

9

Zürich

13 June 2016

Schoch’s hand wasn’t the only one trembling. Around this time almost all of them had difficulty holding their cups in the Morning Sun. It smelled of filter coffee, boozy breath and damp clothes impregnated with smoke. The air was terrible, but if a newcomer stood in the open doorway for a moment, scanning the packed lounge for a free seat, those lucky to already have one would shout, ‘Oi!’ and ‘Close it!’

Most had spent the night outside or in an unheated shelter and were here to warm themselves both externally and internally.

Schoch normally came here to drink his second coffee every morning. He’d have his first at Presto, a shop in a petrol station that opened at six.

But this morning he’d overslept and had come straight to the Morning Sun. He preferred the second cup anyway. You could sit down here and the coffee was better. Although he’d taken a while to get used to the pious sayings that hung on every wall in this small, plain lounge, when facing the choice between pious sayings and expensive coffee, a homeless person didn’t have to think too long about it. Anybody who wanted to could get something to eat here too. But Schoch didn’t want to, not at this time of day. His stomach was still too unreliable. You could never be sure how you were going to react to solid nourishment. He needed to give it time. And a little coffee.

By noon his stomach had sufficiently settled down that he could give it something to eat. Depending on his financial situation he’d have his lunch either at Meeting Point, where people like Schoch came to shower and wash their clothes and could eat for four francs, or at the soup kitchen, where the food was free. If he needed something harder than apple juice to wash down his food, Schoch would dine at AlcOven, a meeting place for drunks, where you could also have a shower and wash your clothes, but were allowed to bring your own beer to accompany a cheap meal.

He usually took dinner at Sixty-Eight, where you could get a decent meal for free, but only in the evenings.

At this early hour – it was just after eight o’clock – most guests at the Morning Sun weren’t particularly chatty. But there were always a few noisy ones, those who’d already taken their first drink of the day. Schoch was one of the silent ones. He never drank before ten. And even when he’d had something to drink he didn’t say much. If he did speak, it was quietly, which lent him an aura of mystery. That and the fact that nobody knew anything about him. Everybody knew the stories of most of the others on the streets, knew what they used to be and what had made them end up here. But they knew nothing about Schoch. One day he just arrived on the scene with old Sumi. The two were inseparable, moved around together and supported each other when they were no longer able to stand up straight.

Supposedly, Schoch was also the one who found Sumi when he snuffed it. He didn’t die from drinking, people said, but from having given up.

Schoch didn’t get close to anyone else afterwards. He kept a friendly distance and remained a mystery.

A young man he’d never seen here before, probably a rejected asylum-seeker needing to go underground, freed up the seat opposite. Within seconds Bolle had sat down. Rapping his knuckles on the table by way of a greeting, he said, ‘Shitty weather.’

Bolle was one of the loud ones. He always had something to say, but it wasn’t always new. Schoch normally avoided him, but in this situation all he could do was acknowledge Bolle’s presence. He shrugged and focused on his cup.

Bolle was blind in one eye, which looked like the white of an undercooked egg. Hence his nickname, Bolle, from the old Berlin folk song: ‘His right eye was missing,/His left one looked like slime./But Bolle being Bolle,/Still had a cracking time.’

Bolle tried to get the attention of the elderly lady, one of the many pious volunteers who helped out here. When she looked over at him, he called out, ‘Coffee schnapps, please!’ He was the only one who laughed; everyone else had heard the joke plenty of times before.

Or they didn’t understand him, like the African man sitting next to him, who said, ‘No German,’ when Bolle, still laughing, repeated, ‘Coffee schnapps,’ and grinned at him.

‘No alcohol,’ Bolle explained in English.

His neighbour replied, ‘No, thank you.’

Bolle now had a laughing fit. ‘No, thank you!’ he repeated. ‘No, thank you!’

When he’d composed himself he turned to Schoch and said, ‘They’ve got a new girl working at Sternen.’

Schoch’s cup was by his lips. Before he took a sip he said, ‘Aren’t you banned from there?’

‘I was,’ Bolle corrected him.

Schoch put his cup back on the table and said in the same dispassionate tone, ‘Because you’ve stopped begging the customers for beer?’

‘Because the new girl doesn’t care. It’s all revenue, she says. Earned, stolen or begged, money is money.’ Once again Bolle had a fit of coughing and laughter combined. ‘Earned, stolen or begged,’ he wheezed.

Schoch failed to react and Bolle tried to change the subject. ‘Ever seen white mice? Not real ones, but in your head.’

Schoch shook his head. Pink elephants, on the other hand, he thought …

‘I have,’ Bolle continued. ‘Last night.’ His bloated red face suddenly assumed a troubled expression. ‘Do you think that’s a bad sign?’

Schoch wasn’t listening. The memory of the tiny pink elephant had suddenly emerged from nowhere. Had he dreamed it? Or hallucinated?

‘Oi, are you listening?’

‘How do you know they don’t exist?’ Schoch said. He placed a franc on the table for his coffee, got up, rummaged on the rack for his yellow raincoat and left.