This is my beautiful son John.
Mme. van den Logh is in a coma. She may not live.
The bankers want a meeting with you. Now. They’ve decided to call in their loans.
She felt choked, as though everything was beginning to close in on her at once. For the first time Elizabeth wondered if she was going to be able to cope. The burdens were too heavy, and they were piling up too fast. She swung around in her chair, to look up at the portrait of old Samuel hanging on the wall. He looked so competent, so sure. But she knew about his doubts and uncertainties, and his black despairs. Yet he had come through. She would survive somehow, too. She was a Roffe.
She noticed that the portrait was askew. Probably as a result of the elevator crash. Elizabeth got up to straighten it. As she tilted the picture, the hook holding it gave way, and the painting crashed to the floor. Elizabeth did not even look at it. She was staring at the place where the painting had hung. Taped to the wall was a tiny microphone.
It was 4 A.M., and Emil Joeppli was working late again. It had become a habit of his recently. Even though Elizabeth Roffe had not given him a specific deadline, Joeppli knew how important this project was to the company and he was pushing to get it finished as quickly as possible. He had heard disturbing rumors about Roffe and Sons lately. He wanted to do everything he could to help the company. It had been good to him. It gave him a handsome salary and complete freedom. He had liked Sam Roffe, and he liked his daughter too. Elizabeth Roffe would never know, but these late hours were Joeppli’s gift to her. He was hunched over his small desk, checking out the results of his last experiment. They were even better than he had anticipated. He sat there, deep in concentration, unaware of the fetid smell of the caged animals in the laboratory or the cloying humidity of the room or the lateness of the hour. The door opened, and the guard on the graveyard shift, Sepp Nolan, walked in. Nolan hated this shift. There was something eerie about the deserted experimental laboratories at night. The smell of the caged animals made him ill. Nolan wondered whether all the animals they had killed here had souls and came back to haunt these corridors. I ought to put in for spook pay, he thought. Everyone in the building had long since gone home. Except for this fucking mad scientist with his cages full of rabbits and cats and hamsters.
“How long you gonna be, Doc?” Nolan asked.
Joeppli looked up, aware of Nolan for the first time. “What?”
“Ji you’re gonna be here awhile, I can bring you back a sandwich or something. I’m gonna run over to the commissary for a quick bite.”
Joeppli said, “Just coffee, please.” He turned back to his charts.
Nolan said, “I’ll lock the outside door behind me when I leave the building. Be right back.”
Joeppli did not even hear him.
Ten minutes later the door to the laboratory opened, and a voice said, “You’re working late, Emil.”
Joeppli looked up, startled. When he saw who it was, he got to his feet, flustered, and said, “Yes, sir.” He felt flattered that this man had dropped in to see him.
“The Fountain of Youth project, top secret, eh?”
Emil hesitated. Miss Roffe had said no one was supposed to know about it. But, of course, that did not include his visitor. It was this man who had brought him into the company. So Emil Joeppli smiled and said, “Yes, sir. Top secret.”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way. How is it going?”
“Wonderfully, sir.”
The visitor wandered over to one of the rabbit cages. Emil Joeppli followed him. “Is there anything I can explain to you?”
The man smiled. “No. I’m pretty familiar with it, Emil.” As the visitor started to turn away, he brushed against an empty feeding dish on the ledge and it fell to the floor. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it, sir. I’ll get it.” Emil Joeppli reached down to pick it up and the back of his head seemed to explode in a shower of red, and the last thing he saw was the floor racing up to meet him.