Lessons in Chemistry(107)

“Mean?” She turned toward him as she lit a Bunsen burner, frowning as if, once again, she didn’t understand why he insisted on asking such basic questions. She then supplied a detailed description of the Babylonians, who had relied on a sexagesimal system—counting by sixties, she explained—for both mathematics and astronomy. “So hopefully that should clear that up,” she said.

Meanwhile, the photographer, whom she’d invited to have a look around, asked about the contraption in the middle of the living room floor. “The erg?” she said. “It’s a rowing machine. I’m a rower. Many women are.”

Roth laid his notepad on the table in the lab and followed them into the next room, where she demonstrated the rowing stroke. “An erg is a unit of energy,” she’d explained while moving back and forth in a tedious sort of way, the photographer snapping from multiple angles. “It takes a lot of ergs to row.” Then she’d gotten up and the photographer took several pictures of her hand calluses before they all returned to the lab, where Roth discovered the dog slobbering on his notes.

That’s how the interview went: from one end of dull to the other. He continued to ask his questions and she answered all of them—politely, dutifully, scientifically. In other words, he had nothing.

She placed a cup of coffee in front of him. He wasn’t really a coffee drinker—too bitter for his taste—but she’d gone to such extraordinary lengths to make it: flasks, tubes, pipettes, vapors. To be polite, he took a sip. Then he took another.

“Is this really coffee?” he asked, awed.

“Perhaps you’d like to see how Six-Thirty helps me in the lab,” she offered. She proceeded to strap some goggles onto the dog, then explained her area of research—abiogenesis, she called it—then spelled it, a-b-i-o, then grabbed his pad and wrote it down in block letters. Meanwhile the photographer snapped shot after shot of Six-Thirty pressing a button that raised and lowered the fume hood.

“I wanted to bring you here,” she said to Roth, “because as I want your readers to understand, I’m not really a TV cooking show host. I’m a chemist. For a while, I was trying to solve one of the greatest chemical mysteries of our time.”

She went on to explain abiogenesis, her excitement evident as she used precise description to paint a full picture. She was very good at explaining, he realized, had a way of making even dull concepts seem exciting. He took detailed notes as she waved and pointed at various things in her lab, occasionally sharing with him test results and her interpretations, apologizing again for the malfunctioning centrifuge, explaining that a home cyclotron was out of the question, implying that current city zoning laws had kept her from installing some kind of radioactive device. “Politicians don’t make it easy, do they?” she said. “Nevertheless, the origin of life. That’s what I was after.”

“But not anymore?” he asked.

“Not anymore,” she said.

Roth twisted on his stool. He’d never had the remotest interest in science—people, that was his gig. But when it came to Elizabeth Zott, getting at who she was over what she did was proving impossible. He suspected there was one way in, but he’d been explicitly warned by Walter Pine not to go down that road—that if he did, the interview would end badly. Nevertheless, Roth decided to chance it. “Tell me about Calvin Evans,” he said.



* * *



—

At the mere mention of Calvin’s name, Elizabeth whipped around, her eyes filled with disappointment. She gave Roth a good long look—the kind of look one gives to someone who’s broken a promise. “So you’re more interested in Calvin’s work,” she said flatly.

The photographer shook his head at Roth and exhaled in a “good going, genius” way. He put his lens cap on in surrender. “I’ll be outside,” he said, disgusted.

“It’s not his work I’m interested in,” Roth said. “I wanted to know about your relationship with Evans.”

“How is that your business?”

Again, he felt the weight of the dog’s eyes on him. I have mapped and memorized the location of your carotid artery.

“It’s just that there’s a lot of chatter about what went on between the two of you.”

“Chatter.”

“I understand he came from a wealthy background—rower, Cambridge—and that you were,” he checked his notes, “a UCLA graduate. Although I notice you weren’t an undergrad there. Where did you go? I also learned you were fired from Hastings.”

“You’ve checked my credentials.”

“That’s part of my job.”

“You checked Calvin’s too, then.”

“Well, no, it wasn’t really necessary. He was so famous that—”

She cocked her head in a way he found worrisome.

“Miss Zott,” he said. “You’re also quite famous—”

“Fame doesn’t interest me.”

“Don’t let the public tell your story for you, Miss Zott,” Roth warned. “They have a way of twisting the truth.”

“So do reporters,” she said, taking the stool next to his. For a moment she seemed on the verge of cooperating, then reconsidered, turning her attention to the wall.