Читать книгу Elefant - Jamie Bulloch - Страница 12

The customs area was a large room with stainless-steel counters. Passengers who’d chosen the green channel – nothing to declare – were streaming past the open exits. Only the odd person followed the red sign and entered clearance.

This is where Jack Harris had been waiting for twenty minutes now beside his wheelie case. He’d put the cool box onto one of the metal tables.

He wasn’t sure if he’d recognise Roux; he didn’t have a good memory for faces and had only met him once, on the fringes of an embryologists’ conference in London on combating infertility. The two of them had attended a lecture on allowing elephant egg cells to mature inside rats. Harris was hanging around the conference because he hoped to make contact with researchers looking for experts in fieldwork. Roux needed someone who could procure some elephant ovaries for him.

They had met after the lecture at Ye Olde Rose and Crown, a pub next to the conference hotel. Harris sensed later that the meeting wasn’t coincidental. Harris was sitting alone at the bar and Roux joined him with two pints of bitter filled to the brim. ‘No sadder sight than a man on his own in a pub,’ he said, in English tinged with a Swiss-German accent. By the second round – it was already Harris’s third – Roux knew that he was a vet specialising in elephants, and when they were on their next drink he asked Harris outright if he knew the best way of getting hold of ovaries from an Asian elephant.

Harris knew.

‘Sorry, Jack, traffic jam!’ said the man approaching him now with an outstretched hand.

Harris had in fact failed to recognise him. He recalled Roux being shorter and fatter.

He took Roux’s hand and shook it. It was clammy. That’s right, he’d noticed this last time: sweaty hands.

Roux was already glancing past Harris at the cool box. Now he took his hand away and placed it on the lid of the container. ‘At last,’ he said. ‘Finally.’

A customs official sauntered up to them. Harris had already informed him that this was an organ transplant and he was waiting for the recipient who had the necessary documents for the import formalities.

Roux showed the official his identification and handed him a slim dossier. The cover bore the red and yellow logo, Gentecsa, and the slogan: Research for the Future.

The customs official slid his finger across the rubric and found the information he needed to complete his form. When he was finished he pointed his chin at the cool box.

‘Is that really necessary?’ Roux asked. ‘It’s vital that the organ stays between 0 and 4 degrees.’

‘I can’t let you through without an inspection.’

Roux sighed and gave Harris a sign to open the box. ‘No more than a second,’ he said.

‘As long as it takes,’ the official corrected, also in English.

Harris snapped open the clasps and flipped open the lid. A sterile box made of milky plastic sat between blue freezer elements. Harris made no move to open it until the official asked him to.

‘You’re endangering a scientific project,’ Roux grumbled.

‘You’re the one dragging this thing out,’ the official responded.

Roux nodded to Harris, who reluctantly took the lid off the container.

What they glimpsed was as small as a child’s fist, with a brain-like structure. It was grey and glistened damply.

‘Don’t touch!’ Roux ordered.

The official slipped a mobile phone from a pouch on his belt and took a photo.

And that was how Sabu arrived in Switzerland.