Twenty-two
“I’m sorry, Olive. You’ve got to believe I’m sorry. About you, I mean. Foryour sake I’d have given him one chance. I warned you that he’d be saferto stay in the Unit and yet I’d come halfway¹ across the world to get him,and I meant to get him for what he did to Elsa.”
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything. Who are you?”
“I thought you knew that. I’m Boris Andrei Pavlov Glydr, Elsa’s cousin. Iwas sent over to America from Poland, to a University there to completemy education. And the way things were in Europe my uncle thought itbest for me to take out American citizenship². I took the name of AndrewPeters. Then, when the war came, I went back to Europe. I worked for theResistance. I got my uncle and Elsa out of Poland and they got to America.
Elsa—I’ve told you about Elsa already. She was one of the first-class scient-ists of our time. It was Elsa who discovered ZE Fission³. Betterton was ayoung Canadian who was attached to Mannheim to help him in his experi-ments. He knew his job, but there was no more to him than that. He delib-erately made love to Elsa and married her so as to be associated with herin the scientific work she was doing. When her experiments neared com-pletion and he realized what a big thing ZE Fission was going to be, he de-liberately poisoned her.”
“Oh, no, no.”
“Yes. There were no suspicions at the time. Betterton appeared heart-broken, threw himself with renewed ardour into his work and then an-nounced the ZE Fission discovery as his own. It brought him what hewanted. Fame and the recognition of being a first- class scientist. Hethought it prudent⁴ after that to leave America and come to England. Hewent to Harwell and worked there.
“I was tied up in Europe for some time after the war ended. Since I hada good knowledge of German, Russian and Polish, I could do very usefulwork there. The letter that Elsa had written to me before she died dis-quieted me. The illness from which she was suffering and from which shedied seemed to me mysterious and unaccounted for. When at last I gotback to the U.S.A. I started instituting inquiries⁵. We won’t go into it all, butI found what I was looking for. Enough, that is, to apply for an order forexhumation of the body. There was a young fellow in the District Attor-ney’s office who had been a great friend of Betterton. He was going overon a trip to Europe about that time, and I think that he visited Bettertonand in the course of his visit mentioned the

分享到：