And it was there, while I sat on a bench in the quiet of St. James Park, that Leo with my assistance finally scored a direct hit. When I stood outside the bookstore I had something to work on. Over the hills and far away — India — flower perfumes, and secrecy, and awful sexual excitement. The strength of those feelings almost swamped me, but they also offered the direction for my next actions. By the time I went back to the hotel I knew what I had to do.
Tess’s message was waiting for me there. Her house, any time after seven. She had my case and everything I needed. And a surprise.
Tess lived alone in a two-bedroom house in Henley , too big for her but kept for its garden — her pride and joy. I went in the back way, past neatly tied raspberry canes and flaming rows of salvias, on to peer in through the kitchen window and knock on the pane. Tess opened the back door and let me in without a word. She gave me a quick hug once I was inside the door, then stepped back out of reach. Her face was anxious and the frown lines were deeper than ever.
“He believes you now,” she said. “I’ve never seen Sir Westcott look so surprised. He hates to be wrong.”
“You told him everything?”
“Not at first — I knew he thought you had imagined everything, and he’d say you were giving us another tall story. So after we finished the wards I asked him right out: if he had any idea what ‘Nymphs’ were.”
“He told you?”
“Not at first. He looked at me pop-eyed, and said he’d be buggered, and where had I heard that word? He thought there must have been a bad breach in the security system.”
Tess led the way through into the living room, motioned me to the couch and seated herself on a chair opposite. Her posture said a lot. Feet neatly together, hands on knees. She didn’t want me close until she got this off her chest.
“So those pills he gave me really are Nymphs,” I said. “Dammit, Sir Westcott told me—”
“They’re not Nymphs.” Tess nodded her head towards the side table, inviting me to help myself to the coffee and sandwiches there. “He told you the truth, you have a new synthetic neurotransmitter in that pillbox. Nymphs are something different — a secret shared by the police, a few doctors, and international security. They’re capsules, and they look like the ones you have — blue, usually — and they’re the hottest and worst illegal drug anybody knows about. The papers haven’t printed a word about them, though they must suspect that something is happening, just from the hospital reports. Sir Westcott is on some sort of blue ribbon royal panel studying the physical and mental effects — that’s why he knows all about it. He gave me a choice, either I’d tell him I didn’t remember a word he was going to say, or I’d be tied up in secrecy agreements for weeks.”
I leaned forward. “Tess, they were all set to torture me last night. If Nymphs are a big secret, it’s one that’s a lot less well-kept than Sir Westcott thinks. Dixie thought those pills were Nymphs and proved I must be Leo. The crooks know all about them.”
She nodded. “Sure they do, some of them. They’re part of the distribution system. The drug is made somewhere in the East — India , or Afghanistan , or Pakistan — and finds its way into this country from abroad. It’s synthetic, but producing it is difficult — thank Heaven. It’s a derivative of Salvarsan — a dihydroxy-arsenobenzene hydrochloride, one of the old treatments for syphilis. That’s too much of a mouthful for anybody, so the pills are mostly misnamed Nymphetamines — Nymphs, for short.”
“But what do they do to you? They can’t be like heroin or cocaine. Dixie said I’d only be using them for one thing, and he said Zan was too old for them.”
“He was right.” Tess sighed. “Can’t you guess, with a name like that? Nymphetamines don’t have much effect at all on adults. They affect children. They induce sexual desire and physical arousal responses — sensitivity, lubrication and increased blood supply for the vaginal mucous membranes — in prepubescent girls.”
I sat there with my mouth hanging open. “I don’t believe it. You think that people would buy those pills and give them…”
I didn’t need to ask the question. I knew the answer. When I was seventeen years old and on my first concert tour, I played a series of two-piano works with Duncan Casimir. He was seventy-two years old, he drank too much, and his playing was terrible, but he was still considered a grand old man of English music. I saw him when the young girls came crowding around us at the end of the concerts. He was practically drooling. And it wasn’t over the ones I thought were attractive, the sixteen and seventeen year olds. He had his bloodshot old eyes on the tens and under. I’d seen the same thing a hundred times since, what old Casimir would delicately refer to as a “refined taste for slightly unripe fruit.” Nymphs wouldn’t lack for a market.
“… so your brother must have been mixed up with Nymphs, somehow,” Tess saying. “Maybe he was trying to find out where they come from, or perhaps how they get to the west.”
“No, that wasn’t it.” I leaned back without thinking, and winced when Dixie ’s cigarette burn pressed on the back of the settee. “That’s just what Leo wasn’t doing, I know that from last night. Dixie said I had to be Leo when he found the Nymphs, because no ordinary person would be carrying them. But Scouse saw past that. He said if they were Nymphs I wouldn’t have carried them into the country with me, and anyway that’s not what he was after. Leo was involved in something different — the Belur Package, whatever that is. But not with Nymphs. What else did Sir Westcott say about them?”
“Not too much. There have been four hundred reported cases in this country, with ages from seven to twelve. He thinks that the drug travels overland from Athens , and comes there either from Turkey or one of the Arab countries.”
I shrugged and poured myself a cup of coffee. Neither of us knew it at the time, but Tess and I were very close to an answer. If she had asked one more simple question of Sir Westcott, we would have saved months of work, much pain and suffering, and many lives.
“I told him about you,” she went on. “He’s really pleased. He says that ten years ago you’d have died, and even five years ago, before the Madrill technique, you’d at best be just trying to stand up by now. As it is, the brain integration is the only big hurdle left. He did wonder a bit about the possibility of a seminal reflux from the vas deferens to the epididymis — the X-ray shows a slight residual lesion there.” She laughed. “I told him I didn’t know, I wasn’t equipped to test for that.”
With my mind still on Nymphs and the Belur Package, I hadn’t been listening. It was the medical terms that caught my attention. I did a mental recap and suddenly realized what she was saying.
“Tess! You don’t mean that you told Sir Westcott about us? That we’d been — that we—”
“Of course. He’s your doctor.” She sounded surprised. “He’ll know better than we will if there was anything abnormal, anything that doesn’t fit what he’d expect in a normal recovery. He asked me what happened — somehow he knew we went to dinner — and I told him.”
“God. You make the other night sound like just another medical test — Intermediate Number Twenty-two, Response to Intercourse.” I couldn’t keep the hurt out of my voice. “I’d thought it was more than that. I’m surprised you didn’t take my blood pressure and pulse afterwards.”
Tess had been sitting quietly opposite me, knees together, prim and virginal in her posture. Now she stood up and came to stand directly in front of me. She was wearing a dark blue blouse that gave color to her eyes and made them seem almost violet.
“Lionel,” she said softly. “Don’t be a ninny.” She reached out and cupped my cheek in her hand. “You’ve been through a medical experience wilder than any other patient I’ve ever heard of. You’re alive, but that’s only half the battle. We knew that someday you’d try to make love again, and that might be a time for difficulties — and maybe danger, too. I wanted you to be all right; and you were.”