2.3 Cleo Strikes Milk
2.3.1 Cleo, Georges, and Professor Ducru Take Refreshments
An Alcove in Professor Ducru's Apartment, Château Mourey
One Morning in Early May, 1987
Cleo could hardly believe her good fortune when Professor Ducru hired her as temporary housekeeper at Château Mourey. Here in the OF's own home--his own home!--she was perfectly placed to ferret out the juicy bits and set up the ironic twists that are the stuff of the really really hot unauthorized bio. And she had the time to bring it off, for her duties were light. Since Lucretia, the gardener's wife, took care of meals and cleaning, Cleo had practically nothing to do but prepare Georges' pâtée aux truffes to that gourmet's taste (heavy on truffles, no grit) at hours to fit his dining schedule: three meals daily, in a special trough located in an alcove off the apartment's kitchen.
On the morning of her first day on the job, Cleo served Georges' breakfast, and gratified by piglet's contented-sounding slurps she went on to sample a portion she had reserved for her own breakfast. She sat down at the neat little table and spooned up the fragrant broth. The verdict: very nice, with a truffle flavor that, though ephemeral by the spoonful, proved cumulatively satisfying....
Her mood soared. Everything was going her way. Her future seemed bright as the sunshine that flooded in through the skylights. She was going to get the goods on the OF, write the bio with schlock-pop philosophical-psychological commentary of the Makes Big & Hanged on his Own Petard genre and get it reviewed in the New York Review, graduate with honors, get into Harvard, and then make it in the tough, glamorous business of journalism.
Now to work, she told herself. Step one--find the stash the OF uses to feed his secret habit, milk or whatever it might be. But it had to be milk, the OF was a milkic for sure. All the evidence pointed that way. He'd never been caught imbibing or even carrying the stuff, but that simply meant he was been clever at covering up. To catch him, she'd have to be very clever. And she considered herself very clever indeed.
She looked about the alcove, and her attention fastened on a wall just then picking up the morning light, a wall decorated with postage-stamp sized tiles of brilliant red, blue, white and yellow arranged in a geometrical pattern of one of the genres covered at Bennett High in the course "Art in Turmoil: From Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism." What was that genre? Yes! Dutch Preprohibition-era De Stijl, and for extra credit, the leading exponent? Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). Given a test on the subject, she would ace it for sure.
But right now getting an A+ wasn't the point. The point was that those little square tiles, white, red and blue tiles, some of them lined up side-by-side and some separated by stretches of yellow, looked like buttons you can press to...make something happen. Might some combination of those be a secret code, key to a secret hiding place? She gave this secret code idea her full attention.
Having learned numbers at her mother's knee, she immediately inferred a code in base 3, where red meant 1, blue meant 2, and red-white together meant 10, or 3 counting in base 3. Swiftly scanning ahead she picked up the combinations red-blue (5 in base 10), and then blue-blue (8), red-red-red (13), blue-red-white (21), and so on, each number after 2 the sum of the preceding two numbers--yes! the Fibonacci series, as described in "Mathematical Magic: The Joy of Integer Sequences." Most likely there was a particular Fibonacci number that was key to the OF's milk stash, a number not to big (that would be a pain to punch in) and not too small (too easy). No, more likely a Goldilocks number, like--like red-red-red, 13.
She paused, heart thudding. Except for Georges' slurping, all was quiet. The OF was probably busy on his research, or whatever. He was always busy with something. Anyway, what did it matter if he caught her pressing these tiles, buttons if that's what they were? She could say it was just an accident....
She pressed re-red-red.
Shock! An alarm sounded, not the wailing siren sort of thing, but a sour grating noise. Her heart racing, Cleo jabbed the same tiles again in a reflexive attempt to mute the sound. But it got louder, with a male voice, tenor, joining in with what sounded like a shriek of agony. . Above the hellish cacophony she heard the clatter of Georges' trotters and felt his bristles brush her knees as he galloped to the entrance of the alcove, and out of the corner of her eye saw the piglet leaping into the arms of--the OF! The OF, neatly turned out she noticed, dapper in Versailles-style black silk knickers and matching medium heel pumps with silver buckles.
Professor Ducru stepped into the alcove, heels rapping briskly, piglet draped over one arm, and rapidly pressed a sequence of tiles to silence the alarm. He set Georges down by his trough. "You gave our little friend a bad turn," he said, turning to Cleo with a genial smile. "He can't bear Schoenberg."
Of course, Schoenberg! Cleo knew it now, the sound was of "Gurrlieder," seminal 12-tone work-- She stammered something about "Gurrlieder" being a good choice for an alarm, and observing that Professor Ducru seemed to take this as a compliment, ventured to ask how he'd turned it off.
"Simple as 1 2 3," he said, smiling again and indicating with a casual wave a particular horizontal sequence of tiles: red, blue, red-white. "You have stumbled on the significance of the tiling," he continued, "but to discover my secret cache--yes, I see from your combative expression that that is your aim, ha ha ha!--to discover my secret cache you must first touch in sequence the tiles representing two Fibbonacci numbers--the only two Fibbonacci numbers, it is conjectured--that are powers of a number. "
I'll go for it, Cleo vowed inwardly. But how to proceed? To calculate square roots, cube roots etc. would be altogether too dull, yet to concede defeat was out of the question. Desperately she scanned the series again and again, until after what seemed a long time though it was only a split second, she found a likely solution. Thanks to the crystal clear vision of youth uncompromised by ingestion of milk or other substances, she perceived that the tiles of the blue-blue (8) and red-blue-red-white (144) combinations shone marginally more brilliantly than the others. Perhaps they had been recently caressed and fondled by the sweaty fingertips of the milkic groping for his fix? She applied her own fingertips, also sweaty, to those tiles, and then held her breath in fear of a disagreeable reaction from the OF. Or a prospect almost as discomfiting, the return of "Gurrlieder."
But the only sounds were the faint hiss of the doors of two hitherto hidden wall-cabinets sliding open one after the other, and of the OF exclaiming in French, approvingly--admiringly, exultantly even--something like "Your mind is working like the wings of the hummingbird." Which seemed dumb, since her mind had not been working at all.
The first cabinet had just tea-making stuff, and the second--a bottle labeled in big letters, PUS. She'd found the genuine article, but she felt flat.
"Now to celebrate your Gaea-given intuition," said Professor Ducru, going about the tea preparation. "You will join me?"
Cleo accepted, but only to be polite. Her triumph seemed utterly hollow, and her vision was blurred by tears of dismay. She paid no attention to Professor Ducru's rhapsodic felicitations on the intuition that had led her to home in on 8 and 144 with the artless inevitability of the hummingbird pausing at the red blossom, etc. The fact was, she realized, the OF had outmaneuvered her by leading her on and clearing the way to the evidence of his milkism. She had blown it. Her hopes for smashing journalistic success had crumbled. Where's the juice in a warts-and-all unauthorized bio when the subject unapologetically reveals his warts on page one?
Professor Ducru misunderstood, or pretended to misunderstand her reaction as one of disgust at the thought of drinking pus. "Courage, mon petit oiseau-mouche, courage!" he urged. "It's not all pus, you know, or even mostly pus. Pus is merely the chief impurity, and so by law must be indicated in large type. With that he, grabbed the milk and loosed a couple of glugs of it into his tea.
Sickened, Cleo pushed aside her cup and saucer, sat sullenly. Let the silly OF ramble on, she decided. She didn't any more feel the slightest remorse at thinking of him as the OF.
"There're other impurities," he went on, ignoring her pique. "All in smaller type in proportion to the extent they exceed allowable limits." After a few appreciative sips milk-muddied tea, he put his glasses on his nose, picked up the milk bottle and studied the label. "Haven't looked at one of these labels for a long time, not since they first made suppliers list list all the major impurities or risk extra-hard time if they got caught.... Hmm, they've loosened the limits--pus is okay up to fifty million lymphocytes per milliliter these days, apparently--but it's the same old lineup--
"Okay!" she interrupted loudly. "Okay already! If you know it's poison why do you drink the stuff?"
She heard the words hanging in the air, and wished she could take them back. How impertinent and unprofessional! Now the OF is going to be miffed, clam up....
But he answered her question. "Habit," he said with a sad smile. "And comfort, I guess."
Cleo sensed some sort of personal reminiscence on the way. Though she'd allowed herself to be nettled at the way he'd effectively forced on her his confession to milkism, still she was enough of a pro to recognize pay dirt coming up. She discreetly checked her vex settings: Recipient, self. Mike, open. In case the OF should blab something worth saving, she was ready!
2.3.2 Cleo Maps her Biography
Her Study in Professor Ducru's Apartment, Maison Mourey
The Next Morning, Early May, 1987
Her hopes denied for success in the schlock journalism field, Cleo fell into a state of depression that lasted into the night. With the morning sunshine, however, her mood lifted and she realized her biography of Paul D--now good as authorized, it seemed--was shaping up nicely. Better rough out something right away, she thought. With Georges working audibly on his breakfast swill, and a bowl of it awaiting her own delectation, she put on her om and vexed a memo to self:
"Conventional three-part layout. Part 1 title, 'The Young Ducru'? No, that's wrong, also too tame. How about 'The Secret Triumph of Paul D Beaucaillou'?"
She picked up speed, positively gabbling the relevant dates, places, names as her broth cooled. She was on her way.
"Antibiotics: Sulfamethazine et cetera.
"Bacteria: Salmonella, E coli, M paratuberculosis--evolved to be resistant to the antibiotics.
"Pesticides: chlorinated hydrocarbons et cetera.
"Synthetic hormones: rBGH--that's recombinant bovine growth hormone--promotes the release of IGF-1, insulin-like growth factor you know, stuff causes accelerated growth of cancer cells. Also causes udder infections in cows, hence the pus....
"Prion bodies, sign of BSE, that's mad cow disease...like every one of the impurities, traceable to animals kept in filthy, crowded conditions and unnatural, high-protein feed like the corpses of animals that didn't make it, recycled fecal matter, mashed brains--"
"O-kay!" Cleo heard herself interrupt in that awful adolescent voice she hated, "All that crud--ew! Milk's crud, anyway. Why would anyone want to drink it? So why do you go on drinking it? Why don't you just...quit?"
After a pause to spoon up some of the fragrant broth, she continued:
"His birth (1900) and childhood in Paris, France. Mother a dancer at the Folies Bergère, father a heavy-using bon vivant--milk derivatives and stuff--died early, apoplexy. Note: Apoplexy, stroke. That's the S in CHAOS AND OUCH.
"His education. At at home with tutors. Skipped lycée, straight to Sorbonne. University of Texas Graduate School. Research at UT, sponsored by Texas Cattlemen's Association. Note: Cattlemen: owners of cattle, q. v. Cattle, domesticated ruminant quadrupeds, in preProhibition era widely used for food for humans. Research aim: Assess benefits of prolonging milk feeding of young cattle raised for beef. Note: Beef, flesh of dead cattle.
"His research result: Benefits negative. Necropsies showed milk-fed cattle corpses riddled with tumors, some cancerous.
"His escape: Ignoring Cattlemen's suggestion, switch result or get disappeared, he hightailed to Washington, gave research records to Edith Bolling's presidential election campaign.
"His love life. With co-respondent Bolling, issue, female born 11-04-24...."
Cleo heard her voice go wobbly. She had a weird feeling--that she wasn't just telling the story, that she herself was actually in it. She felt her heroine's pain as followed the only proper course open to her as president-elect. How awful to give up her babe for adoption! , and to have the OSS quietly hustle her lover to a distant haven out of reach of the Texas Cattlemen's Association.
Important narrative: How DC came to America.
While still a student at the Sorbonne during the War of 1914-18, he made himself expert in the chemical warfare of the period and devised useful countermeasures to enemy poison gas attacks. In recognition of this work, the American leader, General Pershing, sponsored DC's graduate study in biochemistry at UT.
Important point: DC's milk habit persisted in his early 20s.
After the Armistice of November 1918 but before leaving for America, DC and some of his contemporaries among the Doughboys, as American soldiers were called, celebrated the peace by visiting disreputable dives known as "milk bars" where they experiment with the ingestion of a animal milk in an undiluted!!!!!! form known as a "shake." Recollection of the cameraderie of these "bar crawls" seems to have reinforced DC's paradoxically positive image of animal milk. [don't forget to remove !s]