The Magic Bullet (43 page)

Thursday afternoon, at one of these low ebbs, he even came close to calling Dr. Sidney Karpe, the eminent private practitioner who’d so assiduously wooed him before he’d decided to go to the ACF. But, no—what was he thinking? Karpe had been furious at the time; he’d
relish
the opportunity to get even, and then spend the next six months dining on the story of the little bastard who’d tried to come crawling back after he couldn’t cut it at the ACF.

Instead, he picked up the phone and dialed 011 39 6—the country and city codes for Italy and Rome—followed by the six digits Sabrina had scribbled down in his address book. Instituto Regina Elena.

It took several minutes for the receptionist to track her down. As he waited, Logan could hear the sounds of a busy hospital, at once familiar and exotic: footfalls on a hard corridor, the chime of nearby elevators arriving and departing, a “Dottore Ferlito” being paged over the PA system; occasionally, young women—nurses?—exchanging scraps of conversation, the language so melodic, it might have been poetry. Logan tried to imagine the scene, but with little success. All he could summon up were the grim Italian hospitals in vintage movies, where all the nurses were nuns in white habits.

“Logan, it is you!”

“Who else?” He’d thought about this moment for days; now that it was here, he was determined not to show her the depth of his distress. “I’ve been missing you, Sabrina. A lot.”

“I also, dear one.” She laughed, a marvelous sound. “You see, it is so easy for me to say from far away.”

“You sound great. You doing okay?”

“Yes, I think so.”

The distance made it somewhat awkward, but less so than he’d feared.

“So I guess it’s been an adjustment.”

“Not so much. We have electricity here also, Logan, even some of the modern drugs.”

“I meant in a positive way—that it’s not the ACF.”

“No. Thank goodness.” She paused and her voice fell. “I must tell you something, Logan. Larsen, he called the
direttore
of this hospital, saying bad things about me. Untrue things.”

He was less caught by surprise than he pretended. “That son of a bitch! How’d he respond?”

“She
. Her name is Antonella Torrucci. She told him to go screw his own face, she doesn’t want to hear this. She knows me for years, far better than him.”

He laughed, imagining Larsen’s reaction at the receiving end. “That’s great! One small victory for humankind!” Then, despite himself, “I envy you.”

There was a brief awkward silence. “And you, Logan? What’s happening?”

“I’m still looking. I’m working on it.”

“You are okay?”

“Of course.”

But he suspected she’d already guessed that he wasn’t, and it left him with an empty, helpless feeling. There was another pause.

“Listen, Logan, I must go. I am on duty.”

“I’ll call you soon. As soon as I know something.”

“Ciaò, my love.” He heard a kissing sound. “Ti amo.”

A moment later Logan was staring down at his yellow pad. There remained seven institutions on the list. But by now, he wasn’t even sure it was worth the trouble trying them.

* * *

John Reston was frustrated. He hadn’t expected it to be like this. Hadn’t he done his penance, offered up mea culpas till they were coming out of his ears? Yet still they didn’t trust him. What did he have to do to put the past behind him, bring them Logan’s head on a fucking platter with an apple in its mouth? Others at his level, a lot less sharp than he, were right at the center of the work on Stillman’s protocol, a sure road to glory. And here was he, still in Kratsas’s lab, still doing shit work.

So when he got the call to report to Stillman’s office, he made it over in less than five minutes.

“Close the door,” said Stillman, “take a seat.”

Reston perched on the edge of it. “I was hoping you’d call. I was going to come over and see you.”

“Good, I like that attitude. Because I’ve got important plans for you.”

“Thank God, I’m going stir crazy down there.” Reston smiled. He was about to hear about Stillman’s wonder drug. At long last, he was being ushered into the charmed circle.

Stillman hesitated, seeming to study his face. “Tell me about Compound J.”

“Compound J?” Reston was more than just baffled, he was mortified. Wouldn’t they ever let him forget Compound J?

“And the other one. What’d you call it, Compound J-lite?”

“I guess you could say it was sort of like being on the
Titanic
—with someone else at the helm.”

“You participated in the research, didn’t you?”

“It was Logan’s baby. Always.”

Stillman leaned forward. “But Dr. Logan’s gone, isn’t he? And so is Dr. Como. You’re here.”

Reston sat there blankly. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure what the senior man was getting at. “The whole thing was a disaster,” he said. “All I want to do now is forget about it.”

“I’m interested in your honest feeling about these compounds. As one who was personally involved.”

“I think they stink. I think they’re killers.”

“No, Doctor,” he said, with sudden impatience, “no one else is here, I want you to level with me. What are their strengths and liabilities? Why was the decision made to go back to the lab in the first place? What structural problems were identified with the molecule?”

Reston hesitated and Stillman moved quickly to reassure him. “I promise you, should we resume research on these compounds, you shall continue to play a prominent role. You can take that as a personal guarantee.”

It took a moment to penetrate. “You’re thinking of doing more work on Compound J? Why?”

“I’m not dogmatic, I’m a scientist. The drug did show some activity.”

Reston laughed uneasily. “Too goddamn much activity.”

“Yes, of course.” From the top drawer of his desk he removed a sketch. Reston recognized it as the chemical structure for Compound J. “Clearly, in your conversations, you discussed ways of mitigating the toxicity problem. I’d like to know what they were.”

“But aren’t you focused on your own protocol?”

In the split second it took Stillman to answer—“I can do both”—Reston began to suspect the truth.
This fucker’s own drug doesn’t work!

But simultaneously, Stillman was reaching a disturbing conclusion of his own. “Tell me, Doctor, do you even know the chemical structure of Compound J-lite?”

There was an undercurrent of menace to the question, and Reston caught it. But there was no way he could bluff this one. “I lived and breathed Compound J for almost a year,” he said, falling back on bravado instead. “Short of Logan, I know more about the stuff than anyone.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The work in the lab isn’t exactly my strong suit, but I took notes.”

Stillman didn’t believe him, not for a second. Fleetingly, he wondered just how much this guy might shoot off his mouth. “Good, I’ll want to see those.”

“I think I still have them around somewhere. I dumped a lot of the protocol stuff.”

“Sure, bad memories and all.” Stillman smiled congenially. “As I say, so far it’s only a vague possibility. But if we do pursue this, you’ll be key.”

“Good.” The meeting was clearly over, and Reston rose to his feet. “Till then, maybe you can find me something else worth doing around here.”

“Absolutely, I’ll see to it.” Stillman nodded. “In the meantime, of course, we never had this conversation.”

Throughout the latter half of his stay, Logan’s father had been uncharacteristically restrained. After the call from St. Louis, the one which had left his son so crestfallen, he’d not asked even once about the progress of the search.

“So …?” he finally put it to Logan on Saturday morning, as they drove down Webster Avenue, the town’s main street, in his six-year-old Chevy.

Here it comes
, thought Logan.
“So what?
”

They were en route to the library, one of his father’s weekly routines. A voracious but indiscriminate reader, he’d haul home ten or twelve volumes per trip, everything from Herodotus to Jackie Collins.

“So what the hell are your plans? Or do you plan to make a career of feeling sorry for yourself?”

Teeth gritted, Logan said nothing. He just stared out the window at the passing storefronts, so much shabbier than he remembered them.
No question, this guy’d give Seth Shein a run for his money any day
.

“Dad, when are you going to lay off? Why don’t you just let people live their own lives?”

“Don’t be a fool. You sound like your sister.”

“I’m going back to New York, all right? I’m probably going to take a job that I’m incredibly overqualified for!”

He’d reached the decision just the evening before, and
called Ruben Perez to make sure the spot was still open. The pay was minimal, just $34,000 per year, but working was better than not working.

“And whose fault is that supposed to be?” asked his father.

He sighed wearily. “No one’s, Dad, no one’s fault. I guess I’ll be leaving in a couple of days.”

“You know, I’ll never forget that nickel cadmium storage battery you rigged up for the science fair. Useless, but very interesting. It showed a lot of promise.”

“Right. Thanks.”

Over the years, his father had brought up the storage battery regularly, as if all of Logan’s subsequent accomplishments paled by comparison. Invention had been the older man’s own early passion, as well as his most enduring source of disappointment. Forty years before, while in the Navy, he’d concocted an industrial-strength cleaning fluid—but failed to have it properly patented. A few years later, it was in general use in factories and shipyards, and someone else was cashing in.

“I’ll bet you think I did a lot of things wrong, don’t you?” he asked suddenly.

Logan looked at him, staring straight ahead at the road.
Him? Everything
. “Look, there’s no sense in getting into any of that. I’m sure you did the best you could.”

“Damn right I did!” He pressed slightly on the accelerator. “Sure, I know I might’ve done more with myself. You don’t think it bugs me?”

Logan turned back to him in surprise. Never before had he heard such an admission from his father.

“I look at this business of you and the ACF,” he continued, “and it just tees me off. They’re trying to do the same thing to you they did to me.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“I just think it’s awful. The world is full of miserable bastards who think they can get away with anything.”

“You’re right.” Logan nodded, feeling better than he had in weeks. “That’s it exactly.”

“Well … you just keep doing your work, that’s what counts.”

Logan nodded. “I know.”

“That’s the best way to fight ’em. It’s what I should’ve done.” His father fell silent for a few seconds. “And how about staying in a little better touch? Your mother misses you.”

D
an Logan was relieved to find that his prospective new boss was more than just a money-grubbing cynic. Alex Severson had absolute faith in his idea: what he took to be a novel method of targeting HIV-infected cells while bypassing healthy ones. Having patented it, the young biochemist had devoted the past year and a half to raising money for his own start-up biotech company, HIV-EX.

The problem—and Logan saw this almost as quickly—was that the guy was a far better promoter than he was a scientist. Like so many others behind small biotech companies, Severson was trying to stuff something down Nature’s throat—in this case, the notion that a drug delivery system might be made to seek and destroy selected cells while leaving others untouched. Appealing as such an idea might be in theory, plausible as it was to hopeful and unsophisticated investors, Logan knew that in practice it was close to an impossibility. Already in his brief career, he’d seen countless similar ideas bite the dust.

Which made for an awkward situation. Given his reservations about Severson’s project, Logan just wasn’t sure he could bring to the job the commitment the other had every right to expect. Nor, frankly, was he crazy about the idea of being subordinate to someone of such obviously limited gifts.

On the other hand, Severson seemed desperate to have him; so much so, the young entrepreneur was ready to augment the modest salary with stock in his company—plus, far more significant in Logan’s view, unlimited use of the lab during off hours.

“I understand you’re a creative guy,” assured Severson. “That’s why I want you.”

“I’ll tell you the truth,” Logan told him, struggling with it even as they talked, “I’m very tempted. I’m just really not sure there’s enough work here for the two of us.” He glanced around the converted loft space that was HIV-EX world headquarters, trying to conceal his distress; the equipment, what little there was, looked to be reconditioned surplus. “Wouldn’t there be a lot of replication of effort?”

“None at all,” Severson dismissed this. “You’ll be my director of basic research, I defer to your greater skills in the lab.”

“And you?”

“I’m president and CEO, I don’t even
want
to hang around this place. My job is to get out there and round up money.”

“How much have you raised so far?”

Severson gave him two thumbs up. “Nine hundred forty thousand and counting. I’m finding I’m pretty good at it.”

Logan could see that. He was increasingly aware that in what is known as the real world the distinction between reality and wishful thinking can be remarkably tenuous. As a salesman Severson didn’t just spin a good story—more vitally, he believed it himself.

Logan figured, in fact, that it was this very capacity for self-delusion that now had Severson regarding him as a prestige hire.

“Look,” he was saying now, moving into hard-sell mode, “I know how this place must look to a guy like you. We don’t throw money at equipment, we don’t buy three of something if one will do. But lean and mean has its advantages, starting with the fact that you’ll pretty much be your own boss. Could you ever say that at the ACF?” He smiled, and Logan wondered if he might know something of his recent past after all. But, no—if that were the case, he wouldn’t be here. “The fact is, I’m one helluva
great guy to work for. You do the work and I’m happy, period, end of story. Ask Perez.”