The Shadow Box (26 page)

Yeah, well fuck you too.

You want to see speed? I'll show you speed. I'll show
you how fast Moon's brain explodes if you get his blood
pressure all pumped up.

But first things first. AdChem.

Let's see what Michael was into.

AdlerChemiker AG, according to Moody’s, was mostly
a holding company, created in 1982 under German law. It
was actually a merger of several smaller firms, some of
which had been in business since before World War Two.
Of these, the centerpiece was Arznei-Fabrik GmbH,
wholly owned by the von Scharnhorst family of Munich.
Doyle half expected to see that they made poison gas for death camps but all they ever made were vitamins. Later, after the merger, Arznei-Fabrik branched out into pharmaceuticals, buying up two more R&D companies, a printing
and packaging firm, and a mail-order drug firm.

Rapid growth through the eighties. Heavy investment in
R&D, which apparently paid off. They now sell about
sixty different product lines and hold over three hundred
new drug patents. Until the past few years, relatively few
have had FDA approval for sale in the United States but
they made up for it in the rest of the world where stan
dards are far less rigid.

This, Doyle knew, did not mean the products were crap, necessarily. The FDA requires that a new drug be effective
ninety-five percent of the time. That means ninety-five out
of one hundred patients must benefit from it or it can't be
sold in this country. It's a dumb standard. It sounds fine
as long as you're not suffering from some nasty disease
and there's a medicine that will help it, say, eight times out of ten. It's why Tijuana, just over the border, has
become one big supermarket for drugs that you can't buy
here. And where some drugs you
can
buy here sell at a
tenth the cost.

But getting back to AdChem . . .

They have subsidiaries, it says here, in over twenty
countries. Most of them third world. India, Pakistan, Cam
bodia, Egypt. Several in Central America. And there's
Guatemala again, where Arnie said the bogus Ovulen was
made. The legitimate reason for all these exotic subsidiar
ies is, of course, the low labor cost but it's also the free
dom from burdensome controls. Some of them have no
standards at all concerning product contamination, safety
in the workplace, or even for the disposal of toxic waste.
If they did make counterfeits, thought Doyle, you wonder
who'd notice.

Adler.

It struck Doyle as odd that none of the companies in
the AdChem group ever had Adler in its name. None of
the directors had that name either. Most of them are von
Scharnhorsts by blood or marriage. Among them, they
control almost seventy percent of the stock. The largest
single stockholder is the Countess Anna von Reisch und
Scharnhorst. Her husband and her cousins run the com
pany. No Adlers and no Rasmussens either. Moon is really
reaching on that one.

He found a profile on the Countess. It had photographs. One dated back to the war when she had volunteered at a civilian aid station. During the Allied bombings of Munich
she was twice cited for heroism, pulling injured victims
out of burning buildings. This says she saved dozens of
lives.

Doyle thought she had a good face. Very correct, very Prussian. Never pretty, exactly, but strong. The war ended
and, with the help of the Marshall Plan, she started putting
the family business back together. She gave jobs to hun
dreds of destitute Germans, sold ancestral land to pay their
salaries until the company could start earning money. In
her later years she spent less time on the business and
more time on her charities. No kids of her own. She still worked three days a week as a volunteer in a children's
hospital.

Looks . . . profiles . . . can be deceiving, thought Doyle.
But if this woman had a venal bone in her body, he
couldn't see it. Even so, Doyle had no doubt that AdChem
had routinely skirted the law. That, after all, was the point
in having so many subsidiaries in so many places. What
is criminal here is legal there. It is also a way to hide the
very large profits that are made on some of these products.

Take an ordinary blister pack of a given medication.
The raw materials are bought here, there, and everywhere, usually from a company's own subsidiaries, and each in
gredient is marked up separately. Another plant mixes them, marks up the result. The mixture is sent to still
another plant that presses it into pills. That's another mark
up. They go from there to the packaging plant for assem
bly. One last mark-up is added but this is the only mark-up
that shows on the books. Little if any tax is paid on all
those other profits.

For all that, Doyle still couldn't see where AdChem is doing anything that all the others don't do. Johnny G. sees
big-time counterfeiting and even big-time heroin traffick
ing. Doyle couldn't see that either. Just because one plant
in India sells a chemical that's essential to making her
oin—among many other uses for it—that does not a crimi
nal organization make. And if there's still all that money in their regular drugs, and if you keep the right kind of books, why should they bother with counterfeits?

On the other hand
...
if they're more or less straight. . .
why would they need an outfit like Parker Security Ser
vice, Inc.? Why would Lehman-Stone, an investment
banker, need that bunch of thugs?

No Rasmussens at Lehman-Stone either.

He started on his second stack of documents.

An hour later, Doyle had finished his reading. He said,
“I'll be damned” for perhaps the fifth time.
He reached for his telephone, thought better of it, then
picked up the cellular phone instead. He tapped out Arnie
Aaronson's number.

“Tell me,” he said when Aaronson answered. “You
brought your briefcase when you came to my office. Were
those FDA articles in it?”

”I gather you went and got your own.”

“Yes, I did. Why didn't you save me the trouble?”

“Because I want no part of this.”

“But it's public record, Arnie. It's a magazine. How
could sharing it possibly harm you?”

A slow exhalation of breath.

“
That list I gave you? Those people I called? The ones
with a checkmark called me back at least twice. They
wanted a face-to-face meeting. The ones with two checks
hinted very strongly that we might make some
arrangement.”

”A payoff. You told me. But in return for what?”

“For telling them who's asking. And for helping to put
a lid on it.”

“Arnie
...
let me get this straight. Are you telling me
that the entire pharmaceutical industry is engaged in a massive cover-up?”

“They're not felons, Brendan. Call it damage control.”

“To protect their business at the expense of the
public?”

“Wrong, Brendan. It is to protect it from a massive and
unwarranted
loss of public confidence. It is to prevent the panic selling of pharmaceutical and biotech stocks and the
damage that would do to this same public you're talking
about. If spending a few bucks will accomplish that,
they'll spend.”

It was Doyle's turn to be silent.

“Counterfeits are a fact of life, Brendan. I still don't
think it's half but most of what's out there, by far, is
probably just as good as the real thing. If you were the president of Merck or Pfizer, would you want to stand up and say that on television?
Or at a congressional hearing?”

Doyle let him go.

He could understand Arnie's reluctance to be involved. It was not a matter of being afraid of the drug companies.
N
ot at all. Nor was it anything like criminal complicity.
It was more a fear that he'd never have a moment's peace
once his name became associated with a subject so poten
tially explosive as this.

All those firms wondering what he's got. Badgering
him, dangling carrots at him, offering him lucrative con
sulting contracts if he'll tell what he knows. If it's about
a competitor, the deal still holds. Knowing that is worth
money as well. On second thought, therefore, Arnie could
indeed find himself exposed to charges of criminal
conspiracy.

As if that were not enough, in Arnie's view, we now
add Michael to the equation. Michael's involvement with
AdChem means that the interest of Michael's lawyer is
hardly academic. Add the knowledge that Jake Fallon was
murdered. Add the killing of Bronwyn Kelsey, who was
also involved in this industry. Might these not be related?
And, finally, add in that the attorney of both Jake and
Michael Fallon is also the attorney of the infamous Gior
dano brothers who control the Brooklyn docks and are
therefore, prima facie, already involved in smuggling.

Arnie Aaronson is no coward. He's a good and decent
man. Given the right thing to do, he'll do it. But he has
no wish to be put on a witness stand and have a prosecutor
say, “If you knew
this
and
this
and
this,
Mr. Aaronson,
how are we to believe that you didn't know
that?
Or at
least that you didn't see it coming?”