The Magic Bullet

by Harry Stein

Sabrina was waiting for him at the gate.

  Even if he’d expected her, it might’ve taken him an instant to recognize her. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail; instead of one of the stylish suits to which he’d grown accustomed, she wore jeans and a sweatshirt.

  He stood there, stunned, suddenly aware that his heart was racing.

  “I hope there is no one else to meet you,” she said simply.

  “No. I was going to take a cab.”

  “I have brought my car.” She hesitated, seemingly embarrassed by her own brazenness. “Perhaps I should not have come. But I have some news.”

  “What kind of news?”

  “Today was my day of not working.…”

  “Your day off?”

  They started walking.

  She nodded. “And so I went to the library. I want to show you what I have found.”

  “The library’s closed, Sabrina.”

  “The references are on the computer at my home. If it is not too late …?”

  As they headed toward the parking garage, she began telling the story of her discovery: how, poring over documents in the archives all morning long and well into the afternoon—reports and articles and internal memos, in French, Italian, German, and Dutch—she’d come upon an editorial in a vintage German chemicals periodical called Angewandte Chemie on what appeared to be a fairly close relative of Compound J.

  “What’s the name of this compound?” he asked.

  “They do not give the name. But they talk about the structure. And they talk of polynaphthalene sulfonic acids, as in Compound J.”

  “And …?”

  “And what it says in this paper is tremendous interesting.”

  Sabrina switched on the light. Glancing around the small apartment, Logan couldn’t help but note how clearly it mirrored Sabrina’s personality—no-nonsense yet quietly tasteful; such a vivid contrast with his own place, still barely furnished after all these months.

  She walked over to her computer and switched it on. “This paper was published in 1924.”

  “Nineteen twenty-four?” He could scarcely believe it; she was bringing him back to the Dark Ages. Back then almost no one had even the vaguest understanding of the nature of cancer. But he kept his skepticism in check. “What exactly does it say?”

  Sabrina inserted the disc and soon the screen was filled with text.

  “You told me you speak some German, no?”

  In fact, he didn’t know it quite as well as he’d led her to believe. Logan pulled up a chair and, leaning close, set about trying decipher it. It took formidable powers of concentration not to be distracted by Sabrina sitting a few feet away on the floor, eyes incredibly alive with anticipation.

  What instantly struck him about the brief article was its tone. Written in the aftermath of the German defeat in World War I and the devastating inflation that followed, its aim was apparently not scientific at all, but political. Its point was that Germany’s scientists, for all their lack of financial resources, remained vastly superior to their detested counterparts in England and France. The mention of the compound—“the work of a researcher from the former laboratory of the great Paul Ehrlich”—was very much secondary; its alleged cancer-fighting properties were merely cited, without substantiation, as another example of German brilliance. “May this work continue to prosper,” it loftily concluded. “May these compounds always be a credit to German science!”

  Logan turned from the screen. “I don’t know, Sabrina. There are claims made here, but there’s not even a shred of evidence.”

  “Don’t you see, Dan, they talk of cancer! This is important.”

  He shook his head slowly. “It’s so little to go on.”

  “It is a clue. I was looking for clues.”

  “I know. But”—he hesitated—“I’ve got to tell you, it’s hard to imagine those people would even have recognized an anticancer agent.”

  Unexpectedly, she flashed sharp irritation. “You are very arrogant, Logan, for an American living in the 1990s.”

  “Sorry.” He shrugged. “I’d like to believe, but I just don’t. Anyway, Compound J has already been eliminated as an anticancer agent by cell line tests.”

  Such tests, in which drugs are tried against malignant cell growths in petri dishes, are a shorthand method of determining which compounds merit further trials. There exist cell lines for many cancers: this compound had failed against them all.

  “A cell line is not human,” she said heatedly. “A human being, a human environment, how cancer cells interact with healthy cells, these things cannot be seen in a test tube.”

  She was right and he knew it. “Still …”

  “It is a pity you do not know French,” she added sharply.

  “Why is that?”

  But she was already calling up another document on the screen. This one was longer, three or four pages. “This is from the Pasteur Institute in Paris. You maybe have respect for them?”

  He peered at the screen. Though he spoke scarcely a word of French, what he was after was the date. There it was: 1937. “What does it say?”

  “It is a paper … observations of one of their researchers who visited in Africa.”

  “Case reports?”

  She nodded. “From one of the French colonies. Guinea. This researcher worked in a clinic there, he tells of the interesting things he saw.”

  “And …?”

  She indicated a passage she’d highlighted in boldface. “Twice the same thing. Two different women. They had infections, from spirochetes—”

  “Syphilis? Yaws?”

  “It does not tell exactly.”

  “It doesn’t say?” Logan was incredulous.

  “The point is something else. These women had breast malignancies also. And after three injections for the infections—a big surprise!—the tumors began to shrink.”

  “What are you saying? Some relative of Compound J was active against breast cancer?” It was so farfetched as to defy belief.

  She nodded. “Perhaps. From what it says.”

  “What, exactly, does it say about the compound? Does it give any details of its structure?”

  She scrolled slowly down till she found what she was looking for. “Based on organic dyes … Consisting of fused polycyclic sulfonates.” She smiled at him. “This sounds a little familiar, no?”

  Despite himself, he was starting to share her excitement. “Anything else? Any names attached?”

  She indicated a footnote in minuscule print at the bottom of the final page. Amid the foreign words, Logan noted what appeared to be a name: “M. Nakano.”

  “It talks of an unpublished paper this person wrote about the compound,” she noted. “The name is Japanese, no?”

  It rang only the faintest of bells. “Nakano … Didn’t Paul Ehrlich like to use Japanese chemists in his lab?” In fact, if memory served, the great man’s key assistant in the development of the antisyphilis agent that insured his reputation was a Japanese named Hata. “From what I’ve read, he had enormous respect for their work ethic.”

  Sabrina shrugged. “This is history, not science.” She stopped, abruptly realizing what he was getting at. “Ah … because in the other article …?”

  He nodded. “Ehrlich died around the beginning of World War One. Who’s to say this Nakano character wasn’t the one from his lab who continued work on this compound after the war?” Logan stopped, looking at her closely. “Or is that too farfetched?”

  “I do not know the meaning of this word.”

  “Do you think these two articles could be referring to the same research? The same person?”

  She stared back. “Yes.”

  For a long moment he said nothing. “But let’s not get carried away. We don’t know anything about the Frenchman who reported these findings. Was he qualified to make these judgments? Did he even examine these women himself? For all we know, it might’ve been nothing more than chronic mastitis or some other routine inflammation
of the breast.”

  But, in fact, he could no longer hide his own mounting enthusiasm. This is what he’d been hoping for. Hadn’t the Tilley case already impressed on him that the compound could be enormously active? If, in certain circumstances, it inhibited the growth of healthy cells, who was to say it couldn’t also block the growth of malignant ones?

  They talked for the next two hours; discussing the many, many ways such a theory could go awry; if anyone else should be trusted with their secret; above all, given the realities of the ACF, whether it made real sense to pursue such a project at all. Logan, in particular, was torn between his enthusiasm and his qualms; one moment drawn by the challenge, the next sobered by the certainty that their involvement with such an enterprise, should it come to nothing, could only do them harm.

  Not that they would make any final decisions now. When Sabrina yawned, Logan suddenly thought of the time—and for the first time all night, he found himself feeling self-conscious. “It’s late, I guess I should be heading home.”

  Slowly, he rose to his feet.

  She looked at him directly. “Is this what you want to do?”

  Logan was taken aback. Could this be a proposition? No, he immediately chided himself, far more likely Sabrina’s English had fallen short, leading him to misinterpret the question. “Do I want to?” he repeated.

  Sabrina rose from her chair and walked over beside him. “Do you want me to drive you home, or perhaps stay tonight with me here?” She gently stroked his cheek. “I would like you to stay,” she added. “It will disappoint me if you do not.”

  In reaction to his startled silence, she kissed him lightly on the cheek—then began undoing his shirt buttons.

  “I guess I don’t want to disappoint you,” he said finally, smiling.

  “When did you decide we were going to sleep together?” he asked an hour later, as they lay side by side in the darkness.

  She laughed. “I do not know. But if I waited for you to try first, we would never be here right now.”

  “I wanted to for a while, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “The only reason I hesitated … I mean, we’re colleagues. It can be tricky getting involved with someone you work with, you know that.”

  Sabrina reached out and drew him close. “Please, Logan. Stop the analyzing for once.” She kissed him tenderly. “You have to understand—this is sex, not science.”

  Unchecked, the malignancy has begun to work at her lumbar vertebrae. With every sharp twist or turn, the tension comes to bear on the weakened bone. Some tumor cells have moved to within millimeters of the nerve roots leading to the spinal canal.

  Her personal physician is comforting but perplexed. Finding nothing but a slight tenderness over her lower back, he prescribes a nonsteroidal antiinflammatory and orders her to slow down.

  Though she denies it, even to herself, the condition is starting to impact her daily routine. Normally able to get by on four or five hours sleep a night, now, as her body searches desperately for the resources to fight off the relentless invader, she is often exhausted before nine. Usually alert and remarkably perceptive, now she more and more lacks focus.

  In his office, her physician won’t let it rest. His training and instincts tell him, even in the absence of hard evidence, that something is terribly wrong. He calls and informs her that he has scheduled a series of tests at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  “Impossible.” She laughs, though completely in earnest. “Unschedule them.”

  She has fourteen months to live.

  Logan arrived at the hospital ward the following morning a half hour later than he’d originally intended; he hadn’t figured on having to catch a cab to his own place for a change of clothes. Still, it wasn’t yet seven o’clock: if he hurried, he still had time to input the Tilley data before preparing for morning rounds.

  Making a sharp right off the lobby, he headed to the small room at the end of the corridor that served as the junior associates’ computer station.

  The hospital was silent, not uncommon at this hour. But shortly after he sat down at the terminal, he was aware of someone hurrying down the hallway. A moment later, Lennox, the night nurse, stuck her head in the doorway.

  “Excuse me, Doctor.”

  He looked up from the terminal.

  “I’m afraid we have an emergency.”

  “I’m not on duty.”

  She nodded briskly. “I know that. But I can’t find Dr. Lukas anywhere.”

  “Great.” But instantly he was on his feet. “Who is it?”

  “Congressman Marino.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Flying from the room, he reached the congressman’s bed in fifteen seconds. Though it had been less than three days since he’d last seen him, the deterioration was dramatic. Marino was comatose, his color ashen, his breathing agonal, the shallow, raspy breaths coming no more than once every seven or eight seconds. Had he been less familiar with the sudden turns for the worse so common among advanced cancer patients, Logan wouldn’t have believed it.

  Logan leaned close and spoke softly. “Congressman? Congressman Marino?”

  No response. Just another labored breath passing over a parched throat, what used to be known as a death rattle.

  Logan looked up at the nurse. “He’s DNR, right?” Code for “Do Not Rescusitate.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  Not that it mattered; he was beyond that.

  “Has the family been contacted?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, do it. Now.”

  As she moved briskly off, he placed his index finger on the patient’s carotid artery. The pulse was barely detectable.

  Thanks a lot, Lukas, he reflected miserably. Now guess who’s gonna have to take shit for this?

  But, looking down at the dying man’s face, he was suddenly ashamed. Jesus, were these his priorities? Look what this place was doing to him!

  In silent contrition, he took Marino’s cool hand in his own and, staring out the window at the early morning mist, held it till he heard the nurse returning.

  “They’re on their way,” she offered. “I also reached his administrative assistant at home.” She hesitated. “Is he gone?”

  Logan nodded. “A couple of minutes ago.”

  “Anything you want me to do?”

  “Just stay here. I’m gonna go find Lukas!”

  “Give her an earful for me.”

  He had a pretty good idea where she might be. Late at night, when junior associates wanted to make themselves other than readily available, they often retreated to a tiny room on the other side of the building, near the ventilation ducts; formerly an on-call room, it still contained a cot. He’d spent time there himself—but never without letting someone know where he was going.

  The room was at the end of a long hall, but approaching he saw a crack of light beneath the door. His knock was intentionally sharp.

  “Lukas? Hey, you damn slacker, you in there?”

  He turned the knob and slowly pushed it open. “Hey, I have some news for—”

  The sight was so completely unexpected, it took him an instant to grasp its meaning. She was hanging limply from an overhead pipe by a length of plastic intravenous tubing.

  But now he clicked onto automatic pilot, years of training kicking in.

  Christ, I’ve gotta resuscitate her!

  Fumbling in his breast pocket for his bandage scissors, he cut the tubing at the nape of her neck and gently lowered her to the floor. No carotid pulse; the skin was far cooler to the touch than the body he’d felt only minutes before.

  C’mon, Lukas, you bitch, don’t do this to me!

  Pinching her nose, he took a deep breath and placed his open mouth upon hers. There was no taste, only a sudden, sickening sensation of cold, like kissing half-thawed meat.

  This time he said it aloud. “Come on, Lukas! Come ON!”

  He gave her chest a sharp thump; then began repeatedly thrusting an open palm onto he
r sternum, compressing her heart with his full body weight.

  Desperately, he lunged for the phone, punching in the emergency code—5-0-5-0. “We got a code blue in room two twelve!”

  Within moments, people started rushing in: the on-call anesthesiologist, thrusting an endotracheal tube down her throat; two nurses with the EKG machine; the rest of the code team.

  But they were only going through the motions.

  Only now did Logan notice the line of thick computer printouts leading from the spot beneath which the body had been suspended; that was how she’d done it, stood on the stacked printouts and kicked them out from under her.

  It took ten minutes before a couple of men from the ACF’s private security force appeared on the scene, followed closely by local police.

  Pad in hand, one uniformed young man, strapping and blond, took Logan’s statement.

  When they finished, Logan was told he was free to go. Wearily, he began toward the door. But, sensing someone watching him, he stopped and turned.

  Stillman.

  “It’s a sad thing,” Stillman observed, breaking the silence.

  Logan nodded gravely.

  “And I’m sure it was terrible for you. I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t understand it,” said Logan softly. “Why would she have done something like this?”

  “People do strange things. We’re all under a lot of pressure here.”

  “I thought I knew her. I keep wondering if there’s something I should have picked up on.”

  “Yes, well”—he motioned toward the door—“there’s no sense hanging around here. It’s still a workday.”

  Logan remained rooted to the spot. “I just can’t understand it,” he repeated.

  “Dammit, Logan,” Stillman erupted in sudden exasperation, “enough hearts and flowers.”

  The younger man stared at him, bewildered.

  “I just can’t understand it,” parroted Stillman sarcastically. “You think you’ve had it hard this morning? I’ve just come from seeing Congressman Marino’s family—that was hard.” He paused. “Learn this, Logan: What happens to some junior associate means squat. It’s the Foundation that counts.”

  Logan hesitated. He couldn’t mean it the way it sounded. “I guess she was under a lot of stress,” he said.