by Harry Stein
Reston fell silent. “Who else knows about this?”
“Only you, me, and Sabrina.”
He nodded. “Tell me something—what does your friend Sabrina think of me?”
A miserable liar, Logan feigned nonchalance. “What do you mean?”
“She thinks I’m an asshole, right?”
“I don’t think so. She knows I’m talking to you about this.”
“Because if I’ve got one talent, it’s reading the looks I get from good-looking women. And this one shoots lasers.”
“Trust me, that’s not true.” He took a sip of water. “Anyway, what difference does it make? You’re not going to spend your life with her.”
“Right, you are.”
Despite himself, Logan smiled.
Reston put his hands behind his head and leaned back, staring at the ceiling. “Jesus H. Christ, I thought this was just gonna be a pleasant dinner.”
“Sorry.”
He leaned forward again, and spoke softly. “You’re gonna get massacred on this, Logan. Breast cancer belongs to Stillman! He’s about to launch his trial.”
Logan was more aware of it than his friend could ever know. Nor, at this point, did he have the heart to bring up what he’d learned of Coopersmith. “So”—he managed with what felt like a cocky grin—“we’ll go head to head with him. For the good of humanity.”
“If this thing is going to have any chance at all, you’re going to have to get one of the other top guys behind it.”
“I know that.”
“And by a process of elimination …”
“There’s only Shein.”
The implications were clear to both. For all his spirited nonconformity, indeed, largely because of it, Shein wielded far less power at the ACF than most of the others.
Logan leaned forward. “So you with us, or what?”
Reston shook his head with resignation. “Ah, what the hell. I guess we’ve gotta give it a try, right?” He paused. “I’m gonna order another bottle of wine and get drunk. You’d better start thinking of how you’re gonna suck up to Shein.”
As it happened, Shein made things easy for him. Two days later, at the end of another long workday, the senior man called Logan into his office and closed the door.
“You speak German, don’t you, Logan?” Noting the other’s confusion, he added, “I checked out your resume. How well?”
“Enough to get by.”
“Getting by doesn’t impress me. Getting by I can do with my Yiddish.”
“Actually, I’ve been working on it a lot lately.”
Shein nodded. “I know. I see you’ve taken a lot of material out of the archives.”
Logan just stared: was there anything this guy didn’t know? “May I ask what this is about?”
“ ‘May I ask what this is about?’ ” echoed Shein, mockingly. “What is this, a church social? Sure you can. I’m going to the Tenth International Chemotherapy Conference next month in Germany. Frankfurt. And I’m gonna want a junior associate to come along for the ride. There’s a lot of panel discussions and poster presentations, and I’m gonna need another set of eyes and ears.” He nodded at Logan. “Yours.”
“Seriously?”
“Write it down, December fifteenth through the eighteenth. Or you worried that’ll fuck up your Christmas shopping?”
Logan shook his head no.
“It’ll give us a chance to get to know each other a little better, maybe talk about things that have nothing to do with this place. Chess. Women. Barbecue.”
Only now did Logan let himself get excited. “That’s wonderful, Dr. Shein. Really, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Shein dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “My pleasure, I’m sure.”
“Say, Logan,” hissed Shein, eyeing a tall blonde in an elegantly tailored suit, “get a load of that.”
They were standing by the carousel at the airport in Frankfurt, waiting for their luggage. The woman, seemingly harried and slightly severe, the very definition of the no-nonsense executive, was distinctly not Logan’s type. He nodded. “I noticed her on the plane. She was in first class.”
Shein cast her a look that would have been inappropriate even in a bordello. “Wouldn’t you just love to do her? Boy, that’d make you feel young again.”
“Dr. Shein, I am young.”
Ignoring this, Shein turned back toward the carousel. “Trust me, Logan, we’re going to enjoy ourselves here. If the goddamn luggage ever comes.”
Already, after only eight hours together, Logan was starting to have second thoughts about this entire venture. If part of the point was to get to better know his superior, he suddenly found himself knowing more about him than he’d ever wanted to. Even before the flight had left the ground at Dulles, the change had begun. “Okay, Logan, now you’re gonna see my fun side.”
“I think of you as a fun guy already,” said Logan, in what seemed to be the spirit of the moment.
“Naah,” came the reply, “wait’ll you see. I live for these trips.”
Over the next several hours as the plane moved over the North Atlantic, most of the other passengers dozed in the darkened cabin. But the flight attendants kept Shein supplied with a steady supply of Bloody Marys and the tales of his exploits on the road came one after the other. Dead tired but wide awake, Logan could scarcely believe what he was hearing: the research assistant Shein met at the conference in Rome; the English physician with whom he’d found himself deeply smitten in Tokyo; the sultry prostitute with whom he’d spent most of his waking hours in Rio.
There was, to be sure, a large element of braggadocio in this. More than once, Shein caught his colleague’s eye and broke into a broad grin. “That surprise you, Logan?”
But, too, listening, Logan could hardly miss the desperation behind it; the sense that this man, so widely admired and envied, had a void in the center of his life that could not be filled. Even in his own telling, not all of the trysts had gone well. After the first night, he’d been unable to perform with the English doctor. It turned out that a woman who’d been excessively friendly at a meeting in Seattle just wanted to use him for her own professional ends. The Brazilian prostitute took him to the hovel where she lived on the outskirts of the city and, showing him her two young children, exacted a promise that he’d send her cash from the States. He did so for more than a year.
Late in the flight, as Logan finally began to doze, he was aware of Shein’s elbow gently nudging him back toward consciousness.
“Dr. Shein?” he asked. “Is there something you want?”
“I’ll bet you think I’m an asshole, don’t you?” came the soft reply.
Logan hesitated. “No, you’re not. Just human.”
“Don’t kiss my ass, Logan, you don’t know a damn thing about it. Alice—when I think of all she’s done for me. Working at some goddamn bookkeeping job to help me through med school, dealing with my moods. I don’t even know why she puts up with me.”
Momentarily, Logan felt not only sorry but slightly embarrassed for the guy. It seemed someone with Shein’s brains and experience should have a less mundane lament, something more interesting.
But, never one to disappoint, an instant later Shein forgot all about self-pity. In its place there came controlled rage. “The bastards’d use it against me, of course. I know that!” he hissed.
Logan did not have to ask who he was talking about. The ACF was probably one of the last remaining institutions in America where a charge of infidelity might still do someone’s career serious harm; a circumstance born of its reliance on the whims of powerful politicians, some of whom continued to make a public fetish of personal morality. Thus it was that, at least on the campus itself, the kind of casual sexual adventurism so common elsewhere was all but unknown.
“As if they don’t do it themselves, the cocksuckers,” Shein added suddenly. “Every chance they get. Every damn one of ’em!”
Logan s
ilently checked his watch, not yet set ahead: twelve forty-eight. Already early morning Frankfurt time. In little more than an hour they’d be on the ground. “Dr. Shein, maybe we should try to get some sleep.”
“Well, maybe not Larsen. He’s too stupid to figure out how to get away with it.”
There was no way Logan was going to get any sleep now, of course. His head was spinning. Suddenly he felt himself to be less a colleague—a very junior colleague, at that—than a chaperone. Hell, a keeper. This guy was more unstable than he’d ever suspected. A few hours before, Logan had viewed this trip as an immense opportunity, his primary concern choosing the right moment for the delicate task of trying to enlist Shein’s support for their trial of Compound J. Now he had to worry about the esteemed scientist embarrassing the ACF; and, hardly incidentally, taking him down with him.
For an instant, by the carousel, Logan was afraid Shein might have in mind following the blond businesswoman. But when their luggage finally arrived, he allowed himself to be led toward the taxi stand, and half an hour later they were checking in at the Hotel International.
Before the younger man’s eyes, Shein now underwent another metamorphosis. Relaxed and bright eyed, he stood in the large, tastefully appointed lobby, greeting colleagues from around the world; seeming to effortlessly recall not just their names but minute details of the research in which each was involved.
Dead on his feet, wanting nothing more than to collapse on something soft, Logan quietly excused himself and went to his room. In less than five minutes he was out.
When his eyes at last fluttered open, he was momentarily disoriented. The numbers on the digital clock in the TV read 3:08. Sunlight streamed in from the window opposite. Midafternoon. Groggily, he picked up the phone and asked for Shein’s room. No answer.
“But there is a message for you, Dr. Logan,” said the voice in heavily accented English. “Shall I have it fetched to your room?”
The note was in Shein’s slapdash hand, the one he used when writing prescriptions: Papa’s gone a-hunting. Don’t wait up.
Sitting alone at dinner that night in the hotel restaurant, Logan once again reassured himself there was no reason for concern. The three-day conference would not officially open until the morning. Shein was not due to speak until the following evening. Surely by morning …
But Shein was not at breakfast the next day; nor, Logan discovered, had he even picked up his credentials at the front desk. Attending the conference’s opening ceremony on his own, watching from the back of the vast auditorium as the elderly head of the Joachim Brysch Stiftung der Deutschen Krebshilfe welcomed the delegates, he could not shake a sense of dread. What should he do? Summon someone back at the ACF? But who—and what would be the consequences of that? Alert the Frankfurt police? That might prove even more disastrous. Seth Shein was among the world’s most eminent cancer researchers. Who knew, maybe he was just contentedly camped out in the city’s red light district.
In the end, Logan decided to do nothing at all. This seemed not just the best choice for him personally but as close as he could come to following the instructions Shein himself had left in his note. Besides, he also had an obligation to pay attention to the conference itself. In Shein’s absence, wasn’t it more vital than ever that he serve as the senior man’s eyes and ears?
Nor was this just a convenient rationale. The work being discussed and evaluated here was of immense importance. Never before, not even at the ACF, had Logan seen so much talent in one place: preeminent cancer specialists from almost every research institution of any significance in the world. Sitting in the auditorium, leafing through the program schedule, he was actually able to briefly put his problem out of mind. This was like being an eight-year-old at Disney World, with a free pass to every ride. Lectures on everything from common basal-cell carcinoma to oligodendroglioma of the brain, workshops running the gamut from garden-variety chemotherapies to cutting-edge research. So many cancers, so little time.
Then, again, the sheer variety of choices only made his own easier: he’d focus on malignancies of the breast.
On the second page, his eye fixed upon a talk to be held immediately after this ceremony in a lecture hall a floor above: “Prognostic Factors in Early Stage Breast Cancer.” The listed speaker was Sergio Ferrati of Milan’s Instituto Nazionale di Tumori, a name Logan had been liberally dropping since he first came across it during his second year at Claremont. Obliged to speak in English, the international language of science, Dr. Ferrati proved nearly impenetrable, but Logan didn’t care. The treat was seeing him at all. So what if his notes were useless, Reston would bust a gut with envy!
After a break for lunch at the cafeteria, Logan headed straight for “Novel Chemotherapeutic Agents for Advanced Breast Cancer” by Arthur McGee of Houston’s M. D. Anderson Cancer Center; then, as a change of pace, dropped by for the last third of a seminar on “Cell Cycle Progression in Malignant Breast MCF-7 Cells.”
By the time the question and answer segment ended, it was nearly five o’clock. Shein was scheduled to speak at eight, immediately after dinner. The sense of impending disaster returned with a rush. Where could the guy be? What was wrong with him? Throughout the day, Logan had exchanged scarcely a word with anyone on the premises. This he didn’t mind; young and without a big-time reputation in a gathering of some of the most ambitious souls on earth, he was grateful to be able to distance himself from the ego-driven scene. But now he felt not so much apart as deeply, harrowingly alone.
The formal sessions concluded for the day, intent on somehow keeping his mind off his problem, Logan made his way down to the large room off the lobby given over to “poster sessions.”
The atmosphere here was reminiscent of nothing so much as a high school science fair, confidence commingling with just a touch of desperation. Lining the aisles, edge to edge, were easels, each about six feet high and four feet long. This room was open to even the most modestly credentialed, from ambitious postgraduate students, to young researchers of recognized promise, to older midlevel academics hoping against hope to stay in the game. Anyone with data to display or even a product to hawk was welcome; he or she had merely to scrawl a shorthand description of his wares on a poster, paste on a bit of supporting data, and stand there, awaiting interested customers.
Though poster sessions were the low-rent neighborhood of every such convention—senior scientists tending to wander through only in protective packs, like socialites slumming in Harlem for soul food—Logan had heard that they often featured innovative work. Now he slowly made his way past the exhibits: “The Role of p53 in Retinoblastoma” by Edinoff and Bender of New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; “Mutated H-ras Sequences in Pancreatic Cancer” by a researcher from Madrid; “K-Balb Cells Efficiently Internalize Antisense Oligonucleotides” by … no affiliation was listed. But the young woman whose work it apparently was stood at the ready.
More out of politeness than genuine interest, Logan paused, reading her poster.
“Affiliation?” she suddenly spoke up.
“Pardon?” said Logan, startled.
“What is your affiliation, please?” She had some vaguely mid-European accent. Maybe Czech.
“The American Cancer Foundation.”
Her eyes brightened. “Excellent. This will interest you, then.” And, without awaiting a reply, she launched into her presentation. “You see, what we are trying to establish is that antisense oligonucleotide constructs can be used in these cells to sequence-specifically inhibit gene expression. This could be a whole new way of treating patients.”
Forget it, thought Logan, it’ll never work. “Actually,” he said, “my specialty is breast cancer.”
“Oh.” Glumly, she nodded to her right. “Over there.”
The next aisle was entirely devoted to breast research, no fewer than fifteen displays.
As he began strolling down it, one exhibit immediately seized his interest “Inhibitors of Growth Factor Binding to MCF-
7 Breast Cancer Cells.”
Logan stopped short. Even as he tried to feign nonchalance, he was aware of his heart starting to pound. This was precisely the claim he intended to make for Compound J! Had someone else already done his research? Had they been scooped?
He and the man beside the poster, identified as Willem Van Meter, Ph.D., of the University of Antwerp, looked one another over. Obviously unimpressed, Van Meter resumed scanning the crowd for more likely prospects.
Logan moved in closer. A cursory glance at the accompanying display cards confirmed his fear that this was indeed real science, not quackery. He began reading the cards one by one, weighing the hypotheses, critiquing the experimental technique, trying to decide whether the thesis could hold water in its entirety.
Glumly, he concluded it might.
“Interesting work,” he ventured, with studied neutrality.
Van Meter looked at him—“Thank you”—then turned his attention back to the room.
“It reminds me of the study done by Professor Engel at the University of Minnesota.”
“Yes, I am aware of that.”
Logan waited for some elaboration. When none came, it struck him that the other knew nothing at all of the study in question.
But Van Meter became considerably more animated a moment later when an older, far more distinguished scientist happened by: Dr. Vickers of the Royal Marsden Hospital in London.
“So what have we here?” asked Vickers.
“It’s a red-colored polycarboxylate polymer,” the other readily explained. “We think it’s quite interesting.”
“Ah, a polymer, is it …?”
“We are trying to establish activity in metastatic breast cancer.…”
“But,” repeated Vickers, fixing on the key detail, “you say it’s a polymer …?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What a shame. All these fascinating results, and no one will ever treat a patient with it.”
A polymer, which is composed of linked repeating units with the number of units differing from molecule to molecule, has by definition erratic behavior. Nor, because it is produced by a chemical reaction that ends unpredictably, can uniformity ever be achieved. In the same batch will be found molecules varying dramatically in size and weight, some active, some inactive, some perhaps even toxic.