The Magic Bullet

by Harry Stein

  “I take it Reston’s already agreed to this?” asked Logan.

  “Happily. After all, his bottom line is the same as mine: he only wants to see this drug succeed.”

  Logan paused thoughtfully. “Well, then, I hope you enjoy working with John Reston as much as we have.”

  Stillman’s face darkened. “That’s it? That’s what you have to tell me?”

  “Yes,” said Sabrina, taking Logan’s hand, “that is it.”

  “Fine,” snapped the other, turning on his heel. “See you inside.”

  Whatever satisfaction the exchange with Stillman gave them vanished the moment they reentered the room. At the table, where Boudin and Byrne had been, sat … Ray Coopersmith.

  He wore the same anxious expression Logan remembered from their meeting at the Hotel Jefferson. How long ago was that? Nine months? Ten? Only, now his hair was neatly trimmed and his suit, gray with muted pinstripes, appeared to be brand-new.

  “Dr. Coopersmith,” began Larsen, “we understand you met some time ago with Dr. Logan.”

  “November sixth.” He looked around the room and smiled broadly. “A Saturday.”

  “And this was at your instigation?”

  “His.”

  “That’s another lie,” said Logan.

  “Dr. Logan, I am ready to conduct this hearing without you.”

  “I’m just supposed to sit here? I don’t even get to present my side?”

  Larsen’s voice grew even colder. “ ‘Your side?’ You had almost a year to inform me that you had met with Dr. Coopersmith. It was your choice not to do so. Unless you deny that such a meeting occurred.”

  Logan made no response.

  “I thought not.” He turned to Coopersmith. “I promise you, that won’t happen again. Now, perhaps you might fill us in on your background with this institution.”

  Coopersmith exhaled dramatically. “I was a junior associate here five years ago. And I was good too.”

  Larsen nodded. “That strikes me as a fair assessment.”

  “But I screwed up. I was working on a Phase Two prostate cancer trial.” He momentarily stared down at the table, downcast. “I altered some data.”

  There was a silence in the room—a sympathetic silence.

  “It was stupid. I’m trying to live it down.”

  “Why do you think Dr. Logan wanted to see you?”

  “I knew it the moment I saw him, he’s one of these sons of bitches just out for the glory.”

  They waited for him to continue, but instead he looked back down at the table.

  “Yes …?”

  “He wanted to know how to pull the same thing. Just in case.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Sure. How to rework data that wasn’t working for him, how to get away with underreporting toxicity, all that shit.”

  To Logan, it was as if the talk was of someone else. It was so preposterous, under other circumstances he’d have been embarrassed for the guy. Who in his right mind would ever buy any of this?

  “You talked about underreporting toxicity?”

  “I told him it’s not that easy. It’s a shell game. To do it right, you need a ton of legitimate data so the bad stuff gets lost. You need people.”

  “And what did Dr. Logan say to that?”

  “He said that was no problem.”

  What could they have offered to get him here? Reinstatement? Right—when Porky Pig becomes the head of the ACF! Probably nothing more than a few kind words.

  Coopersmith gave a sudden maniacal grin. “Of course, he also wanted to talk about you, Dr. Larsen. And you, Dr. Stillman.”

  “About Dr. Stillman and me?”

  “He said you screwed him over every chance you got.” The grin grew even wider. “He told me he hated your fucking guts. He said you were scum.”

  Larsen turned to glare at Logan. Despite himself, the moment actually gave him a surge of pleasure.

  “He called you assholes.” Coopersmith, clearly improvising wildly, couldn’t have been enjoying himself more. “Fucking assholes. He said he wanted to show you up and I was the man to show him how.”

  “And how would that happen?” Larsen soberly asked, as if the man before him were something other than a certifiable lunatic.

  Logan felt a presence looming behind him. Instinctively, he turned—Seth Shein!

  “He said he knew how fucked up you were, he’d play mind games with you. Both of you.”

  Shein had been staring in bewilderment at Coopersmith, but at this last, Logan saw him break into a broad smile. It matched his own.

  At last, someone was on their side!

  “Did he make any other remarks about senior personnel at the ACF?”

  “Yeah,” cut in Shein, “he said everyone was an asshole!” He began pointing around the table. “You, you, you, you, and me, assholes! That’s just the way we’ve all heard Dan Logan talk, isn’t it?” He eyed Larsen with contempt. “What the hell you think you’re doing here?”

  But Larsen only smiled. “Dr. Shein, I’m so pleased you could join us. Won’t you take a seat?”

  “I’m comfortable here.”

  “Dr. Coopersmith, we thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “I should go?” he asked uncertainly.

  “Please. Thank you.”

  Rising from the table, he walked from the room, glancing blankly at Logan as he did so.

  “So you found Dr. Coopersmith’s presentation enlightening?”

  “Come off it, Larsen, it’s not news you’re an asshole! You really think anyone’s gonna believe this?”

  At this, Larsen began going crimson. Logan felt like leaping from his chair and embracing Shein.

  “The p-point,” stammered Larsen, “is that these people conspired with a known fraud. Dr. Logan’s clear intention was to fabricate data. We have just heard that—”

  “We’ve heard bullshit. That’s all you’ve got, bullshit!”

  “Forget that,” interrupted Stillman, “none of that matters. Let’s cut right to the chase. The real point, as Dr. Shein knows, is that this protocol has become an embarrassment.”

  “Is that what I know?” shot back Shein.

  “Forgive me—as Dr. Shein should know.” He cast Shein a malevolent glance. “But perhaps, being someone who gave a group of incompetent young doctors the power of life and death over a group of women, he really doesn’t know.”

  Shein just glared at him.

  “And the result,” continued Stillman, “has been tragic.” He stood to face his rival and indicated the empty chair at the table. “My question for you now is simple: Are you ready to go on record continuing to defend these people and their protocol?”

  “This protocol has merit, Stillman,” he said, but with considerably less fire.

  “Is that your answer? You are willing, then, to assume public responsibility for any further patient deaths that result?”

  Shein stood there, his face at once showing anger and intense anxiety.

  “Well, we’re waiting,” piled on Larsen, his pleasure at sticking it to his wiseass tormentor all too evident. “I should tell you that we are prepared to bring in Dr. Markell to offer his views.”

  For a moment longer Shein stood silent. “Fuck it,” he announced finally, “the protocol’s a goddamn bust.”

  Stillman beamed. “Would you care to elaborate?”

  Shein glared his way. “You wanna hear me say it? All right, this kid Logan got in way over his head.” In the bat of an eyelash, his hesitancy gave way to resolve. “Logan’s got some talent, but he’s arrogant, he doesn’t know when to listen. He takes stupid risks.”

  “Then we all agree,” said Stillman evenly. He nodded again at the chair. “I’d appreciate your joining us. Please.”

  Logan and Sabrina, about to be cast to their fate, exchanged a glance as Shein assumed his place at the table.

  “The three of you may leave now,” said Larsen, indicating the Compound J team.

&
nbsp; The letters Logan and Sabrina received that evening were identical:

  You are hereby advised that your contract with the American Cancer Foundation has been terminated, effective immediately.

  “You know, we can probably get you out of this,” Logan ventured.

  He watched Sabrina closely, awaiting a reaction. Glancing in the direction of the bar, she appeared not to have even heard. “In some ways, the change will be not bad for me,” she said. “At Regina Elena, they do very good work also. Serious oncology.”

  “It’s me they want to stick it to,” he pressed. “Stillman, even Larsen—if I take full responsibility for this thing, they’ll probably let you stay.”

  She looked across the table, wide-eyed. “Why? Why would I wish to pretend I did not do what I did? Why would I want to stay?”

  Logan realized, too late, he’d underestimated her. He had been certain, at the very least, she would find the gesture touching. Instead, she remained as frustratingly levelheaded as he, at that moment, was veering toward self-pity.

  The worst of it—the part neither of them wanted to discuss, but which Logan’s proposal had partly been designed to address—was that they’d no longer have each other. The ACF had always been, literally, their common ground. Stripped of her standing at the Foundation, for Sabrina there was not even the possibility of work at a comparable level outside of Italy.

  They would be an ocean apart.

  Logan took a sip of his vodka martini; the first time in a year he’d ordered anything stronger than wine. “I don’t know,” he said, “it seemed like the right thing to say.”

  “No, it was not the right thing.” She reached a hand across the table. “But I understand. Grazie.”

  He could see that already, on some level, she was pulling away in self-protection. Probably he should do the same.

  “At least at Regina Elena, they make me feel I am welcome,” she said. “Maybe at home we don’t have all the resources you have here, but what counts most is people.”

  “When do they want you?”

  “They say at the end of October. But I must go sooner, I think.” She momentarily averted her eyes. “The faster to leave, the better.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And you, Logan?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know yet.”

  “You cannot go back to Claremont?”

  “Not a chance. You ever hear the expression ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire’?” He paused. “I’m thinking I might go home for a little while and mull things over.”

  “To Decatur?” she asked, surprised. “Just for a week or two. Get organized, sort out my options.”

  “I see.” She sipped her beer. “Your father will welcome you?”

  “Who knows? But they say home is the place that, when you go there, they’ve got to take you in.”

  “What I mean—he’ll understand when you tell what has happened here?”

  “Well, it would definitely be better if I were going under other circumstances.” He looked at her tenderly. “And with you.”

  Instantly, her reserve melted away. She gave his hand a tender squeeze. “One day, Logan. I promise.”

  Logan headed out of town the same morning Sabrina flew out of Dulles for Rome. The trip to Decatur can be made in as little as ten hours, but he didn’t press it. He spent the night in a motel, then decided to stop in Chicago for a leisurely lunch. On the phone he’d been vague with his father. He was, he said, planning to take “a hiatus” from his job at the ACF. Would it be okay if he stopped by Decatur for, say, eight or ten days?

  He pulled up before the familiar gray clapboard house late afternoon the day after he’d left. Five minutes later, he was still sitting in the car, staring at the house, when the front door swung open and his father came ambling toward him.

  It had been almost three years since Logan had laid eyes on him, and he was struck by how much he’d aged. Though he was still rail thin, at close to seventy his long face was deeply furrowed and his unkempt hair had gone completely white.

  “Well, you gonna get out, or what?”

  “Hi, Dad,” he said, emerging. “Great to see you too.”

  “Don’t get smart with me. Is that what they teach you at those places?”

  “Actually, yes. You need it in self-defense.”

  “I’ll bet you do, I’ll just bet you do.”

  On his previous visit home, Logan might’ve laughed. Utterly unconscious of his own behavior, his father never failed to condemn the mean-spiritedness and authoritarianism he saw in others. The difference was that now the older man’s take on the world—that invariably it is the ruthless and amoral who succeed—was no longer so easy to dismiss out of hand.

  “Yeah. Well, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to get away from that place. At least for a while.”

  “So when you planning to go back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going back?”

  He hesitated. “No.”

  There it was. Logan waited for the inevitable reaction; and, sure enough, the look that attached itself to the older man’s face was the one he’d learned in earliest boyhood, disappointment mingling with scorn. “Great, just great! What the hell happened?”

  “Maybe I can sit down first? Say hello to Mom?”

  “You got fired, didn’t you? Why the hell didn’t you go into private practice like I told you?”

  In spite of himself—he’d sworn he wouldn’t be drawn into something like this—Logan felt his entire body tensing. “It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

  “It always is.”

  “Look, I’m pretty tired.”

  His father snorted. “What’d you do, insult some muckety-muck? Or just screw up?”

  The question was actually a comment, but this time Logan didn’t let it pass. “I didn’t do anything wrong at all, Dad.”

  His father studied him a moment. “Well, c’mon in and give us the bloody details. I guess it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference now.”

  Billed by his mother as a welcome-home party, dinner that evening quickly degenerated into an even sharper reminder of why, all those years ago, Logan had been so anxious to get away.

  “I’m not touching that,” announced the fourth family member at the table, his older sister Cathy, as soon as the main course appeared. “You know perfectly well I don’t eat meat.”

  “Oh, darling, I really didn’t know that included fowl,” fretted his mother, the peacemaker. “Duck is Danny’s favorite. Couldn’t you this once make an exception?”

  “No, mother, no exceptions. This isn’t a game, it’s my body we’re talking about.”

  “Well, that’s the stupidest damn thing I ever heard!” snorted her father.

  “C’mon, Dad, it’s not as if it’s news. Cathy’s been a vegetarian for ten years,” said Logan.

  “Daniel, I prefer to be called Catherine now.”

  If, as a psychologist would doubtless observe, both the Logan children were living their lives largely in reaction to their father, Cathy’s rebellion was probably the more far reaching, an ongoing battle against every attitude and value imposed upon her in that home. Where Logan shared his father’s vast respect for traditional learning, Cathy was open to every crackpot notion that came down the pike; where he had always drawn sustenance from the larger world, she was intensely inner directed. She ran a shop that sold locally handmade artifacts. For friends, she chose aging, over-the-hill veterans of the Age of Aquarius. “Pea brains,” her father called them.

  And yet, in at least one key respect, she was more like the older man than Logan could ever imagine being, for she was as intractable, and every bit as opinionated. It could not have been coincidence that she’d remained so close to home, or that, for all the battling, she stopped by to see their parents at least a couple of times a week.

  “Well, Catherine,” replied Logan, wondering again how he’d let himself be drawn into this, “I suppose I should insis
t that you call me Dr. Logan.”

  “Frankly,” she said coolly, “I don’t know how anyone who professes to know about the human body could put that poison into himself.”

  “We’re all gonna die anyway,” observed their father.

  “Listen, Catherine,” said Logan, “there is absolutely no data to support this thesis of yours that people will drop dead from occasionally eating meat. None. Human physiology is a lot more complicated than that.”

  “I question the validity of that statement,” she sneered.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “All your alleged data is collected by people whose minds are already made up. Doctors are just in cahoots with the drug companies and you know it.”

  Their father laughed. “She’s got you there.”

  “What, you’re opposed to drugs too?”

  “Absolutely. My friend Lucy had breast cancer and they gave her chemotherapy. After every treatment she vomited for hours, and her hair started to fall out. Do you call that natural?”

  This was a ludicrous conversation; the equivalent of a big-league ballplayer trying to explain the fine points of sliding technique to someone who doesn’t know where the bases are. “I happen to know something about breast cancer,” he said. “What would you suggest as an alternative?”

  “Native Americans use yucca plants.”

  “Oh, yes? And do you have any data on their cure rate?”

  “Catherine made me some yucca plant tea for my arthritis,” cut in their mother. “I found it very helpful.”

  Their father held up his hand to indicate this phase of the conversation was over, a peremptory gesture Logan had seen a thousand times before. “So,” he said, turning to his son, “I want to hear about your plans.”

  Logan blanched; he needed time to prepare for this. “I have a number of options,” he equivocated.

  “What?”

  “Well, I do have one offer.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “New York City.”

  His father looked mildly interested. “In a private practice? With a hospital?”

  In fact, the offer wasn’t quite firm—and it was from neither a private practice nor a hospital. Among the first people he’d called after the ax fell was his friend Ruben Perez. Perez was now working part-time at a small start-up company in lower Manhattan, a research lab involved in AIDS drug delivery systems—and he was pretty sure the guy in charge could use someone with Logan’s credentials.