Diane backed the sailboat out of the slip and negotiated the turn into the bay with ease. Vincent went to work raising the sails.
They cleared the far end of the BRI compound and waved at some of Vincent’s racing friends from the sailing club. It seemed everyone was starting the weekend early. And why not? It was one of those perfect days on the bay: low humidity, twelve-knot breeze, Texas bluebonnet sky.
Diane stood at the helm watching her husband tweak the sail trim, and her heart went out to him. She knew that Vincent loved sailing, but she sensed that he found his leisure overload tedious. She knew that the temporary ban on practicing his alchemy had placed a severe strain on Vincent’s patience. And it was weighing on him, demonstrated in part by his growing animosity toward Bellfort.
The erosion of his attitude was also evident in his less-than-burning interest in her achievements. Returning from successful business trips, she had to curb her enthusiasm to avoid the appearance that she was showing off.
So far she had signed agreements with each of the Central and South American countries she visited with Raymond Bellfort and his cousin Gabriel Carrera who had arranged the meetings. Gabriel pointed out that even pharmaceutical giants did not have her 100 percent success rate. He said that representatives of large American companies usually showed up looking impressive in their hand tailored suits and Rolex watches. But their “taco Spanish” was almost an insult, and the use of an interpreter stiffened discussions.
Gabriel attributed Diane’s success to her deft handling of the cultures and her amazing facility with the Spanish language. She communicated like a local wherever she went.
“And, of course, your looks do not hurt,” he had said.
There was a time when Diane would have found that comment offensive, allowing it to diminish her sense of accomplishment. Despite advanced degrees in biology and pharmacology, she always suspected her looks were considered her strongest credential. And early in her career she allowed her resentment to show.
But as she matured she accepted that some people (even within her profession) saw female scientists as anomalies. Eye-appeal could at least explain, to the skeptical, how a woman might have risen to such a position. And maybe they were right to some extent. If she had been hard to look at, would Vincent have become her mentor early on?
From the beginning, they were a team in the workplace as well as at home. But Vincent had always been in charge of their professional life. Now, she wondered if her singular success was producing stress cracks in the foundation of their marriage.
They both knew that their relationship (personal as well as professional) was being redefined. Last week Vincent had even bent to help her with her gardening. However, for a man who could calibrate sensitive laboratory equipment with one hand behind his back, he had shown a marked clumsiness with flower pots—but she adored him for the effort.
So, today she had dropped her trip-planning and ran to catch him at the dock. The boat was the last bastion of Vincent’s supremacy over her. Vincent had introduced her to the world of boats and water. And even though she had been a quick study, they both knew that Vincent was forevermore captain of the ship. And they both liked it that way.
With a hand slice across his throat, Vincent signaled Diane to cut the engine. There was plenty of wind to run on sail-power alone.
He stepped into the cockpit and settled into the starboard seat. Diane glanced over at her husband as he ran his hand admiringly over the varnished cockpit trim.
“You’ve done a beautiful job restoring her. She looks brand new.”
Vincent smiled, acknowledging the compliment, and turned his head, slowly examining the yacht from bow to stern.
“Do you think we should rename her?” Diane asked.
“What’s wrong with Woodwind?”
“I love that name, but in another life she was owned by drug runners,” she said. “Maybe the wrong people will remember it.”
Vincent chuckled. “Now who’s acting paranoid?”
The phone in his pocket vibrated. He dug for it and looked at the screen. It was Raymond Bellfort. He frowned. “This can’t be good.” Bellfort had a habit of saving bad news until the staff left the premises. Then he’d call them on their mobile phones.
After wrestling with the temptation to ignore the ring, Vincent pressed the green button.
Bellfort sounded breathless. “Taking Diane out for some relaxation, I see. Good idea. You two work so hard.”
Bellfort was greasing him up for something.
“Our investors drive me crazy. Gotta have a ‘magic bullet.’ They won’t loosen their purse strings for a car that takes them half way up the hill. They don’t want palliation; they want a cure. But we were lucky this time.”
A shrimp boat chugged past on their port side, with a flock of laughing gulls in close pursuit. With all the commotion, Vincent could only catch every other word, enough though to give him the uneasy sense that he should prepare to do battle.
The boat and the birds moved on by, but Raymond’s litany droned on: “… eliminate the risk, the expense of the interminable FDA processes: Clinical Trials, approval committees and so forth. Just a me-too drug. So what if it has fewer side effects and costs a lot less to manufacture? It’s not a cure.”
Vincent had heard enough. He interrupted, shouting into the wind. “I’m having a hard time hearing you, Raymond. Can we get to the bottom line?”
“Bottom line. That’s what I like to hear. I knew you’d eventually get past that ‘for the greater good’ schlock and get with the program here. Ahh… Welcome to the business world, my man.”
Vincent cursed and tossed the phone onto the seat. He had strongly suspected there was no monetary shortfall at BRI. Now he knew that Bellfort withheld funding for the completion of Peruvase because he planned to sell it all along—probably even before he and Diane had signed on with BRI.
Infuriated, Vincent pounded his fist on the seat cushion beside him; the phone bounced onto the cockpit floor. He bent down to retrieve it and heard Bellfort’s voice still prattling on: “You’ll get a large bonus, of course, and a royalty. We’ll finally be able to order that new spectrophotometer and so forth—all the stuff that’s been sidelined. It was quite a coup, my man. We really put the pants on them.
“Wait ‘til you see what that Taiwanese pharmaceutical company paid up front for your Peruvase.”
Bellfort studied his phone. The battery was fully charged. Signal strength was good. So, as he suspected, Vincent Rose had hung up on him.
The phone buzzed in his hand, and “Aaaa calling” came up on the screen. Bellfort rolled his eyes; the man had been dogging him since early that morning. He pressed the green button and grunted “Hello.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Just a minute ago.”
“And?”
“He had a little bit of an attitude… but I think after he chews on it awhile, he’ll warm up to the idea.”
“Try to help him fast-track his attitude adjustment. We need some damage control here.”
Duh! “I’m on it. Believe me; I know what’s at stake.”
“Keep me apprised. If you’re not successful, maybe I can be more persuasive.”
μ CHAPTER NINE μ
Vincent merged onto Interstate 45 heading south. Diane sat in the passenger seat of the Suburban watching the lush spring foliage roll by.
Southeast Texas had been a surprise when she first arrived months before. She had expected more of a desert landscape. But it was a transitional place where live oaks and magnolias shared the land with prickly pear cactus and mesquite, a place where the South made room for the Southwest.
She looked over at Vincent. His intense focus on the road told her his mind had already jumped ahead to Galveston; he was a man on a mission. Diane smiled to herself. She had forgotten how resilient her husband could be. It was only four days since the sale of Peruvase, and already he had moved on to his next project.
On Satur
day, Raymond Bellfort had stopped by the house to gauge any fallout from the sale of Vincent’s drug and to present his case. The gist was: The cost of studying each and every compound from the medicinal plants added to their arsenal would be prohibitive. For the most promising ones, they’d have to seek a pharmaceutical partner before they reached the clinical trial stage. Even at that, every Investigational New Drug carried risks, what with FDA requirements and the competitive business environment. So, sometimes they’d sell a product—like Peruvase—outright, before the work on it was completed.
Raymond appealed to Vincent saying, “Even with the carefully constructed work you do here in the lab, you can’t guarantee positive outcomes. If we get an early offer, if it’s a good number—and you have to admit in this case it was—we sell them the risk.”
Diane was relieved when Vincent and Raymond shook hands, agreeing to move on to the next project—the development of a compound from a plant Diane had found in Venezuela.
She had been on a collecting expedition more than three years before when she visited the Witochi, an Indian tribe that lived along the banks of Peru’s Maranon River, an Amazon tributary.
During certain tribal rituals, the men became raucously inebriated by sucking on nuts they called the balasi. Afterwards, they threw the nuts into the flames as an offering to the god who provided the trees on which the nuts grew.
The nuts were only permitted during special celebrations, and the tribal Shaman kept the trees’ whereabouts a secret.
The men delighted in these festivities. However, on the mornings after, some of them suffered colossal hangovers replete with demonic hallucinations. They wept and fell to the ground rubbing their faces in the ashes from the previous night’s fire. Then they tore at their flesh and begged the Shaman for more balasi nuts—hairs from the dog that bit them, as it were.
But instead of the nuts, the Shaman administered foliage from a plant he said grew near the balasi. The plant’s small, obvate-oblong leaves with bright yellow midribs instantly, miraculously cured the prostrate men of their hangovers.
It took two weeks for Diane to convince the Shaman that he could be responsible for doing great good in the world if he would give her some of the nuts and the curative leaves to take back to the States with her. When he finally relented, he not only gave her a generous supply of the nuts, but some dried, as well as fresh, specimens of the plant she later named the achimera.
The Shaman then shared with her an amazing fact: For several months after taking the hangover cure, the men were immune to the inebriating effect of the balasi nuts.
After returning home from that trip, Diane’s research team extracted several enzymes from the balasi nuts and the achimera leaves, and Vincent went to work.
At the time, he focused on one particular enzyme that showed promise, VZ13. “We could have a cure for some types of addictions here, or maybe even prevention,” he had said. But then their funding came through for Peruvase and they shelved VZ13 (aka Chimeron)—until now.
Vincent parked in the multi-level visitors’ garage at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and they walked along Market Street toward the Moody Medical Library. When they stopped to allow a campus shuttle—an antique streetcar—pass by, Vincent dug into the side pocket of his briefcase for a handful of index cards. He divided them into two piles, handing Diane the top half. They both giggled; they had played this game before.
The index cards contained a bibliography of science journal titles Vincent had compiled from the Internet. His investigation centered on the variants of the mu opioid receptors in the brain and the pharmacokinetics of certain drug toxicities in the central nervous system.
As they had done so many times in years past, the two of them would go through the library’s computers, on a sort of scavenger hunt, in search of the manuscripts. Then they’d print copies of the research. This would give Vincent a picture of findings already out there, saving him the trouble of reinventing the wheel.
Whoever completed their search first was the winner. And the winner got to ask for anything he or she wanted—within reason.
They entered the lobby of the library and took the elevator to the third floor. In the journal section, they established squatters’ rights at a remote table and dug in for three hours of intense research.
When Vincent checked the last of the items off his list, he playfully pounded his chest in a simian display of superiority—he had finished first. He helped Diane search for the last two items on her list. Then they packed up their copies and headed for the elevator.
When they reached the lobby, Vincent remembered that he’d left some of his materials at the copier upstairs.
“Wait here, I’ll go up and get them,” he said. He placed his briefcase on the information counter and hurried to the elevator.
Diane watched young people passing in and out the library doors and realized that she missed teaching. She still maintained email relationships with former students scattered around the world. But that wasn’t enough for her. She made a mental note to pressure Raymond regarding his promise to affiliate with a university.
Suddenly, she became aware of a commotion behind her. She turned to see the elevator doors opening and realized Vincent was causing the disturbance.
He emerged from the elevator behind a short middle-aged man who wore blue jeans, an orange T-shirt and a baseball cap and had a death grip on a briefcase under his arm. Vincent seemed to be chasing the gentleman toward her. The man hurried past Diane, tipped his hat in her direction and rushed out the door.
Vincent approached in a purple state of apoplexy. “Do you know him?” His voice was accusing.
“No. Why?”
That sonofabitch,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Should we call campus security? What did he do to you, Vincent?”
Vincent waved a hand toward the doorway as if dismissing the man. “He didn’t get much.”
“Much of what?” Diane checked to see that Vincent was still wearing his watch and wedding band.
“The little s.o.b. was stuffing the research I left behind into his briefcase.”
“Really?”
“It’s science espionage, Diane. It happens all the time around here. Ask your buddy, Raymond.”
Diane was flabbergasted by Vincent’s rage. The man she saw running for the door looked harmless. And he was wearing a University of Texas T-shirt. He was probably a professor or a research scientist at the University. Most likely he had more right to that library than they did. She felt certain the man had picked up Vincent’s materials by mistake, and Vincent had grossly overreacted.
Diane noticed the stares of people in the lobby. She extracted the crumpled papers from Vincent’s hand and placed them in the briefcase. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
Obediently, Vincent followed through the front doors. But once outside, he raved on about spies and piracy of intellectual properties until they reached the Suburban. Diane insisted on driving.
By the time they reached the causeway bridge that connected Galveston Island to the mainland, Vincent had gotten his agitation under control. “I don’t know what got into me,” he said, looking contrite with his forehead resting in the palm of his hand.
Diane patted his shoulder affectionately to conceal her concern, then changed the subject. “You won the hunt—fair and square this time. What do I owe you?”
Still agonizing over his thuggish behavior, Vincent didn’t answer her.
She tried a different approach. “What about a telescope for the cupola?”
That got his attention. He looked up. “That’s a possibility,” he said.
Years before, Vincent had developed a fascination with astronomy while learning celestial navigation for sailing. But he never had the time or the place for a telescope. However, when they moved into their Texas home, the six-windowed, cupola with an opening moon roof provided a perfect spot for viewing the heavens. As a matter of fact, three tel
ltale marks in the cupola’s rug indicated Harry Lee had used the room for that very purpose.
Diane thought a telescope would be a great diversion for Vincent. She grabbed for her phone and called the information line, which connected her with a camera and telescope shop near downtown Houston. She punched an address into the GPS and stayed on I-45 headed north.
Vincent spent that evening in the cupola happily setting up his telescope. It was top-of-the-line technology, suitable for lunar and planetary viewing as well as terrestrial observation.
Diane pruned plants in the large screened-in garden on the back deck and played with Huck, their eighty-pound hound. She felt a peaceful aura settling over the house.
No more concerns about espionage and pirates.
David Crowley watched as the maitre’d led the man toward his table. Like himself, he wore a navy blazer and striped tie and carried a briefcase. He could have been mistaken for one of the many business people doing deals over dinner in the dark-paneled dining room. He approached the table, and David reached up and shook his hand. “Haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.” He motioned for the man to sit. “The iced tea should be here any minute. I assumed that’s what you’d want”
The man nodded, then glanced at David’s fingers drumming on the tablecloth. He leaned forward with a smirk. “Slow your motor; no harm has been done… How’s the veterinary business?”
David brought his fingers under control and glanced around furtively. “I guess I don’t have the temperament for this. I feel I’ve been as useful as a trapdoor in a canoe.”
“These things develop slowly. So… what’s up?”
David scanned the nearby tables, then looked back at his dinner partner. “So far there hasn’t been a peep from the Roses about the sale of Peruvase.
“You think they could be players?”
“Possibly. But I need more time.”
“I have some background information here.” The man reached down beside his chair, popped the locks on his briefcase and handed a manila folder across the table. “That should give you some insight into who we’re dealing with.”
Lab Notes: a novel Page 7