The Common Lawyer

by Mark Gimenez

  Because of Russell Reeves.

  He was a carrier of the mutated gene that had caused his son's rare cancer. The gene had not given the cancer to Russell, but he had given the gene to Zach-and the gene had given his son cancer. The man who loved this boy more than life itself had sentenced him to death.

  Russell Reeves had killed his own son.

  Zach had spent more of his life in the hospital than at home; he had been in and out of the children's cancer ward at Austin General Hospital so many times that Russell now kept the hospital's penthouse reserved year-round. When Zach stayed at the hospital, they stayed at the hospital.

  And when Zach was at home, it was as if he were still at the hospital. His bed was a hospital bed; medical equipment lined the wall behind the bed; a nurse sat beside the bed, twenty-four/seven. And there was even the hospital smell: the inescapable scent of death.

  The door opened, and Kathryn walked in. She was only thirty-eight, but the last six years had aged her. She had been a beauty queen at UT and had looked the part when they had married fourteen years ago; now she looked like a woman about to lose her only child. But she never let on to Zach. Russell glanced away from the video screen just in time to catch her putting on her happy face.

  "Zach!"

  She came over and kissed her son.

  "Are you winning, honey?"

  Zach nodded without looking away from the screen. Kathryn checked his chart: pulse, blood pressure, temperature. Every thirty minutes. Zach's fingers were working the guitar-shaped controller expertly when he abruptly leaned over and vomited. He had had chemo that morning.

  Russell grabbed a towel and wiped his son's mouth. He checked Zach's clothes; they were still clean. He removed the oxygen tubes and lifted his frail son-he felt like skin and bones in Russell's arms-then carried Zach to the bathroom to rinse his mouth and brush his teeth. He then carried him over to the bed and gently set him down. Zach lay back on the bed. The nurse replaced the oxygen tubes then took his pulse, blood pressure, and temperature while Kathryn called the maids.

  "You okay, son?"

  "I'm just tired."

  "Okay, buddy, get some rest. We'll finish the game later."

  He kissed his son's forehead. Zach closed his eyes. He was so pale that when he closed his eyes, Russell knew he was looking at his son at the moment of death.

  That moment was not far off.

  The nurse returned to her chair, Russell dimmed the lights, and he and Kathryn walked out of their son's bedroom. Russell shut the door behind them. His wife faced him.

  "He doesn't have a year, Russell."

  "I know."

  "We have fifteen billion dollars, but we can't save our own son."

  She began crying. Again. She cried constantly now. She paced the house all day and night. He often woke and found her gone. He would always find her in Zach's room, kneeling next to his bed while he slept, praying to God to spare her child. It scared him. Zach's doctor had recommended a psychiatrist. She had refused. He was losing them both.

  "Kathryn, I've worked around the clock for six years now to save Zach. I've spent five billion dollars on the lab and the scientists and the research. I've-"

  "Failed him."

  "No, Kathryn, I haven't failed him, and I won't fail him. I won't let him die. I promise you. I promise him."

  He took her by the shoulders; all he felt were bones. She had all but stopped eating. It was as if she were dying with Zach; as if the family were dying with him.

  "I swear to God, Kathryn-I will save him."

  She wandered down the hallway; he walked to his office at the rear of the house. The back wall of the office was a bank of windows that offered a stunning view of the lake below and the hills beyond. White sails dotted the blue surface of Lake Austin. He could imagine the people on the sailboats looking up at this mansion and thinking that the people who lived there must have a perfect life. They would be wrong. Russell Reeves had everything money could buy, but his life wasn't perfect. Because his only child was dying. Would die.

  Unless his father saved him.

  He sat behind his desk and opened the newspaper to the obituaries. It had become a daily ritual. Or an obsession. He read: "Kenny Johnson, age seven, went to the Lord after a brave battle with cancer. Survived by his parents…"

  How does a parent survive the death of his child? Her child? Their child? He looked at the young faces, and he read of their short lives. After the children's obituaries, he turned to the obits for adults that read: "Preceded in death by his son, Henry…" or "by her daughter, Janice…" And he always wondered how they had gone on with their lives after the death of their children. Or had they?

  And he saw his own son's obituary as clearly as if printed in the paper: "Zachary Reeves, age seven, is survived by his parents, Russell and Kathryn Reeves…"

  Would he survive the death of his son? Would Kathryn?

  He had maintained a steadfast public persona, the billionaire philanthropist helping others while his son inched closer and closer to death. But his public life belied his private torture. His personal hell. His life that was now consumed by a single objective: finding a cure for his son. He had devoted the last six years of his life to saving his son; he would spend every dollar of his fortune and devote every day of the rest of his life to save his son… or the rest of his son's life, whichever came first.

  He had read every article ever written, talked to every scientist who had ever studied, and learned everything there was to learn about his son's rare form of cancer: Philadelphia Chromosome-Positive Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. Fewer than one percent of all children's cancer was Ph-positive ALL, as it was referenced in the medical journals. It's almost always fatal.

  Immediately upon diagnosis, Zach had started chemotherapy. But remissions were always short-lived. The only hope for a cure was a hematopoietic stem cell transplantation from a "matched related" donor-from a blood-related brother or sister. Which Zach did not have and would never have. And even if he had a sibling, there was only a twenty-five percent chance of a match. But they couldn't have a second child whose stem cells could save their first child; Russell might pass the cancer gene to that child, too. He couldn't take that chance. He couldn't sentence two children to death. So Russell had established the Reeves Research Institute. He built the facility, hired scientists, and spent $5 billion searching for a cure for his son.

  But without success.

  He then dispatched his scientists around the world searching for a matched unrelated donor, even though the prognosis for such an unrelated stem cell transplant was not good. No cost was spared, but no match was found.

  Until now.

  Perhaps. Possibly. Maybe. There might be hope. A chance. A prayer. But there were issues to be handled. Problems to be solved. Decisions to be made. Difficulties to be overcome. Things to be done.

  Things that had to be done to save his son's life.

  Russell stood at the window and gazed out at the world. What if the world found out what he was about to do? What if what he did in here became known out there? What if he were exposed for what he really was-a man desperate enough to commit a crime to save his son? What would he say to the reporters and television cameras who turned on their favorite son? And they would most certainly turn on him.

  Russell Reeves would stand before the world just as he now stood and say as he now said to the world beyond the window:

  "What would you do if your child were dying of a rare, incurable disease?

  "If you're a normal person with limited financial resources, you would hand your child over to the doctors and you would pray. You would go back to work because you need your job to keep your health insurance to pay for your child's care. That's all you could do. That's all normal people can do.

  "But what if you weren't normal?

  "What if you had unlimited financial resources?

  "What if you were worth fifteen billion dollars?

  "What would you do then?

/>   "What if you had already spent five billion searching for a cure, but to no avail?

  "What if you had chased down every possible hope, every chance of a cure-no matter how far-fetched-but without success?

  "What if you had searched the world for a matched donor, but had come home empty-handed?

  "What if, just when all seemed lost, you learned that there was hope-a chance-of a cure for your child? Of life for your child? Instead of certain death?

  "What would you do then?

  "Would you stand by and watch your child suffer and die? Or would you save your child?

  "I chose to save my son.

  "And I would make the same choice again.

  "And you would have made the same choice, too-if you had fifteen billion dollars."

  That's what he would say. And that's what he would do.

  Russell Reeves would do whatever it took to save his son.

  EIGHT

  Tony Falco believed in God. But he also believed in science. He did not hold to the view that those beliefs were mutually exclusive, that to believe in God meant one must deny science or to believe in science one must deny God.

  He was a faithful scientist. He had always followed the science wherever it led him, without moral, ethical, religious, or political restraints, because those restraints, he believed, were man-made, not God-made. But he had grown weary of American politics that restrained science. Too many Americans believed faith trumped science, as if God had given us our inquiring minds but demanded that we ignore the world around us-the very world God had created, directly or indirectly. He had tired of people who used politics to enforce their moral and religious restraints on science.

  Stem cell treatment might well be the medical breakthrough of the century, but the religious right possessed the political power to take stem cells out of play in America-simply because scientists termed the process "embryonic stem cells." The anti-abortionists latched onto the word "embryo" like a Doberman Pincher's teeth into a T-bone steak and dragged an entire field of scientific research into the abortion debate-notwithstanding the fact that no human life is aborted.

  Scientists create embryonic stem cells by taking the sick patient's skin cells and extracting the nucleus. They then insert the nucleus into an unfertilized human egg. The egg-or embryo-grows and divides until a blastocyst-a single layer of cells shaped like a sphere-forms, at which time they remove the stem cells. Those stem cells are injected into the sick patient, and by some-miraculous? — process, they morph into other kinds of cells-blood, brain, heart, nerve-and repair the patient's sick body. They save the patient's life.

  So wherein lies the political issue? Without the stem cells, the egg dies. Not a distinct human life, but cloned cells of a human patient. But those two words-embryo and cloning-were red meat in politics today. And when it was discovered that most of the existing stem cell lines in the U.S. had been contaminated and were useless for medical treatment, replacement was all but impossible. And so embryonic stem cell research in the U.S. ground to a halt.

  But Tony Falco had devoted his life to saving lives; and allowing the cloned cells-call it an egg, an embryo, whatever-to die in a Petri dish in order to save a child dying from cancer was an easy moral decision for him to make. It was a no-brainer, for him and the child's parents. And Tony Falco did not want to die of old age conducting trials on rats while waiting for the U.S. government to approve treatment for dying patients; he wanted to save patients now. He wanted to give them longer lives through science.

  So he had moved to China.

  There were no such political constraints in China. Embryonic stem cell research was encouraged, promoted, and funded. The facilities were world-class and the researchers Western-educated, and stem cell research and treatment flourished without government control. Chinese stem cell research now led the world. Science, not faith, ruled in China. Americans could bring their faith to China with them, but Tony Falco would treat them with science.

  And Americans desperately wanted the science. They flocked to Chinese institutes for experimental stem cell treatment that was illegal back home. They paid up to $50,000 per treatment. Yes, they were guinea pigs, but when you're looking death in the eye, money and risk mean nothing, because you have nothing to lose. Human beings, Falco had learned, want to live.

  His colleagues back in the U.S. publicly mocked his treatments in Western medical journals as unethical and exploitive-they called it "stem cell tourism"-but privately wished they enjoyed his freedom to follow the science without political interference. And they knew that if stem cells were effective in treating blood cancers like leukemia, they might well be effective in treating a wide range of diseases. They, however, were willing to wait twenty years to find out.

  Tony Falco was not.

  So he had injected embryonic stem cells into the spinal cords of patients with Lou Gehrig's disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord and brain injuries, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, Ataxia, Batten disease, sickle cell anemia, optic nerve hypoplasia, and many other debilitating afflictions. He had conducted experimental trials in the U.S. before the contamination of the stem cell lines was discovered, but he could not have performed such treatments outside of trials because the Food and Drug Administration had not approved the procedures for human medical treatment. Results had ranged from disappointing to remarkable. The latter had lured more Americans to China every day.

  Falco had assumed the American sitting across from him had come to Beijing for stem cell treatment. He had assumed wrong.

  "Mr. Smith, you want to donate fifty million dollars to my research lab?"

  "Yes."

  "No strings attached?"

  "Only one."

  "And what is that string, Mr. Smith?"

  "A name."

  "Whose name?"

  "Patient X."

  Falco leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.

  "Patient X is a myth."

  Mr. Smith reached down and opened his briefcase; he retrieved several documents and tossed them onto the desk. Falco recognized the top article: "Patient X: The Savior?"

  "Mr. Smith, I've read the journal articles."

  "You wrote the journal articles."

  "The author was anonymous."

  "The author was you, Dr. Falco. We traced these articles to you through the printing company. Alvin Adams."

  Falco had emailed Alvin several times on each article.

  "We just need the woman's name," Mr. Smith said.

  "The woman's name?"

  "Yes, the woman's name." Mr. Smith read from the introduction to the article: " 'Patient X is a white female, age twenty-five to thirty-five…' "

  "Ah, yes, the woman. And why do you want her name?"

  "She has something we want."

  "Yes, I suppose she does. Something everyone wants. Something I wanted. But she did not want to share her gift with the world."

  Patient X had been Tony Falco's greatest professional disappointment. Three years later, he was still not over it.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Smith, I can't help you."

  "A hundred million."

  "Are you the donor?"

  "My client is."

  "You're a lawyer?"

  "Yes."

  "And who is your client?"

  "Confidential. I've been sworn to secrecy. The attorney-client privilege."

  "So was I."

  "An attorney?"

  "Sworn to secrecy."

  "The law doesn't recognize a doctor-patient privilege."

  "I do."

  "Two hundred million. Just give me the woman's name."

  "Mr. Smith, I take it you work for the pharmaceuticals?"

  Smith said nothing.

  "Patient X wouldn't be good for business, would she? Well, neither am I. Sorry, Mr. Smith, but I'm trying to put your clients out of business. Goodbye."

  Harmon Payne sat across the desk from Tony Falco. The doctor was gaunt, probably a runner, and middle-aged. His hair was gray and thin
ning, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses. He looked smart. Harmon wasn't in China to kill Dr. Falco, just to bribe him or threaten him into revealing a name. Which, in his experience, seldom worked. Killing was a much more effective tool. But he was just a hired hand, so he had to keep his employer happy. Those corporate suits were so conservative.

  "What can I do for you, Mr. Payne?" Falco said.

  "It's what I can do for you, Doctor."

  "And what's that?"

  "Money."

  The doctor smiled. "Two Americans in two days offering me money. Just a coincidence, Mr. Payne?"

  "What did you tell Mr. Smith?"

  "Not that it's any of your business, but nothing. I don't help the pharmaceuticals."

  "Smith was working for the drug companies?"

  "I assumed he was."

  "Which one?"

  "He didn't say."

  "What did he want?"

  "Again, Mr. Payne, that's none of your business."

  "Patient X?"

  "Mr. Payne, I told Mr. Smith nothing and I'm telling you nothing."

  "You don't want money?"

  "Not your money."

  "I have other methods."

  Dr. Falco clicked a button on the intercom. "Ling Su, please call security." He turned back to Harmon. "Mr. Payne, security will be here in under two minutes. You can leave now or be arrested and spend the rest of your life in a Chinese prison. They do things differently here."

  Harmon stood.

  "We'll meet again, Dr. Falco, when you come home."

  NINE

  Cactus chandeliers, metal tables and chairs, a neon Budweiser sign, and Mexican movie posters constituted the decor of Guero's back room. Andy Prescott scanned the crowd. The room was noisy with conversation and the clinking of beer bottles and silverware against white porcelain plates piled high with enchiladas and tacos, flautas and fajitas, refried beans and Spanish rice. All of SoCo had packed into the back room that evening: homeowners and the homeless, renters and roommates, shop owners and tattoo artists, students and professors, male and female, straight and gay, white, brown, black, and Asian; and their tattoos. A room full of wackos and weirdos-at least that's what the people north of the river would call them.