Eternal Sonata

by Jamie Metzl

  I’ve been on screen with Joseph for much of the three and a half hours it took for my Tesla to glide itself from Lee’s Summit to St. Anthony’s Hospice House in south St. Louis County. We’ve gone over William Wolfson’s impressive bio in detail—PhD from the University of Illinois, former professor of complex adaptive systems at Washington University and director of the university’s Biodesign Institute, former chief scientist at the global agriculture conglomerate Monsanto. Joseph and I have discussed the mathematical probability of two leading scientists vanishing from hospice care within a week of each other in the same state.

  I’ve also gone through the paces with the nonplussed staff at the St. Louis hospice. Like their Kansas City counterparts, they looked everywhere and had no idea what might have happened. As in Kansas City, the overworked and underfunded St. Louis Police Department hadn’t done much of anything to search for the missing old man dying from cancer. Although the St. Louis hospice didn’t have surveillance cameras installed, as in Kansas City, their digital files had also been compromised.

  But as I approach the cozy red brick colonial in University City, it’s the mezuzah that somehow calls to me from the growing pile of coincidences. Two Jewish professors with cancer vanish from hospices in the same state at roughly the same time along with their records?

  I pause a moment and pick up the reverberation of activity from inside the house before ringing the bell. The hospice had been unwilling to provide the home address, and Jerry Weisberg had to do some digging to get it, but we hadn’t been able to track down a working number to let me call in advance.

  A pale teenager with thick eyebrows and frizzy, shoulder-length red hair opens the door wearing blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt.

  “Is this the Wolfson home?” I say.

  “Yes,” he says guardedly.

  “Is Mrs. Wolfson here?”

  “My mother?”

  The math doesn’t add up. “Is there a Mrs. Wolfson who’s your grandmother?”

  A middle-aged man I sense is the boy’s father approaches the door. “Can I help you with something?”

  “My name is Rich Azadian. I’m a reporter with the Kansas City Star looking into the disappearance of Dr. Wolfson.”

  The man’s demeanor shifts defensively, his suspicious look making me feel momentarily self-conscious.

  “May I come in?”

  He doesn’t budge.

  “I’m interested in trying to find out where Dr. Wolfson might be,” I continue awkwardly.

  “Why?”

  The question is a fair one. What is a Kansas City reporter doing in St. Louis investigating a story that even the St. Louis Post-Dispatch hasn’t covered?

  “Because there seem to be some strange circumstances surrounding his disappearance,” I say tentatively.

  “Stranger than just him vanishing?”

  I sense my opening. “Another scientist disappeared from hospice care in Kansas City a week or so before Dr. Wolfson. May I come in?”

  The man takes in my words, still not convinced. “I appreciate your interest, but my father-in-law is gone. We really hope his body can be found, but he was in the final stages of terminal cancer and Alzheimer’s was kicking in. I hope we find him, but there may not be that much left of him to find.”

  “I understand completely, but there could be more to this,” I say, feeling like I’m tripping over my words.

  “Perhaps there could be, Mr. Azadian, but my mother-in-law is in a very weak state. My father-in-law’s cancer treatment gave her a bit of hope. When that didn’t work the floor started to drop out for both of them. Now she has her family around her. That’s her life now. It’s probably best to leave it there.”

  A slight ping rings in my head. Two Jewish scientists dying of cancer on drug programs … “Can you tell me a little more about the cancer treatments?”

  The man pauses reluctantly. It’s not clear I have the latitude for an additional question. Then he relents. “He was on an experimental cancer regimen. It didn’t work and actually made him worse. That’s when we moved him to the hospice.”

  “I’m really sorry to ask, but might you be able to tell me what type of treatment it was?”

  The man shakes his head slightly, making again clear I’m beginning to overstep. “An experimental treatment protocol from the company Santique. They said it had a lot of promise. Now please …”

  “Just one more question?” I say quickly, pushing my luck.

  The man moves his son out of the way and begins to close the door. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Azadian, but I need to ask you to—”

  “Have any of your data files with recent photos of Dr. Wolfson been replaced?” I blurt into the closing door.

  A look of surprise flashes across his face. The door stops moving. “How could you have known that?”

  “Let’s just say there’s starting to be a pattern.”

  He looks at me then behind him into the house. “I can’t let you in. Everything is fragile here. But take down my number and call me later if you need more information. My name is Joel Glass.”

  I downlink his number, then stand reflexively before the closed door for a moment before walking back to my car.

  “Take me home,” I instruct.

  “Routing to 3624 Charlotte, Kansas City, Missouri,” the sexy robot voice responds.

  I realize my mistake. “Take me to Toni Hewitt’s house.”

  As the Tesla resets its route, I instruct my u.D to connect with Katherine Hart. She appears on my screen, leaning in over her coffee table, staring blankly and waiting for me to speak.

  “Are you okay, Dr. Hart?”

  “I’m here,” she says morosely. “And it’s Katherine. Have you learned anything?”

  Her eyes brighten when I tell her about William Wolfson.

  “It’s certainly strange there are so many parallels,” I tell her.

  She nods.

  “There was one thing his family mentioned about the experimental cancer drug I wanted to ask you about.”

  “Yes?”

  “They said it was supposed to be some kind of miracle treatment and that Dr. Wolfson got worse after it didn’t work.”

  Dr. Hart’s head lifts slightly. “That’s what they told us, too.”

  “Who?”

  “The doctors and the health agent.”

  “What health agent?”

  “The representative from the company, Santique.”

  9

  “It’s not just two scientists disappearing, Maurice,” I say into my screen as my Tesla glides west on I-70. “Both of them were part of the same experimental drug treatment from the same company.”

  Joseph and I have spent the past thirty minutes onscreen gathering information about Santique, the Geneva-based health company currently using its stratospheric stock valuation—spiking even higher right now on vague rumors of a miraculous cancer treatment in the offing—to go on a global buying spree, snapping up hundreds of the most promising smaller companies. Santique made a small splash in Kansas City three years ago when it opened a new biomedical research institute next to the massive Sowers biotech park on 87th Street and I-435.

  “Definitely an unlikely coincidence but still not impossible,” Maurice replies from his desk. “This still just isn’t a priority for us.”

  I’d thought Maurice would be more easily convinced, especially after telling me about William Wolfson’s disappearance in the first place. “There’s really nothing you can do to raise the profile of these cases?”

  “There’s a lot I can do,” he responds. “I can divert the entire department to work on them. It’s just not the right use of our limited resources.”

  “There’s no action you can take?” I repeat, my mind whirling to generate suggestions. “What do you do for runaways and missing kids?”

  “Not as much as we should.”

  “Nothing?”

  “We search. And we enter their names into the NamUS database.”

  �
��What’s that?”

  “The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.”

  “Did you enter Benjamin Hart’s name into the system?”

  “It’s not used for that sort of thing. We have protocols—”

  “Maurice,” I say, “just please do me a favor and enter his and William Wolfson’s names. What’s the downside?”

  “It’s not the way—”

  “Maurice, please. I’ve met with their families. They are at a loss. No one is doing anything. What’s the cost of adding their names compared to what their families are going through? Just this once.”

  “Yeah, right,” Maurice says, shaking his head as he taps off.

  It’s almost 10 p.m. when my Tesla turns down Toni’s Brookside street. I take control of the steering to navigate her driveway.

  I know from our quick conversations over the course of the day she’s not been feeling great, so I’m not surprised to see her wrapped in blankets on the media room couch as I walk in. Her disheveled hair and tired face peek out from the top of the wrapped quilt.

  “Hi, baby,” I say, my tone perched somewhere between tentative and enthusiastic.

  “Hey,” she moans, dragging out the vowel. Even her little groans I still find adorable.

  ”You doing okay?” I sit on the couch in front of her and place my hand on the side of her face, then tap her u.D, which flashes the icon for normal biometrics.

  “With all the miracles of medicine, you’d think they’d have come up with something a bit less primitive,” she says.

  She’s being generous. The science of reproduction keeps charging forward, but even if egg freezing at twenty years old is the norm, that doesn’t make the extraction process any less personal, especially for Toni, whose naturalist streak led to delaying the procedure a good thirteen years. Sure, she should have done this years ago; sure, she’d need to freeze even if we weren’t even dating or were having kids tomorrow; sure, we keep hearing of the miracles of induced pluripotent stem cells to someday generate unlimited eggs, but none of that seems to quite matter right now.

  “Only one more day, baby.” I take off my shoes and lie beside her on the couch. “Could you survive work?”

  Toni gives her all to her patients in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Truman Medical Center, babies struggling to survive, but she’s been the one struggling these past weeks to maintain her high standards as a nurse while battling the overdose of hormones surging through her body.

  “Survive is the right word,” she grumbles, wrinkles creasing her forehead. “Find your old guys?”

  She focuses intently as I update her on what I’ve learned.

  “What do you think?” I ask when I’ve finished.

  “I don’t know. Could be a random coincidence, could be something more. If I thought the worst I’d wonder if someone wasn’t trying to hide evidence of something.”

  “Like?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the treatment was so disorienting they lost their minds and wandered off and it just happened that these two guys haven’t yet been found. So what’s next?”

  “I’m going to the Santique research center in the morning. I’m not sure if they’ll tell me anything, but at least I can ask.”

  Her raised eyebrows ask a question she doesn’t need to verbalize.

  “You know I’ll be there,” I respond.

  Toni is actually working a full day and only taking the time to have her eggs extracted during her lunch break. Still, I wouldn’t imagine not being around to support her. “Can I get you anything? Are you hungry?” I continue, feeling yet again that we’re cramming too much that’s unsaid into daily formalities not capable of bearing such a heavy load.

  She shakes her head slightly.

  “Can I massage your bum?” I add mischievously, sliding my hand through the seam of the wrapped quilt.

  Toni’s hand reaches down and gently catches my arm. Her long fingers tap it twice. “Maybe some other time, Dikran.”

  10

  Every blade of grass surrounding the Santique Biomedical Research Institute is perfect. The Scandinavian-style modernist glass building is shaped like a giant sail gliding forever forward into the future.

  As I enter, large walls of frosted glass along the cavernous front entrance flash images of research facilities around the world and patients whose wide smiles make abundantly clear they’ve been given the gift of life by the Santique Health Corporation. The sharp sun radiating through the eternally blue early November sky illuminates the room into a crystal cathedral.

  The lobby is an enclosed cube with no people visible. As I enter, a pulsating blue pastel arrow flashes before me on the floor, advancing with each step I take. The arrow leads me toward the far wall, where a video image of the receptionist materializes as I approach.

  “Good morning, Mr. Azadian. Welcome to Santique,” the clean-shaven young man says, every piece of him as put together as this building and his hair as neatly cropped as the lawn. “May I help you?”

  I immediately power down the u.D on my right wrist that has so willingly betrayed my identity.

  “I’m a reporter with the Kansas City Star,” I say into the wall. “I’d like to speak with someone about an experimental treatment for cancer your company has put into trials.”

  “I’ll be happy to connect you with someone in media relations. Please stand by a moment. Can I offer you a seat and some water while you wait?”

  Before I can answer, the screen fogs and is replaced by the Santique logo, a flexed bow forming the bottom half of the “S” pointing its arrow to the stars, with the remaining letters printed in classical Roman script as if etched into the Pantheon. NO LIMITS, the tag line below adds, as if spray-painted on by a graffiti artist.

  A curved chair rotates out of the wall toward me on a track, a bottle of Badoit water resting atop one of its arms. A pair of VR glasses sits on a small illuminated stand. The flashing light beneath the glasses makes it clear I am supposed to pick them up. I put them on, and the impressive, detailed story of Santique’s spectacular rise from Swiss family company to European champion to global darling unfolds in virtual reality. I’m inside the clinic in the African camps where a series of rhinoviruses is being sequenced and overcome. I am walking down the aisle with a young survivor to meet her groom. The experience is designed to be overwhelming and it is.

  The images mist out as a sinewy thirty-something woman materializes. Her perfectly erect posture and blond hair pulled back in a bun suggest a childhood immersed in ballet. I assume she is a real person, but it’s ever harder to know in virtual reality.

  “Hello, sir,” she says with only the slightest of accents, balanced, I’m guessing, somewhere between Paris and Oxford. “My colleague tells me you are doing a story on one of our cancer drugs? I see in our records that Ms. Halley covers this type of story for your paper. Has that changed?”

  “No, it hasn’t,” I say, annoyed that Sierra is again crowding my space and alarmed but not surprised Santique has kept such close tabs on the Star. Is there any information on the rest of us these companies don’t have, I wonder. “I’m looking at these issues in a different context than Ms. Halley.”

  “I see. And that is?”

  “I’m collecting information on two people who were part of an experimental cancer regimen run by your company.”

  “I understand,” she says. “As I’m sure you can appreciate, we are unable to provide information on any individuals who may have been engaged with our protocols.”

  Her words somehow grate on me, as if each of them has been parsed by an army of lawyers. “I know that. I’m actually more interested in the protocols themselves.”

  “A briefing can certainly be arranged for specific treatment protocols once the findings have been released and published.”

  “And for those currently in trials?”

  “I’m afraid we are not able to discuss those in any way.”

  I feel a bit stupid for even trying to
get information from Santique in such a rookie fashion. With populations aging fast in the developed world and China, cancer is the coin of the realm for the big health companies. They are not about to share information with a reporter wandering in off the street. A company like this didn’t get where it is by responding to the media; they got here by shaping it.

  “Might it be possible to speak with one of your scientists?”

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Azadian, but our internal regulations are quite strict. I’m sure you can understand our need to protect our intellectual property. Our firm exists to foster health and well-being around the world. We are very careful about only releasing information and data once it has been fully vetted.”

  She is so precise and logical, it’s hard for me to counter. It seems fruitless to tell her I’m not asking for data to be released, just to talk with someone who knows more about a specific cancer treatment. She is refusing to help me, albeit in the most polite manner possible.

  “Thank you,” I say with a slight nod, then pull off the glasses. I stand and turn toward the entrance door. The arrows lead me where I already know I am going. Out with no information.

  Joseph is waiting for me onscreen as I boot up my car.

  “Any luck?” he asks.

  “Nothing. It was at least worth trying.”

  “I’m not surprised,” he responds, his tone suggesting that just showing up at Santique was a questionable idea in the first place.

  I’m sure that’s right, but I’ve also found in my nine years at the Star that just poking around turns out to be a decent strategy from time to time. “There’s got to be more information out there. Can you look?”

  Joseph pauses. He has his own stories to worry about.

  But half of his time still belongs to me.

  “Let me see what I can find,” he says warily.

  11

  “Here goes nothing,” Toni says dryly as she approaches me in the NICU waiting room.

  Her noon appointment is in ten minutes, so I’m not surprised she’s not her most enthusiastic self.

  I stand and face her.

  She takes my hand and stops for a moment. “I’m glad you’re here.”