Dead End

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘I thought it was called tribal instinct.’

  ‘It’s warm in the winter,’ said the woman. ‘Or when there’s more of them than you.’

  Richard Parnell preferred the second secretarial applicant, a middle-aged woman named Kathy Richardson who currently worked at the George Washington Hospital, but he deferred any decision because by the following afternoon, when he met her, there were two more enquiries, one from Baltimore and the other from New York. There were also four more approaches from doctorate-qualified research assistants – one a woman – listing genetics experience. Parnell got the same pool secretary as the previous day and scheduled confirmed meetings with each, accepting as he did that, with the possibility of postponements and rearrangements, a full fortnight, if not longer, was going to be taken up with job interviews. He sent an advisory memorandum to Dwight Newton, who replied that it was essential to get the selection right the first time and that he should take as much time as he considered necessary. The final paragraph asked for three days advanced warning of the selection process.

  Parnell kept to his intention to spend the early part of Saturday rereading those CVs so far submitted, and which he had taken home with him from McLean, but still arrived at the Tidal Basin before Rebecca. She wore no make-up and had followed his advice, with the bill cap, thick sweater and jeans.

  ‘So, we’re going on the river?’ she guessed.

  ‘Don’t you like the water?’

  ‘Let’s find out.’

  There were only tourist skiffs available, thick-bodied and cumbersome compared to the racing sculls to which he was accustomed, and Rebecca hindered more than helped by trying too enthusiastically to steer, too often taking the boat across instead of into the current once they got out on to the Potomac. He went upriver, past the canoe club by the Key Bridge, disappointed that he began so quickly to feel the strain across his back and shoulders, and resolved yet again to use the sports facilities in the Dubette building. Despite his slowly recited instructions, she brought the boat about too sharply for the turn, actually shipping water. It was easier going downstream, but Parnell was still relieved to get back into the basin.

  They snacked off hot dogs from a stall and at the stand-up table Rebecca announced: ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be,’ said Parnell, uncomfortable now at the posturing he so easily criticized in others. Because of the sudden embarrassment, he cut short the account of coming as close as he had to representing Cambridge in the traditional annual boat race.

  ‘But you didn’t make it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pissed off?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Never the loser?’

  ‘Never if I can help it.’

  They walked without any positive direction across Constitution Gardens but decided against going to the Smithsonian. When he suggested a movie, she said: ‘Or we could food shop and I could cook dinner at your place.’

  They shopped in the supermarket in the basement of the Watergate building and Parnell bought cooking wine and drinking wine from an adjoining liquor store. He’d anticipated spaghetti. Instead Rebecca cooked beef and shallots in her chosen wine, with a garlicky vegetable stew, followed by a soft goats’ cheese he’d never tasted before.

  There wasn’t a lot of conversation clearing away, and afterwards they settled together on the couch, although she was distanced from him by how she curled her legs beneath her, creating a barrier between them. Their small talk became smaller and smaller. After a long pause he said: ‘You don’t want to go out to a movie?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Just staying here is good.’

  ‘I think it’s good, too.’

  ‘I told you I brought some clothes … things …’

  ‘I thought you just said …’ he began, but she stopped him.

  ‘I mean, I don’t have to go all the way back to Bethesda tonight.’

  ‘What about your Mafia connections?’

  Rebecca sniggered, welcoming the lightness. ‘I was trying to impress you, like you tried earlier, breaking your back rowing up and down the river.’

  ‘So, we’re quits.’

  ‘Not quite. I told you a lie, about the bet. There never was one. I just wanted to speak to you.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘I want this to be right.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘So, this isn’t any big deal. Not unless it becomes one. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You think you can manage, after all that rowing.’

  ‘We won’t know, until we try.’

  They tried – twice – and afterwards, wetly pressed against him, Rebecca said: ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to manage once you get in shape.’

  ‘I’ll be gentle.’

  ‘Don’t be.’

  Five

  The eventual establishment of Dubette’s pharmacogenomics unit took a further month and a half. The secretarial choice remained Parnell’s but, having gone through a similar process himself, he should objectively have known the choice would be decided not by him alone but by a filleting committee composed of himself, Dwight Newton, Russell Benn, Wayne Denny, company lawyer Peter Baldwin and the deputy head of the budgetary division.

  Parnell’s budget was sufficient for a scientific staff of six, with a review after a year. His rejection of five candidates as underqualified was supported by the selection panel. The strongest argument against his choice of the one woman applicant came from Russell Benn, who insisted she was too inexperienced, having only graduated from medical school three years earlier. It took Parnell an hour to win a majority decision in Beverley Jackson’s favour, arguing her graduation pass was the highest of any applicant, that she’d already risen to joint deputy of the genetics research department at Johns Hopkins and published two respected scientific journal papers on the genetics links with drug research. Two of the other applicants, one from Los Angeles’ Cedars of Lebanon hospital, the other from the research department at Harvard Medical School, had also published impressively on the genome project. Ted Lapidus, a fourth applicant and the oldest candidate, with specialized experience in his native Athens before moving from Greece to the George Washington Hospital in DC, actually questioned one of Parnell’s own published opinions.

  ‘Which is a pretty good way of talking yourself out of a job,’ opened Newton, in the after-interview analysis.

  ‘I want a man with that sort of confidence,’ contradicted Parnell.

  ‘He probably sees himself taking over your job,’ warned Benn.

  ‘Then he’s going to work like hell, isn’t he?’ replied Parnell. ‘I want that, too.’

  Parnell’s longest theoretical scientific discussion about applying genetics to drug development came with Deke Pulbrow, another Johns Hopkins University candidate. For almost forty-five minutes the two men conducted a debate that more than proved to Parnell’s satisfaction that Pulbrow had a much broader and deeper understanding of pharmacogenomics than had been obvious in the journal publication that Parnell had found disappointing. Not once did Newton or Benn intrude a comment or offer an opinion.

  Parnell was surprised at Newton’s luncheon invitation to a log-framed inn in the North Virginia countryside, not the Dubette commissary, the day after they made their final selection.

  ‘I want us to get along,’ declared the research and development director, at the bar. The thin man was drinking mineral water. Parnell chose gin.

  ‘So do I,’ said Parnell. He was already getting a déjà vu echo from this conversation – déjà vu upon déjà vu, in fact.

  ‘You really believe you can map a genetically matched responder to a genetically acceptable drug, cutting out all the rejection?’

  ‘Not all,’ acknowledged Parnell, realistically. ‘A lot, hopefully.’

  ‘How much is a lot?’

  ‘I can’t give an estimate, not yet.’

  ‘Ball-park figure?’
pressed Newton.

  ‘I’d be satisfied with fifty per cent.’

  ‘Matching fifty per cent of effective drugs to responsive patients?’ persisted Newton.

  Parnell didn’t hurry his reply. Matching responsive drugs to responsive patients was the very science of pharmacogenomics. Which Newton – which none of them – should have needed explaining. So why was Newton demanding just that? ‘I don’t think I could aim higher. Who knows?’

  ‘So, you fit an acceptable drug to a genetically accepting patient, you knock two or three – four maybe – other drugs from a cocktail administration …’ Newton paused as if seeking an example. ‘AIDS or hepatitis, for instance?’

  When the waiter came with the menu, Parnell ordered another gin and tonic and chose scrod. Newton took the same, impatient with the interruption.

  ‘AIDS or hepatitis,’ prompted the research director, when the waiter left.

  ‘If we get the match right, we won’t need the two or three or four others,’ stated Parnell, flatly.

  ‘So, we lose fifty per cent of the sale of two or three or four other drugs!’

  ‘I said it was an estimate. Maybe I won’t get that high.’ There was an obvious direction to this conversation, Parnell recognized.

  ‘Let’s use it,’ urged Newton. ‘You start reducing drug multiplication by fifty per cent, you’re talking of a lot less drugs being prescribed for a hell of a lot of conditions. You understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘I understand that it’s your business …’ Parnell stopped, to correct himself. ‘My business now … Dubette’s business … to sell drugs. That it’s a commercial operation. But I don’t believe there’d be a dramatic financial fall if I’m anywhere near successful. Which I stress I’ve no guarantee of being, in either the short or long term. My specialized science is still very experimental. What, for instance, if we slot one of the unnecessary cocktail medicines into a condition where it’s properly effective? You get an increase, not a decrease, in sales. To the commercial benefit of Dubette and the medical benefit of the patients taking it. Everyone’s a winner.’

  ‘You can’t guarantee that.’

  Parnell felt the irritation rising. ‘I can’t guarantee anything. Except, by a compensatory measure, an increase in the sales of one matched drug more than making up for any loss from the reduced sales of another.’

  ‘What did you think of Barbara Spacey’s psychological assessment?’

  The profile had come in the middle of the first of the interminable selection weeks. The psychologist described him as independently minded, verging upon overconfidence, with a predilection to decide upon – and follow – his own opinions and judgements over those of others. It was, she’d judged, a tendency that could, in fact, lead to misjudgements. Her conclusion was that he should be encouraged to share and discuss his work throughout the research division.

  Parnell said: ‘Seemed to jar a few chords.’

  ‘That’s what worries me,’ conceded Newton.

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ complained Parnell.

  ‘You’re not here to jar things,’ said Newton, throwing Parnell’s word back at him. ‘You start a programme you think has got potential but which might detrimentally affect one of our existing products, I want to know about it. In fact I want to be kept fully up to speed on everything you do, on every programme you and your new staff embark on. No independent-mindedness, OK?’

  ‘Of course you’ll know what I’m doing,’ said Parnell, which wasn’t the undertaking Newton had demanded.

  The waiter told them their table was ready and as they made their way towards it Newton said: ‘A guy can live very comfortably at Dubette. You remember the president’s salary-review promise at the seminar?’

  ‘Yes?’ said Parnell, questioningly.

  ‘It’s going to be ten per cent. You haven’t even started to work properly yet and your salary has already gone up ten per cent.’

  Parnell dismissed what had clearly been a conformity warning from Dwight Newton, just as he’d dismissed the much earlier but virtually identical conversation with Russell Benn. But not contemptuously. Both job-dependent men were overlooking how long it might take – years, potentially – genetically to refine a drug cocktail to a single constituent dosage. Until that happened it wasn’t a personal consideration, if indeed it would ever become one. He was concerned with his science and its beneficial use, not the price on the label.

  Parnell had had time on his hands during the appointments hiatus and, partially to fill it, established a rigid fitness schedule at the health centre. By the end of the month he’d dropped almost 10 lb, most of it, he was sure, excess stomach flab. When he ate lunch with Rebecca he swapped salt-beef sandwiches for salads and after three days she started to do the same and complained that she’d picked him out for sex, not healthy eating. In the comparable period she lost 3 lb.

  Their relationship settled to both their satisfaction, although it was Rebecca who occasionally insisted that it remained only a relationship, with no binding commitments. They spent most weekends together, more often at his more central apartment than at Bethesda, where she rented a small clapboard house with a garden, which turned out to be her hobby. Parnell helped on the occasions they did stay there, but strictly under her direction after killing a long-established honeysuckle climber he believed himself to be pruning.

  The honeysuckle mistake occurred on the final sixth week, and he took her withdrawal as annoyance at his gardening stupidity. Finally he said: ‘If you want me to say it again, I’m sorry I cut your flowering thing down. I’ll buy you another to replace it.’

  ‘What?’ asked Rebecca. They were in the lounge of the Bethesda cottage, littered with the fallout of the Sunday newspapers.

  ‘You haven’t said more than four words since I cut the honeysuckle down.’

  ‘It’s not the fucking honeysuckle!’

  The vehemence startled him. He came forward towards her and said: ‘Hey! What’s the problem here?’

  ‘There’s something odd happening.’

  ‘At Dubette?’ They couldn’t dodge it all the time – when he’d told her of the psychological assessment, she’d mocked that it was totally right, that he was an arrogant son of a bitch – but most of the time they avoided talking about the firm.

  She nodded, saying nothing.

  ‘What, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘I told you I don’t know!’

  ‘Rebecca, you’re not making a lot of sense! You want to talk about it, I want to listen. But talk in words I can understand.’

  Rebecca straightened in her chair, forcing herself out of her reverie. ‘There’s some stuff coming in … stuff I’m not being allowed to assess and pass on up the line.’

  ‘You’re being sidelined?’

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘It’s bypassing my line manager, too. It’s divisional director to Dwight Newton … we wouldn’t have known it was even happening except for a misdirected email, asking for confirmation that it had arrived. Which didn’t tell us anything but sent Newton into apeshitting cartwheels.’

  ‘So, it’s not personal?’ persisted Parnell.

  ‘It’s never happened before: not since I’ve been in the division.’

  ‘Relax. There’s got to be a hundred reasons why things go between sub-director to God himself, without going the normal route.’

  ‘It’s never happened before!’ Rebecca insisted.

  ‘I heard you the first time.’

  ‘The email came from Paris.’

  ‘So?’ said Parnell.

  ‘Haven’t you wondered what our ultimate God, Edward C. Grant himself, meant at the seminar about a way to prevent our products being reverse-analysed, for cheaper manufacture?’

  ‘I am now,’ said Parnell.

  Six

  Richard Parnell looked around his finally assembled staff and said: ‘There were times I never thought we’d get here!’

  ‘That bad?’ smiled Beverley Jackson, sympathetically. />
  ‘That long,’ complained Parnell. It seemed far longer than just a month and a half and, now that everything – and everyone – was in place, there was a hesitating moment of anticlimax. Parnell said: ‘But at last we’re here. Now we’ve got to prove ourselves and that ours is not a jungle science.’

  ‘A what?’ challenged Mark Easton, at once. He was one of the two original geneticist applicants, a languid, blond-haired, clipped-voiced Bostonian who’d worked at John Hopkins.

  Parnell smiled, hoping to cover the thoughtless, too-glib expression. ‘Pharmacogenonomics is new: we’re new. There’s got to be a coming together with everyone else here.’ Which he singularly hadn’t bothered to do since his arrival, he acknowledged.

  ‘We’re surely among qualified people … sufficiently qualified, at least, to know about the existence of genes and their potential application!’ took up Ted Lapidus. There was little trace of an accent. The Greek had a very full, drooping moustache that made him look permanently doleful: even the smile, which accompanied the overstressed cynicism, was mournful.

  ‘I misspoke,’ Parnell apologized. This was sliding downhill into an awkward opening day. ‘Let’s just not forget our newness and human nature. Dubette go in for rules, although they’re mostly understood rather than official. Within Dubette the recurring theme is that it’s one big happy family. We’re not an accepted part of that family, not yet …’ Oh Christ, he thought, hearing his own voice and seeing the expressions of those facing him. ‘I was trained that science builds upon the free exchange of ideas and theories. That’s how I want us to operate. Any of you get – or already have – an hypothesis, you follow it. And talk about it, to each and every one of us. If, in the end, it doesn’t pan out, it doesn’t pan out. More experiments and research fails than succeeds, as you all know. At least we’ll have taken a possibility as far as we can …’ He paused, as an idea came to him, but decided against proposing it until he’d more fully thought it through, supposing that it was something he should mention first to Dwight Newton.

  Before he could go on, Deke Pulbrow said: ‘You mean there isn’t going to be a formulated schedule, integrated with what other sections are working on?’