by Jennifer Oko
“Mom, Dad,” Polly says, interrupting the ad hoc vigil, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
“Oh, God. Are you pregnant?”
“Mom! No.” Polly rolls her eyes. “No, I’m not pregnant.” From the corner of her eye, she sees Mitya’s face turn beet red. “I’m nowhere near pregnant. But there’s something I need you to know. Something important.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said … Well, what is it, honey?”
Polly pauses, studying how the centerpiece candles are flickering, buying herself a little more time. Just say it, Polly thinks to herself. You can do this. It’s what Olivia would want.
Suddenly, one of the candles blows out and then, not a second later, it reignites. I watch the corners of Polly’s mouth turn up slightly. Mine would, too, if I had a mouth. My repertoire of party tricks is expanding nicely of late.
“I quit my job,” Polly blurts out. “Actually, that’s not true. They fired me.”
Mrs. Warner puts down her glass. “What? When?”
At the other end of the table, Dr. Warner throws down his napkin. “That is totally absurd! Don’t they know you just lost your best friend? How could anyone fire you at a time like this? What kind of people are they?”
“It’s okay, Dad,” says Polly. “Really. That’s not even what I am trying to tell you. I mean, it’s just a part of it.”
Her parents look at each other.
“Look,” Polly says, “this is going to sound crazy, but we don’t think Olivia’s death was accidental. We think—”
“Who’s ‘we?’” her parents ask simultaneously.
“We,” says Polly, acknowledging Mitya and his family with her eyes. “We think Olivia was murdered. Intentionally. We know she was. And so I haven’t been going to work. I’ve been spending all of my time trying to figure this out.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Mrs. Warner crosses her arms. “Why would anyone want to murder Olivia?”
“Polly,” says Dr. Warner with a sigh. “I know this has all been very hard for you. I can’t even imagine how hard. I’m sure you want to believe there was a reason for this horrific, random violence. It would—”
“Sir,” Mitya interjects. “Polly’s not imagining this.”
Dr. Warner looks at his daughter’s new boyfriend. He looks at her. “Who is this guy, anyway? Who are these people you’ve been hanging around?”
Ivan Petrovich coughs, but nobody pays him any mind. Nobody except Zhanya (dressed in a pink terry track suit for the occasion), who pats him on his knee and whispers in his ear that he should stay out of this.
“We have proof, Dad,” Polly says. “We know who’s responsible. We’re pretty sure of it. Actually, we’re positive we know who did this. And why.”
“Honey,” her mother says, “this is crazy. Listen to your father. He has a lot of experience with grief counseling, he knows—”
“No. Stop it.” Polly holds up her hand. “I need you both to listen to me. Just hear me out.” She bites her lower lip, then takes a deep breath and scans the table to make sure she has everyone’s attention. And then she tells them. Everything. She tells them about stealing drugs from her father (“You did what?” he shouts, but she implores him to refrain from comment). She tells them about meeting Missy. She tells them about the celebrities and the nightclubs and the slight taste of the trappings of fame. She tells them about her fall-out with me and how we were hardly speaking when I died. Then she tells them about my research, about Zhanya’s depression and subsequent reaction to the overdose of the pills, and how she tried to peddle some on the street. She tells them about Boris Shotkyn and his threats. She tells them about the photographs and about blackmailing Missy so they could get Shotkyn his pills and get themselves free of him.
“That’s all it took?” says Dr. Warner. “Photos?”
Polly shrugged. “I didn’t really think it would work either. But they were more powerful than I would have thought. Either that or there was something else Missy was concerned I might know about. And now we think we know what that was.”
Yes! I want to cheer. I try to make something flicker, find some way of saying “bingo! You hit it on the nose!” But the best I can manage is to push a small drop of cranberry sauce off of the edge of Polly’s plate and onto the table. Nobody notices.
“Are you safe now? Should we call the police?” her mother asks. “We should call the police. This Boris Shotkyn, he had people who worked for him, right? Are they still involved? Have they been threatening you?”
“Calm down,” says Polly, “We’re fine. Whoever killed him”—she strains not to even look at Zhanya—“did us a big favor. But let me finish.” And she tells them about the folders I had hidden behind the mirror, that I was privy to information she assumes I wasn’t supposed to be privy to, and—perhaps more importantly—she tells them what Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn has (thanks to Raskolnikov) figured out in his makeshift lab.
Her parents are dumbfounded.
After a few moments, Dr. Warner pulls himself together enough to quietly ask a question. “How are you feeling, now?” he asks Zhanya.
She nods, suggesting she is okay.
Mitya explains that he finally convinced her to go to a local clinic, where a real doctor gave her a prescription for fluoxetine, the generic form of Prozac, and she’s doing fine. Never better. She’s got a new lease on life.
“And the rat? Is he alive?” Dr. Warner asks, rubbing his brow.
“Nyet,” says Ivan Petrovich, speaking up for the first time since Mrs. Warner took his coat at the door. “The medicine. It toxic. It does wonderful, good stuff, yes. But then, with too much,” he mimes injecting a needle into his arm, “the brain, it, how you say,” he tightens his chubby hand into a fist, “the brain, it go phffft, like empty balloon.”
“Polly,” says Mrs. Warner, touching her daughter’s forearm. “You need to go to the police. Right away.”
“Oh,” Polly says. “We can’t.” She shakes her mother off and momentarily covers her own face with her hands. “I left that part out. The cops were in cahoots with Shotkyn,” she explains, focusing her eyes on the wine-soaked food on her plate. “At least some of them were. Anyway, we aren’t exactly innocent here. None of us. How could we even begin to explain this to them? Seriously, do you want the authorities to know your daughter was getting samples of medication from your office supply?”
“Jesus, Polly!” Her father slams his wine glass on the table, causing it to shatter into hundreds of pieces. “This is so appalling, I don’t even know where to begin.”
“I know,” Polly says, and brushes back a tear from rolling down her cheek. “But maybe you can begin by accepting my apology. And then maybe you can help us out?” Bravely, she turns to face her father.
“Help you out?” He shakes his head, still processing all the facts.
“It’s what Olivia would want,” Polly says, gathering up what confidence she can muster. “She’s dead. We can’t get her back. But she had information. She knew some very important stuff, potentially dangerous stuff, and she was trying to figure out what to do with. I’m sure of it. There’s a reason she cleared out her lab and took all of her research home. There’s a reason she hid those files behind the mirror. And now we have that information, even more information than she had, thanks to Ivan Petrovich. We want to make sure it gets into the right hands, but we don’t know what to do with it.”
“What to do with it?” Dr. Warner repeats.
“We thought you might know of someone at a medical journal or something. Someone who would be discreet about where the information came from. Maybe they could publish some of the research?”
Dr. Warner guffawed. “Research sent by a celebrity publicist and a bathroom chemist? No journal is going to risk their reputation on research like that. Much le
ss their relationship with advertisers. Pharmaceutical companies fund most of those publications to begin with, they won’t risk that. Anyway, even if they showed interest, it would take months of retesting and vetting the studies before anyone would even consider going forward with publication!”
Mrs. Warner taps her plate with a spoon. “Enough, Stuart,” she says. “Settle down. You aren’t being helpful. In fact, you’re being a jerk.” She looks at her daughter but stops herself from reaching out to touch her. “Polly, let’s dial this back. What is it that you’re trying to achieve here? Is it that you want this Missy person behind bars or that you want to make sure this drug doesn’t get to market?”
“Both.”
“So you need to get some attention, somehow expose it all at once, right? Without indicting yourself, or at least controlling that information so you can protect yourself, yes?”
“Sure, but—”
“Well, isn’t that what you publicists do? Spin stories and get lots of attention for things that may or may not deserve it?”
“This deserves attention, Mom. Millions of doctors already prescribe the original form of Ziperal, in lower doses. The extended release tablets. Once the Fatico Dystopia campaign really takes off and people start asking for the targeted release pills, who knows what—”
“That’s what I am saying, dear. You need a campaign to compete with their campaign. Something that will make a big enough splash so that the press will pay enough attention, generate enough buzz or whatever you call it, that at the very least, the FDA would have to investigate the matter.”
“From everything Olivia ever told me, the FDA is part of the problem.”
“Well, then your campaign will have to cast enough public doubt that you won’t even need the FDA to keep the new version of the drug from going to market, and to get the older version off the shelves.”
“It’s a great idea, Mom, but it’s not like we have millions of dollars to throw at something like this.”
“I don’t know, Polly. Isn’t PR your game? Haven’t you been publicizing and promoting things all these years?”
“Sure, but—”
“Well, now you have a chance to make whatever you learned at that firm worthwhile. It’s about time you did.”
Polly looks at Mitya to gauge his reaction. He cocks an encouraging eyebrow. She looks at her father. “Can’t hurt to try,” he says with a shrug. She looks at Zhanya and Ivan Petrovich. They are both buttering wine-soaked pieces of bread. Then she looks out the window, across the Hudson River. The deep, orange-red sky settling over New Jersey. The warm light is dancing across the water and amber rays are reflecting off the gentle waves. Polly smiles. She sees something.
“Okay,” she says, still looking at the water. “I think I might have an idea.”
52
December 17 (A.D.)
11:30 A.M.
The Oscars they are not. But if there’s any event in the world of pharmaceuticals that churns up a level of excitement that reaches beyond the scope of industry insiders and trade magazines, and out into the rest of civilization, it’s the annual PharmaWorld Expo. Usually held in the glittery confines of Las Vegas, this year the lobbying arm of the industry’s marketers managed to relocate the event to the center of the world. Or at least to the center of the media world, not to mention the probable center of the prescription medication-consuming world. New York City. With market saturations of everything from painkillers to diet pills, there was growing panic industry-wide that the trillion-dollar profit margins they had grown so accustomed to might soon fall to the billions if things weren’t shaken up, and the only way to do that was to create new reasons for popping more pills. For every Fatico Dystopia, there were axilliac syndromes to cure (excessive growth of underarm hair) and festo-phobias (fear of holiday celebrations) to be diagnosed and treated. And they needed to tell those stories.
So to Manhattan, the epicenter of opinion making and deal breaking, the heart that pumps the blood of the media beasts, the place to be if you want your product to be anything more than what it actually is. Well, there or LA. But LA is too warm and sunny, and therefore too distracting. So New York. The Javits Center. Close enough that the reporters from the New York Times could walk there if they wanted to. Not even a mile from CBS News, maybe a mile and a half from ABC and a straight shot across town from The Today Show set (well, across and down a mile or so, but easy enough).
And in the interest of making the event even more sensational, more consequential, it was important to make it impenetrable. Just like the nightclubs lining the streets of lower Manhattan, in order to add a weight of importance, up went the proverbial velvet ropes. Well, they aren’t exactly velvet in this case. They aren’t even rope. They’re credentials. To get access, you need a badge. You need a laminated media pass or an industry card. You need to pay the event organizers about $500 a pop for the privilege to enter this temple of sales.
Unless you have connections.
The cab pulls up to 34th Street and Polly laughs as she notices that the line through admissions snakes out from the heated interior of the Javits Center and onto the icy cold Manhattan street. Security is tight. Every bag is checked, every pocket is searched. There are too many trade secrets in that building to allow anything to be compromised, all of which makes for an extremely long wait to get inside.
“That sucks for them,” she says, stepping out into the frigid air. “Do you see Serge out there?”
Mitya follows her out of the backseat and adjusts the straps on his knapsack. “He said he’d be at the south entrance, down that way.” He grabs Polly’s mitten-covered hand and together they jog towards the mammoth building looking for the bouncer—the same one who works the door at Charity every Thursday and Friday night, the same one who Mitya had slipped some bills to the day before. There are perks to working at a nightclub, after all. A hot DJ doesn’t only spend time rubbing elbows with a list of celebrities. He can also rub elbows with bouncers, bartenders, and audiovisual technicians, and sometimes those are good elbows to rub, because even though people like that work at night, sometimes they’re up for an occasional day job. Money’s money, right?
“There he is.” Mitya points to a door at the side of the building. They quicken their pace and usher themselves over to Serge, whose wall of a body is draped in a large blue down coat with the PharmaWorld logo stamped on the front and SECURITY printed in florescent white letters across the back.
“Nice threads,” Mitya says, reaching up and fingering the coat’s collar.
Serge is in no laughing mood. “I ain’t never seen you,” he says, his icy blue eyes shifting right to left and back again. Polly wonders for a moment if they’re contact lenses, the color is so intense.
“Look,” Serge says under his breath, “I have no idea what the two of you are up to, but go fast and keep your heads down. Some motherfucker in there wants a piece of your ass. Both of yours. Your pictures are plastered all over the security office like you’re Bonnie and Clyde.” He steps aside slightly and cracks open the large glass door behind him, but grabs Mitya’s arm before he can step inside. “Alex said to tell you he’s working the control room on the bottom floor, behind the Special Events hall. Just watch your shit, man. Don’t be stupid. There’re some powerful motherfuckers in there. And remember, if it comes to it, I ain’t never seen you in my life, man. Her neither.” He juts his chin at Polly and releases Mitya’s arm. Then he lets them pass.
53
December 17 (A.D.)
11:45 A.M.
Adrenaline becomes Polly. She looks good, better than she has in months, really. Fleshed up and filled out. As she runs down the corridors of the convention center, I can see that her jeans are fitting better.
She peers around a corner. “I think it’s over that way. Across the expo floor.”
Mitya ta
kes a look. Vendors are spread out across a room the size of a football field, with thousands of people milling about. He shakes his head. “There has to be a back route.”
“We don’t have time to find it, Mitya. She goes on in fifteen minutes.”
“I told you we should have left earlier.”
“Do you really think this is a good time to pick a fight?”
“Sorry.” Mitya takes a deep breath. “I’m just a little nervous.”
“No kidding,” Polly says, this time grabbing his hand and pulling him forward. “But I know we can do this. It’s going to be fine. Just keep your head down. Let’s go.”
They don’t get very far.
“Oh, shit!” they say simultaneously as they notice a security officer catching a glimpse of them. He lifts his arm and says something into a device on his wrist.
“Quick, over here,” Polly says, pulling Mitya behind a large pillar. They zigzag their way through the hall, under and over tables and chairs. They duck underneath a display table. “Okay, I admit it,” she whispers. “This is completely insane.”
“I think we’re okay for a minute,” Mitya says, pulling a keg-sized inflatable proxy of a conventional brown medicine bottle in front of them.
The expo hall is full of these things: oversized “bottles” and meter-high “syringes” overflowing with pharmaceutical swag—capsule-shaped key chains, tins of mints masquerading as erectile enhancement medication, cookies made to look like the latest diet pill to hit the market.