She was right. Another sign that I had moved beyond any semblance of rationality in dealing with the issues at hand. She moved slowly into her apartment, taking off her coat with careful movements and stowing it methodically inside a carved walnut wardrobe standing in the hallway. I led her to an armchair in her sitting room. She let me pour her a small brandy-the only alcohol she drinks, and then only when under severe strain.
“Thank you, my dear. That’s most helpful.” She slipped her shoes off; I found her slippers laid neatly next to her bed and brought them out for her.
“I spent the last two hours with Dr. Christophersen. She’s the nephrologist I mentioned showing your chemical company notebooks to.”
She finished the brandy but shook her head when I offered her the bottle. “I suspected something when I looked at the records, but I wanted a specialist to do a thorough interpretation.” She opened her briefcase and pulled out a few pages of photocopies. “I left the notebooks locked in Max’s safe at Beth Israel. They are too-too frightening to be floating around the city streets where anyone could lay hands on them. This is a summary of Ann’s-Dr. Christophersen’s-notes. She says she can do a thorough analysis if it’s needed.”
I took the pages from her and looked at Dr. Christophersen’s square, tiny writing. She was citing the blood work reported in the pages of Chigwell’s notebooks, using Louisa Djiak’s and Steve Ferraro’s records as an example. The blood chemistry details made no sense to me, but the summary at the bottom of the page was in plain English and appallingly clear:
These records show blood history for Ms. Louisa Djiak (white unmarried female, one parturition) from 1963 to 1982, the last year for which data were taken; and for Mr. Steve Ferraro (white unmarried male) from 1957 to 1982. Records also exist for approximately five hundred other employees at Humboldt Chemical’s Xerxes plant covering the period 1955 to 1982. These records show changes in the values of creatine, blood urea nitrogen, bilirubin, hematocrit, and hemoglobin, and white blood count consistent with the development of renal, liver, and bone marrow dysfunction. Conversation with Dr. Daniel Peters, Ms. Djiak’s attending physician, confirm that the patient first came to him in 1984, only at her daughter’s insistence. At that time he diagnosed chronic renal failure, which has now progressed to an acute stage. Other complications kept Ms. Djiak from being a good candidate for transplant.
The blood work indicates that noticeable renal damage occurred as early as 1967 (CR = 1.9; BUN = 28) and severe damage by 1969 (CR = 2.4; BUN = 30). The patient herself began experiencing typical diffuse symptoms -itching, fatigue, headaches-around 1979 but thought perhaps she was experiencing “change of life” and did not deem it necessary to consult a physician.
The report went on to give a similar summary of Steve Ferraro, ending with his death from aplastic anemia in 1983. The rest of the precise script detailed the toxic properties of Xerxine, and showed that the changes in blood chemistry were consistent with exposure to Xerxine. I read the document through twice before putting it down to stare, appalled, at Lotty.
“Dr. Christophersen did a lot of work, calling Louisa’s and Steve Ferraro’s doctors and doing all that checking,” was the only comment I could get out at first.
“She was horrified-most horrified-at what she was seeing, I gave her the names of two patients I knew could be checked on and she did the follow-up this afternoon. At least in the case of your friend and Mr. Ferraro, it seems abundantly clear that they had no idea what was happening to them,”
I nodded. “It makes a hideous kind of sense. Louisa starts having vague symptoms that she thinks are menopause-at thirty-four?-but then she never had any sex education to speak of, maybe it’s not so incredible. Anyway, she wouldn’t blab it around the plant. A lot of them come from the kind of background she did-where anything having to do with private body functions was shameful and never to be discussed.”
“But, Victoria,” Lotty burst out, “what is the sense of all this? Who besides a Mengele is so cold, so calculating in keeping these kinds of records, and saying nothing, not one word, to the people involved?”
I rubbed my head. The spot where I’d been hit was pretty well healed, but now that my brain was so stressed out, the injury was throbbing in a dull way, the pounding drum in the jungle of my mind.
“I don’t know.” Lotty’s enervated state had infected me. “I can see why they don’t want any of it coming out now.”
Lotty shook her head impatiently. “Not so I. Explain, Victoria.”
“Damages. Pankowski and Ferraro sued for indemnity payments they believed were rightfully theirs-they tried to build a case saying their illnesses were the result of exposure to Xerxine. Humboldt defended himself successfully. According to the lawyer who handled their suit, the company had two workable defenses-the first was that these guys both smoked and drank heavily, so no one could prove that Xerxine had poisoned them. And the second, which seemed to do the trick, was that their exposure had taken place before Xerxine’s toxicity was known. So that…”
My voice trailed off. The problem with Jurshak’s report to Mariners Rest became staggeringly clear to me. He was helping Humboldt hide the high mortality and illness rates at Xerxes to get favorable rate consideration from the insurance carrier. I could imagine a couple of different ways they could work it, but the likeliest seemed to be that they’d buy a better package from Mariners Rest than they offered the employees. Employees would be told that they didn’t have coverage for certain tests or certain amounts of hospital stay. Then when the bills came in they’d go through the fiduciary and he’d fix them before sending them to the insurance company. I thought about it from several different angles and it still looked good. I got up and headed for the phone extension in the kitchen.
“So that what, Vic?” Lotty called impatiently behind me. “What are you doing?”
Turning off the chicken for starters: I’d forgotten the dinner I’d left simmering happily on the back of the stove. The olives were little charred lumps while the chicken seemed to have welded itself to the bottom of the pan. Definitely not the most successful recipe in my repertoire. I tried scraping the mess into the garbage can.
“Oh, never mind the dinner,” Lotty said irritably. “Just put it in the sink and tell me the rest of your thinking. The company argued that they couldn’t be responsible for the illness of anyone who worked for them if it took place before 1975 when Xerxine’s toxicity was established by Ciba-Geigy. Is that it?”
“Yeah, except I didn’t know about Ciba-Geigy or that 1975 was the critical year. And my bet is that they claimed to have lowered their ppm of Xerxine to whatever the decreed standard was, and that that’s what their reports to Washington show. The ones that Jurshak sent out for Humboldt. But that the analysis SCRAP did at the plant shows much higher levels. I need to call Caroline Djiak and find out.”
“But, Vic,” Lotty said, absently scraping charred chicken from the skillet, “you still don’t explain why they wouldn’t tell their workers their bodies were being damaged. If the standard wasn’t set until 1975, what difference did it make before then?”
“Insurance,” I said shortly, trying to find Louisa’s number in the directory. She wasn’t listed. Snarling, I went back to the spare room to dig my address book out of my suitcase.
I returned to the kitchen and started dialing. “The only person who might tell us definitely is Dr. Chigwell, and he’s missing right now. I’m not sure I could make him talk even if I could find him-Humboldt scares him much more than I do.”