“Help yourself to a drink, Ingram,” Rilke said, opening the door of the mini-bar. “I have to make one phone call. I’ll be two minutes.”
Rilke went into the next-door room and Ingram poured himself a tonic water, and sat down, waiting. He knew a certain amount about Alfredo Rilke, but he always felt he knew only half of what he really should. He’d tried to find out more, had other people try on his behalf to find out more, but the story remained frustratingly the same, fundamentally unchanging, full of gaps and unanswered questions — over the years very little detail had been added to the Rilke biography.
Alfredo’s father, Gunther Rilke, had arrived in Uruguay (from Switzerland, by all accounts, though all that was very vague also) in 1946. He almost immediately married a Uruguayan, Asuncion Salgueiro, the only daughter of the owner of a small company producing fungicides and fertilisers, servicing the Latin American coffee industry. Alfredo was born in 1947 and his brother, Cesario, in 1950. Alfredo Rilke took over his father-in-law’s company in 1970, Cesario having died in a plane crash in 1969, and changed the name to Rilke Farmaceutico S.A.
He made his first fortune in the following decade with a cheap contraceptive pill and a powerful anti-depressant, surviving a series of lawsuits for patent infringement brought against him by Roche, Searle, Syntex and others.
Rilke himself left Uruguay and became permanently nonresident in 1982, choosing to live, henceforth, on board a series of large, regularly changed yachts that permanently cruised the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, within easy two-hour reach of a dozen airports and the company jet. Rilke Pharmaceutical was born at that moment and a series of smaller pharmaceutical companies were steadily acquired in the USA, France and Italy. By the late 19905 Rilke Pharma was listed as one of the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the world.
And that was really about all he or anyone knew, Ingram thought, dissatisfied. Perhaps that was what happened when you lived ‘nowhere’ for a quarter of a century — you became very hard to pin down, in every sense of the expression. Except that the pharmaceutical world knew that patents on Rilke Pharma’s big drugs, the blockbusters, that provided the massive cash flow for the continued acquisitions — the oral contraceptive, an ACE inhibitor, a retroviral and a new series of’me-too’ anti-depressants — were all coming to the end of their licence period. Rilke Pharma needed a new blockbuster drug and that was when they had approached Calenture-Deutz and offered to invest heavily in the clinical trials and research of Zembla-4…
Ingram looked up as Rilke returned — he was apologising generously as he came through the door, carrying a file from which he spread documents on the coffee table. They were full-colour, mock-up, two-page advertorials. Each page had in bold type the message: ‘AN END TO ASTHMA?’. Ingram scanned through them: the usual bland advertorial pap—‘Renowned scientists in our research laboratories’; ‘The struggle to rid the world of this debilitating disease’—and pictures of serious-looking men in white coats peering into microscopes, holding up test tubes, healthy people enjoying enviable lifestyles on ranches and at the seaside. The pages concluded with heartfelt assurances of the continued fight against these chronic ailments (money no object) threatening the good life. It was all subtext. Here and there the name ‘Zembla-4’ cropped up. No claims were made, but the promise was vaguely implicit: just give us time, we and our handsome, white-coated scientists are working on it.
“Very impressive,” Ingram said, “but a little premature, no?” It had not escaped his notice that each advertisement featured the familiar logo: the red-circled, blue, scribbled ‘R’ of Rilke Pharmaceuticals. As far as Ingram was aware Calenture-Deutz still owned Zembla and all its derivatives, one through four. He decided to say nothing.
“You may be right,” Rilke said in his usual humble, non-confrontational manner. “It was just that Burton told me that Zembla-4 was close to ready. Third stage clinical trials complete. The documentation ready to be sent in to the PDA at Rockville…We’ve found in the past that an early, vague, very vague, advertorial campaign — with the usual brief-summary caveats, of course,” he pointed to a dense inch-thick footnote at the end of each advertorial page, “can make a significant difference. Everything seems to speed up, we’ve found.”
“Burton told you that, did he?” Ingram said, a little stiffly. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Keegan and de Freitas — I’d like them off the board.”
“That won’t be possible, I’m afraid, Ingram,” Rilke said, with an ingenue’s smile of apology.
It was at moments like these that Ingram found it helpful to remind himself that Alfredo Rilke had enriched the Fryzer family to the tune of some £100 million. It made bitter pills very easy to swallow. He changed his tone.
“It’s just that Keegan and de Freitas are assuming responsibilities no one gave them. It’s not in their remit to—”
Rilke held up his hand as if to say, forgive me, stop, please. “I asked them to assume these responsibilities after Philip Wang’s death. You know, Burton Keegan has supervised four, no five, successful new drug applications for Rilke Pharma. He’s the best: he knows exactly what he’s doing. There’s too much at stake here, Ingram.”
“Well, that’s a different matter. If I’d known—”
“How are things going on the investigation, by the way? Has Kindred been found?”
“Ah, no. Not yet. He seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. The police have lost all trace of him. Baffling.”
“We don’t need to rely exclusively on the police, thank god,” Rilke said. What did he mean by that? Ingram wondered.
Ingram sighed. “We ran our reward-advertisements for two whole weeks. The police think Kindred may have killed himself…”
“What do you think?”
“I, ah, I really don’t have an opinion.”
“A dangerous state of mind, Ingram. If you don’t have an opinion, you can’t function.” Rilke smiled.
Ingram smiled back: safer to say nothing at these moments.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Rilke said, standing, and hoiking his trouser waist up over his gut. “We submit Zembla-4 to the licensing authorities in the US and then the UK. The advertorials will begin to appear, first in learned medical journals, then in selected high-class outlets of the global media—New Yorker, Time, Economist, El Pais, Wall Street Journal, Le Figaro, etcetera. Who can complain if a drug company declares that it is trying to eradicate asthma? Who can object to a mission statement? Then Rilke Pharmaceutical will offer to buy Calenture-Deutz at a moment of my choosing. But all this will happen only, I repeat, only after Adam Kindred is apprehended and dealt with.”
“Yeeesssss,” Ingram said slowly drawing the word out, like a piece of chewing gum, his mind whirring like a malfunctioning clockwork toy. “What’s, um, your timescale? When will all this start to happen?”
“Maybe next month, all being well,” Rilke said. “You’ll be an even richer man, Ingram. And the world will have its first fully functioning anti-asthma drug. It’s a no-lose situation.”
♦
Ingram was told that Colonel Fryzer could be found in the rose garden, so he set off through the well-tended grounds of Trelawny Gables in search of his father. He wandered along the meandering pathways of this high-priced, private, sheltered housing, passing uniformed nurses, white-overalled assistants pushing trolleys laden with meals, dry-cleaning, vases of flowers, wondering vaguely if this were the sort of place in which he would end his days — a five-star ante-room to oblivion with cordon-bleu catering. He was also wondering vaguely about his meeting with Alfredo Rilke and what was its real import, its gravitas. Keegan and de Freitas were staying, that much was clear, but it appeared to him there was a near unseemly rush to have Zembla-4 licensed. Philip Wang had always advocated the slow-but-steady route, that was how the Bynogol licence had gone through so smoothly…Ingram paused to sniff at a flower: he was almost sure something was going on behind his back — that he was not in full control of Calenture-Deutz any more was both as clear as day and very troubling.