I nodded, thinking of Vernon and Deke Tauber and Gennady. Having been quite evasive about my sources, I hadn’t mentioned anything to Morgenthaler about Todd Ellis, either, and the unofficial trials he’d been conducting out of United Labtech.
I shook my head.
‘You said the mid-Eighties?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And these trials would be… unofficial?’
‘Clearly.’
‘Who’s in charge of research now at Eiben-Chemcorp?’
‘Jerome Hale,’ he said, ‘but I can’t believe he’d have anything to do with it. He’s too respectable.’
‘Hale?’ I said. ‘Any relation?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said, and laughed, ‘they’re brothers.’
I closed my eyes.
‘He worked with Raoul Fursten in the early days,’ Morgenthaler went on. ‘He took over from him, in fact. But it’s got to be someone working under him, because Hale’s more of a front-office guy now. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, it’s Eiben-Chemcorp – it’s a pharmaceutical company withholding selective information in the interests of profit. That’s the case we’re making. They manipulated information in the Triburbazine trials, and if I can prove they did the same with MDT and show a pattern… then we’re home free.’
Morgenthaler was allowing himself get excited about the possibility of winning his case, but I couldn’t believe that in his excitement he had so easily passed over the fact that Jerome Hale and Caleb Hale were brothers. The implications of that seemed enormous to me. Caleb Hale had started his career in the CIA in the mid-1960s. In my own work for Turning On, I had read all about the CIA’s Office of Research and Development, and of how its MK-Ultra projects had secretly funded the research programmes of various American drug companies.
The whole thing suddenly took on an unwieldy, headachy scale. I also saw just how far out of my depth I was.
‘So, Mr Spinola, I need your help. What do you need?’
I sighed.
‘Time. I need some time.’
‘For what?’
‘To think.’
‘What’s there to think? These bastards are-’
‘I understand that, but it’s not really the point.’
‘So what is the point, money?’
‘No,’ I said emphatically, and shook my head.
He hadn’t been expecting this, obviously assuming all along that I had wanted money. I sensed a growing nervousness in him now, as if he had suddenly realized that he might be in danger of losing me.
‘How long are you staying in town?’ I asked.
‘I have to get back this evening, but-’
‘Let me call you in a day or two.’
He hesitated, unsure of how to answer.
‘Look, why don’t-’
I decided to head him off. I didn’t like doing it, but I had no choice. I did need to get away and think.
‘I’ll come up to Boston if necessary. With everything. Just… let me call you in a day or two, OK?’
‘OK.’
I stood up, and then he did as well. We started walking back towards East Fifty-ninth Street.
This time I was the one stage-managing the silence, but after a few moments something occurred to me and I wanted to ask him about it.
‘That case you’re working on,’ I said, ‘the girl who was taking Triburbazine?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Did she… I mean, was she really a killer?’
‘That’s what Eiben-Chemcorp is going to be arguing. They’re going to be looking for dysfunction in her family, abuse, any kind of background shit they can find and dress up as motivation. But the fact is, anyone who knew her – and we’re talking about a nineteen-year-old girl here, a college student – anyone who knew her says she was the sweetest, smartest kid you could meet.’
My stomach started churning.
‘So, basically, you say it was the Triburbazine, they say she did it.’
‘That’s what it comes down to, yeah – chemical determinism versus moral agency.’
It was only the middle of the day, and yet because the sky was so overcast there was a weird, almost bilious quality to the light.
‘Do you believe that’s possible?’ I said. ‘That a drug can override who we are… and can cause us to do things that we wouldn’t otherwise do?’
‘What I think doesn’t matter. It’s what the jury thinks. Unless Eiben-Chemcorp settles. In which case it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. But I’ll tell you one thing for free, I wouldn’t like to be on that jury.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, you get called in for jury service and you figure, OK, a few weeks’ break from my crappy job, and then you wind up having to make a decision on something of this magnitude? Forget it.’
After that we continued in silence. When we got back to Grand Army Plaza, I told him again that I’d phone him soon.
‘A day or two, yeah?’ he said. ‘And please do, because this could really make a difference. I don’t want to push you, but-’
‘I know,’ I said firmly, ‘I know.’
‘OK.’ He held up his hands. ‘Just… call me.’
He started looking around for a taxi.
‘One last question,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Why all this outdoor, park-bench stuff?’
He looked at me and smiled.
‘Do you have any idea what kind of power structure I’m up against in Eiben-Chemcorp? And what kind of money is at stake for them?’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Well, it’s a lot, on both counts.’ He stuck his arm out and hailed a taxi. ‘I’m under constant surveillance from these people. They watch everything I do, my phones, e-mail, my travel itinerary. You think they’re not watching us now?’
The taxi pulled up at the kerb. As he was getting into it, Morgenthaler turned to me and said, ‘You know, Mr Spinola, you may not have as much time as you think.’
I watched the cab drive away and disappear into the flow of traffic on Fifth Avenue. Then I took off in that direction myself, walking slowly, still feeling a bit nauseous – not least now because I realized that my plan was unworkable. Morgenthaler may have been slightly paranoid, but it was nevertheless clear that threatening to play hardball with a huge pharmaceutical company was not a good idea. Who would I be approaching in any case? The Defense Secretary’s brother? Apart from how complicated that made things, I couldn’t see a company like Eiben-Chemcorp standing for blackmail in the first place, not with all of the resources they’d have at their disposal. This, in turn, made me think of how Vernon had died, and of how Todd Ellis had left United Labtech and then conveniently been run over. What had happened there? Had Vernon and Todd’s little scam siphoning off and dealing supplies of MDT been found out? Maybe Morgenthaler wasn’t being paranoid after all, but if that was how things really were I was going to have to come up with another plan – something a little less audacious, to say the least.
I arrived at Fifty-seventh Street, and as I was crossing it I looked around. I remembered that one of my earliest blackouts had occurred here, after that first night in Van Loon’s library. It’d been a couple of blocks over, on Park. I’d been overcome with dizziness, and had stumbled, and without any explanation found myself a block further down, on Fifty-sixth Street. Then I thought about the major blackout I’d had the following evening – punching that guy in the Congo down in Tribeca, then that girl in the cubicle, then Donatella Alvarez, then the fifteenth floor of the Clifden…