- •Vernon gant.
- •It was a Tuesday afternoon in February, about four o’clock, sunny and not too cold. I was walking along Twelfth Street at a steady clip, smoking a cigarette,
- •I was certainly sorry to hear this, but at the same time I was having a bit of a problem working up a plausible picture of Melissa living in Mahopac with two kids. As
- •I was puzzled at this. On the walk to the bar, and during Vernon’s search for the right booth, and as we ordered drinks and waited for them to arrive, I’d been
- •I looked over at Vernon as he took another Olympic-sized drag on his ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarette. I tried to think of something to say on the subject of
- •I opened my right hand and held it out. He turned his left hand over and the little white pill fell into my palm.
- •It out. As he was opening the flap and searching for the right button, he said, nodding down at the pill, ‘Let me tell you, Eddie, that thing will solve any problems you’re
- •In. Maxie’s wasn’t my kind of bar, plain and simple, and I decided to finish my drink as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there.
- •I sat staring into my own drink now, wondering what had happened to Melissa. I was wondering how all of that bluster and creative energy of hers could have been
- •I made my way over to the door, and as I was walking out of the bar and on to Sixth Avenue, I thought to myself, well, you certainly haven’t changed.
- •I had registered something almost as soon as I left the bar. It was the merest shift in perception, barely a flicker, but as I walked along the five blocks to Avenue a it
- •I paused for a moment and glanced around the apartment, and over at the window. It was dark and quiet now, or at least as dark and quiet as it can get in a city,
- •I opened the file labelled ‘Intro’. It was the rough draft I’d done for part of the introduction to Turning On, and I stood there in front of the computer, scrolling
- •I stubbed out my cigarette and stared in wonder at the screen for a moment.
- •I was taken aside – over to the kitchen area – and quizzed by one of the uniforms. He took my name, address, phone number and asked me where I worked and
- •I was eventually called back over to Brogan’s desk and asked to read and sign the statement. As I went through it, he sat in silence, playing with a paper clip. Just
- •I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
- •I found an old briefcase that I sometimes used for work and decided to take it with me, but passed on a pair of black leather gloves that I came across on a shelf in
- •I explained about the status of Turning On, and asked him if he wanted me to send it over.
- •In the marketplace, to keep up with the conglomerates – as Artie Meltzer, k & d’s corporate vice-president, was always saying – the company needed to expand, but
- •I slept five hours on the Thursday night, and quite well too, but on the Friday night it wasn’t so easy. I woke at 3.30 a.M., and lay in bed for about an hour before I
- •I did a series of advanced exercises in one of the books and got them all right. I then dug out an old number of a weekly news magazine I had, Panorama, and as I
- •I paused for a few moments and then took out my address book. I looked up the phone number of an old friend of mine in Bologna and dialled it. I checked the time
- •I spent money on other things, as well, sometimes going into expensive shops and seeking out pretty, elegantly dressed sales assistants, and buying things, randomly –
- •I laughed. ‘I might be.’
- •I’d been to the Met with Chantal a week earlier and had absorbed a good deal of information from catalogues and wall-mounted copy-blocks and I’d also recently
- •I’d get off the phone after one of these sessions with him and feel exhausted, as if I somehow had produced a grandchild, unaided, spawned some distant,
- •I sketched out possible projects. One idea was to withdraw Turning On from Kerr & Dexter and develop it into a full-length study – expand the text and cut back
- •I nodded.
- •I stepped over quickly and stood behind him. On the middle screen, the one he was working at, I could see tightly packed columns of figures and fractions and
- •I did, however, and badly – but I hesitated. I stood in the middle of the room and listened as he told me how he’d left his job as a marketing director to start daytrading
- •I resolved to begin the following morning.
- •I got three or four hours’ sleep that night, and when I woke up – which was pretty suddenly, thanks to a car-alarm going off – it took me quite a while to work out
- •It soon became apparent, however, that something else was at work here. Because – just as on the previous day – whenever I came upon an interesting stock,
- •I hadn’t planned any of this, of course, and as I was doing it I didn’t really believe I’d get away with it either, but the boldest stroke was yet to come. After he’d
- •I paused, and then nodded yes.
- •I’d had with Paul Baxter and Artie Meltzer. I tried to analyse what this was, and could only conclude that maybe a combination of my being enthusiastic and nonjudgemental
- •I lifted my glass. ‘I’ve been doing it at home on my pc, using a software trading package I bought on Forty-seventh Street. I’m up about a quarter of a million in two
- •I had to do a short induction course in the morning. Then I spent most of the early afternoon chatting to some of the other traders and more or less observing the
- •It had been a relatively slow day for me – at least in terms of mental activity and the amount of work I’d done – so when I got home I was feeling pretty restless,
- •It did seem to me to be instinct, though – but informed instinct, instinct based on a huge amount of research, which of course, thanks to mdt-48, was conducted
- •Its susceptibility to predictable metaphor – it was an ocean, a celestial firmament, a numerical representation of the will of God – the stock market was nevertheless
- •I was also aware – not to lose the run of myself here – that whenever an individual is on the receiving end of a revelation like this, addressed to himself alone (and
- •I’d only been trading for little over a week, so naturally I didn’t have much idea about how I was going to pull something like this off, but when I got back to my
- •I remember once being in the West Village with Melissa, for instance, about 1985 or 1986 – in Caffe Vivaldi – when she got up on her high horse about the
- •Van Loon was brash and vulgar and conformed almost exactly to how I would have imagined him from his public profile of a decade before, but the strange thing
- •Van Loon turned to me, like a chat-show host, and said, ‘Eddie?’
- •It was early evening and traffic was heavy, just like on that first evening when I’d come out of the cocktail lounge over on Sixth Avenue. I walked, therefore, rather than
- •I sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay and tonic.
- •Very abrupt and came as I was reaching out to pick up my drink. I’d just made contact with the cold, moist surface of the glass, when suddenly, without any warning or
- •I closed my eyes at that point, but when I opened them a second later I was moving across a crowded dance floor – pushing past people, elbowing them, snarling at
- •I’d read a profile of them in Vanity Fair.
- •I kept staring at her, but in the next moment she seemed to be in the middle of a sentence to someone else.
- •I waited in the reception area for nearly half an hour, staring at what I took to be an original Goya on a wall opposite where I was sitting. The receptionist was
- •I nodded, therefore, to show him that I did.
- •Van Loon nodded his head slowly at this.
- •I leant backwards a little in my chair, simultaneously glancing over at Van Loon and his friend. Set against the walnut panelling, the two billionaires looked like large,
- •I sat on the couch, in my suit, and waited for more, anything – another bulletin, some footage, analysis. It was as if sitting on the couch with the remote control
- •Vacillated between thinking that maybe I had struck the blow and dismissing the idea as absurd. Towards the end, however – and after I’d taken a top-up of mdt –
- •If Melissa had been drinking earlier on in the day, she seemed subdued now, hungover maybe.
- •I was a dot-com billionaire. The flames were stoked further when I casually shrugged off her suggestion that, given the storm of paperwork required these days to pass
- •I nodded at all of this, as though mentally jotting it down for later scrutiny.
- •I emptied the bottle of its last drop, put the cap back on and threw it into the little basket beside the toilet. Then I had to steel myself against throwing up. I sat on the
- •I nodded.
- •I swallowed again and closed my eyes for a second.
- •I nodded, ‘I’m fine.’
- •I could see that she was puzzled. My story – or what she knew of it so far – obviously made very little sense.
- •I told her I wasn’t sure, but that I’d be ok, that I had quite a few mdt pills left and consequently had plenty of room to manoeuvre. I would cut down gradually
- •In addition to this, the cracks that had been appearing and multiplying since morning were now being prised apart even wider, and left exposed, like open wounds.
- •It was bizarre, and through the band of pain pulsating behind my eyes I had only one thought: mdt-48 was out there in society. Other people were using it in the
- •I took one of the two tiny pills out of the bowl and using a blade divided it neatly in half. I swallowed one of the halves. Then I just sat at the desk, thinking about
- •I slept until nine o’clock on the Monday morning. I had oranges, toast and coffee for breakfast, followed by a couple of cigarettes. Then I had a shower and got
- •I shrugged my shoulders. ‘You can’t get decent help these days.’
- •In this myself, that I was perilously close to eye of the storm.
- •I spent a while studying the screen, and gradually it all came back to me. It wasn’t such a complicated process – but what was complicated, of course, was choosing
- •Involved wasn’t real. Naturally, this storm of activity attracted a lot of attention in the room, and even though my ‘strategy’ was about as unoriginal and mainstream as
- •I’d landed here today on the back of my reputation, of my previous performance, I was now beginning to realize that this time around not only did I not know what I
- •Investors who’d bought on margin and then been annihilated by the big sell-off.
- •Van Loon, and what a curious girl she was. I went online and searched through various newspaper and magazine archives for any references there might be to her. I
- •I wanted to ask him more about Todd and what he’d had to say about dosage – but at the same time I could see that Geisler was concentrating really hard and I
- •I stared at him, nodding my head.
- •I took a tiny plastic container with ten mdt pills in it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He opened it immediately, standing there, and before I could launch into
- •I slipped into an easy routine of supplying him with a dozen tablets each Friday morning, telling myself as I handed them over that I’d address the issue before the next
- •I seemed to be doing a lot of that these days.
- •I should have expected trouble, of course, but I hadn’t been letting myself think about it.
- •I said I had some information about Deke Tauber that might be of interest to him, but that I was looking for some information in return. He was cagey at first, but
- •Information I had – which meant that by the time I started asking him questions, I had pretty much won him over.
- •I took an occasional sidelong glance at Kenny Sanchez as he spoke. He was articulate and this stuff was obviously vivid in his mind, but I also felt he was anxious to
- •In the cab on the way to the coffee shop, we passed Actium, on Columbus Avenue – the restaurant where I’d sat opposite Donatella Alvarez. I caught a glimpse of the
- •I studied the pages for a few moments, flicking through them randomly. Then I came across the ‘Todd’ calls. His surname was Ellis.
- •I left the office at around 4 p.M. And went to Tenth Street, where I’d arranged to meet my landlord. I handed over the keys and took away the remainder of my
- •I looked back at Ginny. She pulled out the chair and sat down. She placed her clutch bag on the table and joined her hands together, as though she were about to
- •I half smiled, and he was gone.
- •I glared at him.
- •I nodded, and stuck my hand out. ‘Thanks for coming.’
- •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.
- •Versions of this encounter passed through my mind continually during the night, each one slightly different – not a cigar, but a cigarette or a candle, not a wine bottle,
- •I had nowhere to go, and very little to lose. I whispered back, ‘You’re not.’
- •I listened to the report, but was barely able to take it in. Someone at Actium that night – probably the bald art critic with the salt-and-pepper beard – had seen the
I nodded, and stuck my hand out. ‘Thanks for coming.’
We shook hands.
‘This better be worth my while.’
He had jet-black hair, quite a lot of it, and wore thick-rimmed glasses. He looked tired and had a kind of hangdog expression on his face. He was in a dark suit and
a raincoat. It was an overcast day and there was a breeze blowing. I was about to suggest looking for a coffee shop, or even going into the Oak Room of the Plaza,
seeing as how it was right there – but Morgenthaler had other ideas.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said, and started crossing over towards the park. I hesitated, and then caught up with him.
‘A walk in the park?’ I said.
He nodded yes, but didn’t say anything, or look in my direction.
Walking briskly, and in silence, we went down the steps into the park, around by the pond, up by Wollman Rink and eventually over to Sheep Meadow.
Morgenthaler selected a bench and we sat down, facing the skyline of Central Park South. Where we were sitting was exposed and uncomfortably windy, but I wasn’t
about to start complaining now.
Morgenthaler turned to me and said, ‘OK, what’s this about?’
‘Well, like I said … MDT.’
‘What do you know about MDT and where did you first hear about it?’
He was very direct in his approach, and obviously intended to interrogate me as he would a witness. I decided that I would play along with this until I had him in a
position where he couldn’t just walk. In the way I answered his questions, I got several key ideas across to him. The first was that I knew what I was talking about. I
described the effects of MDT in almost clinical detail. He was fascinated by this, and had pertinent follow-up questions – which also confirmed for me that he knew
what he was talking about, at least in terms of MDT. I let it be known that I could supply the names of possibly dozens of people who had taken MDT, subsequently
stopped and were now suffering acute withdrawal symptoms. There would be enough cases to establish a clear pattern. I let it be known that I could supply the names
of people who had taken MDT and had subsequently died. Finally, I let it be known that I could supply samples of the actual drug itself for analysis.
When we got to this point, I could see that Morgenthaler had become quite agitated. All of the stuff I’d told him would be dynamite if he could bring it out in court –
but of course at the same time I had been tantalizingly non-specific. If he walked away now, he’d be walking away with nothing more than a good story – and this was
precisely where I wanted him.
‘So, what next?’ he said. ‘How do we proceed?’ And then added, with the merest hint of contempt in his voice, ‘What’s in this for you?’
I paused, and looked around. There were some people out jogging, others walking dogs, others pushing strollers. I had to keep him interested, without actually
giving him anything – not yet, at any rate. I also had to pick his brains.
‘We’ll come to that,’ I said, echoing Kenny Sanchez, ‘but first, tell me how you know about MDT.’
He crossed his legs, folded his arms and leant backwards in the bench.
‘I came across it,’ he said, ‘in the course of my research into the development and testing of Triburbazine.’
I waited for more, but that seemed to be it.
‘Look, Mr Morgenthaler,’ I said, ‘I answered your questions. Let’s build up a little confidence here.’
He sighed, barely able to hide his impatience.
‘OK,’ he said, assuming the role of expert witness, ‘in taking depositions relating to Triburbazine, I spoke to a lot of employees and ex-employees of Eiben-
Chemcorp. When they described the procedures for clinical trials, it was natural for these people to give me examples, to draw parallels with other drugs.’
He leant forward again, obviously uncomfortable about having to do this.
‘Several people, in this context, made reference to a series of trials that had been done on an anti-depressant drug in the early Seventies – trials that had gone
disastrously wrong. The man responsible for the administration of these trials was a Dr Raoul Fursten. He’d been with the company’s research department since the late
Fifties and had worked on LSD trials. This new drug was said to enhance cognitive ability – to some extent anyway – and at the time, it seems, Fursten had spoken
endlessly about his great hopes for it. He’d spoken about the politics of consciousness, the best and the brightest, looking towards the future, all of that shit. Remember
this was the early Seventies, which were still really the Sixties.’
Morgenthaler sighed again, and exhaled, seeming to deflate in the process. Then he shifted on the bench and got into a more comfortable position.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘there had been some serious adverse reactions to the drug as well. People had apparently become aggressive and irrational, some had even
suffered periods of memory loss. One person intimated to me that there had been fatalities and that this had been covered up. The trials were discontinued and the drug
– MDT-48 – was dropped. Fursten retired and apparently drank himself to death in the space of a year. None of the people I spoke to can prove any of this, no one
will confirm anything. It has the status of hearsay – which of course, in terms of what I’m trying to do, is of absolutely no use.
‘Nevertheless, I talked to some other people in the weird, wonderful world of neuropsychopharmacology – try saying that when you’ve had a couple of drinks –
people who shall remain nameless, and it turns out that there were rumours floating around in the mid-Eighties that research into MDT had been taken up again. These
were only rumours, mind …’ – he turned and looked at me – ‘… but now, what, you’re telling me this stuff is practically on the fucking streets?’
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.’