Sweet Talking Money

by Harry Bingham

  ‘I’ve a right to know,’ said Cameron, storming after him. ‘Did you or didn’t you?’

  ‘Rights?’ said Allen. ‘You’re talking to me about rights?’ He fished around for the wasabi sauce, and a dish to put it in. ‘Perhaps you’d like to explain something to me, something you never told me the whole time I was helping you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where did your background data come from? Who was your third-party client? How did they come to pick your laboratory?’

  ‘Why is that important?’

  Chopsticks. The next essential was chopsticks. Allen had three sets: one lacquered in black, one lacquered in white, one stainless steel. Cameron’s backside was up against the crockery drawer, and she pulled out some chopsticks at random, white ones that didn’t match the black china Allen had selected. He raised the chopsticks in complaint, saw Cameron’s glare, and stifled his objections.

  ‘Those issues are important,’ he said, ‘because there’s such a thing as property rights. There’s such a thing as patent law. There’s such a thing as legal ways of doing business and illegal ones.’

  Cameron paused. There was so much to say, and yet so little point in saying it. Instead she just said, ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Did you tell or did you not tell anyone about my work in respiratory?’

  Allen stared at Cameron, not with hatred but with a kind of cold hostility. He’d picked her up, almost as a compliment to himself: the handsome man with the beautiful flat needed a beautiful intelligent girlfriend to go with it. But intelligence was nothing if it was soiled by too much emotion, and Cameron was acting more than a little hysterical.

  ‘I didn’t tell anyone, no.’

  ‘You didn’t?’ Cameron was astonished, taken aback, hopeful.

  ‘I didn’t have to. Do you know the name Jed Scarlatti? He’s the head of Corinth in Europe, no less –’

  ‘Spare me!’ interjected Cameron.

  ‘I had lunch with him the other day, and –’

  ‘Lunch? Lunch? What the hell were you doing having lunch with Scarlatti?’

  ‘I was eating,’ Allen snapped, then reined himself in. ‘When I withdrew my application to Corinth Respiratory, they generously said they wanted to come back to me, see if they could persuade me to change my mind. This lunch was a part of that.’

  ‘I see.’ Cameron spoke quietly, her burst of anger having passed.

  ‘Jed Scarlatti was there – fairly impressive, I had to admit. He’d heard about you. He said he understood that you were working on respiratory disease.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘He seemed to know already. I didn’t lie to him. This was Jed Scarlatti, for God’s sake, one of the most respected men in the industry. If one can’t trust a man like that …’

  ‘So you told him. After everything you promised, you just went ahead and told him.’ Cameron broke off, too appalled to continue, This wasn’t about the clinic any more. The clinic was safe, and her research along with it. But her heart was important, too, and right now she felt betrayed and abandoned.

  ‘I did not tell him,’ snapped Allen with a mouthful of rice and dead sea creature. ‘I only confirmed what he knew.’

  Of course he didn’t know,’ murmured Cameron, almost to herself. ‘If he had known, he wouldn’t have needed to ask.’

  The whole dirty story became clear to her now. Altmeyer hadn’t had the wit to connect the supposed animal rights break-in with Bryn and Cameron, but Janssen had been more subtle. He’d joined the dots, guessed what was going on, and brought Allen and Scarlatti together to confirm his conjecture. In a remote sort of intellectual way, Cameron found herself admiring Janssen. He was a vicious man, for sure, but clever with it, an opponent of rare ingenuity and intelligence.

  ‘Perhaps you can explain this,’ said Allen, trying to recover ground. ‘Scarlatti had someone with him, strange name, strange guy, actually.’

  ‘Janssen,’ said Cameron dreamily. ‘Elijah Janssen. Dead nerve cells in the face give him a kind of rubbery appearance, loss of facial expression. Sure, I know him.’

  ‘You know him?’ A pink and green rice ball stopped en route to Allen’s mouth in surprise.

  ‘Know of him. A friend of mine’s been giving him swimming lessons.’

  Allen didn’t even attempt to make sense of that one. He paused and shook his head before continuing. The pink and green rice ball continued its journey safely to its destination.

  ‘It was Janssen who knew that you’d been working on respiratory disease. He was under the impression your data were stolen – literally stolen, I mean, actual burglary. I went out of my way to defend you. I said I respected your integrity. I said I was sure you wouldn’t use data if they had been unethically obtained.’

  Cameron nodded, her anger completely gone. She looked at the dish of sushi and saw only blobs of colour on an ebony palette. Things with Allen had lost their meaning.

  ‘I stuck my neck out for you,’ continued Allen, angrily. ‘Frankly, I don’t know where your data came from. Your concept of ethics is much too loose for my liking.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the problem,’ she said. ‘Zapatone, Corinth’s big anti-AIDS drug. There was a British study which showed three quarters of patients had their lives shortened by it, but Corinth continues to sell it. Tell me, is that ethical?’

  ‘We’ve changed the administration protocol –’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me. The change in protocol is meaningless. You know that.’

  ‘The drug has been licensed. There’s a competitive market. If the authorities have a concern, they can intervene.’ Allen was expert with chopsticks. He caught a bit of seaweed-wrapped rice with a thin layer of raw tuna on top, dipped it in the wasabi, and popped it into his mouth. Cameron nodded. She looked around at the steel-and-white flat. It wasn’t a place to live. Real apartments were meant to have clutter and personality and smells and photos and knick-knacks. In Allen’s flat, there wasn’t a single photograph, not even of her.

  ‘You said we,’ she said. ‘We’ve changed the protocol. They made you another offer, didn’t they? You accepted,’

  Allen nodded. ‘I –’

  Cameron shook her head. ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s not important. I’ll be back tomorrow. Clear my things.’

  5

  London’s grey-and-brown winter began to blossom into a brown-and-grey spring.

  Cameron’s work was almost done. The peptides were found and patented, safe from Corinth for all time. The Schoolroom was being developed by an outside manufacturer to meet all of Cameron’s demanding specifications. The last touches were being applied to blood juicing techniques, which would bring the whole thing together. Preliminary human trials were extremely positive, but Cameron postponed the full trials until she could guarantee near-perfect results. She was becoming increasingly well-known, and had been nominated for a couple of prestigious science awards.

  Through all of this, she continued to keep her distance from Bryn. She liked him, she admired him, and the whole contract betrayal issue was now firmly behind them. But she understood now that she would always be vulnerable around him, attracted to him against her better judgement, when it was clear to her that he would never make her happy. She had decided to make a clean break of it. She would return to America as soon as possible, and her plans to leave London became clearer and sharper with every passing day.

  Meantime, Bryn grew more busy, not less. He had to turn his business into one capable of mounting a worldwide sales drive, fighting and winning a global marketing war. His hours became ever longer. As the company outgrew the boathouses, its original home, he worked in one building, Cameron in another. They seldom saw each other. Plans for the company’s stockmarket flotation raced ahead.

  At the same time, and to everyone’s delight, Corinth began to stumble. As the clinic’s breakthroughs beca
me better known, senior doctors began to question publicly whether Corinth’s brand of medicine was any longer appropriate. The company’s stock price began to nudge down instead of up, and Huizinga’s place at the top came under mounting pressure.

  On the romantic front, Meg and Degsy were happily moved in together. Meg, in fact, was two months pregnant, and though she hadn’t yet told anyone, except the delighted father, she was over the moon with joy. Meantime, after two long months had passed, a thin, almost scrawny-looking parrot returned to the boathouse. ‘That’s never Tallulah,’ said Bryn, but when the blue-green visitor eyed him up and screeched, ‘O-shi, matey,’ it was clear enough that the prodigal had returned.

  Kati and Thierry Thingummy were also doing well: engaged to be married, trekking all over London looking at houses to buy.

  And Mungo was chirpy. One evening, Kati came out of work to see Mungo chatting with an attractive teenaged redhead and her twenty-something boyfriend, lolling against a beat-up car.

  ‘Hey, Kati, Canadian Kate!’ yelled Mungo. ‘Come an’ meet JoJo and her number one guy.’

  Kati came over to say hello, recognising in the flame-haired young woman a suddenly matured version of the foster-farmed street-kid of Mungo’s photo. Mungo was as proud as an Ivy League parent at a graduation do.

  ‘This is Jeff,’ said Mungo, ‘and look. Car –’ he said, patting it – ‘job’ – he said, with a poke to Jeff’s ribs – ‘and believe it or not,’ he twirled Jeff’s keys from his hand, and held them up, a housekey to the fore, ‘mortgage!’

  Kati laughed and congratulated them all. According to Mungo, JoJo’s shoplifting habits were calming down (‘lit’rally only make-up stuff now, which is sort of a basic human right, far as she’s concerned’) and Dar was a handful, but only in the way that adolescent girls are meant to be. He didn’t say so, but a huge load was beginning to lift from his young mind and with his precocious parenting duties on the way to being successfully completed, he found time to think more about himself. He continued to work for Bryn, but was growing bored with the routine. ‘Cracking’s what I love, man, only I’m getting a bit grown-up jus’ doing it for fun,’ he complained one evening.

  ‘So don’t. Do it as a job,’ said Bryn.

  ‘Samurai work? Like I used to? Trouble is the suits, man. Too many suits.’

  ‘No. Set up a proper consultancy business. Ask-Mungo.com.’

  And so he did. With cash and advice from Bryn, and plenty of moral support from Kati, Meg and Cameron, Mungo set up shop. After a tough start, he scored a sensational and deserved success with a major client, and business began to flood in.

  ‘’Magine that,’ said Mungo, staring down at his very first legitimately obtained cheque. ‘Mungo the capitalist.’ He tweaked his grubby T-shirt and looked downwards at his ballooning refugee trousers. He wiped his nose on his hand, and his hand on his bum. ‘What d’you think, man? Maybe it’s time I got myself a suit.’

  6

  One night, exhausted and unhappy, Bryn was finding it impossible to sleep. Grabbing a sleeping bag and a bottle of wine, he took himself off to the roof of his barge, lying under the stars and listening to the movement of the river beneath. Cameron was still in his thoughts, every day, every hour, sometimes even every minute. The deluge of work that threatened to drown him was welcome, in part, because it filled his mind and devoured his day. He drank his wine, saw shooting stars destroy themselves in the upper atmosphere, and watched the dark lamps of moored boats splash hide-and-seek reflections over the gently rippling Thames.

  Then, at about two in the morning, a light came on in the boathouse. He sat up, watching. From his own private office, lamplight splashed outside into the darkness. As Bryn continued to watch, he saw a dark shape passing across the illuminated window.

  Bryn’s pulse automatically accelerated. Now that the war against Corinth was won, he had dropped most of the alarms and keys and security codes, but he still didn’t want to give thieves the satisfaction. Pulling on a pair of soft-soled shoes, he ran lightly across the roof, down on to the creaking jetty, and let himself silently into the clinic. At the entrance, he paused a moment to let himself grow accustomed to the layout of the dark, familiar space and the brooding silence of the vaulted roof above. His office light had now been switched off, but the door leading into the research area had been left open, and there was a light on at the stairs.

  Breathing through his mouth, Bryn groped under the reception counter for a wooden bar which was used sometimes to prop open some of the higher windows. Bryn hefted the weight in his hand, preparing for a fight.

  He crept in silence to the research area and waited, listening. There were quiet noises making their way down from upstairs, and Bryn crept silently up. The first-floor laboratory area was dark and deserted, but lamplight came filtering down from Cameron’s tower. The intruder, whoever it was, was in there, in Cameron’s office. He grasped his stick and ascended, stopping a few stairs before the very top. He could hear the sound of a human being, papers rustling, light and purposeful movements, but even after a few minutes not a word of conversation. Whoever it was, there was only one person, not several.

  Bryn shifted his weight on to his toes, flexed his fingers round his truncheon and slammed open the door. The movement alerted the intruder, who whirled round to face him.

  It was Cameron, dressed in a silk taffeta evening dress of infinite-blue indigo.

  ‘Good evening,’ said Bryn, laying down his weapon.

  ‘God, you startled me.’

  ‘Whereas I find it perfectly normal to see someone poking round my office at two in the morning.’

  Cameron was holding a stack of papers, which she raised in explanation. ‘Sorry. I’d left some papers in there which I needed. I just popped in to collect them.’

  ‘This is a regular two in the morning habit? At least you dressed for the occasion, I see.’

  Cameron looked awkward, putting her hand to the neckline of her off-the-shoulder dress as though feeling suddenly naked. ‘It was the awards ceremony tonight. Research Scientist of the Year. Remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. Did you …?’

  Cameron smiled, half-nodded, and shrugged, almost apologising for her success.

  ‘Well done,’ said Bryn. ‘That’s fantastic. Well done you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She looked down at her desk, and, following her gaze, Bryn spotted a glass and silver trophy that hadn’t been there before. ‘Next stop, Stockholm,’ he said, referring to the Nobel Prize awards which were always held in Sweden.

  ‘I doubt it.’ She was embarrassed. There was a single anglepoise lamp on, but mostly the room was full of starlight and the shimmer of streetlamps. ‘Actually, it’s good you found me. There was something I needed to tell you. I’ve been kind of putting it off, I guess.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Cameron swallowed. This was hard. ‘I wanted to collect up my papers because I may be leaving soon.’

  ‘Leaving? As in …?’

  ‘Leaving the clinic. Leaving London. Going home.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ Bryn had long known that Cameron would leave, but the very fact of it was more than he wanted to handle. ‘When you say soon …?’

  ‘In the next week or two. I’ve been offered a job. Heading up a research institute in LA. It’s a great opportunity.’

  ‘But the clinic? Isn’t there more work to do? I mean, we haven’t yet begun the full-scale human trials. I thought it would be months at least …’

  ‘You don’t need me for that,’ said Cameron gently. ‘Honestly, Kati can manage it all. Rauschenberg knows a lot about running human trials. Probably more than I do. I grew up with rats, remember. If you do ever need me, I’ll be on the first plane over.’

  ‘Need you?’ Bryn spoke like a broken toy. He needed her a million times over, but no longer had any reasons he could give her. He was almost overcome by her beauty and his own hopeless desire. ‘Need you? We’ll be fine, I suppose, i
f we have to be.’

  She smiled at him with real kindness and affection. ‘Look, I’m sorry about barging into your office earlier. I guess I feel awkward about going. I wanted to make my exit as clean as I could. I was going to come in and tell you, of course. I just didn’t want to muddle things up by running around after papers and suchlike.’

  Bryn smiled back and nodded. He thought he had been heartbroken before, but at least as things stood now he got to see the woman he loved from time to time. To feel like this about her, but not to be able even to see her, was almost unthinkable.

  ‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘Why don’t I come by tomorrow? We’ll spend the afternoon together. A kind of farewell, I suppose.’

  He nodded. ‘I’d love that.’

  She studied him in the meagre lamplight. Most of his face was hidden from view, framed in black by the dark river beneath. ‘Are you OK?’

  He nodded. ‘Fine.’ He spoke like an automaton.

  ‘Sorry for waking you.’

  He shook his head. ‘I was awake.’ He poked his pole with his foot. ‘Sorry for startling you.’

  ‘My fault, I guess.’

  She riffled absent-mindedly through the stack of papers she’d brought up from his office. And as she riffled, he noticed that she’d accidentally taken too much: there were some papers at the bottom that weren’t science papers but financial documents, which he still needed. He came forwards and gently detached them from the bottom. The dark-blue and gold of the Berger Scholes logo gleamed up at them.

  ‘Berger Scholes?’ she said. ‘Isn’t that your old bank?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What are you doing with them?’

  Bryn shrugged. ‘We need to float the company on the stockmarket. They’re one of the firms pitching for business. This is their presentation.’

  ‘May I see it?’

  ‘It’s your company as much as mine. I’d send these things over to you, only you’ve never shown a lot of interest.’