Camden's Knife

by John Patrick Kavanagh

  “You’re enjoying the single life, then?”

  “Ah, it’s all right. But it tends to get old after a while. If Sash could shake herself from that group of horse worshipers she fell in with, I suppose I’d take her back.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” He paused.”So, anyway, what’s old Trisha’s problem? Is it that piece in Forbes a few years ago?”

  “Could be. I doubt she’ll ever live that one down.”

  The article was the feature story of the monthly, cashing in on the tremendous growth of SUE after the merger, highlighting the various executives who’d contributed to the expansion. The article was glowing in its praise of the conglomerate and Lane was singled out as one of the brightest stars. But the cover picture turned out to be a big surprise.

  Picard and his management team were invited to sit for a photo session and the usual group and subgroup pictures were shot for the accompanying text. Photos of the CEO and his lieutenants were taken against a plain background with some of them standing and others on high stools. These head and shoulder shots were common and no one gave them a second thought.

  The final cover photo, though, was drastically doctored into a full-length shot of only Lane with the others blocked out. She was perched on a stool with her skirt riding a little too high up her crossed legs, and compounding the problem she sported what could only be called a saucy look on her face. The caption, in huge yellow letters, read SUE Heats Up.

  “I think that issue must have sold out the morning it hit the newsstands,” Stonetree said with a laugh.”It was everywhere! You couldn’t go ten feet and not see it on another person’s desk. I don’t think we got in an hour of work that day.”

  “And what was the applause thing?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he continued.”I guess she decided she was just going to face it head on, so that noon she had lunch down in the cafeteria rather than eat upstairs with the boys. So she walks out of the food area with Julie Marx and her tray and acts like nothing’s going on. Some clown decides to start clapping and then other people joined in, and it turned into a standing ovation. Mob mentality. Then the wolf whistles started. Must have gone on for a whole minute. But she just went to a table and sat down and dug into her salad.”

  “That must have been something.”

  “But the best part was after she’s done. It’s maybe a half hour later and nobody’s left the cafeteria. I’d never seen it so crowded. A half hour later she stands up with Marx and one guy starts to clap again. She looked over at him and he stopped real quickly. Then she slowly scans the whole cafeteria, and you can see these grown men cowering in their sandwiches, avoiding her eyes like she’s Lady Godiva. For about ten seconds you could have heard a pin drop. Then she smiles and just strolls out like it’s business as usual. I’ve got to hand it to her. It was really impressive. Nobody breathed for another minute. It was…it was like she’d wired the whole place to explode.”

  “The corporate princess has lunch with the commoners. When I first saw that picture, I thought she was SUE.”

  “So did a lot of people. They still call her that. Someone says SUE and the reply is Mister or Miss. This company has two great legs to stand on. We’re a leg up on the competition. Like Laura Loveland. People think she’s Pandora. It goes on and on, corridor shots at their merciless best. I can see why she wouldn’t have anything to do with you pricks from the Fourth Estate.”

  “Don’t get uppity with me, Dave. I can make you or break you.”

  They moved into the living room, sitting down in two chairs pushed close to a window. McReynolds clipped a lavaliere microphone to his shirt, then handed another to his subject. He then pressed a few commands into his iPad on the small table between them and picked up a legal pad lying next to it.

  “Okay. Let me get adult for just one moment so we can establish some ground rules,” he began.”What I want to do is record our whole conversation and then go back over it to take what I want. Everything you say will be considered on the record unless you tell me it isn’t. But if you don’t want it to be on the record, I want you to either say so before you give me the answer or indicate you’d like it off the record as soon as you respond.”

  “Hey, you’re really serious.”

  “Of course I am. This is my job.”

  “This is fun.”

  “We’ll see. Ordinarily I’d quote you as the source but I agreed with Lane that all the comments about Pharmaceuticals or Media from you would be attributed to a company spokesperson or it was learned or something along those lines. I’ve got most of the raw information I need so I just want to check some of my facts and pick up a little color to give the piece some dimension. Do you understand what I’m saying?” He paused.”I’ve essentially already completed it. This is just icing. I mean, this is just for show. I promised my editor at least an hour’s chat with the three GVPs or their pinch hitters.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll try to be as objective as possible with my questions but I’d like you to be a little subjective, if you could, so I can present a better feel for the company. Seeing that we know each other we’ll probably get into some crap here and there and some irrelevant meanderings, but I want to impress upon you that what you say is fair game unless you say it isn’t. Okay?”

  “Come on, Robin. Does it have to be the third degree? I was looking forward to an enjoyable conversation, not this good cop, bad cop bullshit.”

  “No, we’ll have fun,” McReynolds assured.”I’m just giving you this line for my own protection. I don’t want you to get pissed off if I don’t make you look like Walt Disney. Besides, like I said, I’ve got most of the info I need for the article anyway. There are just a couple of areas I want to explore about Pharmaceuticals, a couple about Media. We are not going to do a doctoral thesis here today.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on. We do this right and we both make out like bandits. Trisha told me you were really up on the whole picture.”

  “Maybe. You make it sound so ominous, though. And you’re not known as Miss Congeniality.”

  “Look man, we’ve known each other a long time and you know I’m not gonna make you look bad. The company maybe, but not you. Besides, I wouldn’t want to be on that bitch’s shit list. Not me. I value my life.”

  “You’re a wise man, McReynolds. There was this boy genius in Corporate PR, I don’t know, he supplied the name of the photographer who just took the Fortune pictures, nothing else. She had his ass sacked after the article came out. He’s probably still licking his wounds. So what do you do with the recording?”

  “Dragon Dictation’ll do all the work on the transcript.”

  “Do we have to sit here the whole time?”

  “Nah. Feel free to walk around. It’ll loosen you up.”

  “Do I get to see this transcript when it’s done?”

  “Uh, if you want. But you don’t get to correct it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I don’t know,” Stonetree said, squinting at his interrogator.”I like being employed.”

  “Climb off. I’ll be fair with you. And Trisha said you’d be great. She used that very word, I think. Come to think of it, I kind of got the feeling that she, uh, has plans for you, if you know what I mean.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t think she’d be beyond taking advantage of you. In a friendly way.”

  “Now you climb off.”

  “I’m serious, Dave. I know that tone of voice. Maybe SUE is heating up.”

  “Questions, please.”

  “For starters, why don’t you give me the rundown, a little thumbnail history, of the Febrifuge Blue series, the way they indoctrinated you. That was Picard’s idea?”

  “Well, he certainly was the one who pursued it. I don’t think it was an original idea to pursue a treatment for CYD. A bunch of manufacturers went after it as soon as the envirus was partially isolated.”

  “Was it he who approache
d Dr. Camden or the other way around?”

  “No, you had it right the first time. He called Camden and essentially said he’d give him the world if he’d just come to Southern Technology and work on a treatment for CYD. At the time Dr. Camden, I think, was… Can I go off the record?”

  “Sure.”

  Stonetree leaned forward and spoke in a low voice.

  “The guy was just a college professor who happened to be the first person to partially isolate the envirus. Him and Professor Young, I guess, did it at the same time. So Camden is probably making a few hundred grand a year, and Pierre calls him up and offers him $800,000 a year salary plus his own staff and state-of-the-art equipment plus massive stock options. Probably got the guy laid along the way too. And of course the royalty agreement.”

  “And why shouldn’t he get the guy laid,” McReynolds chided.”Camden only created the greatest of all the SUE money cows. He must have gotten offers from everywhere.”

  “Maybe. All I know is that he got everything he wanted.”

  “So if he wanted to get laid, Pierre would have got him laid, right? Where do I apply for this job?”

  “You apply for it in your dreams.” Stonetree chuckled.”Okay, let’s get back on the record.”

  “So Picard offered him the job…”

  “And Camden came to work at Southern Technology. It took only a few months to come up with the first compound, Febrifuge Blue 100. The government was so crazy about us developing something that they approved it in about ten minutes. The FDA got the papers and said ‘Okay, go sell it’.”

  “Was he looking for a treatment or a cure?”

  “Initially just a treatment. I mean, how do you cure something if you don’t even know what it is? But he really gave him a blank check to do whatever he wanted. He could work on treatments or he could work on a cure. Whatever he wanted.”

  “There was no pressure on him just to work on treatments rather than a cure?”

  “No. He could do both or either. The initial focus may have been on treatment, as I said, but Camden was free to pursue his research on a cure too. The stories that Picard forced him into a treatment-only posture are fiction. That was never done during Camden’s entire tenure at SUE.”

  “Even though you’re going to make a lot more money if everyone stays sick?”

  “No, that’s a red herring.”

  “What is a red herring? Have you ever seen one? What color are the other ones?”

  “Beats me. Aren’t they black and silver or blue and silver? You know, like sardines?”

  “They pickle them. Maybe they’re usually green. So isn’t it really in the best interests of SUE not to find a cure?”

  Stonetree stood, stretched and stared out the window. The treatment versus cure issue was a very delicate one for the company and the target of many contentious theories. Failure to tow the company line, no matter how reasonable the opposition’s arguments and logic might be, was inviting a permanent exit visa.

  “No, because someone is going to find it eventually and when they do, it’s going to be Nobel Prize time.”

  “But the Nobel carries with it only about, what, five million dollars?” Robin offered.”What were your gross sales of Febrifuge Blue last year?”

  “We topped $338 billion worldwide during the last fiscal year. It’s extremely expensive to manufacture, though. You know that.”

  “And the profits on those sales?”

  “The profits from Febrifuge aren’t singled out from the rest of our products, at least not that I am aware. We produce another dozen or so drugs. The Febrifuge Blue series is only part of it.”

  “Certainly the biggest moneymaker?”

  “Probably.”

  “And if there were a cure, no one would need it.”

  Stonetree stepped away from the window to one of the bookcases fronting an inside wall and ran his finger over the set of volumes at eye level.

  “We don’t know that at this juncture. First of all, it’s not like we are the only company that makes treatments. There is Febrifine Green, Febrifal Purple, Febrium Yellow, and those are just our big competitors. There’re a dozen smaller ones out there too. The Japanese have a hot one about to come out and the Swiss are always snapping at our heels. If it was just us, I might agree with you, but right now there’s a full, uh, I don’t know. There’s real stiff competition in the marketplace.”

  “But...”

  “Let me finish this thought.”

  “Okay.”

  He removed one of the books titled The Drawings of Jasper Johns and began to page through it.

  “The search for a cure is going on all over the world. We know a lot more about CYD now than we did five years ago or even one, a lot more about the whole envirus picture. Although we, I mean SUE, aren’t currently as deeply involved in the cure research as other concerns are, we’re looking at it and may shift more in that direction as time goes on. No final decision has been made yet, though. Yet, though? Though, yet? Which is right?”

  “We can fix that up.”

  “Thanks. Are we doing all right? Am I doing this all right?”

  “Just fine. A little evasive, but otherwise good.”

  “Isn’t that what all great interviewees do? Get evasive?”

  “Get evasive or get cool.”

  “You want to?”

  “Do you?”

  Stonetree stopped when he saw a drawing of repeating numbers similar to the painting he’d seen behind Lane’s desk.

  “No, thanks. I need my job. I’ve got a Mustang I want to buy.”

  “Are you starting up on that Mustang crap again? Haven’t you gotten that out of your system? Why don’t you just buy one and get it over with? You know, here’s the money, give me the keys. It’s easy. You can do it.”

  “It has to be the right one.”

  “Yeah. I said that about getting married and look what happened.”

  “I finally tracked it down. I think. A 1967 with 8300 miles on it.

  “How much?”

  Stonetree turned to him and nodded, “Eighty-three.”

  “That’s unbelievable. Where did you find it?”

  “Some guy. It’s been in his family the whole time. He’s got all the papers, everywhere it’s been. This great story about his uncle buying it. You could write a story about it. Esquire would buy it.”

  “Think so?”

  “Sure. I was mesmerized by this guy.”

  “So how are you…sounds expensive-isimo.”

  “I’m working on that.”

  “How much do you have?”

  “I’ve got about half the price banked.”

  “You’re nuts. You really are. Let’s get back to the subject. Let’s see, where were we?”

  “How much do you pay for maintenance here a month?”

  “About twenty-two. Really not bad for one bedroom, one den. The bigger units probably cost, well, I know they cost a fortune.”

  “It’s a nice place.”

  “Back to work. Let’s see, I think you said you weren’t going to pursue a cure?”

  “It’s…we’re focusing on new generations of Blue.”

  He placed the book back into its space on the shelf.

  “That was what Camden’s leaving was all about, wasn’t it?”

  He returned to his chair and sat down.

  “He and the company came to an amicable parting of the ways. It wasn’t what it was made out to be.”

  “Well, then tell me what happened.”

  “Dr. Camden had been given virtually everything he wanted at SUE by Pierre. And, in all fairness, Camden returned a great deal through his work. He reached a point where he decided that he wanted to devote most of his time to the research on cures. This decision did not fit in with the short and mid-range plans of our company, so it was decided that Dr. Camden wouldn’t be retained as head of R & D.”

  “Who decided?”

  “It was mutual.”

  “I understand Trisha
was behind it.”

  Stonetree sighed and shook his head.

  “At that time, she’d been over Pharmaceuticals for a while so I’m sure she had some input in the process.”

  “I’ve heard that she fired Camden so she could put her own guy in, that she didn’t want to share the limelight with anyone, let alone the guy for whom they named the whole thing.”

  “That’s simply not true.”

  “I’ve also heard that a few of his notebooks and some personal items were taken one night and locked away somewhere so he couldn’t take them with him.”

  Stonetree rolled his eyes, then stared out the window a moment.

  “There is a bit of truth to that story. Under the terms of the contract entered into between…can we go off the record?”

  “Go ahead.

  He stood again then moved closer to the window. Six stories below he could see a group of what had to be cruisers leaning against a wall, motionless, like pieces of discarded furniture. Of the seven of them, not one could be older than twenty.

  He thought about Sharon, he thought about research and cures. For years the scientific community said a magic bullet was just around the comer but for years it remained a mirage. If only they could do it today.

  “So are you going off the record or are you going off the deep end? I’ve got other things to do today.”

  He sat down and leaned back in the chair, locking his fingers behind his neck.

  “Look, Robin,” he began.”This guy was getting everything from us. In return we had the rights to all of his stuff. When the whole flap about what direction we were going to take regarding treatment or cure started, things evidently got pretty tense at the Plaza. Anyway, after one confrontation too many, they just sent Security up and locked up the whole Exec Lab and his office until the dispute was resolved. That was it. Nobody stole anything from the guy. It was ours to do with what we wanted.”

  “Including his personal, non-SUE stuff?”

  “Are we still off the record?”

  “If you like.”

  “Weapons of any kind are strictly forbidden at the Plaza for obvious reasons. They can be seized and become the property of the company. That’s spelled out clearly in the HR book and included in everybody’s employment contract.”