“This is Dr. Thompson,” the man said.
“Dr. Thompson, I’m sorry to disturb you. My name is Zimmermann. I’m the director of the Omnicenter here in Boston.”
“Oh, yes, Dr. Zimmermann, I know of you,” Thompson said. “You took over for poor Dr. French, what was it, four years ago?”
“Five.”
“Tragic accident, tragic, as I recall.”
“Yes, he drowned,” Zimmermann said, now looking directly at Kate, who was beginning to feel sick.
“What can I do for you, sir?” Thompson had a deep, genteel voice.
“I’m here with Dr. Kate Bennett, one of our physicians.”
“Ah, yes. Her name is right in front of me here on my desk. Twice, in fact. She phoned here yesterday and was told I would return her call. However, my secretary had no way of knowing that my son, Craig, had fallen at school and broken his wrist and that I was going to be tied up in the emergency room for hours.”
“He’s all right, I hope?”
Thompson laughed. “Never better. That plaster makes him the center of attention. Now, what can I do for you and Dr. Bennett?”
“Nothing for me, actually, but Dr. Bennett has a question or two for you. One moment.”
“Certainly.”
Zimmerman, his expression saying, “Well, you asked for it, now here it is,” motioned for her to go ahead.
Kate felt as if she were being bludgeoned. She had been sure, so sure, and now.… “Dr. Thompson,” she managed, “my apologies for not being more patient.” She glanced over at Tom, who shrugged helplessly. “I … I was calling to find out if there was any connection between the Ashburton Foundation and Redding Pharmaceuticals.” There was no sense in trying anything other than a direct approach. She was beaten, humiliated again, and she knew it.
“Connection?”
“Yes, sir. Isn’t it true that the foundation was once located in Darlington, Kentucky, the same town as Redding?”
“As a matter of fact, it was. John and Sylvia Ashburton, whose estate established the foundation, were from Lexington. Their son, John, Jr., ran one of their horse farms, Darlington Stables. For two years after his parents died, John stayed at the farm, tidying up affairs and setting up the mechanics of the foundation. I was hired in, let me see, seventy-nine, but by then, the center of operations had already been moved to Washington. I’m afraid that as far as Redding Pharmaceuticals goes, the geographical connection was pure coincidence.”
“Thank you,” Kate said meekly. “That certainly helps clear up my confusion.” Another glance at Tom, and she grasped at one final straw. “Dr. Thompson, I was trying to find out the street address of your office, but there’s no Ashburton Foundation listed in the DC directory.”
“By design, Dr. Bennett, quite by design. You see, where there is grant money involved, there are bound to be, how should I say it, somewhat less than fully qualified applicants contacting us. We prefer to do our own preliminary research and then to encourage only appropriate institutions and agencies to apply. Our offices are at 238 K Street, Northwest, on the seventh floor. Please feel free to visit any time you are in Washington. Perhaps your pathology department would be interested in applying for a capital equipment grant.”
“Perhaps,” Kate said distractedly.
William Zimmermann had heard enough. “Dr. Thompson,” he said, “I want to thank you for helping to clear up the confusion here, and also for the wonderful support your agency has given my Omnicenter.”
“Our pleasure, sir,” Dr. James Thompson said.
“Well?” Zimmermann asked after he had hung up.
“Something’s not right,” she said.
“What?”
“He mentioned my pathology department. How did he know I was a pathologist?”
“I told him you were at the very start of the call.”
“I’m not trying to be difficult, Bill—really, I’m not—but you referred to me as a physician, not a pathologist. You remember, Tom, don’t you?” A look at the uncertainty in Tom’s eyes, and she began having doubts herself. “Well?”
“I … I’m not sure,” was all the resident could say.
Kate stood to go. “Bill, I may seem pigheaded to you, or even confused, but I tell you, something still doesn’t feel right to me. I just have a sense that Dr. Thompson knew exactly who I was and what I wanted before you ever called.”
“You must admit, Kate,” Zimmermann said clinically, “that when one looks first at the business with the baseball player, then at the conflict over whether or not a chemist actually performed tests he swears he never ran, and now at what seem to be groundless concerns on your part regarding the Ashburton Foundation and my long-standing computer engineer, it becomes somewhat difficult to get overly enthusiastic about your hunches and senses and theories. Now, if you’ve nothing further, I must get back to work.”
“No,” Kate said, smarting from the outburst by the usually cordial man. “Nothing, really, except the promise that no matter how long it takes, I will find out who, or what, is responsible for Ellen’s bleeding disorder. Thanks for coming, Tom. I’m sorry it worked out this way.” With a nod to both men, she left, fingers of self-doubt tightening their grip in her gut.
She bundled her clinic coat against the wind and snow and pushed head down out of the Omnicenter and onto the street. What if she were wrong, totally wrong about Redding and Horner, about the Omnicenter and Ellen’s bleeding, about Reese? Perhaps, despite the critical situation in Berenson 421, despite the nagging fears about her own body, she should back off and let things simmer down. Perhaps she should listen to the advice of her father-in-law and reorder her priorities away from Metropolitan Hospital.
They were waiting for her in her office: Stan Willoughby, Liu Huang, and Rod Green, the flamboyant, black general surgeon who was, it was rumored, being groomed for a Harvard professorship.
“Kate,” Willoughby said. “I was just writing you a note.” He held the paper up for her to see.
Kate greeted the other two men and then turned back to Willoughby. He was tight. His stance and the strain in his smile said so. “Well?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“The note, Stan. What would it have said?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. My mind is racing.” He cleared his throat. “Kate, we need to talk with you.”
“Well, sit down then, please.” She felt her heart respond to her sudden apprehension. “A problem?”
Willoughby was totally ill at ease. “I … um … Kate, yesterday you did a frozen section of a needle biopsy on one of Dr. Green’s patients.”
“Yes, a breast. It was an intraductal adenocarcinoma. I reported the results to Dr. Green myself.” Her pulse quickened another notch.
“Was there, um … any question in your mind of the—”
“What Dr. Willoughby is trying to say,” Rod Green cut in, “is that I did a masectomy on a woman who, it appears, has benign breast disease.” The man’s dark eyes flashed.
“That’s impossible.” Kate looked first to Willoughby and then to Liu Huang for support, but saw only the tightlipped confirmation of the surgeon’s allegation. “Liu?”
“I have examined specimen in great detail,” the little man said carefully. “Track of biopsy needle enters benign adenoma. No cancer there or in any part of breast.”
“Are … are you sure?” She could barely speak.
“Kate,” Willoughby said, “I reviewed the slides myself. There’s no cancer.”
“But, there was. I swear there was.”
“There was no cancer in my patient,” Green said. “None.” His fury at her was clearly under the most marginal control. “You have made a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake.”
Kate stared wide-eyed at the three men. It was a dream, a grotesque nightmare from which she would awake at any moment. Their stone faces blurred in and out of focus as her mind struggled to remember the cells. There were three breast biopsies, no, two, there were two. Green’s
patient was the first. The pathology was a bit tricky, but it was nothing she would ever miss in even one case out of a thousand, unless.… She remembered the fatigue and the strain of the previous morning, the stress of Jared’s being away, the crank phone calls, and the disappearance of Ian Toole. No, her thoughts screamed, she couldn’t have made such a mistake. It wasn’t as if they were saying she had missed something, although even that kind of error would have been hard to believe, they were claiming she had read a condition that wasn’t there. It was … impossible. There was just no other word.
“Did you check the slides from yesterday?” she managed. “The frozens?”
Willoughby nodded grimly. “Benign adenoma. The exact same pathology as in the main specimen.” He handed her a plastic box of slides.
Green stood up, fists clenched. “I have heard enough. Dr. Bennett, thanks to you, a woman who came to me in trust has had her breast removed unnecessarily. When she sues, even though I will in all likelihood be one of the defendants, I shall also be her best witness.” He started to leave and then turned back to her. “You know,” he said, “that letter you sent to the papers about Bobby Geary was a pretty rotten thing to do.” He slammed the door hard enough to shake the vase of roses on the corner of her desk.
Kate could barely hold the slide as she set it on the stage of her microscope. This time, the yellow-white light held no excitement, no adventure for her. She knew, even before she had completed focusing down, that the specimen was benign. It was that clear-cut. Her mistaking the pattern for a cancer would have been as likely as an Olympic diver springing off the wrong end of the board.
“Something’s wrong,” she said, her eye still fixed on the cells. The words reverberated in her mind. Something’s wrong. She had said that to Bill Zimmermann not half an hour ago.
“Kate,” Willoughby said gently, “I’m sorry.”
Only after she looked up from the microscope did she realize she was crying. “Stan, I swear this is not the slide I read yesterday. It can’t be.” But even as she said the words, she admitted to herself that, as in the situation with Bobby Geary, her only defense was a protestation of innocence.
“You’ve been under a great deal of stress lately, Kate. Do you suppose that—”
“No!” She forced herself to lower her voice. “I remember the biopsy I saw yesterday. It was cancer. I didn’t make a mistake.”
“Look,” Willoughby said, “I want you to take a few days off. Rest. After this coming weekend we can talk.”
“But—”
“Kate, I’m taking you off the schedule for a while. Now I don’t want you coming back into work until after we’ve had a chance to discuss things next week. Okay?” There was uncharacteristic firmness in the man’s voice.
Meekly, she nodded. “Okay, but—”
“No buts. Kate, it’s for your own good. I’ll call you at home and check on how you’re doing. Now off you go.”
Kate watched her colleagues leave: Stan Willoughby, head down, shuffling a few feet ahead of Liu Huang, who turned for a moment and gave her a timid, but hopeful, thumbs-up sign. Then they were gone.
For a time she sat, uncertainly, isolation and self-doubt constricting every muscle in her body, making it difficult to move or even to breathe. With great effort, she pulled the telephone over and lifted the receiver. “I want to place a long-distance call, please,” she heard her voice say. “It’s personal, so charge it to my home phone.… I’m calling San Diego.”
12
Thursday 20 December
It had taken narcotic painkillers and amphetamines along with his usual pharmacopoeia, but in the end, Becker had prevailed. Now he ached for sleep. He could not remember his last meal. Catnaps at his desk, cool showers every six or seven hours, bars of chocolate, cups of thick coffee for four days, or was it five? These had been his only succor.
Still, he had endured. In the morning, a messenger would hand deliver his manuscript and box of slides to the editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. The letter accompanying the manuscript would give the man ten days to agree to publish the Estronate studies in their entirety within four months and to oversee the appointment of an international commission to assume responsibility for the initiation of Beckerian population control.
The study was in a shambles, with reference books, scrap paper, coffee cups, discarded drafts, candy-bar wrappers, and dirty glasses covering the furniture and much of the floor. Like a prizefighter at the moment of triumph, Willi Becker, more skeleton than man, stood in the midst of the debris and pumped his fists in the air. After forty years and through hardship almost unimaginable, he had finished. Now there was only the matter of gaining acceptance.
It was ironic, he acknowledged, that decades of the most meticulous research had come down to a few frenetic days, but that was the way it had to be. With the pathologist Bennett snooping about the Omnicenter and Cyrus Redding’s antennae up, time had become a luxury he could no longer afford.
Studies in Estronate 250. Becker cleared off his easy chair, settled down, and indulged in thoughts of the accolades, honors, and other tributes to his genius and dedication certain to result from the publication and implementation of his work. He was nearing receipt of a Nobel Prize when the phone began ringing. It took half a dozen rings to break through his reverie and another four to locate the phone beneath a pile of journals.
“Hello?”
“John? Redding here.”
The voice brought a painful emptiness to Becker’s chest. For several seconds, he could not speak.
“John?”
Becker cleared his throat. “Yes, yes, Cyrus. I’m here.”
“Good. Fine. Well, I hope I’m not disturbing anything important for you.”
“Not at all. I was just … doing a little reading before bed.” Did his voice sound as strained, as strangled, as it felt? “What can I do for you?” Please, he thought, let it be some problem related to their myasthenia. Let it be anything but …
“Well, John, I wanted to speak with you a bit about that business at the Omnicenter.” Becker’s heart sank. “You know,” Redding continued, “the situation with these women having severe scarring of their ovaries and then bleeding to death.”
“Yes, what about it?”
“Have you learned anything new about the situation since we spoke last?”
“No. Not really.” Becker sensed that he was being toyed with.
“Well, John, you know that the whole matter has piqued my curiosity, as well as my concern for the safety of our testing programs. Too many coincidences. Too much smoke for there not to be a fire someplace.”
“Perhaps,” Becker said, hanging onto the thread of hope that the man, a master at such maneuvers, was shooting in the dark. For a time, there was silence from Redding’s end. Becker shifted nervously in his chair. “Cyrus?” he asked finally.
“I’m here.”
“Was there … anything else?”
“John, I won’t bandy words with you. We’ve been through too much together, accomplished too many remarkable things for me to try and humiliate you by letting you trip over one after another of your own lies.”
“I … I don’t understand.”
“Of course you understand, John.” He paused. “I know who you are. That is the gist of what I am calling to say. I know about Wilhelm Becker, and even more importantly, I know about Estronate Two-fifty.”
Becker glanced over at his manuscript, stacked neatly atop the printer of his word processor, and forced himself to calm down. There was little he could think of that Redding could do to hurt him at this stage of the game. Still, Cyrus Redding was Cyrus Redding, and no amount of caution was too much. Stay calm but don’t underestimate. “Your resourcefulness is quite impressive,” he said.
“John, tell me truly, it was Estronate Two-fifty that caused the problems at the Omnicenter, wasn’t it?”
“It was.”
“The hemorrhaging is an undesirable side effect?”<
br />
Becker was about to explain that the problem had been overcome and that his hormone was, to all intents, perfected. He stopped himself at the last moment. “Yes,” he said. “A most unfortunate bug that I have not been able to get out of the system.”
“You should have told me, John,” Redding said. “You should have trusted me.”
“What do you want?”
“John, come now. It is bad enough you didn’t respect me enough to take me into your confidence. It is bad enough your uncondoned experiments have put my entire company in jeopardy. Do not try to demean my intelligence. I want to extend our partnership to include that remarkable hormone of yours. After all, it was tested at a facility that I fund.”
“Work is not complete. There are problems. Serious problems.”
“Then we shall overcome them. You know the potential of this Estronate of yours as well as I do. I am prepared to make you an on-the-spot offer of, say, half a million dollars now and a similar amount when your work is completed to the satisfaction of my biochemists. And of course, there would be a percentage of all sales.”
Sales. Becker realized that his worst possible scenario was being enacted. Redding understood not only the chemical nature of Estronate, but also its limitless value to certain governments. How? How in hell’s name had the man learned so much so quickly? “I … I was planning eventually on submitting my work for publication,” he offered.
Redding laughed. “That would be bad business, John. Very bad business. The value of our product would surely plummet if its existence and unique properties became general knowledge. Suppose you oversee the scientific end and let me deal with the proprietary.”
“If I refuse,” Becker said, “will you kill me?”
Again Redding laughed. “Perhaps. Perhaps I will. However, there are those, I am sure, who would pay dearly for information on the physician whom the Ravensbrück prisoners called the Serpent.”
For a time there was silence. “How did you learn of all this?” Becker asked finally.
Side Effects (1984) Page 24
