Leonard gave Renata a brusque wave as she left the room. Seeley, although she hadn't touched him, had for the briefest moment the sensation of her hands lifting from his shoulders.
In the living room, Leonard added a log to the fire and took the easy chair across from Seeley. “This is how it used to be, isn't it? The Seeley boys, taking care of each other.”
Seeley didn't know if it was the wine, or the end of what was probably a long day, or maybe just the person Leonard had become-altogether, they hadn't spent more than two or three days with each other in the thirty-two years since Seeley left home-but it occurred to him, as it had in Buffalo, that there was an unquenchable hole at the center of his brother's life, one that for some reason he thought he could fill with family.
“I haven't done anything for you yet. The thought of Steinhardt on the witness stand bothers me.”
“And that's the only problem?”
“I don't like how broad your patent is.” Patents can be broad or narrow, and Steinhardt's patent claimed that the invention included not only AV/AS but anything remotely similar to it. The problem was that, like any other target, the broader a patent is, the easier it is for a competitor like St. Gall to shoot it down in court.
“That wasn't Steinhardt's call. The decision came from the top. Joel.”
Warshaw was an entrepreneur, not a scientist. From a business-magazine cover story two or three years ago, Seeley knew that Warshaw had founded and sold three software companies in less than ten years. Six months before the dot-com crash, when everyone in Silicon Valley, including the guys who waxed and detailed his car, were making paper fortunes on Internet stocks, Warshaw sold all of his holdings and with part of the proceeds bought a controlling stake in Vaxtek. At the time, it was a struggling biotech with neither products nor patents, but with huge sums of money invested in research. Seven years later, with a small portfolio of patents and two drugs on the market that hadn't yet paid back their investment, Warshaw was beginning to realize that the human immune system is considerably more resistant to quick fixes than computer software.
“Joel wants a blocking position. That way, if anyone comes within a mile of us, we can nail them. If all we got out of our investment in AV/AS was a patent that anyone could copy if they made the smallest change, we'd be out of business anyway. Joel knows it's a crapshoot. All or nothing.”
“What happens if you lose?”
“We have other drugs, but, like I told you, this is the big one. If we lose, the stock will take a hit and Joel will sell the company to one of the big pharmas-Pfizer, Merck, Novartis-for whatever he can get.”
“And if you win, you'll be rich.”
“Believe it or not, Mike, this isn't about money. If we wanted to get rich we wouldn't have gone after a vaccine. The real money is in therapies. A therapy you can sell to a patient week after week, but a vaccine's a onetime deal. How many times did you have to get vaccinated for measles? Once, and that was it. Even the flu vaccine you get only once a year. Clinical trials take longer for vaccines than for therapies. It's almost impossible to get insurance. Give a therapy to a patient who's sick and he's so grateful he won't complain about the side effects. But give a vaccine to someone who's healthy and ten years later, if he has a stomachache, you've got a lawsuit on your hands.”
The glass room had grown dark, illuminated only by the fire, but neither man moved to switch on a light. For some time they sat by the fire without speaking. Backlit by the moon, the branches of a giant oak that overhung the skylight danced in shadows across the polished floor.
On the other side of the glass wall, moonlit figures moved slowly through the yard, first together, then apart.
Leonard turned to see what Seeley was watching. “Deer,” he said. “They love the roses. By the end of the summer, there's nothing left to eat in the hills, so they come down to forage. Two, three in the morning, you'll find them walking down the middle of Atherton Avenue like they owned it.”
Seeley was thinking about how much Leonard had and hadn't changed from the twelve-year-old boy he'd left at their parents' house. Somewhere he had acquired a passion to help people-even in the 1980s, no one went to medical school to get rich-and Seeley admired him for this. Still, Leonard was someone who never stopped manipulating people and events to get what he wanted.
Leonard said, “Do you ever think about the distance we've come? Leroy Avenue. St. Boniface. The Broadway Market with the old ladies in their babushkas. And here we are, talking about a drug that could save tens of millions of lives, two professional men, one who had a hand in creating it, the other who will be defending it in court.”
“The American dream,” Seeley said.
Leonard was almost invisible in the dark. When he rose, Seeley saw the reflection of firelight in his eyes. He came around to behind Seeley's chair. “You were what-fifteen? That's a long time ago.” As he spoke, Leonard kneaded his brother's shoulders with soft fingers. “If we're going to win,” Leonard said, “we need to be working as a team, everyone pulling in the same direction.”
Seeley wondered what else his brother and Barnum had forgotten to tell him. “Sure,” he said. “That would be helpful.”
FOUR
Seeley let down the window as he backed out of Leonard's driveway and the fragrance of eucalyptus again flooded into the car. Turning onto the main road back to the freeway, he thought about how careful Leonard had been with his money long before he haggled with caterers over wedding bills. Into a pickle jar in their bedroom closet he would deposit the coins and dollar bills that he collected from babysitting neighbors' children and making deliveries for the corner grocer. The squat barrel-shaped jar left the closet only when the little miser carried it to the grocer's to change coins for bills. So when, one night, Lenny offered Seeley every penny, the entire hoard, in return for his help, Seeley knew that his easily panicked brother had this time truly blundered into catastrophe.
It was late spring, Buffalo's most temperate season, and close to the end of the school year. Even in this sullen neighborhood of Poles, Litvaks, Ukrainians, and Germans, where resentments hung in the sooty haze like a premonition of bloodshed, neighbors called to each other from stoops and porches, and modest hopes stirred around the patchy, sprouting flower gardens. Seeley, freshly showered from baseball practice, was stretched out on his narrow bed, reading for a history final. Lenny was at his end of the card table that the boys used for a desk, fidgeting with a pencil and pretending at his math homework. In the half hour since Seeley came in Lenny did little more than trace the wood-grain pattern of the vinyl tabletop with a fingertip while a foot tap-danced ceaselessly below. Seeley was certain his brother was going to piss his pants.
It was the dinner hour, as their mother called it, even though the hour itself usually stretched past six o'clock to eight or nine or even later. The rule, cast in iron, was that no one in the Seeley house-hold sat down to dinner before Leonard Seeley Sr. returned from the Germania Social Club to take his place at the head of the kitchen table. Seeley's father had for years worked on the assembly line at the Chevrolet plant, but, with the plant's closing, the after-work detours to the Germania grew longer, filled with complaints to anyone who would listen that the new job, assembling windshield-wiper arms at the Trico plant, was depleting his soul. The Germania was in truth little more than a bar with stuffed stag heads and the heraldry of several German provinces on the wall, and on those rare evenings when her own boiling resentments had sufficiently stoked Mrs. Seeley's courage-a church group meeting might have required that the family eat at a normal hour-she would send Mike to the Germania to collect his father. The stale reek of smoke and beer permeated Seeley's memories of those trips, memories painted in the varnished yellow light of the place.
Once, when Seeley was eleven or twelve and searching through his parents' bureau and closet shelves for some key to the secrets that enshrouded the small, dark house, he found in a compartment of the carved box on top of his father's dresser a stamped brass key, the kind that might open a suitcase or a trunk, and a worn envelope with a translucent plastic sleeve the size of a postcard inside. The stained sleeve contained what Seeley took to be an identity card or visa. It bore the photograph of a man in his twenties-from the steep jaw and violent eyes, it was unmistakably his father-and the name Lothar Seelig.
That mystery lasted until, exhausted by her sons' pestering, their mother explained that, when he arrived in the United States in 1951, Lothar Seelig had changed his name to Leonard Seeley to escape the vilification of Germans that persisted even after the end of the war; indeed, during the war her own family had sloughed off the name Huber to become the Hubbells. The explanation only complicated Seeley's sense of his father's depravity.
