“Sure I do, Rogan,” he guffawed. “You were the one voted most likely to end up under a beer truck.”
“Yeah, that would be me. Makes me feel good to know my reputation preceded me.”
The drive down to Princeton was a breeze and the BMW didn’t overheat. It was a little after three when I got to the campus. Edelstein was waiting for me in his office. He hadn’t changed much from the way he looked as an undergraduate, except that his sandy hair was thinner and less curly. Or maybe it was just because he cut it shorter and combed it straight back. He used to be as big as a house. Now he was as big as a small condo complex. He had the same awkward grin and the same soft, sibilant voice. His glasses were different. In the old days, he wore gold wire-rimmed aviator glasses. Now his lenses were large and square and rimless. His face was as unlined as a teenager’s, which you could probably attribute to the fact that he had so much money he could tell the dean to take a trip to Kosovo whenever he felt like it.
When he saw me, he chuckled loudly, came over and punched me in the arm. It was my bad arm. He saw me wince.
“What’s the matter? You getting flabby?” he said.
“Yeah, it’s the aging process, you know.”
He nudged me again. “Never heard of it. Anabolism. Catabolism. It’s all a state of mind.”
“Maybe for a biologist like you,” I said. “You can repeal the laws of the double helix but the rest of us have to live with it.”
He nodded. “Still the same old Rogan. You haven’t changed at all. Better looking than ever, in fact. You could have played a senator from central casting.”
“Except I feel like the great old white leviathan, with all these scars on my carcass.”
He grinned. “I’ll engineer a new skin for you that will regenerate your tissue and repair all your scars.”
“Can you do that?”
He shrugged. “In a few years, maybe. It’s not my top priority.”
I took a brief look around the office. It was academic nondescript except for the photos on the wall. There were pictures of the statues on Easter Island, the Sydney opera house, the Great Wall of China and Saint Peter’s in Red Square. Nice work if you can get those sabbaticals and have the bucks to enjoy them.
“What is your top priority?” I asked him.
“Well, right now it’s finding a cure for sepsis using recombinant DNA. But I don’t think we’re going to find it for a while. It’s very difficult. There are so many different forms of…” He stopped in mid-sentence. “You must be thirsty. Driving all the way from New York. My top priority right now is buying you a beer. It’ll bring back those good old drunken undergraduate days.”
I slung my arm around his shoulder. “Couldn’t think of a better priority myself.”
We strolled across the campus in a time warp, like medieval monks among the gothic buildings. Nothing had changed. It was as if the sixties and the seventies and the eighties and the nineties had never existed. The waves of time had washed over the campus in never-ending echelons, erasing all memories. All the agony of Viet Nam, the riots of the sixties, the oil crisis of the seventies. All lost in the dim mists of history. Lord Macaulay had said, “Nothing matters very much, and hardly anything matters at all.” The kids, the buildings, the campus, everything looked as peaceful as it did back then. Some boys were playing Frisbee while another group tossed a football back and forth.
We talked about buddies, marriages, divorces, cancers, deaths and heartbreaks, a hell of a lot more cynical than we were the last time we walked on the freshly-mown grass. The buildings didn’t look any older than they did two or three millennia ago.
Edelstein took me to the tavern we used to frequent when we were undergraduates. It was a working-class bar but it was too early in the afternoon for the usual patrons. Dim and dank and smelling of brew, it hadn’t changed at all over the years. Only the bartender had changed. He’d been old then. He was positively ancient now. He looked like one of those villagers from the Caucasus who live to be a hundred and twenty.
He recognized me and said with a glint in his rheumy gray eyes, “You college boys…you all get older, but you all come back. I remember you, sonny boy. You used to like your beer.” His hands shook as he poured us a couple of Rolling Rocks.
“Still do, Pops,” I said. “Only now it’s the non-alcoholic kind for me.”
He snorted. “What’s the point, sonny boy?”
Edelstein led me to a booth in the back. There was a man by himself at the next table, hunched over a shot of whisky, and a boy and girl sitting across from us in a booth holding hands. They were college kids and they were deep in conversation about something to do with political correctness. The boy was saying something about “censorship by the minority” and the girl responded by saying something like “dead white males.” Then the boy’s hand slipped under the table and started playing with the girl’s crotch.
On the jukebox, Johnny Cash was singing a song about falling into a burning ring of fire.
I turned back to Edelstein. “I understand Insignia is about to get FDA approval on their new drug, this HBF gene thing.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything.
“I assume this means a lot of pocket change.”
He grunted. “You could say that.”
“I’m looking into a murder case. Two murder cases. My ex-wife and her sister were both killed. You never met Alicia but…”
“Yes, I did,” Edelstein said.
I blinked. “What?”
“I met Alicia.”
“When?” I felt like a bloody idiot.
“A couple of years ago. It was at a party my partner, Chisolm, gave to celebrate some contract. Your ex introduced herself. She told me she was a securities analyst. She said she was thinking about covering biotech. She asked me for some advice. I told her I’d be glad to help her anytime.”
He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “About four months ago, she called and said she was preparing a research report on Insignia and could I help her with some evaluations. I told her I’d been out of the company for several years but I’d call some people I knew there and put her in touch with them.”
“Alicia never covered biotech,” I said.
Edelstein took off his glasses and closed his eyes. “Interesting,” he said. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “She said she’d already spoken to Chisolm, so I told her to call a fellow named Eric Hobley who was in charge of the clinical trials. After she did, Eric called and said he wanted to meet me.” He opened his eyes and looked straight at me. “It was a very disturbing meeting.”
I stopped him. “Did this meeting have anything to do with the FDA approval?”
He nodded. “Do you have any idea how much it costs to bring a new drug to market?”
“I can guess,” I said.
“More than your guess. It can be in the neighborhood of a hundred million bucks.”
“Pretty high rent neighborhood.”
He leaned back in the booth and took a swallow of beer. So did I, except I finished mine.
“I don’t want to say too much because I don’t have all the facts, but I’m going to put you in contact with Hobley. He’ll be able to fill in the details.”
“Will they get FDA approval for the drug?”
“Probably,” he said. He drained what was left of his beer. “That’s what troubles me.”
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Eric Hobley looked just like I thought he would. He was a thin wiry guy, about five-six, with a high-pitched voice and a shock of brown hair over his forehead. His eyes were dark and deep-set and constantly moving. The only sartorial feature I hadn’t predicted was the bow tie he wore with a starched white shirt.
“Alan Edelstein said you were a man of confidence,” he said.
It was a familiar expression in Spanish, I’d never heard it used in English before.
