A Fierce Radiance (33 page)

“Why, Claire, wonderful to see you!” It was her father, attired in a robin’s-egg blue linen suit. The suit was custom made, she suspected from the jacket’s smooth flow over his shoulders. He gave off an aura of comfortable self-assurance. “Look at you, hard at work and looking great!”

Why was he here? She felt more than taken aback. She felt shocked. What role was
he
playing in the game taking place around her?

“Hanover, meet my daughter, Mrs. Claire Shipley, famous photographer for
Life
magazine.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Shipley, a pleasure.” Hanover was a short man with a large middle and thinning hair gleaming with pomade. He appeared thoroughly relaxed, at ease within the confines of his fiefdom. “Sorry I didn’t have time to meet you earlier. I was with your father. Who would have guessed? Well, Rutherford, we put on quite a show for her. Miss Ryan here presented everything we’re doing.”

Miss Ryan preened for Rutherford, giving Claire the sickening feeling that she was attempting to seduce him, great wealth being the ultimate aphrodisiac.

“This is Tony Pagliaro, my assistant.”

Rutherford said, “Good to meet you, Tony. Glad you’re watching out for my girl.”

Claire could have lived without that, but Tony and her father shook hands on it with great seriousness, two men allied in their protection of her. “Thank you, sir,” Tony said.

Hanover said to Claire, “My driver’s taking your father to the station. Need a lift?”

“Thank you, but no. We have a car.” She couldn’t avoid it, she turned to her father. “Can we drive you back to the city?”

“Why, yes, that’s terrific. Thank you. Damn gas rationing. I love to drive, but I had to take the train out.”

“Happens to the best of us,” Hanover agreed.

“Gas rationing’s not a problem for me in the military,” Tony said, a little too glibly, but she understood his feelings, listening to these rich men complain about their struggles. Pagliaro’s Bakery probably had trouble getting enough gas to complete its daily deliveries.

Tony said he’d bring the car around to the front to pick up her father, and Claire went with him, using the excuse of stashing the equipment.

“I think I’d better sit in the backseat with my father,” she said as they were arranging the bags in the trunk. “Please don’t be offended.”

“Mrs. Shipley, you can’t offend me.”

“Thanks.”

They were back on Route 1 before Claire or Rutherford spoke.

“Nice guy, Hanover,” Rutherford said.

“He seemed to be.” Claire paused. “What were you doing there?” Even she heard the inappropriate level of suspicion in her voice, but her father took it in stride.

“I could ask you the same question.”

She decided to play along with him: “Ask.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Secret. Government work.” She made it into a joke.

“I figured, with the military driver.” He looked pleased, and he was. Seeing her improved his day, he couldn’t deny it. Her vibrant presence, her verve, her skeptical curiosity…he might not have known her when she was growing up, but she was his daughter through and through, no doubt about it, and he was proud of her.

“Actually the work is for the magazine, too. But for after the war. Whenever that may be.”

“Understood,” Rutherford said. The Germans were pushing ahead on the Eastern Front. They’d taken Kharkov and Sevastopol. In North Africa, they were in Tobruk. For the Allies, a long slog lay ahead, and even the experts (and he had access to the experts) couldn’t predict the results. In a year’s time, German or Japanese tanks could be patrolling Route 1. He didn’t want this to happen, but as a businessman he had a responsibility to plan ahead. Win or lose, Rutherford knew he’d be okay. Claire and Charlie, too. His strategy would be public collaboration, while in the background, behind the scenes, he’d support the resistance. He wondered what John D. Rockefeller Jr. would do if German troops took up residence in Manhattan, or how Henry Ford, with his outspoken anti-Semitism, would react if the Nazis became the managers of his Detroit factories. Well, Rutherford couldn’t worry about them. He had enough to worry about, protecting his family, his employees, and, if he could, serving the country. He glanced at his lovely daughter. His job was to make certain she and Charlie were safe and had enough to eat no matter who won the war. He wouldn’t talk to Claire about his concerns for the future. He wouldn’t worry her with theoretical possibilities, or even with the practical considerations he confronted each day.

“Maybe you can explain this,” Claire said with more anger than she’d intended to reveal. “I went to both Hanover and Merck today, and neither one of them showed me what they’re really working on. Only brand-new labs, never used. Fake labs. They kept the actual work to themselves.”

“That’s no surprise,” Rutherford said. “The companies have their proprietary rights to protect. They don’t want photographers or reporters in there. Does Vannevar Bush think the companies are going to shout their business secrets from the rooftops?”

“What makes you bring Dr. Bush into it?”

“Anything to do with medical breakthroughs and the military means it’s approved by Vannevar Bush. Let me share a little secret with you, sweetheart: he needs the companies a lot more than they need him, and the companies know it. His bluster doesn’t scare them. I have to laugh. Penicillin production is the worst-kept secret I’ve ever come across. Wherever I go, men are discussing it. Could simply be the places I go,” he added. “Anyway, the companies will do their duty and get their penicillin to the troops, but as soon as they can, they’ll be turning their full attention to other antibacterials.”

“Are they already turning their attention to other antibacterials?” she asked, trying to sound as if she didn’t care.

“Not that I’ve heard,” he lied, also trying to sound as if he didn’t care, while wondering if each was actually spying on the other. Hanover had dozens of scientists working on the cousins. Rutherford, however, wouldn’t reveal company secrets even to his family. When it came to business, sometimes a protective lie was necessary. Plenty of time to tell the truth later. “The fact is, whoever does crack the other medications is going to end up with quite a tidy profit.”

“How much of a tidy profit?”

“My dear daughter, what’s the price of a human life, do you think?”

“The
price
of a human life?” The price of Emily’s life? Claire didn’t like to think of herself as naive, but she would never put a price on Emily’s life. Were there actually people in this world who put a price on the lives of others? “I have no idea.”

“Neither do I,” he said—although he was learning fast. “But you can be sure a man like George Merck has got some accountant in a back room right now figuring it out. And I’ll wager it’s going to be quite a lot. Enough to make one shot of a penicillin cousin cost, say, twenty dollars or even two hundred dollars, even if the drug itself costs two cents to produce, which it will, sooner or later. Never underestimate American ingenuity, I always say.”

“If it costs two cents, then selling it for two hundred, or even twenty, dollars is profiteering.”

“One man’s profiteering is another man’s rational business planning. What the market can bear, etc. We’re fighting for free markets in this war among other delightful appurtenances of our society.”

At two hundred dollars a dose, most people would have to steal to get these medications for their families. Could she have afforded it for Emily, in the days before she knew her father? She would have sold the house to get it—if she could have found a buyer in the three days before Emily died. To tamp down her outrage, she forced the conversation in a different direction. “And you?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

“Your turn. To tell me what you were doing at Hanover.”

“Ah, yes.” He turned his hands palm upward, as if happily shrugging at the obvious. “Business.”

“What kind of business?”

“The moneymaking kind. The best kind. The war’s been great for business, I’m not ashamed to say. We’re on a roll. The Depression is over and the business class is on Roosevelt’s side now.” Businessmen had hated Roosevelt for what they considered the implicit socialism of his New Deal legislation. “Hanover’s trying to raise capital. Looking to expand, take on the giants. A good time for it, lots of medical stuff needed for the war effort. Sulfa drugs, aspirin, antiseptics, bandages. I got an earful, I can tell you. I’m going to get involved. To tell you the truth, I’m going to buy him out.”

“Really? That’s exciting,” she said sincerely. Here was a man who had enough money simply to buy a company if he wanted to, and one that produced useful products, too. There was something wonderful about him. She felt carried back to the days when she was younger and searched the business pages of newspapers and magazines, hoping to find her father’s name.

“Yes, I made an offer old man Hanover couldn’t refuse. I won’t
change the company name, though. The place has a reputation worth preserving. And I’ll keep Hanover on as president and manager of day-to-day affairs. In my position, I don’t worry about shipping labels and lightbulbs. I do my work at a different level.”

In that split second, reinforcing his previous lie, Rutherford made a decision: he’d keep his cards close for now. He wouldn’t reveal to her the real reason he was buying Hanover. No, he wouldn’t tell Claire about the acre of soil samples in jam jars that he’d seen, the dozens of antibacterial substances making their way through the standard testing protocols. He knew that breakthroughs were just around the corner—breakthroughs that he now owned. He’d keep all that as a surprise for her. He’d share it with her when he actually had something more than dreams and expectations to show for his investment. When he actually had a medication to take to the marketplace. The truth was, his investment in Hanover was for her. And for Emily and Charlie, too. He was making an investment in their futures. A double investment. First, creating a medication that could save their lives—and the lives of all humanity. Second, guaranteeing the family’s wealth for all time. This double investment would be his greatest gift to her, his beloved daughter.

“You see any penicillin?”

He gave her a slow grin. Penicillin was supposed to be a government secret, but she’d probably been fully briefed anyway, so he could talk about it. The cousins, however, were a business secret, and he wouldn’t talk about them. “Wasn’t I the one in the know? Hanover took me around to see the equivalent of a city block or two of milk bottles layered with green mold, and all the while I’m thinking, Sure am glad my girl got me in on this before the curve. Do you know, there’s an actual shortage of milk bottles in New Jersey? They’re all going to penicillin production, at a dozen different companies, at quadruple the usual price. The dairies don’t know what to do.”

Claire would have to report this conversation to Bush and Barnett, she realized. And she’d tell them about her father’s stake in Hanover, although she suspected that with their wide sources of knowledge, they didn’t need her to provide them that sort of information. Was she betraying her father? She didn’t think so. Surely he wasn’t doing anything illegal.

“By the way, you see much of that other young fellow who came to my house? Nick Catalano?” Rutherford proceeded gingerly here. He had a gut feeling that Catalano could be useful to him, and he was looking for an opening to get to know him better without making a big deal of it. “Seemed like an interesting fellow. Worth knowing.”

“I see him now and then.” Distracted by other concerns, Claire waved the question off. “There’s something I don’t understand. Selling antibacterials is not like selling rivets.”

He’d return to Catalano some other time. “Sure it is. Exactly the same as selling rivets.”

“But these drugs save lives, rivets don’t.”

“I imagine rivets have saved a few lives in their long history.”

“You don’t think there’s, well, a human right for people to be able to receive an antibacterial at two cents a dose if that’s what it costs to produce? Okay, at a dollar to allow for a good profit, but surely not as much as two hundred dollars for one shot?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve turned into a socialist?” he said, mock appalled.

“We’re talking about substances that scientists are finding on moldy bread and in the dirt outside their back doors.”

“Sweetheart, you can’t expect a company to do years of research and then sell a product at a nominal profit. You also can’t expect a company to do years of research and give up commercial patent protection. These products never existed before, so new laws have to be written to govern them. That’s my opinion, at least. Penicillin is a commodity, like any other—except in the case of penicillin, the government,
claiming the public good in wartime, is going to take the patents on the means of mass production. The companies still hold out hope that they can change this and get at least some patents on penicillin. Meanwhile I expect other molds coming down the pike will get different treatment. Your Dr. Stanton and I had a discussion about this.”

“Did you?” She stared at him, startled. “He never mentioned it.”

To Rutherford, she sounded suspicious, as if she doubted him. How could she doubt him? He was hurt and offended by her lack of trust in him. He grasped at a way to appease her. “Of course he never mentioned it. It was a
secret
discussion!”

She wished he would stop that irritating compulsion of his to charm her. “What sort of secret discussion?” Despite her best efforts, she took her anger out on him—her anger over the attitude of Merck and Hanover, over the profit motive triumphant, over Jamie and her father keeping secrets from her. She still didn’t entirely trust her father, so by what right did Jamie trust him?

Rutherford felt helpless against her. He’d done nothing wrong. He had nothing to apologize for. His daughter wore what looked like an emerald and diamond engagement ring, and so he might just as well confess the truth. “Stanton came to the apartment to seek my permission to ask you to marry him. Very old-fashioned. Gentlemanly. I appreciated it. I did the same with your mother’s father, although considering what happened between your mother and me, I didn’t recount that bit of family history to my possible future son-in-law.”