A Patent Lie (18 page)

“So, Dr. Kaplan, could you tell the jury what these four obstacles are.”

“Remember,” Kaplan said, talking to the jurors as if it were one of his Harvard seminars, “I told you that vaccines work by stimulating the body's immune system to fight off the virus infection? Well, HIV is unique among viruses in that its target is the victim's immune system. It's in the nature of HIV that it destroys the very mechanism that we need to fight off infection. How can you use the immune system to repel a virus if the virus attacks the system itself?”

Kaplan's little tutorial had the jury's close attention and the judge's, too. Thorpe wouldn't think to break the communion between the expert and his audience. Nor would Thorpe have more than two or three questions on cross, none of them harmful. For the first time that day, Seeley relaxed. The case was going well. Cordier's testimony had also been strong, Chaikovsky's only slightly less so, and Kaplan's comments last evening in the conference room had reassured him about Steinhardt's style of research.

“You testified that there are four hurdles, Dr. Kaplan. What are the other three?”

“Recall I said that for polio and the other vaccines, vaccinologists use a weakened form of the virus to stimulate the host's antibodies.”

“Go on.”

“We can't do that with HIV. We can't use a weakened virus, or even a dead one. Because of the virus's effect on the immune system, it would be too dangerous to the person being inoculated. It could be a death sentence.”

“So what can you use?”

“The best you can do is break down HIV into its individual proteins, and use one of them.”

“What are the other two obstacles?” It was a short, smooth ride from here.

“For an antibody—any antibody—to work, for it to neutralize the virus and prevent it from invading cells, it has to bind to the virus particle. The problem is that the surface of an HIV particle is so dense and complicated that it's virtually impossible for the antibody to reach the binding site.”

“Like a crumpled piece of paper?”

“No.” Kaplan shook his head impatiently. “Picture a tiny sphere. An HIV particle, or virion, is only one ten-thousandth of a millimeter wide—the width of a human hair is one-tenth of a millimeter—and it has a surface like a loose piece of cloth covered with dozens of mushrooms. The mushrooms are constantly in motion, always flopping around.” Kaplan waggled his fingers at the jury. “How can an antibody find a binding site if it's hidden under the mushroom caps? But it must bind to a specific site. Hit or miss isn't good enough for it to work.”

“And, the last obstacle?”

“Mutation. With polio, measles, mumps, the virus you're attacking stays the same from one day to the next, and from one host to another. But HIV is different. It's constantly mutating—and not only over time, and not only from one host to another. On a given day, HIV can take on countless different forms in just a single individual.”

“So you're saying that HIV is a moving target?”

“A moving target and a changing one. As many as a million totally unique virions can be created each day in a single infected host. This means that even if you could somehow manage to get an antibody to neutralize one virion, there are others it won't neutralize. You're pretty much back where you started.”

“These four hurdles—did Dr. Alan Steinhardt, who created AV/AS, manage to get over or around each of them?”

“Yes,” Kaplan said. “Yes, he did.”

“Thank you, Dr. Kaplan. I have no more questions.”

The abrupt halt had the effect Seeley wanted, and an uneasy silence hung in the courtroom. Judge and jurors were asking themselves Seeley's unspoken question: What did Steinhardt do to overcome these obstacles? Kaplan had dispelled any doubt about the scientific significance of Steinhardt's achievement and, tomorrow morning, the jurors would greet Steinhardt as a savior when he explained how he surmounted the hurdles in the way of AV/AS. The trick would be to have him on and off the stand before the jurors discovered how personally repellent he was.

Thorpe rose, but didn't move from the defense table. “Professor Kaplan, your colorful testimony has left all of us in suspense: What was it the discoverer of AV/AS did to break through these four obstacles?”

Seeley was on his feet. “Objection. The question is outside the scope of the direct examination.”

“Your Honor, the question goes to the validity of this patent. Surely the jury has a right to know the nature of this supposed advance.”

Seeley was not going to let Thorpe deflate his plans. “Judge, the jurors have not only the right but the duty to understand the nature of the invention. However, they deserve to learn this from the man who made the discovery, and this man will testify tomorrow morning.”

Farnsworth looked at the jury, as if asking what it was they wanted, knowing that however she ruled on Seeley's objection, it could not possibly constitute reversible error, requiring the appeals court to overturn the jury's verdict.

Still watching the jury, Farnsworth said, “The objection is sustained.”

Trial was over for the day.

FOURTEEN

Cypress Cove, where Lily Warren lived, was a cluster of clapboard town houses built into a hillside overlooking downtown Half Moon Bay and, beyond it, the Pacific. The flowering vines that climbed over the second-floor balconies gave the place a Mediterranean feel, except for the bite in the air and the fog just now beginning to roll in off the water. A faint mineral smell of seaweed, kelp, and wrack wafted past Seeley as he stood at Lily's door, a bouquet of spring flowers in his hand.

Seeley had thought to break the date, but then Steinhardt refused to meet with him to review tomorrow morning's testimony, leaving the evening free. “I'm not some actor who has to rehearse a part,” the scientist said. Seeley wished that he were. Not only could the scientist's arrogant narcissism undo all that he and Palmieri had accomplished with Cordier, Chaikovsky, and Kaplan, but Seeley still didn't know what secrets lay behind the neat grids of Steinhardt's laboratory notebooks.

Lily's flustered half curtsy when Seeley handed her the flowers made him wonder how often she entertained. She led him up a narrow stairway and went off to find a vase. The furniture had the matched look of what someone might acquire on a rushed visit to a rental outlet, but a brightly colored pillow here and there, a couple of bulky art books on the coffee table, and some framed black-and-white photographs on the living-room wall redeemed the monotony. Just inside the glassed-off balcony, a dining table was set with good china and silver and a single gardenia in a crystal flute. Exotic aromas came from the small open kitchen where Lily fussed with the flowers.

She came into the living room carrying a tray with an imported brand of sparkling water, a frosty canister of ice, and two tall tumblers. Her eyes smiled at him. “I have wine or beer if you'd like. But I thought you might prefer this.”

Seeley remembered how at lunch she had caught his lingering glance at the line of beer bottles along the restaurant wall, and he wondered how much about him she had already deduced. Everything, he decided.

She took the corner of the couch across from him and filled the two glasses. In her own home, her posture still as erect as a dancer's, she seemed less confident, more vulnerable, than at lunch.

“I'm sorry, but there's no dim sum. I had to work at the lab all day so I picked up some takeout at a Thai place on the way home.”

“I didn't come for the dim sum.”

“It's my favorite restaurant. I promise, you'll like it.”

She crossed a leg, and an unseen slit in the floor-length skirt momentarily revealed a long graceful leg, then magically concealed it again.

“Did you have any trouble finding me?”

“Why do you live all the way out here?”

“The suburbs? You think a single woman would be happier in the city.”

“No, I—”

“It's convenient. The lab's just fifteen minutes away. Some days I have to be there eighteen, nineteen hours . . .” She stopped, her thoughts elsewhere. “And, when I get lonely, the ocean's a wonderful companion.”

Seeley wondered whether it was the ocean or the thought of home, six thousand miles away, that consoled her. As when she told him of her affair with Steinhardt, Lily's openness surprised him.

“Do you ever think about going back?”

“I think about China all the time, but not about going back.” Again, the expressive eyes smiled. “Every Chinese graduate student who comes to the States says that after she gets her degree she's going back. But when the time comes, not even half of them do.”

“China's going to be a great scientific power.”

“But not for a long time and, even then, the important things won't change, especially if you're a woman. You work for months, years, every day of the week, praying for results. Then the day comes when everything you've done, every one of your intuitions turns out to be right. You've made a major discovery.”

“And you can't claim it as your own.”

She shrugged, but Seeley felt the heat. “Calls are made. Papers arrive. You're assigned to a different lab. Some party bureaucrat who never in his life spent an hour at a laboratory bench gets to put his name on your discovery.”

“It sounds like corporate America,” Seeley said. “Or Switzerland.”

She instantly saw where his thoughts were going, and a rueful smile warned him off: No, not tonight; I don't want to talk about St. Gall or Alan Steinhardt. “I'm famished,” she said. “Let's eat.”

Seeley excused himself to wash up. The guest bathroom, on the other side of the stairway, looked barely used. Another fragrant gardenia was in a narrow vase above the sink. The hand towels could have been starched, they were that stiff, and Seeley wiped his damp hands on his trousers. In a straw basket beneath the towel rack were four or five women's magazines—
Vogue
,
French Vogue
,
Cosmopolitan
, and, on top,
Glamour
. Next to the photograph of a pouty-lipped starlet, the cover promised articles on “Seven Tips for Overcoming Shyness” and “Ten Special Treats to Give Your Man in Bed.” Seeley asked himself what he had expected. Well-thumbed copies of
Immunology
?

When he returned, Lily was setting down a platter on which glistening shallots, crinkly dark mushrooms, and chive flowers surrounded a whole crispy fish. She described the other dishes to him: steamed wontons filled with ground spiced pork, stir-fried noodles with chives, and shrimp-and-olive fried rice.

“Another thing,” Lily said, as if there had been no break in their conversation, “in your country anyone can eat like a party official or a big-time industrialist even if he isn't one.”

The food was good. It might have been the variety, or the complex flavors, or the hour, but they ate more slowly than they had at lunch, talking less and with more comfortable pauses. The tuning fork still hummed, but at a lower pitch.

“What was it like for you growing up in China?” The question, Seeley knew, could spoil the mood but, as in the taxi with Palmieri, it was the question he asked of anyone who interested him; for him, it was the single great mystery.

Lily clapped her hands as a child might. “Oh,” she said, “I had a wonderful childhood.”

“What were your parents like?”

“I never really got to know them. My father's a physicist and my mother's a chemist, but when I was growing up they were either in prison or on a farm hoeing beans and being politically reeducated. I came to America before they got their lives back.”

She spoke of this so lightly that Seeley was certain that he misunderstood.

“My grandparents—my mother's parents—raised me. They were wonderful people and they spoiled me terribly.”

She described trips with her grandfather to a local zoo populated with a weird assortment of animals, and of toiling side by side in her grandmother's small vegetable garden, offering the stories as gifts that implicitly asked for Seeley's memories in exchange. To Seeley's astonishment, he found himself talking about adventures of his own: bicycle excursions to places like the Ellicott Square Building that he'd only read about in the newspaper or seen on television; the long solitary hours he spent in Buffalo's wondrous art museum. He had grown so accustomed to thinking of his childhood as a single, unremittingly dark passage that, as when he remembered building beerbottle castles with Leonard at the Germania, the memories were like bright windows opening.

Seeley said, “Besides being able to eat like a party official, what else do you like about America?”

“The independence.” She pronounced the word carefully, as she had “relationship” the other day, as if the very word was a treasure to be handled gently. “Young Chinese women come here, they find good work and, for the first time in their lives, they have financial independence. Sexual independence, too. That's another reason they don't go back.”

Which
Glamour
article had she turned to first, Seeley wondered, the one about overcoming shyness or the one about ten bedtime treats?

“It must be hard,” he said, “balancing relationships with independence.” It was his last attempt to get her to talk about Steinhardt.

“You're a good listener,” Lily said.

“I liked the stories about you and your grandparents.”

“No, I mean your remembering what I said about relationships at lunch. Not many people listen that closely.”

“I would have thought that's mostly what scientists do. Observe. Listen.”

She poured tea from a teapot and the fragrance of jasmine blossomed over the table.

“The ones I meet, all they want to talk about are their toys. I can tell you anything you want to know about every concept car and useless electronic gadget ever made.”

“You ought to enlarge your circle.”

“I'm trying.”

She rose to gather the dishes. When Seeley started to help, she said she was sure he had been a very dutiful husband—how did she know that he had been married?—but that he should go out on the balcony and watch the fog come in.

On the other side of the sliding doors, the night air was damp, and the ocean and the town were already lost in fog. Seeley listened for the foghorn that at lunch had sounded every fifteen minutes, but didn't hear it. The silence must have transfixed him, because at some point, without his realizing it, Lily had come onto the balcony. She slipped next to him at the rail, and Seeley was aware of a fragrance, like the gardenias in the apartment, but paler.

“It's so quiet,” he said.

“Not really. Concentrate. Listen to the ocean.”

After a long minute in which Seeley tried to block out the street sounds, she said, “What did you hear?”

“Waves splashing against rocks.”

She put her arm around his shoulder to cup a hand at his ear, making it a shell. “Listen.”

“Nothing.” Seeley shook his head.

“It takes time. With practice, you can actually hear the ocean itself, the animal life, the plants, everything.”

At that moment, Seeley wished that he could stay on the balcony with Lily at his side forever. Any hope that he had of discovering Steinhardt's secret lifted off from the balcony rail and soared like a gull out over the Pacific.

Lily said, “The fog will be like this all the way back to the city. It won't clear until just before dawn.”

“I bet you knew that when you asked me to dinner.”

“I'm a scientist. Of course I knew.”

She took his hand—her fingers were as cool, as he'd imagined they would be—and led him back to the living room, indicating the place next to her on the couch. When she drew her legs up beneath her, the magic slit in her skirt parted once more, just barely, but this time remained open.

“Would you like more tea? Anything?”

Seeley said no. “What was your name? In China.”

She smiled but shook her head. “You'd never guess.”

“Something beautiful, I'd imagine.”

“Or mysterious.”

Her hand slipped to his wrist and, unbuttoning the shirt sleeve, she let her fingertips graze his arm. The other hand rested casually on her thigh.

Watching the dark thoughtful eyes, Seeley placed a hand against Lily's cheek. She brushed it with her lips and opening his shirt, leaned into him, pressing her ear to his chest so that she could listen to his heartbeat. Eyes closed, Seeley traced in his mind the imagined arc of the seagull until it was no more than a speck against the night sky.

Seeley felt Lily draw away, and when he opened his eyes she was above him, her features in the dim light—the perfect curve of an eyebrow, the slope of a porcelain cheek—like fragments of a puzzle. She unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse and pulled his head against her own heart. “Listen! This is how the ocean sounds.” After a time, long fingers gently pulled him upward. She touched her lips to his, and Seeley tasted some flavorful trace—tamarind? ginger?—before taking her head in his hands and kissing her.

His lips barely touching hers, Seeley said, “You didn't tell me your name.”

“You're very persistent.” Her fingers rested on his arm, as if she were waiting for something to happen.

“So are you.”

She ran her other hand through his hair. “Mi Huā.”

“Which means?”

“I knew you'd ask.”

“Which is why you wouldn't tell me.”

“Would you like to stay the night?”

“That would be nice,” Seeley said.

“Secret Flower.”

Ah.