A Patent Lie (6 page)

After that, the conversation drifted to Renata's childhood in Schenectady, the challenges women faced as surgeons, stories about her work as one of the Stanford football team's on-field physicians, and the constant temptation to go into research.

Leonard said to Seeley, “You didn't tell me how your meeting went with Alan Steinhardt. He's impressive, isn't he?”

“A legend.”

“Alan can be a pain in the ass, but he's a talented scientist. He's won all the prizes but the Nobel. It takes vision like his to design this kind of research, much less pull it off. Looking for an AIDS vaccine is like running a marathon, except no one gives you a map to show you the route or even how far it is to the finish line. If there is a finish line.”

Seeley said, “I need to be sure he got there all by himself, and that Lily Warren wasn't there, too.”

Renata said, “Lily Warren?”

Leonard said, “Twenty years ago, if you asked the best scientists in the business how long it would take to come up with a true AIDS vaccine, they would have told you ten years. If you asked them the same question today, do you know what they'd say?”

“Ten years?”

“AV/AS is as close to a real vaccine as anyone's come. It's not like a polio vaccine or measles. It's not a cure-all. Maybe in ten years we'll have a vaccine that is. But right now, this is the best chance we have to save some of these people. Maybe the only chance.”

Renata said, “Do I know Lily Warren?”

“She worked with Alan at UC, before he came to work for us.”

“And,” Seeley said, “she went to work for St. Gall.”

Leonard said, “St. Gall used her to try to get a look at Alan's notebooks. They were desperate to develop a vaccine strategy. From the papers he was publishing, they knew he was onto something, but they didn't know what.”

Seeley said, “How do you know that?”

“One of our security guards found her in Steinhardt's lab alone, after hours.” Leonard chewed as he spoke. “You've got a first-year lawyer on your team who made herself a hero on this. She was going through our security reports, trying to find evidence of industrial espionage, and when she sees Warren's name on one of the reports, she remembers that she was on St. Gall's witness list. That's why St. Gall agreed to stipulate priority. They'd look like common thieves if this came out at the trial.”

First the stipulation, then the story behind it. What else was his client hiding from him? “Barnum never told me this.”

Renata had finished her dinner and risen from her place. “I have an early day tomorrow. Like Mike.”

Leonard didn't hear her. “Ed must have forgotten. Our deal with St. Gall is, they don't challenge our priority, we don't go to the DA with criminal charges.”

Seeley felt Renata standing behind him. “Did Pearsall know about the deal?”

“Of course he did,” Leonard said. “He brokered it.”

“I'm glad you came,” Renata said. “Are we going to see you tomorrow night?”

Before he could answer, Leonard said, “Joel Warshaw's having a benefit at his house tomorrow night. He wants to meet you.”

Warshaw was Vaxtek's chairman, but that didn't mean Seeley had to go to parties at his house. “I have a trial to prepare for.”

“Joel doesn't come in to the office,” Leonard said. “He works out of his house. This is a command performance.”

All the more reason not to go, Seeley thought.

“Come by here first,” Renata said. “We'll drive over together. It's just a few blocks.”

“I'll see if I have the time.”

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 Hüber to become the Hubbells. The explanation only complicated Seeley's sense of his father's depravity. Even on his finest days, pitching a shutout or topping the school record for completed passes, Seeley's awareness of himself was that he was the son not of one but of two madmen. Alone in their room, he and Lenny entertained each other by walking about like cartoon monsters, legs goose-stepping, arms straight out and frozen into sticks, abjuring the other to beware, I am
Lo
thar! I
vill
seize you and destroy you!

Beneath the card table, both of Lenny's feet tapped wildly.

“For God's sake, Lenny, go to the bathroom if you have to pee.”

“You've got to help me, Mike.” The boy's lips trembled. “I'll give you all the money in my jar. You have to get rid of this for me.”

It was past eight o'clock and the aroma of roasting meat loaf had long since faded. Their mother had by now settled in the parlor and was knitting or mending or on the telephone with one of her church friends. In the empty kitchen, the television played at top volume; on the evidence of the laugh track, it was tuned to a sitcom. In Seeley's memory, the television, though rarely watched, was always on. It could have been a fifth member of the family and the only one to be counted on for laughter.

From under the card table, Lenny brought out a package and pushed it toward his brother. When Seeley only looked at it, Lenny, his voice breaking, said, “Take it, Mike. You have to get rid of it.”

The bag, an ordinary lunch sack creased and stained from his brother's handling, was tightly wrapped around the object inside, and the moment Seeley lifted the package, he knew from its heft what it was.

“Does he know you took it?”

Lenny shook his head.

“Put it back before he gets home.”

“I can't.” Beads of moisture had formed on his brother's upper lip. He nodded at the bag. His voice pleaded. “Open it.”

Seeley emptied the bag onto his bed. In the bright light of the room, the chrome barrel glowed. The gun was intact and the cartridges, which Lenny had emptied from the cylinder, were all there. Then Seeley saw why Lenny couldn't return the revolver to their father's dresser. The barrel was scarred and abraded as if it had been smashed repeatedly with a rock. Black shards of some hard material clung to the cartridges. Seeley looked at the gun's grip. Lenny's efforts with the rock had shattered the cast black rubber. The larger pieces he had reattached with rubber bands and what looked like library paste.

“What were you trying to do?”

His brother emerged from the closet with the half-full pickle jar. “I wanted to break it and throw it down the sewer.”

“Why didn't you?”

“I was afraid. Take the money, Mike! You have to help me.”

“I don't want the money.”

“You
have
to get rid of it!”

It seemed to Seeley that he had shielded his brother since before Lenny learned to walk. A table lamp shattered on the floor; grape juice splashed from a glass onto a lace curtain. It was easier for Seeley to absorb the blame than to have to listen to his brother suffer a beating. The logic that the role of the strong was to protect the weak was too ingrained for him to do anything else.

Their father could arrive home at any moment, and Seeley thought quickly. Outside it was still twilight, but even if the neighbors had gone indoors, the narrow backyard offered no place to hide the revolver. There was the shadowy cellar where his father spent long hours drinking beer and working on his hunting and fishing gear, but the man knew every spider-filled corner of the place. The living and dining rooms were hopeless: the sofa and easy chairs, covered in stiff transparent plastic, were impenetrable and the cabinet with his mother's collection of porcelain figurines was mostly glass. The two small dressers in the boys' bedroom were the first place his father would look. It seemed odd to Seeley that a house so filled with secrets should have no hiding places.

When Seeley opened the pickle jar and carefully shook the coins and currency onto the table, Lenny misunderstood. “Take the jar! You can have it! Just get rid of the thing.”

On his own forays into his father's bedroom dresser, Seeley had examined the revolver more than once. The grip and barrel now appeared shorter than he remembered and, in proportion, the trigger and guard seemed outsized. For some reason that difference now underlined for him the weapon's deadliness. He pressed open the cylinder and, one by one, inserted the six loose cartridges. The smooth movement of the parts—he clicked the cylinder back into place—was almost comforting in its precision. He quickly covered the bottom of the jar with coins, placed the revolver in the center of them, and distributed the rest of the money on top of the revolver and around it. He screwed the top back onto the jar. The hard black crumbs he gathered up from the bedcover and dropped in the wastebasket. Even if his father were to look there, drunk as he was by the time he got home, he would not connect them to the missing gun.

Seeley examined the jar doubtfully before returning it to its corner in the closet. “I'll toss the gun on the way to school tomorrow.”

Leonard said, “Maybe he won't come home.”

That was Lenny's fantasy, but Seeley had his own version. At around this time, the U. S. Justice Department had, with much publicity, initiated the prosecution in nearby Cleveland of a local autoworker for fraudulently entering the United States by failing to disclose that he had been an SS guard at two death camps in Poland. It took no great forensic leap for Seeley at age fifteen to conclude that Lothar Seelig, also an autoworker and immigrant, had himself been an SS camp guard. Surely the brass key in the carved box would unlock the incriminating evidence. Some day, like the Cleveland autoworker, neither of the two madmen would come home.

One sitcom had replaced another on the television when a slamming door shook the house. Seeley's mother must have come into the kitchen because his father's ancient tirade—booming, guttural, unforgiving—at once filled the house with its complaint of incompetence and betrayal. The sentences had lost their meaning long ago, but the fact that the words were English, not German, momentarily loosened the knot in Seeley's chest. When his father spoke English in the house it meant that his drinking had not yet carried him past the last edge of decency.

There was a heavy
thump
and again the house shook. From experience Seeley knew that his father had hurled his mother against a kitchen wall. Her cry, if there was one, was drowned out by the television. There was a long silence before the heavy boots staggered down the hallway, stopping at the closed door behind which, Seeley on his bed, and his brother at the card table, neither breathed nor moved. The boots turned into his parents' bedroom. Lenny started shaking and, though terrified himself, Seeley was astonished to discover, peeking out from some corner of his soul, a spark of mischief, even glee, anticipating the roar of the dumb, confounded beast pawing through drawers of socks and underwear as he discovered that his gun was gone.

Drawers opened and slammed shut in the next room. Then, as Seeley expected, the mindless, anguished cry.
Wo ist es? Wo ist mein Revolver?

The door to the boys' room swung open—the latch had broken long ago—and the massive figure, all chest and gut, a blown-up version of the boys' pantomime monster, crashed in, the fierce stench of alcohol filling the room. He didn't ask who took the gun. The bloodshot eyes that locked onto Seeley's announced that he had already been convicted of the theft. Wordlessly, his father ripped one drawer from Seeley's dresser, then another, flinging them against the wall, before doing the same with Lenny's. Ignoring Lenny, who was frozen in his chair, the monster seized the table by a leg and flipped it over. The wastebasket he flung against the wall, and black shards rained onto the floor. He didn't notice. Pants, shirts, jackets, followed by wire hangers flew from the closet. The monster again turned to Seeley and glared at him.

To avoid the man's gaze, Seeley's eyes swept past Lenny and the telltale closet, fixing instead on the ocean scene that decorated the wallpaper directly opposite his bed. Against a blue-gray ground, horizontal rows of sailboats alternated with parallel rows of tropical fish. The sailboats were the same color as the sea, separated only by a thin red outline tracing the hull and sails. The fish bore pastel stripes and spots, but, like the boats, were otherwise transparent to the color of the sea. Improbably, the fish were three times the size of the boats. The gross unreality of the images cemented Seeley's terror, as if the fact that these forms could coexist on his bedroom wall implied that any horror was possible; that in this house so rarely visited by outsiders, anything could happen.

The gun's discovery was inevitable. The house was too small, the furnishings too spare, to hide the smallest secret from this man's rage. As if reading Seeley's thoughts, his father swung back to the closet. For an instant, the single swiping movement of his boot threw him off balance but then shoes and sneakers hurtled out into the room. Bracing his bulk against the doorframe, the man leaned in and brought out the squat glass jar. He twisted off the top and, staggering across the room, emptied the jar onto the foot of Seeley's bed. Propped against a pillow, Seeley watched as his father pawed the coins, quickly uncovering the revolver. With a startling delicacy, he lifted the gun so that the scarred weapon rested in his palms. He could have been cradling some small injured animal.

Beneath Seeley's pounding blood, the perverse sense of mischief peered out again, taunting. “
Lo
thar,” Seeley said. His brother shot him a horror-stricken look. “
Lo
thar,” Seeley said again.

If his father heard, he gave no sign. “This is what you do to my possessions?” The voice was heavy with alcohol. “The man, your father, who gives you a roof over your head”—he aimed a thick finger at the ceiling—“who feeds you? This is how you repay me?
Dolchstoss!
A stab in the back!”

A hand the size of a baseball mitt seized Seeley by the collar, and he didn't resist when it pulled him off the bed, onto his feet. The fl at of his father's hand propelled him through the door and down the narrow hallway, the tip of the gun barrel pressed into Seeley's skull, behind his ear. Lenny remained in the bedroom. He must have pried himself from the chair because Seeley heard the door close behind him.

“Let's show your mother what a fine son she bore me.” They were in the kitchen, where Seeley's mother had pressed herself against the far wall. On the stove, a pot boiled violently and the evening's dinner congealed in its roasting pan. As in the bedroom, the raw smell of alcohol filled the room. Formerly a student of wallpaper, Seeley now fixed on the television screen. Two women his mother's age, but elegantly dressed, chatted amiably in a stage-set living room.