The Book of Jonah (18 page)

“Having one too many tequila shots doesn't make you gay.”

“I mean, I honestly do not even believe I am gay. I was just … born with a really strong attraction to men.”

Jonah could only rub his forehead at this, and resist a lawyerly instinct to ask Danny exactly what he believed the definition of “gay” was. “Look, why don't you come out?” he asked. “It's not exactly 1955 out there.”

“It's too late for that!” He wiped his nose with vigor and repeated, “It's too late for that. I've been managing this ever since high school—with only a few slipups, Jonah! It's different in Boise. It's…” He spun his hands rapidly before him, as though trying to churn the words out of the air. “My family does weekly Bible study.”

“And?”

“And they expect things of me! I know I'm a coward, but I can't let them down!”

He looked on the verge of tears again, so Jonah said, “Okay, okay, I'm not going to call your mother, just, calm down.” Try as he might, Jonah could not sustain much scorn toward Danny. He had to admit: Gay in Boise did not sound like a lot of fun—nor did a life of denying your most basic sexual urges. Hell, he hadn't even been able to confine his own sexual urges to a single, very attractive partner. But, he reminded himself, there was more at issue here than Danny's repressed libido. “So don't come out to your family,” he said. “But you have to come out to your girlfriend.”

“Like I said, I'm a coward,” Danny answered with a feeble smile. “I've never come out to anyone. You're the only one who knows.”

“Yeah, me and the slipups,” Jonah muttered. “Anyway, it doesn't matter if you're scared or not. You have to tell her the truth.”

“But we're happy together!” he cried. “I make her happy! Family is very important to me, and I will take our marriage very, very seriously.”

“Marriage?” Danny glanced away. “What was that bullshit before about us being family, we're not…” Danny still didn't meet his eye. Unwanted revelations were coming fast and furious today. “You fucking proposed to her,” Jonah said.

“I already had the ring! I panicked! I thought you were going to say something, and if I—”

“And you figured if you were already engaged, I wouldn't say anything.” Here it was: the scorn, the disgust—the righteous indignation. “You fucking asshole…”

“You can't say anything!” Danny exclaimed. “We're in love! And—besides.” His eyes darted up to Jonah's, then quickly away. “It's none of your business.”

“She's my cousin, remember?”

“You never see her. You're not part of her life! You had no idea how screwed up she was when we got together. Did you know she was cutting herself then?” Jonah did not—and the news had the effect of pulling his indignation up short. The girl who'd bopped so happily through Cat Stevens songs on her acoustic guitar cut herself? “I'm thinking about her,” Danny said, looking at Jonah a little more firmly now. “She's happy with me. And I'll take care of her, you know that. I'll always make plenty of money. We can live wherever she wants. I'll put her through law school if she decides to do that, or she can get an MFA. Or she can raise our kids. I will be a wonderful husband to her.”

“Minus the occasional stairwell.”

Danny nodded quickly, as if in agreement. “I deserved that. But I am telling you, that was the only time since we've been together. And I will work so, so, so hard to make sure there aren't any more.”

“You're supposed to say there won't be any more at all.”

“I want to be honest with you.”

“Why do you want to be honest with
me
?” Jonah said in exasperation.

Danny looked at him with a small, tentative smile. “I don't really know. You just seem … like a good guy.”

“No,” Jonah shouted, suddenly furious—leapt to his feet. “No, no, no. I do not seem like a good guy. I am a corporate lawyer. Do you know what we do here? When companies put lead in baby aspirin, who do you think they call? That's who I am.” He realized he was leaning forward, fists balled on his desk, and he must have actually been scaring Danny a bit, because Danny was pressing himself into the back of his chair, cringing as if he were worried Jonah was about to jump over the desk and start pummeling him. Jonah forced himself to sit back down. “I am not someone you need to be honest with,” he concluded. He was a little unnerved by this reaction himself—lit a new cigarette.

“I'm sorry I said that,” Danny said after a few moments. Then in a quiet, hopeful voice, he added, “Then I don't need to worry that you'll say anything?”

Jonah stared at Danny blankly—stared as he did at the chessboard when he found himself in utterly unexpected checkmate. He hadn't necessarily planned on saying anything to Becky—but he hadn't decided not to, either. Until Danny showed up, he hadn't thought about it at all, his weekend having been consumed by—other concerns. But now that he did think about it—he saw that Danny made a good point. As he had just been so adamant in explaining, he was not some sanctimonious moral crusader—and certainly had not become one over the weekend. Who was he to make judgments as to what was right and wrong, what should be revealed and what remain hidden? Besides, if he did tell Becky, what would he really accomplish besides ruining other people's happiness: breaking up an engagement, perhaps even inducing a relapse into neurotic self-harm? Such outcomes were precisely the reason why you should not take it upon yourself to intervene in other people's lives, he thought. And while he sensed there was a counterargument to be made here, he did not see that he necessarily had to be the one to make it. The bottom line, he told himself, was that he wanted Becky to be happy—and Danny made her happy.

“It never happened,” Jonah said.

“It never happened,” Danny answered promptly.

“And nothing ever will happen.”

“I swear to the Lord in heaven, I will do my best.”

“Remember what I said about being honest with me?”

“Nothing will ever happen again. Or nothing will happen. Nothing happened. Got it.”

“Fine,” Jonah said. Still dissatisfied, though, with his relative goodness or badness in this situation—unclear, actually, on which side of this scale he was trying to align himself at this moment—he added, “And if you ever say a word to me about any company, any fund, any earnings report you got hold of, I will—”

“Never. Never. As far as you're concerned, I work on an ice cream truck. Ha-ha-ha.” The fake laughter was back. This was odd, thought Jonah—and he suddenly wondered if he'd been hustled. Regardless, he was ready for Danny to leave, and this seemed to be Danny's thinking, too. He'd already stood up, was moving backward toward the door.

“Thank you, Jonah,” he said. “This really is what's best for everyone.” He still had the burning cigarette in his fingers—he looked at it, he looked at Jonah, he looked around awkwardly, finally decided to take the cigarette with him, and left.

He had no right to ruin Becky's happiness. Danny was right: This was what was best for everyone. And this was exactly what he would have done before Friday night, he assured himself. But then Jonah put out his cigarette underneath his desk, and gave up pretending that he'd done either right or wrong, or what was best, rather than exactly what Danny had wanted him to do: what was most convenient for himself. He walked gratefully to the boxes of BBEC files.

It took Dolores two hours to return with the suit, but it was navy blue and the correct size and the tie matched and she even smiled as she handed him the Macy's bag, maybe signaling that all was forgiven. He shut his door after her, pulled the pins and tissue paper from the new clothing, started to undo his belt. But it felt inappropriate, somehow, to be undressing at work—the way he imagined texting during a funeral might. So he put on the new suit quickly, his back to the door, just in case. As he tightened the tie, though, shoved his jeans and polo into his briefcase, he had the sense that maybe, just maybe, he had finally regained some kind of control over his life—put the last of the weekend's pandemonium behind him.

Several uninterrupted hours of studying the BBEC files helped affirm this, too. As he made his way through the stacked boxes, the files made a steady exodus from the corner, spreading all across his desk, the chairs, the floor. When he took a moment to look up and surveyed this, he found something heartening in their migration—a visible symbol of what he'd accomplished.

He was still only at the beginning of the work of reading, skimming, assimilating the total, but he already had, he believed, the gist. Dyomax, a biotech start-up founded by MIT researchers and California venture capitalists, was claiming that BBEC had stolen a molecule they had patented in 2001 and used it as the basis of the blockbuster eye drug Lumine. Hence, Dyomax argued, they were entitled to hundreds of millions of dollars in Lumine revenue and unrealized revenue and compensatory damages and so forth. BBEC, on the other hand, argued that Lumine was in fact based on a molecule they called 5F-LUM6, which BBEC had created and patented in 2002. BBEC argued that 5F-LUM6 was “wholly and demonstrably different”—a phrase that recurred frequently in the files—from the Dyomax molecule. It was an apples-to-oranges defense, essentially: BBEC wasn't disputing that Dyomax held the patent for an apple; they were just saying they'd invented an orange. Theoretically, it would be up to the courts to decide what sort of fruit 5F-LUM6 really was—but that, the files made clear, was only theory. The research of Cunningham Wolf litigators showed that Dyomax could never survive a trial that might play out over the course of twelve or eighteen months, plus however many more months before judgment. Minority stakeholders were already demanding a settlement; the company had made it through the previous year only because one of the partners had sold his stake on terrible terms; all the old VCs wanted out, no new VCs wanted in. The show of the trial was simply leverage toward a better settlement. Dyomax would walk in to court and, after a couple of weeks of being outmaneuvered and outfought and outgunned by Doug Chen and Jonah Jacobstein and the seven Cunningham Wolf attorneys sitting behind them, concede that whatever 5F-LUM6 really was—they couldn't win.

Jonah guessed Dyomax had held out this long only because BBEC's theft had been so transparent. The internal documents showed that BBEC had made only token efforts to hide that the genesis of 5F-LUM6 was their attempt to create a version of the Dyomax molecule that was just different enough to be called different. And when that didn't work, they simply called one iteration 5F-LUM6 and patented it. The BBEC correspondence he reviewed was full of what outside legal counsel would call “imprudent language”—phrases like “the science is pretty damning” and “we have about seventeen different ways we need to cover our ass.”

None of this was any some sort of John Grisham, proof-they-knew-the-brake-pads-were-defective! revelation to Jonah, of course. He had guessed BBEC had stolen the molecule almost from the moment he'd heard about the case. And most of the truly imprudent language came in emails with or between in-house counsel and hence could never be admitted into evidence, regardless. More fundamentally, it was all water that could easily be muddied by any lawyer with half Jonah's ability—to say nothing of Doug Chen's. All it would take would be a few dependable expert witnesses, twenty or so insinuating questions. After all, when it came to the molecular level, who could really say what was what, and whose was whose? One thing Jonah had learned early in his career at Cunningham Wolf was that the legal system—with its insistence on precision, exactitude, comprehensiveness—rather than brush away ambiguity actually tended to create it where none had existed. Firms like Cunningham Wolf had for generations been monetizing the manufacture of ambiguity. If BBEC needed a little doubt cast in order to save maybe a quarter billion dollars, then they had come to the right party.

Closing another file, Jonah glanced out his window: the surrounding buildings had a tabular, fixed look against the bare and bright afternoon sky—appeared dense and intractable in their concrete hides. He watched as an airplane banked away toward the East River, the airports in the outer boroughs. The sight of airplanes over the skyline had made him nervous for a few years after 9/11—but he was used to them again. This one, in its silence, looked almost peaceful.

He felt secure enough seated there at his desk—in his suit, amidst the files—to light a cigarette, and let himself consider, for a moment, what the end of the ambiguity he would manufacture for BBEC would be. He didn't feel any particular moral repugnance toward BBEC for what (he was now sure) they had done—and certainly no more than he would have felt before the weekend. This was just how these companies operated. His Roxwood upbringing had taught him to expect nothing else. And it was not like the crime—if you chose to call it that—had hurt anyone; not physically, anyway. Quite the contrary, in fact: Lumine, the drug BBEC created from 5F-LUM6, had saved the eyesight of hundreds of thousands of patients suffering from macular degeneration—this according to the glossy Lumine marketing brochures. All a loss at trial would mean was less Lumine in the world, more macular degeneration, and fewer dollars for BBEC to invest in R&D so they could create and distribute new medicines. It wasn't the most sophisticated moral calculus, Jonah recognized, but neither was it wholly inaccurate.

He lifted a folder from the stack on his desk, this one filled with Dyomax annual reports—opened the most recent one and flipped through it until he came to a three-inch-by-three-inch picture of Dale Compstock, the Dyomax CEO. He was in that stage of middle age that has just surrendered the last intimations of youth: His carefully combed dark hair was thinning, a pervasive pudginess bordered his smile. He looked, overall, like a friendly, geeky man. Jonah knew there were tens of thousands of such men, with their pictures in tens of thousands of annual reports. But this was the man who would lose his business due, to some indefinable degree, to Jonah and his firm's actions. For exactly this reason, he felt compelled to look Dale Compstock in the eye—or in the digital facsimile of his eye, at least. He need not feel guilty, Jonah told himself. The two-paragraph biography beneath the picture mentioned that Dale Compstock had already launched and sold two prominent biotechs prior to cofounding Dyomax. He was rich, in other words, and he would remain rich, regardless of the company's fate. And more, a man now running his third biotech start-up would understand as well as anyone that he was a CEO, and Jonah was a lawyer, and they were both involved in a system, a way of doing business; and every day there were winners and losers, new partners, new counterparties, mergers, lawsuits, settlements—and in the end, they all got rich anyway. It was the promise of white-collar America—and the only morality any of them were interested in applying was the system's own internal logic.