Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (62 page)

“The financial cost of failure would be enormous for you—but the
personal
cost would be even greater. You see, Mr. Truett, I’ve also looked into your past business ventures; this isn’t your first attempt at a visionary startup, now, is it? There was that rather innovative multilevel marketing effort you attempted, followed by a most ambitious Internet venture. Each time you raised several million dollars in venture capital to get your project under way, and each time you failed.”

Truett’s face grew red. “That was not my fault.”

“Of course not. There were unforeseeable market forces, unpredictable actions on the part of your competitors, but investors rarely bother themselves with such details, do they? Despite all their financial sophistication, investors tend to operate by a rather simple rubric:
three strikes and you’re out.
To borrow a metaphor from your beloved Pirates, Mr. Truett, you are standing at the plate for the last time. If PharmaGen fails,
you
fail, and it will be time for you to retire to a nice, safe,
conventional
job—perhaps as an entry-level investment banker. That’s a nice little career—though I doubt it comes with a yacht.”

Truett looked at Zohar as though he had never seen him before. He had misjudged the man’s abilities, and that was an error he rarely made. He ran his eyes over the old man again, quickly revising all of his initial impressions. Zohar was small in stature and unassuming in appearance—but he carried himself like a man much older than his actual years. Truett saw now that Julian Zohar was not old, he was cunning; he was not polite, he was calculating; he was not weak, he was restrained. Truett had thought of the man as little more than a doddering old academic, someone who could lend a scholarly aura to his company’s sterile image—but now he saw him in a different light. Zohar was a serpent—a cobra—and Truett was unsure of his reach, his speed, or the power of his venom.

The old man reached across the table and gently patted Truett’s hand. “My young friend,” he said softly, “you’re in such a fragile position. A virtual sword of Damocles hangs above your head—and I would hate to see that sword fall, Mr. Truett. I would deeply regret the demise of this visionary venture. I would do anything in my power to help keep this company alive. That’s why I wanted to meet you; that’s why I sought you out. I want to show you that
path to cash.
”

Zohar smiled warmly. “Would a million dollars a month help? Tax free, of course.”

The grinding of gears from the lockhouse brought Truett back to attention. There was a crackle from the marine band radio. In the smaller boats ahead of him, captains and their crews scurried over their vessels, coiling ropes and preparing for the remaining journey upriver. Truett glanced over the side of the lock at the lower river
far below. When is it too late to change your mind? The question seemed strangely foreign to him now, a product of the black water and the darkness of the lock, and he cast the thought aside like a clinging bow line. There was nowhere to go but forward—and Tucker Truett was not a man to look back.

The water was at pool stage now, and the black-and-yellow upper gates began to groan open away from them. Truett stared at the warning pattern and watched as it disappeared into the dark of night.

Dr. Ian Paulos ambled down the hallway at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, surrounded as always by an eager group of students who hovered around him like tugboats on a barge—a fitting image, since Dr. Paulos himself was built something like a barge. He was much too stocky to fit the expected image of a scholar, and he walked more like a longshoreman than a doctor of divinity. His uneven mustache completely obscured his lower lip, and his gnarly salt-and-pepper hair looked as though it could shatter any mortal comb. He wore half-spectacles on the tip of his nose, causing him to constantly tip his head back and forth, depending on whom or what he wanted to include in his range of vision. Wherever he went, at any time of the day, his left arm seemed to be forever curled around a stack of books, and his right hand always carried an ancient brown leather briefcase.

His introductory ethics courses, intriguingly entitled “Right and Wrong 101” and “Telling Good from Evil” were the most popular in the seminary curriculum, and they were impossible to contain within four walls. Dr. Paulos had a habit of ending each lecture by
simply turning and exiting midsentence; anyone curious enough to know how that particular sentence might end would simply follow after him. Discussions invariably ensued down hallways, across courtyards, through parking lots—sometimes even in crowded rest rooms, much to the chagrin of the female students.

“I still say love is the highest of all principles,” one student passionately contended. “The most
loving
thing to do is the
right
thing to do. ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind,’ he quoted. “This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

“Read the book and saw the movie—loved them both,” Paulos said. “So this ‘highest principle’ of yours, this ‘love’—what exactly is it?”

“What is
love
? Doesn’t everybody know that?”

“Do they? What about that woman a few years ago who backed her car into a lake and drowned all her kids? When they interviewed her later, she said, ‘I loved my kids. No one ever loved their kids more than I did.’ Do you think she loved her kids?”

“Of course not.”

“How do you know? Are you able to somehow get inside her head and tell me what she did or didn’t feel?”

“Maybe she felt the
feelings
of love,” another student said, “but she didn’t act in a loving
way.
”

Without breaking stride, Paulos turned to the student, tipped his head forward, and peered at her over the top of his glasses. Trinity students learned to read Paulos the way a hunter reads a bear: When he leaned back and squinted at you through his lenses, that was good; it was a sign of consideration or even respect. But when he leaned forward and looked at you full on, it was time to climb the nearest tree.

“A loving way,”
he repeated. “Whatever does that mean?”

She shrugged. “You know.”

“I don’t know—and I don’t think you do either.”

“A way that’s … you know … loving.” That merited a laugh from the entire group.

“Love
is a ruined word,” Paulos said. “It’s been gutted like an old trailer—stripped of objective meaning. When you say ‘act in a
loving way,’ what you mean is ‘act in a way that
feels loving
to you.’ Isn’t that right?”

“I guess so … yes.”

“That’s an
emotivist
ethic,” Paulos said. “Start with David Hume and then read A. J. Ayer’s
Language, Truth and Logic
—then we’ll talk again. You see the problem here? The woman who drowned her kids
felt
loving. She
feels
she did the loving thing; you
feel
she did an unloving thing. Is that all we’ve got here, Ms. Stuart, a difference of feelings? Then how do you ever tell her she was
wrong
?”

Paulos arrived at his office door now. He shifted his briefcase to his already overloaded left hand, reached for the doorknob, then turned to face the group.

“Let me give you a BB to roll around in your puzzle: Five centuries ago John Calvin wrote, ‘Love needs law to guide it.’ In other words, the highest principle is not love, but God—because without God, love
has
no meaning. Think it over.”

Paulos turned the knob and stepped forward, bumping into the door with a resounding thud. He stepped back again and fumbled in his pocket for the key.

“A truly great exit ruined,” he grumbled.

He tried the knob again, pushed open the door with his hip, and backed inside.

“Does this mean the lecture is finally over?” one student quipped.

“The lecture is
never
over. Education is not a preparation for life, my young friends, education is life. Now take what I’ve taught you and get out there and do some serious good.”

Paulos nudged the door shut behind him, turned, and stopped. Standing at his bookshelf was a tall man with very large glasses, leafing through one of his books.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Nick said, motioning to the open volume.

“Mi libro, su libro,” Paulos said, dumping his own stack on the edge of his desk. “The way I see it, no one really owns a book.”

“My students would agree with you,” Nick said. “That’s why the books keep disappearing from Ready Reserve.”

Paulos smiled. “A fellow member of the Divine Order of the Underpaid? Welcome, brother.”

“Nick Polchak,” he said, extending his hand. “I teach entomology at NC State in Raleigh.”

Paulos took his hand. “Oh yes—Tucker Truett’s assistant called me about you. How do you know Truett?”

“We met on his yacht the other night.”

“Lucky you. I got the tour once, plus a nifty PharmaGen windbreaker. Did you meet his girlfriend?”

“I saw a woman. Do you think she was the same one?”

“I doubt it. Please, have a seat—just dump those books off on the floor. Sorry about the mess. I could tell you that you caught me on a bad day, but as an ethicist I’m obligated to tell the truth: it’s always like this.”

“You should see my lab,” Nick said.

“I like you already. Can I get you something? A Coke, some tea?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

“I’m an Episcopalian—I can get you something stronger.”

Nick shook his head.

Paulos took a seat behind his own desk, leaned back, and put his feet up on the corner. “So you have questions about PharmaGen,” he said. “Fire away.”

“I understand you’re a member of PharmaGen’s ethics advisory board.”

“Ab initio,”
Paulos said. “From the beginning. I’m the founding member of an esteemed panel of—let’s see, how many of us are there now? Oh yes—two.”

“Truett says you guys don’t get paid.”

“I’m supposed to serve as a kind of ethical watchdog for this company, Dr. Polchak. I could hardly be expected to bite the hand that feeds me, now, could I?”

“Then what’s in it for you? That is, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“I’m an ethicist. PharmaGen is creating one of the first industries based entirely on genetic information. That raises questions about genetic privacy, questions that up until now have been largely theoretical. This whole area fascinates me—and it worries me too. I want a voice in all this.”

“And what is your voice saying?”

Paulos smiled. “I’d like to hear a little of your voice first. Why the big interest in PharmaGen?”

“I was considering becoming part of their population study. I’ve got some of those questions about genetic privacy.”

Paulos tipped his head down and peered at him over the top of his glasses. “First you corner the CEO, and now you track down the ethics advisory board? I smell a journalist, Dr. Polchak—or maybe a competitor?”

Nick said nothing.

“OK,” Paulos said. “Ethically speaking, withholding information is not the same thing as actually lying.”

“Why did Truett decide to form an Ethics Advisory Board? What’s the watchdog watching for?”

“That’s easy enough. Ever since the Human Genome Project, there’s been a growing concern about the possible misuse of genetic information: employers refusing to hire because of future health risks, insurance companies charging higher premiums for certain genetic types, that sort of thing.
Genetic discrimination,
that’s what they call it. That’s why the Project formed the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in Science group—to help develop guidelines for the security and proper use of genetic information.

“Now along comes PharmaGen, asking half a million people to give away their genetic information free of charge—that’s what you call a problem of confidence, Dr. Polchak. People want to know if PharmaGen can be trusted—after all, there are guidelines about genetic privacy, but there are very few laws. PharmaGen anticipated this concern by volunteering to police themselves; they formed their very own watchdog group, and they make sure everybody knows about it. You should have seen the press conference when this board was first formed—quite the gala event.”

“Are you saying the board is just for the sake of appearance?”

“I’m saying that appearance is a very big part of it. Don’t misunderstand, we have a very real function—but to be honest, our biggest function is simply to let people know we exist. We’re the dog that watches the henhouse. We help create the public confidence that makes PharmaGen work.”

“Why you? Why were you asked to join this board?”

“Who better? I teach at a seminary, Dr. Polchak. Who better fits the image of guardian of the public welfare and enemy of moral turpitude? I’m an Episcopal priest
and
an ethicist—that makes me
twice as nice. All modesty aside, I’m a well-educated and well-published ethicist—but I’m not kidding myself about my real value to PharmaGen.”

“You’re a very humble man.”

“I’m a very realistic man. PharmaGen is a corporation, not a discussion group. They have places to go and things to do—they have money to make. They need my presence, but they hope I’ll sit in the corner and act like a good little boy. But I’ve been a bad boy—I’ve forced them to ask some hard questions about the risks involved in what they’re doing.”