The Magic Bullet (4 page)

F
or a long moment Logan was speechless. “Dr. Shein?” he said at last.

The other nodded. “Call me Seth. Beautiful day, time on my hands, figured I’d come to you.”

Despite himself, Dan smiled. The day was overcast and unpleasantly cool. As the head of the ACF’s clinical oncology program, Shein probably had less free time than the guy across the river in the Oval Office. “So what now?” asked Logan.

Shein rose to his feet and nodded toward the administration building. “There.”

His office turned out to be immense—as large as the lab space in the basement of Claremont Hospital that Logan shared with twenty others. But Shein’s personality seemed to instantly fill it.

“So …” he said, taking a seat in his antique wooden swivel chair and throwing his feet up on his desk, “tell me about this work you did with Greiner.”

Left standing, Logan decided he should sit in the dilapidated upholstered chair at the foot of the desk. Immediately, he sank a foot into it. In fact, he was so low, and the clutter of reports and journals on the desk before Shein so high, that he could see only the top half of his face.

“Well,” he began, repositioning himself for a better view, “we were trying to see if there were unique genes that expressed themselves in glioblastoma—”

“Stop moving, for Chrissakes. Goddamn chair’s like a Venus-flytrap.”

“It’s not very comfortable.”

“Get out of it. Sit
there
.” He indicated a plain wooden chair nearby. “So …?”

“So,” continued Logan, moving to the new chair, “the point was to take the DNA, slice it up with a restriction enzyme, and package it with a virus. Then you let—”

“Right,” cut in Shein, “you let the goddamn virus infect the bacteria and so on and so forth.” He paused, nodding toward the clutter on the desk. “Read about it years ago in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
. Just wanted to hear it in your own words. Good.”

Logan looked at him curiously.

“You’d be surprised how many people try to bullshit me.” He snorted. “Can you believe it—me?”

It didn’t surprise Logan that Shein should flash a huge ego. A certain arrogance was in the makeup of every successful scientist he’d ever known. But he also knew that in this case, it was probably entirely justified; by reputation, Shein was among the most gifted researchers in the field.

“So,” he added, “you were telling me outside how well you learned to follow orders in med school …”

Dan nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

“
Afraid
so. What, you got something against following orders? What the hell you think makes an organization function?”

Logan hesitated. Where was Shein going now? Impulsively—at this point he seemed to have little to lose—he blurted out what he really felt. “Sure. But medicine’s not the military. As a researcher, should you really always defer to a superior? Even if he’s … you know, full of …”

“
Crap
is the word you’re after, Logan. Or is it
shit
?”

“I really don’t mean to—”

“Yes you do. I prefer
shit
myself. Why pussyfoot around?” He paused. “You must have some pretty good offers, no?”

Again, he’d play it straight. “A few.”

Shein nodded. “Right, Karpe’s got a great practice, all right. You’ll be in the society columns in no time.”

The younger man just stared at him. Was there anything this guy didn’t know?

“But you know what?”

It wasn’t so much a question as a challenge. “What?”

“You’re not going there, you’re coming here. You’re gonna help us cure cancer.”

“What?!”
Logan wasn’t even sure he could get the words out. “I’m … accepted?”

“I don’t
want
butt kissers, Logan. What the hell kind of creativity am I gonna get with that?”

“But Dr. Shein—”

“Seth.”

“Are you authorized to …” He hesitated. “I should tell you that Dr. Larsen—”

“Larsen’s a schmuck, all right? He ask you if you were married?”

Logan nodded blankly. “He did.”

Shein snorted. “You’re not black, Jewish, or a woman. Gays are harder to tell. His private campaign”—he put on a German accent—“to
preserve the
Reich!”

“I’m not gay.”

“Look, Larsen knows you’re my kinda boy and he’s out to protect his turf. You’ll find that’s the way it works around here.”

Logan was nearly speechless. “It doesn’t sound like a great work atmosphere.”

“No?” This actually seemed to give Shein pause. “It depends how you look at it. The way I see it, you can tell even more about a guy by his enemies than his friends.”

Logan nodded. Now that the shock had passed, he was aware of the excitement building. He tried hard to suppress it. This thing had to be discussed, negotiated. “Look,” he began evenly, “I can’t tell you how flattering this is—”

“Don’t get so easily flattered either,” cut in Shein, who evidently felt entitled to finish every one of the younger man’s sentences. “You like baseball?”

“Yes.” Logan tried not to look baffled.

“You’re in luck, the ACF’s got a box for the Orioles.” He paused. “This is a draft, get it? And you’re just a prospect. A good one, but still only a prospect. I can’t promise you’ll even make it to the pros.”

“Look,” Logan tried again, “I’ve already made something of a commitment to Karpe. There’s a lot of solid hands-on medical work there.”

“Right, rich people’s diseases. Bet you get lots of chronic fatigue syndrome. And hemorrhoids. Nice work—look up someone’s ass and pull out two hundred bucks.”

“Actually, a lot of his patients have cancer.”

Shein snorted. “You know why you’re not gonna do that? ’Cause you’re smart enough to know the two biggest secrets about cancer. One, that when it comes to treatment, we’re still in the Dark Ages. So, two, even the best clinical oncologists are just glorified grease monkeys. They can only wait for us creative guys to give them some tools.”

He was right and Logan knew it. He made no response.

“You’ll start at fifty-one thousand.”

Logan swallowed hard. “My offer from Karpe is more than three times that. I have a couple of others almost as high.”

“No negotiation. This is a nonprofit foundation, remember?”

Crestfallen, Logan remained silent.

“What,” picked up the other, “you think this is a
bad
career move? This is the big time, Logan. Me, I got security clearance and everything. You know what even a couple of years at the ACF does for your resume? You wanna talk money, the big drug companies start top researchers from this place at three hundred grand, plus a piece of whatever patents they develop!”

Logan weighed this a long moment. “Why would you need security clearance?”

Shein waved the question away. “Are you kidding, where do you think the big shots”—he nodded vaguely in the direction of Washington—“come for treatment? Especially
if they want to keep it under wraps? Who the hell do you think treats them?” He smiled at his own indiscretion. “You can get a nice autograph collection going. Think of it as one of the perks of the place.”

Abruptly, Shein was on his feet, heading out of the room. “C’mon, I want to show you the main lab complex.”

Mutely, Logan followed, his head spinning.

“Then I want you to see the satellite labs—you passed ’em on the way in. And let’s not forget the Eisenhower Medical Center.” He smiled. “I mean, that’s where you’re gonna be spending most of your time, right?”

Late that night in his modest apartment, unable to sleep, Logan got out of bed and flicked on the living-room light. He found what he was looking for on the top row of the bookshelf:
Microbe Hunters
, about the pioneers of microbiology—the very copy that had so moved him as a child. It was a vintage edition, published in 1938, twelve years after the book’s original appearance, and there was some damage to the binding. Gently, he opened it to the glossy section in the middle: old-fashioned engravings and ancient photographs of the geniuses honored on its pages. Stiff, serious men, wearing black suits and grim expressions.

All, that is, except the final one, Paul Ehrlich, the conqueror of syphilis. Slim, bearded, and bespectacled, appearing to be in his mid-sixties, he stared out from the page with a quizzical, almost childlike expression. On the desk before him sat the manuscript upon which he had apparently just been working. In one hand he held a cigar.

Studying the photograph, Logan smiled. As a kid, he’d lionized Ehrlich the way other kids did John F. Kennedy or Reggie Jackson. Even now, he found the story profoundly moving: this impish little man, for more than a decade working against incredible odds to find “the magic bullet” that would cure the ancient scourge.

Now Logan flipped backward to the title page. Yes, there they were, the twin inscriptions. The first was from
his grandfather to his father on his ninth birthday; a curt admonition to read this book over the summer vacation. The second was from his father to himself on his eleventh:
Read this book for love, Dan, and learn more from it than I did
.

T
he buffet luncheon at Seth Shein’s Arlington home had been billed as a social occasion—casual dress, spouses and significant others invited—but Dan Logan knew that career would be at the top of the agenda. In just two days the incoming fellows would begin working at the American Cancer Foundation, and this hazy June afternoon was the first time they would be meeting some key members of the hierarchy; their first shot, in brief, at making an impression—and of sizing up others as they tried to do the same.

“Dammit,” muttered Logan as he stood in front of the open clothes closet of his new apartment. In general indifferent to how he dressed—clean was usually good enough—he realized that today this was not a matter to be taken lightly. Every detail of personal presentation might prove a potential edge—or liability.

He rejected shorts: too casual. Next he tried on the baggy, double-pleated Italian pants his last girlfriend had talked him into buying after dragging him into a chic men’s shop in Manhattan. Staring at his reflection in the mirror, he tried hard to give the pants a fair shot, but wondered how any normal person could feel anything but silly wearing them.

This is ridiculous
, he thought, not for the first time,
I’m a doctor, not a model
—and then began considering the merits of plaid.

After nearly an hour, he decided the wisest move was the safe one: he dimly recalled having once read in a men’s magazine that khaki pants and a blue blazer were right for just about any occasion.

Seth Shein greeted him at the front door of his impressive
Tudor home, a plastic cup of Scotch in his hand, wearing shorts and an extravagant Hawaiian shirt. “Kinda overdressed, wouldn’t you say, Logan? It’s a goddamn pool party.”

Logan looked stricken. “I guess I am.”

“Good thinking. You fit right in.”

In fact, though the temperature hovered in the mid-eighties—and the party was indeed held around Shein’s pool—all but two of the seven male junior fellows were also wearing jackets and most also had ties; while every one of the five women had shown up in a dress-for-success suit.

This made the distinction between the newcomers and the senior fellows—those who’d now been at ACF for a year—immediately apparent. All but a couple of
them
wore shorts.

Shein led Dan onto the patio, making introductions. Never good at names himself—a problem he knew he had to work on—Logan marveled that Shein not only knew who everyone was but the specifics of their backgrounds, their specialties, even their hobbies. “Allen Atlas,” he said, moving him in the direction of a tall, hollow-cheeked young man in a tailored blue suit, “Dan Logan.”

Dan and Atlas shook hands crisply, eyeing one another with interest.

“Allen went to school at Vanderbilt,” noted Shein evenly—then suddenly assumed an exagerrated Southern accent. “In
Tennesseeeeee
. But we won’t hold that against him, will we?”

The tall young man looked stricken—trying to figure out what the eminent Shein might possibly have against his alma mater.

“Now, Dan here,” added Shein, in apparent comparison, “went to Princeton as an undergraduate and Stanford for his Ph.D. Number two in your class at Princeton, wasn’t it?”

Logan nodded.

Shein shrugged. “We’d have gotten number one, but I’m told he went into law.”

“Actually,” Dan corrected, “
she
went into law.”

“Ahhh,” laughed Shein, slapping him on the back, “a person of precision
and
sensitivity. Good going—the girls must love that.”

“Nice to meet you,” mumbled Allen Atlas, eyeing him coolly.

“Same here,” replied Dan. “Looking forward to working together.”

“Oh, Seth …”

They wheeled to face a middle-aged woman bearing a pitcher of iced tea. Anxious looking and dowdily dressed, she was incongruously pretty.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, dear,” she said, “but you’ve got a telephone call.”

He laughed. “Why sorry? What the hell you supposed to do, tell the guy to go screw himself?” He gave her a quick peck on the cheek—“Dan Logan, Allen Atlas, my wife, the endlessly patient and still beauteous Alice Shein”—and headed into the house.

There was an awkward pause. “Well,” she said, “I do hope you young men will be happy here at the ACF.”

They offered their thanks. It was only as she walked away that Logan became aware of her pronounced limp. He looked at his companion in surprise.

“She was one of the last kids to get polio,” said Atlas blandly. And, without a further word of explanation, he wandered away.

Moving to the refreshment table, Logan poured himself a white wine and looked around. The newcomers seemed to be keeping almost entirely to themselves, clustered in groups. After a long moment, he headed toward one of these—three women and two men—at the far end of the pool.

He already knew one of them. John Reston was the other junior associate who had been recruited from Claremont.
Though they’d never spent much time together, Logan had always liked him.