Diamond Solitaire Page 3

  The story had a downturn. The pharmaceuticals industry relies heavily on the development of new drugs; companies cannot survive without massive research programs. In the early eighties, scientists working for Manflex had identified a new histamine antagonist with potential as a treatment for peptic ulcers. It was patented and given the proprietary name of Fidoxin. The potential market for antiulcer drugs is enormous. At that time, Smith Kline's Tagamet dominated the field with sales estimated at over a billion dollars. Glaxo was developing a rival product called Zantac that would eventually outsell every drug in the world. But Manny Flexner was in there and pitching.

  The early research on Fidoxin was encouraging. Manflex invested hugely in studies and field trials designed to satisfy the federal panel that advised the Food and Drug Administration, for no drug can be marketed without the FDA seal of approval. By 1981, Manflex was set to beat its rivals in the race to a billion-dollar market. Then, at a late stage, long-term side effects were discovered in patients taking Fidoxin. Almost every drug has unwanted effects but the possibility of serious renal impairment is unacceptable. Reluctantly, Manny Flexner had cut his losses and abandoned the project.

  Too much had been gambled on that one drug. Through the 1980s Manny had been unwilling to sink so much into any research project. The recession in 1991 had hit Manflex harder than its rivals. Thanks mainly to the old standby, Kaprofix, the company still rated in the top ten in America, but had slipped from fourth to seventh. Or worse. Manny didn't care to check anymore.

  Today was the worst yet He had the Wall Street Journal in front of him. Overnight, his stock had plummeted again in Tokyo and London. The reason?

  "The biggest firework display in history is what they're calling it," he told his Vice Chairman, Michael Leapman, throwing the paper to him. "A twenty billion lire fire. The flames could be seen thirty kilometers south of Milan. How much is that, Michael?"

  "About twenty miles."

  "The lire, for God's sake."

  "Not so bad as it sounds. Say seventeen million bucks."

  "Not so bad," Manny repeated with irony. "An entire plant goes up in smoke, a quarter of our Italian holding, and it's not so bad."

  "Insurance," murmured Michael Leapman.

  "Insurance takes care of plant and materials. There were research labs in that place. They were testing a drug for depression. Depression. I hope to God some of the stuff is left because I need some. Research is irreplaceable, and the market knows it. Do we have" any news from Italy? Is it a total write-off?"

  Leapman nodded. "I spoke to Rico Villa an hour ago. The scene is a heap of white ash now." He crossed the room to the drinks cabinet and took out the scotch. "Can I pour you one?"

  Manny shook his head and indicated the Alka-Seltzer.

  "Then you don't mind if I do?" Thirty-seven, six foot two, and blond, Michael Leapman was less volatile than his boss. He was half Swedish. Supposedly the Swedish half kept him from throwing tantrums. He'd joined Manflex five years ago through no action of his own, when Flexner had bought the small company he managed in Detroit; Leapman had proved to be the only valuable acquisition from that takeover, a creative thinker with fine organizational skills. He'd developed a good rapport with his tough little boss. Within a year he'd been invited to join the board.

  "Anyone died yet?" Manny enquired in a voice that expected nothing but bad news that day.

  "Apparently not. Seven people were hospitalized, two of them firemen. They inhaled fumes. That's the size of it."

  "Environmental damage?"

  Leapman raised an eyebrow. His boss wasn't known for his green sympathies.

  "That could really put us in trouble," Manny explained. "Remember Seveso? The dioxin fumes? Wasn't that Italy? How many millions did the owners have to shell out in compensation?"

  Leapman helped himself to a generous measure of Scotch. "No poison fumes reported yet."

  The tension in Manny's face eased a little. He took off his glasses and wiped them with a tissue that he took from a Manflex dispenser.

  "We can ride this," Leapman said confidently. Providing reassurance was one of his most useful talents. "Sure, it's going to bruise us. The markets will mark us down for a week or two, but we're big enough to absorb it. The Milan plant wasn't a huge moneymaker. Rico kept reminding us it was in need of modernization."

  "I know, I know. We were going to inject some capital later in the year."

  "Now we can give priority to the two plants near Rome."

  Manny replaced his glasses and studied Leapman. "You don't think we should rebuild in Milan?"

  "In the present economic climate?" His tone said it all. Rebuilding was out.

  "You're right. We should consolidate with what we have out there. We can sell the Milan site." Having weighed the options, Manny seemed satisfied. "What I want now is for someone to go to Italy and tidy up, sort out the staffing problems, salvage anything we can from this mess." He hesitated, as if casting about for a name. "Who do you think? Would you say David can handle it?"

  "David?" The name wrongfooted Leapman. He was fully expecting this assignment for himself.

  "My boy."

  "No question." He knew better than to try and talk the boss out of handing the assignment to his son, whatever he privately thought Young David Flexner—young, but by no stretch of imagination still a boy—conspicuously lacked his father's enthusiasm for the business world, yet Manny cherished the unlikely hope that he would make a contribution eventually. After four years in business school and three on the board of Manflex, David should have been ready for responsibility. In reality, all his energies went into amateur filmmaking.

  Towards the end of the morning, the screens in the large office adjacent to Manny Flexner's were registering some improvement in the group's ratings. Taking its cue from Tokyo and London, Wall Street had overreacted to the first news of the fire. Now the market was taking a more measured view. The Manflex group was showing a sharp fall, but it wasn't, after all, in dire trouble.

  Manny exhibited his positiveness by treating his son to lunch at the Four Seasons. Manny was twice-divorced and lived alone. Technically alone, that is to say. In reality he had a string of women friends who took turns to join him for dinner in New York's top restaurants and afterwards passed the night in his house on the Upper East Side. So he knew where to eat well. And the diet had to be good to keep up his stamina. He was sixty-three.

  But lunches were strictly for business.

  "I recommend the salmon with sweet-hot mustard. Or the duck salad with sour cherries. No, try the salmon. It really is something. You heard about the fire in Milan?"

  Clearly his son hadn't looked at the business section of whichever newspaper he read. David had gone past the stage of youthful rebellion. He was a grown-up rebel, with dyed blond hair that reached his shoulders. Blond hair looked wrong on a Jewish boy, in Manny's opinion. The dark green cord jacket David had put on was a concession to restaurant rules. He often attended Board meetings in a T-shirt.

  Manny filled him in with the painful essentials and told him his plan for dealing with the Italian end of the problem.

  "You want me to go there? That could be difficult, Pop," David said at once. "How soon?"

  "Anything wrong with tonight?"

  David smiled. His engaging smile was both an asset and a liability. "You're not serious?"

  "Totally serious. I have up to two hundred people without a job, unions to deal with—"

  "Yes, but—"

  "An insurance claim to file and for all I know, lawsuits pending. Things like this don't get sorted if you ignore them, David."

  "How about Rico Villa? He's there, and he speaks the language."

  Manny pulled a face and shrugged. "Rico couldn't close a junior softball game."

  "You want me to fly out to Milan and wield the hatchet?"

  "Just point out the facts to these people, that's all. Their workplace is a pile of ash now. There's no future in rebuilding it If anyone is wil
ling to transfer to Rome, fix it. Talk to the accountants about redundancy terms. We'll give the best deal we can. We're not ogres."

  David sighed. "Pop, I can't just drop everything."

  Although Manny had expected this, he affected surprise. "What are you saying, son?"

  "I have commitments. I made promises to people. They depend on me."

  Manny gave him a penetrating stare. "Do these commitments have anything remotely to do with Manflex?"

  His son reddened. "No, it's a film project. We have a schedule."

  "Uhhuh."

  "I'm due on location in the Bronx Zoo."

  "Filming animals, huh? I thought you said you made promises to people."

  "I was talking about the crew."

  The waiter arrived a split second before Manny was due to erupt Father and son declared a truce while the gastronomic decisions were taken. David diplomatically elected to have the salmon his father had recommended. It would be no hardship. When they were alone again, Manny started on a different tack. "Some of the best films I ever saw were made in Italy."

  "Sure. The Italian cinema is up there among the best. Always was. The Bicycle Thief. Death in Venice. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis."

  "A Fistful ofDollars."

  David gave a fair imitation of the sphinx. "All—you mean spaghetti westerns."

  Manny nodded and said with largess, "You could get among those guys. Take a couple of weeks over this. Tidy up in Milan, my boy, and you have a free hand. Go to Venice. Is that a reasonable offer?"

  Such altruism from a workaholic was worthy of a moment's breathless tribute, and got it.

  Finally David confessed, "I know you want me to step into your shoes some day, Pop, but I think I should tell you that the drugs industry bores the pants off me."

  "You're telling me nothing."

  "But you won't accept it"

  "Because you won't give the business a chance. Listen, Dave. It's the most challenging industry there is. You stay ahead of the game, or you die. It's all about new drugs and winning a major share of the market."

  "That much I understand," David said flatly.

  "One breakthrough, one new drug, can change your whole life. That's the buzz for me."

  "You mean it can change a sick person's life."

  "Naturally," Manny said without hesitation. "Only what's good for sick people is good for my balance sheet, too."

  He winked, and his son was forced to grin. The ethics may have been clouded, but the candor was irresistible.

  "Research teams are like horses. You want to own as many as you can afford. Once in a while one of them comes in first. But you can never be complacent. When you have the drug, you still need government approval to market it." Manny's eyes glittered at the challenge. He didn't smile much these days, but occasionally a look passed across his tired features, the look of a man who once picked winners, but seemed to have lost the knack. "And in no time at all the patent runs out, so you have to find something new. I have teams working around the globe. Any moment they could find the cure for some life-threatening disease."

  David nodded. "There was a strong R&D section in the Milan plant."

  Manny said with approval, "You know more than you let on.

  "I guess you really believe I can handle this."

  "That's why I asked you, son." He gestured to the wine waiter. When he'd chosen a good Bordeaux, he told his son, "This trouble in Italy has gotten to me. I always believed that someone up there was on my side. You know what I mean? Maybe I should think of stepping down."

  "Pop, that's nuts, and you know it Who else could run the show?" Then David's eyes locked with his father's penetrating gaze. "Oh, no. It's not my scene at all. I keep telling you I'm not even sure that I believe in it. If it was just a matter of making drugs to help sick people, okay. But you and I know that it isn't. It's about public relations, keeping on the good side of politicians and bankers. Thinking of the bottom line."

  "Tell me a business that doesn't. This is the world we live in, David."

  "Yes, but the profits aren't in drugs that cure people. Take arthritis. If we found something to stop it, we'd lose a prime market, so we keep developing drugs to deaden the pain instead. They're not much different from aspirin, only fifty times more expensive. How many millions are being spent right now on me-too arthritis treatments?"

  Manny didn't answer. However, he noted with approval his son's use of the trade jargon. A "me-too" drug was an imitation, slightly reconstituted to get around the patent legislation. There were more than thirty me-toos for the treatment of arthritis.

  David was becoming angry. "Yet how much is invested in research into sickle-cell anemia? It happens to be concentrated in Third World countries, so it won't yield much of a profit"

  "I was idealistic when I was your age," said Manny.

  "And now you're going to tell me you live in the real world, but you don't, Pop. Until something like AIDS forces itself on your attention, you don't want to know about the real world. I don't mean you personally. I'm talking about the industry."

  "Come on, the industry was quick enough in responding to AIDS. Wellcome had Retrovir licensed for use in record time."

  "Yes, and hyped their share price by 250 percent."

  Manny shrugged. "Market forces. Wellcome came up first with the wonder drug."

  David spread his hands to show that his point was proved.

  The waiter approached and poured some wine for Manny to sample. After he'd given it the nod, Manny said slyly to his son, "You know more than you sometimes let on. When you become chairman, you'll be God. You can try injecting some ethics into the drugs industry if you want."

  David smiled. All these years on, his father still had the chutzpah of a taxi driver.

  "So we'll get you a seat on tonight's Milan flight," said Manny, taking out his portable phone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Kensington Library was built in 1960, yet the reference room upstairs has an ambience emphatically Victorian. The carpet is a dispiriting olive green and the chairs are upholstered in dark leather. Notices everywhere urge the readers to beware of pickpockets and to tell the staff immediately if they see anyone mutilating or taking newspapers. True, certain of the papers are heavily in demand. The Evening Standard, which arrives early in the afternoon, can be seen only on request—not because of anything unseemly in the contents, but because it would go from the open shelves and not be found again. The assistants at the desk get to recognize the beady-eyed men who hover from two p.m. onwards, each hopeful of being the first to spot a secondhand car bargain, a tip for the greyhound racing, or a job.

  Peter Diamond—formerly of Harrods security staff—had become one of the job-seekers.

  He got bis turn with the Standard and ran his thumb down the columns. If he could imagine himself filling any of the posts on offer, he would hurry to the nearest phone. Most of the ads were couched in a friendly style—Call Mandy or Ring Trish—and you were encouraged to picture a sweet-natured personnel officer on the end of the line eager to talk you into a thirty-grand job with bonus and pension. Today, as usual, no Mandy or Trish in London seemed to have an opening for a forty-eight-year-old ex-detective who couldn't be relied upon to patrol a floor of Harrods,

  He gave up. The Standard reported another rise in unemployment with the headline DESPAIR OF LONDON'S JOBLESS. The despair wasn't much in evidence in High Street Kensington, apart from the droop of Diamond's shoulders. Young women with laminated carrier bags stuffed with goodies from the department stores stood by the curb waving for taxis. Middle- aged men in designer tracksuits jogged in the direction of Holland Park. The lunch crowd were still installed in Al Gallo D'Oro, the Italian restaurant across the street

  For the past seven months, Diamond and his wife Stephanie had subsisted in a basement in Addison Road, a one-way street where the traffic noise is almost unendurable without double-glazing and earplugs. The house was a stuccoed three-story building with rotting window frame
s that never stopped shaking. Across the road was St. Barnabas, a great smog-stained block with a turret at each corner, not by any stretch of imagination an attractive church, but one that might have been improved by exterior cleaning. Someone had tried to distract attention from the grime by painting the doors in bold Oxford blue, only it wasn't visible from the Diamonds' foxhole. Apart from the towers of St Barnabas, all that they could see as they peered up were the topmost levels of multistory flats. It was a far cry from the view across Georgian Bath that they'd enjoyed until a year ago.

  Not wishing to be idle, Diamond had refreshed the walls and ceilings of the flat with a coat of emulsion called primrose on the color chart. Turned out every drawer and cupboard, oiled every hinge, brushed the chimney, checked the electric plugs, changed the washers on the taps and fitted draft-excluders to all the doors. The drawback to this admirable zeal was that he was no handyman, so oil and paint got on the soles of his shoes and was transported everywhere; the taps dripped worse than ever; the doors stuck halfway; soot fell into the living room whenever the wind blew; and the cat had moved into the airing-cupboard for sanctuary.

  Stephanie Diamond would have joined the cat if she could. She worked two mornings in the Save the Children shop and had lately upped this to four, just to be out of the house. To discourage the DIY, she'd started bringing home jigsaws people had donated, getting Peter to occupy himself assembling them to see if pieces were missing before they were sold in the shop. It was not the good idea it had first seemed. She woke up one night at four A.M. with something digging into her back.

  "What on earth... ?" She switched on the bedside lamp.

  Diamond turned over to see. "Well, what do you know! It's that corner piece I was missing."

  "For crying out loud, Peter."

  "Fancy a cuppa?"

  She remembered the taste of the

  She remembered the taste of the tea since he'd descaled the kettle. "No, go back to sleep."