The Finder

9

They'd been happy once. And this was just the kind of rainy spring Manhattan evening he used to like. "Your wife is in the car downstairs," his secretary would say. Then came a quick brush of the hair in his private washroom. Adjust the silk tie in the mirror, shoot a look at Tom Reilly, guy on his way up. Then, downstairs, the company car would be idling by the curb, Ann waiting expectantly, and soon they'd head to yet another swanky dinner party. He'd let his hand slide along Ann's long firm thigh, eager to show her off, eager to hit the evening hard, plunge unabashedly into all the falsely earnest conversation, the self-congratulatory mannerisms, the grinning and groping, the money ogling and power sniffing, drinking neither too little nor too much, all on the happy glide path of intimacy with people who made things happen. He still remembered the night when Bill Gates was in the room- the richest man in the world is in this room, Ann, right now, the richest man who ever lived — and the time Jack Welch dropped by to pay his respects… but now, tonight it was different, now both of them were lost in their thoughts as the wet night slid by the windows outside, Ann next to him but with zero idea what he was walking into, that he was feeling weird spiders of pain crawl over his chest and left shoulder. Should he tell her, his doctor wife? She'd ask him what was wrong, why he was so stressed out. Nothing, sweetie, just a dinner party at Martz's mansion in the sky, twenty rooms thirty stories up in the air. Martz, the man who is stalking me. Tom had to go, no matter what, pretend nothing was wrong. The invitation had come yesterday. A straight-up test to see if Tom was avoiding Martz. Well, fine. He'd just swallowed a couple of beta-blockers at the office to zap out his anxiety. Martz would find the opportunity to take Tom aside and say, six months ago you were begging me to buy your stock and I do and so now what? Sniffing him for the anxiety that had been zapped out. There was something diseased and awful about Martz. Predatory, vulturish, his many hundreds of millions made by buying and selling the work of others, never had created or produced or invented anything himself, just slithered in when companies were weak or underfunded or down on their luck and sunk in his money-sucking fangs. And that was when Tom was going to look him in the eye and say, Bill, you know as well as I do that the market is irrational sometimes, and the best we can see somebody has been driving down the price, maybe selling on the way down in order to buy back everything at a lower price later. Now you must stop hounding me

… Well, he'd say something like that, flat-out lie, just knock it back at Martz in a moment of high-stakes poker…

But Tom was unconvinced by his own line of bullshit and so felt around in his head wondering if he could feel the absence of anxiety. How long did beta-blockers take to kick in? He should know the answer, given all the drug efficacy reports he'd read. He could ask his wife, but she'd want to know why he was taking them, how he'd gotten them. Why was he so worried? It was not just Martz, no sir. There was more, much more, bad more. His fate, Tom understood all too well now, teetered upon a mere four words, words that were vague and deeply unimaginative: send them a message. Yes, he had said something like that, send them a message, send CorpServe, the office-cleaning and paper-shredding service, a message that he did not want them snooping around in his executive suite or anywhere else at Good Pharma. They were very thorough and got their cleaning done between the hours of seven and four every night as per the contract, but over the last few months several of his people had reported that they wondered if their papers had been pushed around a bit on their desks. The service's workers seemed unresponsive to a few casual questions. Like they were trained to be that way. Were they stealing? Looking for inside information? Hired by a Good Pharma competitor? It was all subtle, unprovable stuff, unless you installed hidden cameras, hired corporate espionage experts, the whole nine yards, a paper trail that eventually could be subpoenaed by a disgruntled, big-shoes investor like Martz or the neat freaks at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He had ordered that the IT department actually enforce the mandatory shutdown of all network workstations after six-thirty p.m., as well as upgrade the instant encryption of intracorporate and outgoing e-mail. Did this give him a margin of security? Not necessarily. So when a new report came that there was a particular question-just a question, mind you-about the service, something about some of the bags of paper for shredding maybe not quite all getting into the big mobile shredder parked at street level, he told his building services chief the words he had repeated to himself nearly every hour since he had vomited under his seat at the Yankees game: "I don't want people screwing around with our information! Send them a message that we want cleaning and paper waste removal and if we have to worry about them, we will tear up the contract and not pay them a dime. But frankly, I don't want to have to go find another service at this time of year. This outfit is cheap. So have a talk with them. Send them a fucking message they won't forget."

How he wished he had a recording of this comment. It would prove that Tom Reilly was innocent of anything. A bit nasty, perhaps, but innocent. Send them a fucking message they won't forget. He'd said it to James Tonelli, his facilities and operations manager, an eager, overly aggressive forty-year-old who prowled the building constantly checking on heating, cooling, plumbing, fire alarms, you name it. James, who was from Brooklyn, had simply said, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it," nodding as he did so, maybe some idea half hidden in his eyes, and so Tom had done just that, he had not worried, because James had said he'd take care of it.

They had not discussed how that might be accomplished, which Tom suspected would probably mean that James would have a ferocious little chat with the representative of the service company, a good-looking Chinese woman, he thought he remembered, having maybe met her once, and question the company's procedures and on-site supervision practices. The usual stuff. But then, a few days ago, he reads in the tabloid newspaper that two Mexican girls working for that same company have been found murdered out by the beach in Brooklyn? Still wearing the company uniforms? That sounded like a fucking message they won't forget. The girls had been recognized by some Good Pharma staffers, and the corporate relations office had confirmed they had worked in Good Pharma's offices that very night. Tom had simply nodded when told this and said, "If there's any inquiry, just please refer it to legal." At least the company name hadn't made it into the news. So far, anyway. And the next day James Tonelli calls in sick, and the day after that. Was this something to worry about? Was that a message Tom wouldn't forget? He wasn't sure. Well, yes, he was sure. He could construct rational reasons that might prop up his hopes, but his gut told him the two things were connected. There had always been a bit of talk about whom James knew in Brooklyn, whom his family was connected to. The Lucchese family, the Gambinos. These were just names, right? Did they really mean anything anymore? What was Tom, an expert in the Mafia? Wasn't the Mafia finished in New York, wiped out by RICO prosecutions? Just a joke that you enjoyed while watching reruns of The Sopranos? We actually kill people, ha-ha. Everybody thinks we are gone, ha-ha-ha. He realized that the Metro section of the paper sometimes had stories on organized crime. He should pay more attention to these things! The speculation about James had actually added a positive aura to his presence, and in general he got things done quickly-solved union issues, city inspector issues, anything that came up. He seemed to know whom to call and how to talk to them when he did. A very valuable skill set.

So Tom could worry about James. But Martz, the man who would be his host in ten minutes, didn't care about James or two dead Mexican girls. He cared about Good Pharma's stock price. In the last two weeks it had taken another dive, dropped another 17 percent. Why? Anyone's guess. Too many sellers! Usually companies knew why their stock was going up or down. Analysts issued reports, made recommendations, knowledgeable people commented in the newspaper, and companies themselves were required to make forward-looking comments about their projected earnings. It was a strange thing when a company didn't understand its own stock price, and by strange he meant very bad.

Why would so many people be selling Good Pharma's stock? Maybe they had a good reason to think his company was not as valuable as others thought it was. Maybe they had a good reason or maybe they had an excellent reason. And what could that be? Good Pharma had six major drugs in final development. Of these six, one was a major hit, three were minor duds, one was unknown as yet, and the sixth was a major wipeout. It had been Tom's intention to sequence the news of these developments very carefully. Unfortunately, the rate of progress of each drug in development did not match the optimal order of the announcement of its success or failure. So he had started to mess around with their progress, trying to speed up the big success, slow the duds a bit, and put the catastrophic wipeout into deep freeze: to be announced in fragments, even as the company also announced new initiatives, the ongoing successes of its major hit, and so on. He'd intended to play by the rules but certainly bend every opportunity to the company's advantage. There were things you could do — if you controlled your information! If you assumed that the data and reports in your office, lying around on people's desks, in their computers, and of course in their heads, were protected.

If not, hell's bells.

But what was he to do? If he started a formal internal investigation into how certain critical drug trial information had been stolen or released, then he might accidentally draw attention to the problem itself. He'd be creating more problematic information. That could be stolen, too, or leaked. All you needed was one Good Pharma exec chatting to an outsider at the wrong moment and you could have a hundred news stories inside a day, virally proliferating to the bloggers and investment websites. The stock price would crater. You would also draw attention to the company's information control processes-how faulty they were. How faulty the oversight was. Tom Reilly's oversight, that is.

Martz, of course, was already on to him, seemed to have sensed the problem, started to harass Tom. That's what this evening was all about, getting a chance to get close to Tom and make his threat even clearer. Tom saw that. Oh, yeah. But Martz would not be the last. Tom knew that the major shareholders-the mutual funds, the banks, the hedge fund operators-were not going to give him that opportunity. They had started to call, pressing for appointments. Lots of folks owned part of the company: German banks, French banks, English banks, their German pharmaceutical competitors, the Japanese conglomerates, South Korean real estate magnates, the Hong Kong shipping and manufacturing magnates. Lots of tough, unsentimental bastards. Cared not a whit for Tom Reilly and how many beta-blockers he was popping. Or anyone else at the company. Lose a quick 17 percent on $100 million, that's $17 million. Need to then get a 20 percent return to make yourself whole again. And Good Pharma didn't have a nice fat dividend protecting the stock price.

He felt the beta-blockers kicking in. He felt… well, calm. Cool, clear. His heart beating more slowly. Wow. Wow. He was calm enough to return to the unhappy topic of James Tonelli. Pretend for a moment that the cleaning service had in fact stolen some valuable information, such as the early rotten results on the synthetic skin trials. Pretend you can prove that. Now pretend that James spoke to somebody else who told somebody else to scare those two Mexican girls out of their minds-self-importantly intensifying the meaning of "send a message"-and they did something stupid, or something worse-like go and kill them. Then pretend you are the New York Times or Wall Street Journal reporter and you find out that some kind of important secret research information leaked out of a company and the stock price cratered and then the company-a company in the health field-apparently somehow caused the murder of the people working for the company that took the information. What might be the outcome of that? Tom felt calm! The outcome? A blizzard of bad press, shareholder outcries, God knew what else. His career would be shit-canned. And no severance or golden parachute, if he was found to have broken federal laws or company policies. Prison, even, if people testified a certain way. Once there was a problem, companies cut people out of their ranks within hours, like a bad spot on an apple. Under questioning, James would report that he had done exactly what he had been told to do. Mr. Thomas Reilly, let me see if I got this right: You are the vice-president of a company doing cutting-edge research into how to save people's lives, your father was a doctor, your wife is a doctor, and you ordered or condoned or intimated that two helpless Mexican girls who cleaned your offices be asphyxiated by a tankload of human excrement?

Maybe he had said something more to James. Was it possible? Maybe he had said something like, "Play rough, if you have to." To which James had given a solemn, tight-faced nod. Had Tom said that? Could he have actually said that? (He felt calm!) "I know people who know some people." Why could he now hear James saying that to him? Why did it sound like something James would say, with a touch of the Brooklyn streets in his voice? They'd talked early one morning, at around eight a.m., when the caffeine was pushing Tom along, jacking him up. I know people who know some people. That was bad. Play rough. That was bad, too. Had these things really been said?

Tom looked over at Ann. She spent the day with patients. Blissful. Had no idea what he was walking into. He felt calm.

As soon as she'd stirred that morning, they'd come to her: Mrs. Thompson, with the heart disease; Mr. Bernard with the bad liver; Harriet Gorsky with end-state renal failure; her patients, all 1,690 of them, a milling, shuffling, coughing, anxious crowd in her mind, divisible by age and sex and of course illness as well as probable illness. Her lung cancer patients, for instance: the patients who in all likehood might have it, pending tests; did have it and were realizing they would die before too long; and those who were in the bed now, coughing weakly. Or there were the many women with anxiety disorders, who ranged from mildly obsessive to those needing immediate hospitalization. Put her in a room with all of these people (no, please don't) and she would be able to drift from one to another sensing disease in many cases, suddenly recalling the string of data that came with each patient, the hemocrit level, the path report, even height and weight at the last checkup. And their histories, their secrets-an enormous psychic burden she tried not to carry but always did. She cared for them, she found them interesting, this selection of humanity, skewed of course toward those who had health insurance and women (men so obstinate about caring for themselves). A few she genuinely didn't like, a few she might cry over when the end came, and a few she even loved, from afar, mostly, chastely, no hint betrayed, of course. Some of the older men who'd lost their wives came in wearing a coat and tie, as if still working, and they often were stoical and silent as she described their conditions, what the problem was. They pursed their lips and nodded, rubbed their dry hands together like it was just a financial matter requiring they write out a very large check. Broke her heart. Maybe they reminded her of her father in his last years. How could they not? They were human beings. They stood nearly naked before her (the men with their loose underwear lowered as she felt for hernias, common in older men and potentially quite serious if infection set in, or testicular swellings), they had odors (women generally wore perfume and cleaned themselves better), they burped softly, farted, grunted. Very occasionally they urinated by accident, especially during an anal exam. She never betrayed any emotion at this, never showed that such behavior was in any way shameful. Because it wasn't. We are animals and subject to the mortification of the flesh. Born so that we may die.

She looked over at Tom in the car. Lost in his thoughts. Seemed calm-for him, anyway. Hadn't asked her about her day. Had barely kissed her hello when she got into the car. Was she angry with him? Yes, but more than that, discouraged. They each worked too hard, they carried too much… and with that the day came back to her… after lunch she'd seen a young married man who complained of chest and stomach pain but admitted that he had just had an affair with his wife's divorced younger sister and probably given her herpes. Ann nodded patiently but thought, You creep. Ann had handed the man a prescription and told him to tell his wife, who was also her patient. Next was a young woman who'd asked to have her antidepressants adjusted upward. The woman was clinically obese, so much so that the fat had reached the last knuckle on each of her fingers, and was a heavy smoker. Ann had spoken sternly to her about her lungs and heart but doubted it would have any effect. The next patient had been an elderly woman whose lower spine and pelvis were deteriorating because of severe arthritis. She moved slowly, apologizing unnecessarily as Ann inspected her lumbar region.

So different from one another, these human beings. If you are a doctor, you have secret knowledge of these differences. And if you have secret knowledge, then you are always at risk of knowing things about people you love, knowing the very thing that you prefer not to know. And now there was something about Tom that was bothering her. She didn't know if she felt this or knew it, or if she felt it as his wife or as a doctor. He was, to all outward appearances, an utterly healthy forty-two-year-old man, six foot one, perhaps 230 pounds, which was too heavy, but vigorous. Yet there was something, a twitch in his eye, a distracted irritability. The animal was under stress, unusual stress. He'd said nothing. Either he knew what was wrong or he didn't. But she sensed that he knew exactly what was wrong. Underneath that affable glad-hander was a sharp mind. Tom could be very tough with people. He compartmentalized, internalized, rationalized. Valuable abilities in a corporate setting, she knew. But the animal always won. This is what she'd learned from her patients. The brain was an organ that privileged itself before other organs, arranged the perception of reality for its own comfort. But it could not control the body's reaction to its own perceptions, the secretion of hormones, the cellular flux. Tom was acting like nothing was wrong. He seemed calm, but she knew he was not. Something was wrong. Right now, as he was staring out of the window of the town car, telling her nothing. Why?

"This is it," he said to the driver.

A lovely apartment! Huge! High in the air! Some of the people were actual billionaires, not that it mattered to Ann. She chatted, drifted, let Tom do his thing, talk to the big wheels, over in the corner, each holding his drink. She'd shaken hands with some people but found her way to a huge sofa and sat there happily, half hidden by a giant spray of lilies, accepted a glass of white wine. The servants were all tiny Guatemalans. She was too tired to be of much use to Tom. So she watched. She'd been introduced to Connie, the youngish wife of someone important there, so Ann studied her. The woman sported a very expensive boob job. How natural and yet grotesque! How impossible yet marvelous! One hardly knew who was most responsible for this aesthetic state of affairs, men or women themselves. And yet, equally strange to Ann was the fact that the fake tits worked. Men who were otherwise among the most sophisticated and brilliant, worldly and perceptive, lawyers, bankers, artists-men who had buried parents, friends, spouses, even children, and who thus knew the essential tragedy of the flesh-were themselves so often rendered helpless before these unnatural yet unarguably beautifully executed falsies. Smart men! Thoughtful, sensitive men! Doctors! Yes, doctors, who should know better, who were well informed about infection rates, adhesions of muscle tissue, immune system response, nerve damage, tissue scarring, ligament failure, the complications of burst implants, and so on. Yes, even doctors. The male response was hardwired in, kicking off testosterone pulses in the endocrine system. Couldn't help themselves. Helpless. Helpless men. They lost the power of discernment and resistance. They lusted, and in the glare of that lust, women gained power, if for only a moment.

Now Connie spied Ann across the room, turned, and came to her, smiling with professional hospitality.

"Are you-you seem to be-"

"I'm sorry-bit tired. Long day."

This admission was on the outer edges of Manhattan dinner party protocol. You never admitted weakness or insufficiency. "Oh, are you-what-?" ask Connie politely, one eye on the room.

"I'm a physician and I just saw a lot of patients today, that's all."

At this Connie's posture softened, and she drew nearer, seeming to reappraise Ann with both admiration and a bit of fear, for people know that doctors know things the rest of humanity does not.

"May I ask your specialty?"

"I'm an internist. Internal medicine."

Connie sat down, intimately next to her. "I keep telling my husband he must see a doctor."

Ann nodded. Many wives said this.

Connie leaned closer, whispered. "Can I talk to you about this? He pees too often in the night. Maybe six or seven times."

"That is too many times."

Connie leaned closer. "And he has pain."

"When he pees?"

Connie winced, as if sampling such pain. "Don't think so."

"Trouble peeing?" Ann asked.

"Maybe. He's so private. I know he has pain you know, down there, down under there."

Benign prostate hyperplasia less likely, malignancy more so, she thought. PSA test. New inflammation test. Eliminate false positive. Biopsy probable. "Pain all the time?"

The question triggered alarm in Connie's beautiful face. "Maybe, but I think yes, all the time!" she whispered.

"Between his anus and scrotum. Sensitive to touch?"

"Well-" Connie drew a breath of surprise at the sudden clinical frankness of this question. And made a quick check that no one was listening to them from behind the lilies. "Well, yes. It worries me so much!"

Ann wondered if she had seen Connie's face before somewhere, an advertisement, perhaps. "He should see a urologist as soon as possible-I mean tomorrow-and get a digital exam."

"That's what he doesn't want…"

"He's going to have to get over that."

Connie was nodding frantically, eyes wet, apparently having forgotten the party.

"It's no big deal, frankly. As a woman, you know that, the way gynecologists poke into us."

"I've told him."

"He's never had one?"

"No."

Ann nodded. "Afraid?"

"Yes."

"You really should have a talk with him."

"Yes. He's so very tender down there."

"He needs an exam tomorrow."

Connie became tearful. "Doctor, do you-do you do them?"

"Almost every day."

"And the men-do they mind the fact that-"

"I'm a woman? No. They accept it."

Connie looked at her, a question seeming to tremble in her big beautiful eyes. "Would-would you, would you do it for him?"

"Of course, he can call my-"

"No, no, he's going to Germany tomorrow for four days, he's being picked up at six… no, no, I mean would you, could you now? Here?"

Here. Now. Not what she wanted to do but it was her duty, always her duty to help. Connie led her down a hallway to a sumptuous bedroom filled with Picassos on every wall, Manhattan sprawling below from two sides. This is real money, Ann breathed to herself. This is what Tom wants.

"Do you need anything?"

Yes, Ann said. Connie nodded. She picked up the phone, pushed one button. A servant was dispatched to an all-night pharmacy for rubber examination gloves and K-Y Jelly.

"I'll go get him," Connie called. "Please just wait-"

More than a few minutes went by. Was Tom wondering where she was? Not necessarily. He could easily be locked in a conversation on the far side of the room. She sat perched on an upholstered bench with her purse, which had a very small doctor's bag in it.

"— to do it, Bill, I absolutely insist."

Connie appeared at the door. "He thinks he's humoring me."

Martz stepped into the room, glowering. "I am."

"I said it would only take a minute."

Connie handed Ann a white bag from the pharmacy and pulled the door shut.

"Well, Doctor-"

"Please call me Ann," she said, "given that I am your guest."

Martz nodded obligatorily, his expression indicating he had no idea who she was. "Where do you practice?"

"I have my own office practice and I have privileges at Beth Israel."

"How many exams of this nature have you performed?"

"I don't know. Several thousand, perhaps."

Martz's eyes, yellowed by decades of golf, hung open as he stared at her. She could not decide if he found her attractive or whether his interest lay elsewhere. Maybe he hated his wife for asking him do this, maybe he hated Ann for agreeing to do so. Most likely he was examining her for signs that might tell him what she was learning about him. This was typical of patients; they studied the doctor who studied them. Up close she saw that he'd had dozens of tiny skin cancers removed, including on the outer edge of his lower lip. The divot in his lip suggested a healed knife wound, even a disregard for danger.

"I told your wife I'd do this," Ann said, "but of course, it's your decision."

"Let's do it. Then she'll let me alone."

Martz dropped his pants.

"Bend over, put your hands on the table," she instructed.

"How did she find you?"

"We got to talking."

"What a topic of conversation."

"Well, you know women," she said, lubing her fingers. "We do talk about everything."

"I didn't meet everyone," he growled, being polite, making conversation. "You came with-?"

She went in with the forefinger and middle finger together in one firm motion. He grunted. They all grunted, except the men who'd had anal sex; they anticipated the sensation and evaluated it. She moved her fingers up the inside of his rectum and felt the lateral and posterior walls for any rectal masses. Then she identified the prostate on the anterior wall and swept her fingers from side to side, noting smoothness, consistency, lumps, asymmetry, and size.

There was a lot of swelling, bad swelling.

"Excuse me," she responded, "what? Oh, I came with Tom Reilly. I'm his wife."

"Aah, I see." Martz stiffened, actually tightened his asshole. "Good to know that, Doctor. That is, aah, informative. I want you to know exactly what would make me… better, would reduce my difficulties."

In general she preferred that patients not self-diagnose. They were inevitably wrong, usually erring on the most dramatic side. She'd once had a woman come in with numb feet and insist she be tested for multiple sclerosis, when in fact the problem was that her shoes were too tight.

"… the change in my life that would be most prophylactic would be if your-"

She paid little attention to what he was saying, instead carefully feathering her fingers against the lumpy surface of the prostate, probing softly, seeing if she caused pain. The basic rule was that you pressed no harder than you would push against an eyeball. She arced her fingers back to the edge of the prostate to see if she could feel the shape of the swelling better, whether it involved one lobe of the prostate or both.

"Dr. Reilly?"

"Yes?" she answered.

"I said, if your husband-"

Martz's hand shot back and grabbed her own, pulling it out of his rectum, making a wet sucking sound. He turned toward her, underpants still at his knees, shirt and tie hanging down, and drew close, uncomfortably close to her. His large, loose-skinned hand lifted her smelly, gloved fingers up between them as his eyes stared into her face. "If Tom would do me the courtesy of telling me-" She fought Martz and tried to pull away, but his big hand held her fist tight, her authority as a physician gone. "-what the fuck is going on at Good Pharma." He saw her confused reaction. "Oh, your bright, ambitious husband knows something, Doctor. But he isn't telling me. Tried to pretend nothing is going on. Tried tonight, to my face, lied directly to my face, Doctor Reilly. Isn't telling me or anyone else, as far as I can see. I have hundreds of millions of dollars invested in his company. Do you understand? That is a lot of money, even for me. Other people's money, Doctor. The stock was going up. But now it is not. There's a piece of information I don't have! Tom has it, Doctor! Tom knows it! And I want him-" Now Martz was crushing her hand in his, leaning into her with the color rising in his face, his lip curled in anger, a primate showing his old teeth, her fingers with his blood-streaked shit on them an inch from her nose. "-to tell me!"