Peter Lovesey: Diamond Solitaire

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 willing 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 amp;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.