2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms (17 page)

Alfredo’s father, Gunther Rilke, had arrived in Uruguay (from Switzerland, by all accounts, though all that was very vague also) in 1946. He almost immediately married a Uruguayan, Asuncion Salgueiro, the only daughter of the owner of a small company producing fungicides and fertilisers, servicing the Latin American coffee industry. Alfredo was born in 1947 and his brother, Cesario, in 1950. Alfredo Rilke took over his father-in-law’s company in 1970, Cesario having died in a plane crash in 1969, and changed the name to Rilke Farmaceutico S. A.

He made his first fortune in the following decade with a cheap contraceptive pill and a powerful anti-depressant, surviving a series of lawsuits for patent infringement brought against him by Roche, Searle, Syntex and others.

Rilke himself left Uruguay and became permanently nonresident in 1982, choosing to live, henceforth, on board a series of large, regularly changed yachts that permanently cruised the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, within easy two-hour reach of a dozen airports and the company jet. Rilke Pharmaceutical was born at that moment and a series of smaller pharmaceutical companies were steadily acquired in the USA, France and Italy. By the late 19905 Rilke Pharma was listed as one of the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the world.

And that was really about all he or anyone knew, Ingram thought, dissatisfied. Perhaps that was what happened when you lived ‘nowhere’ for a quarter of a century—you became very hard to pin down, in every sense of the expression. Except that the pharmaceutical world knew that patents on Rilke Pharma’s big drugs, the blockbusters, that provided the massive cash flow for the continued acquisitions—the oral contraceptive, an ACE inhibitor, a retroviral and a new series of’me-too’ anti-depressants—were all coming to the end of their licence period. Rilke Pharma needed a new blockbuster drug and that was when they had approached Calenture-Deutz and offered to invest heavily in the clinical trials and research of Zembla-4…

Ingram looked up as Rilke returned—he was apologising generously as he came through the door, carrying a file from which he spread documents on the coffee table. They were full-colour, mock-up, two-page advertorials. Each page had in bold type the message: ‘AN END TO ASTHMA?’. Ingram scanned through them: the usual bland advertorial pap—‘Renowned scientists in our research laboratories’; ‘The struggle to rid the world of this debilitating disease’—and pictures of serious-looking men in white coats peering into microscopes, holding up test tubes, healthy people enjoying enviable lifestyles on ranches and at the seaside. The pages concluded with heartfelt assurances of the continued fight against these chronic ailments (money no object) threatening the good life. It was all subtext. Here and there the name ‘Zembla-4’ cropped up. No claims were made, but the promise was vaguely implicit: just give us time, we and our handsome, white-coated scientists are working on it.

“Very impressive,” Ingram said, “but a little premature, no?” It had not escaped his notice that each advertisement featured the familiar logo: the red-circled, blue, scribbled ‘R’ of Rilke Pharmaceuticals. As far as Ingram was aware Calenture-Deutz still owned Zembla and all its derivatives, one through four. He decided to say nothing.

“You may be right,” Rilke said in his usual humble, non-confrontational manner. “It was just that Burton told me that Zembla-4 was close to ready. Third stage clinical trials complete. The documentation ready to be sent in to the PDA at Rockville…We’ve found in the past that an early, vague, very vague, advertorial campaign—with the usual brief-summary caveats, of course,” he pointed to a dense inch-thick footnote at the end of each advertorial page, “can make a significant difference. Everything seems to speed up, we’ve found.”

“Burton told you that, did he?” Ingram said, a little stiffly. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Keegan and de Freitas—I’d like them off the board.”

“That won’t be possible, I’m afraid, Ingram,” Rilke said, with an ingenue’s smile of apology.

It was at moments like these that Ingram found it helpful to remind himself that Alfredo Rilke had enriched the Fryzer family to the tune of some £100 million. It made bitter pills very easy to swallow. He changed his tone.

“It’s just that Keegan and de Freitas are assuming responsibilities no one gave them. It’s not in their remit to—”

Rilke held up his hand as if to say, forgive me, stop, please. “I asked them to assume these responsibilities after Philip Wang’s death. You know, Burton Keegan has supervised four, no five, successful new drug applications for Rilke Pharma. He’s the best: he knows exactly what he’s doing. There’s too much at stake here, Ingram.”

“Well, that’s a different matter. If I’d known—”

“How are things going on the investigation, by the way? Has Kindred been found?”

“Ah, no. Not yet. He seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. The police have lost all trace of him. Baffling.”

“We don’t need to rely exclusively on the police, thank god,” Rilke said. What did he mean by that? Ingram wondered.

Ingram sighed. “We ran our reward-advertisements for two whole weeks. The police think Kindred may have killed himself…”

“What do you think?”

“I, ah, I really don’t have an opinion.”

“A dangerous state of mind, Ingram. If you don’t have an opinion, you can’t function.” Rilke smiled.

Ingram smiled back: safer to say nothing at these moments.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Rilke said, standing, and hoiking his trouser waist up over his gut. “We submit Zembla-4 to the licensing authorities in the US and then the UK. The advertorials will begin to appear, first in learned medical journals, then in selected high-class outlets of the global media—
New Yorker, Time, Economist, El Pais, Wall Street Journal, Le Figaro
, etcetera. Who can complain if a drug company declares that it is trying to eradicate asthma? Who can object to a mission statement? Then Rilke Pharmaceutical will offer to buy Calenture-Deutz at a moment of my choosing. But all this will happen only, I repeat, only after Adam Kindred is apprehended and dealt with.”

“Yeeesssss,” Ingram said slowly drawing the word out, like a piece of chewing gum, his mind whirring like a malfunctioning clockwork toy. “What’s, um, your timescale? When will all this start to happen?”

“Maybe next month, all being well,” Rilke said. “You’ll be an even richer man, Ingram. And the world will have its first fully functioning anti-asthma drug. It’s a no-lose situation.”

Ingram was told that Colonel Fryzer could be found in the rose garden, so he set off through the well-tended grounds of Trelawny Gables in search of his father. He wandered along the meandering pathways of this high-priced, private, sheltered housing, passing uniformed nurses, white-overalled assistants pushing trolleys laden with meals, dry-cleaning, vases of flowers, wondering vaguely if this were the sort of place in which he would end his days—a five-star ante-room to oblivion with cordon-bleu catering. He was also wondering vaguely about his meeting with Alfredo Rilke and what was its real import, its gravitas. Keegan and de Freitas were staying, that much was clear, but it appeared to him there was a near unseemly rush to have Zembla-4 licensed. Philip Wang had always advocated the slow-but-steady route, that was how the Bynogol licence had gone through so smoothly…Ingram paused to sniff at a flower: he was almost sure something was going on behind his back—that he was not in full control of Calenture-Deutz any more was both as clear as day and very troubling.

His father disliked Trelawny Gables with a calm but fierce intensity, Ingram knew, but he endured its customs and rituals with amused pragmatism. He didn’t blame his son that he had ended up here—at least Ingram hoped not as he now saw his father from a distance, spraying insecticide on rose bushes in a small arbour by the perimeter wall. He was a tall, lean, grey-haired man wearing an olive-green sleeveless fleece, a shirt and tie and neatly pressed blue jeans. Ingram had foresworn jeans at the age of forty—no mature or middle-aged man should be seen dead in them, he reasoned, but he had to admit they rather suited his father, now eighty-seven years old. Perhaps jeans were to be taken up again in one’s eighties…

“Hello, Pa,” he said, kissing him on both cheeks. “Looking well.”

Colonel Gregor Fryzer looked at his son closely—scrutinising me, Ingram thought, as if I were on parade. Ingram smiled at this old man’s foible but then worried—absurdly, he knew—that some scent of Phyllis was emanating from him, some odour of sex that only octogenarians could sniff out.

“You seem a bit nervous, Ingram. Bit edgy.”

“Not in the least.”

“I’ve always thought there was something a little
fourbe
about you.”

“What does ‘
fourbe
‘ mean?”

“Look it up when you get home.”

They walked back to his small ground-floor flat—one bedroom with a sitting room, bathroom and kitchenette. The walls were covered with his father’s watercolours—still lifes in the main. His father’s pastimes were tying flies for fishing—that he sold—and painting.

The Colonel went into the kitchen and returned with two gins and tonic, one ice cube in each, no slice of lemon. He handed one to Ingram and sat down and fitted a cigarette into a holder and lit it.

“What can I do for you, Ingram?”

“I just came to say hello—see how you were getting along. You know I pop up on a Saturday.”

“You haven’t been here for two months. Thank god for Forty.”

“Has Forty been here?”

“He comes up twice a week. He’s got some kind of a contract for the gardens.”

“Oh yes, of course.” This was news to Ingram. Forty was his youngest son. “We’ve been very busy,” he said, changing the subject. “Will you come to supper tonight? The whole family will be there. I thought it might—”

“No thanks.”

“I’ll send a car, there and back.”

“No thanks—there’s a documentary on Channel 4 I want to watch.”

Ingram nodded—at least he’d asked. Meredith would have had a seizure if the Colonel had accepted. He felt the usual cocktail of emotions when confronted by his father: admiration, irritation, affection, frustration, pride, distaste. It astonished him, more often than not, to think this difficult old bastard had sired him. But sometimes all he wanted from his father was a sign of affection—a squeeze of his shoulder, a genuine smile. They sat there sipping their warmish gins and tonic like two strangers in a waiting room, bound only by their blood-line. He thought of his long-dead mother: time had transformed her—a diffident, neurotic woman—into something close to myth, a domestic saint. How he missed her.

“Actually, I wanted to ask your design,” Ingram began, carefully.

“Ask my design?”

“Sorry—advice.”

“Oh, yes?” The Colonel sounded surprised.

“Yes. I think I may be…” Ingram paused—suddenly having to articulate this intuition made it seem all the more real. “I think I may be about to be the victim of a boardroom putsch. I think it’ll look like I’m in charge, but I won’t be.”

“I don’t understand your nasty little world, Ingram—finance, banking, pharmaceuticals. Who are these people plotting against you? Get rid of them. Cut out the cancer.”

“I can’t do that, unfortunately.”

“Then be cleverer than they are: second-guess them, pre-empt them, frustrate them.” The Colonel removed his smoked cigarette from his holder and lit up another. “Get something on them, Ingram. Find a way of hurting them. Get some ammunition.”

Not a bad idea, Ingram thought, wondering if this were possible, if he had enough time…Perhaps there
were
things he could do…

“Thanks, Pa. I’d better be running along.”

“Finish your gin before you go.”

Ingram drank it down. Sometimes he disliked gin—he thought it made him depressed.

When Ingram arrived home he took down the French dictionary from its shelf in the library and looked up the word ‘
fourbe
’. Sly, shifty and crafty were the synonyms on offer. Ingram felt a little hurt, for a second or two—who did his father think was paying for Trelawny Gables? His army pension?—and then decided that it must have been the after-effects of his encounter with Rilke that had made him seem preoccupied and thoughtful. True, his brain had been working hard, his words of affection to his father had been token, insincere. Whatever quantities of guile he possessed were being summoned into action, like troops in reserve being called up, expelling his usual cultured, focussed politesse: typical of the Colonel to have sensed this.

He poured himself a large Scotch in his dressing room and drank it before coming downstairs to his birthday party. His three children were already present—Guy, Araminta and Fortunatus—and a stranger, he noticed, someone quickly introduced as Forty’s boyfriend, Rodinaldo.

“Have you met him before?” he whispered to Meredith when he had a discreet moment.

“A few times.”

“He seems incredibly young.”

“He’s the same age as Forty. They work together.”

Maria-Rosa served his favourite supper: cheese souffle, lamb shank with pommes dauphinoises, strawberries with champagne sorbet. The conversation around the table was banal, light-hearted, forgettable. Ingram looked closely at his children, rather in the way his father had looked at him: Guy, thirty years old, handsome, talentless; Araminta, starveling-thin and, to his eyes, almost visibly twitching with nerves. Perhaps his father’s ruthless objectivity was infecting him, but he realised anew, with no particular shock or guilt, that he didn’t much like Guy and Minty—he cared for them, but he didn’t much like them, to be honest, nor was he much interested in them. Only Fortunatus interested him—squat, muscley Forty, already seriously bald in his early twenties—gay, of all improbable things, the only one of his children who never asked him for anything, the only one he loved and the one who would not return it.

“I saw Gramps today,” Ingram said to him. “You’re working at Trelawny Gables, he said. What a coincidence.”

“He got us the job,” Forty said.

“Really?…” This required further thought. “So, Forty, how’s business?”