8
T
HEY SAT
in silence in the back of their taxi. The traffic ebbed and flowed around them as they inched past fountains bordered with spring pansies, statues, limestone edifices, the national associations of nearly everything.
“What is it, Sandy?” Ann asked at last.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Are you nervous?”
“Of course not,” he snapped. Still, he looked strangely subdued, almost defeated in his dark suit and yellow tie.
“What is it, then?” she pressed him.
“It's not what I envisioned,” he murmured.
“What? Washington?”
They had been to DC a hundred times before, but she didn't understand. This was not how he had envisioned his congressional debut. Secretly he'd always meant to arrive in the Capitol a conquering hero, or rather a co-hero with Marion. He'd planned for ribbons and ceremonial picture taking, festive garden parties at the National Academy of Sciences, where he and Marion would nibble strawberries dipped in chocolate and hobnob with their senators under white tents. He'd intended formal dinners and testimonials, certificates calligraphed in vermilion, lapis blue, and gold. He'd imagined entering the city in its grandest, most expansive form. Instead he'd been summoned to an anthill of bureaucrats and bean counters. He'd arrived shackled with prohibitions from his lawyer. Reduced to defending the lab, he'd fantasized about leading thousands of scientists marching on the Hill. But the reality was different. He carried in his briefcase a written statement defanged by Houghton-Smith. His hands were tied.
Ann gazed at her husband. He looked almost ill in the lurching cab. His shoulders slumped, his eyes were pained and tired. She could see he had a headache, although she knew he would deny it. She wanted to reassure him, but what could she say? He knew every trick; he was the master at restoring confidence in friends and patients. What could she possibly say, now that it was finally time to reassure him?
“We'll get through this,” she said.
Turning to the half-open window, he murmured, “This is not how it was meant to be.”
The hearing room was cheap and small, a shoe box stuffed with slick tables, angular chairs, video equipment, and clunky microphones trailing thick black cords. A handful of reporters crouched between the second row of chairs and the back wall. Scruffy and eager, they rustled in the back. Yudelstein! With a little shock of surprise and hatred, Sandy saw Yudelstein among the rodents. The jolt was painful, but it shook Sandy alert. Animosity surged through his melancholy body as he whipped around and faced forward. Bristling, he took his seat and looked straight ahead into the face of Representative Redfield.
Paul Redfield was nearly seventy years old. His eyes were pale, keen, and blue. He had a sharp nose and thin, smooth-shaven cheeks. He was in the pink of health; the kind of man who outlived all his doctors. He had served in the navy in the Second World War, supported his family as a newspaperman and then a trial lawyer. After five terms in the House, two children, and five grandchildren, and forty-nine years of marriage to Mrs. Redfield (Shirley), he was known in his district as the Rock. He was steadfast, and as his opponents pointed out, he was hard. When he spoke—and he spoke at length—he hammered out opinions set in stone.
“At its best,” Redfield read from his typed opening statement, “the scientific community in America dedicates itself to the health and well-being of the populace, the prosperity and security of the nation. We, the taxpayers, entrust the NIH and the research programs it funds to address the medical problems plaguing our society: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other ailments that tear apart so many families and destroy so many lives. We, the family members, the caregivers, and the patients suffering, have waited patiently for progress, and new hope where there has been none. We, the taxpayers, foot the six-billion-dollar bill. How distressing—how appalling, then, to find, in recent years, a growing number of scientific scandals violating the trust of the community. How shocking to uncover a culture of deception corrupting the very research programs to which we have entrusted our tax dollars and our hopes.” Redfield looked up from his text and gazed across the narrow chasm between the congressional table and the table of researchers called to testify.
They were all quite still, Cliff and Tim Borland, Feng and Byron Zouzoua, and, of course, Marion, who was listening with idle hands, her half-knit fisherman's sweater stored safely at the hotel. Meek, and mute, Sandy took his medicine as Ann watched, along with Jacob and Mei in the second row of chairs. Everyone was there except the instigator. Ann was relieved she didn't have to look Robin in the face. Her ingratitude, her lack of common decency! She was nothing less than an arsonist, setting her own lab on fire with furious sparks, then watching the conflagration spread throughout the institute—in fact, fanning the flames. Thankfully, Robin was absent, having finished her testimony the day before, detailing what Redfield termed her ordeal.
The congressman had a term for everything. He used his opening statement as a battering ram, expatiating on the trust of the taxpayers, and his personal belief in accountability. He declared that those funded by the public were, in fact, public servants, not scientific grandees, not princes of the realm, not prospectors, but public servants, as he himself was, and all his colleagues on the subcommittee as well. Several aides nodded. Redfield's logic was unassailable; his dogmatic public servitude irreproachable; above all, his oratory was uninterruptible.
A C-SPAN video camera recorded on its tripod, and the print journalists took notes until Redfield spoke so long that even they began to scribble less. Redfield had refined the art of circling back upon his arguments and restating them with ever-greater strength. If he bored his listeners, then that was his venomous intent. He spoke until his opponents lost their concentration, anesthetized by his rhetoric. He seemed, Ann thought, to hold even Sandy in his thrall. Like a python, Redfield would squeeze the life and very air out of the room.
His arguments were entirely simpleminded, concluded Jacob, at Ann's side. But then, Jacob was hard put to look upon a politician as anything other than a moron. While Ann fretted that Sandy would not have time or spirit left to defend himself, Jacob looked at Redfield and saw only pompous ignorance. He seriously underestimated Marion's opponent.
When questioning finally commenced, the ranking Republican on the committee, Brock Lindell, took his turn, and mildly asked Feng how long he had worked at the lab, how long he'd worked with Cliff, how many projects he'd been working on, and whether he thought it was possible to pursue so many projects at once without ever misplacing paperwork. Lindell sent his queries out with parachutes, and Feng or Cliff had only to pull the string provided for their answers to float pillowed to the ground. But Redfield gave no quarter. He leaned forward in his chair and shot out questions like the trial lawyer he'd been thirty-five years before. “I would like to enter this document into the record,” he told the clerk. “A document entitled Fungi. Mr. Xiang, do you recognize this as your work?” He passed a photocopied page over to Feng.
“This is Cliff's handwriting,” said Feng.
“Granted. However, it is my understanding that these are transcriptions of sayings and definitions that you invented in the lab. For example: ‘Government Appropriations for Cancer Research: GAC (acronym): “sick tax.” Conference (noun): “cancer junket.”'”
“Well, they were definitions attributed to me,” Feng said nervously. “They were meant to be facetious.”
“Were they?”
“Of course.”
Redfield scanned his copy. “‘Research (verb): “To search again.” Research initiative (verb): “To search again for the next five years of funding.”'” The congressman whipped off his reading glasses. “Perhaps these definitions were meant to be facetious; they are also quite revealing.”
“I must interject here,” said Byron Zouzoua. “This is an extraordinary line of questioning, which does not focus on experiments or data, but on the culture of the laboratory.”
“In my opinion, that culture is highly relevant,” said Redfield, “particularly when it's a culture that scoffs at the economic realities of medical research.”
Zouzoua lobbed back, “I worry about focusing on ephemera like private jokes. You are trying to characterize a scientific culture that is, in fact, complicated by the diverse national cultures involved. You're shifting this inquiry away from cold, hard fact into a realm of cultural and character analysis. And how quickly we find, sir, that character analysis devolves into character assassination.”
“I see your point,” said Redfield, but he did not apologize for making his, and as he continued, no detail was too small, no connection too tangential, to pursue. “We have received the ink analysis of your three pages of notes,” he told Cliff, “and the findings are unequivocal. You used one pen to record the data on these mice. One pen to record the identification numbers of these mice, their date of dissection, and the outcome of injection with the R-7 virus. One pen was used here, and one pen only, suggesting that in fact these notes were all made on the same day—they were not, as you stated earlier, jottings made at different times, over different months. These notes refer to the one group of mice, and record one set of data. You published some of that data, but you withheld the rest. I would—”
Tim Borland half rose from his seat. “I would like to record my strong objection to this implication of my client. Despite repeated requests, we have not been able to review this so-called ink analysis. We have not been privy to the methods by which the Secret Service studied the ink on the page. We have not been allowed to contact the agents who conducted the analysis, nor have we received copies of their report. We have been blindfolded and blindsided by a process that seems designed to intimidate my client and obfuscate the evidence at hand. Until we receive these materials, my client cannot answer questions on the matter.”
This was a stout defense. Still, Sandy stared down at the table, disheartened to sit with the others, who were cowering beneath the procedural arguments of the attorneys. Cliff and Feng spoke gingerly. They were circumspect and fearful, coached by their attorneys to talk little, and answer to the point, or not at all. Where was the outrage that Sandy knew they must feel?
Marion had never been a great public speaker. She read her prepared statement without once looking up from the page. When Redfield questioned her about exactly what kind of supervision she had provided Cliff and Feng, she answered haltingly.
“Do you think you could have done more to watch the postdoctoral researchers in your lab?” Redfield demanded.
“Yes,” she told him.
Sandy gazed at her, urging silently: Oh, Marion, look him in the eye, at least. Tell him: Yes, of course I could have done more, but in a lab a certain amount of delegation is necessary. I wasn't there at every moment while these experiments were conducted, but the methods, the results, and the underlying strategy here were always in my purview.
“Presumably you are responsible for those postdoctoral students who work in your lab,” said Redfield.
Not students, Sandy corrected silently. Remind him they aren't students. But Marion didn't correct Redfield.
“Presumably you work in a supervisory role,” Redfield said.
Marion nodded.
“Then where were you when these experiments were going on? Where were you when your students recorded their results?”
She flinched, visibly shaken. Sybil Halbfinger tried to interject on Marion's behalf, but Redfield pressed on.
“Here is my question for you: have you done
anything at all
to safeguard the scientific process?”
Ann watched Sandy's neck and shoulders tense, his fingers clench. He was angry, and as Redfield questioned Marion, his anger grew. He had entered the room obediently, listened quietly, submitting to the terms and restrictions of this hearing. But how could Redfield interrogate Marion like that? How could he treat her with such disrespect? She knew more than ten Redfields; her tiniest conjecture was worth a thousand of his nostrums. Marion, he pleaded inwardly, speak up.
Heart beating faster, Sandy curbed his impulse to interrupt. He bit his lip, waiting for his turn to speak. The session was long, and threatened to go overtime, and still Sandy waited furiously at the table. The reporters were sidling off, shuffling out the door to other rooms. The congressmen who had already spoken had excused themselves as well. Each had said his piece and then ducked out. The little room, so crowded before, was emptying. When his turn came at last, Sandy scarcely had an audience. There was no crowd to absorb his rage, nor did his prepared statement come close to expressing his indignation. “A manifesto is unnecessary here,” Thayer had informed him when they prepared Sandy's statement in Boston. “A recapitulation of your letter in defense of science is exactly what we don't need.”
Sandy glared at the text before him. Thayer's language was well considered, bristling with refined contempt toward ORIS and its inquiry. But contempt was not what Sandy wanted here. His lawyer had advised him to fight this battle with thistles, and Sandy needed spears and sabers. He glanced up from his typed statement and saw Redfield looking at his watch and then conferring with an aide behind him.
He'd witnessed a one-man tribunal masquerading as a House hearing. He had watched Redfield interrogate Cliff and Feng and even Marion. His throat tightened as he read. He'd seen Redfield batter and bruise his own partner and collaborator, the best scientist he knew—and by far the most principled. How could he let this pass? How could he allow this hack to brutalize her?
He put down his prepared remarks. “What I've seen here today has shocked and disgusted me,” he burst out, ignoring the pressure of Houghton-Smith's hand on his arm. “What I've witnessed today has no place in what we call a democratic country.”
How well Louisa knew her father. He did like a beau geste, and he did love to launch himself forward, alone on his horse, into fiery debate. He was wily and pragmatic, but his blood was up, and he forgot himself.