Seeley went through the door into the restaurant's front room, little more than a screened-in porch with electric coiled heaters hanging from the ceiling against the chill, and from there into the dining room. Couples and families were at the oilcloth-covered tables. There were a few tourists, but most of the customers, in unfashionable jeans and flannels, appeared to be locals. None looked like a thirty-six-year-old immunologist named Lily Warren. Seeley went back outside to wait. The couple at the takeout window had gone and the Asian woman came toward him.
“Mr. Seeley?” It was the assured voice from the telephone, and she smiled tentatively when he nodded. “You're embarrassed. Don't be. People are always surprised. Warren's not a very Chinese name is it?”
She was slender and slim-hipped, but buxom in a way that made Seeley think of the recruiting poster in Palmieri's office. What most struck Seeley was the erect dancer's posture. Care had gone into Lily Warren's makeup, and her hand, when she extended it, was marble smooth and perfectly manicured.
They went into the restaurant, and a waitress led them to a corner table, leaving them with menus. There was the faintest hint of something savory in the air, less a fragrance than a memory for Seeley of some fine meals in the past. The window looked out onto a small patch of sand and, beyond that, the Pacific. At the next table, a sheriff's deputy in sharply pressed khakis was having a solitary lunch.
“Thank you for meeting me,” Seeley said. “Can we talk about why you went to see Alan Steinhardt that night?”
Warren said, “Let's look at the menu.” She pushed his toward him and studied her own. “Everything here is good. The crab's better than anything you can get in San Francisco.” She saw that Seeley wasn't reading the menu. “Why are you smiling?”
“I was hoping that if you met me, you'd see you could trust me.”
“And maybe I will, after I get to know you. The fact that someone is direct doesn't mean he deserves to be trusted.”
“But you came anyway.”
“You told me you'd get a subpoena if I didn't.”
Seeley said, “That's not what's worrying you. There's something you want to talk about.”
She put the menu down. “I don't understand why you're making such a big deal about my going to see Alan at his lab. I knew him. I already told you, I worked with him at UC.” When Seeley frowned, she said, “I know people think he's cold-have you met him?”
Seeley nodded.
“In fact, Alan is a kind man. Warm, too, in his own way. I went to see him because he offered to help me professionally.”
The waitress returned. Warren ordered a crab salad and Seeley, remembering Palmieri's suggestion, ordered the tempura oysters. When the waitress asked about drinks, he glanced at the decorative rows of imported and domestic beers along one wall and told her water would be fine.
“So you went there at night, after the building was closed.”
“It was the only time I had free. I was working full-time at St. Gall. There was nothing suspicious about it. Alan met me at the front door and let me in.”
“So he could help you professionally.” Seeley remembered Steinhardt telling him about her crush on him, but Warren didn't look like a woman who pursued men.
“The AIDS research community isn't very big, especially vaccine research.” Warren was as erect sitting as she was standing, her posture accentuated by the way she thrust out her chin as she talked. In a face with conventional Asian features, one was not: a delicately hooked nose that made an otherwise pretty face achingly lovely.
“Alan knew what the bureaucracy was like at St. Gall. He knew they weren't going to give a young scientist, particularly a woman, credit for her work. So he offered to go over our experiments together at UC and co-author some papers with me.”
Seeley didn't doubt that Steinhardt could be charming, or that he was capable of concealing his motives, whatever they were, behind a mask of amiability. But after more than twenty years litigating patent cases, it was inconceivable to him that two people working on directly competing research projects could visit after hours without one planning to extract information from the other, particularly when the two already knew each other well, and one was famous and the other was ambitious for fame.
She continued on about Steinhardt and the exciting work that they had done together at UC. There was an energy in the air as she talked about her science. It was as if someone had struck a tuning fork and the vibrations hadn't ceased.
The waitress brought their food, Seeley's a heaped pile of crisp-battered Pacific oysters, each as fat as a baby's fist. A mound of creamy coleslaw was on the side. Warren started on her salad, and he bit into an oyster. Palmieri was right. Seeley had not tasted anything like this before. First, there was the sensation of the grainy, almost buttery crust, and then the sudden astonishment of the oyster's intense flavor exploding and liquefying in his mouth like the essence of the ocean itself. There was a genius at work in the kitchen, someone who knew the secrets of frying seafood.
Seeley looked around the room with its corny nautical decorations hanging from the ceiling and walls. Behind the cashier's stand was a small open kitchen, with the cooks' busy white backs. Every fifteen seconds the booming of a foghorn punctuated the background buzz of conversation.
While they ate, Lily, with Seeley's encouragement, talked about herself. She grew up in China, came to the United States on a student visa for graduate and postgraduate work, married Warren, a Canadian software engineer living in the United States, and ended the marriage two years later when she failed her husband's expectations of a dutiful Asian wife and refused to give up her career to have children. By this time, she had already started publishing articles in immunology under her married name, and so continued using it after the divorce. When Steinhardt left UC for Vaxtek, he offered her a position in his new lab, but she went to St. Gall instead, converting her F-1 student visa to an H-1.
Unlike other lawyers, Seeley took little pleasure in recounting trial stories, but when Lily asked him about patent cases he'd worked on, she seemed genuinely inquisitive. He was telling her about a case seven years ago, involving a drug-coated stent that had so revolutionized cardiovascular surgery that demand from surgeons across the country overwhelmed his client's capacity to supply the market, when a shrewd light went on in her eyes.
“I bet that instead of trying to shut down the infringers, you just asked the court to make them pay a license fee.”
Her quickness stunned him. “How did you know?”
“Greed is an unattractive quality. Your client couldn't supply the market by itself. Patients needed the stent. It would have been bad strategy to ask for more.”
“If we said it was all or nothing, the court probably would have struck down the patent and given us nothing.” For the first time in a long time, Seeley was enjoying a conversation.
“That's the difference between science and law,” Lily said. “In law you can divide things up so everyone gets something. In scientific research there's only one winner and lots of losers.”
The way she said the word told Seeley that Lily would not accept being one of the losers.
“Had a lawyer ever done that in a patent case-not try to shut down his competition?”
Seeley shook his head. “Sometimes the hardest part of a case is convincing the client to do the right thing.”
“And you're always so confident about knowing the right thing to do?”