"Reckless, I think. Daredevilish, perhaps. Why?"
"Then I too was waghalsig," said Birgit.
Carl wanted to be carried, which she said was unheard of. Justin could safely insist on shouldering the burden. There was business while she unbuckled her backpack and extended the straps for him and — only when she was satisfied with the fit-lifted Carl into it and exhorted him to be well behaved with his new uncle.
"I was worse than waghalsig. I was a full idiot." She bit her lip, hating herself for what she had to tell. "We had a letter brought to us. Last week. Thursday. It came by courier from Nairobi. Not a letter, a document. Seventy pages. About Dypraxa. Its history and its aspects and its side effects. Positive and negative, but mostly negative in view of the fatalities and side effects. It was not signed. It was in all scientific respects objective, but in other respects a little bit crazy. Addressed to Hippo, not to anyone by name. Just Hippo. To the Lords and Ladies of Hippo."
"In English?"
"English but not written by an Englishman, I think. Typed, so we do not know the handwriting. It contained many references to God. You are religious?"
"No."
"But Lorbeer is religious."
* * *
The drizzle had turned to occasional fat spots of rain. Birgit was sitting on a bench. They had come upon a scaffold of children's swings fitted with crossbars across the seats to keep them safe. Carl needed to be lifted into one and pushed. He was fighting sleep. A catlike softness had descended over him. His eyes were half closed and he was smiling while Justin pushed him with obsessive caution. A white Mercedes with Hamburg registration plates came slowly up the hill, passed them, made a circle in the flooded car park and came slowly back. One male driver, one male passenger beside him. Justin remembered the two women in the parked Audi this morning as he stepped into the street. The Mercedes drove back down the hill.
"Tessa said you speak all languages," Birgit said.
"That doesn't mean I have anything to say in them. Why were you waghalsig?"
"You will please call it stupid."
"Why were you stupid?"
"I was stupid because when the courier delivered the document from Nairobi, I was excited and I telephoned to Lara Emrich in Saskatchewan and I told her, "Lara darling, listen, we have received a long, anonymous, very mystical, very crazy, very authentic history of Dypraxa, no address, no date, from somebody who I think is Markus Lorbeer. It tells about the fatalities of the drug combination and it will greatly help your case." I was so happy because the document is actually called after her name. It is titled "Dr. Lara Emrich is right." "It is crazy," I told her, "but it is fierce like a political statement. Also very polemical, very religious, and very destructive of Lorbeer." "Then it is by Lorbeer," she says. "Markus is whipping himself. It is normal.""
"Have you met Emrich? Do you know her?"
"As I knew Tessa. By e-mail. So we are e-friends. In the paper it said Lorbeer was six years in Russia, two years under old Communism, four years under the new chaos. I tell this to Lara who knows it already. According to the paper, Lorbeer was the agent for certain Western pharmas, lobbying Russian health officials, selling them Western drugs, I tell her. According to the paper, in six years he had dealings with eight different health ministers. The paper provides a saying regarding this period and I am about to tell it to Lara when she interrupts me and tells me what the saying is, exactly as it stands in the document. "The Russian health ministers arrived in a Lada and left in a Mercedes." It is a favorite joke of Lorbeer's, she tells me. This confirms for both of us that Lorbeer is the writer of the document. It is his masochistic confession. Also from Lara I learn that Lorbeer's father was a German Lutheran, very Calvinistic, very strict, which accounts for his son's morbid religious conceptions and his desire to confess. Do you know medicine? Chemistry? A little biology perhaps?"
"My education was a little too expensive for that, I'm afraid."
"Lorbeer claims in his confession that while acting for KVH he obtained the validation of Dypraxa by means of flattery and bribery. He describes buying health officials, fast-tracking clinical trials, purchasing drug registrations and import licenses and feeding every bureaucratic hand in the food chain. In Moscow, a validation by top medical opinion leaders could be bought for twenty-five thousand dollars. So he writes. The problem is that when you bribe one you must also bribe those you do not select, otherwise they will denigrate the molecule out of envy or resentment. In Poland it was not so different, but less expensive. In Germany, influence was more subtle but not very subtle. Lorbeer writes of a famous occasion when he chartered a jumbo jet for KVH and flew eighty eminent German physicians to Thailand for an educational trip." She was smiling as she related this. "Their education was provided on the journey out, in the form of films and lectures, also Beluga caviar and extremely ancient brandies and whiskies. Everything must be of the finest quality, he writes, because the good doctors of Germany have been spoiled early. Champagne is no longer interesting to them. In Thailand, the physicians were free to do as they wished, but recreation was provided for those who wanted it, also attractive partners. Lorbeer personally organized a helicopter to drop orchids on a certain beach where the physicians and their partners were relaxing. On the flight home, no further education was needed. The physicians were educated out. All they had to remember was how to write their prescriptions and learned articles."
But although she was laughing she was uneasy with this story, and needed to correct its impact.
"This does not signify that Dypraxa is a bad drug, Justin. Dypraxa is a very good drug that has not completed its trials. Not all doctors can be seduced, not all pharmaceutical companies are careless and greedy."
She paused, aware that she was speaking too much, but Justin made no attempt to deflect her.
"The modern pharmaceutical industry is only sixty-five years old. It has good men and women, it has achieved human and social miracles, but its collective conscience is not developed. Lorbeer writes that the pharmas turned their backs on God. He has many biblical references I do not understand. Perhaps that is because I do not understand God."
Carl had gone to sleep on the swing, so Justin lifted him out and, with his hand on his hot back, walked him softly up and down the tarmac.
"You were telling me how you telephoned Lara Emrich," Justin reminded her.
"Yes, but I distracted myself deliberately because I am embarrassed that I was stupid. Are you comfortable or shall I take him?"
"I'm fine."
The white Mercedes had stopped at the bottom of the hill. The two men were still sitting inside it.
"In Hippo we have assumed for years that our telephones are listened to, we have a certain pride about this. From time to time our mail is censored. We send ourselves letters and watch them come to us late and in a different condition. We have often fantasized about planting misleading information on the Organy."
"The what?"
"It is Lara's word. It is a Russian word from Soviet times. It means the organs of state."
"I shall adopt it immediately."
"So maybe the Organy listened to us laughing and rejoicing on the telephone when I promised Lara I would send her a copy of the document to Canada immediately. Lara said unfortunately she does not possess a fax machine because she has spent her money on lawyers and is not permitted to enter the hospital precincts. If she had possessed a fax machine, maybe there would be no problem today. She would have a copy of Lorbeer's confession, even if we did not. Everything would be saved. Maybe. Everything is maybe. Nothing has a proof."