At a quick glance, I could see that it certainly looked that way. From where I was standing I was able to pick out an O’Leary’s, a Hannigan’s, and a restaurant called the October Revolution Café.
Linden Tower was a dark red-bricked apartment building, one of the many built over the past twenty or twenty-five years in this part of town. They had established their own unarguable, monolithic presence, but Linden Tower, like most of them, was out-sized, ugly and cold-looking.
Vernon Gant lived on the seventeenth floor.
I crossed over First Avenue, took the steps down on to the plaza and went over towards the big revolving glass doors of the main entrance. By the looks of it, this place had people going in and out of it all the time, so these doors were probably always in motion. I looked upwards just as I got to the entrance and caught a dizzying glimpse of how high the building was. But my head didn’t make it back far enough to see any of the sky.
I walked right past the reception desk in the centre of the lobby and turned left into a separate area where the elevators were. A few people stood around waiting, but there were eight elevators, four on either side, so no one had to wait for very long. An elevator went ping, its doors opened and three people got out. Six of us then herded into it. We each hit our numbers and I noticed that no one besides me was going higher than the fifteenth floor.
Based on the people I’d seen coming in, and on the specimens standing around me now in the elevator car, the occupants of Linden Tower seemed like a varied bunch. A lot of these apartments would be rent-controlled from a long way back, of course, but a lot of them would also be sub-let, and at exorbitant rates, so that would create a fair bit of social mix right there.
I got out on the seventeenth floor. I checked Vernon’s card again and then looked for his apartment. It was down the hall and around the corner to the left, third door on the right. I didn’t encounter anyone on the way.
I stood for a moment at his door, and then rang the bell. I hadn’t thought much about what I was going to say to him if he answered, and I’d thought even less about what I was going to do if he didn’t, if he wasn’t home, but standing there I realized that either way I was extremely apprehensive.
I heard some movement inside, and then locks clicking.
Vernon must have seen that it was me through the spyhole because I heard his voice before he’d even got the door fully open.
‘Shit, man, that was fast.’
I had a smile ready for when he appeared, but it fell off my face as soon as I actually saw him. He stood before me wearing only boxer shorts. He had a black eye and bruises all down the left side of his face. His lip was cut, and swollen, and his right hand was bandaged.
‘What ha-’
‘Don’t ask.’
Leaving the door open, Vernon turned around and motioned back at me with his left hand to come in. I entered, closed the door gently and followed him down a narrow hallway and into a large open living-room. It had a spectacular view – but then, in Manhattan, virtually anywhere with a seventeenth floor is going to have a spectacular view. This one looked south, and took in the city’s horror and glory in about equal measure.
Vernon flopped down on to a long, L-shaped, black leather couch. I felt extremely uncomfortable, and found it hard to look directly at him, so I made a show of glancing around.
The room was sparsely furnished, given its size. There was some old stuff, an antique bureau, a couple of Queen Anne-type chairs, a standard lamp. There was also some new stuff, the black leather couch, a tinted-glass dining table, an empty metal wine-rack. But you couldn’t exactly call it eclectic, because there didn’t seem to be any order or system to it. I knew Vernon had been big into furniture at one time, and had collected ‘pieces’, but this seemed like the place of a person who had given up collecting, who had let his enthusiasm wane. The pieces were odd and mismatched, and seemed left over from another time – or another apartment – in their owner’s life.
I stood in the middle of the room now, having seen everything there was to see. I looked down at Vernon, in silence, not knowing where to begin – but eventually he managed to say something. Through the pained expression on his face and the ugly distortion of his features, of his normally bright greenish eyes and high cheekbones, he cracked a smile and said, ‘So, Eddie, I guess you were interested after all.’
‘Yeah… it was amazing. I mean… really.’
I blurted this out, just like the high-school kid I’d invoked sarcastically the previous day, the one looking to score his first dime bag, and who was now coming back for another one.
‘What did I tell you?’
I nodded my head a few times, and then – unable to go on without referring again to his condition – I said, ‘Vernon, what happened to you?’
‘What do you think, man? I got in a fight.’
‘Who with?’
‘You don’t want to know, believe me.’
I paused.
Maybe I didn’t want to know.
In fact, thinking about it, he was right, I didn’t want to know. Not only that, I was also a little irritated – part of me hoping that this business of his having had the shit kicked out of him wasn’t going to get in the way of my scoring from him.
‘Sit down, Eddie,’ he said. ‘Relax, tell me all about it.’
I sat down on the other side of the couch, got comfortable and told him all about it. There was no reason not to. When I’d finished, he said, ‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’
I immediately said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it works on what’s there, you know. It can’t make you smart if you’re not smart already.’
‘So what are you saying, it’s a smart drug?’
‘Not exactly. There’s a lot of hype about smart drugs – you know, enhance your cognitive performance, develop rapid mental reflexes, all of that – but most of what we call smart drugs are just natural diet supplements, artificial nutrients, amino acids, that kind of thing – designer vitamins if you like. What you took was a designer drug. I mean, you’d have to take a shitload of amino acids to stay up all night and read four books, am I right?’
I nodded.
Vernon was enjoying this.
But I wasn’t. I was on edge and wanted him to cut the crap and just tell me what he knew.
‘What’s it called?’ I ventured.
‘It doesn’t have a street-name and that’s because, as yet, it doesn’t have any street profile – which is incidentally the way we want it to stay. The boys in the kitchen are keeping it low-key and anonymous. They’re calling it MDT-48.’
The boys in the kitchen?
‘Who are you working for?’ I asked. ‘You said you were doing consultancy for some pharmaceutical outfit?’
Vernon put a hand up to his face at that point and held it there for a moment. He sucked in some air and then let out a low groan.
‘Shit, this hurts.’
I leant forward. What should I do here – offer to get him some ice in a towel, call a doctor? I waited. Had he heard my question? Would it be insensitive to repeat it?
About fifteen seconds passed and then Vernon lowered his hand again.
‘Eddie,’ he said eventually, still wincing, ‘I can’t answer your question. I’m sure you can understand that.’
I looked at him, puzzled. ‘But you were talking to me yesterday about coming on-stream with some product at the end of the year, and clinical trials, and being FDA-approved. What was that all about?’
‘FDA-approved, that’s a laugh,’ he said, snorting with contempt and side-stepping the question. ‘The FDA only approves drugs that are for treating illnesses. They don’t recognize lifestyle drugs.’