Intuition (27 page)

“Excellent.” He leaned over her shoulder to see the page.

“‘What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer . . .'” Her voice trembled a little as she read. She hoped he'd see why she had chosen the essay—that he would understand all she meant by it: all the lies and doubts and ugliness of the investigation would come to nothing; in the end the truth of what he'd done and what her father and Marion and the whole lab had achieved would come out. “‘Truth is a naked, and open day-light,'” she read, “‘that doth not show the masks, and mummeries, and triumphs, of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day, but it will not rise to the price of a diamond, or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights . . .'”

“Hold on. Slow down,” he said.

“Do you want to read it yourself?”

“I'm a bit . . . I just need to follow a little more slowly,” he said. “So the truth is a pearl—and what was the diamond again?”

“He doesn't say, exactly. Maybe half-truths are the diamonds and carbuncles, because they're faceted. They're more complicated, so they look better in candlelight.”

“Oh, yeah, of course.” He looked through the archway in the entrance hall to the dining room table, which flickered with the soft light of Ann's Hanukkah candles. “What does a carbuncle look like, anyway? I thought a carbuncle was a big, ugly, festering sore.”

“It's a jewel,” she said.

“I don't think so.”

“It is.”

“How much do you want to bet?” he asked her.

She picked at the hem of her new black dress. “Nothing,” she said.

“You'll bet me nothing. You don't seem very confident.”

“I know I'm right,” she said. “You can look it up.”

“All right, let's look it up, then. Where's the dictionary?”

She led him into the library, and then into her mother's office, beyond. She turned on the desk lamp in the little room, which had once been a screened-in porch and then was converted into Ann's writing space. The battered wood desk was covered with stacks of graded papers. A well-thumbed volume of Darwin's letters lay open near the computer, along with credit card bills and shopping lists, and paperweights of clay and painted wood, framed pictures, a miniature Kate, and a shockingly young and bearded Sandy, clasping a baby and two little girls. Cliff hesitated in the doorway. Guests weren't meant to come inside Ann's office.

But Kate was already opening the
American Heritage Dictionary
right on top of her mother's papers on the desk. Briskly she was flipping through the Cs. “Come, look,” she said. “Carbuncle.”

“Ha!” said Cliff. “‘A painful localized bacterial infection of the skin through which pus is discharged.'”

“Okay, fine,” she conceded, sounding a little like her father. “But look at definition two: ‘A deep red garnet.' And in this case, Bacon was talking about precious gems. So I'm right.” She shut the book.

“I think you're just half right,” said Cliff.

“Well, in the context of the essay I'm completely right.”

“So truth depends on context?”

“It shouldn't,” Kate said.

“But sometimes it does,” he said.

“I'm not going to let you get away with that.”

“No?” He reached past her to turn off the light so they could go. “What would you say then?”

“Lots of things.” But she was far too flustered by his presence in the sudden darkness to argue.

6

Wedding of Angeli and Nate was 100 in the shade. I walked home barefoot from the T. My heel was bleeding. C. carried my shoes and a goldfish even though I said . . .

R
OBIN SHUT
the diary on her lawyer's desk. The very sight of the open pages made her cringe.

“Can they
really do this?” Robin asked her lawyer.

“Yes, they really can subpoena your notes, and your lab books, and your personal diary. They can indeed,” her lawyer told her. She was a scrappy attorney named Laura Sabbatini: wiry, with small glasses, a freckled face, and short, spiky brown hair. When she spoke, Sabbatini spoke with emphasis, as one accustomed to instructing small children, or to explaining the world to those less brilliant, or more naïve, than she. She did both frequently, for she was the mother of two small boys, and by far the brightest associate at Brooks, Weinbach, McCabe. She was a little tornado of activity, and she had what people variously called a killer instinct, a cutthroat mentality, or a mean streak. As she understood it, she'd earned her moniker as a killer simply because she liked to work.

“Not my journal,” Robin said. She'd already acceded to Hackett's arguments that her case was better served with primary documents and sent him Cliff's original notes by registered mail. Giving in to ORIS had been bad enough.

“Your journal is some of the best evidence we have,” said Sabbatini.

“They'll try to use it against me.”

“Oh, two can play that game,” Sabbatini told her. “Where was that section?” She leafed through the bound composition book. “Yeah, I like this part.” She adjusted her glasses.

I said I didn't want to and he said why not. I told
him it was too soon but he said he didn't think so. Accused
him of not listening, but. . . .

“Stop. Stop!” cried Robin, covering her ears.

Sabbatini looked up, amused. “When it comes to relationships in the workplace, it's a very, very thin line between consensual sex and sexual harassment. So if Cliff and company want to use your diary, they'd better watch their backs.”

Robin took a moment to assimilate this. Six months after she'd left the lab, her questions were not hers anymore; her doubts had grown into weather systems of their own, her single intuition now transformed into a conspiracy theory implicating not only Cliff but nearly everyone who worked around him. After working so closely with him for so long, why hadn't Feng spoken up about Cliff's unorthodox record keeping? How could Marion, famous for overseeing every detail, have allowed Cliff to work virtually unsupervised? Had they not seized rapaciously on the promise of Cliff's work? Starved for results, they'd conjured up a banquet. Cliff had begun, and then the others followed, and the entire scientific community began to partake. Weren't they all, then, eating air?

“I don't want to use my diary as a weapon,” she told Sabbatini.

“But it is a weapon,” Sabbatini shot back, as if she relished the thought.

At times like this, Robin felt as if she'd stepped through the looking glass into another world, where lawyers and politicians were the true investigators and scientists the pawns. Here, evidence was personal, not chemical or biological. She looked around her in this alien landscape and she understood that she was being used.

Nevertheless, she had information that deserved publicity; she had rescued data that deserved a hearing, and the inquiry had provided Robin with an audience. In the land of ORIS, Robin's suspicion was praised as insight; her frustration called prescience; her skepticism no longer deemed self-destructive jealousy, but valuable, honest, and rare. Publicity had its price, but so did silence. She'd had no choice but to let her doubts loose, and watch and worry as the lawyers on the other side gave chase.

“I don't want you to twist my words around,” she warned Sabbatini.

“I'm just saying—they start twisting, and we'll twist back,” said Sabbatini. “Hey, listen to me. The nastier this gets, the better off we'll be. The more personal and ad hominem they are, the better. Bring it on! The more mud the merrier. You know why, don't you? Because they're desperate. They are so desperate.” Sabbatini bounced a little in her chair. “You still don't believe me, do you? Let's draw up a little balance sheet, okay? Let me see. What have you got? You've got ORIS seriously questioning the lab's integrity, you've got Redfield on the warpath, you've got the press smelling blood, you've got an incipient scandal and cover-up going on at the institute. You've got the truth. Not to mention—me! And I've told you about the Secret Service. They've started their ink analysis on Cliff's notes. They're going to do the forensics to find out exactly how many pens Cliff really used there, and whether some of that data is really much older, or whether it was all from the same set and he really just left some of it out. You thought those questions that you asked would never get a real answer, but they will be answered. You've got the Secret Service on your side. You've got cutting-edge technology. Now, what do they have? Hmm. They have their prevarications; they have their pride; they have your diary.”

“But I don't want them to have my diary,” Robin said, fretting.

Laura Sabbatini knit her fingers together and rested her chin on her hands. “Oh, come on, Robin,” she chided, as though Robin were afraid of spiders. “You have practically the entire government working on your case.”

“That's an exaggeration,” Robin said.

“And the whole world ready to take up pitchforks for your cause.”

“It was just one op/ed piece,” said Robin.

“All right. So almost the whole world. We're going in there and shooting down the liars and the cheats and blowing the cover off an entire culture of scientific finessing and fraud. Don't tell me you're expecting this thing to be pretty, too.”

The inquiry wasn't pretty, and that was just what Nanette liked about it. She phoned Robin regularly and left messages in a breathless Mata Hari voice. The two of them met for coffee at Café Algiers, surrounded by its red walls and polished brass samovars. They sat at the back where the kitchen door swung open to reveal Yasser Arafat's picture pasted on the wall, and Nanette predicted the downfall of the institute. She was sure the ORIS inquiry was going to bring the Philpott crashing to earth, and Robin thought she seemed strangely eager for this catastrophe, considering the institute was Nanette's employer.

“Doesn't matter,” Nanette said blithely. “I could get a job at MIT in a minute. I'm good.”

“True,” said Robin.

“The only question,” said Nanette, “is whether Harvard dismantles us, or we implode from scandal and misspending first. You saw the article in the
Globe,
didn't you? ‘Philpott Near Empty: Hard Choices at the Cambridge Institute'? Actually, that was just Part I.”

“I know,” said Robin, who had been contacted for an interview for Part II.

“Everybody's running scared. I can't tell you. People are starting to hoard media,” Nanette declared, exaggerating just a little. “They're coming in with double orders, upping the amounts so they can run more trials at once. It's a psychological thing, like the way people act before a blizzard, or a war. With the audit and Redfield's shit list and all, people aren't even sure where their next grant is coming from.” Nanette stretched out her legs and rotated her tiny feet slowly. “I'm working ten-hour days. Do you see the swelling in my ankles? My doctor says my job is exacerbating my edema.”

Robin looked down with some concern. Nanette's ankles were in fact puffing out over her shoes.

“I'm supposed to keep them elevated, but I have to use the foot pedal.” Nanette shrugged and smiled. “See, I can't wait for the committee hearings. It would really be better for me if the institute went belly-up.”

“You don't mean that.”

“Oh, it would be so fascinating. I love to watch chronic overachieving SOBs scramble. The people who never give their underlings the time of day. Little words like
please
or
thank you
. All the type As killing their postdocs and ignoring their wives for the sake of science; fighting tooth and nail to get ahead. Everybody and their neuroses just running for cover. I love comeuppance.” She clasped her hands together. “Comeuppance is such a beautiful thing. I just adore it.”

“But where would I work, then?” Robin asked.

“Work!” Nanette shrieked. “You'd be writing your tell-all book. You wouldn't ever need to work again.”

“But I don't want to tell all: Who would hire me? That's the last thing I would ever do,” said Robin. “I love research.” She said it so softly, Nanette had to lean in to hear the words.

“You what?” Nanette took Robin's hand in hers. “You love what?” She shook her head, mystified. “You poor, poor girl.” Nanette threw up her hands. “She loves research.”

7

T
HE FESTIVITIES
in the lounge were for Prithwish and his bride, Sarojini, who had finally returned from Sri Lanka and set up house in an apartment on Elmer Street. There was wine and cheese and there were blue tins of Danish butter cookies. Aidan had rigged up the slide projector to display pictures of the wedding on the wall so that the beige room filled with silk and gold and sun. There was laughter and teasing, and ogling of the banquet, but the party was subdued. Outside, the dirty snow had begun to melt, and each pale evening was strengthening and growing longer. The hearing was twelve days away.

“It's been a good week,” Sandy insisted to Marion after the others had gone.

“Good for what?” she asked. “We got almost nothing done.” The pressure of the hearings, the dread of them, had built until the most mundane tasks required almost superhuman concentration.

“Nothing done? We've got letters of support from the Chinese Consulate, and the Asian Law Caucus, and the ACLU. We've got Houghton-Smith's protest against journalists for colluding in a case against academic freedom. Then there's my letter, of course. Did you see the new draft?”

He took her hand and pulled her down the hall and into the office. “Sit down. Now, take a look at this.”

“‘In Defense of Science,'” she murmured. “‘An open letter.'”

“Read it aloud,” he urged her.

“‘When the NIH feeds unproved accusations to Congress; when scientific disputes are judged by the representatives of government agencies . . .'” she intoned.

“No, not like that, Marion. Can't you hear? There's a rhythm to it. Let me.” He snatched the page from her hands. “‘When scientific data are subpoenaed at the will and whim of Congress; when the Secret Service is employed to analyze personal papers; when characters and careers are shattered, and vital publications suspended purely by suspicion; when scientists are attacked, intimidated, and assumed guilty until proven innocent; when the public discourse about science is polluted by assertions of negligence and fraud; when the scientific community is maligned as weak, corrupt, and incapable of regulating itself independent of government interference,
then we believe
science itself is under siege. The intellectual freedoms we cherish in America are at stake.'” He looked up at her.

“Was that the preamble?”

“Exactly.” He was as proud of that letter as he'd been of anything in his life. “But look at the end. Look at the signature.”

“Peter Hawking.”

“You can say it,” he told her. “I'm brilliant.”

She shook her head at him. The signature was a stroke of genius. He'd crafted a Jeffersonian defense of science that the director of an embattled institute could champion with dignity—and disseminate among his colleagues.

“We've got the signatures of eleven Nobel laureates, counting Peter,” he told her. “I'm shooting for twenty. Then we start publishing in the major newspapers.”

“Sometimes I think you're actually enjoying this,” she said.

“False accusations? Attempts to bring us down?” he shot back. “Absolutely not. But if you're talking about fighting the good fight, and tackling the other side—then, yes, I admit I do enjoy that. I
will
enjoy it.” He placed his manifesto on her desk. “And I'm sure,” he said softly, “you worry enough for both of us.”

Cliff was the last one in the lab that night. Sometime after midnight he began packing up. He perched on his stool and rummaged through the papers on his bench top until he turned up the book that had arrived that day. The volume was a paperback copy of
Bleak House,
which had come with a message: “Dear Cliff: If any novel reflects the times we live in, this is it.” Kate had sent the book and the brief note—the drafts had been much longer. She'd thought and thought about what she could do, and then settled on the book because he'd always asked her for some piece of literature. Cliff smiled faintly and opened the little paperback to Chapter One. “London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets . . .” His eye skipped down. “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping . . .”

Kate had begun to write: “I hadn't understood before that American bureaucracy could act in such Dickensian ways, crushing innocent people in its path.” And then she'd crumpled up the paper and written: “The machinery of government and its self-serving ends, added to the ignorance of bureaucrats swayed by irresponsible accusations, make Charles Dickens seem prescient, to say the least.” But that managed to sound stentorian and prissy at the same time. She had wanted to say that she trusted and believed everything would be all right—without sounding Pollyannaish. She'd wanted to tell him what she knew about her father, but it was hard to put into words. She knew that, difficult as he could be, her father was just too clever to lose a battle like this one. She knew that he would protect Cliff in the pinch, that in the end her father was the one you wanted on your side.

Sandy Glass was much on his daughters' minds. The girls had often fretted about his sharp words and demanding expectations, but they had never felt protective of him before. Now, as the time came for Sandy to travel down to Washington, his daughters began to worry. Louisa made her way down MIT's Infinite Corridor, lined with club posters and classrooms and computer labs, and office doors windowed with old-fashioned white glass, and she imagined him coming under fire, attacked for supporting his young postdocs' work. She had often been annoyed by her father, and frustrated by him, but she was surprised now by how proud she was of him. He could have distanced himself from his postdocs' work. Instead, he chose to champion Cliff and Feng and rally other scientists around their cause.

Her father was loyal. Marion was loyal, too, of course, but as always, Sandy was the active, vocal one. He was the one on the front lines, championing his postdocs' work—defending Marion, as well. What would she have done without him?

Louisa longed to go to the hearing, to sit in her father's corner. Characteristically, however, Sandy dismissed the idea. “I've never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. You will not be missing classes for this particular exercise in futility, and I am not going to have this whole family at the beck and call of Mr. Redfield.”

He was so brave. Would he go to the Capitol and get ambushed there? Would he say something impolitic? He was fond of the beau geste and, Louisa fretted, more of a debater than a strategist. She did not speak of her concern, however. If Louisa had her mother's tender nature, she had her father's impenetrably cheerful manner, as well. She deflected any questions from friends with a laugh and a wave of the hand.

Louisa could avoid the subject, but up the river at Harvard, Charlotte did not have the luxury. Just days before her father flew to Washington, she sat down for dinner with Jeff in the dark-paneled Dunster House dining hall, and he said, “We got a pass to attend the hearings.”

“What?” She drew back.

“We got a press pass at the
Crimson,
” he told her.

They were sitting at a long trestle table, their green cafeteria trays resting on polished wood. Portraits of former house masters lined the vaulted hall, along with the stuffed head of an unfortunate moose.

“I want to go,” he said.

“No you don't,” she told him.

“I really do,” he confessed. Ever since he'd interviewed Cliff, he'd followed the story of R-7. He'd read all the articles about Feng, and gazed, fascinated, as one might ponder the portrait of a serial killer, at the black-and-white photo of Robin in
The Boston Globe.

“You do not want to go,” Charlotte said, aghast. “It's a conflict of interest, for one thing, and you know it.”

“I wouldn't write the story,” he said, hedging. “It's just that I have all the background on the research. Actually, it turns out I did practically the only extensive interview of Cliff Bannaker before the inquiry. My story is pretty much the only record of his side of—”

“What are you
thinking
?” Charlotte demanded. “It would be totally unethical for you to go to the hearing. I can't believe you're even suggesting it. No journalist would do something like that.”

“Well . . .” he began, but the conversation was going badly, and he didn't want to upset her more. He refrained from telling her he had been contacted by several publications interested in his perspective, his insights about where the ORIS investigation might lead.

“This is my father we're talking about,” said Charlotte, half rising in her seat.

“I know,” said Jeff. “I know it's your father.”

“Right, of course you know. How else would you have gotten the interview with Cliff in the first place?”

“I only said I wished I could go,” he said. “I didn't say I was going.”

“I can't believe you would even suggest going down there to DC—to watch.”

“I'm sorry,” he told her, and he meant it, but the undergraduate in him, a little too young, a little too eager, couldn't help adding, “It's just . . . it's going to be a great story.”

“I'm sure you'd love it,” Charlotte burst out. “I'm sure you'd love a ringside seat. What is wrong with you?”

“I'm not going,” he said. “I am absolutely not going, and I apologize.”

But it was too late. Self-promotion had yielded to self-preservation too late. Charlotte sprang up in a fury, tray in hand. Her uneaten Salisbury steak, twice-baked potatoes, and green beans sloshed together on her plate. Astonished and aggravated at her father's prescience about her boyfriend, she slammed her tray onto the table and tossed her cranberry juice straight into Jeff's face.

Loud cheers from a table of rugby players followed Charlotte as she left the dining hall, and the hapless Jeff Yudelstein behind.

Of course, he understood her point of view much better in retrospect, and regretted every word he'd said. But Jeff had not yet learned to feign sensitivity before he felt any, nor did he know how to pretend diffidence. He couldn't help looking forward to the subcommittee hearings. He had worked and slept in the little brick
Crimson
building for nights on end, and he'd been bitten by the bug, the intense desire to divulge, to tap and crack the events of the day. As young scientists thrill at possible discoveries, and young painters open their eyes to the infinite shades and colors of light, so Jeff had awakened to the world of politics and public affairs. That world was so complex and new to him, its power struggles, its adjudications, its dissemblings so enticing, how could he not want to go to Washington, to attend the hearings there?

All the rest of that week he walked through the Yard hating himself, cursing his stupidity. He sat in darkened lecture halls composing apologies, utterly distracted by regret for what had passed, and yet, even then, he could not stop thinking about the hearings. Heartsick though he was, he could not suppress his curiosity.