FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 2021
PHILADELPHIA
JOANNA,” Sean Prior announces, “your brain is a Gothic cathedral.”
Joanna Wasserman holds eye contact with Prior and disguises her consternation. Really? A cathedral? And Gothic? Flamboyant Gothic, at least, thinks the lawyer. Why not the Taj Mahal, the pyramids, or Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas? Although briefly thrown, she still manages to find a reply.
“Well, that’s better than ‘a man’s brain.’ ”
“Excuse me?”
“Simone de Beauvoir. Her father always told her she had ‘a man’s brain.’ ”
Valdeo’s CEO gives a knowing chuckle, as if he were best buddies with Simone, her father, and their dog. Joanna laughs to herself. At best, Prior has a vague idea of who this darned Simone is, but the head of a pharmaceuticals giant worth thirty billion dollars isn’t allowed to show the teeniest flaw. A Gothic cathedral…what a pity.
Joanna has come to Valdeo’s head office in Philadelphia with a young associate lawyer who’s handling the files—and who carries them around too. The pharmaceuticals company has been a client of Denton & Lovell for seven years, mostly for fiscal issues and takeover bids; she’s been working on it for three months, and for two months now Prior has been her direct contact. At their first meeting, Prior turned to her, and with the slow Texan phrasing that he cultivates and the smile like that of a top carnivore, he asked her a question.
“Tell me, Ms. Wasserman, do you know why I chose you from all the dickheads at Denton and Lovell?”
“Let me guess, Mr. Prior. Because I was first in my class at Stanford—maybe; because I’m a young woman—probably; because I’m black—definitely. And also because I win all my cases against the old white guys who were at Harvard with you.”
Prior laughed out loud.
“Exactly right, and because you’re definitely the only one who would dare give a reply like that.”
“In my case, Mr. Prior, I took you on as a client simply because you can tolerate me.”
Prior, who can never bear not to have the last word, added, “But don’t forget that I also went to Carnegie Mellon.”
A tie. Ever since this jousting match, Joanna Wasserman and Sean Prior have pretended to be the best of friends. To speak as equals. Prior makes it a point of honor, this is his big moment of—relative—social and racial diversity, when the multimillion-dollar inheritor takes pride, even revels, in being able to converse without a trace of condescension with a hotshot little black girl from Houston, a scholarship student who deserves affirmative action, the daughter of an electrician and a seamstress (he made sure he had all the details).
Despite the differences between them—thirty-three years, two billion dollars in stock options, and a set of sparkling veneers—they both make profligate use of each other’s first names when they talk, and this colors their conversations with a refined touch of venomous hypocrisy. If the English language had such niceties, they would use the familiar “you” singular, rather than the more formal “you” plural. Like a middle-class man claiming to be friends with his gardener, Prior allows himself to believe in this fictitious friendship, but Joanna isn’t fooled at all. In Prior’s fixed grin she can read the unspeakable Southern characteristics that hover about him, the signs and symbolic nuances that pervade all interracial exchanges; she recognizes the spontaneous gesture that allows a rich white woman with perfect hair to give her black chauffeur her most radiant smile, a devastatingly affected smile that reveals her imperious conviction that this descendant of a slave is beneath her, the poisoned smile that hasn’t moved an inch since Gone with the Wind, the same smile that, all through her childhood, Joanna saw appear on the powdered faces of her seamstress mother’s clients.
One day, toward the close of the twentieth century, when Joanna was waiting for the school bus at the end of the day, a big, shiny black car stopped alongside her, the tinted rear window was lowered, and a classmate offered to give her a ride, with a smile that simply said she’d be happy to spend a few more minutes with Joanna.
“Of course, Joanna,” the friend’s mother said, “get in, we’ll make a little detour to drop you off, it’s nothing.” “It’s nothing.” Joanna understood: the irritated mother had given in to her daughter’s insistence. And she stepped into the back of the big German sedan, with her friend. The lady at the wheel was keen to show that she was polite, to make conversation.
“So, Joanna, what do you want to be when you grow up? Not a seamstress like your mother, surely?”
Joanna didn’t reply. When she arrived home, she threw herself into her mother’s arms, her eyes glistening. She hugged her and then took out her schoolbooks. The arrogance of one sentence had just created the most grateful of daughters and the most hardworking of students.
Twenty years later Joanna knows where she comes from and where she’s going. Most of all she knows that for this Hexachlorion lawsuit—in which many of the affected workers are women, almost all of them of color—a black female lawyer as pugnacious as she is will move the goalposts and temper the opponents’ aggression. That’s what Prior’s banking on, anyway. Joanna has even realized that if she was going to be his lawyer, he wanted her to be taken on by D & L, despite what she’d hoped were dissuasively ambitious salary demands; she was immediately allocated one and only one client: Valdeo. Better than that (and a real rarity), the practice made her a partner straightaway.
The wide windows in Prior’s office, on the top floor of a tall 1930s building, look out over the Delaware River. In the presence of visitors Prior can’t help pacing the room with a satisfied, proprietorial air, and pretending to lose himself in contemplation of the river, his arms crossed and his chin tilted up like Mussolini. The young lawyer always grants him these extended moments of supposedly meditative posturing, not least because she’s here with an associate today, and between them they put a fifty-dollar price tag on every minute. She pointed this out to him once, and Prior dredged some decorously cynical words from his memory: if money weren’t so overrated we’d value it less…the saying is not his own, but Prior likes to quote. In a managerial world where any literary erudition is incongruous, he has made it a powerful instrument of symbolic domination. And when the threat loomed of a criminal case over Hexachlorion, an insecticide released on the market before all the tests were validated, when the board of directors showed signs of anxiety, Prior masterfully pulverized their precautionary approach: “My dear fellow board members, I often think of that magnificent poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson that ends with these words: ‘Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.’ So yes, in the endless struggle to feed the human race, we will leave a trail.”
Hexachlorion…The fact that Joanna is here in this office is down to this active molecule that inhibits certain insects from developing beyond the larval stage. Valdeo synthesized it in the 2000s, the patent has subsequently come into the public domain, and other companies currently manufacture it. But all the evidence now shows that it is highly carcinogenic, even in low doses, and it is also a hormone disruptor. Now that Austin Baker have launched a class action, Valdeo risks having to pay hundreds of millions in compensation.
“Let’s talk about the case, if you’d like to, Sean. With sixty-five patients to date accusing Valdeo of imprecaution, this could prove extremely expensive for us.”
Joanna is very keen on the word “imprecaution,” a neologism that assumes the absence of intentionality. She’s also rather taken with that “us,” which demonstrates how closely her firm identifies with its clients’ interests.
“Tell me, Sean,” she continues, “is Austin Baker likely to provide proof that Valdeo knew how dangerous the molecule was and hid the fact from the people working with it?”
“I can’t see how they would.”
“If you are asked a question like that in court, say anything except ‘I can’t see how they would.’ The way I formulated the question was unreasonable and I would object to it. Start by reiterating that the molecule is harmless.”
“Of course it is. Our clinical trials at the time contradict the independent studies that Austin Baker is lining up.”
“Perfect. But reiterate it all the same. It’ll be one set of experts against another, Sean. Our problem is your former engineer, Francis Goldhagen. He claims that Valdeo chose not to take into account his tests proving that Hexachlorion is harmful.”
“We had reservations about his procedures and dismissed his conclusions. We also did some investigating, and his private life proves that he’s capable of lying, to his wife at least.”
The lawyer sighs. Winning the case with methods like that could damage the practice’s image in the medium term. But losing it in the short term is not an option either.
“I wouldn’t want to discredit him like that. Valdeo would not come out of it covered in glory, nor would the justice system.”
“You know something, Joanna, justice is like a mother’s love, everyone’s pretty much in favor of it…on the subject of families, Joanna, how’s your sister?”
He knows, the lawyer realizes instantly. Obviously. Prior, who’s commissioned investigations into her weaknesses, Prior knows that last February her little sister was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis. He also knows that a young student like Ellen is bound to have taken out standard health insurance before acknowledging, to her horror, that it doesn’t cover PSC. Prior believes that Joanna accepted her handsomely paid position at Denton & Lovell only for Ellen’s sake. Without the two-hundred-thousand-dollar liver transplant, Ellen would already be dead, and it will now take at least a hundred thousand a year, a hundred thousand dollars, just for her to live what, ten years, maybe fifteen, in the hopes that her waiflike body can withstand the cholangitis and hold out until someone finds a treatment, perhaps. But Prior is wrong. The salary made a difference, of course, but Joanna wanted this career pinnacle, this great mound of money, from whose summit she could survey the full extent of her revenge.
The CEO keeps talking, slipping all the solemnity he can muster into his voice.
“What she’s going through is terrible. Please believe me when I say I’m thinking of you with all my heart.”
“I’m…very touched.”
“If your sister needs anything, Joanna, we couldn’t be in a better position to help you. Clinics, drugs, new protocols…”
“Thank you, Sean. For now, we just need the liver transplant to take. But I’ll remember your offer. Could we get back to the class action against Hexachlorion, please. I’m going to ask my colleague, Mr. Spencer, to summarize our planned defense for you.”
The young lawyer hardly has time to finish his presentation before Sean signals, with just a tilt of his chin, that he accepts Denton & Lovell’s strategy for the defense. He shakes their hands, indicating that as far as he is concerned the meeting is over. When Joanna is about to follow Spencer out of the office, he calls her back.
“Joanna, I wanted to offer you an opportunity. To join our meeting at the Dolder club tomorrow evening, Saturday. You know about the Dolder, don’t you?”
Joanna nods. She knows. A very exclusive club even more restricted than its template, the Bilderberg. But while the Bilderberg brings together about a hundred leading figures from the worlds of business and politics, the Dolder comprises only twenty patrons, the elite of big pharma: over the last fifty years, no one has known when these meetings are held, nor what is discussed. It’s possible that the price of medicines is negotiated, that tidy arrangements “between friends” are agreed, and long-term game plans determined. The conspiratorial plotters can have a field day. Prior smiles.
“I will introduce you as my personal advisor, which, in my view, you are. The meeting is to be held in the United States this year, so the honor of making the opening speech falls to me, as an American. You’ll like the theme, it’s ‘The End of Death.’ Julius Braun—yes, the 2020 Nobel Prize winner—will make a presentation of his work on the phylogenetics of embryos, and there will be two other speakers: what they have to say will blow your mind. My apologies for telling you about this at such short notice, you know how paranoid this sector is. It will be in Manhattan, in the Van Gogh room at the Surrey on the Upper East Side. Could you be there for eight o’clock?”
Joanna casts around for a way to say Yes, it’s an honor, Sean, but sadly the invitation comes a little too late and I’m afraid I won’t…But she instinctively brings her hand to rest on her stomach in a protective gesture, a primitive gesture. Because there’s one thing Prior doesn’t know: Joanna is pregnant.
It was exactly seven weeks ago: she did the test in Denton & Lovell’s restrooms, between some sashimi eaten on the run and a partners meeting. And when the two little garnet-colored lines appeared on the stick, Joanna felt her chest explode with jubilation.
The man Joanna loves is a newspaper cartoonist. In late October last year a neo-Nazi leader filed a complaint about one of his drawings, deeming it injurious; she represented his newspaper in court and won the case resoundingly. Keller v. Wasserman set a precedent: the act of writing, in a cartoon or elsewhere, that a white supremacist lacks gray matter is not an offense but an opinion, a diagnosis even. It was easy. That same evening, Aby Wasserman invited her to dinner at Tomba’s, a restaurant that was too expensive for him, and, at the end of the meal, confronted with his heart’s irrefutable certainty, he asked her stumblingly what plans she had for the next few centuries. He refrained from telling her he was put on this earth to love her and go wherever she went, even though that was so exactly what he was thinking. Joanna was in no doubt either. He gave her a fountain pen, Here, this is for you, Joanna, it’s a Waterman, which isn’t far from my own German name, um…my name that I’d like you to take, but I’d be happy to take yours too, you know. Joanna accepted the pen, opened it, and right there on the white cotton tablecloth, she wrote Joanna Woods-Wasserman, trying to avoid getting too teary. The manager agreed to let them keep the tablecloth.
They wanted a baby right away, and followed the necessary procedures to achieve this, frequently, at great length, and in many locations. The doctor was sure: It was after Joanna returned from Europe in early March, on that appalling flight—when she decided that if she survived, she would marry him as soon as possible—and before their wedding in early April that their gametes had met and immediately agreed to a merger. They will never know how to thank white supremacism. In fact, suggested the Jewish Aby, short for Abraham, if it’s a boy, we’ll call him Adolf. As a middle name, Joanna moderated, laughing. And she immediately hated herself for being so happy when her sister was preparing to die a long, slow death. But a few ounces of happiness were growing inside her, and they took over everything.
Prior pursues his invitation.
“Joanna? The Dolder?”
Tomorrow evening? Complicated: she was planning on celebrating the end of the first three months of her pregnancy with her parents…On the other hand, meeting the devil to dance with him does have its upsides.
She doesn’t have time to make a decision, because a heavy black telephone, a Bakelite antique, starts ringing on Prior’s desk. He picks up immediately and snaps irritably, “I asked not to be disturbed…All right…I’ll let her know.”
Prior turns to Joanna with an intrigued smile.
“This will probably surprise you, Joanna, but there are people waiting for you outside my office. Two FBI agents. I’m still counting on you for tomorrow, if they’ll agree to let you go, obviously.”