Fatal Reaction

All-nighters were so common in the deal-driven areas of law that some firms employed three shifts of support staff to provide coverage around the clock.
    A friend of mine from law school liked to tell a story about clerking for a firm in New York that specialized in mergers and acquisitions. One night her husband had woken up at four o’clock in the morning alarmed to find her not there. Worried, he called her office only to have the receptionist inform him politely that his wife would have to call him back because she was in a meeting.
    “The Japanese faxed us a proposal today and Stephen wants us to have our reply ready by tomorrow morning,” I explained.
    “You be careful with the Japanese,” warned Michelle.
    “Why’s that?”
    “They have a way of kidnapping people.”
    “Kidnapping?” I demanded. “I’ve heard them accused of a lot of things, but never kidnapping.”
    “Not literally,” Michelle replied seriously, “but what they do is every bit as dangerous.”
    “And what is it that they do, exactly?”
    “They dangle their money in front of you and ask you to do backflips for it. But what happens is that in the end you spend so much time working on your backflip that you lose sight of the fact that you’re a scientist and not an acrobat.”
    “I guess it was hard when Okuda walked away from the deal for the integrase project.”
    Michelle shrugged, noncommittally. “Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on me,” she said.
     
    I had the first draft of the proposal on Stephen’s desk at precisely four minutes to nine. While he read it I paced the floor nervously. I’d gotten my second wind somewhere around sunrise and I wasn’t tired. From experience I knew this second wave of energy would carry me for most of the day, right up until the time when accumulated fatigue hit me like a ten-pound sledgehammer in the late afternoon.
    Stephen immediately lit upon two potential problems in the royalty structure—hidden grenades, he called them. We spent half an hour brainstorming a way to defuse them. By the time we had worked out the details it was time for Stephen to head to that morning’s project council meeting for the Hemasyn group. Even more important, it was time for Neiman Marcus to open.
    At ten o’clock on the dot, I consulted my address book and phoned the manager of Neiman Marcus’s downtown store. His name was Mr. Riccardi and he was only one of the legion of Chicago retailers willing to fall on their swords at the merest mention of my mother’s name. Like everyone whose job it is to cater to the well-to-do, when I told him what I needed he asked no questions and assured me it would be done.
    That accomplished, I spent the next couple hours drafting Azor’s final counterproposal. I knew any one of the secretaries would have been happy to do it for me, but I feared a fresh typist would only make fresh mistakes and besides, having gotten it to this point alone, I almost preferred to do it myself.
    Once I was finished I took the elevator to the ninth floor and hand-carried the document to Stephen personally for his signature. Having never had occasion to go beyond the first floor, I was mildly surprised to find myself in a parallel universe—labs, lunchrooms, all laid out the same way as for the ZK-501 project, except devoted to different problems.
    Once Stephen signed the proposal and the cover letter, I took them back downstairs to my office and, with a sense of occasion, loaded the pages into the fax. My packages were delivered just as I finished. I accepted the two maroon-and-gold shopping bags, thanked the messenger, and shut the door behind him. Then I carefully closed the blinds and emptied the contents of the two bags onto the desk. Enshrouded in tissue was a slate blue Dana Buchman jacket with a black wool skirt. There were also a cream-colored silk blouse, two pairs of DKNY pantyhose—size tall—and an assortment of Hanro cotton underwear.
    Some kind soul had tucked in a cosmetics bag crammed with sample sizes of all kinds of makeup and perfume, which, according to the embossed notecard I found inside, the manager of the Oak Brook store urged me to accept with his greatest compliments. I picked up the pocket tape recorder from my desk and dictated a quick thank-you note for Cheryl to type before throwing the manager’s notecard into the trash.
    I stripped out of yesterday’s clothes gratefully and told myself that at this point clean underwear was