The Last Trial Page 4

  Sonny has been watching Stern so intently that she seems to draw back at realizing Moses is in the room.

  “I think I see where this is going, Mr. Appleton. Mr. Stern, are you outlining the evidence that will go to the issues of motive that Mr. Appleton addressed?”

  “Just so, Your Honor.” Stern offers the judge his deepest bow yet, before revolving toward the jurors. “Her Honor has understood me precisely. My point is simple. The potential to save millions and millions of lives explains the rush to get g-Livia approved by the FDA and in the hands of doctors and patients. The overwhelming goal, purely and simply, was extending lives, Lord knows not ending them, and not, as Mr. Appleton supposes, making hundreds of millions of dollars. You will learn that Kiril had plenty of money already.”

  “Objection,” says Moses. “Dr. Pafko’s wealth is not proper evidence under the cases.”

  Sonny frowns. She seems to recognize that Moses’s objections, now uncharacteristically frequent, are an effort to throw Stern off stride.

  “I assume you are moving on, Mr. Stern?”

  “Just so,” says Stern, then comes inches from the jury rail, so he again has their full attention. “What the evidence will show you beyond question is that Kiril Pafko’s entire adult life has been focused singularly on one aim: conquering cancer and sparing lives. Virtually every working moment, in the lab at Easton, in his office at PT, has been dedicated to saving you and me.” These last words, an appeal to the jurors’ personal interests, is improper, but Stern is still capable of complex and instantaneous calculations in the courtroom, even though he routinely struggles to operate his cell phone. He knows that Moses has cornered himself and cannot pop up again to object without looking like a brat.

  “So this, then, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the fundamental task before you. You must decide whether the evidence has convinced you beyond a reasonable doubt that a person who has stood on the very highest peak of scientific achievement, a physician revered around the world, a researcher whose name will be remembered long after he, and many of the rest of us, have ended our time on this planet, a doctor, a teacher, a leader, a remarkable innovator, a Nobel Prize winner who has labored for five decades now to end the curse of cancer and to prolong millions and millions of lives, whether it is even possible, let alone proven beyond a reasonable doubt, that that same man has become in his last years a fraud and a murderer.”

  Stern stares down the jury in a second of utter silence before shaking his head vigorously enough to feel the loose flesh wobbling beneath his chin.

  “We say that could not happen.

  “We say that did not happen.

  “We say you will find Kiril Pafko not guilty.”

  5. Innocent

  The moments after a trial session ends have always felt to Stern like the aftermath of a play, as the pin-drop silence gives way abruptly to hubbub. In Sonny’s courtroom, the spectators drift to the doors, while the reporters, eager to file their stories, edge ahead. Members of the judge’s office staff climb the stairs to the bench to bring Her Honor messages. In the meantime, a herd of attorneys who were waiting in the corridor sift in for Sonny’s next matter.

  Stern steers his client across the corridor to the attorney-witness room to brief Kiril on what is ahead tomorrow and to wait for the wide-eared reporters loitering in the hallway to disperse. This is where those who are to testify wait before being called into the courtroom, and where attorneys can offer brief counsel to their clients. The preservationists who lovingly tend the public areas of the courthouse don’t pay any attention here. The old desk is splintered on its edges, and the wooden barrel chairs are shaky. A single nondescript travel poster for the Skageon region up north hangs askew on the wall beside a discolored venetian blind.

  As soon as they are alone, Kiril grasps Stern’s hand between both of his own. Pafko’s liver-spotted flesh is bedecked in gold, a ring the size of a doubloon and a heavy Rolex on his wrist.

  “I stole several glances at the jury,” Pafko says about the opening, “and they could not take their eyes from you.” Stern tempers his pleasure in his client’s compliments with the knowledge that Kiril has never abandoned the Argentinian way and frequently brings forth a river of fulsome bullshit.

  Stern briefs Kiril on what to expect tomorrow when the testimony starts, then opens the door. Donatella is on a bench opposite with Dara, their daughter. Striking and dark, Dara bears a strong resemblance to her mother. As such, Dara unwittingly demonstrates what drove Kiril to pursue Donatella relentlessly decades ago in Buenos Aires, notwithstanding the fact that she was already married. As for Donatella, even in her late age, she retains strong cheekbones and penetrating dark eyes. Despite her white hair, her thick eyebrows have remained completely black, like smears of greasepaint.

  Stern directs the three Pafkos to the courthouse’s central alabaster staircase. With his cane, Stern must go one step at a time. Outside the courthouse doors, he guides Kiril and Donatella and Dara through the melee of reporters shouting questions, and the camera operators who charge like rhinos to get their close-ups. Kiril smiles and waves gamely, as if they were here to hail him, until Stern has the Pafkos safely in the black SUV that has slid to the curb, stealthy as a shark. One of Kiril’s principal indulgences since g-Livia was approved is a maroon Maserati convertible, which he drives everywhere. Stern convinced his client it is not a good idea for a man accused of a crime of greed to be photographed at the wheel of a car that costs more than a house in some local neighborhoods. Sonny has told the jurors to shun media coverage of the case, but the instruction is hard to heed for anyone who gets near any kind of screen. In a couple days, after the news organizations have their file footage and photos for the archive, Kiril will be able to drive himself again.

  Stern then clumps along the curb, greeting several reporters but otherwise saying nothing to them, until he reaches his Cadillac. The car is driven by a longtime employee of the law office, Ardent Trainor, a long, slender man in his late sixties, who alights to help Stern into the rear seat. The car still has that new-car aroma, which to Stern, in his unrelenting desire to be a real American, has always been the smell of success.

  Stern’s near-death experience on the highway back in March had many troubling consequences. His Cadillac, a gray 2017 CTS coupe, was totaled. The good news, as they say, is that insurance provided most of the cost of a replacement. The bad is that his children will not let him drive it. With Peter, Stern’s doctor son, as their leader, the three made their father promise to limit his time behind the wheel to a rare spin to the local grocery store or the dry cleaners in the little suburban town where he lives.

  In the sudden silence as the car door slams, the events of the day can finally be absorbed. Overall, he would say, so far, so good, except for blurting out about the civil settlements, which remains confounding. Every lawyer now and then loses their way as they are speaking, don’t they? The lapse, however, is unusual for him.

  Yet Stern’s principal concern is for his client, who already seems fatigued and old, but worse, uncharacteristically vague. Like many clients, during the investigation and the months leading up to trial, Pafko tried to avoid talking about the case. He has four different phone numbers—home, office, personal cell, business cell—and Stern often had to leave several messages on each line before hearing back. But now that it is all in his face, Kiril is evincing a kind of simpering optimism. Given Pafko’s age, one might even fear early dementia, but Stern knows it is more likely the decimating effect of public accusation. For white-collar defendants like Kiril, people accustomed to the power of wealth or prominence, the months after indictment are a special hell. They confront scorn in the eyes of virtually everyone who hears their name, while they are consumed by relentless anxiety over the future, in which the only certainty is it will bear no resemblance to the past.

  Yet Stern feared Kiril was on the road to this sad torment once he saw the Wall Street Journal story in August 2018. Kiril called Stern a few weeks
later to ask Sandy to represent him, within minutes of Pafko being served with a federal grand jury subpoena. The documents the government was seeking made it obvious that the prosecutors already believed the clinical trial for g-Livia had been tampered with. Stern experienced the inevitable schadenfreude of his profession. He was distressed for Kiril but thrilled for himself. A lawyer called upon to salvage the entire social existence of a person formerly held in the highest esteem is like a sorcerer being asked to turn back time. At eighty-five the opportunities to display that wizardry came, even to Sandy Stern, far more rarely. But a few days later, when Kiril had taken the seat customarily occupied by Stern’s clients, a crimson leather chair in front of Stern’s desk, better sense had prevailed. He told Kiril his best choice would be a younger lawyer, more certain to be beside him for what lay ahead.

  ‘Do you feel incapable?’ Kiril had asked. ‘To my eye, Sandy, you seem every bit the man I met forty years ago.’

  ‘Well, then, Kiril, our first task is to find someone to check your vision.’

  Kiril enjoyed the joke but nevertheless insisted. Knowing his case was in Stern’s hands, he said, would give him his first night’s sleep in weeks.

  Stern continued to resist, yet he realized that it would violate his own deeply rooted sense of loyalty to say no. The truth can be reduced to a few words: He owes Kiril Pafko his life.

  In 2007, Stern was first diagnosed with non–small-cell lung cancer. The left lobe of his lung was removed, and he underwent chemotherapy. By 2009, there was a spot on the other side and he received chemo again. In 2011, there was another recurrence and treatment with yet another drug. By 2013, he had full-blown metastatic disease. Al, his internist, who is on staff at Easton Hospital and was aware of Sandy’s friendship with Kiril, urged Stern to speak to Dr. Pafko. So far as Stern knew, he was the first human to receive g-Livia, several months before the FDA approved it for initial experimental use on patients. It was an act of mercy by Kiril for a dying friend, and one that, if disclosed, would subject Pafko to risks with both the university and the government.

  For Stern, like thousands of other cancer patients after him, the medication has been a miracle. While his cancer is not totally erased, the lesions have retreated throughout his body. For that reason, Stern feels an intense obligation to Kiril—and also to the large universe of other cancer sufferers. The FDA has declared its approval of g-Livia void. The product is off the market in the US, caught up in a maelstrom of lawsuits and administrative actions, while the FDA refuses to set conditions to make the medication available even to patients with no other hope. The outcome of Kiril’s trial will clearly push the agency one way or the other. In the meantime, Stern’s supply comes from a factory in India and is shipped across the border in brown paper and a shoebox.

  So he said yes to Kiril. Pafko, whose old face has something of the texture of a walnut, was brought close to tears.

  ‘Sandy, Sandy,’ he said, and toured around the desk to hug his friend. A good eight inches taller than Stern, Kiril held Sandy by the shoulders and sought his eye. ‘Truly, Sandy. Truly. You must believe this. What the prosecutors think, that I altered those test results. Truly, I know nothing about that.’

  Like a doctor who must face the fact that every body can be overcome by disease, Stern’s practice has taught him that almost all souls are vulnerable to wrongdoing. In Pafko’s case, there are plenty of what defense lawyers politely call ‘bad facts.’ Kiril’s declaration that he knew nothing about the rash of sudden deaths on g-Livia is flatly contradicted by a screenshot of the clinical trial database, before it was altered, that was found on Kiril’s office computer. In fact he even e-mailed the same image to Olga Fernandez, the PT marketing director with whom, back in 2016, he had recently started sleeping. Then there is what Kiril neglected to mention to his lawyers for months, namely that he had sold $20 million worth of the PT shares in his grandchildren’s trust, virtually as soon as he was off the phone with the Journal reporter in August of 2018.

  As a result, Marta long ago wrote off the case—and Kiril. Her judgment was confirmed when the Sterns undertook the pretrial exercise now familiar for deep-pocketed litigants and presented the case to three different mock juries of hired strangers. Supervised by a team of jury consultants, Stern played himself and Marta took Moses’s role, and they gave each side’s anticipated opening statements. Every time, Kiril was convicted of fraud, as well as insider trading—even murder on the first run-through.

  Given those results, Stern, if not his client, accepts that they face long odds at trial. Should the real jury return the same verdicts as the mock groups, Stern has recognized in cold instants alone that Kiril is likely to die in prison. And yet his mind has returned time and again to that first meeting in his office, when Kiril hugged Stern and, with tears brimming in his murky gray eyes, declared that he did not do as the prosecutors claimed. Whatever the lessons of logic and experience, a rush of hope, like a spring rising through the earth, had saturated Stern’s heart. He responded as habit and professional detachment had long taught him not to. Nonetheless, in the instant, he meant each word.

  Stern had told Kiril, ‘I believe you.’

  6. Marta

  Here on the thirty-eighth floor of the Morgan Towers, once the Tri-Cities’ tallest building, Marta and Sandy have made their offices throughout the thirty-year duration of Stern & Stern. From the two huge windows in his office, he has often taken a meditative moment, staring down at the silver ribbon of the River Kindle, known to the original French trappers who settled here as ‘La Chandelle,’ the Candle. The word was corrupted by English speakers to ‘Kindle,’ giving rise to the name of the county, by which this metropolitan area of three million is generally known.

  Last weekend, daylight saving time ended, leaving Stern with lingering jet lag. Now, at four thirty, some stunted sun remains, which means that on the plate glass, Stern can see his reflection, which he usually makes a studied effort to avoid. There he confronts the time-scarred face of the other old men he has seen his entire life. The pumpkin-cheeked look he’d become resigned to in middle age is gone. With the cancer, twelve years ago, he lost dangerous amounts of weight, which, for whatever reason, he’s largely not regained. According to the scale, he should be the same nimble shape as the slender young man of sixty years ago. And yet, after decades of failing regularly at dieting, he has been chagrined to find he looks, if anything, worse. There is a dark hollowness to his cheeks that suggests illness. His flesh is loose and pallid, like a dish of pudding, and after chemo, he regained only a few patches of white hair behind his ears.

  Mired, as he is often, in memories, Stern forces himself back to his desk to check his voice mail, which has been transformed to text on his computer screen. In the old days, after court, he would receive a fistful of phone messages, which he returned late into the night. Today neither call is even about a case. Both are social invitations, one from a widow he’s known for many years. At the age of eighty-five, after two marriages, Stern has decided to leave the playing field as a winner. He feels no inclination for companionship or whatever rubric could be applied to romance at his age.

  Just as Stern is lifting the phone, Marta stalks into his office without so much as grazing her knuckles on the door. He doesn’t need to ask what she is upset about and she is quick to tell him anyway.

  “What the hell was that crap in your opening about the civil cases? I can’t tell you how relieved I was when Moses stood up to object, because I was about to do it myself.”

  He does not really have an answer. He tells her, as he’s told himself, that he was caught up in the moment.

  “Dad, did you see Sonny grab me as we were leaving chambers? She wanted to know if you’re losing it.” It feels like a thorn in his heart to think that Sonny, who for years joked that when she grew up she wanted to be like Sandy Stern, now sees him as possibly addled.

  “Dear God,” he says.

  “I reassured her, but Jesus, Dad.”


  It has always been part of the rhythm between them, going back to Marta’s college years, that she will assail her father, sometimes ferociously, which he must accept in a mood of calm. The reverse has never been true, even now when Marta has reached her late fifties. When it comes to her father’s criticisms, Marta remains as delicate as vellum.

  Stern would prefer that their last trial together be handled in a mood of celebration, but he knows that expectation is as unrealistically sentimental as a corny greeting card. The truth is that Marta is out of sorts for many reasons about this case. When Kiril first phoned Stern, he could not resist sharing the news about this new engagement in an air of triumph as he strode into Marta’s office. Instead, he confronted shock and alarm on his daughter’s face.

  ‘Dad, are you completely crazy? A case like that could kill you. It’s been years since you had a trial longer than two days. Forget about cancer. Your heart could never stand that.’

  ‘My heart is fine,’ he answered sharply.

  ‘Really? Is that why Al has you coming in for an EKG every ninety days?’ Al Clemente, Stern’s internist, has been Marta’s close friend since high school. He is an outstanding doctor, but not good at resisting Marta’s badgering to disclose supposedly confidential information. ‘And besides, Dad, you’re the wrong lawyer for Pafko. You and I have seen this a hundred times. Some white-collar big shot in hot water goes to a close friend, so he doesn’t have to deal with an attorney who will make him face up to the fact he’s guilty. Kiril wants someone he can lie to.’

  Stern felt a crestfallen look droop through his face. The thrill of being professionally revived had blinded him to the risks Marta recognized. Seeing that, Stern’s daughter softened. She motioned him to one of the armchairs and sat down beside him. He was sure she was going to repeat the same points in a kinder tone.