In the Whale's Belly

In this newsletter: The last days of the pharmaceutical conglomerate, the continuing adventures of P.D. Rapaport, and some words of advice.

Part I: The End of Big Pharma, and What It Means

The early 1970s was the age of empire-building for America’s largest drug makers. Bristol Myers opened a movie studio and made the subway hijacking flick The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Pfizer and Eli Lilly got into cosmetics. Drug companies sprawled into veterinary medicine, shampoo, toothpaste, infant formula, and chewing gum.

Today, those empires are in retreat. Over the past decade or so, these same companies have sold off everything but their core pharmaceutical businesses. Next month, in a sort of culmination of this sector-wide shift, the U.K.-based GSK will spin off an enormous division that sells drugstore staples like Advil and Tums. In a feature in Barron’s the other week, I looked at what the change means for the U.S. healthcare system.

It’s a shift investors have demanded… But by taking away stable revenue streams that cushioned the ups and downs of the drug-discovery business, it could turn Big Pharma stocks from buy-and-stuff-under-the-mattress blue chips into riskier bets. At the same time, it may reinforce the long-term shift that has pulled Big Pharma’s focus toward expensive, specialized treatments and away from drugs for the most common causes of death in the U.S., such as heart disease and diabetes.

[…]

The change is most stark in the kinds of prices that drugmakers are assigning to their new drugs. According to an analysis published by Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Aaron Kesselheim and colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association this month, the median list price of a drug first marketed in 2021 was $180,007 per year, up from $2,115 in 2008. Between 2008 and 2013, only 9% of newly launched drugs cost $150,000 a year or more; in 2020 and 2021, 47% of new drugs cost that much.

You can read the rest here.

Part II: Mr. Rapaport Wakes Up

The letters I had been receiving from P.D. Rapaport stopped arriving in February, and by June I had despaired of ever learning what happened after a mysterious goon bonked Mr. Rapaport on the head in the doorway of his walk-up.

Then, just the other day, my downstairs neighbor received a letter addressed to his cat, a geriatric tabby named Isaac Luria. Inside the envelope was a letter addressed to me. It was third in a series of unusual (and also very much imaginary)¹ letters in which a mysterious correspondent calling himself P.D. Rapaport has been relating the story of his search for a barber named Baum, who may or may not have been receiving betting tips from the dead.

This one was written in black pen on unlined white printer paper, the sentences drifting up and down as they wandered across the page. I have done my best to transcribe it below, making guesses in the many spots where the lines bumped up against one another. The letter begins abruptly, taking up immediately after the last installment ended.

The previous letters (which, again, like this one, are all made up) are linked here. To briefly recap: After the barber Baum disappeared with thousands of dollars he had said he would bet on the horses, Rapaport found ghost hunting instructions in the saddlebag of Baum’s abandoned bicycle. Rapaport followed the instructions, didn’t see any ghosts, and then came home to find his apartment had been trashed by two goons, one of whom bonked him on the head. This latest letter picks up from there.

Dear Mr. Nathan-Kazis,

I awoke in a basement, surrounded by bones. There was a lump on my temple the size of an acorn. Meandering towards lucidity, I registered the room around me: A chaise lounge, on which I was reclining. Something gentle playing through a speaker. Shaded windows. A coffee table. Bones.

Bones, bones, bones. Enormous bones, bones on a scale I’d never seen outside of a museum. Two rows of tremendous ribs lined the walls; a matching set, each one stretching to the ceiling to meet a vertebrae the size of a suitcase. The effect was of being inside the chest cavity of a brontosaurus, a mastodon, a paraceratherium.

“A whale skeleton,” someone said.

I jumped, the room spun hard, and I sat back down. Across from me on two stiff-backed chairs were the goons who had ambushed me in the doorway of my apartment. The giant was on the left, his knees folded nearly to his chest. The one with the blackjack was on the right, his blackjack still in his hand.

“The Captain wants to talk to you,” the giant said. “He’s finishing his breakfast. We’ll all wait here.”

The other goon smacked the blackjack against the palm of his hand. So I sat, and I waited, the lump on my temple growing larger with each heartbeat.

I was in a furnished basement somewhere; I could hear trucks bouncing just overhead. A Manhattan townhouse, perhaps. I felt untethered. The goon’s blackjack had severed the causal link from one moment to the next, inserting a gap in my consciousness between when I walked into my trashed apartment in Windsor Terrace, and when I awoke on a dark velvet chaise lounge inside the ribcage of a deceased whale.

On the coffee table between me and the two goons was a little silver galleon on little silver wheels, its little silver sails billowing as though it were running before a little silver wind. It sailed towards me across the coffee table, a little silver captain on its little silver deck looking up at me with his little silver spyglass, ordering the crew to come about; hauling on the little silver helm, trying flee my monstrous hand, but too late: I had lifted the ship, and now the little silver crew was panicked, and they jumped one by one into the mahogany sea, little silver bodies falling like little silver raindrops, until only the captain was left on the deck, bellowing up at me, waving a little silver cutlass with a little silver arm.

“Put that down,” the giant said.

I put the ship back on the table. A moment passed. The giant offered me a coffee. I said yes, and he disappeared up a steep set of stairs, returning a moment later with a tray balanced on one enormous hand. On the tray were three porcelain cups in their saucers, plus a coffee pot, sugar bowl, and a cow-shaped creamer, all from a matched set. The giant poured for the three of us; the cups like dollhouse dishes in his hands. The coffee was good.

My red casino die was still in the right front pocket of my jeans. I imagined rolling it across the coffee table, knocking it against the little silver galleon: Roll a one, I scream for help. A two, I ask for the toilet and squeeze out the bathroom window. A three, I fake a heart attack. A four, I toss the coffee in the giant’s face and charge. The second goon was still toying with his blackjack, fondling it like a toy pistol in the hands of a menacing toddler. I left the die where it was.

I was having trouble making sense of my situation. The goons had broken into my apartment while I was out following Baum’s ghost-hunting recipe. To rob it, presumably. Fine. But why lie in wait for me, why knock me on the head, why remove me to this basement, why imprison me in this whale’s belly? And who was this Captain I was waiting for? One of the notebooks I had stolen from Baum’s bike, the one titled HORSES, listed among the members of Baum’s betting syndicate someone known as “the Captain.” He had paid $19,000 into Baum’s big swing the previous weekend, more by far than anyone else. That had nothing to do with me, though. I didn’t know where Baum was, or what happened to the $600 I had given him, never mind the Captain’s $19,000.

The gentle music stopped. The giant stood and walked to a turntable in the corner, put away whatever had been playing, and flipped through a shelf of vinyl. He pulled out something that sounded like an Italian opera; I didn’t recognize it. The sound of rush hour traffic faded. We heard three more sides of the opera before the blackjack man’s phone rang. He answered, spoke into it briefly, and stood.

“The Captain is ready,” he said.

I followed the giant up the stairs to the first floor of the townhouse, through a kitchen with a six-burner Wolf range, and into a dining room. The sun blasted in through twin bay windows, blinding me after the dark of the basement. “Have a seat,” said a voice from across the room. Out the windows was a garden: a stone fountain, a stubby willow tree. I stumbled to a seat across the long table from where the Captain was drinking coffee in front of something large and broken.

“I appreciate you making the time to see me,” the Captain said. I looked up at the goons, wondering if they would correct his misapprehension as to the circumstances under which I had been brought to his breakfast table. Neither met my eye. “Cyrus, some coffee for our guest?”

Cyrus, the goon with the blackjack, looked down at me. The blackjack was gone from his hand now, though its outline was still apparent in the front pocket of his blazer. “Water,” I said. He left, the door swinging shut behind him. My eyes adjusted, and I saw that the broken thing in front of the Captain was a model ship, or part of one. Its hull was unpainted, its mainmast snapped. All around the broken ship was a nest of tools: glue bottles, knives, small paint pots, a pile of cloth, a rag, tweezers, clamps, twine.

“Excuse the mess,” the Captain said. “I make them myself.”

He gestured to the walls of the dining room, where more ships lined the shelves. Not 16th century galleons like the little silver boat on the basement coffee table, but tall ships from the 18th and 19th century; brigantines and schooners and cutters and clippers, with black-painted hulls and canvas sails that swayed in the breeze blowing in from the garden. I read the names painted in gold on their transoms: Hopewell, Ulysses, Caledonia, Spray. There were eight in all; each distinct in the shape of its hull, the plan of its sails. “You like them?” the Captain asked. I nodded. I could see him now: Early sixties, a substantial grey beard that looked more like a get-up than a natural extension of his face. There was a smell of tobacco in the room, and in his hand an unlit pipe. He looked like an attorney dressed as a lobsterman.

“This is the schooner Cienfuegos,” the Captain said, rising from his seat and gently lifting a wooden ship from a shelf with two hands. It was at least two feet long, with two masts and a cloud of sails. “Captured by the pirate Henry Bishop off the coast of Suriname in the spring of 1810. Bishop’s Melampus knocked out the Cienfuegos’s topsails with a single broadside.” He put the ship down and lifted another, this one a brig with a squat, squarish hull and two little launches hanging from its sides. “The Adventure, a whaler out of Nantucket. Henry Bishop ambushed it the end of a two-year voyage, stinking of blubber, its holds full of whale oil and ambergris.” He put the Adventure back on its shelf, its little whale boats swinging back and forth.

“And this is my current project,” the Captain said, gesturing with his unlit pipe towards the broken thing on the table. “The Wasp. Bishop took it after it lost its mainmast in a storm. I’m trying to build it as he first saw it, with its mast split and its sails on the deck, but how do you make a model of a broken ship that doesn’t look like someone dropped it?” He sighed. “This will be my ninth, when it’s done. I started five years ago. I’m making each of the fourteen ships Bishop captured during his career. Plus the Melanpus. I’ll do that one last.”

Cyrus returned with my water. It was warm, like he had turned on the hot water faucet and let it run a bit before filling the glass. The Captain began to pace the room like Jack Aubrey on the quarterdeck, chewing at the stem of the unlit pipe. “I suppose you’ve never heard of Henry Bishop?” he asked. “An ancestor of mine; the grandfather of my great-grandfather. Born in England, trained as a carpenter, and then pressed into the Royal Navy at eighteen. Happened all the time in those days. Went down to the docks to buy a fish for Sunday dinner, never saw home again. They put him on a ship of the line, and by Monday morning he was halfway across the Channel. He found he didn’t mind being at sea, so after that cruise he shipped out again and again, until he signed onto the frigate H.M.S. Melampus as a carpenter’s mate. The crew of the Melampus threw their officers overboard somewhere near the Azores. They chose the bosun as captain, but then the bosun whipped the cook for burning the mutton, so Bishop stabbed him in his hammock. That made Bishop the captain. He sailed the Melampus back and forth across the Atlantic, looting and pillaging. Eventually he sold the Melampus to the Mexican navy, bought a farm in Rhode Island, built a big house, got himself named director of a bank. My grandfather had an oil painting of him above the fireplace, but the piracy was a family secret. I didn’t learn about it until my grandfather died and I found Henry Bishop’s journals in his safe, wrapped in leather under a pile of bonds. I had a PhD, a job in a Classics department. Henry Bishop’s journals showed me that there are different ways to live.”

The Captain paused to look out the window at a crow that had landed on the stone fountain in his garden. It screamed and flapped away, and the Captain sat down hard at the table and fixed his eyes on mine. “Mr. Rapaport, I don’t like being cheated,” he said. “I don’t mind losing. I prefer winning, but I don’t mind losing. What I can’t stand is being cheated. And what I want to understand, Mr. Rapaport, is whether your friend Baum lost my money, or stole my money.” He rummaged amid the tools and model shipbuilding supplies at his end of the table, pulling out a plain manilla folder and putting it down on the table before him.

“Last week I gave Baum $19,000 to bet on the horses at Aqueduct,” he said. “Did he place those bets?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “How should I know?”

“Find out,” the Captain said. “Aron at the barber shop tells me you’re his friend. I’m going to give you two days. It’s Wednesday morning. Cyrus and his colleague will find you on Friday afternoon. I want proof that Baum placed those bets. Give them my share of the winnings, or give them betting slips accounting for the losses.”

I tried to protest. I had no part in running Baum’s betting syndicate. I barely knew Baum. We were not friends. This was insane, this was an error, whatever the barber Aron said. The Captain shook his head, and I felt the giant’s massive hand land on my shoulder.

“My one concession is this,” the Captain said, as the giant pulled me to my feet. “If you don’t have the money or the betting slips by Friday, you’ll have a choice. You can get me Baum, or be held responsible for his actions.”

With that, the Captain pulled two composition books from the manilla folder and shoved them at me across the table. I knew what they were before they stopped sliding: HORSES and GHOSTS, the notebooks I had taken from saddlebag of Baum’s gold Univega the previous morning. Cyrus and the giant must have snatched them from my kitchen table when they broke in. A folded subway map slipped out of GHOSTS. I stuffed it back in.

“Leave,” the Captain said, as he turned back to the Wasp, prodding at its snapped mast.

I let Cyrus and the giant guide me out of the bright dining room and back down into the dark of the whale belly, to the familiar velvet of the chaise lounge. Away from their Captain, the goons seemed to relax, dropping the dutiful servant act and shifting back into more accustomed roles as straightforward brutes. Cyrus shoved a motorcycle helmet on my head. The inside of the visor was tinted black, and I was thrust into darkness.

“Take it off and you get the blackjack again,” Cyrus said. I left it on. They led me through a basement door and out into the sun. The tint on helmet’s visor was dark enough that I couldn’t see where I was, or walk unaided. Still, out in the sunlight, vague outlines shone through, and I knew that I was being pushed towards some kind of vehicle.

“Sit down,” Cyrus said. I gathered, as I sat, that the giant would be chauffeuring me on a Polaris Slingshot, one of those low-slung three-wheeled roadsters that look like a Hot Wheels Batmobile blown up to two-thirds scale. We peeled out, racing away from the Captain’s townhouse. Trying to see through the blackened visor as we raced towards the avenue felt like riding Space Mountain, the bright lights of the city flitting past as vague impressions of color. The giant turned on an old Chemical Brothers album and cranked the volume up loud enough that I could feel it in my intestines. We accelerated onto a highway, and I shut my eyes.

It was Wednesday, late in the morning. I had until Friday afternoon until Cyrus and the giant came for me again. How far would I need to run by then? I could take a train. MetroNorth to New Haven, rent an apartment, work retail for a while, lay low. I could buy a used Kia Soul and drive out west, sleep in the trunk. And then what? It didn’t make sense, it wasn’t fair. I had nothing to do with the Captain’s $19,000. I could go to the police, they weren’t going to put me in witness protection. Come Friday afternoon, it would be me and the goons.

I had to run.

The giant slowed. We had crossed a bridge, turned, and turned again. We were somewhere near the water now. “Take off the helmet and go,” he said. “We’ll see you Friday, Mr. Rapaport.”

The overgrown tricycle sped away down the block, the Chemical Brothers setting off car alarms as they went. I knew where I was: Flushing Avenue just before it slips under the BQE, where the edge of the Navy Yard runs up against the Satmar frontier. I haven’t been down there in years, and I don’t know what it looks like now, but in those days that eastern end of the Navy Yard was a jungle; the forests of prelapsarian Brooklyn slowly reclaiming the old naval hospital and its various outbuildings.

I was four miles from home, give or take, but I didn’t have a wallet or a phone, so I started walking south along the Navy Yard fence in the general direction of my apartment. After a moment I stopped, struck by an idea. I pulled Baum’s notebooks from under my arm, and took the folded subway map from between GHOST’s pages. I had glanced at it the evening before, just prior to my ghost hunt, but put it aside as useless: Baum had dotted it with little crosses, but each cross covered many square blocks, and some were just floating in unmarked space; a pen mark adrift somewhere in the general vicinity of Woodside.

Still, one of the crosses did seem to mark a spot slightly north and east of where the MTA cartographer had planted the words NAVY YARD. I looked through the fence. I had been through once before. It had been late, nearly 3 a.m., and I’d been biking home down Flushing, sober enough to know I should have taken the train. I spotted a hole in the Navy Yard fence just big enough for a large raccoon, and without thinking too much about it, I locked my bike and squeezed through. Afterwards, the memory seemed like a dream: The empty marble hospital shining in the moonlight, brick mansions beset by undergrowth, tennis courts disappearing beneath the shrubbery, and, down a path past the crumbling tennis shack, a functional street lamp illuminating a little circle of cracked asphalt, civilization’s last foothold against the wilderness.

I had stood there a moment, and then run as fast as I could back up the path and out the raccoon hole. Afterwards, biking home and feeling as sober as I’d ever felt in my life, all I could remember was a pressing realization that I did not belong there.

That had been a year earlier. I stood there on the sidewalk, looking from Baum’s subway map to the Navy Yard fence and back again. I had plenty of time left to run away before Friday afternoon. I could get to Grand Central on Friday morning and be hidden in some Connecticut town by lunchtime. If I found Baum first, though, I may not need to flee. I could get the money, or the betting slips, or, at worst, a forwarding address to pass along to Cyrus and the giant when they came for me.

I felt in my front pocket. The red die was still there. I threw it across the pavement. A three. I climbed over the fence.

Inside it was dark, the vegetation too dense for the daylight to penetrate. I passed the hospital, the houses, the tennis courts, the tennis shack. There was the street lamp, there was its little circle of amber light. And there, under the lamplight, was a woman in blue canvas coveralls.

She waved, beckoning me closer. That she was a ghost was obvious, though I can’t quite say why. She looked solid enough, and didn’t float or make an eerie noise. She was just a ghost, like a squirrel is a squirrel.

“I’ve been waiting,” she said.

The letter ended here. Or at least I think it did: Perhaps Isaac Luria made off with the last page? If I hear more from P.D. Rapaport, I’ll let you know.

Part III: Words of Advice

• You must listen to Foreign Agent, Nate Lavey and Michael McCanne’s extraordinary podcast about the Irish Americans who sent cash and ArmaLite rifles to the Provisional IRA. Without a doubt the best history podcast I’ve listened to in ages.

• Longtime “Black Umbrella” readers might recall the extremely puzzling video I shared last summer of the Slovenian punk band Pankrti lip synching their rendition of the Italian revolutionary anthem “Bandiera Rossa.” I’m happy to report that I’ve found another notable video of a performance of “Bandiera Rossa,” this one by a Slovenian women’s choir called Kombinat. I’m not sure what the deal is with Slovenians and “Bandiera Rossa,” but please enjoy.

• Speaking of enjoyable songs in languages I do not understand: This song, by the Navarran group Chill Mafia, is a cover (or perhaps a parody?) of this song, by the Basque singer Xabier Lete. Both are recommended. (You can get some sense of what the Xabier Lete version of the song is about from this video, in which residents of a Basque village called Segura act out his lyrics. The lyrics of the Chill Mafia version are different; both recount typical day in the life of the singer, I believe; per Google Translate, the Chill Mafia vocalist says he starts his day by “opening Instagram.”)

That’s all I’ve got!

1. This is, as I’ve said, a goof: There is no P.D. Rapaport, there are no letters, this is made up.