community, then the FBI and the SEC should be doing it.
If he had sold out the country to foreign interests, then the FBI and the CIA and the NSA should be doing it- not Shadden Phillips amp; Wycovsky. Not three floors of the whitest of white collars and the blackest of three- button suits.
What Arndt did think of were all the nauseating consequences of public exposure: disbarment, embarrassment, maybe even federal prison. He’d even be disavowed by the rest of the members of his Yale Law School graduating class-not for doing it, he knew, but for getting caught.
“Are you sure you won’t lose him?” Arndt asked.
“No chance. We have, shall we say, an electronic means of tracking his car.”
“Isn’t that-“
The man laughed. “Creative? “ “I was going to say illegal.”
“Seems to me that you’re getting paid a bundle to find a way to argue it isn’t. Capisci? “
Arndt felt his palm perspiring against the receiver. He’d known only one other person who’d used the correct Italian for “you understand.” He had been a mafioso who’d lived across the street when Arndt was growing up on Long Island-that is, until the gangster was found sitting in the driver’s seat of his car in his garage with a bullet hole in the back of his head.
“Yes,” Arndt said. “I understand.”
Arndt set down the receiver, and then wiped his hands on his pants in what felt like a gesture of cleansing. He leaned forward to rise from his chair, but his childhood nightmare of the neighbor’s chunks of exploded skull and brain crusted on the dashboard rose up in his mind. A wave of nausea rolled his body forward. He rested his forehead on his folded arms, sweat beading and his mouth watering.
After it passed, he straightened up and wiped his face with his shirt sleeve. He then pushed himself to his feet, shrugged on his suit jacket, and made the long walk down the wood-paneled hallway toward the office of Edward Wycovsky, the senior partner in the thirty-two-attorney firm, who was awaiting his report.
Arndt’s hands dampened again before he reached Wycovsky’s door. They began to vibrate, not just in fear, but in frustration and anger. A cold shockwave shot up his arms and into his chest. He felt his fingers tightening into fists and imagined himself walking around Wycovsky’s desk and flattening the man’s angular nose into his pockmarked face.
But not yet, Arndt told himself. He needed to stay with the firm and with this assignment long enough to discover what they were up to, and then turn them in.
A glance at the distant reception station at the center of the two wings of the floor restarted the drama in his mind. Him standing there watching the FBI lead Wycovsky and the others toward the elevators and then down to the lobby where news video cameras would seek out their pale rat faces. He’d follow them and watch them duck their heads behind their cuffed hands and he’d watch people crowded on the sidewalk leaning hard against the police lines and shaking their fists and screaming out their outrage and But he knew these fantasies were nothing but imaginary flight, relative to nothing and anchored to air-for that was his character: honest enough to recognize his self-deceptions, but too weak to act on the knowledge. That’s why his wife had once told him that the law was the perfect profession for him. It was all form, and no substance; all talk, and no responsibility. And she was right. Even the bar’s code of ethics had read to him like a permission slip to do evil without shame or guilt.
As he approached Wycovsky’s office, Arndt steeled himself against the reality of his role and the roles of the other Ivy League graduates with whom Wycovsky had jeweled the firm: They were nothing but gemmed pendants hanging from a whore’s neck.
Wycovsky raised a forefinger as Arndt entered the office, holding him at attention while he completed his telephone call with a cryptic “Then we understand each other.” He lowered his right hand as he hung up the phone with his left and looked over at Arndt.
“We don’t accuse the private investigators we retain to assist us of engaging in criminality,” Wycovsky said.
Arndt reddened.
“We only hire professionals and we rely on them to act within the law-and we don’t second-guess them.”
“I didn’t think we’d want to risk-” Arndt caught himself, for he realized that this was exactly the risk Wycovsky had been willing to take.
Wycovsky didn’t respond, his silence pressuring Arndt to finish the sentence.
“I mean, I thought we should make sure we were on solid legal ground.”
Wycovsky waved the argument away. “Do you ask Acme Plumbing whether their corporate filings are in order before you hire them to fix a leak? Do you ask to look at your bank’s cash reserves before you write a check?”
Arndt clenched his jaw and shook his head.
Wycovsky never argued facts or law; he crushed his opponents by analogy. It was a form of argumentation ridiculed at Yale, but encouraged at the street fighters’ law school that Wycovsky had attended at night forty years earlier.
“Don’t question the surveillance people,” Wycovsky said. “Just write down what they tell you and report to me.” He pointed at Arndt’s face. “I don’t want to receive another call like this again.”
Arndt’s emotions battered at him as he walked back to his office. Anger. Fear. Self-reproach. And him defenseless, straitjacketed by the life he’d chosen. Twenty-eight years old and confined to the debtors prison of Shadden Phillips amp; Wycovsky by mortgage and credit card balances that he was permitted by his bank to carry only because greed had made him accept the most lucrative offer after law school, not the best.
And what tore at him most of all as he paused in the doorway to his office was why it hadn’t crossed his mind why Wycovsky had been willing to pay partners’ wages for associates’ work Until right then.
CHAPTER 3
I was so preoccupied that I forgot to ask about your wife,” Abrams said, sitting across from Gage at the breakfast table in his Central Park West apartment. “Faith is fine. She took a team of students to Sichuan Province to work on an archeological dig.”
Abrams frowned. “Isn’t that a little dangerous? We’re getting reports of labor riots from Guangzhou all the way up to Mongolia.”
“They’re in a village way out in the countryside. They only stopped in Shanghai to change planes and in Chengdu just long enough to get on a chartered bus.” Gage tapped the cell phone in his shirt pocket. “She calls every few days.”
Abrams reached over to the kitchen counter, spread out a stack of Federal Reserve finance and economic discussion papers, and handed one of them to Gage titled “Human Capital in China.”
“There are a hundred million migrant laborers over there,” Abrams said. “Another ten million added in the last year. Fleeing farms that can’t produce even enough to support the villages around them. An average wage of fifty cents a day, and their life expectancy is dropping as though the Chinese economy was collapsing instead of expanding.” He pointed at the cover. “If all the little wildfires come together, there’ll be a conflagration. I’d hate to see her caught in the middle of it.”
“Given the places I’ve spent my career,” Gage said, “I’m not in a position to issue warnings.” Even though he knew that there were many times when he wished he was. But that was between him and Faith alone.
Abrams rose and retrieved the coffeepot and refilled their cups.
“You’re a tougher man than me.” Abrams paused and gazed out of the window down toward Central Park. “I was afraid even to let Jeanine jog around the reservoir.” He shrugged and offered a weak smile. “Maybe that’s why she ran away altogether.”
“Have you heard from her lately?”
“Not since I was appointed chairman. Not even an e-mail after I was confirmed.”
Gage didn’t have to ask why. He knew Jeanine well enough to understand that for her it was like Abrams had become the high priest of a materialistic religion that, in words she’d written to Faith, reduced hope and fear to matters of cash value. And it wasn’t that Jeanine had become a new age mystic. It was that she could no longer
