crackpot fantasies about how she is being poisoned by aluminum pots or whether she is a secret reader of the Koran. But there is more to her than she lets on. And that's the final insult she hurls at most of us. That she'll never let us in. Yet Glyndora has her secret place. He says with confidence, a denizen of his own secret places. Somebody who'd been there briefly with her the evening before and was knocking on the door again now. 'I
Finally she leaned toward me and spoke in a softer tone, maybe an appeal of its own.
'No, you don't, Mack. You just gotta tell them you looked.' That was a message. Glyndora was playing the role of medium, of oracle, but even so, I wasn't sure if I was being beseeched or warned.
'You have to give me more, Glyn. I'm clueless. Who are you fronting for? I mean, at least tell me about the memo.'
Her posture became rigid again, her face hard. It was like watching a book slam closed.
'You're asking too much, man.' It wasn't clear if the excess was on her end or mine, if I wanted information I wasn't entitled to or if it came at a cost she wasn't willing to pay. But the answer, whatever, was no. She stood up and walked past me. She was running for cover. I thought about what I ought to do. I could demand her keys and toss her office. I could hire a service and get thirty temps to tear through the files. But I'd just made a deal. Without turning, I spoke before Glyndora could get far.
'One thing,' I said. Her heels stopped clacking, so I knew she was hanging there by the threshold. 'I never put my hand, not once, on your behind.'
When I looked back, she was smiling a little, something like that. I'd gotten that much. But she wouldn't give any actual ground.
'Says you,' she told me.
C. The Devil Himself
'It's a pact with the devil.' Thus spake Pagnucci as Carl, Wash, Martin, and I sat in the same paneled conference room where we had encountered each other at the start of the week. There was a moment of rare winter sun, a part of the circle escaped from the clouds like something hanging out of a pocket. The heavy drapes had been permanently sashed by the decorator and the long walnut table was bright with the glimmer of the late light, thick as caramel. I had found the three of them waiting for me and quickly reviewed my conversation with Jake Eiger that morning. I skipped Bert's memo and my trip to Neucriss. Glyndora had made me shy of both subjects, and I wasn't eager to take on Martin, whose motives remained perplexing to me. He and Carl gravely received the message I'd brought, but Wash was slower on the uptake.
'He's telling us that if we can't put this crime right, it will go unreported,' Martin said to him. 'Jake is concerned about Jake. He can't go to his Chairman, to Krzysinski, with this without endangering his own position. After all, who put Bert in charge of the 397 escrow in the first place? He wants us to keep our mouths shut.'
'Ah,' said Wash, who did a poor job of hiding the fact that he was quite pleased. 'And where do we end up with Jake?'
'In bed, I would say,' said Martin. 'Holding dirty hands. He can't very well cut us off, can he? He's our hostage.'
'And we're his,' said Pagnucci, invoking by his remark a pointed silence.
'But,' said Wash, continuing to muddle it through, 'we've reported the matter to the client. We've done our duty. If he chooses not to do his — ' The back of his elegant white hand traveled off to the land of moral oblivion. Wash was already sold. A tidy solution. Five million gone and a secret forever.
'Jake says he doesn't believe it, actually,' I offered. 'He says that he's hoping that an accounting will prove it's not true.'
'That's horseshit,' said Pagnucci. 'He's posturing. We know the client isn't really informed. If we go along with this, it's the same thing as having said nothing at all.'
With the only difference of course that there was a far lower risk of detection. Auditing of the escrow account from which the money had disappeared was under Jake's direction and control. He'd cover us in order to cover himself. That was the meaning, I realized now, of that remark he'd made to me this morning about an accounting.
We were silent again, all four of us. Throughout this session, my attention remained on Martin. Wash had already set his course down the path of least resistance, and for Carl the problem-solving method was equally apparent, a question of benefits and costs. In his head, the pluses and minuses were already totaling. But Martin's calculations, in line with his character, figured to be more complex. Like an Aristotelian figure, his eyes were raised to heaven in the course of higher contemplation. Martin is your veritable Person of Values, a lawyer who does not see the law as just business or sport. He's on one million do-good committees. He's against the Bomb, the death penalty, and damage to the environment, for abortion, literacy, and better housing for the poor. He's been the chairman for years of the Riverside Commission, which is devoted to making the river clean enough to drink or swim in, goals that frankly will not be achieved until long after we have colonized Mars, but he'll still take you for a walk along the tangled, littered banks, soft with prairie grasses, and describe out loud the bike paths and boat piers he sees in his head.
Like any Person of Values who is a lawyer, Martin is not in it for goodness alone. These activities make him prominent, help him attract clients. Most of all, they invest him with the same thing that knowledge of the law imparts to us all: a sense of power. Martin gets off with his hand on the throttle. When he talks about the $400 million public offering we did for TN two years ago, his eyes glow like a cat's in the dark. When he says, 'Public company', he says it the way the priest passing out wafers says, 'The body of Christ.' Martin has a grasp of the way business runs America and he wants to help be in charge.
Yet it's not just the sense of being important by attachment that excites him. It's also what his clients want to know: right or wrong, allowable or no. He's the navigator, the person with the compass, the man who tells the high and mighty, if not about morals, then at least about principles and rules. His clients can go out in the vineyard and get their boots covered in muck. He's back in the office, charting their course by the stars. When Martin goes to sleep at night and asks God's blessing, he tells the Lord that he helped his clients move with grace and speed through the difficult and ambiguous world He has made for us. Though perhaps not even Martin can tease out the logic, he believes that he is engaged in an enterprise that is fundamentally good.
Listening to this, I'm sure you're humming 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' and marching in place. All right. I'm just trying to tell you how it is. But don't sneer. It's easy to be a poet sitting behind the gates of a university or a monk in a monastery and feel there is a life of the spirit to which you are dedicated. But come into the teeming city, with so many souls screaming, I want, I need, where most social planning amounts to figuring out how to keep them all at bay — come and try to imagine the ways that vast unruly community can be kept in touch with the deeper aspirations of humankind for the overall improvement of the species, the good of the many and the rights of the few. That I always figured was the task of the law, and it makes high-energy physics look like a game show.
Wash finally interrupted this extended silence by posing the question that no one had been willing to ask: 'How would anybody ever find out?'
Martin actually smiled and without saying more looked to each of us, ducking his chin in a brief, suggestive way. The gesture by itself, his mere acknowledgment of what was held within the room, was vaguely shocking. The next step would be to dip a pen in blood.
'Where would you say Bert went?' I asked. 'There are three hundred people here asking already.'
'Say that, so far as we know, he's in Pico Luan,' answered Pagnucci. 'Retired from the practice. That'll pass the red-face test. Forward his mail to the bank there. None of that is what bothers me.'
'Retired?' I asked. 'Just like that? He's forty-one years old.'
'There is not a soul who knows Bert Kamin well who wouldn't believe him capable of something so impulsive,' said Wash, waving his pipe around. He had a point. Bert had done stranger things half a dozen times in the last five years. 'This is doable,' said Wash, 'quite feasible. And as to your concerns, Carl, about Jake ignoring our report — ' Wash filled the pipe bowl with fire from his lighter. ‘I personally do not believe Jake Eiger would lie.' It was something of a non sequitur but we all saw what Wash was up to. If it ever proved that the secret had not held, we could say that we had placed our faith in Jake — to be honest, reverent, and true, to protect the best interests of TN, to tell what-all must be told. The silence upstairs we took to reflect TN's desire to save face and to protect the
