years now, but I cannot find her. Outside, the wash flags in the sunshine which is bright enough to purify, but I am inside, the wind shifting in the curtains and the papers down the hall as I prowl the grim interior corridors to find some lost connection. What did I care about back then? Desperately, in the nights now, I sit up, concentrating, trying to recall the source of all of these errors, knowing that somewhere in this dark house, in one room or another, I will sweep aside a door and feel the rush of light and heat, the flames.
III
It was about seven-thirty when I got back to the office, and Brushy, as usual, was still there. Near as I can tell, none of my partners believes that money is the most important thing in the world — they just work as if they did. They are decent folks, my partners, men and women of refined instinct, other-thinking, many of them lively company and committed to a lot of do-good stuff, but we are joined together, like the nucleus of an atom, by the dark magnetic forces of nature — a shared weakness for our own worst desires. Get ahead. Make money. Wield power. It all takes time. In this life you're often so hard-pressed that scratching your head sometimes seems to absorb an instant you're sure will be precious later in the day.
Brush, like many others, felt best here, burning like some torch in the dark hours. No phone, no opposing counsel or associates, no fucking management meetings. Her fierce intelligence could be concentrated on the tasks at hand, writing letters, reviewing memos, seven little things in sixty minutes, each one billable as a quarter of an hour. My own time in the office was a chain of aimless spells.
I stuck my head in, feeling the need for someone sensible.
'Got a minute?'
Brushy has the corner office, the glamour spot. I'm ten years older, with smaller digs next door. She was at her desk, a plane of glass engulfed at either end by green standing plants whose fronds languished on her papers.
'Business?' she asked. 'Who's the client?' She had reached for her time sheet already.
'Old one,' I said. 'Me.' Brushy was my attorney in my wars with Nora. An absolutely ruthless trial lawyer, Emilia Bruccia is one of G amp; G's great stars. On deposition, I've seen her reform the recollections of witnesses more dramatically than if they had ingested psychoactive drugs, and she's also gifted with that wonderful, devious, clever cast of mind by which she can always explain away the opposition's most damaging documents as something not worth using to wrap fish. She's become a mainstay of our relationship with TN, while developing a dozen great clients of her own, including a big insurance company in California.
Not only does she bill a million bucks a year, but this is a terrific person. I mean it. I would no sooner try to get a jump on Brushy than I would a hungry panther. But she is not dim to feelings. She has plenty of her own, which she exhausts in work and sexual plunder, having a terminal case of hot pants that makes her personal life, behind her back, the object of local sport. She is loyal; she is smart; she has a long memory for kindnesses done. And she is a great partner. If I had to find someone on an hour's notice to go take a dep for me a hundred miles from Tulsa in the middle of the night, I'd call Brushy first. It was her dependability, in fact, which inspired my visit. When I told her I needed a favor, she didn't even flinch.
'I'd love it if you could grab the wheel on Toots's disciplinary hearing at BAD,' I said. 'I'll be there for the first session on Wednesday, but after that I may be on the loose.' BAD — the Bar Admissions and Disciplinary Commission — is a sagging bureaucracy ministering over entrances, exits, and timeouts from the practice of law. I spent my first four years as a lawyer there, struggling to remain afloat in the tidal crest of complaints regarding lawyerly feasance, mis, mal, and non.
Brushy objected that she'd never handled a hearing at
BAD and it took a second to persuade her she was up to it. Like many great successes, Brushy has her moments of doubt. She flashes the world a winning smile, then wrings her hands when she is alone, not sure she sees what everybody else does. I promised to have Lucinda, the secretary whose services we shared, copy the file, to let Brushy look it over.
'Where will you be?' she asked.
'Looking for Bert.'
'Yeah, where in the world is he?'
'That's what the Committee wants to know.'
'The Committee?'
Brushy warmed to my account. The Big Three tend to be tight-vested and most of my partners relish any chance to peek behind the curtains. Brushy savored each detail until she suddenly grasped the problem.
'Just like that? Five million, six?' Her small mouth hanging open, Brushy looked dimly toward the future — the lawsuits, the recriminations. Her investment in the law firm was in jeopardy. 'How could he do that to us?'
'There are no victims,' I told her. She didn't get it. 'Cop talk,' I said, 'it's a thing we'd say. Guy walks down a dark street alone in the wrong neighborhood and gets mugged. Some shmo cries a river cause he lost a hundred- thousand bucks hoping some con artist could make a car run on potato chips. People get what they're asking for. There are no victims.'
She looked at me with concern. Brushy sat here tonight in a trim suit and a blouse with a big orange bow. Her short hair was cut close, a little butch, and showed off two or three prominent acne scars that pitted her left cheek, like the dimples of the moon. Her teenaged years had to have been tough.
'It's a saying,' I said.
'Meaning what? Here?'
Shrugging, I went to the pencil drawer in the gunmetal credenza behind her to find a cigarette. We both sneak butts. Gage amp; Griswell is now a smoke-free environment, but we sit in Brushy's office or mine with the door closed. From the drawer I also removed a little makeup mirror, which I asked to borrow. Brushy couldn't have cared less. She was chewing on her thumb, still wrought up with the prospect of disaster.
'Should you be telling me this?' Brushy asked. She always had a better sense than me for the value of a confidence.
'Probably not,' I admitted. 'Call it attorney-client.' Privileged, I meant. Forever secret. Another of those witless jokes lawyers make about the law. Brushy wasn't really my lawyer here; I wasn't really her client. 'Besides, I need to ask you something about Bert.'
She was still pondering the situation. She said again she couldn't believe it.
'It's a nice idea,
'What kind of new IDs?' she asked.
'Oh, he seems to be using some screwy alias. You ever hear him call himself Kam Roberts for any reason — even just kidding around?'
Never. I told her a little about my visit to the Russian Bath, watching these guys built like refrigerators flail each other with oak branches and soap.
'Weird,' she said.
'That's how it struck me. Here's the thing, Brush. These birds around there seem to think Bert has gone off with some man. He ever mention anyone named Archie?'
'Nope.' She eyed me through the smoke. She already knew I was up to something.
'It made me think, you know. It's been years since I saw Bert with a woman.' When Bert got here more than a decade ago, he was still squiring Doreen, his high-school honey, to firm functions. He'd made vague promises to marry this woman, a sweet schoolteacher, and in the years she waited she turned into a kind of sports-bar bimbo, with a drinking problem like mine and skirts the size of handkerchiefs and blonde hair so ravaged by chemicals that it stuck out from her head like raffia. One day at lunch Bert announced she was marrying her principal. No further comment. Ever. And no replacement.
Always live to nuance, Brushy had perked up. 'Are you asking what I think?'
