Pleading Guilty

'Oh,' said Martin. He relaxed. 'Right. We hid the body.' He made a brief effort to smile. For an instant, I wondered again about who'd moved the body. The only thing certain was that Archie couldn't have walked.

In the meantime, Martin had resumed his explanation, telling me how they had come to blame Bert for stealing the Litiplex money. The first few times Glyndora and he had discussed it, he said, the whole plan, it was in the vein of magnificent fantasy, a perfect future where all problems came to an end. He worked it out with her dozens of times, calculated how the dominoes would fall, saw at once how advantageous it would be to the firm not to have to sacrifice Jake. It was fun to discuss, lots of laughs, like a couple saying they'll rob a bank to pay the mortgage. Eventually he recognized that she was urging him to pursue what he'd regarded as jest.

'I told her this was lunacy. Worse than that, impermissible. A fraud. But you see. Really.' He sat up. He faced me squarely. 'It's me. It's mine. It's my precious values. My law. My rules. Take that out of the equation — My right,' he said, 'my wrong. My precious abstractions.' He halted in the midst of the litany he must have heard from her for years and lingered like some bug in the breeze, manifestly pained. Watching him, my heart spurted with sudden hope that Brushy and I might resolve what divided us the same way, until I recollected, as quickly, that we were both supposed to believe in the same thing.

'Here are these people,' he said. 'Glyndora and Orleans. My partners. Jake. Bert. Even you, Mack. Even you. This is an institution. It's the product of lives. Hundreds of lives. All right. I sound like Wash. Forgive the sanctimony. But do I lay that all on the altar? I've made worse compromises.'

Both hands were thrown wide. He had a touch of priestly majesty. He thought he was revealed.

I said, 'It doesn't hurt you either, Martin. We all know who gets the biggest share.' I was enjoying this — being the man of greater rectitude, even if we both knew it was situational and I knew it was an act. Fact is, I've enjoyed my acts, every one of them — copper, hard guy, smartass, lawyer. I can be a good anything, if it's only part time.

Martin had absorbed my remark with a lingering, rueful grin.

'Not me,' he said. He backhanded the little note card he'd had on his desk so it spiraled through space; I picked it up off the rug. Martin's handwriting is atrocious — slashes and squiggles indiscernible to me, even after all these years. But certain words were clear enough. 'Resigning.' 'Mayor.' 'Riverside Commission.' 'Long-held passion.' In tonight's speech to the partnership assembled, Martin Gold was going to quit.

'Think the public sector can handle me?' he asked.

'You've got to be kidding.' I couldn't believe it. The circus without Barnum.

He muled around. Stubborn. Set. It was time, he said. The deal was done. Martin Gold, head of the Riverside Commission. Starting April i. He talked about thirty years in private practice, giving things back, but I understood the imperatives. If he took a dive for Jake, if he didn't march stalwartly to Krzysinski's office and let his law firm pass into the great beyond, then Martin would punish himself instead. His people might survive, but he wouldn't get to the promised land. It was an old idea, and its mixture of shrewd practicality and highfalutin principles was quintessentially Gold. Lawyerly, you'd say. But still nuts.

'You should have been born a Catholic,' I told him. 'You really missed your chance. There are all these obscure fast days and penitential rites. We've been working for centuries on strategies for self-denial.' He thought I was funny of course. He always did. He laughed out loud.

All these years I've figured that if I somehow eluded Martin's defenses and peered into his core it would be a vision of glory: I'd see a lionheart, beating at mach speed and enlarged by passion. Instead, what was within was some little gremlin that made him believe that his greatest nobility came from cutting himself off from what he liked best. Glyndora. Or the law firm. He was cheap with himself, with his own pleasure. It was crushing to recognize: he was more productive than me, but no happier. I didn't want his life either.

He was still disagreeing.

'As of today' — And he nodded toward me — 'I'm not giving up much. Not once the dust settles upstairs. Whether Tad instructs his new General Counsel to cut us off or just cut us back, this place won't hold together. A fellow like Carl — ' Martin stopped himself; he never spoke ill of his partners. 'Not everyone will settle for less. In the end, frankly, there will be those who paint me as an opportunist. First man to the lifeboat.'

There was, of course, a subtle accusatory element to these observations. Martin had removed a limb or two for the team. I'd destroyed it. The Catholic boy, ever guilty as charged, still reared up to defend himself. It was comic, of course. I'd stolen nearly six million bucks and wasn't beset by thoughts of giving it back. But in that goofy way we have of thinking we are what we're seen to be, I cared about Martin's impressions.

'Am I supposed to apologize?' I asked. 'It's an ugly deal, Martin, the one you were trying to cut with Jake — five and a half mil of the client's money so he continues throwing slops to G and G.'

Martin went still — just the way he had when I mentioned the body. He gave his head a distinct shake.

'Is that what you think?' He smiled suddenly. Luminously. He used the chair arms to boost himself. What I'd said actually pleased him. I knew why too. I'd made some error that allowed him to resume his familiar supremacy.

'Oh, I see,' he said, ‘I see. I was bartering with Jake. TN's business for the money. Is that it? That's it?' It was a contest now, a stalking. I just kept my mouth shut as he kept moving in. ‘I plead guilty, Mack. I was trying to preserve the firm. I was even trying to save Jake from himself. And God knows I was hoping to shelter Orleans. I trimmed some corners off my conscience in the process — I admit that too. Maybe more than corners. But do you honestly think the object of this was that — that crass?'

I didn't answer.

'I can't imagine how you viewed this. Why would I confront Jake with Wash and you last week? Why not just whisper in his ear that I knew he was a thief and demand he send all business now and hereafter?'

He was safer, of course, not confronting Jake openly, but I knew he would ridicule that suggestion.

'Don't you see?' he asked. 'Look at this, for God's sake, from Jake's perspective. We tell him the money's missing, we believe Bert's got it, we can't locate any records related to the disbursement to Litiplex. But we also say we're looking high and low for Bert, and when we find him, we'll beg him to give the money back and come home. We even tell Jake we want his blessing for that arrangement. You were sitting right here. You heard that. Now how does Jake know that you're not going to find Bert? How can he be sure?'

This was like law school. The Grand Inquisitor. I swallowed and admitted he couldn't.

'He can't,' said Martin, 'that's right. He can't. He can't be certain. And when Bert is found, when he returns from whatever exotic detour he's taken, Jake knows where Bert is going to be pointing. Straight at Jake. There's no safety for Jake in the fact we blame Bert. He knows it's a misimpression.

'But now let's consider an alternative. You're out searching up Bert, trying to get him the message that all is well if he just gives back the money, and lo and behold, lo and behold, Jake Eiger, Glyndora, someone is able to report that mysteriously, wonderfully, a wire transfer has come in from Pico Luan. God bless Bert. God bless us. Case closed. As promised, not another word will be spoken on the subject. My God, Mack! Could you really have missed this? Don't you understand that the point was to offer Jake a discreet way, a last opportunity to give the goddamned bloody money back

It settled in then, like the mystical presence of some nearby angel. Martin, of course, was speaking the truth. It had all the delicate signs of his typical engineering. Nothing so direct as a confrontation with Jake. That would have been shabby and extortionate — and risky as well, if Jake ever told tales. This way the world could go on, with all its false faces. Oddly, it would be exactly as the Committee had told me from the start. Except for the identity of the thief, the plan was precisely the same: Get the money back, sweep it under the rug, kiss and make up.

'He could have run,' I said to Martin.

'He could have. But he hasn't run yet. Jake obviously wants to hold on to this life. He just craves some security to which he's not entitled. I was letting him know it was time to make a more realistic choice.'

'And what happens when he doesn't give the money back? You're not telling me you were actually thinking of turning him in?'

He looked at me like I was nuts.

'What other choice is there? That was the one limit I set with Glyndora to start.' He could see I was astonished. 'Look, Mack, if I was determined to say nothing, no matter what Jake did, I would have burned that memo, not kept it in a drawer.'

'But you didn't say anything.'

'Why should I? You're the one who brought us Jake's message last week: Be patient, Bert's not to blame, it's not what it appears, future accountings will show that there's been a mistake. That was clearly the prelude. Jake