Chapter One
Monday, January 23
I. MY ASSIGNMENT
The Management Oversight Committee of our firm, known
among the partnership simply as "the Committee," meets
each Monday at 3:00 p.m. Over coffee and chocolate
brioche, these three hotshots, the heads of the firm's
litigation, transactional, and regulatory departments,
decide what's what at Gage & Griswell for another week.
Not bad guys really, able lawyers, heady business types
looking out for the greatest good for the greatest number
at G&G, but since I came here eighteen years ago the
Committee and their austere powers, freely delegated under
the partnership agreement, have tended to scare me silly.
I'm forty-nine, a former copper on the street, a big man
with a brave front and a good Irish routine, but in the
last few years I've heard many discouraging words from
these three. My points have been cut, my office moved to
something smaller, my hours and billing described as far
too low. Arriving this afternoon, I steadied myself, as
ever, for the worst.
"Mack," said Martin Gold, our managing partner, "Mack, we
need your help. Something serious." He's a sizable man,
Martin, a wrestler at the U. three decades ago, a
middleweight with a chest broad as the map of America. He
has a dark, shrewd face, a little like those Mongol
warriors of Genghis Khan's, and the venerable look of
somebody who's mixed it up with life. He is, no question,
the best lawyer I know. The other two, Carl Pagnucci and
Wash Thale, were eating at the walnut conference table, an
antique of Continental origin with the big heavy look of a
cuckoo clock. Martin invited me to share the brioche, but
I took only coffee. With these guys, I needed to be quick.
"This isn't about you," said Carl, making a stark
appraisal of my apprehensions.
"Who?" I asked.
"Bert," said Martin.
For going on two weeks, my partner Bert Kamin has not
appeared at the office. No mail from him, no calls. In the
case of your average baseline human being who has worked
at Gage & Griswell during my time, say anyone from Leotis
Griswell to the Polish gal who cleans the cans, this would
be cause for concern. Not so clearly Bert. Bert is a kind
of temperamental adolescent, big and brooding, who enjoys
the combat of the courtroom. You need a lawyer who will
cross-examine opposing party's CEO and claw out his
intestines in the fashion of certain large cats, Bert's
your guy. On the other hand, if you want someone who will
come to work, fill out his time sheets, or treat his
secretary as if he recollected that slavery is dead, then
you might think about somebody else. After a month or two
on trial, Bert is liable to take an absolute powder. Once
he turned up at the fantasy camp run by the Trappers, our
major league baseball team. Another time he was gambling
in Monte Carlo. With his dark moods, scowls, and hallway
tantrums, his macho stunts and episodic schedule, Bert has
survived at Gage & Griswell largely through the sufferance
of Martin, who is a champion of tolerance and seems to
enjoy the odd ducks like Bert. Or, for that matter, me.
"Why don't you talk to those thugs down at the steam bath
where he likes to hang out? Maybe they know where he is."
I meant the Russian Bath. Unmarried, Bert is apt to follow
the Kindle County sporting teams around the country on
weekends, laying heavy bets and passing time in sports
bars or places like the Bath where people talk about the
players with an intimacy they don't presume with their
relations. "He'll show up," I added, "he always does. "
Pagnucei said simply, "Not this time."
"This is very sensitive," Wash Thale told me. "Very
sensitive." Wash tends to state the obvious in a grave,
portentous manner, the self-commissioned voice of wisdom.
"Take a look." Martin shot a brown expandable folder
across the glimmer of the table. A test, I feared at once,
and felt a bolt of anxiety quicken my thorax, but inside
all I found were eighteen checks. They were drawn on what
we call the 397 Settlement Account, an escrow administered
by G&G which contains $288 million scheduled to be paid
out shortly to various plaintiffs in settlement of a
massive air crash case brought against Trans-National Air.
TN, the world's biggest airline and travel concern, is
G&G's largest client. We stand up for TN in court; we help
TN buy and deal and borrow. With its worldwide hotels and
resorts, its national catering business, its golf courses,
airport parking lots, and rent-a-car subsidiaries, TN lays
claim to some part of the time of almost every lawyer
around here. We live with the company like family in the
same home, tenanted on four floors of the TN Needle, just
below the world corporate headquarters.
The checks inside the folder had all been signed by Bert,
in his flourishing maniac hand, each one cut to something
called Litiplex Ltd., in an amount of several hundred
thousand dollars. On the memo lines of the drafts Bert had
written "Litigation Support." Document analyses, computer
models, expert witnesses - the engineers run amok in air
crash cases.
"What's Litiplex?" I asked.
Martin, to my amazement, rifled a finger as if I'd said
something adroit.
"Not incorporated or authorized to do business in any of
the fifty states," he said. "Not in any state's Assumed
Names registry. Carl checked. "
Nodding, Carl added like an omen, "Myself."
Carl Pagnucci - born Carlo - is forty-two, the youngest of
three, and stingy with words, a lawyer's lawyer who holds
his own speech in the same kind of suspicion with which
Woody Hayes viewed the forward pass. He is a pale little
guy with a mustache like one of those round brushes that
comes with your electric shaver. In his perfect suits,
somber and tasteful, with a flash of gold from his
cufflinks, he reveals nothing.
Assessing the news that Bert, my screwball colleague, had
written millions of dollars of checks to a company that
didn't exist, I felt some peculiar impulse to defend him,
my own longtime alliance with the wayward.
"Maybe somebody asked him to do it," I said.
"That's where we started," Wash replied. He'd taken his
stout figure back to the brioche. This had come up
initially, Wash said, when Glyndora Gaines, our staff
supervisor in Accounting, noticed these large
disbursements with no backup.
"Glyndora's searched three times for any paper trail,"
Wash told me. "Invoices. Sign-of memo from Jake." Under
our procedures, Bert was allowed to write checks on the
397 account only after receiving written approval from
Jake Eiger, a former partner in this firm, who is now the
General Counsel at TN.
"And?"
"There is none. We've even had Glyndora make inquiries
upstairs with her counterparts at TN, the folks who handle
the accounting on 397. Nothing to alarm them. You
understand. 'We had some stray correspondence for this
Litiplex. Blah, blah, blah.' Martin tried the same
approach with one or two of the plaintiffs' lawyers in the
hope they knew something we didn't. There's nothing," he
said, "not a scrap. Nobody's ever heard the name." Wash is
more shifty than smart, but looking at him - his liver
spots and wattles, his discreet twitches and the little
bit of mouse gray hair he insists on pasting across his
scalp - I detected the feckless expression he has when he
is sincere. "Not to mention," he added, "the endorsement."
I'd missed that. Now I took note on the back of each check
of the bilingual green block stamp of the International
Bank of Finance in Pico Luan. Pico, a tiny Central
American nation, a hangnail on the toe of the Yucatan, is
a pristine haven of fugitive dollars and absolute bank
secrecy. There were no signatures on the checks' backs,
but what I took for the account number was inscribed on
each beneath the stamp. A straight deposit.
"We tried calling the bank," said Martin. "I explained to
the General Manager that we were merely trying to confirm
that Robert Kamin had rights of deposit and withdrawal on
account 476642. 1 received a very genial lecture on the
bank secrecy laws in Pico in reply. Quite a clever fellow,
this one. With that beautiful accent. just the piece of
work you'd expect in that business. Like trying to grab
hold of smoke. I asked if he was familiar with Mr. Kamin's
name. Not a word I could quote, but I thought he was
saying yes. God knows, he didn't say no."
"And what's the total?" I thumbed the checks.
"Over five and a half million," said Carl, who was always
quickest with figures. "Five point six and some change
actually."
With that, we were all briefly silent, awed by the gravity
of the number and the daring of the feat. My partners
writhed in further anguish, but on closer inspection of
myself I found I was vibrating like a bell that had been
struck. What a notion! Grabbing all that dough and hieing
out for parts unknown. The wealth, the freedom, the chance
to start anew! I wasn't sure if I was more shocked or
thrilled.
"Has anybody talked to Jake?" That seemed like the next
logical step to me, tell the client they'd been had.
"God, no," said Wash. "There's going to be hell to pay
with TN. A partner in the firm lies to them, embezzles,
steals. That's just the kind of thing that Krzysinski has
been waiting for to leverage Jake. We will be dead. Dead,"
he said.