“Maybe as we go along, Mr. Johnson, I can give you a boost on that. Maybe when you make your client understand that if he wants to help himself we might be able to help him, by someday letting him have the hope of seeing Damascus again, where he can enjoy the blessings of a true democracy, and in this life, not the next.”
3
THREE BANDS WERE PERFORMING at the firm’s party in the Central Park Zoo. One was a reggae group near the pool in which the seals lived. Another band, more remote, up in the rocky area where the polar bears were kept, was a rock group playing music from U2 and Guns N’ Roses. More sedate, and far more popular with the older partners and their wives, was a band playing Motown music near the trees and mossy boulders where the monkeys lived.
Byron’s firm had rented the entire zoo for the night and invited not only the three hundred partners and associates who worked in the firm’s New York office but also the lawyers from the satellite offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami. They had come with their husbands, wives, partners, and children. The party, which was held once each year in the summer, started in the late afternoon and would run on until ten.
Byron looked forward to the day when he would never have to go to one of these parties again. He had attended the firm’s summer outings-at country clubs, in the Met, at the zoo-for years. Although the people had changed from year to year as lawyers joined the firm, left the firm, retired, died, or were forced out, with more and more new lawyers always replacing them, the core nature of the firm never changed-hundreds of lawyers celebrating their wealth, their success, and the firm’s longevity. In many ways, SpencerBlake was like a baseball team: it had a name, and that name remained the same despite the fact that the lawyers who worked for the firm were constantly in flux. That nebulous thing-the firm-survived the specific identities of the lawyers who made up the firm. Not one of the players on the Boston Red Sox this year had been a player in 2007, yet the identity of the team survived its human parts.
Drink in hand, Byron walked around the zoo. He had arrived alone, six hours after his meeting at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in lower Manhattan. Byron was divorced, against his will, six years earlier.
“Mr. Johnson, I’ve been wanting to say hi to you.” The young woman-tall, slim, black-haired, beautiful-touched his elbow while he watched the seals leap into the air and clamber on the boulders as two zookeepers, young women in knee-high green waders and safari-style clothes, tossed fish into the air. The kids clapped each time the seals caught the fish in midair, as they always did, with the unerring accuracy of major league infielders. Even the adults applauded.
In the dusk, Byron faced her. He no longer made any effort to know the names of every lawyer in the firm and never looked at the pictures in the firm’s ever-changing, yearbook-size directory or on its splashy promotional website. He did what he always did when he encountered someone whose name he didn’t know or couldn’t remember. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you have to tell me who you are.”
“Christina Rosario.”
“Christina, hello.”
She shifted the drink she’d been carrying in her right hand to her left. When he touched her now free right hand it was chilly and wet, electrifying. From years of meeting thousands of people at parties, at conventions, and in the ordinary course of his busy life, Byron instinctively knew how to engage a new person, even one as distractingly good-looking as Christina Rosario, in conversation. “Are you in the New York office? Chicago? LA?”
“I’m a summer associate, here.” Her voice was warm and calm, appealing.
“Welcome, Christina.” Byron asked the natural next question. “Where do you go to law school?”
“Columbia.”
She stood closer to him than he would have expected. She wore a red summer dress. In the steadily deepening dark, with the tinkle of glasses and laughter and the partying voices all around him, he saw that the dress was cut low enough to reveal the lovely shape of her neck and her shoulders, all that flawless young skin, and the swell of her large breasts.
“I’ve been hoping to work in the litigation department with you.”
Until five years ago-when his involvement in the work he had done for years began to wane-Byron had been the head of the firm’s litigation department. “We still have a rotation system, Christina, I’m sure you’ll get there.”
Christina made him uncomfortable, that mix of desire and concern. The desire was understandable: a long time had passed since Joan divorced him, he had spent several years essentially alone except for the fewer and fewer people with whom he had contact at work, and, although a handsome man, he had dated only seven or eight women. He had spent a few nights with only three of them. His sons, Hunter (his father’s middle name) and Tomas (the first name of his mother’s father), lived in distant cities; they were in their early thirties, born just a year apart, probably the same age as this gorgeous woman, and they were starting their own careers. They were always popular, always engaged with friends and with life, more like Joan in that way than like him.
And the concern he felt, as he stood close to Christina in the dusk that gradually filled the zoo, was understandable, too. Male partners in the firm routinely received email reminders from the executive committee that alerted them to the absolute prohibitions against what was called “unwelcome” contact with the junior women and men in the firm. Two years earlier, the firm had been sued when a fifty-year-old corporate partner told a twenty-eight-year-old associate that she had a great ass. Byron barely knew the partner, but at a closed meeting among dozens of the partners, he was impressed by the man’s sincerity when he described the flirty conversation in which he had used those words. “I never even touched her hand,” he kept repeating, completely bewildered by what was engulfing him as a result of uttering one sentence. “I meant nothing by it.” The firm had settled the case swiftly with a payment of half a million dollars to the woman, who left the firm, complete with a six-month paid leave of absence, to join a firm in Houston. The partner had been forced to resign. Privately Byron considered the punishment too swift and too total.
Faced with this alluring young woman with her unsettling presence, Byron heeded the danger signals. She made him feel awkward, somewhat like a teenager at his first party. He raised the glass he was holding in a kind of mock salute. “Maybe we will get a chance to work together,” he said. “We’ll leave that up to the hidden hand of the powers on the assignment committee.”
She stared directly into his eyes and smiled. “I hope so, Byron.”
Even as he turned from her, her presence continued to jar and stimulate him. Byron? There was a daring in her sudden, unexpected use of his first name. Should he avoid her for the rest of the summer? Or did he want to see to it that she worked for him for a week or two? Did he want to follow the temptation that she clearly knew she was presenting? Or did he want to concentrate on that enigmatic man in the prison in Miami?
Almost involuntarily, he glanced over his shoulder. She was in profile, talking to the wife of another partner. Byron registered her entire body-the black hair, the perfect profile, the simple dress draped alluringly over her, and her slender legs. Around her slim left ankle was the distinct tattoo of a bracelet.
Sandy’s real first name wasn’t Sandy. It was Halliburton. He was Halliburton Spencer IV. He was the chairman of the firm. Tall, slender, sandy-haired, and impeccably dressed, he was the grandson of one of the founders of the firm. Although Sandy was to the manor born-his parents had an apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met and Central Park, he had spent the first seven years of his schooling at Collegiate in Manhattan before he graduated from Phillips Exeter, Yale, and Yale Law School-he was charming, easygoing, almost impossible to dislike. He had been able over the last three years to tell Byron that his share of the partnership profits was declining-from three million each year to one and a half million-so soothingly that Byron, who had done nothing to resist the cutting of the percentages that accounted for a partner’s pay, had simply told Sandy that of course he understood. “It’s part of the arc of a partner’s career,” Byron had said, although Sandy, who was only four years older than Byron, had a career arc that continued to increase his pay every year.