Sandy disengaged himself from a group of people near the festive archway where clowns were entertaining the children. Multi-colored balloons swayed in the air. Sandy was a master of working any crowd, but there was nothing unctuous about him. “Byron,” he said, “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
Sandy was as tall as Byron, and they were among the tallest men in the firm. They had known each other for twenty-five years. “I’m not that much of a recluse yet,” Byron said.
“Even Thoreau left Walden every day to visit Emerson in Concord.”
“I think the firm would really benefit, Sandy, if the next lecture was on Thoreau and Emerson instead of marketing and networking.”
“Networking.” Sandy paused. “Awful word, isn’t it?”
Byron said, “It’s an even more atrocious concept.”
Effortlessly Sandy turned to a new topic. “How was your escapade in Miami?”
“Frustrating. I had a total of thirty minutes with him.”
Five days earlier Byron had sent an email to Sandy and the six other members of the executive committee simply announcing that he’d been approached to represent an accused terrorist brought from a foreign prison to the United States to be indicted and tried. He wrote that he had decided that he would represent the man, if the man in fact asked him. Byron didn’t request that this be treated as a pro bono assignment, which would have required him to get approval from yet a different committee so that he could list the hours he spent as though they were time devoted to a paying client. Part of his annual income depended on the number of hours he billed to paying clients or to approved pro bono cases. No one had responded to his email.
“What’s he charged with?” Sandy asked as casually as if asking what Byron’s golf handicap was.
“I don’t know yet. This new regime fascinates me. A man is held in limbo in detention for years. Now he’s been in a United States prison for weeks. Publicity about it everywhere. Even the president commenting on it. And the man still doesn’t know what he’s charged with.”
“What’s his name again?”
“Ali Hussein.”
“Doesn’t sound real. It’s a name right out of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.”
“Sandy, he’s not living a fairy tale. He’s real.”
Dozens of small birds, black against the deepening blue-black screen of the evening sky, swept over the zoo. Sandy said, “I think you can assume that he’s not charged with littering the sidewalk.”
“That didn’t appear to be what the CIA and the Justice Department had in mind when they called me into the U.S. Attorney’s Office so they could do a ranting-and-raving routine today.”
“So that’s where you were this afternoon? How did it go?”
Byron was annoyed that someone had taken account of his absence. But he masked his annoyance. “It wasn’t exactly a dialogue. It was a classic Mussolini-on-the-balcony scene.”
“It’s been a long time, Byron, since you did any criminal work.”
Byron’s first job out of law school was a two-year stint at the Justice Department. He had been assigned to criminal cases as an assistant to more senior lawyers. It was an era when a short tenure at the Department was considered a credential that, for the chosen few, followed graduation from certain New England prep schools, prestigious colleges, and elite law schools and preceded the passage to big law firms. It was exactly the trajectory Byron’s career had followed, and until now he’d never resisted it.
“Cases are cases, Sandy. There’s one side, there’s the other side. There’s one version of the facts, there is another version of the facts. Or several versions, sometimes all true, more or less. The law that applies is usually pretty simple, certainly the law’s no Jesuitical mystery, no matter how hard we want people outside of this business to believe it is. Cases start, they move forward, and they come to an end, all in the fullness of time.”
“Speaking of time, Byron, have you thought about how much time you’ll spend on this?”
“Not at all. It’s like any other case in that way, too, Sandy. It takes whatever time it takes. It may take no more time than the hours I’ve already put into it. Ali Hussein may decide he doesn’t want me to represent him.”
“I doubt that, Byron. You’re skillful, you’re dedicated, you’re respected all around the country-”
“And I’m free, Sandy.”
Streams of multi-colored rockets began to rise, hissing, from reedy poles placed all around the zoo. It was a dazzling display. The firm had all the resources in the world: it could spend thousands of dollars to rent the Central Park Zoo; it could bring together popular bands; it could assemble caterers, magicians, and entertainers; and it could stage fireworks.
Sandy waved his glass at the display of sparks, the expanse of the zoo, the skyline of the grand buildings along Fifth Avenue. “Nothing is free, Byron. You know that.”
Not answering, Byron looked up at the fireworks and, beyond them, the black heights of the park’s ancient trees. During the years he was married to Joan, he had lived in an apartment three blocks from the zoo, at Fifth Avenue and 65th Street. He had never lived as long anywhere else in the world: his father was a career officer in the Foreign Service who never stayed more than four years in any post, and as a child Byron Carlos Johnson had lived in New York City, Mexico City, West Berlin, and Washington, DC. At thirteen he was sent to Groton and, during the four years he spent there, he saw his patrician father and aristocratic Mexican mother eight times, never for more than three weeks each time. He knew even then that there was no real relationship between him and his parents; they were acquaintances, and something about the world in which he grew up-an all boys’ prep school, an all-male college, and law school in the sixties and early seventies-made him believe there was nothing unusual about a family in which a boy visited his parents once or twice each year in whatever city in the world they lived at the time and spent three weeks each summer with them on Monhegan Island, just off the coast of Maine, in the sprawling, shingled house that had been in his father’s family for ninety years. If he had ever been asked if he felt lonely, if he often wondered what his mother and his father were doing in their lives at the lonely moments he was thinking of them, he would have said no, and would have believed it.
Raising his martini glass as if making a toast at a wedding, Sandy said, “I’m glad you’re here, Byron. It’s important for the younger lawyers to see that the old guard is still involved.”
“When did we get to be the old guard?”
“When the young Turks started wondering what we really do.”
“What is it you think we do, Sandy?”
“We make money so that we can have these parties.”
4
DECADES HAD PASSED SINCE the 1967 and 1968 riots in Newark, yet the corner of Broad Street and Raymond Boulevard still looked devastated. Byron remembered the grainy televised images from 1968 when, at a hamburger joint on Nassau Street while he was still at Princeton, he watched news footage of burning storefronts and overturned cars in Newark during the days after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. In the fuzzy, black-and-white images on the screen, National Guard troops ran chaotically back and forth. Black men stood on the sidewalks and streets, apparently unconcerned with the presence of the tense, obviously frightened soldiers. There were trash fires, smashed store fronts, and burning police cars.