“I’ll tell you what, Mr. Prescott. For one hundred and eighty thousand dollars, we’ll disappear. We won’t say anything to the press, won’t sully the perfect reputations of your clients. No nasty trial. Nothing. The end.”
He shrugged. “That’s all a necessary precondition in any event. One hundred thousand dollars.”
I stood. “That’s not enough.”
“I’ll whip you in court, son.”
“You just might at that, sir.”
Prescott stared me down. I was supposed to turn to leave, that was the act, but the sound of those threes jangling bangling through my mind froze my feet in place and I stared back at him, waiting for him to save me.
“I’ll tell you what I’m willing to do,” said Prescott. “I hate doing this, I think I’m going too far, but you are a bulldog, Victor, and you don’t leave me much choice. What I’m willing to do is give you one more number. This number is a blue light special, do you understand? I want to hear a quick yes or no. If it’s yes we have a deal. If it’s no we’ll fight it out in court. Are you ready for the number, Victor?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“One hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”
The division was so easy it couldn’t have been unintentional. Forty thousand dollars registered in my mind with the ringing clarity of a bell. In the blink of an eye I plotted my expenditures. Twenty thousand directly to the office, overdue salary to our secretary and receptionist, overdue rent, overdue use and occupancy tax, overdue dues due to the bar association. Blue Cross had been hounding us for money, as had West Publishing and Xerox, which had refused to service the machine because we were behind on our maintenance payments. All our copies came out badly streaked and gray, as if they were copies of copies of copies. We were short of stationery, manila folders, yellow pads; our postage meter hadn’t been reset in months. Twenty thousand dollars disappearing like so much drifting paper into the abyss of our failing legal practice. We’d put five in the bank to take care of another month’s nut, just in case, leaving fifteen grand to be split between Derringer and me, which, after paying overdue estimated taxes, would leave me with four thousand dollars. One of my credit cards was maxed, so I’d pay that down, and my student loans were deeply in default, maybe a payment or two would renew their patience, and I still owed my father the five thousand I had borrowed last year when things got very very tight.
“We have a deal, Mr. Prescott,” I said.
He slapped his palms onto his thighs and stood, smiling warmly, pumping my hand like I was a new father. “Splendid. Just splendid. Madeline,” he said without looking at her. “Why don’t you get to work right away drawing up the papers.” He said nothing more until she stood and, without saying farewell, left the office.
“I should get going too,” I said. “Tell my clients the news.”
“Not just yet, Victor. You’re tenacious, I’ll give you that. A bulldog. Let’s take a moment together. I might have a proposition for you, son.”
He put his arm around my shoulder. The gesture was so unexpected that I froze as if under attack.
“I might just have for you,” he said, “the opportunity of a lifetime.”
3
CONNIE MACK, the ageless Philadelphia baseball magnate who coincidentally looked very much like William Prescott III, once said, “Opportunity knocks at every man’s door,” but I didn’t believe it for a second. There were men and women who toiled all the days of their lives without getting a single chance. I knew them, I was related to them, I was one. I had been waiting for it all my life and still it had never come for me, never called my name, never knocked on my door, never slipped itself through my mail slot. Or then again, maybe the post office had simply misplaced it, along with that letter I’d been expecting from Ed McMahon. No, it was the great myth of America that this is the land of opportunity. For guys like me, I had learned painfully, there was no such thing as opportunity, only a grind to wear away our spirits as it stole the heart from our lives day by day. So I was naturally skeptical. When someone like Prescott whispered the word opportunity in my ear, it generally meant the opportunity for him to take advantage of me.
“A brilliant man,” said Prescott, gesturing toward a picture of himself standing beside a slouching President Nixon. “It was an honor to work for him.”
“I’m sure it was,” I said. There were things I could say to him about Nixon the perjurer, the man who lied about his secret plan to end the war and then saturated Hanoi with his bombs, who resigned in disgrace and was saved from indictment only by presidential pardon, but this wasn’t the moment.
“Oh, he made mistakes, of course,” said Prescott. “But in my mind that gives him all the more stature. He is a tragic hero, a man brought to power and glory through his brilliant, slightly paranoid will and brought to ruin by the same. But while he was at the top of his ride, he was a damn good president.”
“I’m an admirer of Kennedy.”
“Oh, yes.” He stepped over to another picture of a very youthful William Prescott III shaking hands with a smiling Jack Kennedy. We were standing before his wall of photographs, a shrine, really, to himself, as Prescott introduced me to the greats and near greats who had known him. I listened politely, fighting all the while to restrain the giddy joy I felt about the settlement we had reached in Saltz.
“All charm and good looks, Kennedy,” continued Prescott. “But a bumbler, really. He stumbled into the Bay of Pigs, almost fumbled us into a nuclear war over Cuba, and then put us into Vietnam. November 22, 1963, was a terrible day, but frankly I think the country was better off because of it.”
“Kennedy had vision,” I said.
“No, not really. What did he care about civil rights before King started grabbing headlines? Now Reagan had vision.” There was a large color photograph of Ronald Reagan with his arm around Prescott. “He was a genuinely nice man, too. He wasn’t the brightest, but he didn’t have to be. There are a million smart bureaucrats in the federal government, that’s not what we need at the top. But Reagan’s vision was unrealistic. That’s why of all the presidents I’ve known, the one I admire most is Bush.”
He guided me to a picture of himself with George and Barbara Bush. The Bushes were smiling warmly at Prescott, who was standing with a regal stiffness, staring straight into the camera.
“A fine man,” said Prescott. “A great leader. A true pragmatist in a world of ideologues. He was betrayed by his own people. That’s how the clown we have now slipped in.”
I voted for the clown, but this wasn’t the moment to bring that up either, though I did say, “I’m not sure pure pragmatism is admirable in a politician.”
“Anything else is just diddling, Victor. If you don’t concentrate on the practical consequences of your actions, what do you concentrate on, intent? Good intentions were not the problem with our presence in Vietnam, it was just that, practically, victory there was impossible. A quarter million French had been defeated by the Vietnamese, how did we think we could prevail? The only way to govern effectively is to look beyond the ideology, beyond the surface morality, right to the heart of the doing.”
“But what goals do you seek without an ideological framework?”
“Peace, prosperity, justice, equality. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Goals are easy, everyone wants the same things, but a pragmatist won’t be misled by a false ideology and won’t let narrow restrictions on means get in his way. Lawyers are by their very nature pragmatists. Whether or not we’re in ideological agreement with our clients, our job is to win for them within the rules, no matter how. Anything less is a violation of duty.”