Extraordinary Rendition

8

SANDY SPENCER-GREGARIOUS, GENTLEMANLY, always at ease-often passed Byron Johnson’s light-filled corner office on the twenty-seventh floor overlooking Park Avenue and the urban landscape of midtown office towers. As the lead partner of the firm, Sandy made it a point to walk at least once each week through the five floors the firm occupied in the Seagram Building to make his presence known. On these tours he spoke with the firm’s other partners, the associates, the secretaries, and the messengers. Byron, who was always respectful and friendly to people on the staff, thought Sandy’s tours through the office were a form of politicking, as if, Byron once told a bitter, now retired partner who had been removed from the firm in a campaign Sandy orchestrated, he were running for Mayor of Park Avenue.

Byron was making notes on a yellow legal pad when Sandy knocked on the edge of his open office door. Sandy, his suit jacket off, wore a regimental striped tie. His initials were woven into the cuffs of his crisp white shirt. “Byron,” he said, “when are we going to get you to stop using those yellow legal pads? I thought Nixon was the last man to use them.”

“Sandy, the beauty of these is that I can burn them and nobody can ever know what was in my mind. That’s why Nixon used them. They tell me that what you type on a computer lives forever.”

Sandy had worked as a young lawyer on the staff of the Watergate Committee for its Republican members. Sandy said, “Hell, Byron, I still have Nixon’s notes.”

Bright light from the late morning sun flooded Byron’s sparely furnished office. He still had enough sense of attachment to the firm that he thought it was best for him to sit and banter for a few minutes with Sandy Spencer.

“Sandy, you’re the man who keeps the secrets. That’s why Nixon loved you.”

Sandy sat in the visitor’s chair in front of the desk. He crossed his elegant legs, the relaxed posture of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. As if announcing good news, he said, “I just got a call from Jack Andrews. They have a new case they’re sending over. Securities fraud, he said, with a sprinkle of racketeering claims to spice it up.”

Jack Andrews was the chief inside counsel at American Express, a client of SpencerBlake for all the years both Byron and Sandy had worked there. Jack Andrews had once been a junior partner at the law firm, which long ago had managed the brilliant tactic of placing him in the in-house counsel’s office of a major client. Jack had soon become the ultimate decision-maker in selecting outside lawyers to represent American Express. Jack Andrews “spread the jewels around,” as Sandy Spencer often said, but he usually saved the “crown jewels” of legal work for his old law firm.

Smiling, Byron said, “Sandy, is there a bank in America big enough to hold all your money?”

Sandy returned Byron’s smile. “I’ve moved the excess to the Channel Isles.”

“Now that Switzerland is giving up information right and left,” Byron said, “there are all these other countries racing into the growth industry of tax havens. Or are they islands, dukedoms, principalities?”

“Where there’s money there’s always a way to hide it,” Sandy said, laughing. He then looked at Byron as if, Byron thought, he was about to cajole a boy. “Jack specifically said he wanted you to be the lead litigation partner on this case. It’s important enough to Amex that he wants to be sure you handle it. Even at your $950 hourly rate.”

Byron clicked the tip of his pencil on the top of his desk. “When did clients get the privilege of deciding who’s assigned to what cases? Isn’t that our decision?”

Sandy’s expression changed from its usual urbanity to that wintry look his father used when he was unhappy with another lawyer in the firm. Sandy’s father was still working at SpencerBlake in the first three years Byron was there. He was “Mr. Spencer” to everyone, including his son. There were times when, if he wasn’t satisfied with the research of a young lawyer, he’d throw a book across the desk at him. It was a different world then, austere, aristocratic, and arbitrary.

“Byron, work with us. I don’t want to discuss when clients can and can’t pick the lawyers they want on particular cases. Jack asked for you. He rarely does that.”

“Jack can’t have me,” Byron said.

“Why not?”

“I’m fully tied up.”

“Really, Byron? I looked at your time sheets for the last six weeks. Either you forgot to write down your time or you don’t have more than three billable hours.”

Byron found himself drawing, in pencil, the shape of a house crowned by two triangles meant to represent a sloping roof. It was precisely the kind of drawing he had made in grammar school. “Sandy, I expect my client in Miami to be indicted next week. When he’s indicted I’ll have to put everything and anything else aside to deal with it.”

“Come on, Byron.”

“Come on? I took on a client, Sandy, for better or worse. And for better or worse he wants me to represent him. He’s just like any other client: he’s entitled to loyalty, attention, respect.”

“And so is Jack Andrews. And so is his company. You should be flattered that he asked for you.”

“I’m way beyond flattery.”

“I guess so, Byron, I guess so. You certainly aren’t getting much these days.”

Byron finished the carbon pencil streaks that represented the roof of his childlike drawing. Then he made little rectangular boxes and a door on the front of the house: the drawing had assumed the style of a colonial saltbox in New England. “There’s a charm,” he said, “in being on the wrong side of a genuinely unpopular case.”

“Really? Who remembers the name of the lawyer who represented Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh case? Or the lawyer who represented Ted Bundy?”

Byron looked up from the drawing in front of him. “You know what? Nobody remembers the name Byron Carlos Johnson in any of the cases where I’ve represented American Express, or Microsoft, or Goldman Sachs. It might be that that is what a lawyer is all about-working for a client so that the client is important, not the lawyer.”

Sandy shrugged. He had lived in New York for so long that even he had adopted the New York Jewish shrug-weary, expressive, and frustrated. He stood, and Byron remained seated, relieved that the conversation was about to end.

But it wasn’t. “Byron,” Sandy said, “you are going to take the American Express case. And something else: you are embarrassing yourself and this firm. Everybody has seen the pictures of you leaving that courthouse in Miami. You looked like a deer caught in the headlights.”

“It wasn’t the most flattering picture I’ve ever seen.”

Sandy waved his hand. As he watched the abrupt wave-so uncharacteristic of the patrician Sandy Spencer, as was the New York shrug-he had a sense that Sandy meant to wave him into another world. “You know what else wasn’t flattering, Byron? What else is an embarrassment for the firm?”

Byron now stood. They were separated by the gleaming top of Byron’s desk. He managed to control the antagonism he had held against this man for years. “What else?”

“It’s very bad form, Byron, to take an associate of this firm with you to Miami and have the world witness you acting dumbfounded in front of a camera and then stumbling into a cab with her. We were trying to recruit her as a lawyer, not recruit her as your travel companion.”

“She doesn’t work here, Sandy. She certainly hasn’t got any intention of coming back.”

“You’re tone deaf, Byron. You’re a relic, even worse than I am. I had a call less than an hour ago from the dean at Columbia to ask the firm for an explanation as to why a partner here would travel with a law student, especially one who spent the summer working here as an associate. And one who must be decades younger than the partner.”

Byron spoke slowly in an effort to take any angry edge off the tone of his voice. “Sandy, isn’t it time for you to continue your captain’s tour of the decks of your luxury cruiser?”

Shaking his head, exaggerating the motion, Sandy Spencer left Byron’s office. And Byron knew that he was racing, no longer just drifting, toward the end of his long career at SpencerBlake.