Extraordinary Rendition

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.

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.”