Pleading guilty

XI. EVERYTHING IS JAKE

A. Your Investigator Gets Interrupted If Bert Kamin was dead, then who had the money?

This question struck me suddenly as I stood before a mirror at Dr Goodbody's, where I'd come to clean up before heading on to the office. A shower and shave had not done much for my condition. I still had the shadowy look of some creep on a wanted poster and my headache made me recollect those cavemen who used to open vents in their skulls. I phoned Lucinda to say where I was, asking her to make the calls to cancel and replace my credit cards. Then I found a lonesome corner in the locker room to figure things out. Who had the money? Martin had said that the banker he talked to in Pico had hinted that the account where the checks went was Bert's. But that was hardly authoritative.

A refuge, even a phony one, is where you find it, and I was irritated when the attendant told me I had a call. One of the things I hate worst about the world of business at the end of the century is this instant-access crap: faxes and mobile phones and all those eager-beaver, happy delivery people from fucking Federal Excess. Competition in the big-bucks world has made privacy a thing of the past. I expected Martin, Mr Impatience, who likes to call you with his latest brilliant idea on a case from some airplane at eleven o'clock at night as he's bounding off to Bangladesh. But it wasn't him. 'Mack?' Jake Eiger spoke. 'I'd like to see you ASAP.' 'Sure. Let me get hold of Martin or Wash.'

'Better the two of us,' said Jake. 'Why don't you come up here? I want to give you heads-up on something. About our situation.' He cleared his throat in a vaguely meaningful way, so I suspected at once what was coming. The powers-that-be at TN had reviewed this fiasco – Bert and the money – and concluded there was a certain large law firm they could do without. Cancel the search party and pack your bags. I was going to get to give my partners the news as a 'leak'.

It had been some time since Jake and I had sat down man-to-man. They became uncomfortable meetings after my divorce from his cousin – and Jake's decision to stop directing TN cases to me. We never speak about either subject. The unmentionable, in fact, is more or less the bedrock of our relationship.

As usual, a long story. Jake was not an especially good student; I've always suspected he got into law school on his father's pull. He's bright enough – downright wily at times – but he has trouble putting thoughts on paper. A whiz at multiple choice but gridlock when he was writing essays. His own term was 'cryptophobic', but I think in today's lingo we'd say learning-disabled.

I had been at BAD about a year when Jake invited me to lunch. I thought it was some kind of family obligation -one of Nora's aunts hopping his keester about buy Mack a meal and give him some advice, maybe he'll amount to something. But I could tell he was uneasy. We were at some snazzy rooftop place and Jake squinted in the sun. The wind flapped the fringe of the umbrella overhead. 'Nice view,' he said.

We both were drinking. He was unhappy too. Jake's handsomeness has always had room only for boyish easiness. The worry was like a painted sign.

'So,' I asked, 'what?' There had to be something. We did not have a real social relationship. 'Bar exam,' he said.

I didn't understand at first. I thought it was one of those clever, stylish remarks he made that was beyond me, rich-kid talk. He was just starting his third year at G amp; G, Wash's favorite flunky, three years out of law school, with one year spent clerking for a judge, and the bar ordinarily would have been long behind him. I ordered lunch. You could see Trappers Park from there and we talked awhile about the team.

'I should get out there,' Jake said. 'Haven't had much chance.' 'Busy? Lots of deals?'

'Bar exam,' he said again. 'I just took it for the third time.' And he looked from the distance to me, the level sincere agonized way he probably took in the ladies he wanted to lay. I did not need a guidebook to know I was being compromised.

'Three strikes and you're out,' he said. Three failures and you had to wait five years to take the test again. I knew the rules. I was one of the guys who made them. 'The firm has to fire me,' he said. 'My old man'll die. Die.' His career as a lawyer would, practically speaking, be over, but no doubt for Jake his father would be the worst part.

While I was growing up, Jake's dad was a colleague of Toots's in the City Council and a considerable figure. Invested with the medieval powers typically exerted by a councilman in DuSable, Eiger pere lived in our close-knit Catholic village like a prince among the folk. June 18, 1964, the day I turned twenty-one, my father took me to Councilman Eiger to ask him to find me a place on the police force. I'd had a couple of years of college by then and was sort of supporting myself selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door; I had bombed out around the art department and was a kind of bookstore beatnik, your average troubled youth, an Irish lad still at home with his ma, absolutely mystified about which way to go in life. The Force at least would get me off ground zero and keep me out of the service too, not something I said out loud to anybody, and no left-wing politics involved either, just a pit stop on the life track I didn't want to make, never one to enjoy taking orders from anybody. Three years later I wrecked my knee and had a free shot at law school, no draft, no Nam to trouble me, and went, mostly to be in school again, another of those funny accidental ways things just happen in a life.

Sitting there in the ward office, which looked like a basement rec room decorated with maps and political posters from past campaigns and four of those clunky old-style telephones, big and black and heavy enough to be murder weapons, absorbing most of the space on his desk, Councilman Eiger assured me that my police application would get every consideration. You had to love him, a man so richly endowed with power and so generous about its use. He was the kind of pol you could understand, whose lines of loyalty were long inscribed and well known: first himself, then his family, then his friends. He was not against law or principle. They were just not operative elements. I was a cadet in a previously selected entering class at the Academy within three weeks. Now his son was sitting in front of me, and even though Jake denied his father was aware of anything, the message was the same. I owed. I owed the family. You knew his old man would see it just that way. I made my one and only stab at rectitude. 'Jake, I think we ought to talk about something else.'

'Sure.' He looked into his drink. 'I took the test last week. There was a question – I fouled up so badly – a civil-procedure question, you know, revising a divorce decree, and I wrote this ream about matrimonial law.' He shook his head. Poor old handsome Jake was about to cry. And then he did. A grown man almost, sobbing like a kid into his gin and tonic. 'Hey, you know, I'm sorry.' He straightened himself up. We ate in absolute silence for about ten minutes, then he said he was sorry again and walked away from the table.

One of the peculiar things you learn in life is that what makes Great Institutions great is the stuff people attach to them, not their actual operation, which is often purely prosaic. The scoring of the bar exam was like that. We sent the bluebooks out to ten graders around the state, one for each question. The booklets came back UPS, thousands of stacks, piled up no more ceremoniously than rubbish. The secretaries sorted them for days, then added each individual's totals, and the staff attorneys checked the arithmetic. Those were the results. Seventy passed, 69 failed. Jake was at 66 when I found his stack on another assistant administrator's desk the night I decided to go hunting for it. The guy who graded Jake's civil-procedure answer had given Jake three out of a possible ten. A 3 and an 8 of course can look a lot alike, even if you don't have a gift for forgery. I wasn't taking any risk; no one would ever know. Not counting me, of course.

Still, you wonder, why'd I do it? Not because of Jake, God knows, not even because my old man and my ma'd have been ashamed to think I wouldn't look after a friend. No, I suppose I was thinking of Woodhull and his minion, who confused ethics with ego, those judgmental prigs, my colleagues, one more team I didn't want to play on, one more group I would not allow to claim my soul. Same reason I did it to Pigeyes, then lied, unwilling to play for either side.

Jake took me out to lunch the week after the results were mailed. He was pleased as a puppy. He slobbered all over me and I wouldn't say a thing. I congratulated him when he told me that he passed. I shook his hand. 'You think I'm going to forget this, but I won't,' he said. 'No comprendo. Thank yourself. You took the test.' 'Don't give me that bull.'

'Hey, Jake. Practice makes perfect. You passed. Okay? Give us both a break.'

'You're all right. You know, after my performance last time -1 got sick. I thought to myself, A cop, for Chrissake. You talk like that to a guy who was a cop.'

His look said everything. Us pals. Us guys. That smug fraternity thing Jake over the years has never lost. His life now is country-club golf courses and screwing around behind the back of his third wife, but there, twenty-one years before, I could see I'd restored the central faith of his life: we were special people who could outwit harm if we stuck with each other. I wanted to spit in his eye. 'Forget it, Jake,' I said. 'Everything.' 'Never,' he answered. And I knew it was a curse.

B. Your Investigator Visits Herbert Hoover's America Waiting for Jake, I sat in reception on 44, TN's Executive Level, feeling inferior. There is a jazzed-up air of self-importance here that routinely deflates me. Someday someone will explain to me why this system of ours that is supposed to glorify diversity and individual choice becomes instead the vehicle by which everybody ends up choosing the same thing. With its airlines, banks, and hotels, TN did business last year with two out of every three Americans who make more than 50 g's. Many of those folks think of TN as nothing better than a kind of flying bus, but in a mass society it turns out that even a trivial connection to twenty-five million lives, especially prominent ones, imbues an institution with an extraordinary aura of grandiosity and power.

Jake's secretary steered me back and His Handsomeness rose to make me welcome. The office is so vast that when I walked in he actually waved. Once we were alone, Jake sat on the corner of his desk, one foot on the rich carpet. You could not help thinking it was a pose he'd seen in some ad in a magazine. He had his jacket on. His hair was perfectly combed. To fill air time, Jake usually likes to talk to me about the old neighborhood, guys from high school, our place among the generations. But today he came to the point directly. As I'd feared, he had Bert on his mind.

'Look, old chum, I have to admit I'm playing catch-up. What in God's name is going on down there?' 'I wish I could tell you, Jake.' 'And you,' he went on. 'You're not helping much. I understand you went to see Neucriss.' Word travels fast.

'He was on the phone to me before your elevator had reached the ground floor,' said Jake, 'wanting to know what was wrong. Can I ask what in the world you were doing?'

'Hey,' I said amiably. I never offend Jake. I had all those years watching my old man kiss the fire captain's ring. 'You know, I'm playing hunches. We can't figure what the hell Litiplex is. Maybe the plaintiffs know. I didn't realize that Martin had already tried the same thing with Peter.' Jake took that in levelly. He was assessing me. 'Yes, but he had. And when you showed up, you really began ringing bells. We can't have this kind of fumbling.' Neucriss, on the phone, had obviously had a great time: These klutzes you employ at three hundred an hour. Get a load of this. Two of them busy forwarding the mail. Ho, ho, ho. Jake had felt the needle and I was paying the price.

'Look, Mack, my friend, let's review the bidding.' Jake is a master of these phrases, the corporate idiom, one more style he is on top of. It softens the edges, but he's still as ham-fisted as his father and I knew him well enough to see that no matter how fashionably, he was about to be coarse. 'He' – Jake pointed to the door of the chairman's adjoining suite; he had lowered his voice – 'the Polish gentleman next door. He likes me, he doesn't like me. Who knows day to day? Let's assume he's not president of the fan club. All right? Let's say he thinks I use the wrong lawyers and I pay too much to the ones I choose. All assumed. But he's going to put up with me. Do you know why?' 'The board?'

'The board, that's right, the board. Because there is a faction there, a number of members who believe I fly without wings. And do you know why that is?' 'Why?'

'Because I – and the lawyers I chose – handled a $300 million disaster for this company, a litigation mess where we'd reserved $100 million to pay for our share and we – I, your firm, Martin – we handled that and actually made money for this company. Almost $20 million. Every dollar left in that trust account is a badge of pride. For all of us. And a point on the scoreboard. All right?'

I nodded. 'Sure,' I said. I had to sit still for this, tutored like a child, simpering and pretending he was inventing cold fusion.

'Now let's look at this supposed business with Bert. Very disturbing. Frankly, personally, I don't even believe it. If I did, I'd be more alarmed. But in the end, if we're patient about getting to the bottom of it, perhaps review the accounting, I think it may develop that something else is going on. But it appears as it appears – Fine, investigate. Look into it. That's the responsible thing to do. But, old man, let's keep our eye on the ball. If you go out and rile up the plaintiffs' lawyers so that they want a bean counting before we distribute next month – if you do that and fellows like Neucriss catch wind of the fact that we're running a surplus, they're going to do their utmost to lay hands on every dime. Not to mention our co-defendants. So no matter what you think has happened with Bert, all that would be far, far worse for us all. Okay? So let's move ahead carefully. I told you the other day. Be discreet.'

More or less on cue, Tad Krzysinski, Board Chairman and CEO, poked his head through the side door. In a perfect world, this guy would be somebody you could comfortably hate, a prig like Pagnucci, a wild fucking success drunk on ego. He is nothing like that. No more than five foot four, he is a sunny little fellow, and in every room he enters it feels as if somebody has suddenly installed a compact nuclear reactor, a force so vital you half expect to be blown back through the walls.

'Hack,' he greeted me, and advanced to pump my hand. He is a musclebound former gymnast with an engaging eye. I took a moment to wonder, as usual, about what gave between Brushy and him, but he always seems so goddamn cheerful there is no way to tell.

'Tad,' I said. The guy holds no brief for proprieties, never anything but who he's first to tell you he is, the son of a plumber, one of eight kids, now with nine of his own, a three-hours-of-sleep guy who by his own admission cares only about his family, his God, and increasing the wealth of the people who've put their faith in him by plunking down their dough to buy TN's common shares. You could see that just nodding and shaking hands he scared Jake to death. They were the two sides of ethnicity, the Americans, once excluded, who since the sixties have found their way in corporation land – Jake, a deracinated wimp who aspired to everything vain the upwardly mobile envisioned, and Krzysinski, who accepted like Holy Writ all that stuff the immigrants believed about hard work, fortitude, and the capacity to alter the face of the world. I stood there uneasily between them, with a sudden recognition that this was an impossible match. Jake had powerful boosters on TN's board, but Krzysinski had to hate him. Which was what Jake meant about the 397 surplus being his lifeline.

'Well, I see you here, Hack, we must be in trouble again.' Tad pounded my shoulder good-naturedly and laughed at his own joke and then talked to Jake about a problem they had in Fiji. TN of course owns hotels everywhere. Tokyo. Paris. But they got to the Far East ahead of everybody else, which in these lean times means those operations have become particularly important. Many days Tad is far more concerned about Prime Minister Miyazawa than Bill Clinton. Somebody ought to sit down and think about this, because your corporate types are soon going to be a stateless superclass, people who live for deals and golf dates and care a lot more about where you got your MBA than the country you were raised in. It's the Middle Ages all over again, these little unaffiliated duchies and fiefdoms, flying their own flags and ready to take in any vassal who will pledge his life to the manor. Everybody busy patting himself on the back because the Reds went in the dumper is going to be wondering who won when Coca-Cola applies for a seat in the UN.

As Tad at last disappeared, Jake darted a nettled look at his back.

'Let's take a walk.' Jake headed down the hallway and I followed, acknowledging the people I knew. For me, a visit up here called for a lot of glad-handing, trying to remind folks on the counsel's staff I was neither drunk nor dead. When we reached the elevator, a messenger, one of the members of that minimum-wage cavalry that slams through the Center City traffic on bikes, came charging out, wearing an optic-orange vest over his worn parka. Jake and I stepped in, now alone.

'I want to be sure we're singing from the same hymnal,' said Jake. He jammed the button labeled 'Doors Close' and turned to face me when they had. 'Bert?' I asked. 'That matter,' he replied.

The elevator began to move and Jake pumped the button for the floor below.

'You know what I want – make this tidy,' Jake said. 'And if Kamin really doesn't turn up?' 'Yes?'

He took a step so that he was no more than a foot from me, his finger still anchored on the door-close button as the car slowed.

'No one up here has to hear any more.' He looked at me solemnly before the doors peeled back slowly and he stepped again into the brighter light.