Pleading guilty

1. 3-Seton five, three Franklin.

NEW BRUNSWICK 1.2-S.F. eleven, five Grant.

Lena grabbed a yellow pad out of another carrel and wrote it down. 'Does this mean anything to you?' she asked.

Not a thing. Baseball scores in January? Map readings? The combination for a safe? We both stared desolately at the screen.

I heard my name from the PAs in the ceiling: 'Mr Malloy, please go to Mr Thale's office.' The announcement was repeated twice, somehow more ominous with each rendition. I felt trouble darken my heart. What were we going to tell Jake? I rose, thanking Lena. She clicked off the machine so that Bert's message, whatever it was, vanished in a little star of light that lingered on the dull screen.

B. Washing Relieved to have found me, Wash welcomed me to his office with a warmth you'd expect if you were entering his home. George Washington Thale III has the sort of charm meant to reflect breeding, a steady geniality he radiates even with the secretaries. When he turns all his attention and smooth manners on you, you feel like you've met somebody out of Fitzgerald, scion of an old rich world to which all Americans once aspired. Still, I never can forget the term 'stuffed shirt'. He has this big bag belly that seems to push up to his chest when he is seated. With his bow ties and his horn-rimmed glasses, his liver-spotted face and his pipe, he is a type, one of those used-up emblems of prosperity whose very sight makes you think that somewhere there's a kid waiting for his inheritance.

Wash asked after my well-being, but he was still fretting about Jake, and he promptly dialed Martin's extension on his speakerphone. In Wash's grand corner office, decorated in dark woods, with colonial objects brightened by dabs of gold or red, the practice of law generally has an easy, elegant air, a world where men of importance make decisions and minions at a distance carry them out. He has filled this space with memorabilia of George Washington -portraiture and busts, little mementos, things that G.W. was alleged to have touched. Wash is some ninth- or twelfth-hand relation, and his hapless attachment to this stuff always seems secretly pitiful to me, as if his own life will never measure up. 'I'm with Mack,' Wash said when Martin came on.

'Good,' he replied. 'Just the men I'm looking for.' I could tell from Martin's tone, a quart over on oil, that he too was in the company of someone else. 'Mack, I just bumped into Jake and we began to talk about the progress on some of the 397 cases Bert's been handling. I invited him to stop in. I thought we all might want to talk about this together.'

'Jake's with you?' Wash asked. He only now grasped what Martin had meant when he said we all should get together.

'Right here,' Martin answered. Upbeat. Strong tone. Martin is like Brushy – like Pagnucci – like Leotis Griswell in his day, like many others who do it well, a lawyer every waking hour. He manages the firm; he plans the renewal of the river and the buildings on the shore. He counsels clients and gets fourteen younger attorneys in a room and plays war games on all his bigtime cases. He flies here and there and engages in endless conference calls with parties strung out across most of the world's time zones, during which he listens, opines, edits briefs, and reads his mail. Something in the law is always at hand and on his mind. And he adores it – he is like a gourmet gorging down an endless meal, eating every goody on his plate. With Jake there, with crisis looming, he sounded chipper and self-confident, raring to go. But when Wash looked back, his aging, pale face was stricken and he looked more scared than me.

C. Introducing the Victim of the Crime If you've ever seen The Birth of Venus with the goddess on the half-shell and all the seraphim bent back with the vapors because she is so great, then you've seen big-firm lawyers when the General Counsel of their major client arrives. During our first few minutes with Jake Eiger in Martin's vast corner office, getting coffee and waiting as Martin quelled the usual urgent calls, about half a dozen partners stuck their heads in to tell Jake how fit he looked, or that his latest letter on the Suchandsuch matter reflected the same pith and sensibility as the Gettysburg Address; they threw out offhand invitations to dinner, theater, and basketball games. Jake, as ever, accepted this attention with grace. His father was a politician and he knows the way, waving, laughing, parrying with various skilful jests.

I have known Jake Eiger most of my life. We went to high school together at Loyola, Jake two years ahead. You and I, Elaine, we were the kind of Catholics who grew up thinking we were a minority group, the mackerel snappers who ate fish on Friday and wore ash on our foreheads and made way for the ladies in black sheets; we knew we were regarded by Protestants as a clandestine organization with foreign loyalties, like the Freemasons or the KGB. Jack Kennedy of course was our hero, and in his aftermath America for Catholics, I think, truly was different. But you are ever the child, and I'll never really be sure there is a place at the table for me.

But Jake was a Catholic boy, German-Irish, who thought he'd joined the white man's country club. I envied him that and many other things, that his father was rich and that Jake was easy with people. Very good-looking, a movie-star type, he has smooth coppery blond hair that never leaves its place and is only now, with Jake a year or two past fifty, beginning to show less of the radiance that always made you think he was under a spotlight. He has prepossessing eyes – the kind of abundant lashes that you seldom see on a man and which gave Jake, since an otherwise unimpressive childhood, the misleading look of a worldly adult depth. There were always lots of girls after him, and I suspected him of treating them cruelly, wooing them in his soft way and rebuffing them once he'd gotten between their legs.

Still, when I was on my fourteenth version of who I would be, having decided against Vincent Van Gogh, Jack Kerouac, and Dick Tracy, and figured I'd give my dad's idea, law school, a try, Jake, of all people, became a kind of ideal. Our paths had split after high school but my role as Nora's intended brought us back in contact at little family dos, and Jake took it on himself to give me pointers and advice about law school and practice. Then when I got started at BAD he called upon me for a rather auspicious favor which he felt obliged to repay years later by bringing me here.

A rational person would be grateful to Jake Eiger for that. I made $228,168 last year, and that was after they cut my points for the third time in a row. Without Jake, I'd probably be in some interior office space with cheap paneling, practicing on my own, scrambling around to the police courts and otherwise looking hungrily at the silent telephone. But Jake flies and I float. He's still soaring for the stars and on his way has cut me loose to go to cinders as I plummet back through the atmosphere. A lesser type might be bitter, because without me Jake Eiger would be a handsome middle-aged guy looking for ways to explain why he gave up the practice of law many years ago.

'Wash, Mack -' Martin had clapped down the phone, dispensing with the last interruption, and his secretary had finally closed the door. 'About Brother Kamin.'

'Ah yes.' I smiled brightly and waited to watch Martin dance this tightrope.

'Jake's aware, of course, that Bert is on another of his self-declared sabbaticals.'

'Right.' Smiles. Wash laughed out loud. Martin's such a card.

'And I thought, frankly, that it would make more sense just to share with Jake everything that we've been concerned about. Everything. I don't want any misunderstandings down the line.'

Martin went on in a mood of impressive gravity. The room was quiet as he spoke, windowed on three sides, full of abstract paintings and the kind of kooky objets d'art that Martin adores – funny clocks, a side table whose glass top overlay an entire city carved of exotic woods, a shaman's crook that makes the sound of a waterfall when you turn it upside down. Rather than the standard photo of the family, a small soft-sculpture that rendered Martin and his wife and three kids in the mode of Cabbage Patch Kids was perched on his credenza. Martin was behind the desk toward which all the room's furnishings subtly angle, a broad barely finished burl from the trunk of some thousand-year-old oak.

I saw where Martin was going long before Wash, who was in one of the Barcelona chairs that form a proscenium about Martin's desk. When Wash finally realized that Martin was detailing our suspicions about Bert, he made a vague move to object. But Wash clearly had no time to think it through and instead contained himself.

Martin removed his credenza key – he had it hidden in the rubber belly of a clock set in a hula dancer – and displayed the folder of documents I'd seen yesterday. He explained to Jake that we had found no paper trail authorizing these checks. As Jake began to sense that something had gone wrong, he started to fidget. But Martin, the man of principles and solid commitments, showed no wavering. It couldn't have been easy for him. G amp; G has been life to Martin since his days at Leotis Griswell’s right hand, and he adores the hurly-burly, the business of bringing everyone together. That's his faith, that the team is greater than the sum of the parts. He's my Chinaman here, the man I admire, and he was being admirable now. Only yesterday the Committee had made its decision to wait before the client was informed. Yet Martin was manifesting his allegiance to something more significant than law firm Hoyle: Values. Duty. The lawyer's code. The client, unexpectedly, had asked a question which clearly invited the truth and Martin would not be party to withholding it.

By now Martin was explaining the Committee's plan, how I was searching for Bert in the hope he could be persuaded to relent. From Jake, Martin asked brief forbearance, a couple of weeks, with the promise that at the end I'd provide a full report. To sum up, he came and sat on the forward edge of his desk. 'If we can tell Bert that you, that TN, is looking at this in an understanding way,' he said to Jake, 'I think there's a chance, a real chance, to get the money back. If we do, we can, perhaps, avoid the scandal. That truly strikes me as best for everyone.'

He stopped. Martin had made his appeal, all his formidable charm and powers turned on Jake. Now we waited. It was, on the whole, a moment of high daring. Gage amp; Griswell was probably about to join the lost city of Atlantis as a civilization that fell into the sea. I thought Wash might black out, and even my skin was crawling, anticipating Jake's reaction. Jake, for his part, looked worse than I'd ever seen him, the fatal gray of a man in shock.

'Unbelievable.' That was the first thing Jake said. He got to his feet and walked a circle one way and then the other around his chair. 'How am I ever going to handle this upstairs?' He asked this question mostly of himself, fingertips at his lips, and it was clear he did not know the answer. He stood there, visibly pained, not quite willing to discuss the repercussions, as if they were lexically beyond him, like a man who could not bear to utter dirty words. 'We're here to help you,' Wash said.

'Oh, you've helped a lot,' said Jake and winced at the thought.

TN lately had been on hard times, if a company with gross earnings of four billion every year can be described that way. Almost everything they own – the hotels, the rent-a-car companies, the airlines – is sensitive to fluctuations in travel, of which there had been damn little since our warlette against Sodamn Insane. No surprise either, since anybody with a college business course could have told you that covey of enterprises would move cyclically. To diversify, TN a decade ago bought a traveler's check business and from that made an entry into the world of Sunbelt banking, just in time to watch their loan portfolio go to hell. After the suicidal fare wars of last summer, the company lost about 600 million bucks, the third bad year in a row. To stem the bleeding, the outside directors brought in Tadeusz Krzysinski as CEO, the first person ever to advance above the level of vice-president who was not homegrown. Among many reforms, Tad has cracked the whip on expenses and by all accounts has been prodding Jake about his relationship with G amp; G, on the theory that there should be more competition for TN's legal work. Krzysinski has been heard to speak warmly of a 200-lawyer firm in Columbus he grew to like when he was in his last incarnation, as president of Red Carpet Rental Car.

This, to say the least, is a subject of concern at Gage amp; Griswell, since TN has never been less than 18 percent of our revenues. Martin and Wash have been trying to convert Krzysinski, lunching with him, inviting him to meetings, reminding him repeatedly how expensive it would be to replace our knowledge of TN's structure and past legal affairs. In response, Krzysinski has emphasized that the decision is Jake's – his General Counsel, like most, must have free rein to choose the outside lawyers he works with – a deft move since both Jake and G amp; G have their supporters on TN's board. But Jake has a seasoned corporate bureaucrat's lust for terrain. He covets a seat on the board, the title of Vice-Chairman, which only Krzysinski can award him, and evinces a toadying willingness to please his new Chairman, with whom in truth he seems frequently ill at ease. As often happens in corporation land, there's been more talk than action. Jake has sent only a few morsels to Columbus, as he does with many other firms. But in business, like baseball, senior management is often behind you right up to the day you get the ax. Jake by now had turned to me. 'This is very sensitive. Mack, I want to know about everything you're doing. And for God's sake,' he added, 'be discreet.'

Jake is accustomed to being an executive. He stood a moment, medium height and lean, a hand placed over his eyes. He was wearing a smart double-breasted suit, a subtle glen plaid, and his initials – J.A.K.E.: John Andrew Kenneth Eiger – a favored decorative element, had showed on his shirtsleeve when he pointed at me. 'Jesus Christ,' Jake said in final reflection and with nothing further left.

Wash rose in his wake. In extremis his aging face had taken on the texture of a gourd, and he hung there, a mystery to himself, torn between remonstrating with Martin and comforting Jake, and finally chose the latter. A grade-schooler knew what he was going to say: Give us time. Don't be rash. Once we find Kamin, this can be worked out.

Behind the thousand-year oak, Martin watched them vanish and asked me, 'So what do you think?' He had his hands across his tummy, his face tucked down shrewdly between the matching braces, so that his chin rested on his fancy handmade shirt of jazzy vertical stripes.

'I'll let you know as soon as I get feeling again in my limbs.' My heart was still flapping. 'I thought we weren't going to say anything.'

Martin is one of those men who abound in the legal profession whose brains seem to make them a quarter larger than life. His mind is always zipping along at the speed of an electron. You sit down with him and feel surrounded on all sides. Jesus Christ, you wonder, what is this fellow thinking? I know he's turned over every word I've said three times before I get another one out of my mouth. Accompanying this kind of intellectual handspeed is a canny grasp of human nature. To what uses all of this is put is not necessarily clear. Martin would not be mistaken for Mother Teresa. Like anybody else who has whizzed along the fast track in the practice of law, he can cut your heart out if need be. And talking to him, as I say, is a kind of contest, in which his clever, warm remarks, his conveyed sense that he knows just what you mean, is somehow never mutual. I know you; you don't know me. His true residence is out-of-bounds, somewhere in the neighborhood of Mount Olympus. But Martin was rarely as mystifying as he was now. He seemed unshaken by anything that had occurred here. He met my inquiry with an inscrutable little tip of the hand, as if he could not alter bygones.

'What do you think Krzysinski's going to say when Jake tells him about this?' I asked.

Martin closed his eyes to weigh the inquiry, as if it had not occurred to him yet, and when he looked back a little wrinkle of something close to humor, an embracing irony, briefly crossed his worn face. He stood to regard me, as another of his funny clocks began to chatter like a chipmunk somewhere in the room. ‘I think you'd better find Bert,' he told me.