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  ONE LIBERTY PLACE was a huge granite and glass rocket that blasted beyond the staid and squared-off Philadelphia skyline until it lost itself in smoky autumnal skies, the highest, grandest, most prestigious building in the reviving City of Brotherly Love. Which explained why the law firm of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase had leased the fifty-fourth, fifty-fifth, and fifty-sixth floors for its offices even before construction was completed. Talbott, Kittredge and Chase was the city's most entrenched law firm. It was the home of congressmen and mayors; it had yielded six judges to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and one to the Supreme Court. It was the dream of every law student who sought the brightest of the golden rings the law had to offer. Only the best was good enough for Talbott, Kittredge and Chase.

  I applied for a position at Talbott, Kittredge as a second-year law student. I wrote a spiffy letter and goosed my resume until I didn't recognize myself on its crisp ivory paper. I was not law review and my grade point average was merely mediocre, but still I sent my application off with a queer confidence, sure that my true quality would shine through the flat black type, and for all I know it did. But only the best was good enough for Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. I didn't even rate an interview.

  I wasn't consciously thinking of this rejection as I walked through the great stone lobby of One Liberty Place and stepped onto the marble-walled elevator seven years after sending off that letter, but as I rose to the fifty-fourth floor my resentment rose with me, and not just a resentment of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. There was Dechert Price amp; Rhoads, there was Morgan, Lewis amp; Bockius, there was Rawle amp; Henderson, White amp; Williams, there was Drinker, Biddle, and Reath. There was even Wolf, Block, Schorr amp; Solis-Cohen. Out of law school I applied to the top twenty-five firms in the city and they all passed on my offer to slave in their libraries and work outrageous hours so their partners could become obscenely rich. Cut adrift, I was forced to stoop lower than I could ever have imagined and work for myself.

  By the fall of my visit to Talbott, Kittredge and Chase there were only two of us left in our sad little firm, we were now merely Derringer and Carl. Our third partner, Guthrie, had fled. Seeing the inevitability of our failure, Guthrie had found himself a rich girl with family connections and had ridden her name to a job with Blaine, Cox, Amber amp; Cox, one of the fine old firms that had initially rejected us all. Where he found his young and prosperous wife, now Lauren Amber Guthrie, was in my bedroom, which made his leaving for the money and the prestige and the wood-paneled offices of his new employer particularly galling. The bastard left without a backward glance and he took our best cases with him. That left just Derringer and me and the bills we couldn't pay and the files Guthrie didn't think were worth stealing. One of those files was Saltz v. Metropolitan Investors, in the service of which my resentment and I were rising like a firecracker to the fifty-fourth floor of One Liberty Place.

  The elevator opened on a broad and open lobby, tastefully floored with a rich wood parquet and furnished with antique couches. TALBOTT, KITTREDGE amp; CHASE read the glossy brass letters tacked above the receptionist's desk. Two of the walls were of glass, offering killer views of the city south and east into New Jersey, with the blue sweep of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge spanning the breadth of the Delaware. The other walls were paneled in cherry, waxed and buffed to a military shine. But it was not those walls that were most impressive, nor the huge oriental carpets nor the couches nor the fine wood cocktail tables nor the gorgeous blonde receptionist who smiled warmly at me the moment I stepped off the elevator. What was most impressive was the enormity of the space itself, a breathtaking expanse bigger than a basketball court, a tract with no purpose other than projecting an image of elegance and wealth and power at fifty bucks a square foot. I couldn't help myself from doing the math. With what they spent each year on that lobby alone they could buy me five times over.

  "Victor Carl to see William Prescott," I said to the receptionist.

  "Fine, Mr. Carl. Take a seat and I'll tell him you're here."

  I stepped toward one of the couches and then turned back to the receptionist, who was already on the phone. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, this receptionist. The kind of woman who should only exist in perfume ads or on car show platforms. Her hair was pale and windswept, as if even while I stood in the enormous calm of that lobby, she was perched on the deck of an ocean yacht.

  "Do I know you?" I asked. That was my line at the time, though it has since been discarded, like all the others, due to continued and unmitigated failure.

  She looked me over carefully and then gave a light toss to her oceanic hair. "No, I don't think so," she said.

  "It was worth a try."

  "Not in this lifetime, Mr. Carl," she said with a look that exiled me to one of the couches at the far end of the lobby.

  But she was right, of course. Women like that did not exist for guys like me, they existed for the wealthy, the witty, the thrillingly articulate, for ballplayers and movie stars and presidential aides. And, of course, they were for adorning the offices of those brilliant firms like Talbott, Kittredge and Chase that refused to let me join their ranks. Oh man, I hated this place, I hated it so bad I could taste it.

  "Mr. Carl," said a pretty, sharp-suited woman who had crossed the broad expanse of lobby to the couch where I was sitting. I had been waiting for half an hour, pretending to be interested in a copy of the Wall Street Journal I picked off one of the cocktail tables in the pathetic hope that the receptionist might mistake me for a corporate client checking on the value of his stock options. "Come with me, please," the woman in the suit said. "I'll take you to Mr. Prescott's office."

  I followed her up a flight of stairs and through twists and turns of broad hallways. I passed desks of grim secretaries typing efficiently into their word processors and caught glimpses of well decorated rooms from which worried associates darted back and forth. There was a hum of activity in those offices, a melange of sound emanating from the fluorescent lights, from the computer fans, from the laser printers squeezing out page after page after page, from the incessant soft ring of the phones and quiet voices explaining that Mr. Wilson or Ms. Antonelli or Mr. Schwartz was on another line but would get right back to you. To a lawyer the sound was of more than just run-of-the-mill office activity. It was the sound of billable hours, it was the sound of money. It was not a sound I heard too often. In our hallway what I heard instead was the hush of financial desperation.

  She ushered me into a large corner office, an office bigger than my apartment. The view stretched south and west. Straight ahead Broad Street ran like a mighty river to Veterans Stadium in the distance, and to the right I could see old Franklin Field and the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, whose law school, along with Harvard's and Yale's and Stanford's and NYU's and all the other top ten's, had rejected my application. Prescott's office was wood clad, like a judge's chambers, furnished with an elegant living room set at one end, a long oak table piled with briefs and exhibits in the middle, and a large, gilded desk in the windowed corner, with two tapestry-covered chairs before it and a low wooden credenza behind it. Across one of the walls was a flurry of framed photographs, pictures of mayors and congressmen, senators and presidents, each smiling as they stood next to a tall, stern-faced patrician, the photographs inscribed across the bottoms. On the far wall, above the living room set, hung a large neorealist painting of two boxers circling each other against an angry yellow background. The boxers' bodies were clenched, they peered over their gloves, waiting for the moment to explode into violence. The painting was as tense as a coiled spring and the eyes of the fighters were filled with hate. It was a litigator's painting.

  "Mr. Prescott will be right in," said my guide. "Make yourself comfortable." She gestured at one of the chairs before the desk and I sat like a trained puppy.

  On the credenza was a picture of the perfect family, three smiling beef-fed kids, a pretty wife, the tall patrician once again. In another t
he children were older, the wife wider, they stood before a beautiful country home with a wide veranda surrounded by thickly leafed trees, the patrician now in a wicker chair with a newspaper and a pipe. In that sad fall of my life such teeming family bliss seemed the most remote of all the ambitions I had so far failed to achieve.

  I had never met William Prescott III but I had heard of him, everyone had. He was a great man, this William Prescott, the pride of his old and revered family. Skull and Bones at Yale, the law review at Harvard, he was a former deputy attorney general, a former ambassador to some obscure country in South America, a former Chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar. He was a pillar of the Republican Party and served on the boards of the Art Museum, the Free Library, the Philadelphia Orchestra. And now he was the top trial lawyer, the prime rainmaker, the managing partner at Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. One had to wonder what price he had paid for such success. He had everything a lawyer could ever want, but was he happy? Well, to tell from the pictures, he was ecstatic. I had never met this William Prescott but already I despised him.

  "Victor, thank you for coming up to see me," said a grayer version of the man in all the photographs.

  I stood quickly, like a thief caught in the act, when William Prescott swept into the room. He entered like an emissary from some great nation-state. Very tall, very thin, with narrow lips and high prominent cheekbones, he peered from beneath bushy black eyebrows with blue eyes of startling clarity. He was not a classically handsome man, his nose was too long and his lips too thin, but he was a compelling presence, the very image of integrity. He wore a navy blue pinstriped Brooks Brothers suit, a banker's suit, which he kept formally buttoned as he reached out in greeting. My hand was swallowed by his. Despite his slenderness, I had the unpleasant sensation that had he wanted to squeeze my hand until the bones crumbled he could have.

  "You know Madeline Burroughs, Victor, I'm sure," he said as he led me to the living room set beneath the painting of the boxers.

  I hadn't seen her there, my attention drawn so completely to Prescott and his presence. "Yes, of course."

  "Hello, Victor," said Madeline. She was a round-faced, frumpish woman who dressed and acted like a spinster though still in her twenties. She smiled awkwardly for a moment; it was like a fist opening and closing.

  "Sit down, please, both of you," said Prescott. His voice was precise, graveled with age but still charmingly formal, like the wide unpaved driveways leading to Versailles. He came from the same world as Winston Osbourne and that was in his voice too, but where Osbourne's voice betrayed all his innate snideness, in Prescott's it was well hidden if it existed at all. I sat in one of the easy chairs, he sat directly across from me on the couch, leaning back and crossing his legs in a way that put me immediately at ease. Madeline sat tensely in the bend of the couch off to the side.

  "I may call you Victor?" he asked.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Normally I love the autumn, don't you? But the grayness of the skies this year takes all the pleasure out of it. It might be time to visit our Miami office." His blue eyes smiled at me and then turned cold. "Saltz v. Metropolitan Investors, Victor. That's why we're here today. How long have we been tangling over this case?"

  "Three years, sir," I said. The "sir" came instinctively, drawn out by his very demeanor and appearance. He seemed to accept my deference as his due.

  "You've been hanging on all that time like a bulldog. Three years on a complaint not worth the filing fee. A bulldog. Good for you, Victor. Now Madeline here, one of our toughest litigators, has filed four motions to dismiss but the judge has kept it alive out of mercy."

  "Judge Tifaro is too timid to make a decision," said Madeline, breaking into the discussion.

  "What you're both trying to say," I said, "is that all your attempts to kill our case have failed."

  "Yes," said Prescott, giving me an appraising look. "That is it exactly."

  Saltz was the weakest of those cases my ex-partner Guthrie left behind when he fled our firm on his way to success. A real estate limited partnership had gone bad, as they all seemed to have gone bad, and Guthrie had convinced the investors to sue those who had syndicated and sold the deal. There was a lengthy complaint with wild allegations of fraud and conspiracy. We had the case on a one-third contingency. I had thrown away a pot of money investigating only to find that there was no real evidence of anything other than stupidity on the part of all involved. My investigation wasn't helped by the fact that a crucial witness, the accountant who prepared the prospectus, a weasel named Stocker, had disappeared, taking certain of his clients' trust funds with him. Without him we had nothing but a hope that we could bluff our way into a settlement. Which was why I was there, to take one last look at my hand, to press my lips together, to look around the table and back at my hand and then to raise, confidently, in the faint chance the bastards would fold. Not likely. I had been asking for half a million, hoping they'd give me a counteroffer in the mid-five figures, upon which I planned to leap.

  "Would you like some coffee or a soft drink, Victor?" asked Prescott. He reached to a phone sitting on the coffee table between us and pressed a button. The pretty woman who had led me to the office immediately appeared. "Janice, a coffee for me, please. And for you, Victor?"

  "Coffee, black." Janice left without taking a request from Madeline.

  "We're not here to argue, Victor," said Prescott, which was a lie, because that was precisely why we were there. "The syndicators have asked that I take a more personal interest in this case as we approach the trial. Glancing through the file, I noticed your name wasn't on the complaint. It was filed by a Samuel Guthrie."

  "He was my partner, but he left the firm."

  "Yes. Joined Blaine, Cox, Amber and Cox, didn't he?"

  "They gave him a very handsome offer."

  "Married an Amber, I understand. Their youngest, the pretty one. I was invited to the wedding but was overseas at the time."

  "I couldn't make it either," I said, though I hadn't missed it because I was overseas. I think there was something on television I needed to see that night, The World of Disney on Ice maybe, or something.

  "I suppose the marriage might have had something to do with the offer."

  "Something."

  "That leaves you with two lawyers now, is that right?"

  "Yes, sir." Prescott had done more than merely glance through the file.

  "I assume Mr. Guthrie took a number of his clients with him," he continued. "But he didn't take this case. Tell us why not, Victor."

  "Because it barks," said Madeline.

  I glanced sideways at her and let out a soft growl under my breath.

  "Do you know what the key to any successful law practice is, Victor?" asked Prescott.

  I couldn't help my bitter smile. "Obviously not, sir."

  "Objectivity," he said, with a rich man's certainty. "It's all too easy in this business to take positions that satisfy our emotions but that ultimately hurt our clients. It's all too easy to let our passions stir."

  I tried but failed to imagine passions stirring in the formal upright man before me.

  "Now we've given you all our files and you've found nothing," he continued. His graveled voice, still precise and formal, now gained a touch of anger, just a hint, but just a hint was enough to send me slinking back in my chair. "Some minor discrepancies between the information we received and what went out in the prospectus, yes, but not enough to show a pattern. And you won't be able to prove reliance on the prospectus anyway. Nobody reads those things. You can be assured the jury will learn of the many charitable organizations our clients support, the many philanthropic boards they sit upon. And in the end the jurors will view your clients as fools with so much money they were willing to throw it away on any twisted tax shelter that promised they wouldn't have to pay their fair share. Frankly, Victor, if we go to trial we're going to bloody you, and you know it."

  He paused when the door opened. "Ah, Janice."

  Sh
e came in with a large silver tray and laid it upon the low table. There was a silver coffeepot and two white china cups and a crystal creamer and a crystal sugar bowl with a fine silver spoon. On a doily set upon a china plate perched an array of fancy cookies. It looked as if the Queen were coming to join us. I was grateful for the respite as my eyes had begun watering. My eyes water whenever I am under attack, a condition that was hell in elementary school, and I was under attack now. In less than a minute Prescott had exposed every weakness in my case. As Janice poured for me, I tried to squeeze back the tears.

  "The project never made a dime," I said before taking a sip of coffee. It was so exquisite it startled me for a moment, rich and crisply bitter. I took another sip. "As soon as you took our money it all went down the tubes. I'll make that very clear for the jury."

  "The real estate market died on us," said Prescott. "Everyone on the jury will know that. They can't sell their houses either."

  "Your projections weren't even close."

  "They were only projections. We never claimed we could predict the future." He put a shrug into his voice. "It was a business deal between businessmen that went bad. Business deals go bad every day without any fraud involved. We can go on all day like this, Victor, back and forth, but that's no way to find common ground. Our clients want to fight to the end." Then he flashed the smile of a diplomat greeting an unworthy adversary whom protocol required him to flatter and said the words I had been waiting to hear. "But I have convinced them that the economics are in favor of our working something out."

  I felt a thrill ripple through me just then, the thrill of a settlement on the horizon, of money in my bank. Without changing a card, my poker hand had grown brawny.

  Keeping his eyes focused on mine, he said, "Madeline, what were the most recent figures discussed?"

  "Plaintiffs demanded half a million dollars," she said through a smirk. "We offered five thousand."

  "It hadn't seemed worth pursuing," I said.