Mistress of Justice

place is mondo cool. Bowie hangs out there. It’s so packed you can hardly get in. And they play industrial out of one set of speakers and the Sex Pistols out of the other. I mean in the same room! Like, at a thousand decibels.”
    “Kills me to say no, Sean. But I’ll take a pass.”

     
    Wendall Clayton liked the firm at night.
    He liked the silence, the jeweled dots of boat lights in New York Harbor, liked taking a mouthful of cigar smokeand holding it against his palate, free from the critical glances his secretary and some of the more reckless younger lawyers shot his way when he lit up a Macanudo in the firm.
    This after-hours atmosphere took him back to his days just after law school, when he’d spend many of his nights proofreading the hundreds of documents that make up typical business deals: loan agreements, guarantees, security agreements, cross-collateralization documents, certificates of government filings, corporate documents and board resolutions.
    Proofreading … and carefully watching the partners he was working for.
    Oh, he’d learned the law, yes, because in order to be good a lawyer must have a flawless command of the law. But to be a
great
lawyer—that requires much more. It requires mastering the arts of demeanor, tactics, leadership, extortion, anger and even flirtation.
    Sabotage too.
    He now looked over statements by a witness in a case that Hubbard, White was currently defending on behalf of one of Donald Burdick’s prize clients, St. Agnes Hospital in Manhattan. Sean Lillick and Randy Simms, Clayton’s head of the SS, had dug up the identity of a doctor who had firsthand knowledge of the hospital malpractice St. Agnes was allegedly guilty of.
    Clayton had slipped the identity of this man to the plaintiff—in effect, scuttling the case against his firm’s own client.
    This troubled him some, of course, but as he read through the witness’s statements and realized that the St. Agnes doctors had indeed committed terrible malpractice, he concluded that his sabotage was in fact loyalty to a higher authority than the client or the firm: loyalty to abstract justice herself.
    He rolled these thoughts around in his complex mind for a few minutes and reached this conclusion: that he could live with St. Agnes Hospital’s extremely expensive loss in the trial.
    He hid these documents away and then opened another sealed envelope. Sean Lillick had dropped it off just before he’d left for the night. He read the memo the paralegal had written him.
    Clayton’s money was being well spent, he decided. Lillick had apparently aristocratized the right people. Or begged them or fucked them or whatever. In any case the information was as valuable as it was alarming.
    Burdick was taking an extreme measure. The firm’s lease for its present office space in Wall Street would be up next year. This expiration had been a plus for Clayton’s merger because it meant that the firm could move to Perelli’s Midtown office, which was much cheaper, without a difficult and expensive buyout of an existing lease.
    The purpose of the secret talks Lillick had learned about between Burdick, Stanley and Harry Rothstein, the head of the partnership that owned the building, was to negotiate a new, extremely expensive long-term lease for the existing office space.
    By entering the lease, the firm would take on a huge financial commitment that would cost millions to buy its way out of. This would make Hubbard, White a much less attractive target for a merger. The full partnership didn’t need to approve the lease, only the executive committee, which Burdick’s side controlled.
    The lease agreement, Lillick had learned, wouldn’t be signed until this weekend.
    Son of a bitch, he raged. Well, he’d have to stop the deal somehow.
    He put Lillick’s memo away and began thinking about defensive measures. If Burdick learned what Clayton was up to, particularly with the St. Agnes case and the lease, he and his bitchy wife would strike back hard. Clayton began to worry about loose ends.
    He picked up the phone and called Lillick.
    The boy’s cheerful voice drooped when he realized who the caller was.
    “That information was … helpful.”
    This was one of Clayton’s highest forms of compliments.
Helpful
.
    “Like … I mean, I’m glad.”
    “I’m a little concerned though, Sean. You
are
being careful, aren’t you?”
    The boy hesitated and Clayton wondered if there was anything more to his uneasiness than