Nathan Bines felt the vibration coming from his wallet. In a slot designed for a credit card, his special cell phone—the size and thickness of a credit card—was vibrating. Bines found himself grinding his teeth. He didn’t like being at the beck and call of another. The vibrating stopped, but that only meant the clock was ticking. Bines had two minutes to drop everything and find a spot to take the call in private.
Geofredo Salazar didn’t like to be kept waiting.
Bines wished he could ignore the summons. He felt the clench in his gut. For the better part of a decade, Salazar had been represented by Bines, an arrangement kept secret by both parties. Several other law firms worked for the billionaire hedge fund manager and were his on-the-record lawyers. All clients have baggage, but Salazar had more than most. Now, looking back to the beginning of their relationship, Bines wished he had known just how much baggage that was.
He finished another conversation and closed the door to his office. Salazar didn’t keep him waiting.
“I hope I didn’t interrupt your golf game,” Salazar said.
“As I’ve told you before, I rarely have time to play golf.”
“What lawyers say, and what really is, I have often found to be contradictory.”
Salazar sounded as if he were joking. His mellifluous Spanish accent— Bines thought it reminiscent of the late actor Ricardo Montalbán—certainly sounded affable. But Bines knew Salazar was neither genial nor good-tempered. Despite his image to the contrary, he was as cold and calculating an individual as Bines had ever met. At the same time, Bines and the firm had grown dependent on the billable hours charged to their anonymous client and his shell companies. That tended to happen when you were billing up to fifty million dollars a year in legal fees.
“Tell me about our case,” Salazar said.
“Everything is proceeding as hoped. Tomorrow morning, Judge Irwin is going to publicly smack down Deketomis. After he gets through with him, Deketomis will be hamstrung. I expect he’ll be so judicially constrained that his case will wither up and blow away.”
Instead of being pleased, Salazar said, “That’s not enough.”
“Excuse me?”
“Deketomis needs to be humiliated.”
Nathan Bines did not like Nick Deketomis, but he liked even less what he was hearing. It was one thing to work the legal system to your advantage, but quite another to endorse the equivalent of beating a dead horse.
“I can assure you that his ultimately losing this case will be punishment enough for him. Deketomis would sooner eat excrement than he would a serving of humble pie.”
“Excrement?” By his tone, Salazar was clearly mocking Bines for his euphemism. “He needs to be dragged through a pile of excrement, so that when he comes out on the other side he will be fouled, and bowed, and beaten. Deketomis must be an example so as to discourage any other foolhardy lawyers from ever considering taking up a similar case.”
“I cannot endorse anything inappropriate or illegal.”
Salazar began laughing. Bines wasn’t sure if he had ever heard him laugh before. “Inappropriate? We have been in bed together for far too long for you to start making protestations of your virtue.”
“I am an officer of the court,” Bines said.
“You say that with pride, but the only difference between you and those who work on their backs is that your hourly wage is so much more expensive than theirs. And so much less gratifying.”
Bines could feel his throat tighten. Salazar had a reputation as a great philanthropist. The stated purpose of his international foundation, the Global Union Manifest (GUM), was to advance justice throughout the world. Those in many progressive camps liked to proclaim themselves as “gummies” or “gummy bears.” But by no stretch of the imagination was Geo Salazar a gummy bear, or the good guy he pretended to be.
“I assume you called me for a reason other than offering insults.”
Salazar said, “No insult was intended. I merely offered what seemed to me was a needed reality check. As for the purpose of my call, I wanted to discuss the amicus brief you filed last week.”
“Amicus brief?” Bines said, puzzled. An amicus brief was filed by nonlitigants in cases where interested parties wished to make their opinions known. The Latin translation of amicus curiae meant “friend of the court.” An outsider writing the kind of brief Salazar described was essentially endorsing the action.
“I filed no such brief.”
“The record speaks to the contrary.”
“There must be some mistake.”
“No mistake. We took one of those law firm letterheads where your name is so prominently featured and attached it as a cover letter to the legal document that you filed in an ongoing appellate court case.”
“What!” yelled an outraged Bines.
“It’s only a three-page opinion.”
“You’re telling me my name was put on an amicus curiae brief. My name.”
“That’s right. We had a need to use your name. Aren’t you the voice of reason for the media? Don’t they always call upon you to comment on the legal story of the day? And didn’t you tell me you had thousands of Twitter followers?”
“You make my point,” Bines said. “All those are reasons I need to be protective of my name and what it stands for.”
“I doubt whether your amicus brief will get much attention, but should anyone take notice, I am certain you will be able to justify your arguments.”
“You submitted a forged document to an appellate court, and I’m supposed to go along with that?”
“You are paid more than an ample sum to go along with it.”
“It was one that you didn’t want to dirty your hands with. You might remember its particulars. I wanted you to challenge the government’s age restrictions requiring all H2B workers to be eighteen and older. Our position is that the legal age should be lowered to fifteen so as to allow the kind of internship programs that exist in many countries around the world. When you begged off representing my interests, I retained another firm to take up the action.”
“I told you in good conscience I couldn’t take that case,” Bines said. “I was against the idea of minors entering the workplace.”
“And I accepted your decision.”
“Yet you submitted an amicus brief in my name that supports positions you knew I was not comfortable endorsing?”
“Everything in the brief was in keeping with your usual First Amendment arguments and your well-documented distrust of the government overstepping its bounds and impinging upon individual freedoms.”
The knot in Bines’s stomach loosened a little. Maybe the amicus brief wasn’t as bad as he’d feared.
Bines said, “Were those arguments solely applied to adults they might very well fly, but that is not the case. We’re talking about children here.”
“That’s where your brilliant legal mind took on ageism,” Salazar said, not sparing his sarcasm. “In the brief you referenced American cultural exceptionalism and detailed how it was out of step with much of the world.”
For a moment, Bines couldn’t speak. This was worse, far worse, than he ever could have imagined. “That’s—that’s—”
He struggled to find a word adequate to his outrage, but couldn’t.
Salazar blithely continued, “I’m not saying we’ll win this case, but it will give us traction for the next case, and the one after that. If we can erode the laws bit by bit, we will ultimately prevail.”
“Do you realize that by signing my name to that brief, you have put my legal reputation in jeopardy, and potentially undermined my effectiveness in working the Welcome Mat case?”
“A mal tiempo, buena cara,” Salazar said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s a Spanish saying that translates to, ‘In bad weather, a good face.’”
“Having a good face won’t help me represent your interests in court, especially if I have the reputation of being morally bankrupt.”
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot that you are a man of the people, and fight for the rights of individuals.”
“I need to withdraw that amicus brief,” Bines said. “I’ll say someone in my office mistakenly sent it. I won’t go on record publicly defending the notion that a fifteen-year-old child from another country should be allowed to enter the workplace and treated like an adult. My daughter is fifteen. I am of the belief that she and all other teenagers need to be afforded the protections that come with being a minor.”
Salazar made tsk-tsk sounds. “I am afraid you painted a very different picture in your amicus brief. You pointed out that culturally, and historically, the notion of adulthood has been an extremely fluid concept. Even the age of consent, as you so sagely noted, isn’t something necessarily written in stone. Was not Romeo’s beloved Juliet only thirteen years of age when she succumbed to his charms? That work of fiction, as you were quick to note, was certainly within the norms of its time.”
“This is insane! I am your advocate. What possible advantage is there in setting me up as your fall guy?”
“Don’t be a drama queen. At most, you have dirtied your hands, even though they have never been nearly as clean as you’ve imagined them to be. We needed a spokesperson to go along with the positions we are advocating. You were the logical choice.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Friends of mine. The same friends who have significant, if not visible, positions in Welcome Mat Hospitality.”
There were long-standing rumors of Salazar being involved with criminal enterprises. When Bines had first begun representing Salazar, he had thought he could keep clear of those potential entanglements and not have to be concerned about the Spaniard’s silent business partners. But sometimes there was no avoiding stepping on gum, despite your best efforts to avoid it. And when that happened, the gum somehow found its way into clothing and hair.
“I am asking that my name be removed from the amicus brief,” Bines said.
“Hacer la vista gorda.”
“You know I don’t speak Spanish.”
“Then I will translate. The literal translation is ‘do the fat view,’ but what the saying really means is that you should pretend not to notice what is being thrown your way.”
“You’ve seen to the forging of my name, and the counterfeiting of my words, and that’s all you have to say?”
“Consider it good advice. If your brief generates any attention, ignore whatever is said.”
“You would have me go about pretending I agree with positions totally antithetical to what I believe?”
“You are paid to believe what I want you to believe.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“So, you dictate to me now? When your partners learn of this noble stand of yours, will they admire your taking the moral high ground, especially after I take my business to another firm?”
Bines didn’t answer.
“I thought as much. And do acquaint yourself with your amicus brief. As its author, you need to know its particulars.”
Salazar clicked off, and Bines found himself staring at his phone. Among his peers, Bines had the reputation of being calm and collected. Nothing was supposed to be able to shake him, but at the moment his hands were trembling uncontrollably.
Bines was reminded of a story he’d once heard that was supposedly attributed to George Bernard Shaw. During the course of Shaw’s conversation with a beautiful actress, the playwright asked if she would consider going to bed with him for a million pounds.
The actress said, “For a million pounds? Why, yes.”
Then Shaw asked, “Would you go to bed with me for a sixpence?”
The actress indignantly replied, “What do you take me for?”
Shaw said to her, “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just quibbling over price.”
That’s what he and Salazar had been establishing, thought Bines. His price. Along with the price of his soul.