Mr. Baker was a mouselike man, which isn’t to say he behaved as one, but that he truly did look very much like a mouse. Sometimes he looked like an angry mouse, sometimes wise; on this day, as he sat waiting for Frances to arrive, he resembled a mouse who wished he were another mouse. He had been enamored of Franklin Price; coming up the ranks he’d had the honor of witnessing the great litigator in court any number of times. The first case was still clear in his memory—a minor affair, a hostile takeover of some Midwestern communications company, but Mr. Baker had never seen Price’s equal for controlled brutality and pure showmanship. It was on this day that Mr. Baker grasped the elusive point: the court was a performance environment, a stage play whereby the actors conceived their lines on the spot, and it was the finest entertainer who won the prize. From the instant Price rose from his chair to speak, all in the courtroom were rapt. Restrained applause followed his closing arguments. Mr. Baker afterward followed Price’s career with an almost fanatical fervor.
Price personified all that Mr. Baker held to be of any importance. Certainly he looked the part: he was a dashing man, poised, stylishly attired; but this was offset by the needed amount of menace, a tactile pulse of psychic violence. It was difficult to speak with Price because if you bored him, he told you you did; and if you bothered him, there was in his carriage and language a hostility that one could not help but equate with actual bloodshed. Price was never recognized for physical mayhem, but his dismissals were just the same as a wallop in the face.
For all the inhabitants of this particular landscape, there was the pursuit of money as a primary, as the primary goal. This was key to Price, of course, and in the years making up the first half of his career he accrued a legitimate if modest fortune. But there were others who made more, which must have displeased him, for he set out to address this during the second half of his career, the phase that came to define him.
Price became known as the most vicious, the most tenacious litigator, defending only the indefensible: the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, the apparatus of the war machine, gun lobbyists. Mr. Baker was not above the occasional unsavory pursuit, particularly if the pay was sound, but Price took one repugnant case after another, with never a break in between, so that his own persona became indivisible from that of those he worked for. The collective assumption was that he enjoyed his role in the wrongdoing. Whether or not this was the truth, who could say; what was indisputable was Price’s prosperity. He was among the highest-paid lawyers in the United States, and his every extracurricular investment was seemingly predetermined to turn a profit. Sensible, professional men and women spoke with sober seriousness of Franklin Price as one imbued with and directed by dark energies. Up-and-comers shared a joke, which was to discreetly genuflect when they crossed Price’s path.
His death came unexpectedly, while the man was at his zenith, and was thrilling in its details. The coroner who performed the autopsy said he’d never seen so powerful a heart attack in his long years at practice, and his line, often repeated by Price’s cronies and enemies, was that the overtaxed organ had exploded like a goddamned hand grenade. The fact of his wife’s discovering his body, then going skiing in Vail for the weekend without bothering to call the authorities, was somehow fitting as an ending, the just debasement of a man who in all honesty had it coming. The tabloids ran a photograph of Frances attending an après-ski party at the mountain lodge, and she had never looked more glamorous or pleased; the image presented her to the public as one reveling in the private knowledge of the stiffening corpse of her husband. The picture in question was five years old but the tabloids couldn’t see the point in stating that, and so they didn’t.
The hushed discussions in the following years that Frances, that witty, fearful beauty, had gone quietly mad and now addressed her aged cat as Price represented a weird icing on an already weird cake. It was a good story, and so it was told, and told again, and it brought a reliable delight to the tellers and audience both.
Mr. Baker had seen no evidence of this particular mania in Frances. All he knew was that anyone who could hold her own against the formidable Franklin Price—and by all accounts Frances did more than hold her own—was one deserving of his respect, and from the start of their working together he had afforded her this. She’d received it as a matter of course, and for the first years of their collaboration had extended him a mirrored respect along with the occasional small kindness. But as time passed, and the estate faltered, Mr. Baker had become for her a totem of disintegration, and she turned away from the man. So began their game of go-seek.
Having made every effort to salvage her holdings, Mr. Baker suffered no professional guilt: Frances’s spending was pathological. How many times had he reached out to beg for frugality, only to learn later that the warning had kicked off a frenzy of lavish purchases? She bought homes in cities she never intended to visit; she gave staggering sums to charities whose aim she could not accurately name. Mr. Baker couldn’t rid himself of the notion that ruin was the object of the game for Frances. But was she herself aware of it? That is, was she perhaps attempting to distance herself from what could be considered dirty money? For what his opinion was worth, he thought her motivation was not linked to morality, but something smaller, something more personal, and bitterer.
He’d experienced a queasiness in the recent months whenever her name came to mind, knowing the matter was beyond hope, and knowing he would eventually have to have the conversation he most dreaded having with his clients. He was having that conversation now. Before Frances had settled in her chair, Mr. Baker spoke:
“It’s all gone, Frances.”
“What’s all gone?”
“Everything.”
Frances took a drink of water. “Everything,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Not the money in my account.”
“It’s not your account for long.”
“It’s in my name.”
“The name you get to keep. But every penny in that account, in addition to the investments and properties, is going back to the bank.”
Frances said, “The properties.”
“The properties are yours I would imagine until the end of the month. By that I mean you have use of them. But they can none of them be sold or rented, and you will be locked out on the first of January at the latest.”
Frances took another sip of water, then held the cool glass to her cheek. “Certainly I’ll get to keep the money I brought to the marriage?”
“That was shuffled into the estate a long time ago and it was not, excuse me, a very large sum.”
“What about Malcolm’s legacy?”
“No,” said Mr. Baker.
“What are we meant to live off once the bank has moved against us?”
“I can’t claim to know the answer to that.” It was grotesque to see a person such as Frances exposed in this way, and Mr. Baker was peeved to be party to it. He told her, “I spoke to you about this as a possibility for seven years, and as an eventuality for three. What did you think was going to happen? What was your plan?”
She exhaled. “My plan was to die before the money ran out. But I kept and keep not dying, and here I am.” She shook her head at herself, then sat up. “All right, then. It’s all been settled, and now I want you to tell me what to do.”
“Do,” he said.
“Yes. Tell me, please.”
“What else is there to do but start over?”
“And what does that mean, I wonder? When you know I’ve never generated money, but only spent it?”
“What can I say, Frances? Take a loan from a friend?”
“Impossible. Name something else.”
“There is nothing else.”
“There is something else.”
Mr. Baker looked away and back. He said, “Speaking off the record, there’s only one thing you can do: sell it all.”
“Sell what all?”
“Everything that isn’t nailed down. Sell the jewelry, the art, the books. Sell it privately, quietly, cheaply. Bring me the checks and I’ll transfer it to cash for you.”
“And then what?”
“And then whatever-you-wish.”
“But where will we live?”
“I suppose you’ll have to rent.”
To hear the word, it was like swallowing a sharp crust of stale bread, and Frances winced. No one was going to help her, she realized, and she felt very small and cold. She stood. Staring at Mr. Baker’s forehead she said, “Thank you for everything. I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing each other again.”
“Frances, sit,” he said. “Order some lunch.”
“I need to breathe.”
“It’s not a death.”
“I need to leave.”
That evening, Malcolm came into the kitchen to find Frances sharpening a long, gleaming knife at the marble-top island. She worked with a sense of rhythm, and intently. Malcolm had never seen her perform this or any other kitchen duty before, and he asked her, “Are you cooking?”
“No, I only like the sound it makes,” she said, lightly panting, the vein on her forehead plumped. “How was your time with Susan?”
Malcolm murmured indistinctly.
“What’s that, Mr. Mumbles? I can’t understand you. Well, my news trumps yours. Are you ready for this? We’re insolvent. We’ve nothing left. Nothing in the world!” She laughed dementedly, cutting at the air with the knife. It came away from her hand, clattering down the length of the island and onto the floor. Malcolm was unnerved, and went away from her. Alone again, Frances collected the knife and resumed her work of sharpening the blade, but more slowly than before.