Harold pulled the car into the gravel driveway of the Guzmans’ ranch house. “Now you’re going to see how to do a deposition,” he said. Inside, Felix Guzman sat on a couch in the living room, Robert Macey and Tom Peters at his side. A wicker chair held the court reporter. No provision had been made to seat Harold, who began a professorial pacing. Mark stood uneasily in the corner, looking around the room. Janette Guzman, he thought. Who had she been? Framed photographs answered: a smiling dark-haired girl, clutching a diploma or a friend’s shoulder, posing with classmates in front of the Capitol, with her parents beside a weathered car. Once, made up and gowned, her escort ill at ease in a rented tuxedo. Marty, Mark realized, and looked away.
“Okay,” said Harold. “Mr. Guzman, let me extend my condolences for your loss.”
Felix Guzman said nothing, deep-set eyes fixed ahead of him, face impassive. “That’s not a question,” said Macey. “Let’s get to what you’re here for, Harold.”
Harold nodded. “Okay,” he said again. “Mr. Guzman, could you tell me how you came to be represented by the firm of Macey and Schiller?”
“Objection,” said Tom Peters promptly.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Representation is a legal relationship about which our client is not qualified to testify. Moreover, the process by which it was created is shielded by the attorney-client privilege.”
“How did you first hear about this firm?”
Felix Guzman said nothing. “You can answer,” Peters told him.
“I was looking for a lawyer. I found them on the Internet.”
“Do you have a computer in this house?”
“No.” Harold raised one eyebrow. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Tom Peters cleared his throat. “I went to the public library,” said Felix Guzman. “I used the terminals there.”
“Please let your client decide for himself when he’s finished his answer.”
“What are you insinuating?”
“I’m asking the questions. Let the record show that Mr. Peters is prompting the witness.”
“The record shows nothing of the sort,” said Macey. “Come on, Harold, let’s keep it moving.”
“Okay,” Harold said.
Felix Guzman interrupted. “You think I can’t go to the library? We used to go there a lot. You don’t know me. You don’t know Janette.”
Mark bit his lip. The line about the computers sounded like an agreed-upon fabrication, but this one rang true.
Harold dipped his head toward one shoulder, then the other, eliciting faint crackles of vertebrae. “How did you decide to become a class representative?”
“Objection. Please try to speak English.”
“Mr. Guzman,” said Harold. “Are you aware that you are pursuing claims on behalf of a number of injured parties other than your daughter?”
“Objection. They’re not injured, Harold; they’re dead. Let’s be straight about this.”
“Are you aware that your suit presents the claims of other deceased persons?”
“I want justice,” said Felix Guzman. “What they did, they did to a lot of people. They should pay for everyone they killed.”
“Could you tell me why you feel that you should present these claims instead of allowing the other representatives to sue individually?”
“My lawyers are good lawyers. Not like you. They will hold these men accountable. They will bring justice.”
“Could we strike … Forget it.” Harold ran a hand over his face. “Have your lawyers consulted with you about the possibility of a settlement?”
Felix Guzman shook his head. “You know what they gave me, the men from the company? A box of dirt that they said was my daughter.
Now you come here, into my house, throwing more dirt. You think I want a settlement? You think you give me money, everything’s all right again? You want a settlement, you give me back my daughter, my Janette.”
“What is the fee arrangement you have with Macey and Schiller? No, strike that.” Harold paced and frowned. “What’s that on the wall?” he asked. Macey and Tom Peters turned their heads; Mark looked up at the framed paper, read Janette’s name. A diploma?
“It’s a stock certificate,” said Felix Guzman. “Janette, she was proud of her job. Proud of the company. She took her first paycheck and bought stock. What did they do? They locked her in like an animal and burned her to death.” He paused. “You got any more questions you want to ask me?”
“You know what?” said Harold. “I think that’ll do. I thank you for your time, Mr. Guzman, and again, let me offer my condolences.” Felix Guzman shook his head angrily. Harold made as if to offer his hand and reconsidered. “Let’s go,” he told Mark, and they left the house. “So,” said Harold, starting the car. “As I was saying, that’s how to defend a deposition.”
Ryan Grady lifted a pair of pants by the hems and shook them. He laid his suit jacket flat on the bed and patted it down. He looked around the motel room in panic. I know it was in my pocket, he thought. I know because I was checking e-mail this morning. And then we went to the warehouse, and then I came back here and changed, and where the fuck is my phone? Okay, he told himself. Calm down. Take a deep breath. Have a drink. Or take another deep breath. There’s something you do in this situation. Remember the crucial things. Free grace and salvation by works and how to find your missing phone. Oh, yeah.
He picked up the motel phone and stood with it for a moment in his hand, gazing about the room. You’re here somewhere, baby, and I’m going to find you. He dialed his number, waiting to hear the familiar electronic rendition of “Fur Elise.” Three rings from the cradle in his hand, and silence in the room. Did I leave it on vibrate?
The voice in his ear surprised him so much he almost dropped the receiver. “That’s a very annoying ring you’ve got there, buddy,” it said. “Who is this?”
“Who is this?” Ryan repeated, incredulous. “It’s the guy who owns that phone you’re holding. Who are you?”
There was a pause. “I’m the guy that’s got your phone.”
“Yeah, well, you’d better give it back. I’m a lawyer.”
Another pause. “What have you been up to, lawyer?” the voice said. “Looking at things you shouldn’t have been?”
“No,” Ryan said reflexively. Then he remembered Katja. What the hell? he thought.
“Oh, I think you have been, lawyer,” the voice said. “Did you see anything that interested you?”
Ryan shuffled through possible responses. Perhaps there was a strip club nearby, or someone running an escort service. “What business is that of yours?” he demanded finally.
“It’s our business, lawyer. I suppose you don’t understand, not being a businessman. But that’s exactly what it is.”
Aha, thought Ryan. Things are looking up. “I might be interested in your business. If you’re discreet.”
The chuckle on the other end did not indicate amusement. “Think you’re going to come in here with your pals and then do a little freelancing, is that it? See something you like, you think you can just have it? You leave your phone so we can get in touch? You’re a smooth one, aren’t you?”
Freelancing, thought Ryan. That’s a nice way to put it. What did you do last weekend, man? Oh, a little freelancing. How about you?
“I don’t think so,” the voice continued. “I would advise against it. You’re in over your head just talking to me, lawyer. I don’t think you’d have the faintest idea what to do, out on your own without your buddies from the firm.”
Ryan collected himself, insulted. “Look, you fucking psycho,” he said. “Maybe I don’t care about your business after all. That’s not what I came for. I’m not on vacation. I’m just here to do a job. Maybe I’ll just concentrate on that. So why don’t you stop hassling me and give me back my phone?”
“Sure,” said the voice. “I’ll do that. Why don’t you tell me where you are?”
“The Redbird Hotel,” Ryan said. “Room 208. When are you coming over?”
“It’s a motel,” said the voice. “And you’ll know.” The line went dead.
“So,” said Mark. “How was your day?” He hung his suit jacket in the closet, atop the other jacket, and began to change.
“Sucked,” said Ryan.
“Yeah,” said Mark. “Mine too. You want to go out for a drink? I ran into Katja, she said she saw some little bar down the road.”
That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say, thought Ryan. “Can’t,” he said sadly. “I have to meet someone here.”
Mark pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. “Hot date?”
“I wish. No, it’s a long story. Maybe I can catch up with you guys later.”
Katja squeezed a wedge of lime into the beer bottle and tilted it toward her lips. “So,” she said. “How was your day?”
Mark shook his head. “I don’t know. I do these depositions, they almost have me in tears. And I don’t know when to object.” He consulted his own bottle. “But I went to one with Harold today and he got crushed too. So I feel a little better.”
“I’ve seen that happen,” Katja said. “How did he take it?”
“He told me that I was learning how to defend a deposition.”
“Yeah. But did he seem upset about it? Or do you think he was maybe a little relieved?”
“Relieved? No, he was just Harold. You know, kill them and eat their babies.” Katja leaned back. She’s disappointed, Mark thought. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “We were talking to this girl’s father, the lead plaintiff. They set it up for us, had us go to his house, pictures of her all around. You could see it was staged. But I think it got to him a little bit, even so. I mean, he felt for the guy. I could tell.” Katja sipped and nodded calmly. Whatever emotion Mark had detected was hidden again. “How was your day?” he asked.
“Well, I was in a warehouse for most of it, going through boxes with your pervert roommate. Then I went for a run, but I had to come back because I realized I’d forgotten my gas mask. Have you noticed that the air around here smells funny?”
“I thought it was Ryan,” Mark said.
Katja rewarded him with half a laugh. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just, at times it all seems unreal. If you’d asked me a couple of years ago what I’d be doing now, I couldn’t even have imagined this. I mean, is this why you joined a firm? Why you went to law school?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Mostly it was for my parents. So I could give them something back. Why did you?”
“To do something with my life. To have a career. My mother never did. Well, you’ll laugh at this, but she was an airline stewardess when she met my father. Lufthansa. It was more glamorous back then.”
Mark shrugged. “Mine’s a secretary. And what did she do after?”
“Nothing, really. Social stuff. My father probably didn’t think I was going to work either. But I had all these opportunities and I didn’t want to waste them. I wish he was still here to see what I’ve done.” Mark said nothing; Katja closed her eyes for a moment and continued. “But is this really what it’s all about? Working harder to have less freedom? You give up half your life to get good grades so you can get that top-firm job, then as a reward you get to give up the other half. And then if you’re lucky someday you bail out and go work as in-house counsel to some corporation so you can get a little bit of it back. Who told us that this was what we wanted?”
“Who said we get to do what we want?”
Katja shrugged. “If we don’t, who does?”
“I don’t know,” said Mark. “I think it’s different when you get a little more seniority.”
“Yeah,” said Katja. “You’d think so. Or that’s what they tell you, anyway.” She paused. “I turned up some interesting documents today.”
“Did you send them to Canada?” He got a full laugh this time, but not a happy one.
“You heard that speech too?”
“Just the highlights. What did you find?”
“Securitization,” said Katja. “It’s a financing technique. It means that Hubble doesn’t own any of its assets.”
“How can it not own its assets?”
“That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t own them.”
“So?”
“Well, it didn’t hit me until later, because I was thinking about it in terms of financing. But what this means is that there’s nothing there. The
plaintiffs can get their judgment, but Hubble just slips into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, discharges the debt, and comes back out. They never have to pay anything. It’s like one of those toys you can’t knock over.”
“That’s good,” said Mark. Katja looked at him. “Or not,” he said. “Or not good.”
“One or the other,” Katja said. “But doesn’t it make you wonder what we’re all doing here? I mean, the plaintiffs’ lawyers are gearing up for a big battle; we’re here doing all this preparation for defense, but we’re fighting over nothing. It’s an empty shell. Once Macey and Schiller figure that out, they’ll just pack up and leave. There’s nothing in it for them if they get a judgment they can’t collect. So why didn’t Hubble disclose the securitization immediately?”
Ours not to reason why, Mark thought. “I don’t know,” he said.
“I don’t know either. But it makes me curious. Don’t you wonder?”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “I do.” How had he come to this place? This town, this bar, this green-eyed girl. “Do you have any guesses?”
“Not yet,” said Katja. “Maybe something will turn up.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “But so that’s not going to make more sense when I’ve got more seniority. I get these projects, you know, and I immerse myself in them, and it seems like I’m doing something. But then I take a step back and it’s all canceled out. It’s like you’re swimming in a river, and you can feel yourself moving through the water, but then you look up and it’s the same bit of shoreline.”
“Or you look up and get clocked in the head by a log,” Mark said. What she was describing sounded like a substantial improvement over his experience. “You should try pro bono.”
Katja nodded. “I admire you for taking that on. I don’t know how you find the time.”
“I don’t either,” Mark said. He didn’t have the time, if he thought about it realistically. There was no way he was going to make the annual target of two thousand hours chargeable to a client. But thinking about things realistically was proving to be a recipe for depression. Perhaps that was the value of law school, that it taught you how to rationalize away what happened to your life when you became a lawyer. He looked down at the table, studying knife-etched graffiti in the dark wood. At the moment the billables didn’t seem all that important.
“I guess it helps that you can have the firm do your shopping for you,” Katja went on. “Isn’t that crazy? Before you join the firm you have
this normal life. Then all of a sudden half of what used to be your life is taking place inside the firm. Your meals, your exercise. And half of it is still taking place outside, but the firm is doing it for you. It’s like a fairy world. You eat one meal with them and suddenly three years have gone by outside.”
“Yeah,” said Mark. “Funny, they didn’t play that up so much in the interviews.”
“What if they had?” said Katja. Her face had grown more animated. “Can you imagine what the interviews would be like if they told you the truth?”
Mark smiled. “‘Don’t worry if you don’t like the associates you meet,’” he said. “‘They’ll all be gone by the time you get here!’”
“Right,” said Katja. “And when they talk about the classes you should take. ‘Forget Bankruptcy. I highly recommend Proofreading. And Document Review. And Staying Up All Night Because a Partner Called You at Seven.’”
“Really, they shouldn’t have interviews,” said Mark. “They should just bring us all in and see how long we’ll hold our hand over a candle flame. Last thirty get the job.”
“Oh, it’s not just a job.”
“It’s an indenture?”
“It’s a lifestyle.”
“It’s two or three really terrible jobs all stuck together is what it is,” Mark said.
Katja laughed, pushing her shoulders forward, deepening the hollows under her collarbone. She shook her bottle by the neck: empty. “Your round, isn’t it?”
She watched Mark walk away, shaking her head. Affection leads to distraction; distraction to errors of judgment. How many times would she have to learn that? She was window-shopping something she could not afford, not while the consequences of earlier mistakes pressed upon her. What had she been thinking?
Nothing; that was the problem. She hadn’t been thinking at all. And even as she saw the first changes in Harold, she’d let herself imagine they were just parts of a more general transformation. Fairy-tale kisses turned beasts to men, brought statues alive. But Harold wasn’t showing many
signs of recovered humanity. Only one, in fact, and it was one that Katja tended not to connect with humanity at all: he was starting to look at her that way.
It had been clear when she stopped by his car that afternoon. Clear earlier, if she hadn’t been trying to avoid the knowledge. She’d seen that look often enough, and she knew what followed. A week or two, maybe a month, of great solicitude, then the distant reproach of wounded dignity, the snide comments behind her back. As though something had happened that was her fault; as though she should be blamed.
She did blame herself, this time at least. It was how the fairy tales went, after all. Harold was just following the plot. But why was it that men had to take any gesture of kindness as an indicator of sexual availability? Perhaps because, coming from them, it was. Still, you’d think they’d learn from experience. Though likely Harold’s experience of kindness was small. Katja clenched her teeth against a surge of pity, summoning frustration in its place. Why couldn’t she find someone normal, someone she could talk to, someone … She raised her eyebrows, surprised at the thought. Someone like Mark.
Mark walked toward the bar, keeping his eyes down. The floor was speckled with sawdust and peanut shells. The Cactus Cantina was small and dark, and though a sign outside had advertised nightly battles between man and margarita, most of the patrons sat quietly sipping beers. Mark and Katja had entered to near silence, no one meeting their eyes. Now he could feel a few stares directed his way. “Two more Coronas,” he told the bartender.
“Where you from, buddy?” one of the men at the bar asked.
Mark kept his head down. “Washington,” he said.
“Nice place, ain’t it, that Washington? Nation’s capital and all.”
“It’s okay,” Mark answered. He collected the bottles and overtipped.
“Surprised you don’t miss it more,” the man said. “But I guess you’ll be going back soon enough. Just visiting our little town, aren’t you? Come to see the sights.”
“Yeah,” said Mark. “I guess.” He turned back toward the booth where Katja waited, took two steps, and abruptly found himself on the floor, having tripped over an outstretched leg. He grabbed for a rolling, foamy bottle, hearing laughter.
“Careful, there, Washington,” the man said dryly. “Lots of things to stumble over out here. You don’t watch where you’re going, you might even run into a fist or two.” Mark got to his feet, sudsy and glowering, the bottles wet and half empty in his hands. “You lookin’ to have a conversation about something?” the man asked. “Me and the boys, I don’t know if we’re up to your Washington standards. But the way you lookin’ at me, makes me come over all chatty. Makes me think I might take you out back and conversate you a good one.”
Mark dropped his eyes and shook his head. Watching the floor, he walked back to the booth. “I’m afraid it doesn’t count as your round if you spill the drinks,” Katja told him.
“I think we’d better get out of here,” Mark said.
“What,” Katja asked as they trotted back down the road, “they were going to fight you? All four of them? That doesn’t seem fair.”
“I wasn’t concerned about the numbers,” said Mark, holding his breath as headlights rumbled by.
“Really?”
“Well, when you have my degree of experience in bar fights, it really doesn’t matter how many of them there are.”
“I see,” said Katja. “What you mean is that you’ve never been in a fight and any one of them could have kicked your ass by himself.”
“You could put it that way,” Mark said. The fear past, he was beginning to realize that certain kinds of unpleasantness could be enjoyable in retrospect. “Won’t Ryan be sorry he missed the excitement.”
“I’m sure he will,” said Katja. “I bet he didn’t come half as near getting stomped to death as you did. I’m feeling a little jealous myself.”
“I guess I’m just lucky,” Mark said, and laughed. The night was crisp with oncoming fall, the stars bright overhead. Katja had been right; there was still a chemical flavor to the air, borne on the breeze from the wreckage of the Hubble plant. But the stars were luminous and distinct, and Mark felt a sudden eerie slippage, as though the true map of the universe were emotional, time and space folded upon themselves to bring distant points together through the power of common feeling. He had come again to the Nantucket night, the wonderment and longing, the possibilities looming in the vast unseeable future. The sense that darkness was a gift, a curtain behind which anything might await: the girl on the other side of the fence, all the unknowable treasures of the world. But now there was a girl at his side, close enough to touch. Mark cast a glance at
Katja and it all returned, the smell of red clay and seaweed, the wooden decks as they dried in the sun. The hedge clippings in the road and the steady thwack of a ball against racket strings. Wonder stirred within him. Why not? Katja’s sleeveless shirt showed smoothly muscled shoulders; her dark hair hung in a long ponytail. She looked like a tennis player. Maybe something had indeed brought them back together.
Mark opened his mouth, hesitating. Katja turned her head toward him, eyebrows raised, the beginning of a smile on her lips. The girl on the other side of the fence. The wind shifted; the breeze brought poison. Janette, Mark thought. She would have grown up with these stars; to her they would have seemed normal. And then she died under them, because she was on the wrong side of the fence.
He closed his mouth and looked down at the road. Luck, he told himself. You could grow up behind any number of fences, or you could walk around them looking in. It just depended on where you were born. And that was what had brought him here. His luck, Janette’s lack of it. He wondered what the air had smelled like when she was a little girl.
Soon the lights of their motel appeared. Mark opened the door to his room and turned to Katja. “You want to come in?” Her face registered shock. “I mean just to talk,” he explained quickly, alarmed. “I’m sure Ryan’s here.”
“He’s here, all right,” Katja said, her voice grown suddenly small. Mark turned back to the doorway and felt momentarily abashed. The room hadn’t been tidy when he left it, but now it was a scene of mayhem, clothes and papers scattered, the mattress torn off the bed. Then understanding’s chill alchemy turned embarrassment to dread, as his gaze followed Katja’s to where Ryan Grady lay motionless in a small pool of blood.