by Peter Murphy
‘No, it’s not,’ I agreed.
‘And here’s another thing,’ Arya said. ‘Bearing in mind that we are in America, how many of those thousands are likely to be attorneys?’
10
I found myself trying to make my entrance as casual as possible in the hope that Arlene wouldn’t notice me. She was busy thumbing through a client’s file, trying to find something, so it looked promising; my timing seemed good. I set the latte I had bought her as a subconscious peace-offering on her desk, wished her a cheerful good morning and breezed into my office, clutching mine. For a few moments, as I took my seat behind my desk and fired up my computer, I actually thought I had got away with it. It was all so silly.
Even if I had got away with it, how long would that last? I would have to deal with Arlene in a matter of minutes. I don’t know what I thought I was achieving by sneaking into my own office like an indoor cat that’s been out chasing mice all night when he shouldn’t have been. But there has always been a part of me that believes that I can solve any problem, regardless of how long I have been puzzling over it, if I can just have a little more time. One more hour, one more coffee, one more night’s sleep is bound to bring about enlightenment. It’s a fallacy, of course. An hour, or a coffee, or a night’s sleep later, the problem is still the same, and I solve it exactly as I always knew I would. But still I cling to the illusion.
Arlene opened the door and stood tall in the frame.
‘Miss Kiah, I swear you are as ornery as a rattler stuck in a storm drain. You’re fixin’ to take Lily Langtry’s case, ain’t you?’
I looked over to the conference table. The papers had not miraculously disappeared overnight. They remained in place on my table. And Arya was still playing in my head. It was a moment I had waited for and dreaded and rehearsed in my mind a hundred times during my drive from Arya’s house to the office, and now it had arrived. My heart was beating quickly, and I felt slightly faint, almost detached from my body.
‘Yes,’ I heard myself reply. ‘Yes, I am.’
Speaking the words aloud had an immediate effect on me. While they were trapped inside me, they had produced only anxiety and indecision. But now that they were out there in the ether, their power was released. I was jolted back into my body to find that there were butterflies in my stomach, but now, it wasn’t just anxiety. It felt scary, yes. Had I really said that? Was this really what I was going to do? But at the same time it felt exhilarating. For a few moments, I felt as I sometimes had before the Week: confident, in control, light-hearted, optimistic, feelings I’d thought the Week had robbed me of forever. I calmed down after a few seconds, as the immediate rush subsided. The feelings lessened, but to my delight they did not leave me altogether. It was so good to have them back, to rediscover that part of myself again, that I cried. I couldn’t help it.
Arlene watched me, and I had the sense that she was ditching the lecture she had planned to deliver about the behaviour of rattlers stuck in storm drains. I realised then that I had tried to avoid her because I had been afraid of losing her, afraid that this would be a bridge too far after the ravages of the Week and the reopening of the office. But that wasn’t Arlene. I should have known that by then. She had had her say; I had decided; and whether she agreed with my decision or not, she was going to stay and help to keep her crazy boss afloat for as long as she could. She allowed me time to recover, waited for the tears to stop.
‘We’re gonna need some help,’ she said eventually.
I took a deep breath. ‘I know.’
‘I’ll need someone in the office.’
‘I’ll get you someone. I promise.’
‘And you’re gonna need someone to run around for you, talking to people, finding documents, digging dirt. Y’all are gonna be way too busy acting like a lawyer to do that kind of shit y’all’s self.’
I nodded. She was right. I would need legal support at some stage. I had no doubt about that. I’d originally thought I would have to hire an associate. That would have been a major expense, and I was baulking at the idea. But Arya had pointed out the obvious solution. Among the dispersed branches of the van Eyck family, there would have to be a good number of attorneys. Some wouldn’t be able to help: those who worked in government or a big law firm; those who had retired or had some arcane specialty like international trade. But there had to be some who would be willing and able to help me if I needed some legal research done, or some document drafted. Even two or three would do if I could depend on them.
But that wouldn’t be enough. Someone would need to work with Sam: interviewing family members; following up leads; building up a picture about what we knew, and didn’t know, about Jacob’s loans; finding out what evidence we had, or could hope to have. Because without evidence, there was no lawsuit. There was no way I was going to have time to do all that myself, and in any case it didn’t need a lawyer. A paralegal, perhaps, or…
‘What about Powalski?’ Arlene asked.
‘Powalski?’
‘Sure. He has other work, so you wouldn’t have to hire him. You could do a deal with him for so many hours a month.’
‘Do you think he would do it?’
‘Hun, he’d jump at it like a stallion jumping into a corral full of mares.’
It was a great idea. Powalski was a private investigator I’d used almost as long as I’d been in practice. He had come highly recommended by a lawyer I knew well and trusted. He was discreet and reliable, and he got things done without charging an arm and a leg for fees and expenses. I’m sure he has a first name. In fact, I’m sure he told me what it was one day, but I can’t remember and no one ever calls him anything except Powalski.
When he got to know me better and we adjourned to a wine bar one evening on the eve of some national holiday and we were swapping life stories, he confided to me that his earlier career history had been with the CIA. It was something he wouldn’t talk about in detail, and I had the impression that it wasn’t just a matter of the usual professional discretion. It seemed to me that he was very glad to have left that world behind him. But we were likely to make enemies in high places with this case, and some insight into the darker side of Washington would serve us well at some point down the road. Powalski would know how to talk to the kind of people we would need to talk to without rubbing them up the wrong way, and that was going to be important.
‘Arlene,’ I said, ‘I think you may just have come up with the perfect solution. Way to go, girl.’
She smiled modestly.
‘Aw, shucks, hun. Even a blind squirrel stumbles over an acorn now and then.’
11
‘So: we are going to have to decide what our immediate priorities are,’ I said.
I was sitting at the conference table with Sam and Arlene. Arlene was with us because she needed to know everything I knew, and everything I was planning. This was going to be a team effort or nothing, and there could be no secrets. Sam had been delighted, jumping up and down, when I told her I was going to take the case. That was understandable, and I didn’t want to cut her off. It was going to be important for her to maintain her enthusiasm over the long haul, because this was going to be a long haul. But we also needed to have a serious conversation now, in which I explained to her the realities of conducting a case on this scale when we still didn’t have any actual evidence. Painstakingly, I took her through the mechanics of litigation in the Claims Court, and the basics of class actions. I probably took far too long about it, but Sam needed to know what she was about to embark on.
‘First, we need to find out what evidence there is out there. We need to find out what the family knows. The impression I get from reading the documents you left with me is that there are different family members, all with different information, who are not talking to each other. It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle and no one has all the pieces. We need to find those pieces and put them together.’
‘What goes on at these reunions?’ I asked.
‘It’s mainly a social gathering. One evening they have a sit-down dinner; another night they may have a cocktail party with finger food. But sometimes they will have a business meeting to discuss something of interest, and my dad always said that was when the subject of the loans would come up, if it ever did. But they could never agree to do anything. The rest of the time, they break up into small groups and catch up with family news, go sight-seeing, generally have a good time.’
‘If they’re doing stuff like having a major reunion,’ Arlene suggested, ‘they must have a membership list of some kind.’
‘There’s a small, hard-core group of family members who are the real cheerleaders and they are the ones who always seem to take the lead organising these things.’
‘Can I get names and email addresses?’
Sam nodded and made a note for herself. ‘Sure. I think I know where to go for that.’
‘We need to be there in New Orleans,’ I said. ‘We need to be on the agenda. We need to contact the cheerleaders and make sure they call a general meeting, so we can let them know what we are doing, and start building our database of potential plaintiffs.’
‘Not to mention letting them know we’ll be expecting a contribution towards expenses from every last one of them,’ Arlene said.
‘Not to mention that.’
‘We’ll need a website,’ Arlene continued, ‘a website where they can download a form to register as a plaintiff, and pay their contributions. I can fix that for y’all if I can get Bert, down the hall, to help me some.’
Sam and I looked at her questioningly.
‘He works for the CPA two doors down, and he seems to know all about that kind of shit, and I think he has the hots for me. If I smile the right way at him, he’ll come running. Leave it with me.’
‘Go for it,’ I said. ‘OK. The next priority is the search for the Holy Grail. If we don’t get our hands on at least one loan certificate with the name of Jacob van Eyck on it, the case is going nowhere.’
‘How do we do that?’ Sam asked.
‘I’m not sure yet. I need to research it. I need to know a lot more about loan certificates and loan offices than I do now. But even that’s not going to be enough. There will be some places we can’t go. I’m pretty sure that at some point, we are going to need the government’s help in tracking them down.’
Arlene laughed. ‘Hun, I don’t think the government is going to be exactly falling all over themselves to help us with that. I reckon they’ll be running the other way faster than a turkey on Thanksgiving.’
I smiled. ‘They won’t want to. But the government is going to be a party to this lawsuit, and we are entitled to ask the court to make the government look for evidence and tell us what they have. The only problem is that we have to give the court some idea of what we are looking for, and some idea of where we expect the government to look.’
‘I can help with that,’ Sam volunteered. ‘I’ve already done quite a bit of reading about the Continental Congress and the loans, and I’m happy to hit the library again if you can give me some direction.’
‘Good,’ I replied. I paused. ‘I think this means we are going to have to file suit quickly, within the next week or two. We definitely need to have it done before the reunion.’
‘Whoa, hold your horses there, Tex,’ Arlene said. ‘Ain’t that a bit like letting the bull out of the gate before the bell rings? I mean, shouldn’t we have just a teeny-weeny bit of evidence before we ask the government to hand over 672 billion dollars and change?’
‘It’s not ideal,’ I agreed. ‘I would prefer to wait until we have done as much evidence-gathering as we can. That’s the general rule. But that’s not going to work in this case. We need to put in a discovery request as soon as possible, and we can’t do that until we file suit. Plus, we need to let the family cheerleaders see that we are serious about this, and give them something to sign up to. Just talking about filing a lawsuit isn’t going to make them sit in the hotel for a business meeting instead of exploring New Orleans and getting started on the mint juleps. We need to show them we already have the show on the road.’
On the way home I called in to Georgetown Law on the off-chance, and found Kate Banahan, my wills and trusts professor, in her office. My timing was good. She had just got out of class, and she was happy to see me. It was a few years since I had been in her class, but we had got on well then; she had given me an A, and we had run into each other at receptions at the law school since. We drank coffee from the machine in the faculty common room. I told her all about the forthcoming lawsuit to be entitled Samantha van Eyck (individually and on behalf of all those similarly situated) v United States.’ Her eyes lit up as she listened. Kate is of Irish extraction, and she has that Irish combination of jet black hair and bright blue eyes. There is the odd fleck of grey in the hair now that she is in her early fifties, but the eyes still sparkle. She was a trial lawyer before she settled on academia for the long term, and she still remembers the thrill of the chase.
‘Kiah, this is amazing,’ she said excitedly. ‘This would make legal history. Does anyone know yet?’
‘No. I’d like to keep it under wraps until we file.’
‘My lips are sealed.’
She demonstrated with her finger. I hesitated.
‘Kate, the reason I came to see you is that I am going to need some help in the office, and I wondered whether…’
She laughed. ‘You wondered whether I could steer the odd student your way?’
‘We can pay them for some time if they can fit it in between classes, and I think it would be interesting for them.’
‘I can do better than that,’ she said.
‘Oh?’
‘I will offer my wills and trusts class some course credit if they do four half-days during the semester and write me a report about it. Any further time is up to you to arrange with the student.’
I took her hand.
‘Kate, that is fantastic,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Can you do that, really?’
‘Sure. Why not? Professors often give partial credit for outside work if it’s relevant to the class. It’s something they can take to the bank before they take my exam. Most of them will jump at the chance. Besides, when would they ever get the chance to work on something like this? This is a one-off.’
‘How many do you have in your class?’
‘Thirty-five. About the same as in your day. It doesn’t change much. It’s pretty much the same every semester.’
She walked me to the elevator.
‘You know, Kiah, I am as sure as I can be that you’re right about the intestacy law in Pennsylvania back then. But I’d be glad to look at it for you and give you a call if you like.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That would be great.’
She grinned. ‘No problem. OK, I have a hidden agenda. Don’t you think you may need an expert witness on the law of intestacy somewhere down the road?’
‘I’m sure we will,’ I replied, shaking her hand, ‘and you are hereby retained.’
12
Dave Petrosian
I can say without any hesitation that the day the file landed on my desk was the most interesting day of my career. All right, that’s not saying much. Representing the federal government in the United States Claims Court doesn’t usually get the blood pumping. It’s a steady diet of government contracts, pension disputes, and insurance coverage claims. Not the kind of stuff most people get excited about, certainly not the kind
of stuff novels and movies are made of. But it’s a steady job. When I come into the office in the mornings I see my name on a small plaque perched on the front of my desk, and I am content: United States Department of Justice, Civil Division, David R. Petrosian, Senior Litigation Attorney. I think of Maria, and I think of little Raul and Cindy, and I am content.
I guess there is part of me that would like to be out there in the private sector, with some huge law firm, drawing down a junior partner’s salary, or even a senior associate’s salary for that matter. But you know what? I know some of those people. They were my classmates in law school. They are lawyers I have been pitted against in the courtroom. I see them from time to time, and they talk a big game about being close to the centre, about being able to feel the power, about playing in the major leagues. I know some of them earn more in a month than I earn in a year. But I also see them swallowing their ulcer medication in the corner of the court cafeteria when they think no one is watching them. I look in their eyes and see the exhaustion. I listen to them talk, and I hear the premature cynicism, the tales of carnage and devastation in their personal lives, and any trace of envy I might have felt disappears.
I’ll be honest. It’s not like the big law firms were beating a path to my door to hire me when I graduated law school. That doesn’t happen to you when you are working and have to study part-time, when the high grades don’t come easy, and when you give any time you have left to your wife and children instead of writing articles for law review or participating in moot court competitions.
I went to law school late. When I graduated from college in Minnesota, I’d already met Maria and fallen desperately in love. In our senior years we both had part-time jobs waiting tables in a burger joint in downtown Minneapolis to help fund our tuition, and we fell for each other in a heartbeat. I’d always found that dark Latin look irresistible and in any case I wasn’t trying very hard to resist. It was a magic time. But then, life intervened. Towards the end of the year she became pregnant. It wasn’t what we had planned, but, as much in love as we were, neither was it unwelcome. So, very happily, we did what we had to. We got married. I took a job as an insurance claims adjuster, while Maria looked after Raul. Two years later, Cindy came along. It turned out that I had a flair for claims adjusting. I was promoted rapidly, and we were doing pretty well financially. But there was no spare money for either of us to think about going back to school full-time.