by Peter Murphy
I had harboured thoughts about law school in my junior and senior years of college. I’m not sure why, really. I have no family connections in the law. I’m from a blue-collar family of Armenian immigrants, and while my family encouraged my education right through school and college and were always reminding me that it was the key to a better life, they didn’t have many ideas about what exactly I should do after graduation. Law school was my idea, and I guess for some reason it seemed like the natural next step. But now, it seemed, I would have to put thoughts like that behind me, and embrace claims adjusting as my life’s work. And so time went by.
Then one evening, after we had eaten dinner and put the children to bed, Maria sat me down with a glass of wine. Someone had told her about William Mitchell Law School in St Paul, a private law school which would allow me to study part-time. It would still be tough to find the tuition, but the children were six and four now, and she was comfortable making arrangements for them so that she could take a part-time job herself. I think she had a touch of cabin fever by then, and was itching to be out of the house. It made sense. My undergraduate grades were good and with a reasonable score on the Law School Admission Test, I could get in. It would be a hard grind at my age, but it was what I wanted to do, and delaying it could only make it harder. I took the plunge.
I had no clear idea what I was going to do once I was admitted to the bar. As I say, my age and part-time student status were not what the big boys were looking for. Opening my own office had few attractions. I needed the security of a reasonable salary. Then, one day in my final year of school, two attorneys from the Department of Justice appeared on campus to interview students who might be interested in a government career. Most of my classmates, if they were interested at all, were attracted to the Criminal Division with its promise of glamorous high-profile prosecutions. No one else took up the offer to talk about the Civil Division’s work in the United States Claims Court. But it was a position the Department needed to fill urgently. I talked to one of the attorneys, Harry Welsh, for almost an hour. He asked me in detail about my experience in claims adjusting. For once, instead of being a drawback, my age and experience actually gave me an advantage, and I could hear the click as we talked. I was invited to Washington to interview formally the next month, and I was offered the job a week later. Maria was more than happy to move to Washington, and we were able to find a home we could afford, in a good school district in Bethesda. We were happy then, and we are happy now, and if the work is often routine, even boring, well, that’s a sacrifice I am glad to make.
But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t very pleased when the file landed on my desk. It seemed like my reward for all those years of mind-numbing pensions and insurance cases.
13
When I say that the case ‘landed on my desk’ I’m employing a figure of speech. It didn’t so much land on my desk as get placed there with great care, and with an elaborate protocol. The morning began with a summons to drop whatever I was doing – not a problem, I’d only just arrived and I’d barely had the time to take the lid off my morning cappucino – and report to my former interviewer and now immediate supervisor, Harry Welsh, who is in charge of the Civil Division’s litigation in the Claims Court. Harry is a good lawyer, a nice enough guy, and a decent manager. He leaves his attorneys alone to do their jobs unless something seems to be going wrong, and he doesn’t usually try to micromanage cases once he has assigned them. But he can get stressed out sometimes, which is not good for his high blood pressure, and when he gets stressed out he starts trying to control everything, and when he realises he can’t control everything he starts to panic. On this morning, he was already showing signs of nervousness. He was pacing up and down in his office when I put my head around the door.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
He pointed to a thin brown file on his conference table, and continued to pace.
‘Read that,’ he replied.
I sat down and opened the file. It contained a single document, and if Harry was watching, he must have seen my eyes open progressively wider as I read through it. It was a Complaint, a pleading used to start proceedings in the Claims Court. The case was entitled Samantha van Eyck (individually and behalf of all those similarly situated) v United States. The Complaint said that Samantha van Eyck was suing the United States to recover the principal sum and interest due on loans made to the government by an ancestor of hers called Jacob van Eyck during the War of Independence, in the winter of 1777–1778. The Continental Congress had authorised loans to be raised for the conduct of the war, and its agents were authorised to issue loan certificates as evidence of the amount of a loan and the identity of the lender. The loans were to be repaid with compound interest at the rate of six per cent per year – that got my attention – on presentation of the certificate to a government loan office. The United States had repaid nothing, as a result of which Jacob van Eyck had been ruined and had died in poverty. The causes of action against us were: breach of contract; and the unconstitutional taking of private property for public use without just compensation. The Complaint claimed repayment of the principal and interest, a declaration that the total sum was held by the government in trust for the heirs of Jacob van Eyck, costs, and attorney’s fees. It concluded by reassuring the court that the sum satisfied its minimum jurisdictional requirement – in other words, the claim was for more than $10,000. No kidding.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud, and couldn’t stop for a minute or so.
‘I’m glad you find it humorous,’ Harry said. He stopped pacing and sat down at his desk.
‘This is for real?’ I asked.
‘Well, it’s signed by an attorney, and that sure looks like the court clerk’s stamp on it, so what do you think?’
The first time through, I had been so diverted by the content that I hadn’t looked for the name of the attorney who had filed the suit. I looked now. Kiah Harmon?
‘You know her, don’t you?’
‘Kiah? Sure. I’ve had several cases with her.’
‘And…?’
‘She’s good news. She’s a straight arrow, a good lawyer, a Georgetown grad. She’s always been completely honest with me, and she’s a nice lady.’
It was true. I breathed a sigh of relief whenever I saw I had Kiah as an opponent. It meant the case on the other side would be competently prepared, everything would be done ethically and by the book, we would have honest, realistic discussions to see if we could settle the case, and there would be no lawyers’ games. You couldn’t say that about many of the lawyers I had to deal with. Kiah and I had settled every case we had together except for one, in which we went to trial and she kicked my ass.
‘So, we can assume it’s for real, then, don’t you think?’
‘I guess so.’
Harry stood and started pacing again.
‘Dave, this case may seem like a joke, and there will be a lot of people out there in the press and among the great American public, not to mention our superiors in this office, who will think it is a joke, and expect us to knock it on the head accordingly. But you and I know it doesn’t quite work like that.’
‘It’s going to need careful handling,’ I admitted, ‘especially with Kiah on the other side.’
‘Damn right. And you know what? It’s the kind of case where, when we win, everyone will say, “well, sure, it was a joke; how could they not win?” But, if, God forbid, we were to lose… guess what they’re going to be saying then?’
‘That would not be good,’ I agreed.
‘Right. So you and I are going to handle this case together. Here’s how it’s going to work. You’re my senior trial attorney. You’re going to conduct the case on a day-to-day basis, file pleadings and motions, attend hearings – all the usual stuff. You and I are going to talk about this case every day without exception, at least once, and you are going to report to me everything that happ
ens.’
‘OK.’
‘After you report to me, I am going to report to my boss Maggie Watts, who, as you know, is Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division. Maggie is going to report to the Attorney General; and the Attorney General is going to report to the President.’
‘The President?’ I exclaimed incredulously. ‘The President is involved in this?’
‘Dave,’ Harry replied, ‘Samantha van Eyck, whoever she may be, is trying to hijack some number of billions of dollars from the federal budget. How much exactly, I don’t know. Have you ever done a compound interest calculation? Trust me, it’s a large number. So, yes, the President is taking an interest.’
He resumed his seat.
‘The resources of the office are at your disposal. Whatever and whoever you need – attorneys, paralegals – you come to me and ask and I will give them to you. I’m clearing out one of the storage rooms for you and putting in a couple of desks. All the case papers will be kept there under lock and key, and all work on the case will be done there. You and I will have keys, and I will issue keys to anyone else on a need-to-know basis.’
‘A need-to-know basis?’ I asked. ‘Why all the cloak and dagger stuff? Everybody in the office will know what’s going on.’
‘I know that. But it’s going to be all over the media from later today, and we don’t want any leaks. What was it they used to say? Loose lips sink ships? What they don’t know, they can’t talk about. Oh, and while I’m on the subject, no one in this office talks to the media – no one, myself included. Maggie will control all communications, and she, or the Attorney himself, will handle press conferences. Understood?’
‘Understood.’
‘I want you to start on this right away. Whatever you’re dealing with, drop it. I will reassign it as of this morning. By this afternoon, I need to give Maggie some kind of assessment, however general it may be.’
I shook my head.
‘Harry, this isn’t a routine insurance claim. There are going to be some legal questions, and God knows where we even begin with the facts of the case, and –’
‘I know that, Dave. I’m not asking for the complete picture. I need to make some reassuring noises, that’s all. I need to tell Maggie what areas we are exploring, what the basic issues are, what defenses we may have, and, most importantly, what steps we are planning on taking. Remember, whatever she reports higher up the chain is going to end up in the Oval Office. We have to make it look like we are doing something, taking action.’
‘We will be taking action,’ I tried to reassure him. ‘For one thing, we have to respond to the Complaint, and tell the court how we answer all this. We can probably make a request for further details of the claim, buy some time if we need it. But… OK. Let me think about it, and I’ll get back to you with a plan of action this afternoon.’
‘Good.’
‘I want Ellen Matthews to do legal research for me, and I want Pam as my paralegal.’
‘Are you sure? Ellen is good, but she’s just out of law school –’
‘That’s why I want her. She’s exactly what this case needs. This is the moot court case from hell. It could have been written by a sadistic law professor. We need someone who still thinks the way they do in law school, and hasn’t had her mind blunted by years of wading through the everyday realities of practice.’
For the first time, Harry allowed himself the suggestion of a smile.
‘OK. You got it. Talk to me soon.’
14
I returned to my office with the file, closed the door, sat down at my desk and swivelled my chair around so that I could look out of the window. I sat staring out at the city for some time.
Eventually, I turned my chair back around, read the Complaint again, and started an internet search for names. I started with Samantha van Eyck, and I learned that she was an actress. There were numerous photos of a good-looking young woman, several notices and play bills relating to productions in which she had appeared, and reviews of the same in provincial newspapers, all very favourable: ‘one to watch’; ‘up and coming’; ‘deserves a chance to show off her range’; that kind of thing. I also found a bio giving her educational details; she was a graduate of the University of Virginia, majoring in theatre and performing arts, graduating cum laude; the bio also gave the name of her agent. I felt some sense of disappointment. What had I been expecting?
I suppose I was still clinging to some hope that this might be a joke, that she was a flake who couldn’t be taken seriously. But there was nothing to suggest that the Samantha van Eyck I was reading about was a flake, or that she would have any reason to play a joke like this. In any case, she would never have talked Kiah Harmon into going along with it. If Kiah had even suspected that it was all some kind of hoax or publicity stunt, rather than a viable lawsuit, she would have shown Samantha van Eyck the door in a New York minute. There were some lawyers, attention-seekers or simply buffoons, who would file all kinds of ridiculous lawsuits without even thinking about the time and money they were wasting. I spent enough of my time getting their lawsuits dismissed to know that. But that wasn’t Kiah Harmon.
Then I searched for Jacob van Eyck. There wasn’t a lot. There was a Wikipedia entry that said little except that further information of a factual nature was needed to update the entry. That was something of an understatement. Beyond giving his dates of birth and death – 1730 and 1812 – there was almost nothing. The article noted that he was a Pennsylvania landowner and reputed friend of George Washington, and that he had sacrificed – interesting choice of word, I thought – all his worldly goods in the cause of the War of Independence, in return for which he had been spurned and ignored by an ungrateful nation. This had to be a contribution by some self-serving descendant who would be joining in the class action before long.
Other than that, there were a few old local newspaper articles. From time to time, it seemed, some family member or other would persuade a congressman to take some interest in the alleged loans, and naturally, the congressman concerned took advantage of the situation to create a photo op, allowing the local press to quote him on the subject of patriotism, self-sacrifice, and other American virtues, and how shameful the government’s treatment of Jacob van Eyck was. It reads well, but you only have to be in Washington for five minutes to know that it is completely meaningless.
It is language crafted for the congressman by an experienced aide, and it is in code. It says to the powers that be: don’t worry about it; I have to create a bit of a fuss to keep my constituent happy, but it’s not going to come to anything. Once the photo op had come and gone, the congressman would return to Washington, assuring his constituent that he would do all in his power to right the wrong. If the constituent pressed, he would receive further assurances that the matter was in hand. Eventually, either the constituent would give up, or he would be informed of the congressman’s deep and most sincere regret that despite his best efforts, nothing could be done. There was one exception. In the mid-1960s a congressman from Georgia had actually proposed an amendment to the budget for the relief of the van Eyck family to the tune of $20,000. How he came up with that figure, which bore no resemblance to any figure mentioned by anyone else, heaven only knows. In any case, the amendment died in committee and was never resurrected.
In none of these sources did I find any reference to the actual existence or whereabouts of any loan certificate with the name of Jacob van Eyck on it. It was tempting to continue searching, but this afternoon I would have to give Harry a bit more than internet searches to put in the report that would eventually reach the Oval Office. There was research to be done and strategy formulated. As if by a sixth sense, Ellen made a timely entrance.
‘Well, this is fun,’ she said brightly.
She was clutching a copy of the Complaint, from which I deduced that Harry had already indoctrinated her about the protocol, and I’m s
ure it was quite a lecture. If so, it hadn’t fazed her. Ellen Matthews was young and energetic and, as I had told Harry, exactly what I needed for this case. She had graduated high in her class from the University of Denver law school, and still thought enough like a student to get her head around problems like 200-year-old war loans. She looked young, too. She was dressed in the same austere dark suit all government lawyers wear, but somehow she looked too young for it. I couldn’t quite work out why. Perhaps it was that she was still a bit full in the face, as if she hadn’t outgrown it yet; or that her make-up was still experimental in some ways; or perhaps it was the way she moved with all her energy. But it still looked as though the suit should belong to an older sister.
‘This is your idea of fun?’ I asked, smiling. ‘At your age? You need to get out more.’
She laughed. ‘No, this is so off the wall; it’s wild. It’s the kind of problem law school professors give their students to drive them crazy, and make them wish they’d chosen psychology or anthropology instead of law.’
‘My thought exactly. That’s why I asked for you.’
‘I guess I’ll take that as a compliment. Harry said you know her attorney?’
‘Yes. I know her quite well.’
‘Well, good for her for taking the case. I don’t think many lawyers would.’