Scott Turow - Pleading Guilty

It settled in then, like the mystical presence of some nearby angel. Martin, of course, was speaking the truth. It had all the delicate signs of his typical engineering. Nothing so direct as a confrontation with Jake. That would have been shabby and extortionate — and risky as well, if Jake ever told tales. This way the world could go on, with all its false faces. Oddly, it would be exactly as the Committee had told me from the start. Except for the identity of the thief, the plan was precisely the same: Get the money back, sweep it under the rug, kiss and make up.

'He could have run,' I said to Martin.

'He could have. But he hasn't run yet. Jake obviously wants to hold on to this life. He just craves some security to which he's not entitled. I was letting him know it was time to make a more realistic choice.'

'And what happens when he doesn't give the money back? You're not telling me you were actually thinking of turning him in?'

He looked at me like I was nuts.

'What other choice is there? That was the one limit I set with Glyndora to start.' He could see I was astonished. 'Look, Mack, if I was determined to say nothing, no matter what Jake did, I would have burned that memo, not kept it in a drawer.'

'But you didn't say anything.'

'Why should I? You're the one who brought us Jake's message last week: Be patient, Bert's not to blame, it's not what it appears, future accountings will show that there's been a mistake. That was clearly the prelude. Jake was planning to get the money back.'

A strange qualm passed between us then, some recognition of the differing planes where we'd stood which was transmitted in a stark look. Martin got to his feet.

'My God,' he said. It was just coming home to him, not the dimension of our misunderstanding — he'd seen that before — but rather, its consequences. He'd assumed I'd sent Carl to Krzysinski out of disdain for the grubby arrangement Martin was orchestrating — protecting Jake and the firm, breaching our duty to TN to fully inform them of what we knew about the General Counsel. Martin saw only now that I'd been propelled by imagining malefactions far grander. He spotted his stud on the floor and pitched it at the windows again — full force, so the jewel flew off in a kind of musical ricochet. He pointed at me. He called me names.

'You goddamned dumb bastard! You wouldn't even talk to me on the phone.'

He stood there huffing and puffing. And how did I feel? Pretty strange. Confused. In a peculiar way, I was actually relieved. When I recovered some sense of myself, I realized I was smiling. I'd misjudged Martin and his complexities. You wouldn't call his conduct saintly, but he'd done better than I thought — and, God knows, a hell of a lot better than me.

There was a knock on the door. Brushy. She had put on her formal, a sleeveless black floor-length job with sequins. She wore long white gloves. A rhinestone tiara was perched in her hair like a sparkling bird. Her eyes went to the desk where the copy of the form from the International Bank still lay and she tolled that, as usual, at the speed of a Univac. I whistled at her and she diverted herself for a fraction of a second to smile.

'Is Wash here yet?' she asked. 'He just called and asked me to come down. He sounded upset.'

Wash arrived presently. In the condition she'd discerned.

‘I’m just off the phone with Krzysinski. All hell's broken loose up there.' He was in his tux, with a jazzy red bow tie, but his face was pale and he had broken a sweat. 'Tad asked for everyone TN works with — "my dependables" was how he put it.' Wash closed his eyes. 'He wants all of us upstairs. You. Me. Brushy. Mack. Bert as well. What do we say about that? About Bert?'

Martin waved his hand to pass off the question; Wash, as usual, was missing the point. Martin asked what precisely Tad wanted and Wash at first seemed unable to bring himself to answer. The old age descending on him, where he would be bewildered and addled, seemed at hand. He stood there with his mouth vaguely moving and his eyes never quite fixed. He answered at last. 'Tad said he wants to figure out what to do about Jake.'

A. Office of the Chair

In Tad Krzysinski's huge office we found the disjointed air of a large, unhappy family. Tad's assistant, Ilene, met us and said that Pagnucci had stepped out to put on the tuxedo his secretary had brought up. Mike Mathigoris, the head of security, was also elsewhere for the moment, while Tad's four o'clock meeting was going on in his adjoining conference room. Only Tad and Jake remained here, paying no attention to each other. Krzysinski was taking a phone call and Jake was abjectly hulked on the edge of his chair, staring without much comprehension at the many portraits of Krzysinski's children that were the principal decoration on the far wall, between the three doors that led to Jake's office, the office of TN's CFO, and the conference room. You could tell from the empty way that Jake first looked at us, the wan smile, that he couldn't explain what was wrong with this picture, why Brush in her floor-length gown and the three men in tuxes appeared out of place. Martin's bow tie was still hanging loose through his collar, and his shirt was held closed over his stomach principally by his cummerbund, since he'd never managed to insert the last stud.

'I wanted you to hear this.' Krzysinski had gotten up to shake each of our hands, the usual crushing grip. In college, I'd heard, Tad's nickname had been 'Atom' and that about said it all — size, structure, the barely contained power. Tad, of course, had a vast corner office. The parquet was covered by an enormous Oriental rug — fifty grand at least — and his view ran all the way to the airport on a clear day. When the weather was good, Tad liked to stand at the long windows and watch TN's planes rise, giving you the flight numbers and the names of the pilots.

Now, once he'd greeted us, he jiggled a commanding finger at Jake, instructing him to proceed. Jake recounted the story somewhat methodically, drained of emotion. You could tell that he'd repeated it about six times already and it was beginning to get routine. He was, as usual, perfectly groomed, hair stiffly parted, his gray herringbone suit buttoned at the waist to add to the impression of his ordered form. But his face was out of focus. Jake, for once in his life, was under the crush of sensible pain and it threatened his sanity. I felt only a twinge of regret. Asked to speak, I might well have said, 'Goody.'

In November, Jake said, as we were thinking about making the final disbursements on 397, Peter Neucriss and Jake had a talk. Actually, Peter took Jake out for the evening, a characteristic manipulation, wooing the enemy. Royal treatment. Dinner at Batik. Many drinks. Hockey game. Afterwards, as Jake and Peter were having a nightcap down at Sergio's, Peter got to what he had been leading up to all night. He had a business proposition for Jake. For TN, really. Neucriss had three different settlements on 397. Huge cases, naturally. A mother and child one of them. The total was nearly thirty million. Peter was working on the usual third. He had almost ten million in fees coming.

'He told me this long farfetched tale, how a fortune was owed to this litigation support group, Litiplex. He said their work had benefited all the plaintiffs, but the class lawyers were acting as if they'd never heard of them and Peter was in a spot because he was the one who'd retained the company and made some cozy deal with them, these Litiplex people, something a little unsavory. You know Neucriss when he gets like this. You'd expect him to leave a spot on the wall. At any rate, he felt it was his obligation to pay Litiplex even though I — me supposedly — I'd said at one point it would come off the settlement fund. I objected. A number of times. I mean, I'd had a few drinks, but I knew I'd never said anything like that.