What He's Poised to Do

It is hard for me to explain exactly what I did in the file room the first part of that summer. The firm had started as a civil-rights concern but under pressure from Mortenson had shifted its business toward anticorporate litigation: a pharmaceutical company that had not adequately advertised the health harms of its products, a shipbuilder that had exposed its workers to irresponsible levels of asbestos. I summarized existing documents, copied new blanks, arranged and assembled. I did not work with any great speed, because I enjoyed staying late, past Schiff and Mortenson, past the secretaries. I liked the office when it went quiet and cool with evening light. It was as if I were the last man on Earth, and I insisted on that belief even when I heard the cleaning lady’s cart clattering its way down the hall. I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.

ON FRIDAYS, Schiff and Mortenson rounded up the secretaries and the paralegals and the office manager, ordered food, and sat in the conference room. The two of them did not agree on many things, but there was no argument here: Chinese. The restaurant was run by a man who had not a drop of Chinese blood in him, but that’s how it was done in those days. We put it out, the moo goo gai pan and chicken chow mein and barbecued spare ribs, and we flipped our ties back over our shoulders and tucked napkins into our collars and got to it.

“Pass that carton, please,” Mortenson said.

“Here you go,” Schiff said. He was eating. He was a man who ate. But while the rest of us sat around the table and talked about our week, he held himself back from the discussion. His gaze went to the window, though he had a way of giving you to understand that he was looking at the pane of glass rather than through it.

“It’s a nice day out there,” said one of the paralegals, a young woman with a brunette bun.

“That it is,” Mortenson said. “Don’t you think?” he asked Schiff. Schiff didn’t answer, and this spurred Mortenson on. “I saw a movie the other day,” he said, pointing his chopsticks—and the shrimp pinched between them—at his partner. “Exciting. About a man who tries to kill the president of an African nation. It’s based on fact.” He knew which part of the sentence shone most brightly to his partner, because he repeated it. “Can you imagine?” he said. “An assassin.”

“I don’t like it when they make a movie about something like that,” Schiff said, bringing his large head around. “The very point of an assassin is that he is trying to be as famous as the man he assassinates. The film shouldn’t conspire with a murderer to that end.”

“What do they call the man they’re trying to assassinate? The assassinee?”

“He is the assassination. That’s the noun for the victim as well as the process.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Mortenson.

“It’s a fact,” said Schiff, “though not a pretty one. What we believe but cannot praise.”

Mortenson was unwilling to be drawn into the other man’s current. “Well,” he said, “this movie has a great sequence where the assassin is assembling his weapon to practice for the fateful moment,” said Mortenson. “He is in a bedroom at the home of his girlfriend, and there is a baby sleeping in the corner. It’s a melodramatic contrast, but somehow it’s very affecting.”

“Well, I don’t like the whole business of it,” Schiff said. “It’s distasteful.”

“Also, in the film, many of the Africans are wearing American T-shirts. And not just any shirts. Did you know that after sports championships are played, the shirts announcing the victory of the losing team, which have of course already been printed, are shipped to Africa? It’s like there’s an alternative reality there.”

“Or here,” Schiff said. And that is how it went: Mortenson moved from subject to subject, like a child discovering the very process of discovery, and Schiff functioned punctuationally, always with a heavy sense of judgment. It was like watching two painters work side by side; Mortenson with more colors in his palette, Sciff furnishing the sense of form.

Toward the end of the meal, they turned to practical matters, specifically to personnel, and to the sense that they would have to settle a few questions before they went away again. They were traveling often that summer, as they were handling a pair of cases involving police shootings of unarmed young men in central Florida and southern Georgia. After they had returned from the previous trip, one of the secretaries had left—the rumor, as usual, was that it had to do with Mortenson—and Amy, one of the other secretaries, was out on maternity leave. “We’re down two,” Schiff said, “and we need someone new.” They discussed the issue in front of everyone, which was their way.

“What’s your feeling about Lisa Foster?” Mortenson said.

“Who?”

“The Foster girl. I told you the other week. We got a letter of application. She wants a summer position. Or we could promote Jim here to a real job.” He swiveled the chopstick toward me.