“What are you doing? Get going! You’re worse than Jack with that mirror,” Brent says. Jack is his lover of five years, a bartender at Mr. Bill’s, a gay bar on Locust Street. Judy calls him Jack Off, but Brent claims he thought of it first. “Go, girl, you’ll be late!”
Berkowitz’s corner office is on Pride, and Delia’s desk blocks its entrance like a walnut barricade. She types as she listens to the teaching of Chairman Berkowitz through dictating earphones. Even the ugly headset doesn’t mar her good looks. Lustrous red hair, a perfect nose, the sexiest pout in legal history. Brent is right. Deliais a stone fox.
“Hi, Delia.”
“I’m busy.” She doesn’t look up but continues to hit the keys of her word processor with spiky acrylic nails.Click-click-click-click. It sounds like a hail on a rooftop. Too bad it will look likejciywegwebcniquywgxnmai. I know, I’ve seen her work.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“He’s in there.”Click-click-click. Oreuhbalkejeopn?
“I’ll just go in, then.”
“Suit yourself.”
This is even more attitude than I’m used to from Delia; I wonder what’s bothering her. I walk to the open doorway of Berkowitz’s office, but his brawny back is to the door. A tailored English suit strains at its shoulder seams as Berkowitz hunches over. The only time Burberrys has dressed a major appliance.
“Go in already!” snaps Delia.
The command startles me into the sanctum sanctorum. Berkowitz is on the telephone and doesn’t turn around. I walk the three city blocks to his desk and sit down in a massive leather wing chair. The decor here screams Street Kid Who Made God-I mean, Good. The desk is a baroque French antique with a surface that was polished by a Zamboni. The high-backed desk chair could have belonged to the Sun King. Photographs of Berkowitz’s first, second, and third sets of children adorn curly-legged mahogany end tables. I feel like a scullery maid at Versailles.
“I don’t care, Lloyd! I don’t giveone flying fuck! ” Berkowitz bellows into the telephone, as he swivels around in his chair. “You tell that little bastard if he thinks he’s going to fuck me, he has another thing coming! We can take his fucking littlepisher of a firm, and we will!” Berkowitz is so engrossed in making what constitutes Terroristic Threats under the Pennsylvania Crimes Code that he’s oblivious to me altogether. This is why Judy calls him Jerkowitz, but I think she’s being unfair. Berkowitz grew up in tough West Philly and made it to the peaky-peak on sheer brainpower and force of will. If your Fortune 500 Company is in deep shit, he’s one of the few lawyers in the country who can save your sorry ass. Guaranteed. But not in writing.
“Where the fuck does he get off? I told him what the agenda was, and he tries to make a fool out of me! He’ll be offa this committee so goddamn fast it’ll make his head spin!” Berkowitz is yelling at one of his apostles on the Rules Committee, which he chairs. It’s a twelve-man panel of federal judges and prominent litigators that meets at our offices to propose changes in federal court rules. If something didn’t go well at a recent meeting, heads will roll, and balls too. Everything rolling, off down the hall.
“Don’t tell me to calm down! Iam calm!…No! No! No!You deal with him then!”
Berkowitz slams down the telephone receiver. The glaze in his eyes tells me he’s back on Girard Avenue, decades ago, fighting off the punks who want a peek at his foreskin. Or lack thereof.
Berkowitz shakes his head, his face still florid. “Can you believe this fucking guy? Can you fucking believe this guy?”
I gather the question is rhetorical and say nothing.
He rubs his eyes irritably and leans back in his chair. His look says, Heavy is the head that wears the crown. “You want my job, Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary?”
“What?”
“I’m asking you. You want it?” He isn’t smiling.
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you want to be here someday? Run the department, head the committees? When I was your age, I wanted to be me so bad I was on fire.” He gazes out of a massive window at the best view in the city. From his vantage point, you can see all the way to the Delaware River and the snaky black border it makes between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. An occasional tourist ferry travels in slow motion under the Ben Franklin Bridge. We ain’t the port of call we used to be.
“I would have killed to be me,” Berkowitz says absently. Suddenly he snatches a pack of Marlboros from his desk and lights one up, belching out a puff of smoke so thick it looks like the Industrial Revolution took place in his office. I pretend the smoke doesn’t bother me, which it does, mightily. I try not to breathe.
“But you’re not interested in this shit and neither am I. You’re wondering why I called you up here.” He takes a slow drag on the cigarette and squints at me through the smoke.
I nod, yes.
“Two reasons. One: That was a helluva result you got on the motion before Bitterman. I saw him at the Rules Committee meeting” -at this he winces- “and he told me you had great potential.”
“Uh…thank you.”
“He’s an ugly bastard, isn’t he?”
I laugh.
“Two: Harbison’s GC is sending me a new case. You know how they like to spread their business around, get all the firms competing with each other. They sent the case to Masterson originally, but the GC thinks we can do a better job. We can, right?”
“Right.” So we stole a case from Masterson, Moss amp; Dunbar, the firm at the apex of the holy trinity. We must have snaked them with our win before Bitter Man and some pillow talk by Berkowitz. He doesn’t say these things, but I don’t need a crib sheet to translate Latin One.
“It’s another age discrimination case. They demoted aCFO, so it’s very high-profile. And they won’t settle. They want to crush the bastard.” Berkowitz blows an enormous cloud of smoke upward, which is something he does at meetings when he thinks he’s being considerate. “I’m assigning the case to you, Mary Mary. You make all the calls, just be sure you blind-copy me on the correspondence. I don’t want to look like a smacked ass if theGC calls. There’s a pretrial conference scheduled for today at three-thirty. It’s your baby. Any questions?” He sucks on the cigarette throttled between his thick knuckles. Its red tip flashes on like a stoplight.
“And…Martin?”
“Forget Martin!” he says, breathing smoke. “You don’t need Martin, do you?”
“No, I just…I thought he handled your matters.”
“Well, he doesn’t. I told him the other day. He’s fine with it. You want this case or don’t you?”
“I do. I do.”
“Good. Then we’re married.” He erupts into laughter.
I laugh too, with relief and wonder.
“Now get out of my office. Can’t you see I’m a busy man?”
I laugh again, but the meeting is over. I get up to leave.
“By the way, Ned Waters was in here bitching today. He heard that only two of you will be making partner in June. You hear anything like that, Mary, Queen of Scots?”
“No,” I lie.
“Fine,” he replies, knowing I’m lying. “It’s not true.”
“Good,” I reply, knowing he’s lying.
As I leave his office, I see that Delia’s headset is off, resting at the base of her neck like a cheap choker. As I walk by, she’s sipping tea in a genteel way from a white china cup. An affectation she’s picked up from Berkowitz, who likes to stub out his Marlboro in the saucer.
“See you later, Delia.”
“Ready to play with the big boys, Mary?” She looks daggers at me over the delicate cup.
Her expression bewilders me. “Guess so.”
“You’d better be.” Her lovely eyes glitter with hostility as she sets the cup down. It makes an unhappy sound when it crashes into the saucer.