The tableau froze for a long moment. At last the banker’s eyes came back into focus. ‘I just wonder if George realized that. That we’d taken steps. Maybe if we had in fact filed charges-’
But Helen was firm. ‘There was no need, Leland. We did inform the social agencies. They would be getting around to him. This wasn’t a continual stalking, just an episode-’
‘Several actually.’
‘Three. Only three. But the point is that there wasn’t really any urgency. And these things always take time. There was no further danger – in fact, there hadn’t been any danger all along. Sal would just flip into the past. I know George realized that.’
‘I hope so,’ Leland said. ‘But I’m not at all so sure.’
13
On Monday morning, early, Hardy was in his office with Michelle, one of them on either end of the couch, folders and copies of briefs on the low table in front of them. ‘You know where we get the term straight from the horse’s mouth?’ Michelle looked up from some paper she’d been reading as though Hardy had broken into Sanskrit. ‘It relates, it relates.’
Small talk wasn’t Michelle’s long suit, but she had already learned that this was how her new boss liked to break up his work, so she sat back and listened.
‘No, this is important. We’re talking one of the major philosophical questions that plagued the early Middle Ages – right up there with “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” ’
‘What was?’
‘How many teeth a horse had.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
Hardy was having a difficult time believing that Michelle – with the possible exception of David Freeman the most highly developed brain in the office – was ignorant of this fact. But then, he’d seen enough intellectual myopia that it didn’t shock him anymore. Here in the Age of Specialization if you held a double major in law and accounting, you weren’t expected to master any context. Any history. That was irrelevant junk for the most part.
But Hardy thought it wouldn’t kill her to know an oddball fact or two that wasn’t strictly related to the case at hand. ‘I’m not kidding. They argued about it all the time.’
‘Who would argue about that?’
‘Philosophers and theologians, most of whom, I think, would have been lawyers in today’s world.’
‘So why didn’t they just count them?’ She made a face at him, wondering if he was teasing her. ‘Are you making this up?’
‘No, I swear I’m not. It’s true. Okay, Michelle, you got the right answer, but you’re ahead of my story. Listen. These guys would sit around the old monastery, convinced that there was a Platonic ideal number of teeth in the perfect horse. They evidently debated this thorny problem for decades.’
‘These were not rocket scientists,’ Michelle said.
Hardy wondered if she realized they were talking about a time before there were rockets, or scientists, for that matter. ‘No, but these were intelligent men.’
‘No women?’
‘I doubt it. I’d be surprised. This was a guy thing.’
‘No wonder,’ Michelle said.
‘Well, anyway,’ Hardy continued, ‘one day a monk who was far ahead of his time decided on the revolutionary approach of going out, finding a horse, and counting the teeth in its mouth.’
‘And that settled it.’
‘Well, not exactly. I gather it took maybe a hundred years or so before everybody agreed that this was an acceptable way to get an answer to a question like this. Anyway,’ he pressed on in the face of Michelle’s sublime tolerance, ‘that’s where we get the expression.’
‘Great,’ she said dryly. ‘That’s fascinating. Really.’
The judge in the Tryptech case had just taken on the modern role of the monk who’d counted all those teeth. First thing this morning, Michelle had called Hardy at home with the news that they had been served with a cross-complaint. The Port of Oakland had evidently decided to press the charge that Tryptech had overloaded their container. Further, a judge had decided that Tryptech had the burden of proof as to how many computers were actally in the container. An affidavit from some shipping guy wasn’t going to do it.
Tryptech – through Hardy – had been making the argument that the container hadn’t been overloaded. He had presented the bill of lading, which, in theory, ‘proved’ the actual number of computers inside the container. Additionally, the computers were insured and therefore it would obviously be counterproductive for the company to claim fewer than had actually been there, since they were being paid for every one that had been lost.
Of course, Hardy knew it wouldn’t take a genius to realize that the monetary difference between say, two hundred extra computers at a thousand dollars each, and the millions the company stood to lose if the Port of Oakland won the lawsuit, was fabulously insignificant. Now the thing would have to be lifted from the bottom of the Bay, so that the computers within could be counted.
But pulling up the container would cost a bundle, and their client had told them he didn’t have a bundle on hand in cash just now.
The name of the game was delay, and Hardy had been successful in putting off this problem for nearly five months.
However, now that the judge had decided, it was going to happen.
The dredging fee of one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars might not be unreasonable in light of the potential size of the damage award, but Brunei was saying it was blood from a turnip.
Hardy didn’t know how he could delay any longer. Tryptech would have to figure out some way to come up with the money.
‘Actually’ – Michelle was more comfortable now that they were back to business – ‘I see a way that we can use this to our advantage. We should be able to string this along for a while.’
‘Okay, hit me,’ Hardy said.
‘Take it out to bid. We’ll of course comply with the ruling, but unless the Port wants to take on some – no, all - of the expense, I think we can argue that it’s only fair that we solicit bids from competing dredging firms, get the best possible price. Who could argue with that?’
Hardy had to admire her. Say what he would about the values of his own classical training, he had to admit that in the here and now Michelle was a godsend. Competing bids would buy them another few months at least, and anything could happen in a couple of months.
Maybe, Hardy fantasized, he could convince Brunei to hire a team of scuba divers to locate the container in deep secrecy by night and put in some extra units, the presence of which Brunei continued to assert.
‘How would you like to handle the details?’ he asked her. She had already gathered the paperwork and put it atop the stack of briefs they still had to discuss.
‘That’s what I’m here for.’
Before the ‘horse’s mouth’ issue had intervened, the morning routine at home had been anything but. Today’s drama was the mystery of how every toothbrush in the house had disappeared.
Upon some pretty hefty cross-examination, Rebecca and Vincent had confessed that maybe they remembered that yesterday Orel Glitsky might have thought of another use for them and they’d played some game in the backyard, or mostly in the backyard, they thought. There were fences and forts involved.
And Jason, their little nephew – ‘and he’s still a baby, Dad,’ Rebecca reminded him – had played with the toothbrushes too. But both of his kids were sure, they were positive, that if somehow they had taken all the toothbrushes, which wasn’t very likely, but if they had, then they had put them back right afterward.
After finishing up the morning’s strategy-and-review session with Michelle, he’d walked three blocks in the breezy forenoon and picked up half a dozen fresh bao - sticky buns filled with hoisin and plum and barbecued sauces and stuffed with various roasted meats – pork, chicken, duck. All by itself, he thought, the ready availability of hot-out-of-the-oven bao was reason enough to live in San Francisco.