Manny’s stomach rumbled at the same moment he interrupted her. “Yes, thank you, I was getting to him. The only one who saw or heard you make any remarks about a defragmenter was Dieter Althoren?”
“Yes.”
“There are no documents, electronic records, cold memory or other conversations about it?” An unbidden image of a sardine sandwich with mayonnaise popped into his head.
“No, but I intended—”
Manny held up his finger in a reliably commanding gesture; the finger reminded him of a sardine. “Actually, I don’t think I need to know what you intended, Ms. Beltran. Our concern should be with the evidence. Mister Althoren was the only person there? And there were no other conversations?”
Beltran froze, as if she’d caught the sudden scent of a predator. Finally she said, “Yes, but he’s enough, isn’t he?”
The twitch in Elsa’s eyebrow seemed to be attempting to send Morse code. Manny asked, “Do you mean, because of Whole Truth?”
“Well, obviously.”
Now Elsa dropped her pretence of objectivity and stared at him the way she probably stared at her children when she caught them in a lie.
Manny folded his hands over his increasingly empty belly and spoke slowly to Beltran, avoiding Elsa’s gaze. “I agree that the Whole Truth process gives us a disadvantage in the courtroom.”
“Disadvantage?” Beltran chittered. “They’ll believe every word he says!”
Inwardly Manny sighed. Too many client consultations reached this same impasse. His head inclined one way, then the other. “I’ll admit it’s a risk. But tell me, how strongly do you feel about this case?”
“How strongly do I feel?” Manny imagined the thrashing of Beltran’s angry tail. “One: all I did was talk. Two: all I talked about was creating a defragmenter to reassemble media files with expired copyrights. Expired copyrights, Mr. Suarez! Three: this stupid lawsuit is by some holding company I never even heard of, for my life savings! How do I feel?”
“Well,” said Manny, “I think a lot of people will feel the way you do about it—people on the jury, for example. Not a lot of people have even heard of the PIPRA statute. Once they understand what it is, well, it seems pretty compelling, doesn’t it? Giant holding company bankrupts honest designer for talking about creating software to do something perfectly legal?”
Beltran chewed her lip rapidly. “So you don’t think we should settle, Mr. Suarez?”
“Please call me Manny. Well, so far they haven’t offered us any settlement. If they do, naturally we should consider it.”
“We could offer a settlement ourselves.”
Manny gave her his widest, hungriest smile. “Would you like to?”
Her beady eyes flashed. “No.”
“Good,” he said. “Because I think we can beat them.”
After Tina Beltran left the office, Elsa stood in the doorway to the conference room, all sixty inches of her, fierce and birdlike, staring at Manny as if he were a shoplifter or graffiti artist.
“What?” asked Manny. Elsa didn’t answer, but her eyes narrowed. He continued, “I’m starving. Do you want a sandwich?”
“You are a shameless, unprincipled opportunist,” she said, sounding more like a crow than a songbird.
“You object to the sandwich?”
“I’m not talking about the goddamn sandwich.” Then, as if changing her mind, she glowered at his belly. “Anyway, you eat too much.”
“Do you nag Felix this way?”
“Felix doesn’t lie to people and build false hopes.”
“Neither do I.”
“Really?” she asked, speaking through her sharp little beak as she did at her most sarcastic. “After the last six cases, you expect to overcome the testimony of a Whole Truth witness?”
“It’s possible,” he said, not very convincingly.
Elsa stepped up to him so that her nose was about six inches from the bottom of his breastbone, and started poking her index finger into his chest with each word, as if pecking for worms. “You—” Peck. “—got—” Peck. “—her—” Peck. “—hopes—” Peck. “—up.” Peck, peck, peck.
“Ow, stop it, get away. Look—” He rubbed his chest with his palm. “This is a test case for PIPRA. If we win it—”
“With what? Good intentions? Political sympathies of the jury? I can see it now: Members of the jury, you should give a damn about little Tina Beltran and some complicated IP statute you never heard of. Manuel Suarez waves his magic wand and everybody ignores the evidence.”
“That’s possible too.” She glared at him. “There’s a good chance that PIPRA is unconstitutional.”
“And how many levels of appeal would it take to decide that point in her favor? Don’t tell me that WorldWide isn’t going to keep going until they run out of courts.”
He tried to find a way around her through the doorway, but she blocked him. “Possibly all the way to the Supreme Court,” he conceded.
“Sa—. And we know how much that costs, don’t we? Do you imagine that that woman has anything like those resources?” If she’d really been a bird, she would have flown into his face.
“I’ll think of something,” Manny said. “I always think of something.”
Elsa shook her head and marched out of the room.
“It doesn’t look like it’s going to work,” Manny told Jerry Zucker. “She doesn’t want the procedure when it’s totally untested.”
He could hear Jerry’s sigh over the phone. “So we’re back where we started from, aren’t we?”
“Yes. We were pretty close, too. Nelson says that if you had even a few patients with major alterations or enhancements from your nano-machine process, Ishikawa might give it a go—he says she’d even drop the suit and sign a release.”
There was a sound of something soft banging on something hard—possibly Jerry’s fist on his desk, or maybe his forehead. “Hell.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any way you could produce a confidential human subject, is there?” asked Manny.
“What?”
“Well, from what Nelson told me, I gather that Ishikawa would accept any successful subject, even one that wasn’t, well, fully disclosed to the FDA.”
“You’re kidding. We’re supposed to trust her with something like that? It’s like giving a blackmailer the key to your diary.”
“She seems to want this alteration very badly. We might be able to get her to sign a confidentiality agreement.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but there is no such patient. I’ve been a good boy, and I haven’t engaged in human experimentation without a go-ahead from the powers-that-be.”
“Not even with a consent form?”
“Manny.”
“Ah, well. It was worth a try. Looks like the courtroom for us.”
“Not a lot of plastic surgeons on juries.”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
As he hung up, Manny wondered idly whether Jerry would be happy living in some other country and engaging in some other profession. Probably not.
Then he looked up and saw Elsa, standing in the doorway of his office like a torch of righteousness. “Have you found some way not to cheat Tina Beltran?” she asked.
“It’s nice to see you too, Elsa. I’m not cheating her.”
Elsa began counting on her fingers. “No way to avoid the Whole Truth evidence. No way to cause jury nullification. No way to get a ruling on the law without bankrupting the client. Shall I go on?”
“I’ll think of something, chica.”
“Don’t call me chica. You’ll think of something, right. You have the gall to take that woman’s money, and you have nothing. She deserves more than to put her hopes in one of your hallucinations!”