Law Street LLP
Phil Wohl
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Phil Wohl
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LI
Steve Christianson sat in his palatial corner office facing the Statue of Liberty and ignored yet another law as he lit up a celebratory cigar. His firm had just settled the largest securities class action case in the history of the country, and he would be able to buy that vacation house in Vail to go along with the one he already had on Dune Road in the Hampton’s.
He took a long, relaxing puff on the Cuban smoker and then bellowed instructions into the hallway.
“Li, get in here and disable the smoke alarm!”
Lihwa Kwan was every bit the Chinese princess trapped in the limited space of a commoner. She did every task with precise skill, preferring to sit in the shadows rather than place her abundance of talents on display in a city that was not known for its humble citizens. Li was the most dedicated of employees, a mail-order secretary if you will, who serviced any and all of her bosses needs and asked for nothing but more tasks in return.
She never looked Steve straight in the eyes, because that would have been an improper gesture and a sign of disrespect in her Chinese culture. He was a voracious eater and had an equal appetite for manipulating and pushing people to extremes.
“It’s finger time!” Steve simply grunted.
Li responded like she always had to the request over the past years, by walking over to the tall oak cabinet in his office and pulling out a pack of Vienna Fingers. She then closed the door and walked around the desk and dropped to her knees, crawling the few extra feet under his desk. Li handed the red and white plastic package of cookies to Steve, who slid the tray open while his virtual slave unzipped the trousers of his blue Armani pinstripe suit and then dug deep to find his pleasure source.
Twenty seconds later, when both of them had consumed their mid-afternoon snacks, Steve transitioned back into his unrelenting work persona. Li cleaned up the small mess and returned the cookies to their rightful place in the cabinet. She then opened the door and Steve barked, “Send those loss numbers to Barrett now! He’s been waiting for them all day!”
Christianson always made it sound like people were not doing there jobs, but in reality it was his jumbled mind, and the escalation of internal conflict, that prohibited him from having rational, continuous thoughts. Years of being Father Devine’s lead altar boy at St. Catherine’s Church on Long Island made sure of that.
Li sat back down at her desk inside her windowless, 8x8 office, closed her door and flushed Steve’s junk out with a healthy dose of mouthwash. She spit the green liquid into her wastebasket and then moved toward her purse, which was buzzing from her hidden phone. The usually unflappable and demure Li - at least inside the confines of Bauman Rogers LLP - was about to reveal her less-sensitive side.
She picked up the small device and it read, “We need to meet tonight.”
“No shit, Sherlock!” she muttered angrily under her breath.
SOFTBALL
The Bauman Rogers annual summer outing was a bonanza for the grossly-compensated partners of the firm. It was here that they could display that blatant disregard for the firm’s associates and other professional staff by attempting to humiliate them in a variety of athletic challenges. Each event was either rigged in their favor, or designed in such a way that losing would be an option only if accompanied by a pink slip to the winner.
It was also here, cradled in the lap of luxury in the Hampton’s, that these married men could chase some skirt while their wives slaved at home while watching the au pair take care of their kids. If ass-chasing was one of the activities planned by the firm’s vast marketing department, then Norman Rogers certainly would be a perennial gold medal winner.
Normandy Bernard Rogerstein was born during the tail end of World War II when his father was overseas fighting Nazis. At least that was the story his mother, Zelda Rogerstein, told him. His dad heard his country calling him in the late 1930’s and he answered the siren by fleeing the country and settling in Toronto, Canada, where he started a small but successful dry cleaning business after his career as a traveling salesman stalled.
As the story was told, Morty Rogerstein died while on a combat mission in the south of France, about six months before Norman was born. Since the beach at Normandy, France was a well-known landing spot for the allied troops, Zelda decided to incorporate the reference into her bastard son’s name. The truth that she never told was that Norman’s father was a Spam salesman from Toledo she met at Coney Island in the summer of 1944 and had a brief fling with…
The outing’s festivities started with a rousing round of golf, which was an early start time for a group of men who kept hours like they were vampires. Of course, the firm had to book a course about 20 minutes from the Hampton’s, in the quaint hamlet of East Quogue, due to the wasp-only restriction of all of the country clubs on the East End.
Norman was the jollier and more aggressive half of the Bauman-Rogers partnership. Seventy-five year-old Walter Bauman’s spotless reputation preceded him - it also kept the firm free from persecution during years when other figureheads of the plaintiffs’ bar were being tried and hauled off to white-collar jail, affectionately named Hampton’s West by its inhabitants.
Steve Christianson had played a round or two with Norman and his wife, Violet, but the slow-pace of the play was no match for his 100 mile per-hour, no-holds-barred style. Instead, he decided to talk to marketing associate Melanie Penders, who was happy to switch him into another group with a young female associate, who would surely be wearing a short golf skirt for the occasion.
It was Jacob Worth’s first outing with the firm. The Wall Street veteran had seen market crashes and even survived the smell of his Aunt Edna’s egg salad, but nothing could have prepared him for the Armageddon that was to come. Worth was plucked from relative obscurity in the Midwest where he had enlisted in the financial witness protection program after fleeing Manhattan after 9/11. The slow pace of Chicago was a welcomed change from the speeding bullet that is New York.
“Is this Jacob Worth?” a New York headhunter asked him one day as he sat in his Illinois office.
Although he had no designs on returning to the city from which he was spurned, or perhaps spawned, he was nonetheless willing to listen to anyone with a pulse at that point.
“Yes, this is Jack Worth.”
“I saw your resume on-line and thought you would be a perfect fit for this job I’m trying to fill.”
The words “law firm” initially dulled his senses, but when Lisha Fong said, “It pays upwards of $200,000,” all of the trepidations that he had about returning home melted away like a Good Humor Toasted Almond Bar on a subway platform in the summer.
Jack’s wife asked him, “But I thought you didn’t want to go back to New York?”
Of course, that was before he told her how much they were willing to pay, proving that everyone truly does have a price. But it wasn’t until Jack was flown into New York and he and Steve Christianson were face-to-face, that a rivalry between a giraffe and hedgehog was born. Six and-a-half foot Worth being the leaf-eater in the comparison and diminutive Christianson being the carnivore.
“It’s not the salary that will make you rich, it’s the bonus,” Christianson said to Worth at their initial lunch as he positioned a huge hunk of cheeseburger in his mouth.
New Yorkers are infamous for their ability to ignore the sage advice of elders to not “talk with a mouthful of food.” He continued to shovel French fries into the cavern of bullshit, but that did not deter his pursuit of the prey.
“What did she [the recruiter] tell you about the package?”
It had been quite some time since Jack had harkened back to his teenage days at the Socrates Diner eating a few hamburger platters. He was an adult now and tended to eat foods that wouldn’t stay in his system for an entire football season.
He also learned to simplify his dialect when negotiating. Rule number one in negotiating was to never name your price before the other side. But that golden rule was superseded on this day by his desire to move on from the stationery garbage truck sitting across the small, round table from him.
“Two-hundred-plus,” Jack replied without blinking.
If Steve had his way he would pay no one and keep all the money for himself. But, somewhere along the line, he realized that in order to get the money he had to hire people to do all of his work for him.
Christianson was a master negotiator. He realized that if Worth came all the way from Chicago he wasn’t just in New York for a sightseeing tour.
“I think we can get to a package between salary and bonus that will get you to two-hundred.”
Although he wasn’t sure what kind of reaction that would elicit, he figured that the offer would be a good start. In reality, though, Steve needed Jack. The previous financial guy at the firm often spoke above Steve’s thought capacity, leaving him feeling even smaller than his stocky five-foot, nine-inch frame. When he was handed Jack’s resume, which was sprinkled with a variety of Long Island colleges, including one that he attended, he knew that the language they spoke would be in the same ballpark. The other guy vying for the job was a Harvard undergrad and Columbia MBA... enough said.
Jack heard the number and almost choked on his burger. Having a slab of meat lodged in his windpipe would have been a Heimlich-bonding experience for the two boys, but might have labeled Jack as soft in the dog-kick-dog world of New York law.
Instead, he swallowed the meat and his pride and succumbed to the temptation of untold riches, which would eventually prove to be the classic carrot on the string trick.
“The money is less important than the opportunity,” Worth said like a good doggie who was about to double his salary.
“Gotcha’!” Steve said to himself as he triumphantly completed another negotiation.
Jack was at the firm less than a month when he encountered his first outing. That year, he decided to skip the golf and get some much-needed sleep instead. It had been years since he felt the competitive juices flowing through his veins and even longer since he actually acted on the urge to really compete.
Steve knew that Jack was a real jock so he stacked his team with the big man, so his nose could remain firmly planted in Norman Rogers’ ass. Rogers was the team’s pitcher despite his affinity for throwing softballs that looked as large to the hitters as a Manhattan large pizza pie. It had been 10 years since Jack had picked up a bat, and15 years since he participated in an actual softball game. If this had been a relaxed, casual game where the outcome wasn’t contested, then he surely would have transferred less than five percent of his brain cells to the cause. But the daily contesting of every single topic brought him back to his days as a teenager when it seemed like everything mattered and he was under a super high-powered microscope.
Jack batted fourth and played first base for team Rogers. He hit behind his boss Steve Christianson, who unceremoniously ended the first inning by popping up to his counterpart at shortstop, Carlo “The Scooter” Scarnaccio. The team was down 1-0 by the time the bottom of the second rolled around. There were days early on when Jack thought it would be best to take his foot off the gas and let his new boss shine, like so many other bosses before him had received the gift of false modesty. However, by the time he picked up the black aluminum bat and walked toward the right side of the batter’s box, he was so far gone that rational thought no longer existed.
He let the first pitch - a ball - go by so he could gage the speed of the pitcher, paralegal Dominic Vaspucci. Yes, Italians do like their baseball. The left fielder moved back a few steps toward the left-field wall, which doubled as the wire-mesh fence to the tennis courts, just at seeing the sheer size of the batter in the box.
The next pitch was down the middle, and floated toward the upper middle part of the zone, which also happened to be Jack’s personal sweet spot. Animal instinct kicked in and Jack stepped toward the pitcher and uncorked a furious swing. The ball exploded off the bat and catapulted through the air down the left-field line. Left-fielder and firm associate lawyer Don Benson took one step toward the fence and then simply looked up as the ball cleared the fence still gaining altitude.
Steve Christianson was taking a big gulp of a beer, and was the one choking on toxic fluids for a change. Third-basemen and partner Greg McNulty simply said, “Holy, shit!” as the ball eventually landed half-way into the tennis court area and then rolled to the back fence.
Norman Rogers stood up and yelled, “I think that should count as at least two home runs!” always taking the opportunity to negotiate even the most established of rules.
Steve looked at his boss and took another swig of his luke-warm green bottle of Heineken. It then occurred to him that his choice of a boy from the Long Island over a weak-hitting Ivey-leaguer might have been a tad misguided, if not shortsighted. Then he sat down on the weathered wood bench and gulped down the remaining six ounces of piss-water, while thinking about the thing he loved more than anything else in the world. He sneered and thought to himself as Jack lumbered around the bases, “That Gulliver-looking mother-fucker better make me a lot of money!”
E=M²
“We’re almost there,” Agent Harry Lawson said to Samantha Waters, alias Lihwa Kwan, as they sat on a vacant, late-night Number 4 train heading uptown.
“What the fuck, Harry?” Li/Samantha said in an accent from the New York streets. “If I have to suck that pencil dick one more time, I might chop it off with a plastic knife!”
The bureau’s investigation had reached a critical juncture and could not afford to pull back now.
“You have to hang in there, Sam! We have bigger problems coming our way.”
She was frustrated but still had enough of a sense of humor to take one more shot at Christenson.
“Is there a another boss with a three-inch dick? Those two extra inches might make my job easier.”
Agent Lawson reminded her about their deal and how she had to see it through to completion.
“How much longer? And if you say, it’s hard to say, then I’m going to get off this train and head right to Rikers Island myself.”
In reality, Lawson was going to say just that, but he switched gears to avoid inciting the volatile Waters further.
“It should only be a few more months, and don’t even think about running!” he said with all of the conviction of an inner-city school principal. “Remember when we first met?”
She nodded and flashed back to waking up on a cold, steel table and looking up at Agent Lawson.
“We put a chip into you that it traceable by any of our satellites around the world. So unless you plan on hopping on the next space shuttle and traveling to the moon, SAM, I would suggest you take care of business.”
“Then, I’ll be free?”
He replied, “Then you’ll be free.”
She shook her head in disbelief and exited the train at the Yankee Stadium stop at 161st Street, her usual drop-off point after discussing matters with the FBI. Sam switched to the other side of the tracks and headed back downtown to her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
She was on her way to freedom just before Melanie Meyers came into her life with a machete, and proceeded to confuse matters surrounding Steve Christianson. An associate in the Christianson's Case Development Group left the firm and there was an opening for new blood to enter the machine.
It was six months after Jack Worth joined the firm and the FBI was only a few more turns of the screw away from closing the deal. Li was feeling optimistic that day - she had even started making plans in her head about what Sam would do once she was a civilian again. Go live on the West Coast and ignore corporate assholes that commit fraud, like Norman Rogers and Steve Christianson. That was her thought until the pathologically neurotic styling’s of M-squared, as Sam referred to her, joined the group.
It took Meyers all of two hours to create such a ripple in the group that Li became physically ill and had to barf into her waste basket. She realized that her fluids in the waste basket were disgusting and always tipped the nighttime cleaning lady effusively to get her on board with the no-nonsense waste removal.
The 27 year-old Meyers was a relative newbie to the industry, having just completed law school a few years earlier before distinguishing herself as an around-the-clock gopher for a team on a high-profile case. This constant vigilance put a crimp into the FBI’s late-night dump of all things Baumann Rogers. An extra security detail on Melanie ensured a clear path to the PCs on most nights.
Jack tried to extend an olive branch a day after his underling, Boris Jankovich, rudely welcomed her to the group. The pair of 20-somethings were attempted to mark their territory in the most unprofessional fashion. In his real life, Jack would have suggested that these two complete assholes get a fuckin’ room for god’s sake. But this was work, where the big people play during the day, and he had to talk to the one person that had the greatest potential to make his life completely miserable.
“I just wanted to apologize for Boris’ behavior today and welcome you into the group.”
Melanie had the stability of shaken and stirred nitro glycerin, which sent her into an immediate eye waterfall. Again, Jack would have normally borrowed from Tom Hanks and exclaimed, “There’s no crying at work!” unless of course you’ve just been informed that a large sum of money is going to be deposited in your bank account during the next pay period.
She then went on to tell Jack the sob story of her life and how she was so grateful that he listened and was so welcoming. Jack felt all weird like a fly that had been lured into a spider’s web. Melanie gave him the creeps and he opined that she must have made most people feel either nauseous or like an unexpected snack in an inescapable web.
A few days after Melanie’s arrive into the group, Boris went on a work strike and was fired. Jack implored him to break out of his funk, but Melanie had gotten inside of her head and found his off switch. Her campaign of annihilation and destruction was well underway, and she was hell-bent on clearing away everyone in her path toward the throne - which was pretty much everyone in the firm except Li, who she thought was an invaluable resource to her master plan.
Steve, for all of his greed and pettiness, did not want to fire Boris. He beat the hell out of the kid for the better part of two years and then was squeamish about letting the unkempt and unprofessional underachiever go.
In a meeting with Jack and data group head and resident lounger Patti Fong, Steve said, “If he is willing to just do his work in the role he is in, I am willing to keep him.”
Jack was an eternal loyalist, but he loathed it when employees sat around and drank off of the corporate teat without contributing. He had protected Boris and his surly attitude for months and was tired of both the insubordination and general indifference at performing his fairly routine daily tasks.
“I don’t think he’s going to snap out of it,” Jack said to Steve but he really wanted to say, “What, are we five years old? If I tell somebody once to cut the shit and get back to work, they better get off their ass and get back to work!”
Jack talks to us as Boris walks down the hallway with a box of his possessions, “That’s really the fundamental problem with the muted language of work. You can never really say what you really want to say, or what has to be said. The only person who could get away with some colorful language or off-color remark in the past was the boss - that was, until, the age of political correctness and the prominence of the human resources department took form. Now you can barely say ‘fuck’ without being sued for sexual harassment.”
FONG YOU!
Steve Christianson and Patti Fong had worked together for the greater part of the past 20 years. They met in the bathroom of their first employment experience at Walton, Crabtree & Wright. More accurately, they met hours earlier as Patti was introduced around, fresh out of college and hornier than that dog that always humps your leg when you go over your friend’s house.
At the time, Fong was Patti McFarlane from the great state of Virginia, which as we have been told is known for its ‘lovers.' McFarlane was as Catholic as a communion wafer and her lineage traced back to some of the south’s most followed preachers. Yet, she was in the aged men’s bathroom of W.C.W. just after her lunch break with her skirt around her ankles and young associate Christianson conducting what he thought was a locomotive from behind.
They had just finished in one of Steve’s longer sessions, a whopping 58 ticks of the clock; 35 seconds if you subtract the time he fumbled to find home base - and one of the senior partners of the firm, Charles Wright, walked into the bathroom and heard giggling and whispering and saw two sets of legs behind the stall.
Patti bravely emerged from the stall first, primarily from a push from behind from Steve, as Wright finished draining the main vein and then washing his hands in one of the two sinks. Patti adjusted her knee-length skirt and washed her hands in the sink next to him. He looked her over in the mirror and apparently liked what he saw, because she was summoned to his office later that day to account for her unprofessional behavior.
The 6-foot 3-inch, 54 year-old, self-proclaimed family man, sat in his high-backed black leather chair facing the Empire State Building.
“Please close the door and sit down, young lady,” the deep-throated Wright said.
Patti was all of 21 years-old and was only a few months removed from escaping her home and riding on a greyhound bus for the better part of an entire day. She barely survived those early months, but learned real fast how a young woman survives in the big city: use any assets you have.
Patti sat down and fully expected to be fired, or flogged, and was obviously in favor of the flogging option because she had finally slept her way into an apartment with two other girls.
The long and lean Wright rose to his feet and pulled down the vest of his blue pinstripe three-piece suit. “Do you realize how many hours it took me to get this office?”
Wright kept talking so Patti assumed that the question was rhetorical in nature.
“Do you realize how many times I had to bend over and take a pounding from behind in order to work my way up?”
Patti didn’t react, so the now-aggressive Wright looked at her and spun his right index finger around in a circular motion. She had seen that gesture before and knew it meant that she should get up and turn her back to him. He came behind her and skirted her with one swift motion, lowering her skirt and pink cotton panties with strawberries to the carpeted floor around her three-inch black pumps.
She stepped out of her lower garments as Wright tapped on the desk, as if Patti was a dog in training. The 5-foot 4-inch McFarlane obediently hopped up and gave up her derriere to Mr. Senior Partner.
A few minutes later, Wright was giving it to Junior Tax Associate McFarlane pretty good, so he asked the question that had been on his mind since their impromptu lunch meeting in the men’s room.
“Who was in there with you?”
Patti was holding on for dear life and her head was rubbing against his fine wood desk, so she was about to utter the first thing that came in her mind.
“Jerry Rosenberg!”
But the only thing that Jerry Rosenberg could hammer was a balance sheet, and would not be a believable bathroom hookup. So she quickly shifted to Plan B and something she heard Christianson mutter angrily before she escorted him to the bathroom.
“Fuckin’ Greg Paulson!”
Paulson was Christianson’s boss and the person most responsible for his misery and lack of career advancement. So Patti took a shot.
She grunted, “Paulson! Greg Paulson!” as Charlie swung his long right hand and whacked Patti on her snow-white butt, leaving a handprint across her ample right cheek.
It wasn’t long after that the satisfaction of keeping up with a 20-something melded with the evil pleasure of extracting information. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a thick roll of money, and flipped three $100 bills on his desk.
“Go get your clothes cleaned and join a gym to tighten that ass up,” he said as he sat back down in his chair without looking at her. She scooped up the money and before she left the office, Wright picked up the phone and blurted to his secretary, who received a bigger bonus than most associates for her discretion, “Fire Greg Paulson and promote whoever’s next on the list.”
He slammed down the phone and said to smirking Patti before she opened the door, “Young lady, that ass is mine if you want to continue working here.”
She turned back to look at him, but he had already spun his chair away from her and toward the view.
“Yes, sir,” she said as she opened the door and exited his corner office.
Flash ahead 15 year later as Christianson was named a partner at Bauman Rogers. He and Patti - now Fong - celebrated in his new corner office with a rousing 1-minute, 12-second session. The reclined together on his desk looking toward the ceiling.
“I am now in position to grant you one wish,” Steve said.
Patti knew this day would come and had one bullet already loaded in the chamber.
“I want Friday’s off,” she quickly replied as she rose from the desk and started to get dressed.
“Friday’s off? How am I going to explain that?”
She also had an answer for that obvious question.
“I’m a Jehovah’s Witness. They don’t work on Friday’s.”
Steve chuckled and then saw Patti’s serious face, “Really?”
She looked at the schmuck in front of her and forcefully replied, “Really!”
And thus the four-day work-week was born.
COOKIE MONSTER
Steve Christianson came from a big family where he was the youngest of six children, four girls and two boys. His older brother Mark was a hot-shot entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, leaving Steve always feeling like he was playing catch-up.
Vying for Maria and Bob Christianson’s attention was a daily pursuit for the two boys who were only 10 months apart in age. They were both decent athletes, got decent grades in school - although Mark got statistically better grades and went to better colleges - and were helpful around the house. But the place that Steve won his Italian mom’s heart over was in the kitchen. It was also the place where his Irish dad turned away from the momma’s boy.
Steve’s love for food was unparalleled until he passed the bar exam and started making some money. It was this greed of edible objects that paved the way for his obsession with making green paper, lot's of green paper. But that didn’t stop him from instituting a weekly team lunch a few months after he was named the firm’s youngest partner in its 30-year history and head of the Case Development Group, as it was called in its first iteration.
In Jack’s first lunch meeting, he was tasked with presenting his first case and had no idea what to expect. In his 45 years on the planet he had seen, heard and experienced many things that he probably shouldn’t have been exposed to, and he was about to add another level onto the list.
Boris took a seat next to Jack at the end of the 14-seat rectangular, dark wood table. Jack instinctively sat at the end to accommodate his daddy long legs.
Steve had not entered the room yet for the noon meeting, as it was his custom to be uncomfortably late for every meeting and appointment. This initially infuriated some of the senior partners until they started seeing a few extra zeros in their bonus checks each and every year as a result of Steve’s efforts to hand-deliver the most tasty cases available to the plaintiffs bar.
“Just keep in mind that Steve might lose focus once Li puts out the tray of cookies,” Boris said with a rare smile as he looked across the table at associate David Mann, who was really David Moskowitz, a Reform Jew from Roslyn, Long Island, who “upgraded” to the orthodox level once he realized that this would increase his chances of first being hired and later being retained due to an age-old quota system.
Mann smiled with his rubbery, chubby face and squinty eyes revealing that Boris was speaking the truth.
“Actually, it’s tough to get him to listen with or without food,” Mann said in typical New York fashion, having to act like he was saying something better than what had already been said. New Yorkers like to repackage garbage and resell it as new, sort of like investment bankers taking subprime mortgages and piecing them together in a bigger pile of sellable shit.
Steve walked into the room moments later as most of the people around the table had already started eating their sandwiches and salads that were passed out by woman-servant, Li. Jack decided to wait to eat because Boris had informed him that they would be first up, in the veritable lead-off spot to present at the meeting. So much for easing into your first week of work…
“All right, let’s get this meeting started!” a chipper Steve said as he walked into the conference room without closing the door behind him. Li, in the obedient side of her life, immediately rose to her feet and gently closed both doors of the frosted-glass conference room.
He stayed on his feet and took a glass from the marble counter-top and filled it with ice before pouring himself a Diet Coke. “I’m sure most have you have met Jack, but I wanted to officially welcome Jack Worth to our little family,” he said in typical undramatic fashion - especially when the topic of conversation was focused on someone else - without actually looking at Jack. The overflow crowd at the table all greeted Jack accordingly with smiles and good wishes as Li waited anxiously for Steve to sit in his seat at the end of the table and eat the salad she had placed out for him.
“Let’s hear what you guys have for us this week,” he then said referring to Jack and Boris.
Jack started to present a case after thanking everyone for their good wishes. Steve was about to turn around and take his seat, but his keen sense of constant disruption prevented him from doing so. His mother always let him sneak a cookie or a brownie in before dinner and now that he was the beast of all beasts, he saw no reason to discontinue that fine tradition.
So he reached his hands toward the large plate of cookies on the counter and peeled back the three layers of Saran Wrap in order to fetch a few cookies. The first attempt proved unsuccessful, as the sight of dreaded raisins caused Steve to immediately shove the fingered cookies back on the plate. Worth continued talking about the case, mostly in the direction of David Mann, but all of the attention in the room was focused on Christianson and his search for the perfect pre-lunch cookie.
Li fidgeted under the table as her boss in the corporate world was once again up to no good. Although this latest transgression was not an admissible offense in a U.S. District Court, it broke just about every etiquette rule known to man.
Steve dove back into the plate in search of chocolate and pulled out the plumb he was looking for, a triple-fudge brownie. Two huge bites later his mouth was full and gulped down half of his glass of soda to provide a slip-and-slide atmosphere in his throat. The gluttonous Christianson never stopped at one of anything, especially when it was pleasing, so he spotted another brownie and touched just about every other cookie, ruining the hopes of every woman in the room of snagging a sweet treat after lunch, because they all knew where his hands had been.
He finally sat down after inhaling the second brownie, downing the remainder of his soda, and then grabbing another can for the meal. Jack was finishing up his four-minute dissertation on the case and then waited for Steve to comment.
“Sounds like there could be something there.”
He then turned to the group’s chief investigator, and ex-FBI forensic accounting agent, and said, “Sam, have your guys take a look at that,” even though he probably heard only about two percent, at most, of what Jack said.
It was then Boris’s turn to present his case, and he did exactly what Jack would never do, he read off a few pages of written text. The group had suffered mightily during the six months that Boris was flying solo analyzing cases. Thus, it became important to replace him with anyone that had a pulse.
Everyone at the table turned their attention from Steve’s brownie search to their own food the minute the floor was turned over to Boris. Christianson’s two percent retention rate instantly dropped to nil, as he chomped on a huge multi-meat hero with cheese. Boris concluded seven minutes later when most people were finishing up their lunches.
Jack looked on in painful disbelief at the bore that was sitting next to him. He again waited for Steve to react, which was apparently the local custom. He looked at Steve and marveled at his ability to swallow great quantities of food without actual chewing them. His pile-and-flush system would have to eventually end in choking at some point, Jack thought.
“So, do you like the case?” Steve asked Boris, not really caring to hear his opinion because he could make a deal with any competing law firm at any time for a piece of the case.
Boris was notorious for guarding his opinion with his life, for fear that anything he said would be scrutinized and thrown right back in his face. Being in his mid-20’s and completely wet behind the ears didn’t help his cause with this group of seasoned veterans. He often made inappropriate comments and was told “We’re not friends!” once by Christianson as he feebly attempted to crawl up his boss’s crowded, no vacancy, butt.
“I think the case might have merits but there are a few problems,” Boris said taking the most neutral stance he could muster.
Steve had no problem embarrassing Boris, so he turned to his left and said in a friendly tone to Jack, “Why don’t you take a look at it and tell me what you think.”
Jack thought that was rather insensitive, but he mistakenly viewed it as a vote of confidence of his abilities when, in fact, it was just another slap upside Boris' head. Steve then transitioned to a few seemingly in-depth conversations with Melanie and David, which had the sleeping-gas impact on the rest of the crew, which included marketing people and data people mooching free food. Steve liked a crowd when he performed.
Just when the group sleep was about to down-shift into first gear, Li got up and walked over to where the cookies were situated and removed the plastic wrap before setting them in front of Steve at the head of the table. This was the perfect place for the cookies – especially if you were Steve – because David the orthodox Jew (who couldn’t eat the cookies) was on one side of him, and Jack the healthy eater was on the other side of him. A few of the data guys in need of a sugar rush shamelessly got up and took a few of the raisin-infused cookies to their leader’s delight.
For the next 10 minutes, Steve proceeded to clear the plate of 10 cookies, one by one, until there was nothing left but crumbs. Canadian resident and firm associate Patrick Trottier turned to Patti Fong and said, “That man is the cookie monster.”
Patti raised her eyebrows and thought to herself, “You have no idea.”
BILLABLE HOURS
If you ask a lawyer they will tell you they work around the clock, a slave to the billable hour. While many attorneys pull all-nighters about as often as they deviate from the truth, it is their hedonistic habits that should probably get the attention of clients, not the inflated number on the bottom of their bills.
“What do you want to do tonight?” Norman Rogers said as he closed the door to Steve Christianson’s office.
“You staying in the city?” Steve asked as he continued to look at his computer screen while his boss sat down on the green leather couch in his office.
Rogers’ 8-5 day was usually extended by various ‘business’ activity at night, which he told his wife of 35 years usually consisted of taking clients out and attended various ‘meetings’ throughout the city. The man had five houses scattered throughout the country in Summit, New Jersey, Southampton, New York, Tuscon, Arizona, Vail, Colorado, and he still owned his mother’s house in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, which he rented out to a Russian family that had ties to the mob.
“Every chance I get!” Norman exclaimed.
Steve was just starting to master the late-night meeting speech to his wife, who had squirted out three kids in five years. Mary Christianson was blessed with a girl after having two feisty boys, and thanked god for finally giving her someone she could talk to, albeit in a few years.
She always knew Steve was going to make money because of his one-track mind and his ultra-competitive spirit. She helped put him through law school by being the one that worked during the early years, the couple’s best years. But once Steve started making money, the balance of power permanently and irrecoverably shifted in his favor.
“It could be time for another double-team. Do you think that waitress from the Frozen Squirrel is up for it again?” Steve asked as he and Norman walked toward the bank of elevators and rolled up on Jack Worth.
Norman reached up and patted Jack on the back, but Steve chose to ignore the Bunyan-esque Worth and continue his conversation. Jack was surprised that the two figureheads of the firm would speak so openly in such a common area. He wasn’t sure if he was more offended with the disrespect of their wives, or the shameless overcompensation of male bravado?
Norman continued with his conversation after acknowledging Jack.
“That girl is always ready. We should check out Satin’s Playground in Hell’s Kitchen. The girls are young and ready for action there.”
“Isn’t that a swinger’s club?” Steve countered as if he had prior experience with that establishment.
Jack looked at Norman, who was fishing for some sort of confirmation from the firm’s provider of all relevant information. Jack’s world was so tight that he would never gain access to such a depraved universe, so he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head to suggest that he didn’t know. He felt as if he was in the high school lunch room and his friends were bullshitting about doing things with girls that they never did, but only jacked-off to.
“All right, Christianson. You pick the place!” a quickly-disturbed Rogers replied. “But I don’t want to go to Chug and Ride again. Last time I rode that mechanical bull I had to go to the chiropractor for two months,” he added as they all exited from the elevator.
The two men branched off from Jack as they left the building. Norman - being his usual hyper-social self - said goodbye to Jack. Steve, still nursing a life-long Napoleonic complex, ignored the gesture and kept walking while directing his comments to his boss.
Worth thought to himself about Christianson, “I don’t know if this guy’s nose is so far up Norman’s ass that he can’t see people through the mud, or the more logical and direct explanation that he’s just a douche bag?”
The hours that were billed that night involved two cans of whipped cream, a container of Bosco chocolate syrup, three sporks and a bowl of crushed nuts. Christianson and Rogers seemed to always run the risk of crossing swords, but the borderline homophobic act never seemed to bother either one of them.
After a night of climbing the biggest indoor rock wall - made out of fake rocks - on the East Coast, the guys headed out of Vail K10 and headed back to Norman’s playground apartment in the Meat-Packing District. When he first bought the apartment in the late 1990’s, Norman heard it was an up-and-coming neighborhood but didn’t realize that his new play-pen was also the home-base of the gay community. So it was no wonder that sword-crossing was not only an acceptable practice, but it was also a right-of-passage - a vital sub-sect of an initiation if you will - for members of the rainbow community.
While it is true that older man lack the stamina and sexual desire of their younger counterparts, it is the responsibility of younger women to boost their confidence in the bedroom, or the kitchen table, or the $20,000 dining room table. Norman always had a steady supply of Viagra on hand, proudly displayed in a handy dispenser in the bathroom. He of course took this down when his wife made the rare appearance in the city for a special occasion. Aside from having their three children, Martha Rogers used her beds primarily for sleeping, not taming her pint-sized husband’s endless libido.
Mary Christianson was also home that night, and she was definitely not alone. Her three kids were climbing all over her and swinging from the ceilings like a pack of chimpanzees in the wild. The Christianson kids were cute, but they tended to have erratic sleeping patterns. Mary bore the brunt of one kid always being awake. She had slept an average of four hours per day since the kids were born, which was less than half the number of hours of sleep her husband got that night.
He texted her “Meeting went well” on the company-provided car-ride back from scaling the indoor equivalent to Mount Everest. “Kiss the kids good night for me.” Nowhere in the correspondence did Steve mention his love for his wife - it seemed like the more money he made, the more he stayed over in the city with Norman. What started out as a once-in-a-while thing had turned into a once or twice a-week habit with the prospect for even more.
Norman and Steve were sitting on the couch half-naked at three o’clock in the morning with lit cigars dangling out of their mouths. Their date for the evening, Becky Cartwright had left a few minutes earlier, sticky from head to toe but headed back to her apartment with five crisp $100 bills in her pocket that she didn’t have when she started the night, and a certificate for a lifetime membership to the Christianson-Rogers Fan Club.
The men sat on opposite couches half-naked and still charged up from all the Viagra.
“Man, that girl was flexible,” Norman said.
Steve took a huge puff of his Cuban phallic symbol and then billowed smoke rings into the outer reaches of the ten-foot ceiling.
Steve countered, “I never realized that a person could scratch their ear with the big toe of their foot.”
Little did they know that Becky was on her way in a company car to 24 Hour Fitness to take a quick shower and then work out before heading to her morning job as a London exchange trader.
“Do you think it’s too late to order some take-out?” a cocky Norman asked.
Steve knew he wasn’t talking about food and replied, “Depends what you have in mind? Italian? Chinese? Greek? What about a kosher meal?”
Norman chuckled, “You know that there is nothing kosher available after 9:00 p.m.! And even if you order the kosher meal before nine, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to still be hot by the time it’s served.”
Steve laughed because of his lone experience with a Jewish girl in college. “What about Chinese then?”
Norman thought about all of Steve’s stories with his secretary Li, whom he had no idea was an animal in her real life.
“If we do Chinese then we’ll be wanting more a half-hour later.”
Steve laughed at Norman joke just as he did for mostly every attempt at humor by Norman.
Steve picked up his BlackBerry, which was never out of his reach, and searched his speed dial for his favorite late-night Italian.
“Hello, Brittany!” Steve exclaimed in his self-professed charming voice.
Brittany Lagastino was at their front door about 20 minutes later holding two bags filled with pasta drenched with red gravy.
“Did you bring the stuffed shells?” wise-guy Christianson asked.
The New Jersey girl aggressively stepped forward and grabbed his package.
“Did you bring that hard Italian sausage?” she countered, but really thought that it took two of these cafones to make one normal cazzone.
Brit was as easy as she was shrewd. Her legs were open as often as gynecological patients, but she was a working girl in her family’s Brooklyn, Staten Island and Manhattan pizzeria chain. By day she made local deliveries and helped out in the kitchen, but at night she visited mostly male clientele with leftovers and orders that were more off-menu in nature.
A typical $20 tab for food would balloon to at least two crisp $100 bills at night, giving the term off-balance sheet financing a whole new meaning.
RAINBOW COALITION
"These mother fucka's will fuck anything!" Li texted her good friend, business and trading partner from her cell phone, which she knew the FBI would be screening constantly.
"Have they dipped in curry yet?" Gretchen Farrelly texted back.
The trading artist currently know as Li had taken the rap for trading with a shit-load of material inside information in buying gold futures on several occasions.
"No curry yet, but I'm sure they would toss some fruit salard if it was within sniffing distance.
"Where are we at with the daily trades, Sam?"
"Pencil-dick thinks it’s a good time to buy stocks, so buy the shit out of Treasuries and gold! Economy is tanking. Clean trade, Inspector Gadget! :)" she added to keep Agent Lawson at bay.
"We have big meeting in Miami the end of the month. You gonna' make it?"
Sam was pissed that Gretch disclosed their plans to the Feds, not knowing that she was intentionally misleading their pursuers.
"Later," was all she wrote in her response.
":0" Gretch replied.
Sam was about to morph back into Li until she saw the reply, which tipped her off that her better half was a real player and knew the game.
No meeting to cash out their almost $50 million in accounts and intellectual property would take place until Sam was loose as a pair of aged boxer shorts.
Human Resources had become one of the most important departments of the law firm. Norman Rogers had seen too many lawsuits filed against the company for his taste, so he went out and actively recruited a stout German named Helga to literally put his affairs in order.
“Is she boneable?” Steve Christianson asked Rogers one night over drinks.
The always cocky Rogers had his usual shit-eating grin on his face.
“She not only boneable, as you say, she burned up every last speck of my Viagra dosage!”
“You mother fucker!” Steve playfully grunted as he took another painful sip of scotch. He was no more comfortable drinking that lighter fluid as he was waiting in line for sloppy seconds behind Norman Rogers. But climbing the law firm ladder had its price, meaning that the catholic school lifer had to convert to Judaism until his boss no longer served a purpose.
Christianson was utilizing Fraulein Helga faster than he could say "Suck my veiner schnitzel." Steve couldn't help but think - in the 30 seconds it took Frau Zimler to drink from the tainted stein of stale spooge - that he should get in touch with 25 percent of his German heritage more often. Later that evening he had Zimler over a desk and her thick German accent was becoming both a communication deterrent and a natural turn on.
"Der russel is big," she grunted moving in and out of her broken English and fluent German.
Any time a women was using the word big during sex, Steve was happy to accept the compliment.
"You tight little Nazi," he grunted.
Helga was of course familiar with her heritage and the unyielding stigma of the association. She also knew that jobs in the Human Resources capacity were scarce, and that her family was in fact a pack of raging Nazis.
The Director of Human Resources then said the only thing a Wall Street professional could say as she was being railed by the boss from behind.
"Heil Hitler!"
The rush of adrenaline must have done wonders for Steve's premature ejaculation difficulties, because he crashed through the two-minute barrier for the first time in his life and marked the occasion with a celebratory chant, "Heil Hitler!" as he saluted with his right hand and then arced his arm like a softball pitcher so he could slap Helga's milky white derrière.
TECH WONDERBOY
Patti Fong was given a looser budget than most group heads. It was her penchant for human insulation, with a focus on distancing herself from hard labor, that created the revolving door of data personnel. She created a system of funneling the pay scale toward the top, leaving only small shards of dollars for the people actually doing all of the work.
The latest casualty of the Fong That! campaign gathered his belongings after being let go following a unremarkable two-year stint. The job was reposted on all of the employment web sites and resumes started piling in like flies on shit.
"I like this one," Patti Fong said to herself as she spun her chair around and looked toward the mirky waters of the Hudson River.
She had been through a dozen candidatures and hadn't seen a single one that could support the vast burden of her work. Her salary was now in excess of $200,000, but only half of that was on the official Baumann Rogers books. The remainder of her salary was picked up by Steve Christianson, via an "overflow fund" provided on the side by a roster of clients. These clients were mostly state and county pension funds that were given the lofty responsibility of managing the money of its constituents. In the event of a major loss, which resulted primarily from a significant decline in the price if a stock or a bond, the funds would band together in kind as part of a class - a class action if you will - to try to save face and recover funds.
Recoveries were based more on judge and venue than they were on facts and actual fraud. The more liberal settings such as New York and California were more open to attacks against corporations than the deep south, where redneck judges set the bar for scienter - the intent to commit fraud - as high as the blue sky in which their courts were located.
Keeping track of clients' losses was the charge of Patti's data group, who would crunch numbers once a complaint was filed. This lack of initiative got under the skin of Jacob Worth, who was aggressively-proactive by nature. However, no potential case made it past go without material client losses, unless Steve Christianson was able to bullshit and strong-arm his way into sharing a piece of the case with other firms fighting over the scrap of meat.
"I'm gonna' hire this guy, so don't give him a hard time," Patti Fong said in her best influential voice as she stepped into Jacob Worth's doorway. Worth had no idea why Patti was even talking to him, because it had been at least six months since she had even acknowledged his presence.
Worth muttered under his breathtaking as Fong cleared the doorway, "What the fuck?"
He had become increasingly agitated by the passive-aggressive stylings of Christianson and Fong, and the more direct abuse administered by Melanie Meyers. The culture shock of returning to New York after five years in hiding in the sleepy Midwest was both significant and increasingly insurmountable.
Just as Worth was debating whether to go from office to office and toss each asshole crashing through their windows and splattering onto the dirty downtown sidewalk, Fong showed up with a ray of light in the form of Bart Pagglia.
Pagglia had started the Tech Wonderboy company from the basement of his parents house in Huntington, New York, and grew it to a multi-million dollar payout. His software was bought out by BestBuy for its Geek Squad franchise. At first blush, the $500 million price for a program that could fix computers from the inside seemed excessive for a category killer that had cornered the market. But, with Bart's company rapidly eating market share in the tech service business, BestBuy did not want to underestimate the seemingly unstoppable force that was Tech Wonderboy. So they bought him out.
It is said that every success comes with a price, and Bart Pagglia's price was dealing with the federal government after hacking into the Langley, Virginia database and stealing essential code that went into his groundbreaking software. The government waited for the payout and then approached, actually cornered, Pagglia with the information.
"So what the fuck do you want me to do?" Pagglia asked after a dark ride in an unmarked van.
Agent Harry Lawson stepped out of the shadows, desperate to complete a multi-year investigation that was in danger of faking through the cracks.
"You stole our code and we're not happy."
Bart never backed up even in the face of certain danger.
"You can't fuckin' prove it!"
Lawson thought about roughing up Pagglia, but he appeared to be in much better shape than expected. So he backed up and then clicked a switch that replicated a desktop computer to a large screen affixed to the wall.
Bart looked at his replicated keystrokes and then said, "You've had this for six years? Why use it now? How much is this gonna' cost me?"
Lawson smirked, "You can either give all of it to us and go rot in a jail for the rest of your life, or you can go to work at a law firm and help us put away a couple of scumbags?"
Pagglia imagined being used as someone's bitch in jail, and then thought about a similar scenario while working for a law firm.
"Well, at least I get to keep my money if I work for the law firm."
Lawson smiled, "Very good. Very good."
TWO AGAINST A COVEN
Pagglia got the job even though his real credentials would have had him on top of the corporate food chain instead of being placed in a menial job that was obviously beneath him. While he knew he had to cooperate with the FBI, the extent of his involvement was nonetheless mirky. Remembering his alias, Greg Palmieri, would prove to be much more difficult than the actual job, at least in the beginning.
Greg went to his first group lunch meeting and sat across from Li Kwan not knowing that she was also working under cover. The indentured servant act was so convincing that no one, save Jacob Worth - who was the consummate conspiracy theorist and a tad-bit paranoid - thought she was anything but Steve Christianson's better half at work.
Kwan did not make any eye contact with anyone as she buzzed around the rectangular conference room delivering sandwiches and salads to everyone around the table,
"No cookies?" Steve barked as he looked around the room.
"They will be delivered in a few minutes," Li meekly replied.
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