(1969) The Seven Minutes (3 page)

They had quit within a month of each other. Barrett had been the first to quit. His disillusionment with the Institute had become complete due to his mother’s death. He had obtained some hints of evidence that the newly marketed drug which had been administered to keep his mother alive had actually hastened her death. And, since he could scent like a pointer, he had soon learned of other untimely deaths from aplastic anemia, a side effect induced by this same drug. Shocked, Barrett had built up his sketchy outline of a legal case, found an eligible complainant, and finally presented his memorandum to the managing director of the Institute. The memorandum was an indictment of one of America’s most renowned pharmaceutical companies. Barrett requested funds for a thorough investigation, and urged, if the findings substantiated his suspicions, a legal prosecution of the drug company or a hearing before the federal Food and Drug Administration. He was positive

that he would be encouraged to go ahead.

Eventually, the managing director of the Institute had summoned Barrett to a private meeting. The director spoke, and Barrett listened, stunned. Barrett’s request to proceed with an investigation, to be followed by a lawsuit or a hearing, had been turned down by the governing board. His evidence had been regarded as too flimsy, and, besides - oh, besides, it just wasn’t the kind of clear-cut case in which the Institute wished to become involved. Barrett’s disbelief and bewilderment lasted only forty-eight hours. At the end of that time, after discreet inquiries, he had learned the truth. One of the Institute’s chief backers and major contributors was the very pharmaceutical company that Barrett had attempted to indict.

The following day, Mike Barrett had resigned from the staff of the Good Government Institute.

Abe Zelkin, after a similar disappointment, had resigned a short time after Barrett.

And then each of them had had to make his choice. How well Barrett remembered. Ze.kin had made his choice first: He had moved to California, been admitted to the bar, and taken a post with the Los Angeles office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

But Barrett had been made too cynical by the realities to emulate Zelkin’s choice. So he made his own choice. If you can’t fight them, join them. He had joined the world of power, of big business, of big government. If he was to remain a do-gooder, he would concentrate on doing good for one person, himself. The name of the grownups’ game was - money. He would be a grownup, too. It was goodbye to all salaries of eight thousand a year and bonuses of to-thine-own-self-be-true. It was hello to a new life of eighteen thousand a year and a new goal, which was: to become, by whatever means - by osmosis, by training, by association - one of Them, one of the powerful ones.

The new life began with a position as a minor associate of a huge law firm on Madison Avenue - a beehive of forty attorneys - that specialized in corporate law. It had been a dreary two years. The work had been technical, grinding, monotonous. He had rarely had an opportunity to see a client and he had not once seen a courtroom, an arena he had so much enjoyed in his Institute days. He had been expected to employ his spare time participating in New York civic and cultural affairs, as prescribed by the firm’s elders. Opportunities for meaningful financial advancement had been few. Since he had been unhappy, restless and moody, his limited social life had been unhappy. There had been two love affairs, one with an attractive brunette divorcee, the other with a bright redheaded fashion model, and, while both had been physically satisfying, they had not satisfied him otherwise. Because he had been bored with himself, he had become bored with others.

His situation was becoming clearer. He had tried to go to the

other side -to stop fighting them, to join them -and become one of them. Oh, they welcomed every Faust with open arms, enlisted each with glowing promises, let each and every one eat cake instead of bread - and then assigned each to hard labor in the dungeon of corporate law, mergers, taxation; and then they threw away the key. Yes, it was clearer. You could serve the powerful, but not easily join them - because there wasn’t enough room at the top, because somebody had to serve them, and because their magic really never rubbed off. Or so it seemed to Barrett, in his worst despair, at the time.

A drastic change was wanted, and one day the possibility of a change was offered. In one of his monthly letters, Abe Zelkin had written of the many big-paying positions open for able and experienced attorneys in Los Angeles. Zelkin himself had been offered several, and resisted them, although admittedly one or two had been magnificent and even glamorous. From this the lure of California had grown in Barrett’s mind, and, shortly after, he had made his decision and made the change.

He had passed the California bar examination, and a few months later he had found himself installed in a small but beautifully decorated office as one of fourteen attorneys working for the successful business-management firm of Thayer and Turner on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. All of the clients were either celebrated or wealthy, or both, and the proximity to success had once more given Barrett hope that he might strike it rich. Yet, after almost two years - hard, demanding years in his office, in the firm’s law library, in courtrooms, and in the offices of affluent clients - during which he had gradually specialized in tax law, Barrett had slowly begun to come to the conclusion that he was not one of those fated to make it big.

His assets were many, and he could be coolly objective about them. He wasn’t classically handsome, true, but he had a rugged, weatherbeaten face. Part Polish, part Irish-Welsh, he had a craggy face marked only by scowl lines, the faint remnants of contracting brows and puckering eyes that grew out of skepticism and disappointment (like those of a quick, slightly aging light-heavyweight boxer who was beginning to be hit more often and was still in the semi-windups). He possessed a shag of matted black hair, restless, roving eyes, a short, straight nose, hollow cheeks, square jaw. He was just below six feet in height, with supple, sloping shoulders, a sinewy swimmer’s body. His outer demeanor was loose, casual, ambling, slouching, careless, but, like every man, he knew that he owned another man inside, and this one was alert, tense, crouching, a sprinter waiting for the gun. Only there was no gun.

At work, Barrett was serious, dedicated, quiet, steady. On his own time he could be personable (when not moody), since he had a fair sense of the ridiculous and a strong strain of sardonic humor, along with an accurate instinct for perceiving how other people felt

and an understanding of why they behaved as they did. He was an easy and arresting talker when he cared, which was no longer often. He was well read beyond Sir William Blackstone. He had meant to major in English literature, but he had also wanted to be practical, and law offered a broader horizon. Also, he possessed two unique qualities marvelously useful in the practice of law. The first quality was that of an almost freakish memory. Like his more illustrious predecessors, Rabbi Elijah of Lithuania, who had memorized the entire contents of twenty-five hundred scholarly volumes, including the Talmud and the Bible, and like Cardinal Mezzofanti, nineteenth-century curator of the Vatican Library, who had learned 186 languages and seventy-two dialects, Barrett’s eye was a camera obscura, forever capturing the sacred and the profane, the momentous and the trivial, and imprinting these on his brain, there stored for instant reference and recall. He could, on demand, recite most of the Code of Hammurabi, the Dred Scott decision, Shakespeare’s will, and Sir John Strange’s epitaph (‘Here lies an honest lawyer and that is Strange’). The second quality was that of a questing, trapping mind, one that enjoyed mysteries, riddles, games, all the unsolved phenomena of Charles Fort. He knew that he was suited for the profession of law, and he was stimulated by its promise of fresh challenges. Next to law, literature was merely a self-indulgence, a defrosting of the past.

Yet, though the surface assets were there, the hidden defects, or certain lacks, were there also, no question, no doubt about it, especially when you thought about it at three in the morning. He had skill in his work, but he lacked financial and social aggressiveness. While creative, he was not sufficiently self-promoting to claim credit where credit was due. He was too thoughtful and intelligent, perhaps too self-deprecating, to define himself or his role publicly. He was neither extrovert nor introvert, but ambivert, at once intrepid and outgoing, uncertain and withdrawn. When he had fallen from the family tree, he guessed, his ego had been flawed in the accident.

Barrett doubted that his seniors, Thayer and Turner, had ever thought of him as a unique personality, an indispensable individual. And the worst of it - yes, the very worst of it, his secret - was that he did not believe in what he was doing. He did not believe that it was important (beyond the comfortable sustenance it afforded him), and, secret or no secret, this absence of commitment may have shown up on his employers’ built-in radars. It was as if - well, hell, as if Henry David Thoreau had finally taken a job as a tax attorney. That was it. It was like that.

He had reached dead end, he had decided, some months ago. The job had become as tiresome and routine as waking every morning, and Los Angeles was, as some kindred soul had once put it, just one goddam beautiful day after another. In desperation, he had even spent four successive fifty-minute sessions with a psychoanalyst,

but his sense of futility had not been dispelled. He had not wanted to discuss his departed mother and father, or really to go into his Id and flawed Ego, and he had canceled the fifth appointment.

Then, overnight, as if the smog had cleared to reveal a pot of hope at the end of the rainbow, a small miracle had happened. And, a few weeks after that, there had been a greater revelation, a bigger miracle, and the pot of hope had become a pot of gold.

The first, the hope, had come from Abe Zelkin. By now, Zelkin was a fixture in the community, with respectable connections, and he had decided to quit the American Civil Liberties Union and open his own office in Los Angeles. There was a definite promise of clients, the kind of Scopes-Vanzetti clients he and Barrett had once dreamed about, and cases that would enrich their lives if not their pocket-books, important and never-ending opportunities to challenge injustice and inhumanity and bigotry. To open his own office, Zelkin wanted a partner. He wanted Barrett.

The offer to be young again, to do good works, invest each day with meaning, had excited Barrett. He would be independent. He would be alive. He would help others. He would have everything -except what he had so long though he had wanted the most, and that was riches, which also translated as power.

Barrett was interested, very interested, but still hesitant. He wanted to think about it. He wanted the next move to be right, and he had to be certain. But yes, it was a good idea, the idea of Zelkin and Barrett, Counselors at Law, Specialists in Idealism, and he thought he would go for it. Zelkin had said to him that there was no hurry, because Zelkin still had to clean up a number of cases. When they were under control he would ask Barrett again, and if Barrett was ready they’d put up their shingle.

That was the Zelkin pot of hope. And four weeks later, like a vision out of the blue, there was the Osborn pot of gold. And then it was that Barrett had known he had made it, finally made it.

With surprise, he emerged from his reliving of the recent past, to find that he had automatically turned off Wilshire Boulevard onto San Vicente Boulevard and that he was almost home. On Barring-ton Avenue he headed the convertible toward The Torcello (the owner had never quite forgotten that honeymoon in Italy), the six-story building constructed around a patio and a swimming pool where he had leased a three-room apartment after his first year in Los Angeles.

Reaching the building, Barrett swung his car into the cavernous opening beside the entrance walk, and drove into the subterranean garage. Getting out of the car, he checked his watch. There was still an hour before his appointment with Abe Zelkin. Plenty of time to shower again, change into a lighter suit, and rehearse what he would tell Zelkin.

He came around the convertible, bent down and removed the carton heavy with his past, and then jauntily made his way to the

elevator. It carried him smoothly to the third floor of The Torcello. He went down the corridor, opened his door, deposited the carton in a dark recess of the guest closet, and then went to dial the switchboard.

The living-room shutters were closed against the sun, and his apartment was cool. The room seemed less his own, and less comfortable, than it used to be, although admittedly it was smarter. This was Faye’s doing. Like so many wealthy women with time on their hands, she carried a decorator’s card. When she had first laid eyes upon his furnished apartment, she had shuddered. The taste these landlords have. What’s the period they’ve done it in? Early San Fernando Valley?’ Soon the landlord’s sloppy, cushiony sofa had been replaced by an expensive reproduction of an austere Chippendale camel-back sofa. Soon, too, the walls had been covered with hemp-cloth, the lighting had become recessed, and a late-Victorian rolltop desk and a French country-style chair of walnut and cane had dominated one corner. After the first beachhead, the invasion of good taste had continued. He had submitted to a glass-and-steel coffee table, too low to have any use whatsoever except as an object upon which to nick his shins and fully awaken him in the morning. Most recently, the telephone had been inconveniently tucked out of sight inside a carved wooden cabinet that had found its way to Decorators’ Row on Robertson Boulevard from the Swiss Village in Paris. On the cabinet stood a lamp and two fragile pieces of Limoges. Whenever he was alone, as he was now, Barrett would reverse the position of the Limoges and the telephone.

Removing the telephone from the cabinet, Barrett placed the Limoges inside, set the telephone down next to the curved arm of the sofa, and dialed the switchboard operator in the lobby.