Extraordinary Rendition (8 page)

“Sandy, the beauty of these is that I can burn them and nobody can ever know what was in my mind. That’s why Nixon used them. They tell me that what you type on a computer lives forever.”

Sandy had worked as a young lawyer on the staff of the Watergate Committee for its Republican members. Sandy said, “Hell, Byron, I still have Nixon’s notes.”

Bright light from the late morning sun flooded Byron’s sparely furnished office. He still had enough sense of attachment to the firm that he thought it was best for him to sit and banter for a few minutes with Sandy Spencer.

“Sandy, you’re the man who keeps the secrets. That’s why Nixon loved you.”

Sandy sat in the visitor’s chair in front of the desk. He crossed his elegant legs, the relaxed posture of Rex Harrison in
My Fair Lady
. As if announcing good news, he said, “I just got a call from Jack Andrews. They have a new case they’re sending over. Securities fraud, he said, with a sprinkle of racketeering claims to spice it up.”

Jack Andrews was the chief inside counsel at American Express, a client of SpencerBlake for all the years both Byron and Sandy had worked there. Jack Andrews had once been a junior partner at the law firm, which long ago had managed the brilliant tactic of placing him in the in-house counsel’s office of a major client. Jack had soon become the ultimate decision-maker in selecting outside lawyers to represent American Express. Jack Andrews “spread the jewels around,” as Sandy Spencer often said, but he usually saved the “crown jewels” of legal work for his old law firm.

Smiling, Byron said, “Sandy, is there a bank in America big enough to hold all your money?”

Sandy returned Byron’s smile. “I’ve moved the excess to the Channel Isles.”

“Now that Switzerland is giving up information right and left,” Byron said, “there are all these other countries racing
into the growth industry of tax havens. Or are they islands, dukedoms, principalities?”

“Where there’s money there’s always a way to hide it,” Sandy said, laughing. He then looked at Byron as if, Byron thought, he was about to cajole a boy. “Jack specifically said he wanted you to be the lead litigation partner on this case. It’s important enough to Amex that he wants to be sure you handle it. Even at your $950 hourly rate.”

Byron clicked the tip of his pencil on the top of his desk. “When did clients get the privilege of deciding who’s assigned to what cases? Isn’t that our decision?”

Sandy’s expression changed from its usual urbanity to that wintry look his father used when he was unhappy with another lawyer in the firm. Sandy’s father was still working at SpencerBlake in the first three years Byron was there. He was “Mr. Spencer” to everyone, including his son. There were times when, if he wasn’t satisfied with the research of a young lawyer, he’d throw a book across the desk at him. It was a different world then, austere, aristocratic, and arbitrary.

“Byron, work with us. I don’t want to discuss when clients can and can’t pick the lawyers they want on particular cases. Jack asked for you. He rarely does that.”

“Jack can’t have me,” Byron said.

“Why not?”

“I’m fully tied up.”

“Really, Byron? I looked at your time sheets for the last six weeks. Either you forgot to write down your time or you don’t have more than three billable hours.”

Byron found himself drawing, in pencil, the shape of a house crowned by two triangles meant to represent a sloping roof. It was precisely the kind of drawing he had made in
grammar school. “Sandy, I expect my client in Miami to be indicted next week. When he’s indicted I’ll have to put everything and anything else aside to deal with it.”

“Come on, Byron.”

“Come on? I took on a client, Sandy, for better or worse. And for better or worse he wants me to represent him. He’s just like any other client: he’s entitled to loyalty, attention, respect.”

“And so is Jack Andrews. And so is his company. You should be flattered that he asked for you.”

“I’m way beyond flattery.”

“I guess so, Byron, I guess so. You certainly aren’t getting much these days.”

Byron finished the carbon pencil streaks that represented the roof of his childlike drawing. Then he made little rectangular boxes and a door on the front of the house: the drawing had assumed the style of a colonial saltbox in New England. “There’s a charm,” he said, “in being on the wrong side of a genuinely unpopular case.”

“Really? Who remembers the name of the lawyer who represented Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh case? Or the lawyer who represented Ted Bundy?”

Byron looked up from the drawing in front of him. “You know what? Nobody remembers the name Byron Carlos Johnson in any of the cases where I’ve represented American Express, or Microsoft, or Goldman Sachs. It might be that that is what a lawyer is all about—working for a client so that the client is important, not the lawyer.”

Sandy shrugged. He had lived in New York for so long that even he had adopted the New York Jewish shrug—weary,
expressive, and frustrated. He stood, and Byron remained seated, relieved that the conversation was about to end.

But it wasn’t. “Byron,” Sandy said, “you are going to take the American Express case. And something else: you are embarrassing yourself and this firm. Everybody has seen the pictures of you leaving that courthouse in Miami. You looked like a deer caught in the headlights.”

“It wasn’t the most flattering picture I’ve ever seen.”

Sandy waved his hand. As he watched the abrupt wave—so uncharacteristic of the patrician Sandy Spencer, as was the New York shrug—he had a sense that Sandy meant to wave him into another world. “You know what else wasn’t flattering, Byron? What else is an embarrassment for the firm?”

Byron now stood. They were separated by the gleaming top of Byron’s desk. He managed to control the antagonism he had held against this man for years. “What else?”

“It’s very bad form, Byron, to take an associate of this firm with you to Miami and have the world witness you acting dumbfounded in front of a camera and then stumbling into a cab with her. We were trying to recruit her as a lawyer, not recruit her as your travel companion.”

“She doesn’t work here, Sandy. She certainly hasn’t got any intention of coming back.”

“You’re tone deaf, Byron. You’re a relic, even worse than I am. I had a call less than an hour ago from the dean at Columbia to ask the firm for an explanation as to why a partner here would travel with a law student, especially one who spent the summer working here as an associate. And one who must be decades younger than the partner.”

Byron spoke slowly in an effort to take any angry edge off the tone of his voice. “Sandy, isn’t it time for you to continue your captain’s tour of the decks of your luxury cruiser?”

Shaking his head, exaggerating the motion, Sandy Spencer left Byron’s office. And Byron knew that he was racing, no longer just drifting, toward the end of his long career at SpencerBlake.

C
HRISTINA ROSARIO’S CHEEK RESTED on Byron’s chest. A sheet was draped over her hips. Uncovered and naked, Byron was on top of the sheets, slowly cooling down, relaxing deeply, and utterly content. Christina looked up at the handsome ridges of his face—the taut cheeks, the sloping forehead that reminded her of Cary Grant’s, the hazel eyes, the high cheekbones—as he in turn stared down at the beauty of her unblemished face and shoulders, the alluring contours of her breasts, and the tautness of her young stomach. And then, too, the swell of her womanly hips under the white sheet, still damp from their love-making. As she stroked the slightly graying hair on his chest, he felt himself get aroused again.

It was the middle of the afternoon. The windows of Christina’s apartment were ten stories above Riverside Park. A breeze stirred the gauzy beige curtains. Although the weather was hot—almost, Byron had said before they began to undress each other, like “miserable Miami”—the wind was refreshing. The breeze came from New Jersey, from the high cliffs of the Palisades, over the sultry expanse of the Hudson River and Riverside Park. The old-world apartment had no air conditioning. Standing fans, rotating, stirred the air.

For the third time she whispered, “That was so, so good.”

He turned slightly to kiss her forehead. “You are a sweetheart, Brighteyes.” Over the last several weeks, and especially
since the first glorious evening when they made love, he sometimes called her Brighteyes. She called him Carlos.

There was almost complete stillness in the bedroom. The traffic noises from Riverside Drive were muffled. Byron couldn’t remember a time in his life when he’d experienced such satisfying lassitude, such contentment, as he slowly and lightly moved his fingers along the unblemished skin of her upper arm.
Why have I waited so long for this?
he wondered. This was happiness, he thought, a feeling always possible, never realized.

Christina sensed that Byron’s stillness had passed into the realm of sleep. Gradually his breathing deepened. She stopped moving her hand gently across his chest. She, too, felt drowsy—more than two hours had passed since she kissed him, said, “Hey, lover boy,” and, naked, led him to her bedroom. During the two weeks in which, like an uncertain schoolboy from an earlier generation, he hadn’t done more than touch her hand, she had wondered what kind of lover Byron would be. Arrogant, indifferent, devoted, caring, self-absorbed, athletic, timid, quick, potent, impotent? She had been certain, from the moment she sought him out at the evening party in the Central Park Zoo, that he would become her lover. She saw the beginning of his enthrallment in the artificial bantering they exchanged in that first conversation. So she was certain he would pursue her—the week’s delay after she left SpencerBlake in August and his sending her that first email didn’t shake her confidence—but she could never predict how he or any other man would be as a lover.

As she lay on his chest, with the afternoon light all around them, she realized she was surprised: Byron, that handsome,
polite, and at times awkward guy, was a devoted and passionate lover. In the courtroom, he was cogent and self-possessed but restrained, even when he was being battered and baited by a judge, as in Miami. But there was little restraint in the way he undressed her and helped her undress him. There was no uncertainty or prep school mannerism in the way he kissed her, stroked her, licked her, and entered her. And stayed in her, in position after position. She was young, athletic, and supple. He was lithe and strong. If he took Viagra, he didn’t tell her that. But she imagined that his long endurance, his steady erection, and his intensity probably came from that magical blue pill. Even teenagers were using it: the age of the universal stud had arrived.

It was just after sunset when they both woke up. A breeze from the Hudson and Riverside Park lifted and then dropped the gauzy curtains. In all the time she had spent with him over the last few weeks—in diners, libraries, courts, airports, even in taxis—she’d been puzzled about whether Byron Johnson was a happy or unhappy person. There was that demeanor she could only describe to others as “equable”—unflustered, patient, tenacious, and at times self-deprecating. There was also what she thought of as old-world kindness. Byron let other people leave an elevator before he took a step to enter it, he held doors open for people who followed them into a restaurant, and he said thank you to taxi drivers as he paid them. She had once imagined that, if she ever met a man who behaved like that, he’d drive her crazy. But nothing about Carlos annoyed or distracted her.

She admired his focused mind. As soon as he came out of the shower, toweling his thick, subtly graying hair, he said,
“Listen, my little lovely, I need to look at these documents before I head downtown tomorrow morning. Let’s order up some Chinese food.”

“Or,” she said, “do we want falafel from the Moroccan place on 104th Street?”

“I think it’s enough that I’m learning how to read the
Koran
in Arabic. I don’t need genuine Arabic food.”

In Christina’s experience, other men in the wake of an afternoon like this would have suggested the quiet recuperation of a movie or supper in a small restaurant. And maybe, she thought, she and Byron might later do that, but as soon as Byron put on his pants he sat down at the dining room table on which he had earlier placed two manila envelopes given to him that morning by Hal Rana. The envelopes contained two documents he had not yet read.

One of the documents was the indictment of Ali Hussein. As soon as Byron arrived at his office that morning, his telephone rang and he picked it up himself because his secretary was not yet there. It was Rana. He said that Ali Hussein had been moved the day before from the detention center in Miami to the bleak federal prison in lower Manhattan. Hussein would be indicted, Rana said, “tomorrow, for money laundering, racketeering, terrorism, and conspiracy to murder.”

When he heard those words, Byron felt his body flush, that system-wide pulse of blood that was the result of sudden anxiety. This had last happened to him seven years earlier, when his wife simply looked at him during supper at their apartment and said, “I don’t want to be married to you any longer. Not for one more day.”