A Civil Action (60 page)

“He’ll want a check,” said Gordon glumly.

A loud, manic laugh erupted from Schlichtmann. “A check! A
check!
Oh, we can give him plenty of those!”

He dialed Dmitri’s number. “Hi, Dmitri, it’s me, Jan … Jan Schlichtmann … Remember me? Well, I’ve been caught up in trial. I got back and found all your messages on my desk.” Schlichtmann’s voice became tight and constrained with shame.

Gordon held out the credit card. “One suit,” he said to Schlichtmann.

Schlichtmann reached for the card and Gordon snatched it back. “Just one,” Gordon warned.

Schlichtmann hung up the phone and nervously cleared his throat. Dmitri had given him a tongue-lashing. He couldn’t pay for just one suit when all three had been ready for months. He tried again to persuade Gordon to come with him to Dmitri’s, but Gordon just shook his head.

Later that afternoon, Gordon took pity on Schlichtmann. They went to Saks Fifth Avenue, where Schlichtmann selected a lucky new tie. It was red and made of silk and cost sixty-five dollars, which Gordon put on the credit card.

Of all the many omens, the most telling occurred at dinner that night. They took a cab uptown to a fine new Italian restaurant named Elio’s. Schlichtmann had the maître d’ select their meals. Their waiter, a young Italian who spoke English with the thick accent of a newly arrived immigrant, was eager to please. At the end of the meal, pondering the matter of a tip, Gordon called the waiter over. “Are you lucky?” he asked the waiter.

The waiter grinned affably and said yes.

“How lucky?”

The waiter weighed this question. He said he’d bought stock in an electronics company three months ago and sold it yesterday at a fifteen-hundred-dollar profit.

This amazed Gordon. The waiter, it seemed, barely spoke English. “No kidding? You play the stock market? Have you ever heard of W. R. Grace?”

“W. R. Grace?” The waiter looked at the ceiling, mouth pursed in concentration. “Yes, yes, they got some kind of problem in Massachusetts.” The waiter had difficulty twisting his tongue around Massachusetts. “They made the water … polluted?… and killed some kids. Six kids, I think.”

At this, Schlichtmann leaped up with a cry, knocking his chair over. Gordon jumped up, too, and hugged the waiter around the shoulders like a lost friend. In an instant, Conway and Crowley and Phillips and Kiley were all standing, shaking hands and congratulating the waiter, who looked pleased but puzzled. The other patrons, engaged in noisy and convivial conversation, suddenly grew hushed and turned to look at the group of men causing a commotion.

Gordon decided the waiter must be a harbinger of great success. Luck traveled in strange and mysterious circuits. Gordon left an exceedingly generous tip, hoping that it would enable them to tap into the waiter’s circuit of luck.

The next morning at a quarter to ten, Schlichtmann and Conway, Gordon and Phillips, the negotiating team, departed for W. R. Grace’s corporate headquarters, leaving Kiley and Crowley at the Helmsley. They walked out of the dark, air-conditioned lobby of the Helmsley into the bright summer sunshine. They crossed Fifth Avenue, and it was then that Schlichtmann realized he did not know the address of the Grace Building. Gordon said he thought it was on Sixth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, three blocks away. They walked briskly. At the corner of Forty-eighth Street, Gordon peered at the tall buildings, looking for the Grace corporate logo. They stood on the corner, perplexed. Schlichtmann asked a passerby for directions to W. R. Grace, but the pedestrian shrugged helplessly.

Conway laughed, a bitter, mirthless laugh. They expected Grace to give them twenty-five million dollars and they couldn’t even find the building. As omens went, it was a very bad one indeed.

Gordon finally went into the lobby of an office building and checked the address in a phone book: forty-third Street and Sixth Avenue. Five long blocks away, and they were already late. Back on the street, they tried without success to hail a cab. They started walking again. It was only midmorning, but in their dark suits and the furnace
heat and humidity of New York in August, they began to perspire. Sweat ran in rivulets down Schlichtmann’s neck and stained the front of his shirt. Gordon took out his handkerchief and wiped his plump face. “God, I hate to sweat,” he said.

At the Helmsley Palace, Kiley and Crowley paced and looked at their watches, announcing the time to each other. The television droned in the background, the muted sounds of one morning talk show following another.

“A quarter of one,” intoned Kiley. The negotiators had been gone almost three hours and Kiley began to hope that the settlement was at hand. “What are you going to do with all the dough to keep it away from Jan?” he asked Crowley.

“We have to put him on a salary,” replied Crowley. “There’s got to be some kind of policy.”

At that moment the door opened and Schlichtmann walked into the suite. He stopped in the middle of the room, his hands on his hips, his suit jacket opened. He looked at Kiley and Crowley, a level gaze, and said in a neutral, uninflected voice, as if he was simply reporting a fact: “They offered six point six million, take it or leave it.”

Gordon, his face flushed, his hair in disarray, followed Schlichtmann into the room. He sat at the dining table. “It was one of the most depressing times of my entire life,” he announced. He looked up at Kiley and gave him a pained smile. “The only good thing, Tom, is you should be glad you weren’t there. They had a pot of terrible coffee, some stale pastries wrapped in napkins, and paper plates. They didn’t even offer us lunch.”

Conway and Phillips came into the suite a few minutes later. Everyone was standing, facing each other in a loose circle, except for Gordon, who slumped at the table.

“They were very hostile,” Conway told Kiley and Crowley. “Eustis was a different person today. He blamed us for not settling before all the publicity. ‘If you’d settled then, you’d be rich men,’ he said. ‘Now you can recover your costs and you’ll be famous.’ ”

“Keating was there,” said Gordon from the table. “But he hardly said a word. It all went downhill fast. We tried everything we could to keep it alive. I don’t think we missed a step.”

Schlichtmann took off his suit jacket and stood at the window, staring out at the city. “It’s too bad they terminated the discussion.”

“They did it by the book,” said Phillips. “Those bastards,” he added, muttering under his breath.

“They’re not bastards,” said Schlichtmann, still looking out the window. “It’s the jury. For whatever reason, I lost them. They’re willing to support the system.”

Gordon looked over at Kiley and Crowley. “Jan was so
fucking
good today. I’ve never seen him better. He brought tears to Eustis’s eyes when he told him what Patrick Toomey went through before he died. Eustis said, ‘It’s a terrible thing, but money can’t bring the boy back.’ Then he turned to Jan, almost like a father giving advice, and said, ‘It’s not worth it to go for broke. You can go to trial and risk losing it all. Or you can put a notch in your belt now and have plenty of business.’ Eustis said six point six million dollars is a lot of money. ‘You can declare victory with that.’ ”

Schlichtmann walked over to the table where Gordon sat. He picked an apple out of a basket of fruit, courtesy of the Helmsley, and bit into it. There was a bottle of wine in the fruit basket, too. He picked up the bottle and studied the label.

Gordon watched him. “It’s been an interesting case, a learning experience. I don’t feel nearly as egotistical as I used to.”

Schlichtmann gave a short, abrupt laugh. “I concur with that.”

From across the room, Kiley said, “We’ve got a problem, Jan. I think you’re ethically bound to tell the families about the offer. You’ve got a gross of almost a million dollars a family.”

“We’ve got a problem,” agreed Schlichtmann. “The judge is going to start eliminating families on September fifth, beginning with the Zonas. Then he’ll try to get rid of the Kanes and Anne Anderson. He can destroy us.”

“We’ve got to act fast,” said Kiley. “Let’s be realistic. Can we get ten million dollars and get out?”

“The case is over,” said Conway with finality, hitching up his pants and walking in worried circles. “Our big win was the waiter last night.”

Silence descended upon the group. They sat and paced around the garish hotel suite, with its satiny, rose-colored wallpaper and fake Louis Quinze chairs with gilded arms. Outside the window the city looked golden in the sunshine.

“Those bastards,” murmured Phillips again.

Schlichtmann sighed deeply. “I guess I got a choice. Using all my intelligence, do I see this case as hopeless? If I do, then I have to grab whatever money I can for the families. And a fee as a whoremongering attorney. But I’ll never allow my own financial pressure to rule what happens to the case.”

Kiley scoffed at this. “Do you have an obligation to lose your house, ruin your health, your career, your mental outlook for this case? It boils down to dollars and cents, Jan. That’s what this is all about. You can get half a million dollars for these families and they can send their kids to college. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. To get half a million dollars in the hands of these people, that’s significant.”

Schlichtmann opened the bottle of wine in the fruit basket and took a sip. He wet his lips and took another sip. “Good wine,” he said.

Conway said, “Jan, win or lose, we’ve got to get this case behind us. We’ve gone as far as we can go. It’s over. It’s done.”

Schlichtmann stood at the window and gazed out over the city. He seemed to have left the discussion and gone somewhere else in his mind.

Kiley spoke to his back. He reminded Schlichtmann that when they flew back from New York a week ago, the day of the
Good Morning America
show, Donna Robbins could not even pay for the cab to Woburn. “This is a lot of money to these people. You think they’ll look at this as a loss? Half a million dollars?”

“It’s hopeless, absolutely hopeless,” said Conway, his tie askew, his mouth set in a deep crease. “We cannot go to a verdict with this jury. You know that as well as I do, Jan. We can’t even go until September fifth because of the potential for the judge to destroy it all. It’s over, Jan.”

Schlichtmann, still at the window, didn’t respond.

Gordon looked at Phillips. “Is it over, Mark?”

“Uh-huh,” said Phillips quietly. “Jan, the judge cut your balls off. There’s nothing you can do about that. We’re surrounded. It’s Pork Chop Hill.”

“What happened at Pork Chop Hill?” asked Gordon.

“They got wiped out.”

“Yeah,” said Schlichtmann turning back to the group. “But they held the hill.”

Gordon sighed. “What the fuck are we going to do? Do we have a medical causation case or not?”

“They proved medical causation in Velisicol,” said Schlichtmann, referring to a recent decision in a Tennessee case involving residents who lived near a toxic waste dump and claimed a variety of health problems.

Kiley laughed harshly. “They had three hundred thousand barrels of shit. The stuff was oozing out of their pores in Velisicol.”

“We had six barrels at Grace,” said Gordon sadly, “and two of them were empty.”

Schlichtmann laughed so hard that the wine he’d just sipped spewed from his lips. Conway looked at him, startled, and then Conway laughed, too. In a moment, Phillips joined in, and then Kiley. Everyone was laughing, a convulsing, cathartic uproar of laughter that lasted for a minute or more.

“So,” said Schlichtmann at last, wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes, “we got blinded by greed. Nothing wrong with that. It’s our motivating factor. That, and the historical aspect. This was a political case. If it had just been a personal injury case, it would have settled a long time ago.”

“Do you know what you want to do?” asked Conway, hoping Schlichtmann would agree that it was over, hoping he would settle the case and get it out of their lives.

Schlichtmann considered this for a moment. “Nobody is in more pain than me,” he said at last. “Nobody wants to end it more than I do. But I’m not going to let it end just because I’m in pain.”

Phillips said, “Would you take fifteen million right now?”

“Sure,” replied Schlichtmann.

“What bullshit!” cried Kiley. “We almost had a fistfight over these numbers. At fifteen million it’s a political cause and at eight million it’s a personal injury case?”

“So what do we do between now and September fifth?” Conway asked. “I don’t mean paying the bills. I mean the work, the experts. Do we go ahead with that?”

“We’ve got problems,” said Gordon. “There’s the office staff. People’s lives are at stake. We got to prepare for phase two. We can’t negotiate without being prepared. Things are not black and white.”

Phillips grimaced at Gordon. “Don’t get philosophical on me now. It’s out of character.”

But Gordon hadn’t finished his litany. “The fucking computers are going to be repossessed on Monday.”

Schlichtmann looked at Gordon with genuine surprise. “Really?” he said.

Gordon nodded. “Does unemployment insurance cover people who’ve been laid off?”

“Have we been paying it?” asked Conway.

Gordon shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Conway said, “Even eliminating the office staff doesn’t solve our problems. We’ll still have to pay for transcripts.”

“Are we in fucking fantasy land or not?” said Gordon. “No payroll taxes have been paid at all.”

Schlichtmann said quietly, “It would have been better if they hadn’t made us any offer.”

Conway went into the bedroom to pack. After a few moments Schlichtmann followed him into the room, still carrying the glass of wine. Conway hefted his suitcase on the bed and took off his suit jacket and folded it. Schlichtmann, his arms crossed, leaned against the door and watched him, saying nothing.

“It’s over, Jan,” said Conway as he packed. “If we go on, it will destroy us all. We’ve got to stop it now.”

Schlichtmann still didn’t say anything. He shrugged and then turned and left.

Conway watched him go. He knew the case wasn’t over until Schlichtmann said it was. When Schlichtmann was out of earshot, Conway said, “He’s willing to take everything a step further than anybody else. God knows, he loves the edges. If he decides to go to trial, I’ll be there. But I hope he doesn’t. God, I hope he doesn’t.”