Big Law (5 page)

I
PUSHED OPEN MY
office door, nearly hitting Sadir, who was sprawled out on the floor, looking like a corpse and smelling like one that had been there for days.

“Mackenzie!” Sadir jumped to his feet. “Shit, is it morning already?” He snorted and snuffled as he raked his sleeve across his nose. Then he rubbed his bloodshot eyes and attempted to smooth down his hair, which was sticking up after being mushed against a pile of files used as a makeshift pillow.

“Yuuuup. Morning time,” I answered with a hint of annoyance, placing my bag on the floor, slipping off my coat and hanging it on the back of the door before taking a seat at my desk. I was used to Sadir sleeping in the office, but this morning I found the sight a little … repulsive.

“Looong night.” He let out a guttural sigh, stumbling to his seat. “Reallllly long night.” I could tell he wanted me to press for details, but I wasn’t going to take the bait. My mind was hazy from sleep deprivation and all I really wanted was to sip my latte and peacefully do some online shopping. Clicking open Outlook, I could hear Sadir running through his morning routine on the other side of the partition—eye drops, mouthwash swished ten times and spat out in the garbage can, and two spritzes of cologne. I knew what was coming next.

“Hey, did you hear the latest?” He popped his head over the partition.

“Nope,” I answered disinterestedly, scrolling through my email. Every morning Sadir offered up what he referred to as “the latest,” which gave the sense that he had some juicy tidbit of gossip, when in reality it was just the information he’d gathered on who was working on what, what deals had died, or whether one of F&D’s clients was in the
Wall Street Journal
that day. None of it fell into the category of “the latest,” but that didn’t stop Sadir.

“There’s a new deal being staffed. Wanna know the partner?” He paused before drawing out the name dramatically. “Saul Siever. Some poor associates will be sucked into his vortex of craziness today.”

“Really? That sucks.” I continued my daily script of responding enough not to be rude, but not enough to encourage him—then my mind caught up to what he’d just said. “Wait.” I suddenly felt my insides cramp, remembering Saul standing in the elevator when I stepped in at 6
P.M
. last night. I was just ducking out for a quick sushi dinner with Jason, a tiny present to myself for enduring the all-nighter and impressing Ben. Saul gave me an angry once-over as I resisted the urge to tell him I would be returning to the office in an hour (and that I’d just come off an all-nighter). Now, I was kicking myself for staying silent because Saul Siever, the craziest partner at F&D, thinks he saw me leave the office for the day before seven. In Biglaw that was akin to pulling the trigger four times in a game of Russian roulette, knowing you had two pulls left and one was the bullet. “
Who’s
staffing a new deal?” I stood up slowly, my heart pounding.

Before Sadir could answer, my desk phone trilled, filling our small office with a sound that I was certain got louder and louder with each ring. I took a moment to steel myself before I looked, but still felt like the wind had been knocked out of me when I saw the name on the caller ID: SAUL SIEVER.

Sadir’s eyes were wide. “Aren’t you going to get it?”

I nodded, saying a silent prayer that Saul had simply dialed the wrong extension, and tentatively picked up the phone.

“Come see me. I need you to do something for me,” the voice on the other end snarled, almost unintelligibly. Then he hung up. There was no “Hello, this is Saul Siever. Can you come to my office,
please?” Not even a chance for me to respond with an, “Okay, on my way.” Just dead air.

I felt my throat close up. After a moment of listening to the deafening silence, I pulled the receiver away and noticed my fingernails were digging into my palm, as I death-clutched that phone like it was the last piece of solid ground and if I let go I’d be washed away.

“Well?” Sadir looked at me expectantly.

Without responding, I fumbled around my messy desk frantically, picked up a legal pad, and hustled down the corridor of filing cabinets towards Saul’s corner office. There was no way I could work on a deal with Saul simultaneously with the Highlander deal. Ben specifically asked me to commit one hundred percent of my time.
Just tell Saul you’re too swamped to take on anything more
, I told myself firmly. I had two years of dealing with partners under my belt and knew what to expect: impatience, ingratitude, edginess, and the occasional threat of violence. I considered myself such an expert in the Biglaw partner personality that I could’ve tapped into my BA in psychology and written a book:
Fragile Male Egos with Napoleon Complexes and No Idea of Limits
by Mackenzie Corbett. Surely that meant I could handle Saul.

As I approached the corner office I could hear Saul’s voice raised, presumably on a conference call. “Listen, these motherfuckers think a buyout is their only fucking choice. That’s crystal fucking clear.” I stopped outside the door, suddenly too afraid to knock or go in. I felt like I had bricks in my shoes, unable to put one foot in front of the other.
Is this what it feels like to be paralyzed with fear?

Anna Perez, Saul’s latest secretary, glanced up from her computer. “You gotta show no fear, hon—just knock and go in.” She pointed a long, animal-printed fingernail at Saul’s door. I’m sure she was used to the sight of tentative associates making their first trip to see The Godfather. I grinned tightly and nodded. Taking a deep breath, I lifted my hand and knocked.

“Yeah?” Saul barked. I cautiously put my hand on the door handle, looked at Anna, who gave me a confirmatory nod, and pushed the door open.

Saul’s office was the size of a small apartment; its sweeping view stretched all the way up from Midtown to the tip of Central Park. In the middle of the room was an imposing desk, roughly the size of a large dining room table. Seated behind it, in an elevated chair that reminded me of a throne, was Saul. Pasty-faced and balding, he looked like the type of person that must have been stuffed in a locker multiple times in high school. He was skinny, with no muscle tone, and had a scrunched-up face that reminded me of a weasel. His dress shirt was so wrinkled it looked like it had been balled up on the floor before he picked it up, dusted it off, and put it on. He had two deep furrows between his eyebrows, the kind that implant themselves on a face after a lifetime of scowling, and his few wisps of hair flew crazily on his head. He glared up from his phone, regarded me with a mixture of disdain and contempt, then returned his focus to the call.

I took this as my cue and removed the pile of files resting on the chair across from him and sat down. Immediately, I felt like I was Alice in Wonderland, having just eaten the pill that made me smaller. I thought for a moment that it was the large, intimidating office that made me feel this way. Then I realized my seat was about six inches lower than Saul’s. The whole thing was designed to make me look and feel tiny. On the plus side, if you could call it that, my chair did afford the most amazing panoramic view of the park—you could see all the way up to the reservoir, not that Saul seemed to notice. He spent most of the day with his back to the view.

“We need them to continue to think their ship is sinking and we’re the last fucking life boat,” the voice on the other end of the speaker phone blared. “The last thing we need is any fucking media leaks making the stock go up giving these imbeciles a shred of hope.”

Sitting in on my first conference call, I’d been surprised at how much the clients swore. These were educated, grown men (and occasionally women), but they used the word “fuck” with the frequency most people reserved for adjectives. It was like being on a playground with a bunch of fifth graders who had just learned their first swear words. “Fuck” was used as a noun, a verb, and sometimes even a preposition. Some of the combinations they put together didn’t even make sense. “The fucking guy’s a fucking shit ass fuck.” “The
cock-sucking draft they sent us was fucking fucked.” Not exactly the most articulate way of describing things from these so-called titans of business. But our clients were large hedge funds and the people that worked there were known for being gritty and unrelenting. These were not people that came from old money, living off trust funds. No, these were guys who started with nothing and climbed, one hand over the other, all the way to the top, making millions in the process. Even though they had more money than ninety-nine percent of the population, they still had huge chips on their shoulders and rarely uttered a sentence without adding “fuck,” “shit,” “asshole,” or some combination of the three.

I was experiencing the strangest feeling sitting in Saul’s office. It was like being in a haunted house—I could almost feel the souls of former associates that Saul had crushed lingering around me. I shivered as I picked up my pen. Taking notes of this call was the least I could do for the unfortunate associate who would have to replace me on this deal when I told Saul I was too busy with Highlander.

“I hear you. I hear you.” Saul leaned into the speaker phone, nodding impatiently. “I can assure you this place is like Area 51. Nothing ever leaks. Look, I gotta bounce. We’ll get started and circle back tomorrow night.” He slammed his finger down on the “end call” button as the other line rang, and scribbled something down on a yellow sticky note.

I looked down at my notes. “Buyout. Confidential. Motivated seller—sinking ship.” The details of the transaction must have been discussed before I arrived. These notes were not going to be a big help when I passed them on.

“I assume you got all that.” His tone was almost accusatory.

I cleared my throat. “Unfortunately, Saul, I don’t think I’m going to be able to help on this transaction. I’m working on the Highlander deal and Ben said that it would take up one hundred percent of my time.” I tried to keep my tone even, but I noticed a tiny shake in my voice.

Saul folded his arms across his chest, glaring at me. His expression was unreadable and I briefly wondered if he was sizing me up to see if he could take me. Then, as if I hadn’t even spoken, he said,
“The relevant documents are on my secretary’s desk. Copy them and get up to speed. Get me a bid letter and document request list by tonight.” He returned his attention to his computer, signaling the end of our conversation.

Back in my office, I pressed the heels of my palms hard against my eyes. How was I possibly going to balance surviving a Saul deal with impressing Ben? And why weren’t there any other associates on the deal? A small deal usually had at least two corporate associates working on it. A large deal could have more than ten assigned. It was one thing to be on a deal with Saul—that was bad enough, but to be the ONLY one on the deal with him? That meant no buffer between me and Saul. I’d be the only one for him to abuse.

I picked up the phone and called the one person who could help. Jason might sympathize, but not being in the corporate department, he had no idea of the implications of being put on a deal with Saul. The partners in the Trusts department might as well have been Birkenstock wearing, tie-dye clad, dreadlocked, hacky sack–playing hippies sitting around holding hands around a campfire singing kumbaya compared to the partners in the corporate department.

“Nooooooo! Oh, man, you’re screwed—he’s going to eat you alive!” Alex wailed.

I sighed impatiently into the phone. “I’ve worked for Maxwell before, remember?” Maxwell was certainly no picnic. He believed associates should be treated like soldiers and routinely employed the tricks of psychological warfare he’d learned during his ten years in the Israeli army. Except instead of trying to gain information from a prisoner of war or get an enemy to surrender, he used these tactics to get his associates to work harder, stay later, and never EVER make a mistake.

“Please,” Alex scoffed. “Maxwell is a kitten compared to Saul.”

I suppressed a shudder. “Okay, then fill me in on what I need to know before working for him.”

“Let’s see. Well, he likes to drink the tears of sobbing associates.”

“Ha, ha. You know what I mean. Like, he’s best to deal with in the morning, he’ll freak out if you don’t print out his documents double-sided …” I tried to tap into my repertoire of partner idiosyncrasies.
“Doesn’t want you to refer to him by his first name? Doesn’t want you to eat meat while working for him? You know, just one of those strange quirks that all partners seem to have … anything like that?”

He cleared his throat and lowered his voice. “Listen, and understand. Saul is out there. He can’t be bargained with, he can’t be reasoned with, he doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

Had Alex lost his mind? After a beat of silence I remembered. “Umm … is that a line from
Terminator 2
?”

“Yes, but it is surprisingly appropriate in this situation.”

“As helpful as your 90’s movie knowledge has been …” My tone was clipped.

“Okay, okay …” His voice softened. “Listen, Mac, the only advice I can really give you is to repeat the following in your head: ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’”

Not helpful. At all.

I flipped through the pile of documents that Saul had provided and tried to make some sense of them. No matter how many times I looked at them, though, they still looked like a random compilation of corporate documents from various companies. There was an organizational chart of the employees for an entity called Falcon Mobility Inc., a few directors’ resolutions, and the bylaws of various entities. Were they subsidiaries of Falcon Mobility Inc.? It was impossible to tell. There was nothing in the documents to indicate which company was making the bid, what they were bidding on, or what the proposed terms were intended to be. And I would need to know whether our client was purchasing the stock or the assets. That detail was crucial to drafting a document request list.

I felt like I’d been dropped in the middle of the Sahara without a compass. Saul knew I’d only been there for the end of the call, and his directions had been so sparse, I’d just assumed the background material would be in the documents he provided.