"Paralegal, actually." Taylor smiled and said to the girl pleasantly, "You look like Alice."

"Huh?"

" Alice in Wonderland. It's one of my favorite books."

The girl shrugged and returned to the oblivion of her music.

Dudley wondered what this woman wanted. Had he given her some work? An assignment?

"I'd like to ask you something."

"What's that?"

"You went to Yale Law School, didn't you?"

"That's right, I did."

"I'm thinking of applying there."

Dudley felt a bit of alarm. He hadn't quite graduated, despite what he'd told the firm, and so couldn't exactly send a letter of recommendation for her.

But she added, "My application and letters and everything're in. I just want to know a little about the school I'm trying to decide between there and Harvard and NYU."

Relieved, Dudley said, "Oh, I went there before you were born. I don't think anything I'd have to tell you would be much help."

"Well, somebody here said you helped them decide to go to law school, that you were very helpful. I was sort of hoping you could spare a half hour or so."

Dudley felt the pleasure he always did at even minor adulation like this. "Tonight?"

She said, "I was thinking tomorrow night maybe After work? I could take you out to dinner."

A woman taking a man out to dinner? Dudley was nearly offended.

The paralegal added, "Unless you have plans."

He did, of course – plans he wouldn't miss. But that was at 10 P.M. He said, "I'm busy later in the evening. But how would seven be?" A charming smile. "I'll take you to my club."

Junie of the selective hearing said, "Like, Poppie, you told me they didn't let women in there."

Dudley said to her, "That's only as members, honey." To Taylor he said, "Come by tomorrow at six, we'll take a cab uptown." Then, calculating the taxi fare, he added, "No, actually a subway would be better. That time of day, traffic is terrible."

"Now he's going after the clients."

Donald Burdick knotted the silk tie carefully with his long fingers He liked the feel of good cloth, the way it yielded yet was tough. Tonight, though, the smooth texture gave him little pleasure.

"First he rams through the accelerated vote and now I hear he's targeting the clients."

"The clients," Vera Burdick repeated, nodding. "We should've thought of that." She sat at her dressing table in the bedroom of their Park Avenue co-op, rubbing prescription retin-A cream on her neck. She wore a red and black silk dress, which revealed pale freckled skin along the unzipped V in the back. She was leaning forward studiously, watching the cream disappear.

A resolute woman, in her early sixties, she'd battled age by making tactical concessions. She gave up tanning fifteen years ago and carefully gained a little weight, refusing to join in the dieting obsession of many of her friends, who were now knobby scarecrows. She let her hair go white but she kept it shiny with Italian conditioner and wore it pulled back in the same style as her granddaughter. She'd allowed herself one face-lift and had flown to Los Angeles to have a particular Beverly Hills surgeon perform the operation.

She was now as she'd always been attractive, reserved, stubborn, quiet. And virtually as powerful as the two men who'd influenced her life – her father and Donald Burdick, her husband of thirty-two years. Arguably she was more powerful in some ways than each of these men because people were always on guard with the masters of Wall Street, like Donald Burdick, but tended to get careless around women and be too chatty, to give away secrets, to reveal weaknesses.

Burdick sat on the bed. His wife offered her back and he carefully zipped up the dress and hooked the top eyele. The partner continued, "Clayton's moving against them. It's pretty clever, I have to admit. While Bill Stanley and Lamar and I've been taking on as much debt as we can to poison the merger. Wendall's been spending time with the clients, trying to convince them to pressure the partners at the firm to support the merger."

Vera too felt admiration for what Wendall was doing. Although a firm's clients have no official vote in firm affairs they ultimately pay the bills and accordingly can exert astonishing influence over which way the partners vote. She'd often said that if clients unionized against law firms it would be time for her husband to find a new line of work.

"How's he doing it?" she asked, curious to learn his technique.

"Probably promising big discounts in legal fees if they support the merger. Those that still don't go along with him – my clients or Bill's, the ones who won't support the merger in any case – we're afraid he's going to sabotage."

"Sabotage. Oh, my. What's the vote so far?"

"It's closer than it should be."

"You've got the long-term lease with Rothstem, right?" Vera asked. "That should slow him up some. When are you signing it?"

"Friday or the weekend," he answered glumly.

"Not till then?" She winced.

"I know," he said. "The fastest they could get the papers together. But it's okay – Clayton doesn't know anything about it. Then I've been talking to Steve Nordstrom."

"At McMillan Holdings," Vera recalled. "Your biggest client Steve's the chief financial officer, right?"

A nod. "I'm closer to him than I am to Ed Gliddick, the CEO I'm going to get them to lobby some of the other partners against the merger."

"And Steve'll agree?"

"I'm sure he will. Gliddick's in charge. But he listens to Steve. Wendall doesn't know about that either I've been excruciatingly discreet I…"

Burdick realized that he sounded desperate and hated the tone of his voice. Then he glanced at his wife, who was gazing at him with a savvy smile on her face. "We can do it," she said. "Clayton's not in our league, dear."

"Neither was that cobra on vacation last year. That doesn't mean he's not dangerous."

"But look what happened to it."

Hiking in Africa, Burdick had accidentally stepped on the snake in the brush. It had puffed out its hood and prepared to strike. Vera had taken its head off with a swipe of a sharp machete.

Burdick found his teeth clenched. "Wendall just doesn't understand what Wall Street law practice is. He's crude, he bullies. He has affairs."

"Irrelevant." She began on her makeup.

"Oh, I think it is relevant. I'm talking about the survival of the firm. Wendall doesn't have vision. He doesn't understand what Hubbard, White is, what it should be."

"And how do you define 'should be'?"

Touché, Burdick thought. He grinned involuntarily. "All right, what I've made it. Bill and Lamar and I. Wendall wants to turn the firm into a mill. Into a big merger-and-acquisition house."

"Every generation has its own specialties. That's very profitable work." She set down the blush. "I'm not justifying him, darling. I'm only saying we should stay focused. We can't make logical arguments against the nature of the legal work he wants the new firm to handle. We have to remember that the risk is that as part of the merger he's going to burn the firm to the ground and then sow the ashes with salt. That's why we have to stop him."

She was, as usual, right. He reached for her hand but the phone rang and he walked to the nightstand to answer it.

Burdick took the call and listened in dismay as Bill Stanley's gruff voice delivered the message. He hung up and looked at his wife, who stared at him, clearly alarmed by his drawn expression.

"He's done it again."

"Clayton?'

Burdick sighed and nodded. He walked to the window and gazed outside into the trim, windswept courtyard. "There's a problem with the St Agnes case."

Donald Burdick's oldest and second-most-lucrative client was Manhattan 's St Agnes Hospital. It had recently been sued for malpractice and Fred LaDue, a litigation partner, was handling the trial, which was in its fourth day now.