New Amsterdam Bank & Trust v. Hanover v. Stiver Jury trial.

Ten a.m. No continuance.

He looked at his watch. "Let's talk again tomorrow. But we should keep our distance when we're at the firm. If anybody asks tell them you're helping me with some year-end billing problems."

"But who'd ask? Who'd even know?"

He laughed and seemed to consider this a naive comment. "How's the Vista Hotel at nine-thirty?"

"Sure."

"If I call you at home I can leave a message, can't I?"

"I've got an answering machine."

"No, I mean, there won't be anybody else there to pick it up, right? I heard you lived alone."

She hesitated momentarily and said only, "You can leave messages there."

"I have a breakfast meeting in half an hour then the partnership meeting for the rest of the morning," Wendall Clayton said into the phone. "Get me the details as soon as possible."

"I'll do what I can, Wendall," Sean Lillick, a young paralegal who worked for Clayton regularly, replied uneasily. "But it's, like, pretty confidential."

"'Like' confidential. It is confidential or not?"

A sigh from the other end of the phone line. "You know what I mean."

The partner muttered, "You meant it is confidential. Well, find out who has the information and aristocratize them. I want the particulars. Which you might just have found out before you called. You'd know I'd want them."

"Sure, Wendall," Lillick said.

The partner dropped the phone into the cradle.

Wendall Clayton was a handsome man. Not big – under six feet – but solid from running (he didn't jog, he ran) and tennis and skippering the forty-two-foot Ginny May around Newport every other weekend from April through September. He had a thick bundle of professorial hair and he wore European suits, slitless in the back, forgoing the burdened sacks of dark pinstripe that cloaked most of the pear-shaped men of the firm. Killer looks, the women in the firm said. Another three inches and he could have been a model. Clayton worked hard at his image, the way nobility worked hard. A duke had to be handsome. A duke enjoyed dusting his suits with pig-bristle brushes and getting a radiant glow on his burgundy-colored Bally's.

A duke took great pleasures in the small rituals of fastidiousness.

Aristocratize them.

Sometimes Clayton would write the word in the margin of a memo one of his associates had written. Then watch the girl or boy, flustered, trying to pronounce it Ar-is-TOC-ra-tize he'd made up the term himself. It had to do with attitude mostly. Much of it was knowing the law, of course, and much was circumstance.

But mostly it was attitude.

Clayton practiced often and he was very good at it.

He hoped Sean Lillick would, in turn, be good at aristocratizing some underling in the steno department to get the information he wanted.

By searching through the correspondence files, time sheets and limousine and telephone logs the young paralegal had learned that Donald Burdick had recently attended several very secretive meetings and made a large number of phone calls during firm hours that had not been billed to any clients. This suggested to Clayton that Burdick was plotting something that could jeopardize the merger. That might not be the case, of course, his dealings could be related to some private business plans that Burdick or his Lucrezia Borgia of a wife, Vera, were involved in. But Clayton hadn't gotten to his present station in life by assuming that unknown maneuverings of his rivals were benign.

Hence, his sending Lillick off on the new mission to find out the details.

The Tuesday morning light filtered into his office, the corner office, located on the firm's executive row, the seventeenth floor. The room measured twenty-seven by twenty – a size that by rights should have gone to a partner more senior than Clayton. When it fell vacant, however, the room was assigned to him. Even Donald Burdick never found out why.

Clayton glanced at the Tiffany nautical clock on his desk. Nearly time. He rocked back in his chair, his throne, a huge construction of oak and red leather he had bought in England for two thousand pounds.

Aristocratize.

He ordered his secretary to have his car brought around. He rose, donned his suit jacket and left the office. The breakfast get-together he was about to attend was perhaps the most important of any meeting he'd been to in the past year. But Clayton didn't go immediately to the waiting car. Rather, he decided he'd been a bit harsh on the young man and wandered down to Lillick's cubicle in the paralegal department to personally thank the young man and tell him a generous bonus would be forthcoming.

"You ever been here, Wendall?" the man across the burnished copper table asked.

When Clayton spoke, however, it was to the captain of the Carleton Hotel on Fifty-ninth Street, off Fifth Avenue. "The nova, Frederick?"

"No, Mr. Clayton." The captain shook his head. "Not today."

"Thanks. I'll have my usual."

"Very good, Mr. Clayton."

"Well, that answers my question," John Perelli said with an explosive laugh. "How's the yogurt today, Freddie?"

"That's a joke," Perelli barked. "Gimme a bowl. Dry wheat toast and a fruit cup."

"Yessir, Mr. Perelli."

Perelli was stocky and dark, with a long face. He wore a navy pinstripe suit.

Clayton shot his cuffs, revealing eighteen-karat-Wedgwood cuff links, and said, "I feel, in answer to your question, right at home here."

Though this was not completely true Recently Wendall Clayton had been coming to this dining room – where many of Perelli's partners breakfasted and lunched – to make inroads into Midtown. Yet this was not his natural turf, which had always been Wall Street, upper Fifth Avenue, his weekend house in Redding, Connecticut, his ten-room cabin in Newport.

Clayton had a stock portfolio worth around twenty-three million (depending on how the Gods of the Dow were feeling at any particular moment). Hanging on the oak paneling in his Upper East Side den were a Picasso, three Klees, a Mondrian, a Magritte. He drove a Jaguar and a Mercedes station wagon. Yet his wealth was of the hushed, Victorian sort a third inherited, a third earned at the practice of law (and cautious investment of the proceeds), the rest from his wife.

But here, in Midtown, he was surrounded by a different genre of money. It was loud money. Acquired from new wellsprings. This money was from media, from advertising, from public relations, from junk bonds, from leveraged buyouts, from alligator spreads and dividend-snatching. Commission money. Sales money. Real estate money. Italian money. Jewish money. Japanese money.

Claytons wealth was money with cobwebs and therefore it was, ironically, suspect – at least around here. In this part of town, when it came to wealth the slogan was the more respectable, the less acceptable.

He tried not to give a damn. Yet here Clayton felt as if he were "without passport," the phrase whose acronym gave rise to the derisive term for Italians. Wendall Clayton in Midtown was an immigrant in steerage.

"So why the call, Wendall?" Perelli asked.

Clayton replied, "We need to move faster. I'm trying to accelerate the vote on the merger."

"Faster? Why?"

"The natives are restless."

Perelli barked, "What does that mean? I don't know what it means. That your people wanta go forward or that Burdick and his cronies trying to fuck the deal?"

"A little bit of both."

"What's Donald doing? Setting up an office in DC and London to goose up your operating expense?"

"Something like that. I'm finding out," Clayton conceded with a nod.

The waiter set the plates on the table. Clayton hunched over the soft mounds of eggs and ate hungrily, cutting the food into small bites.