Dale left for ten minutes and returned. Probably a bathroom break. He bet she kept the meter running.

Lunch was in the firm cafeteria on the forty-third floor. Much had been made about the high quality of the food. Great chefs consulted, the freshest ingredients used, a dazzling menu of light dishes, and so on. They were free to leave the building and go to a restaurant, but few associates dared. The firm’s policies were prominently published and distributed, but there were many unwritten rules; one was that the rookies ate in-house unless a client could be billed for a real lunch. Many of the partners used the cafeteria as well. It was important for them to be seen by their underlings, and to brag about the great food, and, most important, to eat in thirty minutes as an example of efficiency. The decor was art deco and nicely done, but the ambience was still reminiscent of a prison mess hall.

There was a clock on every wall, and you could almost hear them ticking.

Kyle and Dale joined Tim Reynolds at a small table near a vast window with a spectacular view of other tall buildings. Tim appeared to be shell-shocked — glazed eyes, vapid stare, weak voice. They swapped stories of the horrors of Document Review and began joking about their departures from the legal profession. The food was good, though lunch was not about eating. Lunch was now an excuse to get away from the documents.

But it didn’t last long. They agreed to meet after work for a drink, Dale’s first sign of life, then headed back to their respective dungeons. Two hours later, Kyle was hallucinating and flashing back to the glory days at Yale when he edited the prestigious law journal from his own office and managed dozens of other very bright students. His long hours led to a product, an important journal that was published eight times a year and read widely by lawyers and judges and scholars. His name was first on the masthead as editor in chief. Few students were so honored with such a title. For one year, he was the Man.

How had he fallen so fast and so hard?

It’s just part of the boot camp, he kept telling himself. Basic training.

But what a waste! Placid, its shareholders, its creditors, and probably the American taxpayers would get stuck with the legal fees, fees being racked up in part by the now-halfhearted efforts of one Kyle McAvoy, who, after reviewing nine of the thirty-five thousand files, was convinced that his firm’s client should be locked away in prison. The CEO, the managers, the board of directors — all of them. You can’t jail a corporation, but an exception should be made for every employee who ever worked at Placid Mortgage.

What would John McAvoy think if he could see his son? Kyle laughed and shuddered at the thought. The verbal abuse would be funny and cruel, and at that moment Kyle would accept it without firing back. At that moment, his father was either in his office counseling a client through a problem or in a courtroom mixing it up with another lawyer. Regardless, he was with real people in real conversations, and life was anything but dull.

Dale was seated fifty feet away with her back to him. It was a nice back, as far as he could tell, trim and curvy. He could see nothing else at the moment but had already examined the other parts — slim legs, narrow waist, not much of a chest, but then you can’t have everything. What would happen, he reckoned, if (1) he slowly, over the next few days and weeks, put the move on her, (2) he was successful, and (3) he made sure they got caught? He’d be bounced from the firm, which at that moment seemed like a great idea. What would Bennie say about that? An ugly, involuntary dismissal from Scully & Pershing? Every young man has the right to chase women, and if you get caught, well, so what? At least you got fired for something worthwhile.

Bennie would lose his spy. His spy would get the boot without getting disbarred.

Interesting.

Of course, with his luck, there would probably be another video, this one of Kyle and Dale, and Bennie would get his dirty hands on it, and, well, who knows?

Kyle mulled these things over at $300 an hour. He didn’t think about turning off the meter, because he wanted Placid to bleed.

He had learned that Dale earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at the age of twenty-five, from MIT no less, and that she had taught for a few years before deciding that the classroom was boring. She studied law at Cornell. Why she thought she could make the transition from the classroom to the courtroom was not clear, at least not to Kyle. Right now a class of struggling geometry students would seem like a parade. She was thirty years old, never married, and he had just begun the task of trying to unravel her withdrawn and complicated personality.

He stood to go for a walk, something to get the blood pumping into his stultified brain. “You want some coffee?” he asked Dale.

“No, thanks,” she said, and actually smiled.

Two cups of strong coffee did little to stimulate his mind, and by late afternoon Kyle began to worry about permanent brain damage.

To be on the safe side, he and Dale decided to wait until 7:00 p.m. before checking out. They left together, rode the elevator down without a word, both thinking the same thought — they were violating another of the unwritten rules by leaving so early. But they shook it off and walked four blocks to an Irish pub where Tim Reynolds had secured a booth and was almost finished with his first pint. He was with Everett, a first-year from NYU who’d been assigned to the commercial real estate practice group. After they sat down and got themselves situated, they pulled out their FirmFones. All four were on the table, much like loaded guns.

Dale ordered a martini. Kyle ordered a club soda, and when the waiter disappeared, Tim said, “You don’t drink?”

“No. I had to quit in college.” It was Kyle’s standard line, and he knew all of the follow-ups it would provoke.

“You had to quit?”

“Yep. I was drinking too much, so I quit.”

“Rehab, AA, all that stuff?” Everett asked.

“No. I saw a counselor, and he convinced me that the drinking would only get worse. I went cold turkey and have never looked back.”

“That’s awesome,” Tim said as he drained the pint of ale.

“I don’t drink either,” Dale said. “But after today, I’m hitting the bottle.” From someone with absolutely no sense of humor, this declaration was quite funny. After a good laugh, they settled into a rehash of their first day. Tim had billed 8.6 hours reading the legislative history of an old New York law aimed at discouraging class action lawsuits. Everett had billed 9 hours reading leases. But Kyle and Dale won the game with their descriptions of the dungeon and its thirty-five thousand files.

When their drinks arrived, they toasted Placid Mortgage and the 400,000 foreclosures it had precipitated. They toasted Tabor, who had vowed to stay at his desk until midnight. They toasted Scully & Pershing and its wonderful beginning salaries. Halfway through the martini, the gin hit Dale’s mushy brain and she began giggling. When she ordered a second, Kyle excused himself and walked home.

AT 5:30 ON Tuesday, Kyle was wrapping up his second day in the dungeon and mentally drafting his letter of resignation. He would happily tell Bennie to go to hell, and he would happily face Elaine and her rape claim in a courtroom in Pittsburgh. Anything would be better than what he was enduring.

He had survived the day by continually repeating the mantra “But they’re paying me $200,000 a year.”

But by 5:30, he didn’t care what they were paying him. His FirmFone pinged with an e-mail, from Doug Peckham, and it read, “Kyle, need some help. My office. Now if possible.”

He forgot his letter of resignation, jumped to his feet, and bolted for the door. To Dale he said as he dashed by, “Gotta run see Doug Peckham, a litigation partner. He’s got a project.” If this sounded cruel, then so be it. If it was boasting, he didn’t care. She looked shocked and wounded, but he left her there, all alone in the Placid dungeon. He ran down two flights of stairs and was out of breath when he walked through Peckham’s open door. The partner was on the phone, standing, fidgeting, and he waved Kyle into a fine leather chair across from his desk. When he signed off with a “You’re a moron, Slade, a true moron,” he looked at Kyle, forced a smile, and said, “So how’s it going so far?”