Noble and forthright corporate lawyers with square, manly jaws contend with simian paralegals, body-snatchers, revenants, gently-used sandwiches, and sentient and often malicious office equipment. Studs Terkel meets M. R. James meets P. G. Wodehouse. Dead lawyers abound. "While sitting at my secretarial station in the hall late one afternoon, I heard a roar from the overgrown office, Mad Wood's office. Tendrils of creeper vines continued their inexorable growth out the door, and, more impressively, several leather-bound records of old transactions flew from the office, coming within lamentable inches of braining McCartney as he sauntered provocatively past. Wood, Mad Wood, came roaring after them. "GEROFMILAM " bellowed the nearly naked figure. He had lost his grasp of language years ago. He was clad, as per his custom, only in the tattered remnants of a pair of khakis, now ripped away up to the knees, and the overflow of his tangled blond beard, which came down to his waist. McCartney fled. I watched as Wood, trembling still with rage, went to retrieve the volumes. Three had rebounded off the far wall and landed on the outside of the corridor, the side nearest Wood's office. These he gathered carefully, gently, plucking them from the rose bush in which they'd landed. A fourth, however, lay on the other side of the corridor. Wood edged his way to the center of the corridor, which was marked by a line of neon tape. Wood bent at the very edge of the tape, reaching for the book. It was inches past his outstretched fingers. He strained. He stretched. His weathered face reddened with exertion and concentration. He sank to one knee so he could reach further. His fingers inched closer.... "What's this? Litter in the halls, eh? Well, we can't have that. It's nasty, Wood, nasty." Portly, pink-faced Jenkins, dapper in a dark suit, kicked the book out of his reach with one wingtip. "Can you believe the slovenliness of some of our staff, Wood? It will have to go in the trash, I'm afraid." Jenkins beamed as he held the book up, still out of reach of the snarling Wood. "What is it, anyway? Oh, I see... The closing set for a billion-dollar public financing. I would have thought that would have had real sentimental value for someone. Still, anything left in the hall is trash. It's a pity, a real pity." Wood snarled and gnashed his teeth as Jenkins set the volume carefully in a steel trashcan on the inside part of the corridor. "If by chance I've thrown away something someone values," Jenkins continued, expounding to the world in general, "well, they've only to retrieve it from the trash before the girl comes by to empty it. Much neater, eh? Cleanliness, you'll find, Wood, is next to godliness." Pulling a pen from his pocket and ripping a sheet of paper from a pad on a nearby desk, he wrote out a note for the janitor, speaking aloud each letter as he wrote it. "B-A-S-U-R-A." Basura, the Spanish word for trash. Bellowing, Wood strained to reach the volume as he had before, approaching but not passing the line in the middle of the corridor. Now, however, the book was out of his reach by several feet. After several minutes of struggle and contortion he realized its futility. He collapsed back into his rose bush and wept. As he heard the wheels of the Albanian janitor's cart around the corner his weeping became desperate moans." Though I am by long-standing habit an observer rather than a participant in the lives of these lawyers, Wood's moans touched me. I fingered the thick envelope taped to the underside of my desk. The curious writing on it bore words I knew by heart: "In exchange for a kindness long owed and not yet paid." I resolved to act.
