The Chrysalis (6 page)

eight

NEW YORK CITY, PRESENT DAY

F
OR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, MARA RETREATED INTO HER WORK.
She marginalized her other cases—tender offer litigation, a securities fraud action, a fiduciary breach class-action suit—and plunged into
Baum v. Beazley's
with single-minded intensity, almost as a way of apologizing to Michael, as if offering him a victory would serve as an ample act of contrition for what she withheld.

Michael aside, the
Baum
case was unusually demanding because of the intricacies of replevin law, the archaic civil law that governed the return of stolen property. The only way Mara could understand and detangle replevin's latticelike web was to hole up in the law library, neglected by most associates since the advent of computer research, and pore through its disused treatises. Ignoring the firmwide paging system bellowing out her name from time to time, she studied the dusty tomes, learning that the most straightforward way for her to win a replevin case would be to find a gap in Hilda Baum's title. Although Mara hoped that she could gather enough material from Lillian to challenge the plaintiff's claim to title, she worried about her ability to create an entirely impenetrable defense on the title issue alone, given the staleness and unavailability of old wartime records.

After midnight one night, as she was downing her third cup of coffee and willing her eyes to stay open, she stumbled across a promising footnote in a treatise. It explained that, while replevin law stated that neither a thief nor any subsequent good-faith purchaser of a stolen piece of artwork could have legitimate title to it, certain cases placed restrictions on owners' abilities to get their artwork back by providing defendants with a particular type of defense called laches. Those cases required that owners hunt ceaselessly for their art before bringing a replevin suit, or the courts would deem the suit time-barred by the statute of limitations. Mara was elated. If she could persuade the judge to follow these cases, and if she could establish that Hilda Baum had waited too long to search for
The Chrysalis
or hadn't searched hard enough, and that this prejudiced her client, Mara could have an unassailable case.

But she needed to make sure the cases were as strong as the footnote implied. Mara tracked down the primary cases cited in it,
DeClerck v. McKenna,
a 1958 case from the New York appellate court. In
DeClerck,
the father of the German plaintiff had had a substantial art collection that included a Cézanne. The plaintiff inherited the Cézanne in 1925 and kept it in her home until 1942, when she sent the painting to her sister's estate in Austria for safekeeping. In 1945, an American soldier was quartered at her sister's, and after he left, the Cézanne vanished. The plaintiff immediately contacted several authorities, as well as her insurance carriers, to no avail. After these initial attempts, the plaintiff did not undertake any further efforts to locate the painting.

In the meantime, the Cézanne made its way onto the American art market, where a well-known American businessman purchased it in 1948 from an esteemed Boston gallery at a highly publicized auction. The businessman displayed the painting in several exhibitions in major museums around the country, each of which had glossy exhibition catalogs with pictures of the Cézanne.

When the plaintiff eventually brought suit, ten years after the painting surfaced, the court gave the painting to the businessman, on the grounds that the plaintiff had failed to exercise reasonable, timely diligence in trying to locate the painting. The plaintiff should have looked for the Cézanne in the decade following the war, especially through such obvious, readily available sources as the exhibition catalogs.

Though she realized she faced a serious challenge convincing the judge to adopt
DeClerck,
with the additional burden it would impose on Holocaust victim Hilda Baum, Mara was overjoyed with
DeClerck
and its progeny. Until she found the
Scaife
case.

In 1964, a Seurat painting was stolen from the Scaife Museum of Art in New York. The Scaife neither publicized the theft nor informed the authorities of it. In 1969, fully believing that they were good-faith purchasers of the painting, the Laurel family bought the Seurat from a prestigious New York art gallery. In 1986, when the Laurel family placed the Seurat up for public auction, the Scaife Museum discovered the painting and demanded it back.

Following along with the reasoning of
DeClerck,
in 1987, the lower New York court denied the museum's arguments in
Scaife
and granted the Laurels dismissal of the case. The court adopted the reasoning of
DeClerck
and found that the Scaife Museum did not act with reasonable diligence in trying to locate its stolen Seurat. But several months later, the appeals court reversed this decision by utilizing the unusual “demand and refusal” rule. The appeals court determined that a time limit for an action for the return of stolen property did not begin to run until the former owner located the stolen property, demanded its return, and was refused; it did not matter whether the former owner had exercised due diligence in searching for the property, only whether he or she did so in demanding its return once the property had been located. Since the Scaife Museum had just demanded the return of the Seurat and the Laurels had just refused, the court found the Scaife's suit timely.

The Laurels did not further appeal to New York's uppermost court, which meant that the judge Mara faced would have his choice of appellate decisions:
DeClerck
or
Scaife.
The burden would be on Mara to guide him toward
DeClerck.

As she wove together her argument for
DeClerck,
Mara continued to review all the other related replevin cases she could locate. She hoped to marshal as much legal precedent as she could to protect her position against any unexpected holes. Technically, the cases she studied assured her that she did indeed have a strong argument that wouldn't unravel under either her opponent's attacks or the judge's scrutiny, and for the most part, her confidence and excitement grew. But the cases also detailed the human stories that underlay all the legal posturing, the tragedies that had spawned the lawsuits. Mara read about the sacrifice of Alphonse Schwarz, who suffered through repeated Nazi interrogations and permanent disfigurement in order to protect the secret location of his family's extensive Flemish art collection, only to learn eventually that the paintings had already been looted by the Nazis and his brothers killed. She read about the bankruptcy of Eva Blumer, who spent every mark of her family's fortune trying to recover just one of her father's treasured Tiepolo sketches. Eva never had a single one returned to her, despite the fact that they were on public display in a small museum in Nice. Mara learned about the harrowing journey of Otto Stern, who survived the war years in and out of concentration and refugee camps only to discover that the Renaissance engravings he had so painstakingly secreted in a French friend's wine cellar had been scattered across the world by the Nazis; he spent decades futilely trying to locate even one engraving before eventually dying of heartbreak.

These personal stories unnerved Mara and brought her back to the moment when she had first reviewed Hilda Baum's complaint and felt a pang of empathy for her. Before, she had experienced elation at being selected for the assignment. As she worked into the dark, night after night, the only thing that kept her from lingering on the pathos of the plaintiffs' stories was the technical complexity of her argument. In her best imitation of Sophia, Mara forced herself to go over and over her points and counterpoints. The intensity fueled her concentration and sense of gamesmanship, so Mara kept her strategies secret from Michael during the fact-finding meetings he arranged and their daily e-mail and phone exchanges. She wanted her argument to be seamless when she finally revealed it to him, and she could almost taste the triumph she'd feel.

Early one afternoon, Mara was engrossed in
DeClerck
when she heard Sophia banging on her door. “Come on, Mara, I know you're on some kind of crusade with that
Baum
case, but you've gotta eat.”

Mara looked up and actually had to think hard about whether she had already eaten lunch that day; over the previous few days, she had lunched at her desk elbow-deep in cases in about six minutes flat. Her stomach grumbled, so she reluctantly left her work and joined Sophia. They made their way to the weekly attorneys' lunch, a lavish catered affair designed as much to impress visiting clients as to provide the firm's lawyers with a social forum.

As they filled their plates, various classmates passed by, and everyone exchanged polite hellos, but no one invited the two women into their conversations or to their tables. Mara and Sophia had an ostensibly cordial, though actually icy, relationship with their contemporaries in the firm. Their classmates resented the preferential treatment the attractive friends received—assignments with client exposure or court appearances, attendance at dinners designed to lure in business, invitations to any social minefield requiring a finesse that the often awkward partners couldn't muster—and they often gossiped about what the friends did to procure it, though nothing was further from the truth. So, without other options, Mara and Sophia sat down at a table of corporate partners, even though they knew it would only fuel the rumor mill.

Sophia quickly joined the conversation about a hotly contested takeover battle, but Mara could barely follow. Her mind kept returning to the cases she had left on her desk. Just then, she spied Harlan. Not that Harlan was easy to miss, of course, with his huge body and the begrudgingly extinguished Cuban cigar he carried between his fingers like some nefarious magic wand.

Harlan usually dined alone in his office, so Mara was both surprised and more than just a little curious about his presence. But then she saw Michael trailing behind him, and her stomach lurched. It wasn't the mere sight of Michael that churned her gut. She'd grown used to seeing him, had even become accustomed to demurring tactfully to his ongoing entreaties and flirtations. It was seeing Michael in
her
territory that unsettled her.

She wondered what had brought him here and why she hadn't been invited to meet with the two men. They settled at a table in her line of vision but outside of their view of her. She studied the way they interacted, fascinated by Michael's ability to draw Harlan out, even to make him laugh. No one made Harlan Bruckner laugh. She recognized the same charisma that, despite her resolve, she still found so attractive.

As she watched, someone approached the men's table. From the back, all Mara could see was a tightly belted plum wrap dress and the swivel of hips. But she recognized that particular saunter. It was Deena, a fellow senior litigation associate one year behind Mara in seniority with a penchant for powerful, married partners. Deena leaned toward the men, her attention clearly directed at Michael. Mara watched Michael warm to Deena's banter and caught his smile when Deena gently touched his jacket sleeve. Even though she knew the display couldn't possibly be done for her benefit, she couldn't stand the exhibition any longer. She pushed back from her table, apologized to a confused Sophia for forgetting an imminent conference call, and raced from the room.

THAT EVENING, MARA LEFT FOR HOME MUCH EARLIER THAN
usual. For a change, she didn't feel driven to labor on the
Baum
case long into the night. Instead, she convinced herself that an engrossing video and popcorn would help calm her agitation. But after she flipped on the balustrade lamps in her living room, Mara proceeded immediately to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine in the tallest glass she could find.

As she drank it, she changed into sweats, peeling off her uncomfortably close work suit. The wine further softened her and allowed her to recognize that her loneliness was of her own making. If she was alone with only work and Sophia to keep her company, there was no one to blame. She had made all her own choices, including the decision to gun for partner at any cost. Finally, the tears came.