A Civil Action (62 page)

Eustis made small talk, asking some polite questions about how Schlichtmann had been, addressing Schlichtmann by his first name. Eustis said he had spent the last week on his boat, alone, sailing Long Island Sound. The solitude, he said, had been wonderful.

Schlichtmann imagined Keating calling Eustis on his sailboat, on a two-way radio, saying, “Yes, Mr. Eustis, yes, Mr. Eustis.” Schlichtmann recalled that Keating had always addressed Eustis in a formal manner. Schlichtmann decided that he would not do so.

“Well,” said Eustis after a bit, “let’s get to it.”

Schlichtmann began talking about a settlement that would assure Grace of “peace in Woburn.” Eustis listened, nodding his head occasionally. Then he asked Schlichtmann for his figure.

Schlichtmann said, “We can settle this—meet our needs and your needs—for a sum under twenty million.”

Eustis compressed his lips, closed his eyes, and shook his head once, an emphatic gesture. “I need a hard number,” he said.

“Al,” said Schlichtmann, “that sort of negotiation is just not going to work.”

“You’re being coy with me,” said Eustis with a smile.

“No, I’m not. You said you wanted a ballpark number. I’m not going to keep giving you one number after another just so you can keep saying no.”

A secretary knocked on the door and entered, carrying a note for Eustis. Schlichtmann could see that it was handwritten. Eustis read the note in a quick glance and crumpled it. He looked at his watch. “Why don’t you come to lunch with me? We’ll go to the Harvard Club.”

Schlichtmann felt certain that someone, perhaps J. Peter Grace himself, was listening in on their conversation, directing Eustis. And now Eustis had been directed to take him to lunch. Schlichtmann thought, Oh my God, I don’t want to go to lunch with this man. He felt awkward and unsure of himself and not at all hungry. But he had to keep the discussion going. Eustis stood and put on his suit jacket, and Schlichtmann stood, too.

On the way to the Harvard Club, a walk of two blocks, Eustis seemed in fine spirits. He laughed and talked in an animated fashion about sailing. Schlichtmann tried to listen and respond, but he found that hard work. They entered the Harvard Club, cool and dark, men sitting in large leather upholstered chairs reading
The Wall Street Journal
, others standing in small groups talking, a quiet sanctum away from the city streets. Eustis showed Schlichtmann a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt and the stuffed head of an animal that Roosevelt had shot.

Schlichtmann, at a loss for words, finally said, “Gee, there must be a lot of business transacted here.”

Eustis smiled and shook his head. “No, it’s an unspoken rule that no business is ever transacted here.”

Schlichtmann felt a spasm of anxiety. He and Eustis had nothing in common, not in their pasts or their futures. He wondered how he could possibly endure lunch without talking about the case.

The maître d’ escorted them to a table. A waiter arrived with menus and placed a basket of rolls on the table. Schlichtmann eyed them. He wanted to break open a roll simply to occupy his hands, to allay his nervousness, but he thought about the crumbs of bread on the clean, white linen table cloth and decided against it.

They studied the menu in silence. Schlichtmann ordered flounder and a glass of white wine. Eustis began talking knowledgeably about wines and vintages. He and his wife, he said, liked to enjoy a good bottle
of wine with dinner. Schlichtmann, who knew very little about wine, labored to contribute. He told Eustis about visiting some Napa Valley wineries years ago on a tour. The subject exhausted him, and the conversation ended lamely. Eustis spoke about his children, grown now, with careers of their own. Schlichtmann could think of nothing interesting to say. Eustis asked Schlichtmann how he had become a lawyer, and Schlichtmann told him about the office in Newburyport and the Eaton trial. After that, the pauses seemed to grow longer. Every subject trailed off into awkward silences, although Eustis seemed perfectly at ease. The one subject that filled Schlichtmann’s mind, that he could have talked endlessly about, was Woburn, but he couldn’t mention it.

The waiter brought the bill on a silver tray and placed it between them. Eustis ignored it. He asked Schlichtmann again if he was certain he did not want coffee, and Schlichtmann again declined.

The bill began to worry Schlichtmann. No doubt Eustis would pay. Eustis, after all, had invited him to lunch. The bill sat in the middle of the table, equidistant from them both. Eustis sipped his coffee. Schlichtmann thought: Maybe he expects me to pay. I’m the one asking for millions of dollars. But Schlichtmann had only a single credit card that Gordon had given him that morning, and that card was in Gordon’s name. What if Eustis noticed him signing someone else’s name? What if Eustis discovered that he was as broke as a homeless person in Central Park?

Eustis, of course, did pay, a quick signature with barely a glance at the bill.

The moment they stepped out of the Harvard Club onto the street, Schlichtmann began just where he’d left off. “Al, I’m not going to give you another number just so you can say no again. I’m not going to start bidding against myself.”

“I need a hard number,” replied Eustis. “We’re not going to get anywhere unless you can give me a hard number.”

They walked back toward the Grace building. Schlichtmann realized he had no idea what to do next. Eustis had flatly refused to engage in the sort of negotiation that Schlichtmann was familiar with, the process of give-and-take that he’d gone through a dozen times with insurance company agents. Conway had been right. All the talk about peace in Woburn had meant nothing. Eustis cared only about the bottom line.

Schlichtmann looked down at the pavement. “Okay,” he said finally. “What if I get back to you this afternoon with our bottom line?”

They were in front of the Grace building. “Do you need an office and a phone?” asked Eustis. “I can give you a room to work in.”

Grace headquarters was the last place Schlichtmann wanted to work. “No,” he said, “I’ve got a room at the Helmsley.”

Eustis shrugged.

Schlichtmann called the Boston office when he got back to the Helmsley. Conway took the call in the conference room and put Schlichtmann on the speakerphone.

“Well, he took me to lunch,” Schlichtmann said. He described the meeting with Eustis to Conway and Phillips, omitting the details of his nervousness at the Harvard Club. “I’m very pessimistic,” Schlichtmann said when he’d finished. “He kept saying he wants a hard number, a hard number. What do I tell him? Do I just say fifteen million?”

Conway said, “I think you’ve got to give Eustis our bottom line. Fifteen is supposed to be our squeal point.”

Phillips said to Schlichtmann, “Do you feel compelled to disclose your squeal point today?”

Over the speakerphone, Schlichtmann’s voice rose in anger. “You’re not
thinking
, Mark. Eustis is not negotiating. He’s a bottom-liner. I think I’ve got to do this his way. I’ve got to give him the bottom line.”

Phillips said quietly, “Our bottom line is not fifteen million.”

“What is it?” said Schlichtmann.

“We don’t know yet.”

“Twelve?” asked Schlichtmann, a plaintive note in his voice.

Conway liked that number. “That might get you dinner with Eustis.”

Phillips grabbed a yellow pad from the table and began calculating while Conway talked with Schlichtmann. Phillips worked in silence for a few minutes, punching numbers into the calculator. “Okay,” he said to Schlichtmann. “What do you think about this: One point two million in cash for each family, and five thousand dollars a month for thirty years. That comes out sixteen point two million.”

“I like that,” said Schlichtmann.

“I don’t give a shit if you like it,” said Phillips. “Do you
believe
it?”

“Do we have to get it typed up?” interrupted Gordon from an extension at the Helmsley.

“Fuck, no,” said Phillips.

“Yeah, we do,” said Schlichtmann. “It’ll make it look firm.”

At six o’clock that evening, Schlichtmann called Boston again. “Eustis was standing in his office looking out the window when I arrived,” he told Conway and Phillips over the speaker phone. “He offers to take my coat, but I wanted to keep it on because I had the paper with the figures in it. I’m ready to give him the numbers. He gets a yellow pad out and starts writing on it. Then he says, ‘Oops, out of my ballpark. You could’ve called me and told me this, you wouldn’t have had to come down here.’ So, shit, I figure it’s over with. I’m ready to leave. He puts his feet up on his desk, on this spindly French antique thing. He tells me to take my jacket off and put my feet on the desk, too. I don’t want to. It was very strange. There was a lot of talk about me putting my feet on the desk. ‘Go ahead,’ he says. ‘Relax a bit.’ Then he says: ‘Six point six million dollars is a lot of money.’

“I tell him: ‘Let me put this in perspective for you. Our costs are two and a half million.’

“He takes his feet off the desk and starts pacing up and down. His secretary comes to the door with a note. He reads it and tears it up, and then he says: ‘Suppose I took that into account?’

“I ask him, ‘Don’t you see any opportunity here?’ He says, ‘No, I don’t.’ Then he says, ‘Well, maybe. There are other people involved in this. I’ve got to discuss it with them.’ ”

Over the phone, Schlichtmann paused in his account. “I think we made a breakthrough,” he told Conway and Phillips. “I think his authority was to ten million. We’re beyond ten now. He’s got to call the others to see if he can get a ticket to our ballpark. He wants me to stay another night. He did say he was pessimistic, but this whole thing with taking my jacket off and making me put my feet on the desk indicates he smells opportunity. I don’t think he’d ask me to stay in New York if all he’s going to do is offer eight million. He got very excited, very animated. It was so uncharacteristic of him. He mentioned calling Charles
Erhart in Maine and some other guy. We’re supposed to meet tomorrow at eleven.”

Erhart was chief administrative officer of W. R. Grace and vice chairman of the board. Phillips thought this was a good sign indeed. “It sounds propitious,” he told Schlichtmann. “They’ve got a figure they can’t ignore.”

That night in New York, Schlichtmann felt hopeful but also wary. After so many ups and downs, he could no longer trust his instincts. It was in this state of uncertainty that he received a call from Eustis the next morning. “This will take more than one day,” he heard Eustis tell him. “Call me tomorrow around eleven. Will you still be in New York?”

Schlichtmann, caught off guard and not knowing what to do, said yes, he’d stay another night.

When he hung up the phone, Gordon berated him savagely. “I’m not staying here another fucking day, watching soap operas and shining my shoes. Call him back and tell him we’re leaving.”

Schlichtmann, completely unmoored now, did as Gordon instructed. He told Eustis’s secretary he had decided to leave New York. “Tell Al he can reach me in Boston.”

“What’s the matter?” asked the secretary. “You don’t like New York?”

Schlichtmann thought he detected a mocking tone in her voice.

5

Schlichtmann and his partners waited in the office on Milk Street all the next day for Eustis to call. Phillips, unable to sleep last night, had gotten up to read Clausewitz’s treatise
On War
. When he laid the book down, it had fallen open to the chapter entitled “Retreat after a Loss.” This, Phillips warned Schlichtmann, must be an omen.

In his own office, Conway stared numbly out the window. A poisonous lethargy hung over the office. Phillips came in and sat in the chair across from him. Neither man said a word for a long while. Finally Conway sighed. “Want to go to a movie?” he asked.

“What’s today?” said Phillips.

“Thursday, August twenty-first.”

Phillips held his head in his hands as if he had a terrific headache. “We can’t go on this way,” he muttered. “We don’t know our bottom line. There’s only two weeks before we see the judge. We’ve got to try to settle this by tomorrow.”

“What can we do?” asked Conway.

“We’ve got to squeeze an ounce of dignity out of this. Jan’s not ready to go to trial.”

After a while, Phillips wandered back into Schlichtmann’s office. Schlichtmann sat at his desk, still as a mannequin. There was nothing on his desk except for one phone message from a
Boston Herald
gossip columnist named Norma Nathan. She published an annual guide to Boston’s most eligible bachelors, of which she had deemed Schlichtmann to be one. To update her bachelor file, she wanted to know how much money Schlichtmann had made this year.

“Tell her about four parts per billion,” said Phillips.

Schlichtmann tore up the message.

They sat in silence, waiting for Eustis to call. Phillips smoked cigarettes and watched the smoke curl around his finger. Schlichtmann looked out the window at tourists.

“Nobody calls here anymore?” said Schlichtmann. “Not even creditors? Do we have any other cases?”

That reminded Phillips of the Gallagher case, a woman crippled by a cerebral aneurysm. Phillips had worked on the case while the Woburn jury was deliberating. The case was not ready for trial, but Phillips hoped it might settle early and provide them with some cash. He asked Schlichtmann to call the defense lawyer.

Schlichtmann shook his head.

“It’ll only take one minute,” said Phillips.

“No. Later.”

Schlichtmann leaned back in his chair, cradled his head in his arms, and stared at the ceiling. “I remember going out to Woburn five years ago and telling them it couldn’t be done. It would cost too much, take too long, and the results were too uncertain. The file was less than half an inch thick. The only thing in it was the CDC report and Mulligan’s contingency fee agreements. Every time I looked at that fucking file I’d get nauseous.”

Conway came into Schlichtmann’s office and sat wearily on the couch, listening to this reminiscence.

Schlichtmann glanced at him. “Should I have talked to Eustis directly?”