(1969) The Seven Minutes Read Free Page B

Wilshire Boulevard, halfway between the law office in Beverly Hills that he had just left forever and his three-room apartment in Brentwood, that the complete realization of what had happened to him struck Mike Barrett with its fullest impact.
    After all the years of struggle, he was liberated.
    He was one of the emancipated ones. He had made it.
    From the corner of his eye, he could see the carton on the seat next to him. An hour ago he had filled it with the personal papers and effects that had accumulated on the firm’s walnut desk, the desk which had been his desk as an employee, for two years. The contents of the carton, in a way, represented the corpus of one frustrating, unfulfilled, second-rate legal career spanning a decade of his thirty-six years. The carton itself, the act of its removal, symbolized a victory that (on the blackest of the sleepless and self-hating nights) he had nearly given up hope of ever achieving.
    It wanted a celebration, a triumphal parade, an arch, at least a garland. Well, they were all present in his head and his heart. But still, some outer celebration of independence won and success attained was required. Firmly holding the wheel of the car with one hand, he undid the knot of his tie with his free hand, and yanked the tie off. Next the shirt collar. He unbuttoned it and spread it open. Tieless at high noon of a working day. Lese-majeste in the kingdom of the American Bar Association, unless you are majeste himself. Then the Latin phrase came to him. Rex non potest peccare. The king can do no wrong.
    God, what a lovely day. The sun, beautiful. The City of the Angels, beautiful. The people in the streets, his subjects, beautiful. Osborn Enterprises, Inc., beautiful. Faye Osborn, beautiful. All friends, beaut - No, maybe not all - not Abe Zelkin. Abe, beautiful, yes their friendship, yes, that too, except that it might not exist a few hours from now, and he felt guilty, and a blemish suddenly marred the face of joy.
    He became aware of Westwood passing outside his top-down Pontiac convertible, and there were people, the sidewalks were crowded with people, and they were not his subjects applauding
    him on this great day. They were Abe Zelkin admonishing him for selling out.
    Honest Abe. Who the hell needs a conscience for a nag when he has a friend like Honest Abe?
    Yet, curiously, and in truth, it had been Abe Zelkin who had planted the seed that had borne this day, the undoing of Zelkin and Barrett, the doing of Osborn and Barrett. His mind sought the beginnings, bit by bit revived them, to give him his brief before he pleaded his case to Zelkin at lunch.
    Where had it begun? Harvard University? No. That had been bis friendship with Phil Sanford, when they had roomed together. No, not Harvard, but sometime later, in New York City. Not at that big factory of a law firm he had started with, because he had not liked that firm, had still been interested in defending human rights, not property rights, in retrospect immaturely idealistic, a stupid legal hick with a cowlick for a brain. It was that next place, that hothouse for the flower children of the law, the Good Government Institute on Park Avenue, where your salary consisted of elbow patches for your threadbare coats and quotations from Cardozo and Holmes on the high purpose of the law. The Good Government Institute, a foundation supported by twenty big-business corporations as a sop to their own bad consciences, where every case was derived from the overflow of the American Civil Liberties Union and where every client was the ever-present underdog. Six years of that, of living off peanuts because you felt that you were upending a few evils and many wrongs, deluded into thinking that they were the real enemies, until you learned that they were only prop windmills to keep you busy putting on a public-relations show for the Institute’s founders. Six years to learn the identities of the real enemies, to learn that your work was a fraud, that