When The Butterflies Come

by Rosemary Ness Bitner

  She gazed at her blazer hanging on the back of her door. The beautiful butterfly pin over its right pocket connected her to many fond memories.

  ISRAEL’S SIDE

  David sat in a conference room chair in his lawyer’s office absorbed in his thoughts, reflecting, strategizing, contemplating the antics of his antagonist, planning and mentally rehearsing his own responses. Long gone were the times years before when the litigation commenced. Then he was flush with confidence that he would crush Bob and Sol. He’d hired the most reputable and most expensive law firms in the city. He’d trusted their advice. They had the plush offices, the deep blue and red carpeting, and the chrome and brass railings on their opulent staircases. They showed off their impressive quarters, their panoramic views from the Rockies all the way around to the east, seeing as far as Kansas no doubt.

  Why shouldn’t he have believed them? There was the Statute of Wills. He had the right to change his will. Repeatedly they’d assured him he was in the right, those money-thieving bastards! It was just a simple quantum meruit case. They were so sure of their position. They’d looked at hundreds of precedent cases and charged him plenty for all their work, the fucking pricks! He did tell them he wanted the most aggressive defense they could possibly mount, told them that settlement was not an option. He demanded a ferocious counterattack.

  The lawyers he hired played off court all right. To buy time and delay, to move the goal posts on Bob so he wouldn’t get any closer to relief, David changed his major law firm in charge of the case, not once or twice, but now for the fourth time. Each change bought him a good three months’ time or more, but the cost was now running over three million invested in destroying Bob and he had not yet done it. Success eluded him. Bob would not break.

  Try as he might, David was unable to crack the key to the success of Bob’s firm. How could a no-name upstart without clients, staffed by a man embroiled in litigation, with no money and a quiet skinny Indian girl as partner and secretary, possibly survive in the competitive investment business? David tried twice to use a trumped-up excuse to get a court order that would allow him to see Bob’s books and records. He couldn’t prove there was a silent enemy of his hiding in the weeds, backing Bob and Bob’s litigation. He had no evidence, he just suspected it. But twice Barbara filed for protective orders to block his demands for discovery and twice the courts granted her order. He was unable to find any dirt on Bob or Barbara or their business and he was going nowhere with that idea.

  David kicked one of his dogs the night when the lawyer from his second law firm told him he needed to drop the idea of harassing Bob’s firm. He was told if he persisted Bob could file harassment charges. David hated feeling stymied. He tried to find out about Barbara, her parentage, her family’s wealth and connections. Susan told him she didn’t know anything about her. That surprised David. Ordinarily Susan could rattle off all sorts of information about any of her staff girls, but she was strangely silent about Barbara. All he could pry out of her was that Barbara was extremely bright and very competent, a very diligent worker who never talked about herself or her background. She didn’t smoke or drink, which made sense for an Indian, he figured. She knew all the corporate evolutions, understood the Investment Advisor’s Act, the Investment Company Act, the Securities Act, the Securities Distribution act, and all the pertinent rules that were promulgated by the regulatory agencies under those acts. She was diligent at keeping up with changing regulations, and she was so savvy at reading requests for comments that she could actually anticipate regulatory changes before they were promulgated. That skill was a tremendous advantage for any firm to have.

  He knew she was a trusted resource that Susan sorely missed, but why in the world had she left his firm to join Bob? She was paid extremely well, could take time off whenever she needed it. David couldn’t imagine that Barbara saw Bob’s firm as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He had no idea that her family had money, political power, or staying power. All he knew was that her father lived on some Indian reservation, but that meant nothing to David. He imagined her father fishing and hunting, chanting while pounding on a drum, and weaving baskets or making silver jewelry, nothing more. As far as he was concerned, Indians were a worthless defeated people.

  For David, it all boiled down to the personal. Either Barbara was holding a grudge against him for the time he shoved his hands into her blouse and squeezed her tits, or else Bob had been secretly fucking her all the time she was working at David’s firm. But that would be impossible because Marty was fucking Bob, and she would draw so much energy from a man he couldn’t possibly have the strength to fuck a second woman. David wondered if Barbara was fucking Bob now that she’d left the firm. He reasoned those probabilities unlikely because she was always so reserved and businesslike and Bob was always selling. Besides, Barbara was Indian and they tended to stick to their own kind.

  The question that vexed David remained. Why had Barbara left the firm? His paranoia landed on anti-Semitism. It either had to be that Barbara secretly hated him because of his playful tit-squeezing incident or because she just hated Jews. David whittled the reason down to his belief that Barbara must hate all Jews. After all, he reasoned, all women secretly loved to have their tits squeezed. It had to be the Jewish thing, or the prim, studious Indian just wanted to get Bob into her teepee. He couldn’t quite put all the pieces together and eventually gave up trying, chalking up Barbara’s decision to just another case of a woman thinking with her pussy instead of her brains. Nothing else made sense to David, who couldn’t comprehend anyone being repulsed by unethical personal conduct.

  The very thought of Bob made David scream. He forbade any of the office staff from speaking his name. All letterhead with Bob’s name had been destroyed long ago. If anyone on staff heard Bob’s name spoken, the speaker was to be reported immediately to David and that offense was grounds for dismissal. He personally destroyed all the furniture in Bob’s office, which David had paid handsomely to obtain from the finest furniture store in Plaintown, and the pieces were sent to a storage locker to which only he had access. Bob’s former office was locked and yellow crime scene tape was strung in dramatic fashion across the door in a forbidden oversized X. To propagandize his position, David instructed that all visitors be told Bob’s former office was still an active crime scene, although the space had long been stripped of its contents and this was strictly a civil matter. It was David’s way of rewriting history; to generate a false rumor by misleading a hapless visitor; of demanding that the staff, if not the courts and the real world beyond UGGA, see things his way.

  Despite his endless stream of venom, David still was haunted by his thoughts of Bob. Why had Bob rejected him after all he’d done for the younger man? What could he possibly see in a woman that David couldn’t provide? If he had to have a woman, why couldn’t he also allow David into his love life as a male companion? He’d offered Bob friendship, love, wealth, status, and all the benefits of his wisdom, yet Bob still rejected him.

  David’s heart ached from his alienation from Bob. He worked to replace the ache with relentless fury and his quest for vengeance. Here was a man who now knew Judaism better than David. Bob was in many respects the perfect son. David had coached him to always see a fight through to the end, to take over companies, wage proxy fights, gain control of corporate boards, all of it. Now he was fighting David like the Jews of Masada fought the Romans. It was a fight to the death, or at least a fight to the demise of one or the other’s corporations.

  David remembered telling Bob that all good Jews loved a good fight, especially when it was against another Jew. Now his protégé was taking David’s lessons all too literally. Ben had told David’s latest lawyer that Bob would rather fight until hell froze over and even fight him after death on the ice than ever settle with him. Bob now regarded David as a no-good son of a bitch; Ben passed along that tidbit in no uncertain terms. There was no way David was going to pass this off as a simple misunderstanding. He was appalle
d. Bob had taken on some of the same tenacious determination that David taught him and that David saw in his own father, Marvin. He’d had a horrible nightmare the night before he heard how much Bob now hated him. He dreamed that Bob and Marvin were talking about him. His dead father, whom Bob never met, and Bob, David’s protégé, were talking about David as their common enemy,

  “He’s always been a sissy,” said Marvin to Bob. “I did what I could for him. But now, here you are. You’re more of a son to me than he ever was.”

  Bob said to Marvin, “I always had to look through him to see you. All this time I knew him I secretly laughed at him. He was never the man you were.” The two men who haunted David’s nightmares embraced as father and son might, while they closed a door on David who was sitting in a chair in an adjoining room watching them.

  It was a horrible dream and he sat upright in his sleep, in a cold sweat in the dark, and spoke out to the ghost of his father.

  “Dad? Dad, are you there? Can you hear me, Dad? Why is this happening to me, Dad? Why didn’t you love me, Dad? Why didn’t Mother love me? Why doesn’t anyone love me? What should I do, Dad? Whose side are you on, Dad? Whose side are you on?”

  Then David had a vision of Marvin in his talus at temple. His father was joyfully singing the Shema. Marvin’s voice was speaking for hearts of the People of the Book. He spoke to Bob, and David overheard him say, “Israel is all you need to know and believe in. I and the good souls of Israel will deal with this wherever it goes. I will stay in touch with you. You will never be alone. You and Barbara go on building your business and enjoy your lives.”

  David poured sweat as his body chilled and shivered. He heard his father’s voice leaping out of the Torah. It roared at him and held him down by his throat. He wrestled with the voice and tried to shake it away. Then he awakened, screaming and trembling as the dawn broke. He’d betrayed Father and Israel. Father always told him to earn money legally and send money to Israel. David disgraced his father and Israel by making money illegally and keeping it all for himself. Marvin’s ghost had found him out and had shaken David to his core.

  His wife ran into his bedroom and asked if he was ill. He sent her back to her room and just lay there for hours wondering whose side Marvin was on in this fight. He stared at the ceiling. What was happening to him? Then David heard his father’s voice speak again. It rang in his ears and in his mind as if it were a bolt of lightning shot from the blue sky. “You are a disgrace to me and to Israel. You have earned all that will befall you.” It was suddenly clear to David: Marvin was on the side of Israel and no one else. He trembled in fear that a harsh judgment would be rendered against him. Marvin’s voice spoke for good, for the People of the Book.

  PARTNER BEN

  As David looked out the window of his latest lawyer’s office, he watched two birds splashing in a fountain birdbath. Long passed were the glory days of the case, the grandiose meetings with five or six lawyers and their secretaries all at a big conference table looking out over the city to the Rockies, strategizing on how to destroy Bob’s case and his life, with David paying them a collective ten thousand dollars per hour to do little more than chew the fat. It seemed so important then, so intriguing. Now it all came to naught. The lawyers made a fortune off him, those filthy pricks.

  All that seemed important now was to get this messy affair finished and behind him so he could play a little in his twilight years, like those two happy birds in the fountain. But it wasn’t finished yet. David reminded himself that he needed to be tough. He dared not show the slightest sign of weakness. Like the period of the Judges, he needed to be the personification of Israel’s strength renewed. He needed to sweep the Golan, the Gaza, and Samaria and retake Jericho, engage and destroy the Canaanites, Sidonians, Hivites, and all the evil worshipers of Baal, all the evil forces that were encroaching upon the sacred land given to his people by God. David promised himself he would atone for letting his guard down, for failing to be strong in his generation like Marvin was in his time. He would fight his way back into the good graces of the tribe. He was older now and wiser, beaten in the courts but unbowed.

  Mal, David’s secret weapon against the legal community, had dutifully tracked the practices of all the lawyers in the case. He had meticulously observed all the proceedings, recorded them secretly, and made notes of who was in the courtrooms at each appearance before a judge. He had gathered enough malpractice dirt on two of the firms to make a valid case that they had harmed David to the tune of several million dollars. Even though David had been the instigator of the dirty tricks strategies and even though he had paid them double their customary fees to execute the bribes, Mal made sure David was buffered by one or two intermediaries in each instance so he could be exonerated of criminal wrongdoing. Mal made sure David was in the clear and his former attorneys were on the hook.

  Mal also ran exhaustive checks on Ben. Every team operating in opposition to another team or teams has to have a weakness. David reasoned if neither Bob nor Barbara was the chink in the plaintiff’s armor, then perhaps the weak link would be Bob’s attorney, Ben. Mal’s reports convinced David his hunch was on target. Ben had no money. His mother was ailing, Ben himself was ailing, and he had a sister whom he also supported. Diabetes ran in the family and they had no insurance, but all three needed regular dialysis treatments. Ben would owe money to Sol for the prior work done, and that debt made it imperative that he not lose at trial. Trial was a risk Ben couldn’t take any more than David could. Ben had to know that David could possibly find a way to bribe a judge again or a couple of jurors and that, even with the U.S. Supreme Court behind him, Ben could still lose. David reasoned there had to be a settlement that separated Ben from his client.

  After cordialities, the lawyers got down to talking about money. Ben made his first mistake. He spoke first, indicating he wanted to settle the matter in the first place. David saw the weakness and felt confident of Mal’s assessment. Ben threw out the first offer.

  David scoffed. “Your case is still a quantum meruit case. I could have easily hired a man to do what Bob did for one-tenth what you’re asking, and I’m sure a jury will see it that way.”

  “Not true,” Ben fired back. “You and I both know you acquired Bob’s services by fraud. Even the Supreme Court saw it that way. Read the remand instructions back from the Court of Appeals. And I will tell you this. The longer this matter drags out, the more valuable the case becomes. You can hire new counsel all you want, but the clock is running against you, not us. Damages are compounding. You have other exposures also. No one in the world would want to invest with you knowing what they’re going to find out about you when this goes to trial. Assets will flee.

  “Israel also has some exposure here. Did you ever think of that? What were you thinking when you took him in the bank vault? You were just going to take advantage of a half orphan, screw his life and career to the wall and run away with everything. Israel wasn’t going to get a dime either, isn’t that true? You were just going to have a big playtime with all the money, weren’t you? You were trying to sell the companies while Bob was out there working his ass off. How do you like what I’m saying? How do you think a jury will like it?”

  “You assume too much, sir. You could lose. I have a witness who says Bob had a plot to take over the companies.”

  “You’re talking about that blubbering Judith, the one you and your lawyer bribed for a condo and a pickup truck to commit perjury. Go ahead and put her on the stand in district court. Put her up where I can get some decent cross on her instead of your cheap-shot ‘I feel threatened’ horse shit restraining order. A jury will see right through that. She cried her eyes out under a gentle soft cross, and she made a record that proved she had no idea what she was talking about. She’ll come off like a bought-and-paid-for nincompoop and you know it. I can’t wait to tear into her with a hard cross. I’ll end up nailing you for witness tampering and perjury.

  “Why did she call Bob asking for some money bef
ore she agreed to commit perjury for you? Two weeks before! How do you explain the interval? She was never afraid of Bob! She called me after the stunt, called me eight times bawling her eyes out. ‘Tell Bob I’m sorry,’ she said to me, all eight times. You put her up and you’re getting perjury and libel on top of everything else. All you end up with is nothing. Put her up, I dare you. All you’re going to prove is that you are a slimy off-court player and a bribing bastard.

  “He had a plot to take over your companies, you say. Hah! You mean the companies that you already gave him in the bank vault. Don’t be ridiculous. He can’t take away something that you already gave him. You’re fucking ridiculous. You’re through, David.”

  “Gentlemen, lets back up a minute. We’re not here to try the case. We’re here to see if there’s a way we can both put this tedious nightmare behind us,” said David’s mouthpiece.

  “Frankly, Ben,” David chimed in as if on cue, beginning his well-rehearsed lines, “I’ve heard great things about your work over the years.” Actually, the opposite was true. He knew that Ben usually lost cases. “You were absolutely brilliant when you were in front of the Supreme Court.” Flattery always opened a door. David needed to make a friend of this newcomer lawyer and enlist him in a common cause.

  “You know, if I’d had decent lawyers to start with, the case would never have gone this far. The advice I kept getting from them was to fight Bob every step of the way, fight him with everything I had. They should have advised me to settle at the outset, but they didn’t.” David proffered a half-truth. He’d wanted to destroy Bob. His attorneys only told him they could provide a vigorous defense. “Anyway, I apologize that things got so out of hand. Tell me something that I don’t understand though. Why on earth did you agree to take on this gentile in a fight against Israel?” David reflected upon his tilt toward graciousness. Flattery from a fox will get a crow to drop his meal from a high branch into the mouth of the cunning fox. It was an old European fable, and David worked it well.