Dinner at Meridian

For two years the lane and the black card and the name in the will kept their secrets, and Marsh kept his counsel. He was a man who believed that most documents, like most tumors, should be watched rather than cut, and he watched. Once a year Dr. Voss gave a dinner for his oldest friends, a small one, at the director's house on the institute grounds, and that year Marsh accepted, and went, and found the party of ten reduced to a party of three by rain and reputations.

The annual dinner had a geography that never changed, and Marsh, arriving early as he always did, walked through it like a man walking through a museum of his own career. The entrance hall held the photograph of the founding, nine people and a centrifuge in a rented room, taken the year the operating agreement was two pages long; Marsh was in it, at the edge, half out of frame, holding the corner of a whiteboard that someone had thrust at him, and every year Voss pointed at the photograph and said the same thing, which was that the institute had been incorporated by a man who did not want to be in the picture, and every year Marsh said the same thing back, which was that someone had to hold the whiteboard. The lecture hall and the corridor outside the director's office held the borrowed portrait and the framed covers, and Marsh walked past all of it without looking.

Voss kept the dinner small on principle. It is the anniversary of my solvency, he liked to say, and I do not celebrate insolvency in front of creditors. Over the years the guest list had behaved like a star going dark: nine chairs the first year, seven the fourth, four the eighth, and for the last five years a table for three, Marsh and Voss and, when the year was good, the memory of the third guest, who had been Dr. Miriam Adler, and who had stopped coming the year the quarrel went from private to published. Marsh missed her at the table the way one misses a load-bearing wall. She had been the only person in either man's life who talked to Voss as a scientist rather than an institution, and the dinners without her had a pleasantness that Marsh distrusted the way he distrusted a settlement that both sides call fair.

He had tried, over the years, in the careful way of a man who keeps other people's structures standing, to understand what the quarrel had been. The published version was a dispute about method. The true version, assembled by Marsh from twenty years of half sentences at half past ten at night, was simpler and worse: Adler had seen data that Voss would not show anyone else, had believed in them, and had then watched Voss seal the program from every eye in the institution, including hers, and had understood that her belief was now an unauditable asset in a private vault, and that no science survives the move from a bench to a vault. You have stopped doing science, she had told him, and started doing miracles, and the sentence had ended thirty years of friendship and begun, though neither of them knew it, the countdown of everything else.

The soup came and went and the fish came and went, and Marsh let the table conversation run on the institute's business, the new imaging grant, the search for a successor to the aging head of development, the endless comedy of the city's permitting office, because he had learned that Voss would arrive at any subject in his own time and could not be driven to one. It was the coffee, the point in the meal where the staff withdrew and the candles made their only serious light, when Marsh set down the cup and named it.

Voss was fifty-two that year and looked thirty-eight, which everyone said and no one said twice. He had a large, smooth face of the kind that ages into money, an agreeable manner with a flash of something harder underneath, and a cinema-handsome share of silver at the temples that made strangers trust him with their funding and their daughters and their donations. He met Marsh at the door himself, and took his coat, and poured the wine without asking, and it was only when the staff had gone and the two of them were alone with the candles that Marsh set down his glass and named the matter.

"I have seen him," Marsh said. "Wick."

"Have you." Voss turned the glass by its stem. There was no surprise anywhere on him. "And what was the arithmetic of the encounter? Did he frighten you, or did you frighten yourself?"

"He told me I could not buy him out of your will. His words were that the document is in him. Julian, I drafted that will. I know what it says, and I know what I meant it to say, and I know what you made it say. There is a man alive who steps into your whole existence the day you stop existing, and I am asking you, as the man who will have to execute it: what is he to you?"

"You are too literal, Alden. It is the defect of your virtues." Voss leaned back, and for a moment the lamplight did something unkind to his face, hollowing it, and Marsh saw for one second the skull under the cinema. "Every man carries two ledgers. The public one and the true one. I have merely had the good sense, or the bad luck, to separate the bookkeeping. Wick is my dark side made safe and separate and anonymous. He goes where I cannot and pays what I will not, and when I am rid of him, I will be rid of the whole second ledger. That is all any of it is. That is all any of us are."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only answer I have that is fit for a lawyer's ears." Voss smiled, and the smile was warm and the eyes were not, and Marsh felt the conversation closing around him like water over a stone. "If I am leaving anything in your care, Alden, I ask only one thing. I ask for justice. Give me justice, and give Wick the justice also. I am done talking about him. Now, tell me about the Henderson trust, because I want to know whether their son has finally married the woman with the horses. It was the oldest of the running jokes between them, and like everything else in that house it had never once been meant to resolve."

But Marsh did not want the Henderson trust, and he did not want the wine, and the thing in him that kept other men's papers would not lie down. He put both hands flat on the table, an ugly, lawyerly, thoroughly un-Voss gesture, and said:

"You know my position. I have never seen a man I so disliked and yet so trusted as I trust you. I will sign whatever you put in front of me, because I have signed for you for twenty years and my signature is my face. But hear me once, man to client, client to man. I have seen Wick swerve. If he is the second ledger, then one day the two ledgers will be audited together, and there will not be enough of you left to indemnify the difference. Get rid of that man, Julian. Buy him off. Lose him. Whatever he has on you, pay it."

Voss looked at him for a long moment, and the candles made his shadow stand up on the wall behind him, twice its size and with a smaller shadow inside it, and then he did the last thing Marsh expected. He laughed, freely, the laugh of a man unburdened, and refilled both glasses.

"Alden," he said. "The moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Wick. It is a scientific fact, and I am a scientist, and you may hold me to it under oath if I am ever so unwise as to make it one. Tonight I ask you to take it as a promise between friends. Now drink your wine. The vol au vents are getting cold and the Henderson trust is getting away.

The coffee arrived as the laughter settled, and Marsh, who had come to the table with a printout in his breast pocket and had watched two hours of good wine fail to make it cheaper, took it out and put it on the cloth between the candles.

Voss looked at it, and did not touch it, and read it where it lay. The confirmation page. The program name. The amount. The date, which was three weeks before the dinner, and the city, which was one neighborhood away from it.

"The eldest uncle came to my office," Marsh said. "A practical man. He asked me whether the payment was legal, and I told him it was, because it is, and then he asked me the second question, and I have carried the second question around for two weeks like a stone in a shoe. The second question is why a charity I chartered is settling a child's injuries in the dark, at two in the morning, under the signature of a man who does not exist. I can defend every line of my own paperwork, Julian. I can no longer defend the set. Give me something. A sentence. A document. A beginning."

Voss was quiet for a long time. He turned his glass by the stem, one full slow revolution, and Marsh, who had watched him face down funding committees with the same small motion, understood that he was watching the man decide something on the far side of a door that had never opened in twenty years.

"You are a good lawyer," Voss said at last. "It is the thing about you I have exploited the longest, and I want you to know that I know it. A good lawyer asks for the thing in writing, because the thing in writing ends disputes. But some things do not end, Alden. Some things are entered into." He looked up then, and the poster face was back, warm and fully funded. "Give me until the spring dinner. One year from tonight. If I cannot put the innocent explanation in your hands in writing by then, I will put the guilty one there instead, and you may do with it whatever your license requires. That is a promise from a man who does not make promises he cannot keep, and it is the only door I can open tonight." The year, as it turned out, was already spent.

It was an oral instrument, and Marsh had never once in his career relied on one, and he turned this one over in the silence anyway, looking for the catch the way he looked for the catch in any instrument, and the terrible thing, he thought later, was that there was no catch. It was simply a promise made by a man who knew, even as he made it, that he would not be alive to keep it, and the knowledge was not on his face anywhere. It was in the will. It had been in the will for four years, and Marsh had read it a hundred times and never once taken it as a date.

He went home and wrote the date at the top of a fresh page, and below it he drafted the questions he would ask when the year was out, and the first question was four words long, and he wrote it and crossed it out and wrote it again for a week, and it never got shorter. The question was: Who is Ezra Wick?"

They parted warmly at the door, and Voss stood in the lamplight waving until the car turned out of the grounds, and Marsh, looking back through the rear window, saw the tall figure withdraw and the door close, and thought, with a professional's distaste, that the will needed a codicil and the codicil needed a man with better nerves than his.

Six weeks later, at half past eleven on a weeknight, the phone rang in the Marsh house, and the night took the turn that the whole city would be talking about by breakfast.