Page 351 - WhyAsInY

Do a JoB—Harvey tHe litiGator
were seated there was guarding his door, I told her that I understood that Mr. Freund wanted to see me. She buzzed him, gave him the news, and motioned me in.
Clutching a yellow legal pad (white legal pads were for the partners, at least according to the new and very status-conscious office manager) and trying to catch my breath (I had stupidly taken the fire stairs up in order to get to the twentieth floor), I entered and stood by the doorway awaiting a signal from the very trim, vested, sixty-or-so-year-old man who was seated behind the very large desk that had to have been at least twenty feet from the entrance. After what seemed like thirty seconds, he looked up from the papers in front of him, motioned me to one of the three chairs in front of his desk, then nodded, and said, “Our client George Farkas owns the Cross County Shopping Center with a partner, Sol Atlas.” I had never heard of either of the men, but, even though I was from Brooklyn, I did know what the Cross County Shopping Center was. Camp Starlight would have its campers gather in that Westchester shopping mall to be bused up to camp at the start of each summer. Thus, I was somewhat in my comfort zone. But that was not to last. Unfortu- nately, Mr. Freund’s first sentence was essentially the last one that I understood during our brief encounter.
He continued: “Farkas, the joint maker with Atlas, has been sued by the holder of a recourse balloon mortgage note secured by the Center, but Atlas seems to be in league with the holder and was not sued.” What? He might as well have been speaking in Martian. I could hardly com- prehend a word that he had uttered but did not think that it would be a good idea to ask questions. I did know that when Mr. Freund said, “joint maker,” it was unlikely that he was talking about an illegal substance. All I could think was: “This is the way that real lawyers talk? What am I doing here?”
There followed about five minutes of the same, sprinkled with the phrase, “young fellah,” which I was to hear a lot of from Max over the years. I was grateful when the audience ended with “See Arnold Roth. You’ll be working with him on this.” Having met the kind, smart, and slow-drawling Roth when I interviewed, I held out the hope that he
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