Page 237 - A Little Life: A Novel

private to swim, because the motion stilled his back and because he wasn’t
able to take his walks any longer.
But he couldn’t tell Harold any of this. He didn’t want Harold to know

just how flawed he was, what a piece of junk he’d acquired. And so he said
nothing, and told Harold he had to go, and that he would talk to him later.
Even before he had talked to Harold, he had prepared himself to be
resigned to his new job, nothing more, but to first his unease, and then his
surprise, and then his delight, and then his slight disgust, he found that he
enjoyed it. He’d had experience with pharmaceutical companies when he
was a prosecutor, and so much of his initial caseload concerned that

industry: he worked with a company that was opening an Asia-based
subsidiary to develop an anticorruption policy, traveling back and forth to
Tokyo with the senior partner on the case—this was a small, tidy, solvable
job, and therefore unusual. The other cases were more complicated, and
longer, at times infinitely long: he mostly worked on compiling a defense
for another of the firm’s clients, this a massive pharmaceutical

conglomerate, against a False Claims Act charge. And three years into his
life at Rosen Pritchard and Klein, when the investment management
company Rhodes worked for was investigated for securities fraud, they
came to him, and secured his partnership: he had trial experience, which
most of the other associates didn’t, but he had known he would need to
bring in a client eventually, and the first client was always the hardest to
find.

He would never have admitted it to Harold, but he actually liked
directing investigations prompted by whistle-blowers, liked pressing up
against the boundaries of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, liked being
able to stretch the law, like a strip of elastic, just past its natural tension
point, just to the point where it would snap back at you with a sting. By day
he told himself it was an intellectual engagement, that his work was an

expression of the plasticity of the law itself. But at night he would
sometimes think of what Harold would say if he was honest with him about
what he was doing, and would hear his words again: Such a waste, such a
waste. What was he doing?, he would think in those moments. Had the job
made him venal, or had he always been so and had just fancied himself
otherwise?
It’s all within the law, he would argue with the Harold-in-his-head.