Page 307 - A Little Life: A Novel

wished for tells him to stay. Be brave, he tells himself. Be brave for once.
And so he looks back at Caleb. “Let’s go,” he says, and although he is
already frightened, he begins the long walk down the narrow hallway

toward the elevator as if he is not, and along with the scrape of his right foot
against the cement, he hears the tap of Caleb’s footsteps, and the explosions
of rain pinging off the fire escape, and the thrum of his own anxious heart.

A year ago, he had begun working on a defense for a gigantic
pharmaceutical company called Malgrave and Baskett whose board of
directors was being sued by a group of their shareholders for malfeasance,
incompetence, and neglect of their fiduciary duties. “Gee,” Lucien had said,
sarcastically, “I wonder why they’d think that?”

He had sighed. “I know,” he said. Malgrave and Baskett was a disaster,
and everyone knew it. Over the previous few years, before they had come to
Rosen Pritchard, the company had had to contend with two whistle-blower
lawsuits (one alleging that a manufacturing facility was dangerously out of
date, the other that a different facility was producing contaminated
products), had been served with subpoenas in connection with an

investigation into an elaborate kickback scheme involving a chain of
nursing homes, and had been alleged to be illegally marketing one of their
bestselling drugs, which was approved only for treatment of schizophrenics,
to Alzheimer’s patients.
And so he had spent the last eleven months interviewing fifty of
Malgrave and Baskett’s current and former directors and officers and
compiling a report to answer the lawsuit’s claims. He had fifteen other

lawyers on his team; one night he overheard some of them referring to the
company as Malpractice and Bastard.
“Don’t you dare let the client hear you say that,” he scolded them. It was
late, two in the morning; he knew they were tired. If he had been Lucien, he
would have yelled at them, but he was tired too. The previous week,
another of the associates on the case, a young woman, had stood up from

her desk at three a.m., looked around her, and collapsed. He had called an
ambulance and sent everyone home for the night, as long as they returned
by nine a.m.; he had stayed an hour longer and then had gone home himself.
“You let them go home and you stayed here?” asked Lucien the next day.
“You’re getting soft, St. Francis. Thank god you don’t act like this when