“I’m doing a two-person job,” I reminded him. This was true. I worked unholy hours.
Traurig shrugged. “Take it or leave it, kiddo. We got you where we want you.”
Leaving the firm at this stage, when I was a breath away from becoming a partner, could set my career years back, and the bastard knew it. I was going to either suck it up or get a partnership at a much smaller, less prestigious firm.
It wasn’t the way I’d wanted tonight to go, but it was better than nothing. Besides, I knew my capabilities. Depending on court schedules and the case I’d pick, I could be made partner in a few short weeks.
“Consider it done.”
Traurig let out a laugh. “I pity the unlucky counsel you are going to go against to prove your point.”
I turned around and made my way to the bar across the street, to meet Arsène (pronounced aar-sn, like the Lupin character) and Riggs.
I didn’t have principles.
And when it came down to what I wanted from life, I didn’t have any limits either.
The Brewtherhood was our go-to place in SoHo. The bar was a stone’s throw from Arsène’s penthouse, where Riggs could be found whenever he was in town and wasn’t crashing at my place. We liked the Brewtherhood for its variety of foreign lagers, lack of fancy cocktails, and ability to repulse tourists with its straight-shooting charm. Mostly, though, the Brewtherhood had an underdog appeal—small, stuffy, tucked in a basement. It reminded us of our Flowers in the Attic adolescence.
I spotted Arsène straightaway. He stood out like a dark shadow in a carnival. He was perched over a barstool, nursing a bottle of Asahi. Arsène liked his beer to match his personality—extra dry, with a foreign air—and was always dressed in Savile Row’s finest silks, even though he did not technically have an office job. Come to think of it, he did not technically have a job, period. He was an entrepreneur who liked to stick his fingers in many lucrative pies. Currently he was in bed with a few hedge fund companies that waived their two-and-twenty performance fees just for the pleasure of working with Arsène Corbin. Merger arbitrage and convertible arbitrage were his playgrounds.
I shouldered past a drunk group of women dancing and singing “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” getting all the words wrong, and leaned against the bar.
“You’re late,” Arsène drawled, reading a soft paperback on the sticky bar counter and not even bothering to take a look at me.
“You’re a pain in the ass.”
“Thanks for the psychological assessment. But you’re still late, on top of being rude.” He dragged a pint of Peroni my way. I clicked it against his beer bottle and took a sip.
“Where’s Riggs?” I shouted into his ear over the music. Arsène jerked his chin to his left. My eyes followed the direction. Riggs was there, one hand leaning against the wooden, taxidermy-decorated wall, probably knuckle deep between the blonde’s thighs through her skirt, his lips dragging across her neck.
Yup. Arsène definitely meant her ass implants. She looked like she could float on those things all the way to Ireland.
Unlike Arsène and me, who prided ourselves on looking the part of the 1 percent club, Riggs loved sporting the billionaire-bum look. He was a con artist, a crook, and a delinquent. A man with so little sincerity I was surprised he didn’t practice law. He had the clichéd appeal of the wrong-side-of-the-tracks bad boy. The floppy flax-gold hair, deep tan, unshaven goatee, and dirt under the fingernails. His smile was lopsided, his eyes depthless and bottomless at the same time, and he had the annoying ability to talk in his bedroom voice about everything, including his bowel movements.
Riggs was the richest of us three. On the outside, however, he looked like he was cruising through life, unable to commit to anything, including a cellular network.
“Had a good meeting?” Arsène popped his paperback shut next to me. I glanced at the cover.
The Ghost in the Atom: A Discussion of the Mysteries of Quantum Physics.
Can someone say party animal?
Arsène’s problem was that he was a genius. And geniuses, as we all know, have an extra hard time dealing with idiots. And idiots, as we also know, make up 99 percent of civilized society.
Like Riggs, I’d met Arsène at the Andrew Dexter Academy for Boys. We’d connected instantly. But whereas Riggs and I had reinvented ourselves to survive, Arsène seemed to be consistently himself. Jaded, cruel, and dispassionate.
“It was fine,” I lied.
“Am I looking at Cromwell and Traurig’s newest partner?” Arsène eyed me skeptically.
“Soon.” I dropped onto a stool beside him, flagging down Elise, the bartender. When she moved over toward us, I slid her a crisp hundred-dollar bill across the wooden bar.
She quirked an eyebrow. “That’s one hell of a tip, Miller.”
Elise had a soft French accent, and a soft everything to go with it.
“Well, you’re about to have one hell of a task. I want you to walk over to Riggs and splash a drink on his face à la every corny eighties movie you’ve seen, acting like you’re his date and he just ditched you for Blondie there. There’s another Benjamin waiting for you if you can produce some serious tears. Think you can do that?”
Elise rolled up the note and tucked it into the back pocket of her snug jeans. “Being a bartender in New York is synonymous with being an actress. I have three off-off-Broadway shows and two tampon commercials under my belt. Of course I can do that.”
A minute later, Riggs’s face smelled of vodka and watermelon, and Elise was two hundred bucks richer. Riggs dutifully got called out for leaving his date waiting. Blondie stalked off with an angry huff back to her friends, and Riggs made his way to the bar, half-amused, half-pissed.
“Jerk.” Riggs grabbed the hem of my blazer and used it to wipe off his face.