Chapter 59: Four Hundred Pages a Day
By August, the direction every door moved in was closed.
Recruiters stopped returning his calls.
A staffing agent told him, kindly, to try a different field.
He did. Insurance. Compliance. A teaching post at a business school that never called back.
The insurance company hired a twenty-six-year-old instead, then asked Grant to train her for a week, at half rate.
He did it. He needed the week, and the week did not ask about his past.
The ethics referral was still open, his old clients were not his to take, and his name had a headline glued to it.
So in September, Grant Wexler did the thing he had spent fifteen years climbing away from.
He went to work by the hour.
A staffing agency placed him in document review, the basement of the legal world.
The woman who placed him was kind in the brisk way of people who handle the fallen.
It pays what it paid in 2009, she said. The market has noticed nothing since.
A windowless floor across town, where forty temporary lawyers sat at long tables reading other people's records.
Eight hours a day. A timer on the screen. Lunch brought in a bag.
His tablemates were a laid-off teacher studying for the bar, a retired judge who liked the solitude, and a kid who called everyone sir.
He learned the software in a morning. He learned the lunch rotation by Friday.
He learned not to say what he used to be.
Once, at the vending machines, the kid asked if he had ever worked anywhere important.
Grant said, a long time ago, and bought his coffee, and that was the end of it.
The irony is not subtle, so I will not dress it up.
The man who never read page eleven now read everything.
Four hundred pages a day, for what he used to bill in twenty minutes.
The agency's weekly chart put him first twice. Fast. Accurate.
That is the part people get wrong about Grant. He was never stupid.
He was just never punished before.
Punishment, it turns out, is a teacher with no patience and perfect attendance.
He read merger files. Lease disputes. A bank's dirty laundry.
Tag. Code. Next document.
Then, one Tuesday in October, a new batch loaded onto his screen.
A vendor company had been hired to review records for a corporate acquisition.
The project manager said it was a big one. A trust acquisition. Thousands of records, tight deadline, overtime approved.
Grant stayed late. He needed the hours.
One of the trust's acquisitions. Routine work, farmed out to the cheapest qualified hands.
The cheapest qualified hands were his.
He did not ask to be taken off the project. The hours did not care whose name was on them.
Page by page, the Hale Trust moved across his monitor in gray little boxes.
Board minutes he half-recognized.
Vendor contracts. Correspondence with firms he used to sneer at in restaurants.
He told Dale later it was like being made to read his own obituary.
One paragraph at a time, at four hundred pages a day.
He almost clicked past the engagement letter, the way he had clicked past ten thousand documents that fall.
It was routine. The kind the trust sent out every year, renewing some small provider nobody thought about.
The kind of document he had spent a career skimming.
But the batch had trained him now. Tag. Code. Read the signature block.
So he read it.
And there, at the bottom of the page, in blue ink that scanned badly, was my name.
Nora A. Hale, sole trustee.
Dale says his hand stopped on the mouse.
And for a long moment the timer kept counting, and Grant Wexler did not move at all.