After I finished Manheim took off his glasses and went through an elaborate cleaning ritual involving his necktie. It was clearly a habitual gesture of nervousness, but his eyes looked so naked without their protective lenses that I glanced away.

At last he put the glasses back on and picked up his pen again. “I’m not a bad lawyer. I’m really a pretty decent lawyer. Just not very ambitious. I grew up on the South Side and I like it down here. I help a lot of the businesses on the street with leasing problems, employment issues, that kind of thing. So when those two guys came to me maybe I should have sent them someplace else, but I thought I could handle the case—I’ve done some comp claims—and it made a nice change. Pankowski’s sister owns the flower shop next door—that’s why they picked me—she told them I’d done a good job for her.”

He started for the filing cabinet and changed his mind. “I don’t know why I want the folder—nervous habit, I guess. I mean, I know the whole damned case by heart, even after all this time.”

He stopped, but I didn’t prompt him. Whatever he said now would be to himself more than to me and I didn’t want to intrude on the flow. After a few minutes he went on.

“It’s Xerxine, you know. The way they used to make it, it left these toxic residues in the air. Do you know any chemistry? I don’t either, but I made quite a study of this at the time. Xerxine is a chlorinated hydrocarbon—they add chlorine to ethylene gas usually and get a solvent. You know, the kind of thing you might clean oil from sheet metal with, or paint, or anything.

“Well, if you breathe the vapors while they’re manufacturing it, it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good. Affects the liver and kidneys and central nervous system and all those good things. When Humboldt first started making Xerxine back in the fifties, no one knew anything about that stuff. You know, they didn’t run the plants to kill the employees, but they weren’t very careful about controlling how much of the chlorinated vapors got into the air.”

Now that he was into his story his manner had changed. He seemed self-confident and knowledgeable; his claim to being a good lawyer didn’t seem at all farfetched.

“Then in the sixties and seventies, when people started thinking seriously about the environment, guys like Irving Selikoff began looking at industrial pollution and worker health. And they started finding that chemicals like Xerxine could be toxic at pretty low concentrations—you know, a hundred molecules per million molecules of air. What they call parts per million. So Xerxes put in air scrubbers and closed up their pipes better, and got their ppm down to federal standards. That would have been in the late seventies, when the EPA issued a standard on Xerxine. Fifty parts per million.”

He smiled apologetically. “Sorry to be so technical. I can’t think about this case in simple terms anymore. Anyway, Pankowski and Ferraro came to me early in 1983. They were both sick as hell, one with liver cancer, the other with aplastic anemia. They’d worked at Humboldt for a long time—since ’59 for Ferraro and ‘61 for Pankowski—but they’d quit when they got too sick to work. That would have been two years earlier. So they couldn’t collect disability. I don’t think they were told it was an option.”