“No?” He looked at me gently. “If you start next month, you’ll be judging others for forty-two years. You will sit on high, they below; you will listen to them, talk to them, even smile at them sometimes, but in the end you decide who’s in the right and who is wrong, who gets locked up and who goes free. Is that what you want – forty-two years up on the bench, forty-two years of being right? You think that will do you good?”

I didn’t know what to say. In fact, I liked the prospect of sitting on high, dealing with others fairly, justly deciding their fates. Why not forty-two years?

He closed the file that lay before him. “Of course we’ll take you if you really want. But I won’t take you today. Come back next week, my successor can hire you. Or come back in a year and a half, when you’ve spent your extra time. Or in five years, when you’ve seen the world of law from below, as a lawyer, or a legal advisor, or a criminal investigator.”

He stood up, and I stood up too, confused and at a loss for words. I watched him as he took his coat from the closet and laid it over his arm. Then I went with him out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, and finally stood with him in front of the building.

“Do you feel the summer in the air? Not long now, and we’ll have hot days, and balmy evenings, and warm rainstorms.” He smiled. “God be with you.”

I was annoyed. They didn’t want me? Then I did not want them. I became a lawyer not to heed the old man’s advice, but to spite it. I moved to Frankfurt, joined Karchinger and Kunze, a five-man firm, wrote a dissertation in my free time and made partner in three years. I was the youngest partner at any firm in Frankfurt, and was proud of it. Karchinger and Kunze were friends from their schooldays, and had gone to law school together. Kunze had no wife or children, Karchinger had a jovial wife from the Rhine Valley and a son my age, who was expected to join the firm one day. He struggled with his studies and I prepped him for his exams. Luckily, we got along well, and still do. Today he’s a senior partner like me, and what he lacks in legal expertise, he makes up for in social finesse. He has landed important clients. That we now have seventeen junior partners and thirty-eight employees is his doing too.

4

For the first few years, I got the cases in which Karchinger and Kunze had no interest. A painter who had executed a commission, had been paid, and was now in dispute with the client – the seasoned manager of the firm gave me the case without even asking Karchinger or Kunze.