CHAPTER 1 New York
The offices of Lewman, Applebaum and Fromm were in a typical office tower off Park Avenue, near 55th Street. The black marble building housed 45 floors of offices, homes to a group of people who came every day to justify their salaries or look for a step upwards in their self-imposed struggle towards whatever they had set their sights on. You could change the nameplates of the companies inside, but the building and the people working there every day would still be the same. The information age was eating away at people like this, everywhere in the business world. Their physical presence was becoming less and less necessary. Soon it wouldn’t be needed at all. For any company, it made more sense to let the workers do their stuff at home through PCs, faxes, phones and the web, without renting expensive space in Manhattan, or anywhere else.
And then there was the saving in
transport... These were the thoughts that were going through Paul Anfield’s mind as he rode the elevator up to the 40th floor, the lowest of the 10 floors occupied by Lewman, Applebaum and Fromm. Lewmans represented more than 40 years of New York uptown and downtown legal history, for anybody who was anyone in business or society. The firm had consistently worked in one capacity or another for firms from the Fortune 500 list of companies. It catered perfectly for this economy-shaping group of worldwide entities. Its owners, its interests and its social structures even extended to divorce proceedings, though these were handled through trusted third parties.
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