WILLA JANSSON NOVELS             WHERE LAWYERS FEAR TO TREAD   1987 Bantam Books; 1991 Ballantine Books                 Anthony and Macavity Award Nominee.         1.     LAW SCHOOLS DON'T have football teams, they have law reviews. Law reviews may look like large paperbacks, but they are arenas. Legal scholars maul each other in polite footnotes, students scrimmage and connive for editorial positions, and the intellectual bloodlust of law professors is appeased, rah rah.   Law reviews are edited by law students. After three years of competing for grades, jobs, even vending machine food (it's nothing but Fig Newtons after four o'clock), law students will do anything--if it means someone else doesn't get to do it.   "Top ten percent and law review," that's the magic phrase. If you don't want to work in Puyallup, Washington, or Lawton, Oklahoma, if you want to work in a big city law firm, if you want a decent salary, if you want a job in a government agency or a hip organization like the American Civil Liberties Union, you'd better be in the top ten percent of your class, and you'd better be on law review. And if you're not at Harvard, Yale, or Stanford Law, it's best to be editor-in-chief.   I was editor-in-chief of a law review for a while, through no fault of my own. I replaced an infinitely more qualified woman named Susan Green.   Here's everything I know about Susan Green, former editor-in-chief of the Malhousie Law Review:   Susan Green was born to Dr. Sidney and Mrs. Greta Green in 1960, the year I, Willa Jansson, started grade school. While I played with incense sticks and chose my mantra at one of the first alternative schools in San Francisco, Susan Green, super-baby, learned her alphabet from flashcards displayed by an overqualified nanny. While I was hating my first job, washing dishes at a vegetarian restaurant, Susan Green was giving piano recitals and taking ballet lessons. While I organized high school antiwar rallies and refused to salute the flag, Susan Green began using her eidetic memory to memorize patriotic verse. When my parents joined the Peace Corps, Dr. and Mrs. Green began their retirement cruise, leaving Susan in an elegant boarding school in Washington, D.C. So, when I hitchhiked there to join fifteen thousand or so others camped around the White House, Susan Green and I were in the same city for the first time in our lives.   That didn't happen again for four years, when we both ended up at Stanford University, me after much impecunious gypsying around the country (which did not affect my college entrance exam score), and she after graduating with honors from the toughest of prep schools. Not only did we end up at the same university at the same time, but our families actually met at freshman orientation. My father looked faded and ill after two years of diarrhea in Liberia, but my mother was still rosy and pear- shaped under twenty pounds of African jewelry. Susan's parents looked made-for-TV and smelled faintly of leather from their new Jaguar. We all ended up at the same little outdoor picnic table for a cafeteria lunch.    My mother noticed the band of endangered wildlife around Mrs. Green's neck. I knew what was coming. So when Mother suggested, "We should love animals--" I did Mrs. Green a favor. I cut in, "They're delicious."   My father laughed, but no one else did. The Greens took a few more hasty bites of salad, then fled.   Susan Green and I had one class together that year, and I wrote her off as a walking résumé, an amalgam of dull accomplishments in an impeccably preppy shell, the kind of girl who wore a pearl necklace to class and paid two dollars a bar for Neutrogena soap so her cheeks would be as shiny as the rest of the sorority's. (Her sorority motto was "Learn from the successful and inspire the unfortunate"; luckily, inspiration is cheap.)   In spite of myself, I had to admire Susan's brainpower. She had total recall, a photographic memory. And she spoke in well-edited paragraphs, complete with topic sentence, supporting facts, and brief restatement. She was long on information and short on insight, whereas I have the kind of sloppy brain that hares off on romantic associations and refuses to memorize.   I had a few more classes with Susan along the way, never did as well on the exams, never impressed my professors, and got into a lot of trouble over some articles I wrote for the school paper (I called Leland Stanford a bloodsucking pirate, which I learned was not beyond dispute, after all).   Then the fates decreed that Susan Green and I begin law school together, make law review together, and end up on the editorial board together.   But here's one thing we didn't do together: the day I argued with Larry Tchielowicz about the war in Vietnam, somebody smashed Susan's head in as she bent over a manuscript.     -2-     "LOOK WHAT THE Communists have done to Vietnam--too bad you radicals didn't keep quiet and let Nixon win the war."   There were half a dozen other editors in the law review office, sleepily filling their cups with metallic wastewater from the coffee urn. They regarded Tchielowicz with weary incredulity. Exams were less than four weeks away; only I could be goaded into fighting the old battles.   "You'd have protested too if the government planned to kill your ass on foreign soil. " Tchielowicz was five or six years younger than me; he'd been just a kid during those years of division, death, and defoliation.   "No Republicans in foxholes?" Tchielowicz's thin lips--the only thin part of the muscle-bound, big-headed man--twitched back a smile. "The army's paying my way through law school, I'll have you know. Paid my way through college, too. I've already done basic training, and I owe them six more years, after the bar exam." He rubbed his smallish, bent nose. "So you see, I've already consented to let the government do with my ass what it will."   I treated Tchielowicz to my candid opinion of this arrangement.   Susan Green rapped at the glass of the inner office to try to shut me up. She'd talked the law school into erecting a plywood and acrylic enclosure around the half dozen desks in the basement office, separating them from the sagging Naugahyde couches and encrusted coffee accoutrements. The partitions created an illusion of privacy, but they stopped several feet short of the ceiling to allow for a maze of overhead pipes, and they barely muffled the sound of conversation on the other side.   Since it took sixteen of us to do the proofreading, disparaging, and kvetching known as the editorial process, and since most of us did it in the outer office, Susan's inner sanctum was less than silent at the best of times. But I honored her request by concluding more quietly, and more kindly, that Tchielowicz was a prostitute for the cryptofascist war machine.   Before Tchielowicz could respond, Jake Whittsen strolled in and ruffled my hair--I don't know why men treat small blond women like puppies. "Are you coming to hear Jane Day?" Even Jake's voice was gorgeous, about an octave lower than most men's, and so quiet it sounded like pillowtalk no matter what he said.   Jane Day was one of those damned Republican feminists. You know, Get women out of the home and into the Mercedes for luncheon with the Ladies Against Drug Abuse ("Madame Chairman, I'd like to propose a toast to the eradication of drug use").   She belonged to every bar association committee ever devised; it was spooky how often you ran across her name in bar publications. She was currently on the rubber chicken circuit, trying to win her party's nomination for state attorney general. The law school, which happened to be her alma mater, was hosting a reception for her that afternoon. The editorial board of the law review had been invited; the rest of the student body was not deemed worthy to break bread with our distinguished professors.   I was inclined to go with Jake--it was a chance to sit beside him and become intoxicated by his cologne (probably selected by his stunning and sophisticated wife, alas).   But Tchielowicz remarked that he guessed Jane Fonda was too busy building up her pectorals to worry about the Vietnamese people now that they were being slaughtered by socialists instead of capitalists, and I couldn't leave the fray. I declined Jake's invitation.   A few students drifted in, earnestly discussing the relative merits of squash and raquetball. They drank the dregs of the coffee, then Reeboked off to a commercial paper class. Professor Haas, a comparative law professor with a lilting Swedish accent and a shy, charming smile, came in to get the latest issue of the review, hot off the presses and stacked on the floor near Susan's desk. Professor Miles, who'd been teaching trusts and wills long before they'd mummified her, stalked in clutching a copy. Through the plywood partition, I heard her shriek to Susan that we'd failed to list all her degrees in the editor's note preceding her article on blind trusts.   That was the last thing I ever heard anyone say to Susan Green.   I left to go to my federal income tax class. I didn't particularly want to go, but I was beginning to suspect Larry Tchielowicz thought I was cute when I was mad.   And while my tax professor lasciviously discussed his favorite tax shelters, someone stood behind Susan Green, raised up a weapon, and brought it down twice on the back of her head.     …           A RADICAL DEPARTURE                     1988 Bantam Books; 1991 Ballantine Books                                   Edgar and Anthony Award Nominee             HIDDEN AGENDA                     1988 Bantam Books; 1992 Ballantine Books         1.     IT BEGAN WITH a phone call at seven in the damned morning. I could hear the buzz of long-distance cable. "This is Willa Jansson," I admitted grudgingly.   "And this is Thomas Spender!" His tone said, Bully for me! "We met in January of your last year of law school."   I frowned down at my bare toes, kicking aside some underwear. If he was waiting for me to say "How nice," he would wait a long time. My last year of law school was not a cherished memory.   "In the midst of that, um . . . imbroglio."   Imbroglio--the word crackled across my sleepy synapses. I remembered somebody using that word, somebody from "Wailes, Roth--"   "--Fotheringham and Beck. Yes, indeed. You remember our interview!"   Despite plans to work for a respectably radical law firm in San Francisco, I'd interviewed with two morticians (that's what they'd looked like, anyway) from an august Wall Street firm. Thomas Spender, Esquire, began to take shape in my memory: plump and pinstriped, the spawn of some Republican Central Committee petri dish.   "Let me get to the point, Ms. Jansson. We, uh, heard that your law firm-I believe you worked for Julian Warneke's firm?" He spoke the name with bemused contempt. "And that firm is now, uh, somewhat defunct?"   Somewhat defunct--the murder of two partners and a secretary will do that. "The firm doesn't exist anymore," I confirmed. Anyone who read the newspaper knew that.   "The reason I mention it is, I find we still have your law school resume on file. And we, um, thought you might care to send us an updated vita."   I edged closer to my bedroom window and pulled up the shade, flinching from the morning light. I was surrounded by laundry, books, papers, dust balls: it was my room, all right. Not a dream.   "Send you an updated résumé?"   Since when did the biggest, piggiest law firm on The Street have to solicit résumés? And why from me? I'd done well in law school, but Malhousie wasn't a top ten school. And Wailes, Roth was the kind of firm that Stanford and Yale Law grads grovel before, after clerking at the Supreme Court.   "Let me tell you what made us think of you, Ms. Jansson. In spite of the publicity about the Warneke um-" I guessed he didn't want to use the word imbroglio again. "That was rather unfortunate, of course, but--  Tell me, do you know Bud Hopper?"   "No."   "Apparently a very high muck-a-muck in the Department of the Interior. He has the President's ear, you might say." He spoke with walrus-to-the oysters heartiness. "He tells us you wrote an excellent little law review article about alternative immigration restriction scenarios."   "My student article?" in which I did not use the word "scenario." Not once.   "And that some senior White House aides looked at that article. In fact"--his tone was both superior and congratulatory--"the President's people even kicked around one or two of your thoughts when they made their limited amnesty recommendation to Congress."   I almost groaned. The latest Republican plan allowed bosses to continue exploiting their existing cheap foreign labor, while slamming the door on future immigration. "I'm sure you misunderstood your friend-"   "Now, now. No false modesty. I haven't had a chance to peek at the article myself, but Bud Hopper certainly seemed to think it was a good piece of student work." He added brightly, "Good enough for the Reagan administration!"   I sat down, almost missing the edge of the bed. If my parents learned I'd contributed, however unwittingly, to the Republican body politic, they would wander the streets in sackcloth and ashes.    "And," he continued, "a few of the partners here were sufficiently impressed when I mentioned it to suggest that I call you this morning and invite you to update your résumé."   "Mr. Spender, thank you. But I don't think I'd like to--"   "Naturally, we would be prepared to lateral you in."   I briefly considered the verb. Was it better than being verticaled? "Lateral me?"   "Give you credit for your two years with the Warneke firm. "   "In what sense?"   "Salary and seniority," he said indulgently. "I believe our third-year people are making about ninety thousand. It goes up quite sharply in the fourth year, and continues climbing until one makes partner in the seventh year, assuming one does. Partners, of course, are on a different scale altogether."   Ninety thousand dollars! And goes up sharply! Warneke, Kerrey, Lieberman & Flish, the law firm of my left-wing dreams, had been paying me twenty-five five before becoming somewhat defunct.   "Let me give you the name of a contact person in our San Francisco office," Spender continued, in the same Indulgent tone. "In case you decide to give us a call. "   And, with the breathless obedience of a Nancy Reagan, I purred, "Let me get a pencil!"   …   ____________________________________________________     PRIOR CONVICTIONS   1991 Simon & Schuster; 1992 Ballantine Books                                   Edgar Award Nominee         1.     I WATCHED MY marijuana float away from the Santa Monica pier. At the last minute, an eddy of gray water sent it swirling back toward me. It seemed to call out, Willa, no; I'm your last vestige of hipness. I almost jumped into the water to reclaim the damp detritus of my one remaining vice. My one remaining vice--God, I'd gotten boring.   But I thought of all the mornings I'd wakened feeling like a bad country-western song. Every morning for the last year. And many mornings for many years before that. I'd been smoking pot since I was thirteen, in fact, since a cute boy with an earring handed me a joint on Haight Street, near my parents' flat. I had enough undamaged left brain to realize (if not exactly comprehend) that that was almost twenty-five years ago. I'd accomplished a lot in spite of it--and in spite of the nomadic movement politics that defined the life-style. A decade later than most of my peers, I'd endured Stanford University, Malhousie Law School, and two legal associate jobs--one politically correct, one fiscally correct. Maybe I'd needed pot to help me put up with the bullshit. But it worried me that I now needed it every single day.   Anyway, I reminded myself, this was a good time to quit. I was embarking on a (slightly premature) midlife crisis. I'd just left the best job--rather, the best income--I'd ever had. My sex life was lying somewhere with a wooden stake in its heart. My mood was beyond repair; I might as well give my brain cells a chance to regenerate.   Behind me on the pier, an Iranian couple noisily unfolded a quilted-steel hot dog wagon. Early rollerbladers strapped on knee pads. A Vietnamese man with an armload of buckets baited fish hooks. I shook the last few flakes of pot out of my Baggie and watched them sift through a layer of yellow smog. Then, more discreetly, I dropped the Baggie off the pier. In Santa Monica, I could get more jail time for littering than for possession of a controlled substance.   I walked the length of the pier, brushing the last of the green dust off my fingers. Santa Monica, the Miami Beach of sold-out activists; fitting that I should dump my pot here.  I was a straight person now, dull and unhip in the uniform of my outmoded youth: faded jeans, moccasins and a tie-dyed T- shirt. (At least my hair wasn't still long and center-parted. It was shoulder length and side- parted, the only style that looks vaguely adult on a five-one blonde who won't wear makeup and hates high heels.)   Smoking pot in grumpy solitude had been my alternative to sushi bars and health clubs with lawyers I saw enough of at work. Pot was my own little party, the last flicker of an old light show. Without it, I would probably devolve into Marilyn Quayle. (At least the uniform of my youth didn't include hats that looked like dog dishes.)   I took a last, unfond look at the motels and bungalow restaurants of Santa Monica Boulevard. Then I climbed into my car, a hatchback filled with all my worldly possessions, mostly plastic hanging bags of clothes. A year at a top-dollar L.A. law firm had done wonders for my wardrobe. A few more months and I'd have been the best-dressed lawyer at the Betty Ford Clinic.   I started the car, feeling clammy and nervous. I'd lived most of my life in San Francisco, where you can get anywhere by bus, streetcar or subway. I'd never learned to drive. But by the time I'd subsidized a fleet of L.A. cabs, I decided I was flexible enough to learn. Today, I had hundreds of miles to drive before nightfall.   I was finally leaving. I'd made 346 chalk marks on the walls of my Westwood apartment (stucco, of course; wall-to-wall carpeting; utterly characterless and bland, as I was fast becoming). I'd served my time. My résumé had been paroled.   Leaving was the good news. The bad news would fill several volumes.   Yes, I'd rehabilitated my résumé. It had taken a year of squinting at loan agreements and conferring with obnoxious men in red power ties, but I'd done it. I was now marketable--a fourth-year attorney with family law and corporate litigation experience; experienced enough to be of use but not senior enough to threaten associates on the brink of partnership. I'd have no trouble finding a job in another firm.   Unfortunately, I hated being a lawyer….   I drove up the coast highway, oblivious to crashing waves, kiting pelicans, cliffs painted in ice plant. The price of admission to a midlife crisis is that you stop noticing anything that won't sleep with you.   …   ___________________________________________________     LAST CHANTS   1996 Simon & Schuster; 1997 Pocket Books     ____________________________________________________       STAR WITNESS   1997 Simon & Schuster; 1998 Pocket Books     __________________________________________________________________       HAVANA TWIST                          1998 Simon & Schuster; 1999 Pocket Books           Chapter One       I often hear people complain about their mothers.  But I'd celebrate if all my mother did was skewer me with advice and bore me with anecdotes.  I think anyone who hasn't had to bail her mother out of jail cells full of demonstrators is lucky.  Anyone who can guiltlessly utter a cynicism or consort with an occasional Republican is lucky.   The capper, as far as I'm concerned, was last year, when my mother flew to Cuba with a bevy of gray-haired "brigadistas", then failed to return with them.                                     When fourteen sweet and unpretentious women dedicated to not hugging their children with nuclear arms filed off the plane, I could tell by their faces that something was wrong.  Global Exchange and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom had, by natural selection, assembled an ecstatic group prepared to bliss out on revolution.  The women should have been flushed with the rapture of connection, they should have had that noble Dances With Revolutionaries look.  Instead, they looked worried and confused.  And members of WILPF rarely look confused.  They are the Jewish mothers of politics, ready to chicken-soup the whole third world.  So I knew something had gone wrong.  But foolishly, I thought maybe they'd been disillusioned.  I thought maybe something had cracked their rose-colored lenses.                        I should have known better.  I'd accompanied Mother to an itinerary meeting filled with women who couldn't stop exclaiming about Cuba's excellent schools and health care, the warmness of its people, and the fact that no racial inequality existed there.  My mild question about political prisoners provoked a temper tantrum about our CIA-backed press, and the hypocrisy of blockading Cuba while maintaining relations with governments of torturers.  I followed up--at considerable risk to my mother's reputation-- with some particulars about a recently-jailed poet.  Until her sudden fall from favor, she'd been relentlessly trotted forth as an epitome of the Cuban spirit.  Could a repressive regime produce a world- class poet? Castro argued.                         "A perfect example of distortion by a biased press," one of the Fidelistas sniffed.  "When we asked our Cuban hosts about that, they explained that since the U.S. is waging war on Cuba, certain things the poet did were tantamount to treason."                        I let the war on Cuba slide.  "What things?"                        "Well, she was talking to foreign journalists."  The woman's voice was hushed with disapproval.  "She was leafleting."                        Leafleting.  Any woman in the room would run into a burning house to save her stash of WILPF pamphlets.  Most would sacrifice family photos before they'd let their leaflets burn.                        My mother poked me in the ribs.  "You have to understand their context, Baby--their whole economy is being ruined by our government!  They have a right to try and stop that."                        Leaflets were powerful weapons, all right: look how WILPF's tracts had brought the Republicans to their knees.                        Since that evening, I'd been inundated with alternative-press articles on Cuba.  Mother's friends couldn't bear to have me think bad thoughts about the place.  The regular press, on the other hand, was gleefully monitoring the collapse of the Cuban economy.  See, it said, socialism doesn't work.  Never mind that Castro's "final hour" had dragged on for a decade.                        Anyway, the WILPF women did not look righteous as they deplaned--not a good sign.  They huddled together, stopping short when they saw me.  Also not a good sign.                        "We had to leave," one of them blurted.  "Because of visas and other commitments and things.  I'm so sorry."                        My first thought was they were apologizing for not having defected.  "Of course," I murmured.  "Where's my mother?"                        "We wanted to wait for her, we really did."                                     By now they stood close enough for me to smell their cheek powder.                         "She's still there?  Why?  What's she doing?"                        I was suddenly flanked, motherly hands on my back.                                                                       "We don't know.  Last night she went off on her own and didn't come back to the hotel.  We looked everywhere we could think of this morning."   Sarah Swann, the alpha granny, added, "Our Cuban hosts were so upset.  They've made finding her their top priority."       I'll bet.  My mother was not a cannon you'd want loose in a controlled society.       "I know you have some funny views about Cuba from the Western media," Sarah continued, "but honestly, it's such an open society.  The one thing you can count on is that there's no monkey business from the government.  It's not like other countries-- ones our government supports--where people get disappeared."      I sat on a hard plastic airport lounge chair.  I was quickly going numb.  My mother had "disappeared" from my life many times, getting arrested for pouring blood on draft files, attacking missile nose cones, blocking access to nuclear power plants, and more recently, driving chainsaw-demolishing spikes into old-growth redwoods.  My government was committed to arresting her, usually at her insistence.  I didn't see why a foreign government should be more charitable.       I looked up at the concerned faces of women who resembled my mother: spry seniors with uncolored hair and intelligent eyes.  I took comfort.  Like them, my mother believed in the Cuban revolution.  She'd see their militarism--anything they did, including jailing of dissidents and polluting of their coastline--as a pitiable result of U.S. policies.  She would save her civil disobedience for her return to this country.                         "No," I said finally.  "I can't think of any reason for the Cuban government to bother her."                        "Oh, no!  They're wonderful there, you can't imagine."                        Unless you're a homosexual.  Unless you leaflet.                        But Mother would have agreed with these women.  She would--for once!--have made no ideological waves.  So where was she?      "The crime rate is very, very low there," Sarah consoled me.  "If you're thinking she might have been … attacked."                        The thought had certainly crossed my mind. On the other hand, I could imagine Mother meandering off with new-found friends and missing her plane.  In which case, maybe she'd already turned up.                        At worst, how difficult would it be to find a pale-skinned blond American in Cuba?                         Famous last words.   …