The Fairmont

The Fairmont is the setting for the celebration following Steve Maryk’s acquittal, and its hired dining room becomes the site of a sharp reversal. Tom Keefer brings the officers together to mark both the verdict and his literary success; Barney Greenwald’s arrival, however, turns the party into a confrontation over who benefited from the trial and who bore its cost. The gathering begins as a public release of relief and ends in strained silence, making the hotel an important setting for the novel’s reckoning with responsibility.

The Celebration After the Trial

After Maryk is acquitted, Keefer announces that dinner will be held at The Fairmont, that he has hired a room, and that he will pay. He calls it a double celebration: he has received a contract for his novel and a check for one thousand dollars. The officers’ excitement is therefore bound to two forms of apparent vindication—Maryk’s legal success and Keefer’s arrival as a published author.

The gathering brings together the Caine’s officers amid exuberant congratulations. Their mood is buoyant enough for Harding to announce extravagant plans for drinking, while Jorgensen embraces a tree outside the court building and breaks his glasses. At the hotel, the celebration takes a more organized form around dinner and Keefer’s champagne. The distinction matters: the party is not merely an extension of the courtroom crowd’s relief, but a gathering Keefer has arranged and can present as his own triumph.

A Party Staged Around Keefer’s Success

A large cake covered in green icing and shaped like a book dominates the table. Its design makes Keefer’s novel a literal centerpiece, while the title, Multitudes, Multitudes, connects the celebration to the work whose contract he has just secured. The object brings his new literary identity into the room as visibly as the legal victory brings Maryk’s acquittal into the conversation.

When Greenwald arrives, Keefer calls for a toast and presents him as the lawyer who defeated Queeg and rescued the oppressed. The language of the toast turns the trial into a heroic performance, with Greenwald cast as its triumphant champion. The officers respond in a festive mood, but their praise rests on incomplete knowledge: Willie Keith suspects that Keefer did not act with particular courage in court, yet he has not heard the testimony and does not know what happened between Keefer and Greenwald. Maryk, for his part, has said nothing against Keefer during the proceedings. The Fairmont celebration thus gathers people who share the verdict but do not share the same understanding of how it was won.

Greenwald’s Rebuke

Greenwald refuses the celebratory account. In his drunken address to Keefer, he says that he defended Maryk because he recognized that the wrong man was on trial, but that the only way he could defend him was to bring Queeg down. He resents having been forced into that position and says he is ashamed of what he did. He also discloses that he owed Queeg a favor: Queeg had protected Greenwald’s mother from Hermann Goering. The disclosure complicates the simple triumphal story told at the table, placing personal indebtedness and moral discomfort alongside the courtroom victory.

Greenwald declines both Keefer’s dinner and his wine, makes a toast to Keefer and his book, and throws wine in Keefer’s face. Maryk begins to intervene, but Greenwald pushes him back into his chair and offers to meet Keefer outside. The action punctures Keefer’s staged celebration: the lawyer publicly refuses the role of grateful hero and directs his anger at the man he believes escaped the moral consequences of the trial.

The Celebration’s Collapse

The other officers begin glancing toward Keefer, but no one meets his eyes. Greenwald leaves, and Keefer dismisses the incident as drunkenness, asking Willie to have the meal brought in. The group continues with dinner, yet the atmosphere has changed; conversation dwindles, the cake receives only brief applause when cut, and the gathering ends after coffee with five unopened bottles of champagne left on the table.

The Fairmont therefore holds two incompatible versions of the trial’s aftermath in the same room. For Keefer and the officers, the dinner begins as a celebration of acquittal, professional recognition, and apparent freedom from Queeg. Greenwald’s rebuke forces the group to confront the difference between winning Maryk’s case and acting loyally toward him. The party does not resolve that conflict, but its sudden quiet makes the cost of the celebration visible.