Fixers (42 page)

“The royal 787 is on twenty-four-seven standby in in the capital,” Lucia said, adding that preparations are advanced in a neighboring emirate to move close to a billion dollars’ worth of Gauguin, Picasso, and Cézanne on short notice out of the country and into the ruling family’s vaults in a Geneva report. She went on to report that a chum in MI6 tells her that ISIS agents are circulating in the Qatar slave labor camps where the Bangladeshis and others imported to build soccer stadiums and palaces are penned up. The terrorist enlistment teams are having no problem signing up recruits, so there’s another powder keg ready to blow up.

It was after she told me that she’d just cashed a “rather handsome” STST bonus check for work done in 2008 that I recalled that I had a New Year’s gift of my own for Lucia, a bit of gossip that would give her warm memories of Rosenweis an extra holiday glow. It’s a tidbit I picked up from a client, a trust-fund glamour girl who’s married to an editor at
Fortune
. It seems that the magazine’s going to be releasing a poll that ranks how 100 highly visible publicly traded companies rate with the public.

“Guess who’s right at the bottom?” I asked her.

“Citibank?”

It was a logical guess. Most people would pick a company that transacts a lot of face-to-face, voice-to-voice business with the public, and if you’ve ever wrestled with Citi’s phone tree, you’ll know why the big bank was Lucia’s first choice. Besides, only two weeks ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who has
turned out to be Wall Street’s biggest Washington nemesis, got up on the Senate floor two weeks ago and really laid into Citi, urging the government to break it up.

“Not a bad guess,” I said, “but no soap. Try again.”

“One of the big airlines? Walmart?”

“Wrong on both counts.”

I heard her hesitate, then, in a voice edged with happy anticipation, she said, “Don’t tell me!”

I knew she’d gotten it. “Right the fourth time!” I exclaimed. “The mighty TARPworm, ruler of all it devours! They’re top of the charts—and by a healthy margin. For the way they treat their first-year hires.”

“How absolutely marvelous!” Then she paused. “Does Richard Rosenweis know this yet?”

“Don’t know. STST’s no longer a client, and I never speak to anyone over there. I’m surprised they haven’t asked you to rush back and save the day.”

“Fat chance!” And on that cheering note Lucia and I ended 2014.

B called late this morning, and I told her I have a table booked at Balthazar at 7:30 p.m. on the 31st. That’ll get us home in time to watch a movie. None of that Times Square ball crap for us. A good dinner, a movie, bed: that’s it. We alternate picks and don’t let on until just before we sit down to watch. I’m no mind reader, but I have a strong hunch that this year B’s chosen
The Dirty Dozen
because she’s mentioned it a few times in recent months. I gather it relates to a new project she and Claudio have got going with Carousel, the big cable outfit.

The next two days should be terrific. Marina and the diary, then B for New Year’s. One triumph after another.

This has been some day. Not at all what I expected. A total bummer.

You’ll recall, Gentle Reader, that I left the diary at Marina’s yesterday.

She called first thing this morning. Excited is hardly the word for how she sounded. Apparently she stayed up until three in the morning reading the damn thing and says she needs to talk to me soonest. Needless to say, her excitement is infectious. Like her, I can hardly wait to get going. But I had a lot on my plate today that had to be dealt with, so we made a date for 6:00 p.m. at my place to discuss strategy.

I got through the day OK, although I confess my mind was elsewhere a good deal of the time. In my business, you get pretty good at centering your thoughts on B while your face and small talk indicate absolute concentration on A. I made sure I got out of the office early in plenty of time for a pit stop to pick up some special cuvée Pol Roger with which to toast the salvation of this great republic—and Marina’s future Pulitzer.

The bell rang promptly at six. When I flung open the door, a huge triumphant grin pasted on my face, I got a shock. Marina wasn’t alone. Artie was with her, and I could see at once that this wasn’t some fortuitous coincidence, their arriving together. They had the look of a tag team climbing into the ring. Something was up. I guessed that she’d shown Artie the diary.

Even as I was sorting that out, I took note of Marina’s expression. Marina’s not exactly a high-fiver, but I was still expecting something more exuberant and positive than what was on her face. At least the kind of smile you see when your team leaves the field
at halftime up 45–0. What I was looking at was the reverse: down 0–45, and your quarterback’s just been lugged off to the infirmary.

When we sat down, I decided to let them have the opening bid, and looked expectantly from one to the other. After a short pause, Marina reached into her handbag and took out the memory stick I’d dropped off just a day and a half earlier. She placed it carefully on the coffee table, then gave me a warm smile, and said: “Chauncey, you’re right. This
is
potentially the greatest gift—the greatest scoop—any journalist has ever been offered. You make Deep Throat look like chopped liver.” She paused, and I knew at once that bad news was on its way, and I could guess what it had to be. She was turning me down.

I’ll give her credit. She looked uncomfortable when she told me that she feels she simply can’t do this, that in her opinion it will tear the country apart, and she doesn’t want to be the agent of its destruction. “Forty years ago,” she said, “it was different. Watergate fell on differently tuned ears. The country still had a modicum of community left. There was a kind of civic pride that kept things together. A kind of common purpose, you might say; a consensus, an agreement—admittedly vague—about what this country is supposed to be like and who’s entitled to what. Today there’s none of that left.”

She let that sink in. Artie just sat there, keeping a poker face, but his body language declared that he was on board with Marina’s thinking. I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there, too. Now will come the conciliatory bit, I found myself thinking. And I was right.

“Chauncey, your diary is pure gold, journalistically speaking,” she went on. “If anything can stand up to the money that’s poisoned our politics, it could only be something like what you have. Your journal certainly clears up a number of things I’ve had trouble with. I could never understand how the candidate—what do you call him, ‘OG?’—suddenly came by all that early money in
2007 and 2008. One minute his people were in the streets with tin cups, the next he had money coming out of his ears to the point that he could walk away from public financing. It looked legit, all those small contributions, but when you think about it, the final number—around $750 million, $25 for every person in the country—seems out of whack.

“The Winters and Holloway appointments never made any sense to me, either, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand how someone like Brewer got her job in the Justice Department and then kept it. Everything she did and said about Wall Street prosecutions flew right in the face of what the president had talked about in his campaign. And I’ve often wondered how exactly Struthers Strauss got bailed out of its GIG trades. Or how Polton slipped the noose on that Protractor deal. Then there’s Greece: why Struthers hasn’t been punished for helping them pull a fast one on the EU, Zeus only knows. I don’t suppose you have the answer to that?”

I shook my head. I still had no idea what to say.

“So I’m flattered that you think enough of me to give me first dibs. If I took your material to David Remnick, I’m sure
The New Yorker
would devote an entire issue to it. I think Graydon Carter would give his eyeteeth to publish it in
Vanity Fair
. You and I would be on every talk show you can think of, and you’ll surely be asked to testify to Congress.”

I hadn’t thought of this. The idea of having to face a panel of the peckerwood troglodytes committed to put Wall Street’s and the GOP’s well-being ahead of the people made me shiver, even as I heard Marina finish: “You could probably get seven-figure bids from publishers for the book rights, Michael Lewis money. Bob Woodward would jump at this!”

“This isn’t about the money, Marina. You know me better than that.”

“Look,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound pleading. “I know there are great journalists out there. But as much as I admire people like Taibbi, I don’t know them. This is an all-time hot potato, and I can only give it to someone I trust to cover my ass. I betrayed the voters when I cut the deal with Orteig, and now I’m proposing to betray the people in whose interest I acted. That’s a shitload of betrayal for one little guy to be lugging around. Hell, it could get me killed. I need to feel comfortable with whoever I do this with, and with us WASPs, comfort begins and ends with old acquaintance.”

This made her smile. I started to continue, but Artie stepped in and cut me off: “Chauncey, it isn’t just generalities. There are specific practical, political reasons for not making this public. Right now the GOP is flailing about. They need a cause. They’d like nothing better than to impeach the president. Your diary will give them the ammunition they crave.”

“Why should it?” I wanted to know. “Impeachment is for bad stuff that goes down in the White House. When I cut my deal, this guy wasn’t even a nominee.”

“You know what I mean.”

She looked over to Artie, who took up the thread: “The truth is that OG hasn’t been all that bad a president, considering the obstacles he’s faced. But he needs—the country needs—to see him finish strong.”

“He let Wall Street off the hook,” I objected. “And what about health care? It’s a mess.” I was going to go down swinging. It’s
my
diary after all, and maybe Marina had a point: these weren’t the only two fish in the sea. At least that’s what I told myself at that moment.

“Nobody can say whether the ACA’s working or it isn’t,” Marina argued. “Health care’s like Dodd-Frank. Once the lobbyists got through with it, no sentient human being could understand how it works, really. But people seem satisfied on the whole. Or at least, a great many people who didn’t have insurance are
now covered. The GOP claimed the costs would skyrocket, but that hasn’t happened.”

The fact was, I don’t know enough about health care to argue one way or the other. “OK,” I said, “give him the benefit of the doubt on health care. But what about foreign policy? You can’t tell me that’s not a total mess.”

“You’re talking about the Middle East,” Artie said, “but that’s a Gordian knot that Metternich, Bismarck, and Talleyrand combined couldn’t have unscrambled. He who was our ally on Monday in Syria is fighting us to the death on Tuesday in Yemen. Mistakes have been made, no doubt, but you have to ask yourself: who could have done better?”

“What it comes down to,” Marina interjected, “is this: your diary can cripple this administration, what little time it has left. But is that what we really want? Arthur’s right; it’s highly likely that releasing your journal will move the GOP to bring an impeachment bill. It’ll be a straw man, but it will burn up vast amounts of political energy. And I will guarantee you that this president won’t cave the way Nixon did. He’s not a drinker, and he isn’t exactly full of self-pity. He’ll never agree to give in to people he holds in utter contempt. The government truly will grind to a halt. Nothing will get done.”

“It seems me to that nothing gets done as it is,” I responded. Weakly, honesty compels me to add.

Marina now took the debate in a whole other direction. I was having trouble keeping my thoughts organized. “Chauncey, you have to be pleased with yourself for what you accomplished,” she told me. “You were given a job; you did it—and did it wonderfully well. But has it occurred to you that your dealings with Orteig may have been only one of a series negotiated with the 2008 campaign? Has it occurred to you that yours might not have been the only $75 million moved into the campaign in return for understandings
concerning other spheres of business? He raised over $800 million overall.

“Just think about it,” Marina continued. “Wall Street’s just one of many hogs at the trough. Look at Big Pharma and the health insurance companies and what they stand to milk out of the Affordable Care Act. You can hear them licking their lips from here to Capitol Hill. You think they were handed that for nothing? Why do you think health-care stocks keep reaching new highs? And what about the trillions in untaxed profits the big companies and wealthy individuals have stashed overseas? The legislation that protects these would be worth a great deal more than $75 million to the 1 percent, wouldn’t you think? There would have to have been fixes put in all over the place. You may have just been one—and not a very big one at that.”

This is something that’s bothered me from time to time since I carried out my mission for Mankoff. It might be flattering to consider myself the only game in town, the man who fixed the World Series. But how could I be sure? I frankly found the inference hard to take. Still, I had to concede that while the notion might be demeaning, it was also possible. Would Mankoff have done that to me?

Of course he would. That’s why he was Mankoff.

“And think of what Fox News—people like O’Reilly and Hannity—will do with your diary,” Artie now added.

I was starting to feel like the shuttlecock in a game of badminton. “Those people are liars,” I said. “No one I know listens to them.” Even to my own ears I didn’t sound convincing.

Marina: “No one except half the country. The half the three of us don’t know. The half I don’t write for because I know they refuse to read me. The half with guns. Just imagine how they’ll react, given the excuse. You think this will change their minds about anything? It’ll only fan the flames. There could be blood in the streets. Is that what you want?”

“I’m not sure.”

And I’m not. Or I wasn’t—not at that moment. Tomorrow, when I’ve had a chance to think this all through, I may change my mind. One thing I’m sure of, though: Marina’s not going to change hers. She’s out. For reasons I would only learn about later from Artie, reasons I have to respect even if I think the hand I’ve offered her is stronger than the hand she’s chosen to play.