This Is How It Really Sounds (12 page)

Lev talked some more. Pete listened to him, but he kept getting distracted by the poker hands on his shirt. All royal flushes. But if everyone has a royal flush, they split the pot, right? So what the shirt was really saying is, even when you think you're holding a winner, life's a goddamn stalemate, so fuck you. Maybe that's what was so special about that store in Bangkok—fucking
irony
.

“… And the first thing is, do you want to take the deal?”

“What deal?”

Lev looked annoyed. “One of the big banks is offering to buy out what's left of Crossroads' bonds for five cents on the dollar, and you have to decide whether to take it. You'd clear about four hundred thousand.”

“Four hundred thousand. That sounds pretty good.”

Lev looked over at Bobby, who put his hand to his forehead and looked away. “Pete! It's not good. It's what you have left out of eight million.”

The singer took off his reading glasses. There was something really serious about this that he didn't like.

Lev went on in a soft but insistent tone. “Let's try it again: if you take the offer…”

He was listening now. Listening harder than he'd listened to either of them in a long time. It was like there was a messenger on horseback wearing a red coat, coming from far away over the hills, reappearing around each bend a little bit closer, a little bit bigger, that red pennant, the pounding of the hooves: he's coming.
If you take the money, you'll have enough to live on for a few months at your present level. Otherwise, there's a class-action lawsuit you can join, in which case you might get a payoff a few years down the line, but maybe not. In these kinds of class-action lawsuits …

He put his hand up in the accountant's face. “Hold the noise for a second, Lev. You said, ‘enough to live on for a few months.'”

Lev stared at him for a second, looking annoyed. “Pete! You're broke!”

“What do you mean
broke
? I can't be broke! Jason told me I had eight million dollars of assets!” Actually, he couldn't quite remember how much Jason had said he had, because Jason always gave such complicated explanations about assets and liabilities when what Pete really wanted to know was: can this go on? And if it could, then he didn't need all that static about liabilities and cash flow and etc., etc., etc.

Now Lev started in on him again. “You had eight-point-three million in
assets,
but you also had liabilities. Unfortunately, your assets are worth about one tenth of what they were before. But your liabilities are the same. And when that happens, and you miss payments, people start wanting your assets. That's what happened with the Boxster. I've been telling you this for six weeks. Didn't you read my e-mails?”

Bobby was actually trying to be gentle with him. “You're broke, Pete. That's the bottom line.”

Message delivered. He was still taking that one in when the hostess came up to them. “Would anyone like a drink?” She looked like she was giving him a special smile as she glanced around the table and finished looking directly at him. Yeah, she was definitely available. Probably thirty-five, nice body tone, all the parts still in place, and with a whole lot of experience at making them work together. He stretched his gaze up at her over his reading glasses. “What's on offer?”

The messenger in the red coat had moved on now; things were back to normal. Bobby and Lev knew better than to cramp his style, and he had a nice little exchange with the hostess before he ordered another vodka and mango. He watched her walk away, then turned back to Lev. “So I'm broke.” He shrugged. “I've been broke before.”

“Exactly,” Bobby said, comfortingly. “It's nothing you can't deal with. You've been up and you've been down, and, either way, you're still Pete Harrington and you've got millions of people every day who listen to your music and love you. Meanwhile, we have to do some streamlining.”

Lev pulled out some papers to explain exactly what “streamlining” meant, which was sell the house, sell the place in Montana, sell the race car, take the deal offered by the bank. Get an apartment and keep his living expenses under five thousand a month. That would look good to the judge when he got to bankruptcy court.

“Bankruptcy court?”

“Yeah, Pete. A couple of banks are getting ready to foreclose on your houses and they're going to want your song catalog, if they can get it.”

“The banks?” He remembered the article he'd looked at in the magazine the day before. “You mean the same banks who just pulled off the biggest heist in the history of the fucking world? Those banks? The ones who held the whole fucking galaxy for ransom when they needed a bailout? Where the
fuck
do they come off foreclosing on
me
?”

The hostess showed up at that moment with his second drink, and they all went silent as she put it on the table. She started with a big smile, but then she glanced at the faces and left without a word.

Lev said, “Maybe you ought to hold off on that drink until we're finished.”

“I could use one,” Bobby said suddenly, putting his hairy fingers around the tall glass. “That okay, Pete?”

“Fucking
whatever
, Bobby!” He let the annoyance pass. “Lev, I'm about to go on tour in three months. Can't that raise enough money to take care of this?”

Lev looked at Bobby, then back at him. “Pete, we looked at the income side, and I'm not seeing salvation there. We could sell your catalog, but that wouldn't save much and would leave you without any income stream in the future. I don't want to see you go there.” Lev went back to the list. “I guess the Boxster's taken care of. Then there's three Harleys. Anything left in the wine cellar?”

Another one of his hobbies. He still got the Sotheby's catalogs. “Nope.”

Lev raised his eyebrows without looking up from the list. He started to go into more detail, including an action plan for each item: call a Realtor, fix the driveway, sell the horses—crap he wouldn't know how to do in a million years. Look for an apartment—was he serious? Lev was still rattling on with various tiresome shit when his order came: a twenty-five-dollar hamburger made with meat from some special farm, cheese from some special village in the French Alps. They should have called it
hamburgicchio.

“And, uh, Matthew's got to go.”

“Matthew! That's ridiculous! What am I going to do without Matthew?”

“Let's see … Go to the supermarket? Answer the phone? Take your own clothes to the dry-cleaners? Not to be snippy, Pete, but most of us do that every day.”

“Well, I'm not most of us, Lev, and I would think you'd have figured that out by now! Everybody has an assistant! I mean, you're a fucking accountant, and you've got an assistant!”

“Show some respect, Pete,” Bobby cut in. “Lev's just trying to help you out here.”

“Hey! You're right. I'm sorry, Lev. My head's all messed up.” He put his forehead in his hand and squeezed his temples. He could see his Gucci reading glasses sitting on the table, but they didn't look cool anymore. They just looked like reading glasses. “What happened here, Lev? Is it my fault? Is it Jason? Because if it's Jason, I'm going to track his silly ass down and beat him with a fucking seven-iron!”

He expected Lev to get all over Jason's shit, like Bobby had, but Lev's voice was strangely gentle. “Jason never should have put eighty percent of your assets into one instrument. And he should have read the prospectus, just like thousands of other people should have. If you want to go after Jason, you have good grounds for a negligence suit. But you wouldn't get anything out of him. Jason's ruined. He lost his house and his FA license.” He shrugged. “And he deserved to. But the fact is, Jason got conned by experts. There was fraud every step of the way, but the guy at the top walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars, and he'll never be prosecuted for anything. You want to track somebody down with a seven-iron? That's who you ought to go after.”

“Who is he?”

“His name is Peter Harrington.”

“Yeah, Lev, that's really funny. I really need sarcastic morality shit right now.”

His accountant smiled. “No, really! His name is Peter Harrington! If you were ever ego surfing, you must have run across him.”

He tended to consider those other Peter Harrington entries on the Internet interlopers on his fame, but, come to think of it, Crossroads did sound familiar. “The fucker even ripped off my name?”

“That's ironic,” Bobby said.

“No, man, it's not ironic,” Pete answered. “It's
seven
-ironic! Yes!” He curled his fingers, and Bobby responded with a congratulatory fist bump at the pun. “I'll deal with Mr. Peter Harrington later.” He motioned toward Lev's list. “Go on. Because every item on that list I'm taking out of that guy's ass.”

As they went over the accountant's plan, it began to dawn on Pete that things really were about to change. When he left this table, he'd be walking into a whole other life, a sort of underlife that had been secretly waiting for him beneath what he thought was his real life. He tried to put it out of his mind.

The bill came, and they all stared at it for a moment. Close to a hundred bucks for a burger and a couple of sandwiches. Pete waited a few seconds to see if anyone else would pick it up.

“We can split it,” Lev said.

“Forget it!” He reached for the check. “It's still a business meeting.” He threw his gold card down on the little black tray. A few minutes later the hostess came back with an awkward look on her face. Pete knew why she looked so embarrassed. This was her last chance to hook up and she had to figure out how to make her play in front of everybody. He smiled encouragingly at her. No use making her beg.

“Mr. Harrington?”

“Angel of mercy?”

“I'm sorry. Your card's been declined.”

He laughed out loud. It looked like that date wasn't happening.

Bobby picked it up and they all left. The same valet fetched his car, a young Mexican guy who looked just about right driving up in the old Volkswagen. The Gardenermobile. “Here you are, Mr. Harrington.”

He felt like pretending the car was someone else's, but there it was, served up with his name on it. He folded up a fifty and put it into the valet's palm, who thanked him smoothly, without even looking at it.

*   *   *

He was on the computer within five minutes of getting home. Matthew was on his laptop, posting messages on the boards, or some shit like that, and he started to tell him about his phone calls, but he walked right past him, “Not now, Matthew,” and went straight into the studio, which, since it hadn't been too active lately, he'd fitted out with a massive TV screen. He reached into the minifreezer for a bottle of vodka and was pleased as always to find it so cold that it was almost syrupy. He poured some vodka in a glass and shot it, then poured some more and flopped onto the couch. He put the keyboard on his lap and searched his name and “Crossroads.” He got over a million hits on the wall-sized monitor. Shit! This other Peter Harrington was as big as he was.

He clicked on the pages, and the story started to come out. First, most recently, the fallout: journalistic crap about the collapse of Crossroads and how it had laid waste to a butt-load of banks and pension funds. Everybody shaking their heads, like this Harrington guy was Satan's fucking ethics professor. It didn't mention any bankers or pension-fund guys losing their jobs—that wasn't how those guys played it—but they did manage to find some Moms and Pops out on Main Street who'd seen a big chunk of their retirement get vaporized. They looked old and wronged, in that sour, hurting way that kneels down at night and prays,
God Almighty, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change, the courage to change the things I can, and a large-caliber handgun filled with fucking magnum rounds to blow this greedy motherfucker's balls off. Amen!
Or something like that. A prayer that never got answered. Even the government was crying foul, ponying up $160 billion to stabilize some insurance company, another couple hundred bil to rescue some banks. The funny thing was, searching back a few pages, all the same fuckers were saying just the opposite! Ass-kissing write-ups in
The New York Times
and
The Wall Street Journal
. Harrington's a genius, a rock star!
Rock star!
Nothing remotely “rock star” about him: that pasty skin, the high forehead and wispy brownish hair. His face was shaped like a peanut, for Christ's sake!

He kept moving backward in the search engine, where relevance to the terms “Peter Harrington” and “Crossroads” began to drift. Now the foreign-language entries began to surface, in German and Chinese. He translated a few, but most came out too garbled to understand. A bunch of hits to the Metropolitan Opera and the Museum of Modern Art, and a half dozen other charities the shithead seemed to mess around with. Showing up at parties with his picture next to unrecognizable people who must mean something in that world. Hey, there he was with Al Pacino! And again next to some model chick, and Calvin Klein.
Livin' large, on my money.
Further back, the traces of Harrington's earlier career were floating around. Promoted to vice president of Special Purpose Vehicles at Goldman Sachs, something about extreme skiing. He skied? Something fired in Harrington's memory, and he clicked on the link.

It was an old back issue of
Ski
that someone had scanned in, and the cover said “The Greatest Extreme Skier on the Planet,” with a picture of some dude just completely launching into the ether, the edge of some ungodly steep mountain behind him and a mountain range far off below him, flying over it on his skis like gravity had never been invented. Unreal. He looked at it a few seconds, imagining himself up there, hanging effortlessly in the sky, and then he remembered. This was that skier he met that time! The guy from Alaska! Mitch's friend: he was in L.A. trying to be somebody, or maybe Mitch was trying to make him somebody, but when you looked at the picture, it was pretty clear that he was somebody all by himself. He'd been supposed to meet that guy in Tahoe. That was it: they'd been all set up to do some runs in Tahoe and then Beth unleashed fucking World War Six on him and that ski trip was the least of his worries. He couldn't reach the guy to cancel, and Mitch told him later he'd snapped his leg or something. Never saw him again, and he hadn't seen Mitch in about ten years either.