A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (25 page)

"I'm sorry about that. I wish I could help you."

He nodded. Time was running out for him. He didn't want to ask anything else of her, but he was short on options. In a sense, he was looking forward to getting fired. He was ready to be liberated from the stress.

Neither one of them said anything for a while. They just sat beside each other staring at the other twin bed, where he had thrown his medical supplies, including the large box of gauze, the white medical tape, three boxes of adhesive bandages, the antibiotic ointment, both bottles of pills, and an ice pack, now at room temperature. The boxy and colorless flotsam of the wounded.

"Would it be so bad if you lost this job?" she eventually said.

He was about to shake his head, but stopped to think about it. He envisioned New York and his life there, impressions flashed of late-night subway rides and of a glistening breakfast in Greenpoint at the Polish deli that smelled of old dishwater and was always full of cops and of the annual
IBI
staff party at Faddo's, a tiny Irish bar in Chelsea. He remembered walking backward into a cold wind one winter night with some friends, all of them were walking backward and emitting a chorus of groans at the gusts. They had ended up in the loft of a friend of a friend of one of Gabriel's suddenly wealthy college friends—Vic, a quant at D. E. Shaw. The woman who owned the loft looked like a young Yoko Ono. Her husband was a bigwig at Geffen Records. She served them cashews and champagne and they talked about a recent rash of exploding manholes. Gabriel wanted to take the subway home afterward, but Vic insisted on their taking a taxi. Gabriel gave in, and when he got out of the cab he handed Vic fifteen dollars, and Vic, who no longer thought about money in the way that mortals did, accepted the bills absent-mindedly. Then Vic continued to his new brownstone in Park Slope, and Gabriel walked up to his studio apartment.

So to Lenka he said, "Yes, it would be bad if I lost my job." It was lovely to be in Bolivia and to stand comfortably outside the local class structure, but he wasn't going to be in Bolivia forever. Sooner or later, he would be back in New York. He didn't want to lie to her any more than was necessary; actually, he didn't want to lie to her at all, so he didn't say anything else.

"Is your job that satisfying?" she asked.

"
Satisfying?
" He shook his head. "No, it's not satisfying. I'm afraid it's only rewarding in one way: the most straightforward way."

This last part wasn't quite true; there were more perks to it than that—the thrill, the illicitness, its espionage quality, to name a few—but the spirit of the point remained. Working for the hedge fund might even be as exciting as working for Evo, but in the end a very large part of the allure had to do with the crazily outsize paychecks.

Understandably, she didn't like what he was saying. And that was the problem. She didn't respect people who would work for the sole purpose of making heaps of money. Not many people did. It seemed to require a base value structure, something that was, if not outright corrupt, at least a little cold and nihilistic. And while that position did resonate on a deep level with Gabriel, who was, after all, his mother's son, he believed that there was more to it than that.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that he was pursuing profit to the neglect of everything else, at least the work wasn't as harmful as people seemed to believe. For one thing, the profit in question wasn't coming at the expense of the inhabitants of any poor countries, as his mother had claimed in her opinion piece in the
Los Angeles Times.
It turned out that the point of his work was not to extract money from Bolivia—there was, frankly, not enough money there to attract his employer's attention—but to find some way to outgun the competing hedge funds. He was in Bolivia because it was an angle the others weren't pursuing. The point was to somehow achieve better gains than the other hedge funds did. It was a straightforward race, but it was sprints, all the time. There were four sprints per year, one each quarter. The object was to beat the others on your quarterly statement. Ultimately, the goal was to generate a record of such impressive gains that risk-friendly people seeking a place to plant a few million would be willing to accept your high fees. The fees themselves were nice, but it was imperative to always lure new clients to your shop. With those kinds of small hedge funds, there was no point in marketing, really. Anyone with the means to participate was not going to look at the company's logo. Interested parties would study the quarterly results alone. The best hedge fund generated the best results, and, in so doing, did the best job of appealing to the greedier instincts of those in the position to play with millions of dollars.

Gabriel had noticed that of all the cardinal sins, greed was the most uniformly maligned. A glutton might be merely an overzealous bon vi-vant, a lustful person might be too passionate; and a slothful person could be simply over-mellow. Envy, wrath, and pride flared once in a while in everyone, and so they were easily appreciated. Greed however held purely pejorative implications. Unlike the rest, it wasn't seen as spawned of heart—of passions. It was seen as a cold and cerebral sin, a schemer's sin, one that had to be committed knowingly. But Gabriel didn't see it that way. To him, it was just as complex and obsessive a vice as lust, envy, or wrath.

When Hernán Cortés encountered Montezuma's emissaries, in 1519, he reportedly said, "Let your king send us more gold, for I and my companions have a disease of the heart, which only gold can cure."

Crucially, he spoke of the heart. What else but passion would propel a group of men on such a journey? What else could enable them to commit such deeds? A look at the many swelling and popping financial bubbles of the past century indicated a culture overcome with fits of mass hysteria and delusions, a culture
passionately
obsessed with the acquisition of wealth. It was all heart. And the enemy of wisdom was a taste not for vice but for certainty. This was Lenka's failure, her unambiguous moral clarity and the attendant proclivity for judgment. It was what made her a brilliant spokesperson for Evo, and it was what made her incapable of understanding why Gabriel sincerely wanted to work for the Calloway Group. Lenka's own mother, though, seemed to stand at the distant opposite end of this spectrum. The wise aura she emanated implied not an adamantine moral confidence but an acquaintance with (and an appreciation of) human frailty.

Gabriel was hoping to appeal to something similar in Lenka when he said, "My job is not about the things my mother told me mattered. It's about money."

"But you think that money does matter."

"Look around you, Lenka. What do you think?"

"I believe that life can be about more than that."

"I do too. Or, I hope so. My problem is that I am in a very strange situation, and it's a good situation. It's a great situation, actually. I have a job right now that, if I can manage to keep it for a few years, will put me within striking distance of very early retirement."

"Right."

He took her hand. "I just need to survive at this job for two or three years and then I will be done. This is my chance. If this doesn't work, I'll go back to some other job, and I'll be a slave to some paycheck. And that's not the end of the world, it's normal, obviously, and it's what I'd expected life to be like. But I've managed to locate a secret passage out, and I've just entered that passageway."

She looked at him and, in the next moments, he watched as she gave in. The part of her that had been resisting—he could practically see it collapse. "Fine," she said.

"Fine?"

She took a deep breath. "Yes, fine. I'll ask Evo what he has planned for Santa Cruz Gas."

"Thank you," he said. He said nothing else. He wanted her to speak next.

Eventually, she said, "I'll do it tomorrow."

There was no harm in her asking, of course, but if Evo told her something major and she told Gabriel, she would be committing a serious breach of Evo's confidence. Giving information about the president-elect's economic plan to an agent of a hedge fund would be nearly an act of treason. Evo would almost certainly never find out. Even if his administration figured out that a hedge fund had been betting on Bolivian gas, it would be more or less impossible to locate the source of that hedge fund's information. Still, she was risking everything that she had achieved for Gabriel's future in an industry she reviled.

"Thank you," he said again. There would be no way to thank her sufficiently.

She kissed his forehead, stood up. He pulled her back down.

"Thank you," he said, once more. He kissed her shoulder.

She stood up and started to resume her trip to the door but he pulled her down once again and pushed her back on the bed. He straddled her and leaned in, kissed her. She smiled up at him a little halfheartedly. She stared at his eyes so close that he could feel her eyelashes tickling his forehead and he could almost see the reflection of his own eyes.

"I should go," she said.

"No. You should stay." He had never ravaged anyone before, to the best of his knowledge. He hadn't quite known what it meant. But now he did know, and he planned to ravage her that night.

She gave a vulpine smile and said, "How much money do you actually make?"

"A lot. And if things go well here, I get a two-hundred-and-thirty-thousand-dollar bonus."

She blinked at him in disbelief, her mouth open. She was blushing.

***

That night, they slept embraced, their bodies pressed completely together. He'd never managed to sleep that way beside anyone before. And while he awoke often, sometimes with her breathing or snoring softly in his neck or at his chin, he never pulled away. He kissed her sleeping face, brushed strands of hair from her eyes, and let himself absorb the heat burning off her body.

In the morning, wearing his bathrobe, Gabriel stood with her by the elevator door and kissed her neck. It was eight thirty. She had spent the whole night for the first time. When the elevator bell dinged, they kissed once more. The doors slid open and there inside stood Alejo—of course, that lurker, and witness to Fiona's recent early-morning exit—in his black and white uniform, with his bowl cut and grimace-etched terra-cotta face.

"Hello, Alejo!" Lenka said as she swished inside, guileless.

"Mrs. Villarobles," he mumbled. He didn't even look at Gabriel.

If he'd been a different kind of person or had trusted his instincts a little more, Gabriel might have intervened in the seconds that remained. He could have stuck his arm out, stopped the doors. He could have gone down with them, supervised the interaction, and then walked her out. Or he could have pulled her from the elevator altogether, free of Alejo's venomous gossip. But he did nothing. He just stood there dumbly and waved goodbye to her. And she, standing there beside Alejo, smirked flirtatiously back at him, waving slowly.

And then the doors slid shut abruptly and Gabriel was alone in the dim corridor again, which stank of mildew, industrial carpet cleaner, and stale cigarette smoke.

THERE'D BE NO MORE breezy chitchat with Catacora after Gabriel's drunken performance Christmas Eve. Still, he hoped he could salvage the situation somehow, and maybe even turn the blunder into something worthwhile. So he showed up early at the office, clutching his notebook, and shook the man's hand firmly, making direct eye contact. He sat down, apologized for his behavior. "The alcohol," he said, "it affects me much more at this altitude," which was true, if somewhat beside the point. "And I was upset about this." He pointed at his still-swaddled face.

"That's fine," Catacora said. Gabriel had the notebook open on his lap, having learned from his initial interview with Lenka that people might find him suspicious if he didn't take notes. As expected, Catacora skipped the small talk and said, "So, how did you find out?"

"I can't reveal my source, but I will say that your appointment isn't a very well-kept secret." Gabriel emanated blaséness as studiously as possible. This was a bluff he'd thought up in the taxi on the way to the Monoblock. He hoped to direct suspicion away from Lenka.

"I actually thought it was a well-kept secret. It hasn't been in the press yet."

"I'm the only reporter who knows." By now, Gabriel was practiced enough with this kind of deception that the irony didn't even touch him.

"Why haven't you written about it then?"

"I wanted to talk to you first." Gabriel saw an opening developing for him in the conversation and thought he might be able to make a move for it after two or three more steps.

"Who are you going to sell the article to?"

"Probably a wire: Knight Ridder, AP, Reuters—I have no idea. I'd prefer to have it in the
Wall Street Journal,
but I'd need something extraordinary." He was getting into position.

"What do you want to know?"

"I'm interested in your thoughts on how to change Bolivia's fiscal policy."

"I have not yet been—"

"But you must know his plans." There, it was almost done. Catacora shrugged and Gabriel continued. "I want to know what Evo has planned for the foreign gas companies. That's the million-dollar question, and the
Journal
would find my piece a lot more attractive if I had some information on that."

"As you know, Evo has—"

"I understand he's promised to renegotiate the contracts with foreign gas companies, but you know it's not that simple. I've read your master's thesis, Professor Catacora, and you're attentive. Evo wouldn't be hurting only Repsol or some huge multinational conglomerate that could absorb the loss. There are a lot of companies invested in Bolivian gas. Brazilian companies would be the most damaged. Petrobras would survive, but Evo would be killing Santa Cruz. What would Brazilians say? You mentioned that Evo would clear it with Lula, but why would Lula agree to something that has no benefits for Brazil? And if he refused, would Evo just do it anyway?"