A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (29 page)

"Good morning, this is Tim Nester, may I ask whom I'm speaking to?"

"Gabriel Francisco de Boya," he said. He stubbed out his cigarette. He refreshed his browser, and the price of Santa Cruz Gas lifted three cents. The spread was wide, because trading was still light.

"Okay, let me pull up your account information," he said. Tim was probably Gabriel's age. Gabriel pictured a doughy guy with a crewcut. He pictured the office, some three-story building on the outskirts of Omaha. He saw something drab and awful, a slightly more deadening version of his former job at
IBI.
"How's your day?" Tim eventually said.

"It's been pretty crazy already, actually." It occurred to Gabriel that E-Trade might be taping the conversation. He should act blasé.

"Oh?" Tim said, seemingly just happy it was something different. "Where are you?"

"Bolivia."

"Bolivia? Wow."

"What about you?"

"We're in Atlanta." Tim sighed. "Sorry, it gets kind of slow this close to opening."

"That's fine." Gabriel refreshed the browser. The buy price ticked up one cent, but the sell remained steady. He refreshed again. The buy ticked up another cent, the sell still didn't move. These were just the normal palpitations of a lightly traded stock. The direction was favorable to Gabriel, but negligibly so.

The crime he was about to commit wasn't victimless, exactly, but Santa Cruz's shareholders—those who held on to their stock—would be unharmed, as would the employees. The only people hurt would be those who speculated against Santa Cruz Gas or other companies exposed to Bolivian natural gas based on the rumor Gabriel planned to circulate. The losers, for the most part, would be other hedge funds and a handful of adventurous day traders. On the whole, it was a pristine and lovely stratagem: he profited, it hurt other speculators, and it left the
true
investors in the company largely unaffected. Even the company's founder, Lloyd Pingree, would be unharmed (unless he sold out too, in which case he'd lose more than anyone). The perfection of the scheme lay in the fact that it was profiteering for Gabriel, but it was also a morality play, because those who lost the most would be those who bet against the future of Bolivia. So went the logic.

Gabriel called Priya just after he'd opened his own short position. He said, "I have your answer on Santa Cruz Gas. It's not confirmed at this point, but I have it on good authority that he's going to sack all of the foreign companies at the same time, most likely in the first couple months of his term. So I'd short-sell Santa Cruz Gas. The news is probably going to hit this afternoon, or maybe tomorrow morning."

"How do you know when the news will hit?" she said. The skepticism was not disguised. She was an expert appraiser of odds, if not of people. So while she might have trouble locating innuendo, she could spot bullshit from a mile off.

"Well, I heard it from the finance minister—designate," he said, trying to make himself sound weary, not rattled. "Also, I gather that people were talking about it at the bar here where the journalists hang out, those people know—"

She cut him off. "If I do this, you know that it's your ass on the line."

"Yeah, I know." He said it quickly, to underscore his confidence. The fact that his ass was
already
on the line—that Oscar had phoned him to clarify the precariousness of his situation—was beside the point. This was a zero-sum gambit: if he gambled and won, he won big; if he gambled and lost, he lost big; but if he played it straight, he lost outright. Therefore he had no choice: he had to gamble.

"I'll talk to you later," she said, and hung up.

He went back up to his room. He could feel his heart flexing with mechanical efficiency. He hadn't felt that way since he'd shoplifted a Snickers from the Exxon on the corner of Foothill and Upland, in Claremont, when he was fourteen. He and Nico had each grabbed one candy bar. After, they leaned against a pinkish wall beside the nearby strip mall, chewing, dizzy with adrenaline. Now he felt the same as he stood in his room, on the verge of hyperventilating, staring at his bandaged face in the mirror above his desk.

At ten thirty, he was back in the business center, where he fired off an e-mail to Edmund at
IBI,
who had taken over the Latin America desk:

TO
:
[email protected]
FROM
:
[email protected]
SUBJECT
: Off the record

Hi, Edmund,

Hope you're well. I just had a tip, and Calloway is taking a position on the basis of this tip. Now, we don't know when the news will trickle out into the public, and Priya would rather not wait weeks before the move pays off, so I thought I'd let you know. If this turns out to be untrue, please let me know. As of now, I think it's true.

Long story short: I've heard from two sources close to Evo that he intends to seize all of the foreign gas installations within his first year in offi ce. He'll offer them a chance to renegotiate their contracts, but he's talking about turning the Bolivian share of the profits from around 30% to around 72%. Anyone who doesn't cooperate will be booted out of the country.

So, I just thought I'd give you a heads-up. Thanks for forwarding the e-mail about this job at Calloway, by the way. I love it.

—Gabriel

At the Lookout at noon, he ordered a pisco sour and went over to say hello to Craig, a midcareer reporter for the Associated Press.

Half an hour later, he went to a different table, said hello to Sandra, the cute, young Scottish woman from the
Economist.
She was freckled and thick, ginger-haired, bawdy as a roughneck. She was all glint, no glare.

As he'd done with Craig, Gabriel told her that, regrettably, it all had to be completely off the record. "Oh, I love secrets," she'd breathed huskily. In a simpler era, Gabriel would have lingered to flirt with her, but these were not simple times.

At three thirty on the dot Gabriel was downstairs again, tilting after two pisco sours. He glanced skyward but didn't see any silvery airplanes cruising toward the airport. Despite his mother's insistence that he not meet her at the airport, he knew that with his being newly and gruesomely injured, and with his Thanksgiving no-show hanging freshly in the air, to say nothing of the fact that he'd forced her to stay at a hotel one mile distant from his own, he needed to be there at that airport when she arrived. He could do
that much,
at least. Petulant italics were implied within the idea itself. So he'd go pick her up and escort her to her lodgings, safely outside the rings of orbits in his strange solar system.

He'd have to tell her an updated lie. What he'd decided on was, like most good lies, a half degree from the truth. He'd tell her that he was writing freelance reports for a private equity firm. He'd say that he was working for Big Thunder, which was a teddy bear of a firm, despite its awkwardly macho name. Based out of Tahoe, it sought to replicate the returns of a frosty hedge fund like Calloway by buying direct stakes in startups through providing venture and angel capital. The group remained aggressive on tech, but it had also diversified into forward-looking green companies. Gabriel could tell her that he'd lied to everyone in Bolivia because he didn't want to tip them off to Big Thunder's Bolivian agenda. It was ecotourism, he'd say—and solar power; also, there was interest in finding a socially and environmentally responsible way of tapping the lithium in the salt flats for use in the batteries of electric cars. It was all very hush-hush, he'd say. Mostly, he'd keep it as vague as possible.

He opened the door of a taxi parked right there outside the Hotel Gloria, got in, and lit a cigarette. They were off before he remembered that he was supposed to buy gum. He said, "Excuse me, sir. Before we get to the airport, can you remind me to buy some gum?"

"Yes. Of course." The man caught Gabriel's eyes in the rearview and said, "You have no bag—are you picking up a girl?"

"Oh, no, no, no." Gabriel chuckled and rolled his eyes. "It's my mother."

The man tossed his head back, laughing. Gabriel smiled. "She's coming here to destroy my chances with any girls."

The driver kept on laughing.

Gabriel's mother's plane had already landed by the time he arrived. The driver didn't remember to tell him to buy gum, and Gabriel thought of it only once they'd seen each other by the baggage claim. Seeing her, despite himself, despite all his grumbling, he felt a fantastic relief. He found himself smiling—beaming—involuntarily, immensely reassured. She was staring at his bandages, of course, but he didn't want to dwell on that. They hugged first, and then, when they kissed cheeks, he held his breath, aware that keeping her in the dark about his smoking was probably futile. She was not the type to be so easily deceived.

Half a foot shorter than he, she looked up at him in wonder; there were tears in her eyes. This was because of his bandages, he supposed. Not the cigarettes, he hoped.

She was what people sometimes referred to as a "well-preserved woman." She had a pretty face, much like Gabriel's, if a little more elfin. Skin collected uncomfortably around her neck now, and she was slowly losing her battle against the bulk that had been trying to gather itself in the lower half of her body for several decades. She looked, finally, like a middle-aged woman one might encounter at Whole Foods on a Thursday evening pushing her cart through the store after her weekly yoga class.

"Good to see you," he said. He tried to hold his breath back as he spoke. "You like the look?" He turned his bad side to her. She needed to understand that he was not going to allow it to be a big issue. If she'd come down to minister to her baby's scrapes and bruises, she'd come for the wrong reason. The wounds would be subjected to the same kind of acid humor that she applied to his writings on finance.

"Gabriel, you look—" She just shook her head, tears shimmering in her eyes. "You look wonderful." She was, mercifully, speaking English. She knew she was on his turf. It was a strange alchemy, the way a person came to belong to a place, or a place came to belong to a person. Bolivia, once hers, was now all his. She might have been a scholar of the place, and she'd spent more time there than he had, but he'd been scarred by it. It was literally in his blood. So Bolivia was his now and, whether he liked it or not, he was Bolivia's.

In the taxi, they kept things broad and nonaligned—they discussed her flight, an angry e-mail she'd received from a colleague at Pomona, and so forth. He tried not to think about the churning rumors that he'd kick-started that morning. Horrific possibilities presented themselves: the rumor had already been corrected and had been traced back to him, Lenka's connection to him had been exposed too. As firmly as he was able, he assured himself that such fears were pure paranoia. In any case, it was out of his hands for now. He had his mother to cope with. He sat with his bad side to her, and he could feel her staring at the bandages, could feel her wanting to peel them back and look at the wounds. Emanating as much diversionary energy as possible, he ushered their conversation toward Evo. They spoke English to evade the curiosity of the driver.

Sitting in the loud, uncomfortable back seat of the taxi, Gabriel's mother administered a concise verbal abstract of her essay on Evo. He listened as carefully as he could. He noticed the highlights in her hair; a bit too coppery, he thought. She'd been darkening out the silver for as long as he could remember and had kept her hair short, in the style of suburban moms everywhere.

Seeing that they were approaching the city and would soon be in less tightly confined spaces, Gabriel pounced on a short pause. "I haven't been completely honest," he said.

"Oh dear." She drew a quick breath and glanced once again at the bandages, as if they were covering the misplaced truth or as if the truth about his wounds were in doubt.

"It's nothing too bad, but I don't actually work for BellSouth."

She nodded at him, guarded, her forehead fully furrowed.

"I've been doing consultancy work for Big Thunder, the private equity firm."

"Oh." From her nonresponse, he guessed that she hadn't heard of Big Thunder. So he explained who they were, where they were located, explained too about his projects there: the solar-power panels, which he said seemed unlikely to work (he added this just to give it a realistic flavor, the wariness of a skeptical insider); the salt flats, which Evo was not likely to share with foreigners—

"Nor should he!" Gabriel's mother interrupted.

"Of course," Gabriel said dismissively, and then he talked briefly about the ecotourism, which he claimed to consider a far more promising investment than either of the other two. "It'd be indirect," he said, "bundling projects together and providing a single loan to all of them at once. So we'd be creating a network too."

Whether she was actually relieved or not, he couldn't tell, but her response was infinitely better than what it would have been if he'd told her the truth. She asked a few questions, but they were trite. And he, relieved by how well the lie was holding up, went on to explain that he'd been telling everyone that he was working as a freelance journalist.

"Why?"

"Well—we don't want to alert people to our interest in Bolivia. Not yet, anyway. There are other firms that are trying to replicate our strategy, and they'd follow us here. So, if anyone asks why I'm here, you need to tell them that I'm a freelance journalist."

She scowled, looked away. "Oh, I don't like
that,
" she said.

"Me neither." It was true, he didn't.

"What about the girl you're seeing? Does she know?"

His gut told him to say that yes, she knew, so when the two women met, Lenka wouldn't have to lie much—she'd just have to switch out
Big Thunder
for
Calloway Group.
But, ease of use aside, he couldn't risk telling
anyone
—not even his mother—that Lenka knew that he was an investor posing as a journalist. It was too risky for Lenka, so he said, "No. She thinks I'm a journalist. We don't talk about these things much."