Fixers (43 page)

Anyway, we wore out the subject for the next hour, arguing up one side and down the other. At one point we got into a circular discussion about how my disclosures would prompt some smart lawyers to bring a class-action suit, the way they did against BofA and Citi, collecting multibillion-dollar multiples of the piddling multimillion-dollar settlements Uncle Sam extracted. If they could figure out whom to sue, that is. The government, for inadequate vigilance with respect to the electoral process? Mankoff’s estate? Me? I do well enough, but I’m not good for that kind of money.

In the end, they wore me down and I ran up the white flag. I know I’ve mentioned in this diary how I was trained in various schools to lose gracefully, a concept that’s next to blasphemy in twenty-first-century America, so when I finally accepted that I might potentially be responsible for the destruction of a polity that had lasted for two centuries, I broke out the champagne and we drank to principle—another notion that’s not exactly prospering in the way we live now.

When it came time to part, all that could be said having been said, Artie asked if he could stay behind. He had something else he wanted to discuss with me, he said. Marina gave him a suspicious look, but what could she do? We embraced at the door, and I promised to give B a big hug for her. We swore eternal fealty, that this would make no difference to our friendship, and I think the feeling is genuine on both sides.

“Well,” I said when I returned to the living room, “that was a
surprise. I was flabbergasted to see Marina chicken out like that. You don’t get many chances in this life to do someone a favor that’s a real game-changer, and here I thought I was doing just that. Handing Marina the keys to the kingdom, the goddamn gold of the Nibelungs and Aladdin’s lamp all at once, not to mention a sure-thing Pulitzer Prize, and she turns me down flat.” I eyed him suspiciously, then added, “Something’s going on, isn’t it? You going to tell me what that something is?”

“There is,” Artie answered. “She’s sworn me to secrecy, but I suspect she knows I’d tell you anyway, so here we go. Marina has a conflict of interest that she’s not at liberty to disclose to you, but which I, as your friend, feel I should.”

“Which is what?”

“Have you heard anything about something called the Rediscovery Initiative?”

“Only vaguely.” Scaramouche had mentioned it in his final letter, but frankly, I hadn’t understood the reference, and hadn’t bothered to look it up.

“I’m not surprised. For the moment, it’s very hush-hush. I trust you know who Merlin Gerrett is, but are you aware that he has a sister?”

“I didn’t.”

“Her name is Circe. Apparently their father had a thing for sorcerers and sorceresses. Anyway, it seems that Circe Gerrett is a kind of philosopher queen who lives a reclusive life in the Rockies. Somewhere in Montana. She has a big influence on her brother—she owns a huge position in his company through a series of trusts—and she’s convinced him that the only way this country can be saved from itself is if enough
good
big money can be persuaded to go up against
bad
big money. Just like we discussed at lunch all those years ago.”

“Bad big money, like the Dreck brothers?”

“Exactly. Hence the Rediscovery Initiative. ‘Rediscovery’ as in helping America rediscover its founding principles.”

“In other words, a third party?”

“Not quite. Maybe, in time, but for the moment it’s a bunch of ideas the Gerretts believe the electorate, from both sides of the aisle, can be convinced to buy into. It’s a political philosophy that’s the direct opposite of what the Drecks and people like them believe. They believe in top-down control of the political economy: by buying politicians, basically. The idea the Gerretts are backing argues that the way to go is through bottom-up reclamation. Brother and sister are committing $2 billion at first, and they’ve already signed up Bloomberg, along with some very big Seattle money, and a bunch of Silicon Valley heavy hitters.”

I had to sound skeptical. “ ‘Bottom-up reclamation’?” I responded. “Are you kidding? In this country? Now? When the 1 percent have everything nailed down and to their liking and the lower brackets are fighting each other for crusts.”

Artie smiled. “Cynicism doesn’t become you, Chauncey. Just hear me out. Have you heard of Benjamin Barber? He’s a CUNY professor who wrote a book called
If Mayors Ruled the World
. Its thesis is that reform politics and sensible government must be local to really take hold, and that it should be built around mayors. Circe Gerrett read it, was impressed, and got her brother to read it; he was impressed, too, and when they decided to go ahead with this Rediscovery Initiative they also decided to make the “Barber plan” a core program. They’re recruiting 200 mayors who represent a cross-section of America: high-tech, Rust Belt, college towns, dirt-road hamlets, urban sprawl, you name it. And Marina’s writing the manifesto.”

“How did she get involved?”

“It seems that Circe Gerrett’s a big fan of her writing. She reached out to our friend to head up the Initiative’s communications end.
As it happens, she caught her at just the right moment: Marina’s decided to switch voltages. She’s concluded that tearing-down journalism isn’t doing any good. The bad guys are too entrenched; they just get up, dust themselves off, and go about their business.”

This wasn’t a surprise. Words rarely work: to do the job properly you need sticks and stones and they cost money.

“The way she puts it,” Artie went on, “is that even before the Gerretts popped up on her radar, she’d decided to get out of the Chicken Little business. She was just plain tired of writing bad stuff about terrible people. And then like an answered prayer, Circe Gerrett calls and offers her this job.”

“You know what they say about answered prayers?”

“I’m going to choose to ignore that. It’s a job with tremendous access; I gather that the remuneration is terrific, not that money has ever mattered to Marina, and it jibes perfectly with her present state of mind. But for the Initiative to take hold, the country needs to be relatively calm—that is, in no more than its usual uproar, and certainly not in the hysterics your revelations are likely to set off.”

“I see.” And I think I did. And I had my doubts. You may think your boy Chauncey cynical when I say that the last thing the country needs right now is another one of those feel-good, do-good, save-the-nation causes with names like the Hamilton Project, which
bien-pensant
billionaires are always launching to show how imbued with civic and cultural virtue they are. On the other hand, $2 billion for openers? That’s serious money. Of course, the better angels of our nature, if there are any such creatures left, had best be billionaires.

One other thing bothered me. Noble intentions tend to fall about when skeletons come rattling out of the closet. There’s a factoid going round that Artie’s worshipful attitude toward Merlin Gerrett conveniently omits. To be sure, Gerrett has created a lot of jobs, especially in and around his hometown, but he’s also
participated recently in a massive destruction of jobs and communities. Last year, Gerrett was a major participant in a multibillion-dollar buyout of a famous global home products company. The word in the financial pages is that since the buyout closed, the private-equity firm that put the deal together has eliminated product lines, shut down plants, and fired tens of thousands of workers in this country and overseas, all in the interest of jacking up the investors’ rate of return.

Of course, I didn’t point that out. I simply listened as Artie spelled out the Initiative’s plans for an organizing convention patterned on Philadelphia in 1787, and we left it that.

Frankly, I’m at sixes and sevens. But what was I to do or say to Artie? I’m all for giving virtue and good intentions every chance, but what I possess is dynamite, and the targets I have in mind still seem well worth blowing up.

Is the nation really that fragile? I just don’t know, and should that really deter me? Maybe we deserve to be blown up and let the next generation start over.

I need to do some heavy thinking.

I went to bed in a sulk and woke up in a sulk. It’s hard to accept Marina’s turndown. Still, what can I do? If I try to take the diary to a journalist I don’t know, either I have to find someone to make the introduction or make a cold call myself. In both cases, there’ll be some preliminary explaining to do, which risks tipping my hand. And suppose whoever I approach turns me down the way Marina has? Sees things the way she and Artie do, that everything provoked by the disclosure won’t be so much a healing catharsis but a destructive convulsion? Frankly, I doubt there’s much of a risk of rejection. Most journalists would sell their mother for a scoop of the magnitude I’m offering. So I’m inclined to see if I can find a discreet path to Matt Taibbi. He’s right up there with Marina when it comes to high-grade muckraking; he calls ’em as he sees ’em; he’s a really good, strong writer. But I want to think this over.

Anyway, nothing can get done until the New Year. B gets here tomorrow, and her visit will take up my time and energy for the next couple of days. She leaves the morning of the 2nd; by then, my sulks will have faded—I know myself well enough to be sure of that—and I’ll be able to think clearly about what to do next. If anything.

Two hours ago, I took B over to the heliport, where a presidential chopper was standing by to convey her to Camp David. She’s probably arriving just about now.

I have a lot to report since my last entry. Let’s begin at the beginning.

After the usual airline problems, B got to my apartment midafternoon on New Year’s Eve. “Do you mind if we don’t go out?” were practically the first words out of her mouth. “I’ve had enough of people in the last two weeks to last me five lifetimes. I need a bath and I desperately need a nap.”

“I can well imagine.” Her mother’s sudden death, looking after her father, the memorial service, all the people to be thanked, welcomed, wheedled, air-kissed, chatted with. Wears me out just thinking about it. I wasn’t particularly worried about canceling on Balthazar—I knew it would take them about five seconds to fill my slot from a waiting list that must stretch from Prince Street to Key West. So I persuaded her that there was plenty of time to bathe and then catch forty winks, and I left the plan in place.

Which is what we did. As we both knew it would be, dinner was just great, and we were back at my place by 9:30, wide-awake and raring to watch.

“So—what is it this year?” I asked. “My money’s on
Dirty Dozen
.”

She smiled delphically, went into the bedroom, and returned with a fistful of DVDs. “I thought you might like to see the first three episodes of
American Jihad
, the new show. These are a little rough, still; we need to refine them down and take out a couple of minutes across the board, but they’ll give you an idea—and I’m dying to hear what you think.”

In a way my
Dirty Dozen
guess wasn’t so far off the mark.
American Jihad
is about a bloodless (!) terrorist campaign waged by a small group of disaffected Americans against the plutocracy that has taken over this country and appropriated its wealth and its governance. On one side, you have the usual mixed bag of types: the core group is led by an retired professor of political science and his wife, a medical scientist, and their daughter, a teenage computer prodigy; other members of the cadre are IT and weapons experts, a former Special Forces operative, a CIA agent, the retired CEO of a major bank, and an aggrieved veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, along with various supporting characters with specialized skills. Most important, the Cadre, as it’s called, has access to the same tools as its targets, from private jets to offshore banks; it has unlimited money, multifaceted expertise, and deep technology.

Their enemies list is made up of the types who are thrust into our awareness almost every day, thanks to their thirst for publicity and their (and their PR reps’) genius for getting it as well as what they get away with, which varies from vulgar exhibitionism to breathtaking greed to a total lack of real talent. The specific characters are heavily disguised, yet somehow recognizable. The first of the three episodes B brought for us to watch involves a lavish party in a pretentious, architecturally mediocre beachfront mansion—the Hamptons presumably, but it could equally be Malibu or the Florida Gold Coast. It’s the sort of vanity event dripping with self-proclaimed “socialites” that gets written up in glossy society magazines and websites. Everyone is strutting their stuff, posing for the camera, showing off how rich and important they are—until interrupted by a flight of three smallish crop-spraying drones that suddenly appear overhead. Earlier in the episode, we’ve learned about these drones; we’ve watched them being conveyed to the launching point by fake FedEx trucks, and we’ve watched them armed and launched. That we can figure out what’s coming doesn’t
spoil our pleasure. Once overhead, instead of herbicides, they will discharge on the glitzy company a mist compounded of raw sewage and industrial adhesive.

The scene is very well done. The camera lingers lovingly on the hysterical faces and shit-smeared finery of the partygoers, as the drones disappear out to sea. B tells me they flipped a coin between leading with this episode, or one in which a bunch of shit-spewing IEDs are set off at Art Basel Miami. They’re saving the latter for later in the season “because that way we’ll give the viewer a double bang for the buck: mess up a lot of crap people and wreck a bunch of crap art.”

The second episode also centers on a party, this time one of those huge charity affairs where a ticket costs $10K and everyone shows up in couture and other adornments calculated to outglitter everyone else. It’s obvious that Claudio and his writing team had the Metropolitan Museum Fashion Gala in mind as a model, but here again, this kind of event takes place all over the world—it could easily be Venice or Newport. The weapon of choice in this episode is a strain of
novovirus
, the germ that not long ago incapacitated entire cruise ships with diarrhea and vomiting. In this instance, the jihadists, as they call themselves, infiltrate the catering brigade and dose the elaborate cuisine with the virus. I must say that I greatly enjoyed the spectacle of the crème de la crème puking and shitting all over each other’s haute couture as they fight their way to the loos. The actress playing the alpha female English fashion editor—the event’s big dog—gives an Emmy-worthy performance.