Spygirl (17 page)

“He's the
best.”
I said dreamily.

“Mr. Best? ”

“No. He's a doctor.”

“Nice. So he's Dr. Best?”

“Yep. He's Professor Best. He's a doctor of bestology”

“Cool,” Evan said, looking slightly pained. “Can I get a lesson from this guy? ”

“Sorry, love, you have to be
born
the best. And it doesn't hurt to be six foot three and
stunning.
But don't worry.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “There can only be one Dr. Best, but there's a lot
of room in the better category, and believe me, you're better than most.” I pinched his cheek and he blushed.

“Awww, you're just saying that.”

I turned away and called back, “You're right, I am.”

He laughed and looked embarrassed. “Thanks, Gray.”

“A. Gray, phone call,” Wally Yoo trumpeted.

I hit the line.

“Sweet cheeks?”

“Hi, Andrew.” He was a master of flattery.

“Who was that raging bull answering your phones? And more importantly, is he single? ”

“He's nineteen.”

“Even better.” He sighed. “I had my assistant check for the proposal, and of course you know I don't usually keep those things more than three months, and this was two and a half years ago.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But I do keep a log on my computer—or my assistant Molly, does, actually—of all the submissions I get, and I saw the title for it—didn't you say it was called
Buyer Beware?”
I said yes. “Right, so I have it here, it looks like we got it in on January 11, 1997. The agent was Claudia Perroni.”

I gagged audibly. Claudia was a Jersey girl who had rebirthed herself as a lifelong Upper East Side girl with the requisite Kate Spade handbag and split ends from overprocessing. She did low-end-to-middlebrow-type books—self-help for fat girls, quick-and-easy diet books, stories about weddings with happily-ever-after endings. She'd essentially set up an homage to
The Rules
and its requisite reading culture—girls like herself. “That's interesting,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” Andrew said conspiratorially “Have you seen
her recently? She's completely ballooned. Hef City!” That Andrew could turn around and ridicule me to someone else for an improperly plucked brow line, or for having yucky yellow perspiration stains on a sleeveless shirt, was part of his charm. He could just as easily turn his unforgiving vision on himself—he was as self-hating as anyone worth knowing, but when he was letting you in on it, you felt illuminated, like the only special girl in the room. “So, I had Molly go check for the proposal, and of course it wasn't there.”

“Oh.” Disappointment flooded me.

“And then I remembered that Bill Graves”—the editor in chief of Andrew's imprint—“keeps a general submission file from all the proposals we discuss in editorial meetings. So Molly checked in there, but it wasn't there because apparently I rejected it before bringing it up to the editorial committee. Ha-ha!”

“Well, that bites, Andrew. I'm sure Claudia Perroni won't be able to help me.” She'd left the business to marry a doctor whose book,
A Feminine Touch: Bringing Compassion into the Operating Room
, she'd represented. Plus, she was notoriously self-serving and I had nothing to give her, except perhaps more embarrassment about having represented this guy, anyway.

“Not so fast, sugarlips. I'm not done with my story.” He sounded exasperated. “So I mentioned your little problem to Bill and he said that Thom Sanger keeps copies of all the submissions that are sent around for review. Bill called me ten minutes ago and said that I'd sent him the proposal with a note that said, ‘I think I'm going to pass on this. Am I missing something, blah, blah, blah?’ He wrote back with a note that said, ‘There's something off with this guy. He seems to have come out of nowhere.’ Isn't that wild? That he
knew
that?”

“That
is
wild. So do you have a copy there?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Is there a biography attached?”

“Hmm, let me see. No, no, no, no, no … hmmm. No—oh, wait, yes. Yes! Here it is. ‘About the Author. Joe N. Smyth is a prominent tax advisor currently in private practice, advising clients in Massachusetts and the Cayman Islands. He formerly held financial positions at International Business Machines and Peat Marwick.”

“Holy shit. It's him.”

“Well, slap my momma silly, I can't believe this.”

“Andrew, I have to run. I'm sending a messenger over for the proposal. You're a doll.”

I ran over to George with a copy of the article about the book and showed it to him. He told me to call the prison and get his real Social Security number, and get a copy of the transcript of the trial. George said he would call the clients and make sure they put a stop order on any payments to Smyth.

The corrections officer at the Attica Correctional Facility in western New York was functionally illiterate. I resorted to having him spell the names of the prisoners on the files he'd pulled, which I'm sure violated some sort of prison confidentiality policy. Finally, he said, “I think I got it here, but it's S-M-Y-T-H-E,” and I said, “That's our guy.”

He read to me from the file. His real name was John Nguyen Smythe. He was born on June 18, 1961. His Social Security number was issued in South Dakota. His mother was identified as African-American and the father as “Asian-slash-Other.” I got the name of the arresting officer. From his arresting officer, a reformed beatnik living in Rochester, New York, who called himself Detective Sammy, I was able to secure a copy of Smythe's case file. According to the file, he'd lived in Ridgewood, New Jersey; Tulsa, Oklahoma;
and Auburn, Alabama. I found incorporation records in Tulsa for a Joe's Laundry, a shell company he used to funnel money from his “consulting practice,” which consisted of selling phony shares in a telecommunications company he had invented.

George had spoken to the client, who was a bit shell-shocked by the news. They'd already wired $180,000 to Smythe. The first few interviews were interesting. A few class-action suits had been filed against Smythe, which were consolidated and later handled in bankruptcy court. None of Smythe's victims had seen a dime, but they described him as “brilliant, seductive” and “a genius at spin.” “He could have sold a dime for a dollar,” one woman told me.

Smythe had been in prison for the last eleven years. That meant that, aside from his unlicensed accounting in the eighties in New York, his entire history was forged by words and symbols. He sent missives electronically, passing e-mails to his lawyer to copy to his computer; he made collect telephone calls on designated days from the correctional facility, and typed newswire releases and letters to his editors on an old Olivetti typewriter he kept under his bed. He grasped the function of spin and PR beyond most pundits and politicians. He had erected a true paper moon, invented from the cloistered distance of a prison cell.

“Hey, Dinglebrother!” Among the steady clicks of fingers gracing laptops, Sol's explosion gave us a brief shock. Of course, we were used to it. Sol was the loud one, George had a gentle, soft-spoken temperament, although his Irish-Catholic intensity surfaced occasionally. For example, in bar fights (I've heard), or when someone really fucks up at work, or sometimes on the phone with his wife. I had a math teacher in the fifth grade who used to sneeze so loudly that the entire class would scream and gasp afterward,
and one pale little girl, Miranda, actually had a seizure after one of his sneezes. So I preferred Sol's way. I can hear it coming.

“Can you get Pavlov's dogs over there to get me the case file for Rotenfeld?” he continued vexingly “Pavlov's dogs” was Sol's pet name for verifications officers. Wally Yoo probably should have been in charge of the verification department, considering his responsibility and seniority, but he was too impulsive. Next in line was Archie Jefferson, a seventeen-year-old kid with an astonishing 350-pound, six-foot frame. He was a native East New Yorker, half black, half Orthodox Jewish. Temperamentally he was most unlike his appearance, a true gentle giant and a peaceful counterpoint to Wally's hummingbird mania. Archie tried to catch and set free the rats and mice that overran the office rather than letting them suffer the swift and cruel fate of George's broom or Gus's shoe. He would set them out the window with the bidding, “Okay, little guy, go!” He wanted to get his Ph.D. in history.

The biggest difficulty for Archie was that people expected him to be mean. When I walked down the street with him, the sidewalk would part like the Red Sea dividing before Moses. Tough New York City kids tried not to look him in the eye. The world interpreted him as mean thug: a professional wrestler, a gangsta rapper, a fullback for the New York Jets, a hitman. Taxis wouldn't pull over when he hailed. So Archie, somewhat unwittingly, got used to the fact that he was terrifying. When we had big office parties, he was the bodyguard. We always imagined that if a gun-toting subject happened to rush the fourth floor to exact revenge on the people that had ruined his life, Archie would be there to at least look like he could protect us. All he had to do was stand there, impassively, and the running-away would happen around him.

Archie took particular offense to the Pavlov's-dogs epithet. But Linus's e-mail calling the verifications officers “office lackeys”
sent Archie over the edge. He dashed off a scathing missive, complaining that Linus had no respect for the hardworking men and women who keep the Agency afloat. (This was, actually, true.) George and Sol thought this was hilarious, and took it as an opportunity to put an extra effort into lampooning Archie. Archie shrugged and shuffled over to his desk to look for the Rotenfeld case. There is a strange law of perception that the more you look at something, the more it disappears. Sometimes, for Archie's sake, I wished people could see less of him.

I wandered out to the fire escape and found a note on the door that said, “To the tenants of 254 East 21st Street. It has come to management's attention that occupants of the fourth floor have been using this fire escape landing for smoking. This is strictly prohibited. Lit cigarettes have been thrown down the grate and have set fire to the tarred roofing below, despite repeated warnings, causing the fire department to be called to this site on several occasions to put out small fires. This exit will be locked from now on. If anyone is caught tampering with this fire exit or in any way attempting to tamper with this exit, eviction proceedings will be initiated against this tenant.”

I sucked my breath in, leaned my back against the door, and slid down until I was sitting, slumped with my head slung over my stomach, defeated. Going downstairs to smoke seemed like an unbearable chore.

I heard voices coming down the hallway. “Yeah, dude, I almost got it in a turquoise velour. But my boyfriend liked it better this way.” It was Wendy and Assman. Assman said hi to me and turned right into the men's room. Wendy was wearing a rainbow
velour, butterfly-style boatneck dress and white cowboy boots. She had a gold charm around her neck that said her name in thick, diamond-studded, ghetto-style script.

“Hey, chiquita.” She looked at the door behind me. “What's going on?”

“They locked us out of the fucking fire escape.” Wendy put her wrist to her forehead in horror.

“No fucking way!”

“Way,” I deadpanned. Renora, the new girl, emerged behind her. She'd assimilated quietly, although during her second week at the office Evan had us each chip in fifty cents for a bottle of Maker's Mark on her birthday, which seemed like more than the usual show of goodwill toward a new colleague. Hormones seemed to be palpably raging since her arrival. She was wearing one of her two indie-girl outfits, a cotton skirt that looked like it had gone from black to a blotchy gray after years of washing, and a tight black V-neck long-sleeve T-shirt. (Her other outfit was the same skirt with a blue long-sleeve shirt.) She also had on a tiny pair of men's shoes that she told me she'd gotten from her friend Randy, who was a stripper she met in England. Randy had gotten them from a guy who was in love with her whose flat she and Renora both stayed in. They were ancient-looking shoes with hand stitching that looked like typical civilian wear in circa-1820 London.