The Frankenstein Candidate (46 page)

“The cumulative effect of the short positions, by that we mean of course the selling of shares that are borrowed but not owned, positions taken by Featherstone, Alpha Corporation, and certain other funds based in Channel Islands, was to disrupt the normal working of the stock market for the stock of East Coast Atlantic and International Financial Group, which had the effect of rendering impossible the fundraising necessary to save those organizations from bankruptcy.”

“A very long-winded speculative theory,” Blake said. Frank remained silent.

“Mr. Stein, I am hereby advised to give you notice that you are being investigated for an alleged breach of Rule 10b-5 of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. We will require from you detailed statements as regards your best recall of your dealings and conversations with—”

“Save your breath Mr. Drummer,” Blake said. “Leave the notice with us.”

“Given the immediacy of the circumstances, the state of the economy being what it is, and the position of the banks…with East Coast already in Chapter 11—”

“Don’t we know it?” Blake interrupted him again.

Ignoring Blake, Drummer continued, “It would seem prudent to make headway rather quickly. Unfortunately, the SEC is obliged to make a public statement, as you no doubt appreciate—”

“Of course, the fact that my client is the leading contender for president in a federal election fifteen days away is merely an unfortunate coincidence.”

“Very unfortunate, Mr. Heynman, but you see our investigation was proceeding at just the right—”

“As I said, save your breath, Mr. Drummer. We shall be seeing you,” Blake said.

After the unwelcome visitors left, Blake slammed a fist into the wall of the campaign office corridor. He left soon after, knuckles bruised on his left hand, his right hand shaking, reaching for his car keys as he wandered around the parking lot, forgetting in his rage where his car was parked. Frank remained steely, bristling on the inside, but with a look of resignation that said he was expecting things to get dirtier.

Olivia had taken the hour to rouse nearby shoppers in an impromptu performance. A camera came out of nowhere and followed her as she lifted various items in the grocery store, from cucumbers to eggs to milk, calling out their prices, and comparing them with what they were a year ago. The campaigning had started to feel like fun.

Frank was waiting for her when she got back. Olivia went into Frank’s private office and shut the door behind her.

“It was always going to be difficult for someone like me, with my background…to trust someone like you,” she said.

“True. Yours has been an incredible transformation, just the one that the whole country needs to make.”

“So did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“The thing that they are trying to pin on you…whatever it is…the wrong thing, the criminal thing.”

“You speak as if the two are one and the same.”

“Did you?”

“I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Not the time for games, Frank.”

“I did the right thing, and it is entirely lawful as well. These days, though, some right things have been criminalized. We sold shares in some banks. Alpha Corporation sold those shares by borrowing them from someone who owned them. Then Alpha bought the shares back from the market at a profit when they had fallen in value. All this is perfectly legal. The regulators may take a view that it caused or could have caused the demise of the banks in question, but in fact most of the large banks have been bankrupt for quite some time and have been propped up by their dear friends in DC. Money managers like to hasten the demise of a very sick corporation. It’s like mercy killing.”

“How will you explain this to the public?”

“Same as I just did. The banks deserved to die before they could be revived. The law says we can’t collaborate to bring a corporation down. We never did, even though the law is wrong in this case anyway.”

“What are they basing their charge on then?”

“We assume it is a single conversation I had with Roscoe Maynard at a conference. We shared our views about banking. We never discussed our investment strategy.”

“So Roscoe will say that as well?”

“Shouldn’t he?”

“What if he has other problems, and they will all go away if he says you did talk specifics?” Olivia was getting nervous now.

Frank was taken aback by her conjecture. “You can think like them, which is a good thing. Know thy enemy. What you say is true. That is a risk. Then it is his word against mine.”

“If there are six or seven of them—”

“Then it will be one word against seven. All depends on the jury then.”

“I will speak to Phil Enright. Perhaps he can intervene,” she said.

“I doubt it, but no harm in asking.”

She was amazed that Frank Stein didn’t look anywhere near like a man unjustly accused or one facing a possible felony. He sensed her astonishment.

“You are in the same boat as I am, Olivia. We are taking on a colossal monstrosity, a Frankenstein that has long since escaped its creators’ design. You literally have to be prepared to die for the cause. You could get unjustly defamed, go to prison, or lose a loved one. But we have momentum on our side. In another ten years, it could be too late. More laws will be changed. The entire Supreme Court bench could be reappointed by the new mob that gets in. It’s now or never.”

She remembered what Mardi Tedman had done, what Ralph Prescott and others who followed him had done. The nervous energy dissipated. She was once again proud of her accomplishment. She was the one who carried the people’s vote. She could defend Frank’s reputation.

Predictably, the regulators made their press release—since March 2018, the SEC had enjoyed legal immunity from being sued for damages if their allegations were not just untrue but completely unfounded or even malicious. This allowed them to sully reputations with absolute impunity.

The moral outrage and condemnation that followed was highly predictable. The Mizzis and the Prescotts of this world were still heavily outnumbered by those who followed the herd, were ignorant, or had their snouts in the trough. But Olivia fought on, doing interview after interview on radio, television, and even the Internet. Blake Heynman went ballistic at all the legal forums and called in every favor he had coming his way, every credit he had saved in his entire career. Blake reiterated that witnesses with testimony bought by carrots and threats should be disbarred from testifying. But his pleas fell on deaf ears; the government of the day was hardly likely to repeal a law that made government bullying perfectly legal.

Sidney Ganon loved the fact that Victor Howell was no longer the most scandalous news there was. John Logan reasserted his Christian faith and appealed to the Christian right.

Frank Stein kept on campaigning, repeating the ten commandments of governance.

Some held Frank Stein to be guilty by sheer virtue of his wealth since extraordinary wealth itself was the standard by which guilt could be ascertained. Then there were those who understood that the world of industry and business had its genuine stars, where the combination of hard work, ingenuity, perseverance, and talent produced fortunes, at times aided a bit by pure luck.

Despite the extraordinary timing, The Net Station, operating as Net TV, raised a large amount of new money from the market to expand its operations under the new chief executive, Kayla Mizzi. Net TV had recruited dozens of established journalists and reporters like Ralph Prescott, and many others were writing clandestinely on Net TV’s newspaper pages; many were writing for free. In many ways, the moniker was wrong; Net TV was at once a newspaper, a magazine, a radio station, and an entertainment cum news television broadcasting service, some of it free-to-air and some of it like pay TV, ending forever the battle of the old paradigms.

The people were out in droves now. The apathy and the cynicism were gone. It was either this America or that America. Either the same old two-party system where public servants served themselves, their party, and then their particular constituency, in that order, so the only thing left to do in this world of thievery was to make sure you got the benefit of at least some of the thefts since some of your earning was bound to be stolen—or a new America where enterprises were free to compete with the best in the world and capital was to be released from boondoggle projects that met the so-called public interest.

So the United States of America went to the polling booths on November 3, 2020, with a historic, stunning turnout that approximated 88 percent; even some seventeen-year-olds and Mexican green card holders turned up at the poll booths insisting that they be granted the right to vote and were rightfully indignant when they were turned away.

Dr. Rohan Joshy lit his pipe. He hadn’t done so since that meeting with Olivia. It was Monday, November 2. He had another celebrity client in his offices, talking the same talk about whether he ever deserved it all—all that success that had come to him.

This time, Dr. Joshy’s preliminary diagnosis was completely different, however. He believed he was seeing a straightforward nervous breakdown. “Nervous breakdown” was in fact an undefined term in psychiatric literature. Psychologists, however, relied on the same standard used by Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart when he tried to define porn: “I know it when I see it.” Dr. Joshy, though, had an objective test for a nervous breakdown: “The total breakdown of self-confidence that shakes one’s belief in everything that one ever believed in because one begins to severely doubt the efficacy of one’s own mind.”

Surprisingly, the man in front of him was a large, well-built, highly intelligent, and successful man in his early fifties, hardly a typical candidate for a nervous breakdown. Dr. Joshy knew he had to pinpoint the event that had led him to lose all sense of self-belief. The man must take up the challenge to reinterpret the event with a different paradigm, one that was not contradictory to the nature of the thing that one was trying to make sense of. It is great to know and to know that you know, but the greatest fool was the one who didn’t know and didn’t know that he didn’t know. That realization, that you were the latter, especially in your fifties, was an immense shock to the system. From that viewpoint, though, an intelligent mind could get to the enlightened position, provided it desperately hung on to the belief that it was not all of a sudden ineffectual and incapable. Self-confidence could be restored if self-esteem had not vanished.