A Prayer for the City (64 page)

“I don’t want you to go to Germany,” said Benjamin. “You don’t even know how to speak German.”

“Who do you know in Germany?” asked Josh.

“Maybe no one,” their father admitted, particularly when he was going to Germany unannounced, without even an invitation, to see a man who might decide not to see him at all.

He went upstairs to his bedroom and packed quickly and carefully, layering shirts, socks, several ties, and a copy of
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
into a black bag with the lettering
TEAM PHILADELPHIA
. He went back outside, where Sergeant Buchanico was waiting. He was driven helter-skelter back to his office, where, like a spy, he received his final batch of secret documents—a letter from Ridge to Bernard Meyer pledging his support, a printout outlining the financing. He was driven to the airport just in time to make a 7:20
P.M.
flight on British Airways. He settled into seat A10 and hurtled through the night to a place he had never been to before, to convince a man from another land with another culture who didn’t even know he was coming to do a deal that seemed dead.

Cohen arrived at Heathrow in London the following day, September 21, at 7:25
A.M.
, and had enough of a layover that he could go to a Thomas Cook lounge and shave, shower, and put on a clean shirt and tie. At 10:55
A.M.
,
he flew Lufthansa flight 4035 to Bremen, about an hour’s drive from Papenburg. When he got to the airport at Bremen a little after 1:00
P.M.
, he was paged. It was the mayor calling. The good news was that Bernard Meyer had been contacted and now knew he was coming (the plan had always been not to contact Meyer until Cohen was in the air, on the assumption that he would not refuse a meeting if he knew Cohen had already traveled several thousand miles in the middle of the night). The bad news was that Bernard Meyer was out of town.

Cohen walked over to the Hertz office at the Bremen airport, where the clerk did not speak any English, and he, true to the words of his son Benjamin, did not know a stitch of German. He was given a makeshift map and set off on his way to the Maritim Hotel in Bremen, known for its wonderful view of the city’s Burgerpark. It was now rush hour, and Cohen discovered that the map was basically useless. None of the streets was straight. Some of them changed names without notice. Others had no names at all, and those that did were of course in German. The drive took an hour and a half instead of a half hour. And once he got to his hotel room, he was faced with a situation that he hadn’t faced in at least twenty years. He had nothing to do. And he had to do it in Bremen.

Back in the mayor’s office in Philadelphia, Ed Rendell worked feverishly to keep the deal intact. In the city, there was a remarkable surge of momentum, particularly once word leaked out that Cohen was in Germany. His reputation as someone who always got what he pursued only reinforced the belief that Meyer Werft would return to negotiations and added to the fervor. But in Germany, the signals continued to be clouded. In Philadelphia, the mayor sat at his desk, his face tilted downward and his eyes downcast.

“Maybe none of this stuff can work,” he said quietly.

“The problem is Bernard has gone just too far,” said Cohen when he spoke with the mayor by phone later that afternoon. “He’s informed his labor employees of the withdrawal]. He’s informed his banks. He’s informed the German equivalent of the SEC. He’s informed the press.”

Rendell told Cohen of his idea to lead a huge delegation of congressmen and other elected officials to Papenburg and explain to various German interests involved that what happened to Bernard Meyer wasn’t a show of disrespect but the nature of American politics, in which rudeness and gratuitous potshots were common features of the sport. The great pomp of such a delegation flooding the pristine atmosphere of Papenburg, Rendell
hoped, would give Meyer the cover he needed to come back into the deal. “Tell [Meyer] I can suck up as good as anyone on earth,” said Rendell over the phone. “That may be the best thing we’ve learned in my years on the job.”

Several hours later, he spoke to Cohen again, this time to convey the news that Meyer had agreed to a meeting the next day in Papenburg. “At least he’s not irritated by your visit. Keep your fingers crossed.”

An hour afterward, the Delaware River Port Authority officially approved the bond package that would supply $110 million of public financing to Meyer Werft. Six days after the governor’s disastrous press release and three days after his even more disastrous press conference, everything was in place—the public money, the structure, the rate of return, the support of every politician imaginable. Even President Clinton was playing an active role, agreeing to call Bernard Meyer if the deal seemed on the cusp of closure and needed one final push.

Now all eyes focused on Cohen, still stuck in a hotel room in Bremen with its view of the Burgerpark.

“It’s not so easy to make phone calls from here,” he ruminated to the mayor at one point, although he was certainly trying.

“David in a hotel room in Bremen?” Rendell mused after he hung up. “He must be going through call withdrawal.”

At noon the next day, Rendell, looking for any hope across the Atlantic, took it as a positive signal that he had not yet heard from Cohen. The meeting between the chief of staff and Bernard Meyer had begun at 8:00
A.M.
Philadelphia time, and if Meyer had dispatched Cohen quickly, sent him off in a rowboat on the North Sea, the mayor assumed he would have heard something. Ever maneuvering, he seized upon yet another line of attack: using his leverage with the White House and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown to try to get Disney to move its order for two cruise ships from an Italian shipbuilder to the new Meyer Werft shipyard in Philadelphia.

At 2:15
P.M.
the phone rang in the mayor’s office.

It was Cohen calling from Papenburg, where it was 8:15
P.M.

“I don’t know where we are. We started at a definite no. I don’t know if we’re still there or not.”

Cohen said that Bernard Meyer had been “blown away” by the particulars of the new financing package and liked the idea of a huge delegation coming to Papenburg to provide him with cover to come back to the table. “You could tell that this had appeal to him, but he’s sort of stuck on—he’s told everyone [he’s not coming], and wishy-washiness is really criticized over here.”

Rendell told Cohen of his idea to get Secretary Brown to intervene with Disney. He said he also thought he could get the State Department to ease the German government’s fears of losing shipbuilding technology to the United States.

“I don’t know if business concerns [matter] to him at this point,” said Cohen. “I think you should say you still haven’t heard from me. Since we have no idea where this is heading, I think you shouldn’t say anything.”

Of all the requests made to the mayor, that was always the hardest. But he seemed eager to do his best to comply.

“Whatever you say. I will say you guys are now dining.”

Three and a half hours later, when Rendell had not heard from Cohen again, he felt almost giddy. It must mean they were having dinner, a long and glorious dinner at which all the issues were somehow being resolved. It must mean that Cohen had worn Bernard Meyer down and convinced him that this was too good a deal to pass up. “This has to be a good sign,” he said as he paced about the office. “You have to believe that they’re doing some good. I mean it’s a four-hour dinner.” Too excited to work, he opened the most recent batch of gifts he had received. Turning some of the items on their sides to make sure he understood them from every possible perspective, he came to a swift conclusion.

“I get the most useless junk,” he said.

A little bit after 6:00
P.M.
the phone rang in the mayor’s office.

It was Cohen.

David Cohen had never worked harder in his entire life to make something happen, and the qualities that had made him such a sensation in his own country had transported themselves across the Atlantic. Cohen’s greatest gift may have been knowing just how to serve powerful men in a way that made them think his ideas had really been theirs all along—an appealing combination of obsequiousness and quiet strength, ego sublimation and steady faith in his convictions.

He could tell that Bernard Meyer’s original plan was to be polite but dismissive,
get him in and out as quickly as possible and give the dream of a new shipyard that would be the envy of the industrial world a final burial. But a rapport was established, and there was a plain simplicity to Cohen that made him hard to say no to—still in the same suit he had worn on the plane, with that boyish face untouched by the slightest whiff of a hard edge, appearing uninvited on the doorstep of Meyer Werft like a wayward puppy, remarkably buoyant despite jet lag and lack of sleep.

Bit by bit as the afternoon progressed, Cohen had sensed that he was making headway, whittling away with dogged patience. As he went over the idyllic terms of the financing and put forth letters of support from Governor Ridge and President Clinton, he could feel the war that Bernard Meyer was waging within himself, torn between his heart and his own professional code of not going back on his word. Cohen himself had been almost overcome by the magnificence of the massive Papenburg shipyard, easily capable of working on two cruise ships at once yet so precise in its modern technology as to be somehow delicate. It made the idea that such an opportunity might fall through the fingers of the city not just frustrating or regretful but almost cruel.

He met with Meyer for several hours that afternoon. The two men, along with several others, had a dinner that lasted nearly three hours. And then they met again for another forty-five minutes. Cohen returned to his hotel room around 1:00
A.M.
German time, the emotional residue of a day unlike any other in his life still very much with him. And then he called the mayor.

“I don’t think it’s good,” he said.

One could almost hear the mayor deflating.

“He is obviously anguished,” Cohen continued. “This is a dream he’s had, and with our proposal this is a dream that he could have had.” But Meyer had also told him that he had “built a prison” for himself over the past week by announcing he was pulling out, and he did not know how to get out of it without losing all face and credibility, particularly after being so terribly humiliated by Governor Ridge. When the shipbuilder had announced his decision to his workforce, he received a five-minute standing ovation. So overcome with gratitude, the workers in turn promised a 20 percent increase in productivity. Various European labor leaders had also spoken positively of the decision and said it was good not only for Germany but for the entire European Union.

“He’s a wonderful man,” said Cohen, speaking of Bernard Meyer with
an emotion that he rarely expressed about anyone. “It was very frustrating. If it makes you feel any better, it was very frustrating for him.”

“It doesn’t make me feel any better,” said the mayor.

Rendell trudged around the corner to the Reception Room to hold a press briefing. Withdrawn and somber, he reported that Meyer Werft would not be coming to the city. He was well aware of the degree to which Governor Ridge’s actions had destroyed that dream, but he refused to place any blame publicly. “What happened, happened,” he said with a shrug. “We’ll see where we go from here.”

The reporters, satisfied with his answers, drifted away to file their stories and make their obligatory deadlines, and Rendell returned to his office. It was dark outside, and a church bell pealed seven times like the distant sound of a buoy. He sat at the round table he had sat at a thousand times and there in the silence, with the light of a lamp in the corner of the room spreading its light, took out several clean pieces of paper. The silence gave way to the scratch of Rendell’s pen and then to the quiet mouthing of words as he composed what he wanted to write. He looked like a boy back in grade school, and there by himself in the softness of that light, he wrote out a letter to Bernard Meyer, one final chance, one final hope. He did not have anyone to read it to make sure the spin was right. He did not use a fancy word-processing program or a spelling checker. He relied on the one place that had always served him well when he allowed it to, the spontaneous dictates of his own heart.

The ostensible culmination of Ed Rendell’s four years in office would come shortly, in the general election, when voters would approve or reject him. But despite the typical worries and fears of overconfidence, he knew he was too far ahead in the polls and enjoyed too much popularity in the city to lose. The real fight for the future
had
come here, and the fading away of the dream of a new shipyard, the fading away of the sounds that once defined the very marrow of the city, only reinforced for him a truth that he fought as much as possible to reject.

He had stopped the bleeding of the patient he had inherited on that faraway
January day four years earlier. But he could not stop the creep of cancer. Because no one could.

Sitting at that table in the light, surrounded by a misshapen pile of papers and the plastic wrap from a sandwich, he continued to write his letter. At times such as this, he understood the wrenching futility of it all. But he would never stop trying. Because he was the mayor, and this was his city.

“Good luck to you,” he wrote to Bernard Meyer on the last line. “I hope our paths will cross again.”

As Jim Mangan sat at home on Haworth Street, struggling to figure out what to do with his life, one thing was now certain: he would never go back to work in the yard.

After 194 years of service and honor, it was another artifact in the city.

The
Pennsylvania
and the
Relief
. The
Antietam
and the
Omaha
. The
Philadelphia
and the
Wichita
. The
New Jersey
and the
Wisconsin
. The
Los Angeles
and the
Chicago
.