Fixers (36 page)

“I can understand that.”

“They’re very keen to meet you.”

That pleased me. I could infer that I’d received a good report card. “And I to meet them,” I said. “Anything else exciting?”

“I spoke to Marina on the phone. She’s on her way to China. We’ll get together when she returns.”

Suddenly, there’s much to look forward to.

The SEC action on Protractor is a done deal. STST will pay $600 million in fines and penalties; there will be a mild acknowledgement of corporate error, but no individuals will be named.

The critics are pointing out—not unreasonably—that the fine is a pittance for a firm as rich as STST, and Lucia reports that the Street consensus is that STST has cut itself a fantastic deal, although nobody’s saying as much, lest Uncle Sam get bigger ideas about future settlements with other firms. If Protractor was a $600 million malfeasance, the talk goes, what should BofA be looking at on Countrywide? $6 billion? Meanwhile the rumors about LIBOR are intensifying, with Barclays the name on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The numbers being thrown around will surely run well into the billions.

As usual, ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. To 99 percent of the world, $600 million will sound like a lot of money, but Mr. Market clearly knows what’s what, and the stock’s at $150; a month ago, you oculd have bought it for $125 and change.

And so it goes.

Mankoff called first thing this morning. He didn’t sound like himself—half his sentences seemed to glitch in the middle—but he did manage to tell me that Rosenweis went to see Polton yesterday after the close, and the two men had a frank exchange of views centering on Polton’s role in the SEC-Protractor outcome. It was made clear that either some accommodation must be reached, or Polton will never do another ten cents’ worth of business with STST. That might not sound so ominous to us, but once the word gets out that Polton’s on the STST shit list, a lot of other lucrative doors will close to him and he knows it. The upshot is that bygones are to be bygones, and Polton will personally pick up $350 million of STST’s tab at the SEC. Who said virtue isn’t its own reward?

Like most people, I keep tucked away in my mind a list of my best and worst days. My best list starts with November 21, 2008, when the news of Winters and Holloway’s appointments was released. There’s also the day I was tapped for Bones; the day my old man and I won the father-son squash doubles at the Racquet Club. The destruction of the Bank of West Congo went under.

That’s the good stuff. Yesterday, July 31, goes right to the top of the list of yours truly’s All-Time Worst.

Most of the day had gone pretty well. A meeting with Maecenas’s accountants concluded that we’re in good shape. This was followed by lunch at the Morgan Library and a productive discussion of a future Lewis Carroll exhibition, followed by drinks at the Stuyvesant Club with a friend from Denver, who filled me in on the world of cultural investment and finance in the Rockies. I got home around seven.

B’s crisscrossing the Midwest for the next ten days, scouting locations, so I’m on my own. Our relationship is progressing nicely: say, eight on a scale of ten. We see each other two to three times a week when she’s in the city. We’ve developed an easy intimacy; sometimes she’ll stay over, sometimes I will, most nights we return to our separate homes and separate beds.

So all seemed copacetic until about 9:30 p.m., when the house phone rang, and the guy at the lobby desk told me that a “Mrs. Lucia” was downstairs asking for me. Whatever this was, I thought, it was unlikely to be good news.

It wasn’t. She looked terrible. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“First of all, I need a drink. Now.”

I poured her a stiff single malt, no ice. She took a couple of unladylike swigs. When she spoke, her voice was a rasp.

“Leon’s leaving,” she told me.

“Leaving? My God.” I sat down heavily, then got up and stiffened both our drinks. “Tell me.”

“I’ve just come from the office. I was at the Four Seasons charming one of my lapdogs at the
Times
when I got a call telling me to get my fanny down to global headquarters posthaste. To Richard’s conference room. The Executive Committee was there. Then Leon got on the speakerphone from Santa Fe.

“He told us that he has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. He’s been everywhere: Mayo, Johns Hopkins, MD Anderson in Texas. At present, the symptoms come and go, but he feels the disease gaining on him. He’s decided he can no longer responsibly perform his duties as CEO and has asked to be relieved, effective immediately. They’ve appointed a special committee to handle the matter of succession, but of course it’ll be Richard.”

She moved nervously around the room, fussing with her hair, stopping to examine a row of narrow shelves on which I’d ranged my old man’s trophies.

“These are nice,” she said, almost dreamily. “They remind me of the house I grew up in.”

Then she returned to the sofa, sat down beside me, and patted my cheek. “Oh, Chauncey. What will become of you without Leon? How long have the two of you been together?”

“Thirty years this past June.”

I poured another round. We talked about what life was going to be like at STST without Mankoff.

“I’ll stay on board for a while,” she said. “There’s a lot about this firm that isn’t easy to defend, but at least we’re not a bunch of crooks. Not compared to some others I could name. And I fancy I haven’t done a bad job. But I can’t see working for Richard indefinitely. Eventually I’m going to move back to London. I’m thinking about joining with some friends in a social advisory service for rich
foreigners. Everything from what school to apply to and which fork to use to travel, what decorator to hire, how to wangle an invitation to Ascot, how to get a good table at Harry’s. It’s the best way for people like us to use our taste and background to make really very good money teaching all these Chinese, Russians, and Arabs how to spend their jillions. God knows, Chauncey, I don’t have to tell you about that.”

“I’m not sure how to take that,” I replied.

“Listen, being a whore is an honest business. These are riffraff who believe that unless something’s expensive, it can’t possibly be any good, which lets one mark up goods and services to three or four times their normal cost. I may ask you to help me now and then. Fix up a box at the opera, arrange for someone to sit close to Anna at the Costume Institute gala.”

“I shall be delighted. If the price is right.”

“You may assured it shall be.”

I poured us another round. We talked for a long while, until suddenly Lucia exclaimed, “My God, look at the time!” It was getting on for 1:00 a.m., and she got up and rushed out the door, barely thanking me for the drinks and the sympathetic shoulder.

I stumbled to bed. My mind went back three years to that equally dull morning outside Three Guys, and all that had happened as a result. It was as if a life was ending, you’d have to say it was.

The issue now is, where the hell do we go from here?

Just back from visiting the Mankoffs in Santa Fe. A tiring trip, whose emotional stress wasn’t helped by a late flight, a missed connection in Dallas, and an overnight stay at a vile airport hotel in Nashville. It was 10:00 a.m. this morning when I finally dragged myself into the apartment.

So: Santa Fe. It started with a call a week ago from Grace Mankoff. Could I come down? Leon would like to see me.

To get to Santa Fe, you fly into Albuquerque and then take a shuttle bus a bit over an hour north, where you’re dropped off downtown. On my trip out, I left at the crack of dawn, and by early afternoon, I disembarked in Santa Fe to find the Mankoffs waiting for me. Leon looked OK. Grace looked beat.

To my surprise, Mankoff was at the wheel, although I could see Grace keeping an eagle eye on him. The short trip proceeded without incident. Their house is about twenty minutes northwest of the city, in scrubland that’s mostly undeveloped, but which is dotted here and there with large pueblo-style houses, low-lying in the pueblo style, and with vistas to die for. Their house is a very pleasant, homey place: big open rooms and porches decorated with Hopi and Navajo art, blankets, drawings, and pots. There’s a music room with a harpsichord I recognized from the Connecticut house. Mankoff’s other instruments, though—along with his musical manuscripts—have been given to Yale.

The visit went about a million times better than I expected. The atmosphere was upbeat; Mankoff wasn’t the drooling, withdrawn, shambling being I’d anticipated. Now and then, he seemed confused by small things or simple tasks. There was one morning when we were going downtown when he seemed momentarily taken aback by the task of starting the car. Still, if you didn’t know him
as well as I did, you’d’ve said that the old engine was ticking over more or less normally. I did get Grace Mankoff off to one side one day to ask for a medical briefing; all she said was that her husband was like a refined orchestra that had been turned over to a tempestuous, quixotic, unpredictable conductor with a drinking problem. “All in all, it still plays reasonably well, but there are moments …”

I spent three full days in Santa Fe. On my last night, we ate outdoors at a pleasant cafe around the corner from the Plaza. When we got home, Grace retired with her book, and Mankoff suggested a nightcap. We went out onto the terrace and sat under the stars. You forget how big the sky is out west. Pretty amazing.

“Do we have any loose ends to tie up?” he asked after we clinked glasses.

“Not that I can think of, but your wish is my command.”

“You do realize, Chauncey, that I’m losing my mind?”

“I understand the prognosis isn’t good.”

“It’s like a slow tide washing over me. Who was that English king who ordered the time not to come in?”

“You mean Canute?”

“That’s me: King Canute. In another six months to a year, the prognosis is that I’ll be totally off in an impenetrable world of my own. Probably die not long after that. Grace will need you to help her sort out a few things. And Rich may ask you to stick around to help him with a few loose ends. I know you two don’t like each other, but could you do that—as a favor to me?”

“I’ll do whatever you want.”

Now it was my turn. There’s been a question I’ve had on my mind for a long time, but I’ve hesitated to ask it.

“The money you had me feed into the campaign three years ago.”

“Yes?”

“One thing you never told me. And don’t tell me now if you don’t want to. Where’d the money come from?”

He thought the matter over. “I can’t tell you. Does it matter?”

I supposed it didn’t. You could probably go back from where we are now to where we were in 2007 and see who’s made out best, and come up with some pretty plausible answers.

Suppose Three Guys had never happened. Without Mankoff’s $75 million—without Saudi Arabia’s or Citibank’s or whoever’s $75 million it was—would we be better off? OG has turned out to be a poor president in the way historians and pollsters judge things, but he’s been just great for Wall Street, and wasn’t that the point? The price of stocks is back up, and the rich are richer than ever before, so go figure. I sure as hell can’t.

And I have to add one heartless note. When Mankoff disappears into that mental blackness, he’ll take our secret with him. That’ll leave only me—me and whoever reads this diary years from now.

Well, after several cancellations and delays, I’ve finally made it to Longboat, Bianca’s family’s place in Leeward Harbor, Maine.

Let me tell you a bit about Longboat, Gentle Reader. On a map, Pilgrim Island looks like a bunch of bananas dangling from the coast of central Maine. It’s joined to the mainland by a short umbilical causeway. The island is split up the middle by a wide sound known as Satan’s Sluice that thrusts inland from the Atlantic for a distance of nearly four miles.

Pilgrim Island is renowned for its natural beauty, which more than a century of strict conservation and generous environmental philanthropy has done a good job of protecting. Much of the island is now a national park embroidered with a capillary network of hiking trails that draw a million visitors annually. More than one writer has noted that it offers living affirmation of the famous hymn that for over a century has been sung in the island’s churches. It truly is a place “where ev’ry prospect pleases / And only Man is vile.”

Close your eyes and let your imagination take over, and it is not hard to imagine the island as it once was, the virgin evergreen forests, the Indian villages, not to mention the great flashing schools of cod and sun-darkening squadrons of canvasback duck that drew the attention of English seafarers in the late seventeenth century. Huge, dark green swathes punctuated with streaks of blue, and with the lighter colors of rocky uplands covered in meadow grass. The alternation of heights and water is dazzling. When Thomas Mann visited the island in the early 1950s, the writer remarked that the views compared favorably with his beloved Engadine in Switzerland. That the place has inspired the efforts of a veritable Parnassus of American landscape artists,
including Winslow Homer and Thomas Cole, should come as no surprise.

To the south, where Satan’s Sluice ends in a wide bay, the land is protected from the roughest bits of offshore weather by two uninhabited islands, Blueberry Major and Blueberry Minor. Inland from the islands is a wide bay. On its southwest shore sits Leeward Harbor; almost directly across to the northeast, settled on a tongue of richly forested land, is Windward Harbor, which includes the more social and moneyed enclave of Porpoise Point. Windward’s topography is more dramatic than Leeward’s, altogether flashier, its bluffs higher and steeper, its enclosing forests loftier and more enveloping, its colors richer.

Anyone remotely familiar with the landscapes of American privilege will recognize at once that this is Old Money Country. The key aesthetic principle in the local architecture seems to be circumspection. Even the largest Windward “cottages”—the local name for any dwelling larger than a fisherman’s shack—are unpretentious by, say, Hamptons standards, notwithstanding that there are families hereabouts with resources sufficient to buy out every hedge-fund impresario between the Shinnecock Canal and Amagansett. But this is changing; the opportunity to be—or to claim to be—cheek-by-jowl with some of America’s oldest money and bloodlines has proven to be catnip to a number of freshly minted money barons, and Windward prices have moved up steadily.