Fixers (44 page)

The final episode is the most dramatic of all, and comes closest to crossing a line I’ll come to shortly. The opening shot is of a long shadow extending north into Central Park almost to Wollman Rink. The camera tracks the shadow southward to its source: one of the condo skyscrapers thrusting into the sky like enormous glass
needles that have been built a few blocks south of the park, where Russians, Chinese, and other flight-capital investors are buying $20 to $100 million condos as investments.

The scene then cuts to the jihadists discussing a plan to launch a shoulder-fired Stinger missile into the building. The plan is to attack after dark from a boat in the East River, using a laser programmed to strike a darkened section of one the buildings, on the assumption that unlit equals unoccupied. The actual attack is a masterpiece of CGI. The follow-up, a montage of the building emptying out in a frenzy, purchasers calling from Beijing to cancel sales agreements and decorating contracts, moving vans halted in mid-journey, real estate brokers weeping into the telephone as panic spreads throughout the Manhattan luxury market, developers pleading with bankers for time, is very convincing.

I liked what I was shown. Of course I would, since it goes after the sort of targets I would go after if I knew how, and if some of them weren’t among my clients. (I’m not unaware of my own hypocrisy.) The show was very carefully and cleverly edited to focus on what I’ve observed over time as the New Plutocracy’s Achilles’ heel: its overweening arrogance about how its great wealth empowers it, along with the class’s utter lack of humor about itself. These people actually think they deserve to be liked because they are rich, but few have relationships based on anything except deference bought with money—from headwaiters, money managers, interior decorators, and the people who sell luxury cars and watches.

As entertaining as it is, a veritable feast of lighthearted schadenfreude,
American Jihad
has a serious—to my mind, perhaps deadly—political undertone. It tacitly endorses class welfare. As one character puts it in the first episode, “These rich cocksuckers are destroying civil society as we know it; civil society has to fight back and to make it so hot for the bastards they either behave or
are driven back under whatever rotten log they crawled out from under.”

“So what do you think?” B asked me after the third and final episode ended.

“I liked it. I think going nonviolent is a very smart choice. Still, you need to be careful. Even nonviolence could put bad ideas into people’s heads. You don’t want to find yourself under fire the way the video game makers were when that kid shot up that school in Connecticut.”

B smiled. “I’m glad you say that. The nonviolence angle is my doing, and I had to fight Claudio tooth and nail on it. As originally scripted, that episode with the drones
did
use napalm, and people were horribly burned. The special effects and facial makeup were terrifying; they made your average cable-TV zombie look like George Clooney.”

“Do you have an episode planned about your loathsome Uncle Wally? I’d think he’d fit the bill perfectly.”

B laughed. “Don’t think we didn’t consider it.”

As we talked, my mind kept returning to the notion that, nonviolent or not,
American Jihad
is loaded with stuff that will have an impact on impressionable minds, starting with whom to hate and moving on to how and where to get hold of certain weapons and how to modify them. For instance, how to buy a Stinger in Romania and fit it with a guidance system developed in Turkey. This is information that might be put to lethal use by some scrambled egg out there who’s brimming with resentment and haunted by demons. I can see how, in the wrong hands,
Jihad
might exert a more dire influence than
Grand Theft Auto
times ten.

“No doubt about,” I told B when we finally wrapped it up and got ready for bed, “you guys have a winner here. There’s a lot of rage out there, and you’re going to tap into it without directly inciting people to blow up Congress.”

The next morning, New Year’s Day, I woke up early, clear-eyed and clearheaded, as if I’d gone to bed at 10:00 p.m. instead of 2:00 a.m. An idea had taken possession of me. Somehow, somewhere in the night, I came to the decision that whatever else may happen to the diary, I must show it to B. Given how our relationship has developed, this is simply too big a secret to keep from her. There are risks in showing it to her, but worse risks in keeping it from her, especially if I go ahead and seek out Matt Taibbi or another journalist to work with.

I slid out of bed and left B sleeping. I got out my laptop and skimmed through the diary to make sure that I hadn’t missed any potentially troublesome or indiscreet personal and intimate stuff. I set the text up on an iPad I had kicking around (I have a bunch, each engraved with a different corporate logo, from a couple of years back when iPads were the business gift of the year). Now I was ready to go.

I started the coffee machine, and soon the apartment was filled with the compelling aroma of an overpriced artisanal fair trade blend that I knew would arouse B. Sure enough, there soon came a few ladylike groans and snuffles from the bedroom, then the expected bathroom noises, and in due course B appeared, dressed in an old robe of mine, eyes still half-closed, following her nose like some classic goddess feeling her way through the Stygian underworld. She is a girl who just
has to have
her morning coffee; only then can life and awareness begin.

She went off with a cup, got dressed, and returned, and we sat down to breakfast. We didn’t talk at first. I shuffled through the
Times
and the
Post
; B checked her cellphone for e-mail and read “the dailies,” as Hollywood calls its trade papers. She called Thayer in Boca, wished him a Happy New Year, put me on and I did the same, then B spoke to Claudio and wished the same to him and Frederick. After she hung up, she sighed how much she missed
her mother. “You know something about Mother?” she said. “She understood differences.”

“Such as?” I asked.

“Such as that a ‘right’ isn’t the same as an ‘entitlement.’ She understood what privilege entails.” She paused. “I’m going to miss her horribly. I already do.”

“We all will,” I said. “In that connection, there’s something I need to tell you about.” I placed the loaded iPad on the kitchen island between us. She looked at it curiously, then at me.

“You need to read this,” I said. “It’ll take you a couple of hours, tops. Then we’ll need to talk.”

“This sounds very ominous!” she exclaimed.

“Fear not. You’re going to find it interesting, I promise you.”

I watched her start the diary. I have to say I didn’t feel nauseously nervous the way my writer friends tell me they do when a wife or boyfriend is reading a manuscript of theirs a few feet away. After all, my stuff isn’t literary; it’s the facts that matter, not the style. I knew I was taking a chance, but I felt I had no choice. She could very easily decide that what I’d done was defraud her and millions like her, get up, and walk out the door and out of my life. On the other hand, without Mankoff and me, her candidate would probably never have gotten elected.

My estimate proved more or less on the money. It was just before 2:00 p.m. when she got up and came back to the end of the apartment where I was working.

“That was fast,” I remarked. I looked at my watch. “Just under four hours for something around five hundred pages. Yeoman’s work.”

“I actually finished a half hour ago, but I needed to think this over,” she said, handing me the iPad. “You astonish me. I thought I understood you body and soul, but it seems you have unexpected depths—as an evildoer, at least. You could use an editor, of course.”

“Forget the grammar and my writing skills,” I replied. “Evildoer?
Moi?
” I was trying to keep it light.

“I’ve had to decide whether to walk out that door and never see or speak to you again. I’m not sure I’m suited to be the life’s companion of a bagman for Wall Street. You know how I loathe those people.” Pause. “Oh, don’t look so hurt. I’m kidding. We all make mistakes. You must have been a different person then—at least compared to the Chauncey I fell in love with.”

She got up, came around, and gave me a kiss. “What matters, darling, is the simple fact of your showing me this, and what that says about our relationship. How could I not stick around?”

“The latter would be preferable. There’s some other background you need to know, things that aren’t in there.”

For the next half hour, I took her through what I’ve told you about in this coda, Gentle Reader. I started with her mother’s death and memorial service and how it—and especially the First Lady’s performance—had affected me, and the determination my time in Boston sparked in me to put the diary in the public service. Then I went through my session with Marina and Artie in great detail, point by counterpoint. I confess I made myself sound eloquent and penetrating in argument and valiant and graceful in surrender, like the famous Velázquez painting, but what the hell: aren’t I entitled to some satisfaction? I didn’t say anything about the possibility of offering what I’ve got to another top-notch journalist, because frankly I wasn’t there yet.

“Are you trying to inveigle me into interceding with Marina?” she asked when I finished. “You can forget that.”

“Frankly, I’d never considered that,” I replied. This was true.

“What’s more,” B continued, “I happen to think she’s right. I think what you have is a prescription for virtual anarchy and very likely violence.”

“No more than that show of yours.”

“That’s not at all the same. The country’s split down the middle. In a showdown, who’s to say the radical right won’t win?”

I couldn’t disagree. “Marina thinks it will inspire the GOP to impeach the president,” I told B, “which will
really
shut the country down. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with that.” I suppose I could have added something about Marina’s involvement with this Rediscovery Initiative of the Gerretts’, but I make it my business not to go around spilling other people’s confidences. If and when Marina wants this association to be known, let her tell B herself.

“You seem to think the president has no idea of this?”

“At the time, I’m sure he didn’t. Now: who knows?”

“What about his wife? I remember Mother telling me how close with Orteig the candidate’s wife was during the campaign. Do you think she knew?”

I shrugged. “Maybe—but I really doubt it,” I said. “Certainly there was no opportunity for Orteig to consult with her; I didn’t broach Mankoff’s offer until I got him on the plane, and by the time I dropped him off in Chicago, we had a done deal. If Orteig had taken her aside afterward and whispered in her ear, my guess is she’d’ve kicked her husband’s butt and we’d’ve had a better president these past six years. Everyone says she’s one tough cookie and that he’s scared shitless of her.”

“That was certainly Mother’s feeling—although she’d never have used that word. But that has given me an idea. Suppose …”

It took about ten minutes for her to explain her thinking. My first reaction was: No way. But as B fleshed out her thinking, and I silently compared her plan to the alternatives, I began to come around.

What she wants to do is to take my diary and show it to FLOTUS, and let the First Lady make the running, in private, with her husband.

It seems that FLOTUS has been concerned practically from
year one of OG’s administration that her husband was being undermined from within. That his policy and legislative difficulties weren’t strictly attributable to the unholy Washington triad: K Street, its Wall Street and corporate clients, and the idiots and bought men on Capitol Hill.

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“Mother told me. She and I had no secrets. She and the First Lady spoke regularly—two or three times a week, at the end. The woman’s desperate. The president refuses to accept what’s going on, and if he doesn’t, and doesn’t do something about it in the next two years, his legacy will be no better than the Clintons’.”

So what? That was my first thought. Legacy shmegacy. Is this administration all about ego? “A fate worse than death,” I commented.

“Don’t be silly. Mother used to say that the First Lady’s literally seething at the way things have gone and what history’s likely to make of her husband.”

“And you think that the First Lady can use
this
”—I picked up the iPad and flourished it—“to light a fire under the president’s ass? Get him to use these last two years to turn things around? At least as far as history’s concerned?”

“I do. This is a president who likes to talk things to death. But shove
this
in his face, and there’s no way around it. It’s all here in black and white. But he’s gradually come to realize that he’s been made a fool of. And he would rather hand the country over to Putin than let the world see that.”

No way to disagree with that.

“OK,” I said. “Suppose I let you take my diary with you to Camp David and you show it to FLOTUS. I’m not worried about it leaking, because if it does, the GOP’ll have a bill of impeachment on the floor within twenty-four hours, and nobody wants that. Do you think the First Lady can get the job done?

B nodded vigorously. “Absolutely! Mother always said that she thought the president is secretly terrified of his wife. Give her a weapon like this, and … well … Don’t have to draw you any pictures, do I?”

People say about bankruptcy that it happens gradually, then all at once. Mind-changes can work that way, too. That’s what happened to me.

There are great, great journalists and powerful writers out there, but they’re pushing a boulder uphill, trying to pierce an impenetrable static of ignorance and partisanship. I was keen to give my diary to Marina because she’s a friend, and I like to do things for my friends, and I trust her to get the max out of the diary’s potential to stir things up. But now that she’s turned me down, I’m starting to see things clearly. Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is; today, if you want to effect real change, you have to go where the power is, and that’s not in the media. What real change did Jon Stewart ever effect? What policy was rejected because Paul Krugman said it should be? Would there have been a Watergate if Fox News and Limbaugh had been in business back in the ’70s? I think we know the answer. Sure, it’s a big gamble, but at times when so little in this country’s civic life becomes us, why not take the shot?