The 500: A Novel (4 page)

I needed the money, and I liked the perks, but that’s not what pulled me out of bed every morning at 5:45. It was the ritual of shined shoes and a crisp shirt. It was crossing off eight tasks before 9:00 a.m. It was the soles of my Johnston & Murphy’s cracking across the marble floor of the Davies Group foyer and echoing back from the oak panels. It was walking through the halls and seeing wise men do work that mattered, seeing Henry Davies and an ex–CIA director in the courtyard laughing like old roommates and realizing that if I kept busting my ass, I might one day belong in their company. It was the same thing that had been driving me ever since a judge gave me a choice: the need to find something larger than myself to be a part of, some honest work to lose myself in; anything to hold off the criminal in my blood.

I was going to do everything it took to make it at Davies, to make that respectable world stick. And that’s how I found myself sealed up in the mahogany box.

Those first few months were like pledging a fraternity. Nobody said how exactly, but you knew you were being scrutinized at every step. Every so often someone would disappear and you had the feeling that in some clubby chamber at Davies Group the night before, ballots had been cast in secret, and black marks scratched beside the name of the unfit.

That was the chatter among the junior associates, at least. I thought it was a little much. But the piece of it I did buy was that your first real assignment was do-or-die. In the government affairs business, when you’re needling some politician or bureaucrat to give you what your client wants, there comes a moment called the ask. No matter how byzantine the issue, it ultimately comes down to one question: Will he give you what you need? Yes or no.

A partner does the actual ask. He is the august face of the company. The real work, however, is all left to the associate. And when you get your first case, you own it. If the mark says yes, you’re golden. No: you’re gone.

William Marcus gave me my first real case. He had the office next to Davies on the third floor. It was the executive corridor. An oak-paneled boardroom ran along one side. On the other there were six or seven suites, each as big as my apartment, all looking down over the District from this hilltop perch in Kalorama. Walking that hall made my hair stand on end. I would flash back to drills and forward march with thirty-inch steps, head, eyes, and body at attention.

The men on that hall had literally run the free world, and they daily, without a second thought, made or crushed the careers of dozens of strivers like me. Most of the principals at the firm had bios as long as your arm; that’s what the clients paid for. But Marcus’s background was a mystery. As far as I knew, I was the only junior associate he was keeping an eye on. It was either a very good or a very bad thing, and given the caliber of the talent I was up against, I figured the latter.

Marcus was in his late forties, maybe a little older; it was hard to tell. I took him for a triathlete or, given his build, maybe one of those white-collar guys who spend four nights a week trading leather at the boxing gym. He had reddish-brown hair trimmed short, a strong jaw, and drawn cheeks. He always seemed to be in a good mood, which cut down the intimidation factor a bit, but only until he had you alone in his office. Then the smiles and easy manner disappeared.

He put me on to my first ask. A giant multinational based in Germany (which I probably shouldn’t name outright, so I’ll just call it what we called it around the office: the Kaiser) had finagled a tax-and-tariff loophole and was using it to lowball American companies and drive them out of business. It was a typically complex international tax case, but in the end it came down to this: overseas companies that sell services to Americans pay way less in taxes and tariffs than companies that ship actual goods to the United States. The Kaiser people sure looked like they were selling goods to the United States. They claimed, however, that they were just offering a service, connecting American customers to overseas vendors and manufacturers, and so they should have to pay only the cheap tax on services. We’re just a middleman, the Kaiser would argue, who never actually takes possession of the goods. But once you looked at their supply chain, it was clear they were selling goods just like everybody else and simply dodging the higher taxes.

Still awake? Bravo. The folks who were getting driven out of business had hired the Davies Group. They wanted us to close the loophole and level the playing field. That meant getting some bureaucrat in the bowels of Washington to sign a piece of paper that said the Kaiser was offering goods, not services.

One little word. And for that, the Davies Group was getting at least fifteen million dollars, which, rumor had it among the junior associates, was the minimum required to attract the firm’s attention.

Marcus laid the case out for me, with a few more details but not many: my first ask. He didn’t even tell me what he wanted me to give back to him—the product, as it was known around the office. My ass was now officially on the line and I had zero clue what I was doing.

I’d been out of my depth for the last ten years, though, and it had worked out surprisingly well, so I figured I’d just keep doing what I always did: hustle. A hundred and fifty hours of work and ten days later, after talking with every expert who would answer a plea for help and reading every legal code and journal article that even vaguely touched on the issue, I distilled the case against the Kaiser into ten pages, then five, then one. I boiled the sea. Eight bullet points. Each one alone was potent enough to annihilate the Kaiser. It was the memo equivalent of uncut heroin, and I was proud and sleep-deprived enough to pass it along to Marcus thinking it would blow him away.

He skimmed it for thirty seconds, grumbled a little, and said, “This is all fucked up. You can’t know the why until you know the who. These things always turn on one man. Don’t waste my time until you find the fulcrum.”

I wanted marching orders. I got Confucius. So I dug back in. Among my junior-associate peers hustling for a spot at Davies Group were the secretary of defense’s son, a guy who at thirty years old had already been deputy campaign manager on a successful presidential bid, and two Rhodes scholars, one of them a former CIA director’s grandson. The job came down to knowing Washington, and the issues, sure, but more important, knowing the deep anthropology of the place, the personalities, the loves and hates, the hidden nodes where power massed, who had pull on who, who owed who chits. It was stuff that takes a lifetime of connections, of being immersed in the DC elite, to learn. The other guys had it. I didn’t. But that wasn’t going to stop me. Because I had learned a few things along the way too. What I did have was will, in spades.

So I got out of the office, away from LexisNexis and the endless Googling, to actually talk to some human beings (to many of my youngish peers, this was an art as mysterious as levitation or snake charming). I was working on the premise that official Washington, however peculiar, could ultimately be understood as a neighborhood like any other.

About six different government offices had a say in the decision on whether the Kaiser could hang on to the loophole. But the final stop turned out to be a typical example of Washington bureaucracy: a sub-body of something called the Interim Interagency Working Group on Manufacturing at the Commerce Department.

It took about a week to crack the working group. Everything was a little harder because Marcus had told me that for now there shouldn’t be any obvious signs we were working the case. I had to talk to about four or five junior staffers until I found a chatterbox, big ego, who knew nothing that mattered to me. He did, however, turn me on to a paralegal who moonlighted for fun as a bartender at Stetson’s—a U Street bar that the Clinton White House staffers used to frequent, though by now it had gone to seed. She was a redhead with a nice tomboyish thing going, as amiable as you could want, though she snored like a chain saw and had a habit of “forgetting” things at my apartment.

She laid it all out. There were two figureheads who would sign off on it, but in the end, the real decision came down to three people on the working group. Two were typical agency staffers, human paperweights; they didn’t matter. The third—a guy named Ray Gould—was the actual decision-maker, the one who was keeping the Kaiser’s loophole open. Gould was a deputy assistant secretary (that is, under the assistant secretary under the undersecretary who was under the deputy under the actual secretary of commerce. Having fun?). I found myself saying these org-chart tongue twisters in all seriousness. If I needed something to keep me from thinking the whole thing was a ridiculous bit of policy trivia, I would just remember that nailing it meant fifteen million minimum to my boss and, more important, would save me from spending the rest of my life wiping down a bar and hiding from Crenshaw.

Besides, I was starting to really enjoy myself. The characters were less interesting and the money was better, but otherwise this wasn’t all that dissimilar from the hustles I knew growing up. That had me equal parts excited and worried.

I had my fulcrum. Marcus didn’t seem pleased with me, exactly, when I brought him Gould’s name, but at least he seemed a little less angry. He told me to start from scratch on making the case to close the tariff loophole. I had to tailor it all to a single goal: change Gould’s mind. I read Gould’s theses from college and graduate school. I found out what newspapers and journals he subscribed to, the charities he donated to, every decision he’d ever made that there was a record or memory of. I started zeroing in, fine-tuning every argument against the Kaiser’s loophole so it would appeal to Gould’s particular habits and beliefs. I boiled down the arguments over and over until I’d trimmed them to a single page. The previous memo had been uncut heroin. This was a designer drug. Gould would have to give us the decision we wanted.

“You’d better hope so,” Marcus said.

Even with all the reading and interviews, I couldn’t get a sense of the guy, of what made him tick, until I saw him in person. In profiling Gould, I may have gone a little overboard. I knew where his kids went to school, what car he drove, where he went on his anniversary dinner, his usual lunch spots. They were mostly high-end: Central Michel Richard, the Prime Rib, the Palm, but every other Thursday he would go to Five Guys, a burger place.

The week after I turned in my new report on Gould, Marcus called me upstairs, then led me into Davies’s suite. Davies gestured for Marcus to wait outside. This was the master-of-the-universe office I had imagined back at Harvard, except of course Davies had better taste than my imagination did. Books ran from floor to ceiling on three walls. They’d been read too; they weren’t just leather-bound props. Everything was kitted out in mahogany. And the ego wall—mandatory for Washington: snapshots of grip-and-grins with anyone influential you’ve ever met—was like nothing I’d ever seen. He had shots with world leaders going back decades, and they weren’t the usual two-guys-in-suits-at-a-fund-raiser variety. There he was, younger than I was, bowling with Nixon; there fishing in a little skiff with Jimmy Carter; and there skiing with…

“Is that the pope?” I blurted it out before I could stop myself.

Davies stood behind his desk. He didn’t look happy. “Gould hasn’t budged,” he said.

They’d given my memo—the arguments tailored specifically to Gould—to the trade group fighting the Kaiser, and the group had made the case to Gould’s working group. Davies had people inside Commerce who would know if Gould was starting to come around. He hadn’t given an inch.

“I’ll do more,” I said.

He lifted up the memo I had put together. “This is perfect,” he said, then let me hang for a minute. His tone didn’t make it sound like a compliment.

“I already have a hundred and twenty guys downstairs who can give me perfect. I don’t need another. Do you know what this contract is worth?”

“No.”

“We’ve worked out arrangements with every single industry and trade group affected. Forty-seven million.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. He looked me over for a few seconds.

“We can’t bill by the hour here, Mike. If we win, we get the forty-seven. If we lose, we get nothing. We won’t lose.”

He walked a little closer and stared me down. “I took a risk with you, Mike. I hired you for the same reason others wouldn’t, because you’re not the usual candidate. I fear I may have made a mistake bringing you here. Prove I didn’t. Show me what you have to offer that the others don’t. Give me more than perfect. Surprise me.”

It’s easier to have nothing all along than to get your hands on something and lose it. And all the time at Davies Group, I’d thought of the money and privileges as a mistake soon to be rectified. I didn’t dare think I could really have it; I didn’t dare think of it as my life. But eventually you find something you really want. Something you need. Then you’re fucked. You can never let that life go.

What I wanted wasn’t anything fancy. For me, the moment I found it came around August of that first year at Davies, three months after I’d moved to the District. I was strolling through Mount Pleasant, a ten-minute walk from the office. The neighborhood had one main drag, with an eighty-year-old bakery and a hardware store that’d been there for decades. It was where the Italians, then the Greeks, and then the Latinos found their first foothold in DC, and it felt like a little village. Off the main street of shops, the area was wooded, and to me it seemed like the suburbs. The houses were small, and I saw one for rent, a two-bedroom with a porch and a backyard where you could look down into the woods of Rock Creek Park, a band of streams and forest that cuts DC in half north to south. While walking past the house one night, I saw a whole family of deer, just standing there, calm, unafraid, looking back at me.

That’s all it took. I hadn’t had a backyard since I was a kid. My dad had had some steady money coming in—I didn’t know where from back then. We had finally moved out of the apartment complex in Arlington where I’d grown up—it sort of looked like a motel, and I remember it always smelled like cooking gas—out to a place in Manassas, just a small ranch house. And I know this is a little corny, but I remember we had a swing set there, all rusty aluminum tubes that would open your palm right up if you grabbed the wrong spot. We didn’t live there for long, but I remember summer nights when my parents and a couple of their friends would be sitting around a fire pit, laughing and drinking beer. I would stay on that swing all evening, pumping my legs like a locomotive, and I’d go so high up, up with the bar, looking out over the trees, that I’d be weightless, and the chains would go slack, and I would’ve sworn I could just take off flying into the night.