The 500: A Novel (5 page)

Then they sent my dad up, for burglary, and it was back to where we belonged: the gas-smell motel.

After I finished work at Davies, ten or eleven o’clock at night, sometimes even later, I would walk through that neighborhood and picture myself in that backyard with a little fire going, a couple of lawn chairs, a nice girl. It felt like starting over, like making things right again.

The thought of losing it all lit a fire beneath me. After my meeting with Davies in his suite, it was a week before I went back to Marcus’s office. I laid down two more files. One profiled Gould’s mentor at the Department of the Interior, where he’d worked for nine years before joining Commerce. The second focused on the best man at Gould’s wedding, a roommate from law school who was now in private practice. He was still Gould’s go-to for advice; they had dinner every other week or so, one of Gould’s few social outlets.

“And?” Marcus said.

“These guys are easier”—I caught myself before I said
marks
—“influentials. If you look at their decision-making, you can see they’re likely to be sympathetic to our arguments. I’ve tailored the arguments against the loophole to appeal to each man. The first already has a relationship with Davies Group. If we can’t influence Gould, we can influence those around him. If we change their minds, we can change Gould’s without his ever knowing it was our words in his ear.”

Marcus was silent. I knew what was coming. I had given him more than he wanted on Gould. I had done everything but case the poor bastard’s house, and I was thinking about doing that the next night. Marcus shifted in his chair. I hunkered down for a reaming-out.

Instead, Marcus smiled. “Who taught you that?”

That would be my dad’s old friend Cartwright. In his younger days, he’d used a similar technique to charm lonely women hitting their late thirties out of their savings.

“Just sort of came to me,” I said.

“It’s a variation of a technique we call grass-topping,” Marcus said. “You slowly, subtly lobby everyone close to the decision-maker—wife, chief fund-raisers, grown kids even—until he comes around.”

“Grass-topping?”

“That’s where we make it look like we have broad bottom-up support—from the grass roots—but we’re faking it. You don’t need to waste time with the roots when the legislator can see only the tops.”

“Do you want me to take a stab at the next step? Actually influencing the people around Gould?”

“No,” Marcus said. “I’ll put a few people on it.”

I caught something in his voice, something I didn’t like.

“We’re running out of time, aren’t we?” I asked.

Marcus paused. He never said much, and always thought carefully before he spoke. But I could see he didn’t want to bullshit me, saw maybe even a glimmer of respect.

“Yes.”

The next week one of the Rhodes scholars washed out. He was a nice enough guy, with the swept-back blond waves and entitled air of a true prep. Someone told me, and I could believe it, that the guy didn’t even own a pair of jeans. I could have resented him, I guess—every privilege had just been handed to him—but he had a sense of humor about himself and I had to like him.

He was a gunner like me, the first in our group to have an ask. But the decision-maker didn’t come around. And that was it. Rhodes tried to play it off like he’d decided to move on to greener pastures, but he had this hitch in his voice as he was making his good-byes, like he’d been crying. It was hard to watch. I guess the kid had never failed at anything. He’d done everything he could. The case just hadn’t gone his way.

I hadn’t quite believed that these multimillion-dollar contracts were riding on a bunch of junior-associate twits with no idea what they were doing. But by all appearances, they were. I guess you could say it wasn’t fair. Maybe they give you an unwinnable case; there’s only so much you can do and then it’s out of your hands. But it’s hard for me to get worked up about things being unfair. That’s life, the only way I’ve ever known it. You could cover up your head and moan about it, but my approach was just to make sure I won, no matter what. I’d been going for a long time on fumes, on some abstract dream of the good life. Now I was close. I could smell and taste it. The more real the dream became, the more intolerable I found the idea of losing it.

Case in point: Annie Clark, senior associate at Davies Group. I’d never had much trouble talking to women, never really even given it much thought. But around this particular woman, the usual one-thing-leads-to-another ease abandoned me. From the first moment I saw her, on the second floor, all manner of corny nonsense crowded my brain.

Every time she and I talked (and we worked together fairly often), I found myself thinking that she had everything that I’d ever been drawn to in a woman—black curls, innocent face, and sly blue eyes—and some things I hadn’t even known to look for. After observing her all day as she ran circles around all the smug boys in meetings and fielded phone calls in three or four different languages, I’d be walking out of the building with her and all I’d want was to blurt out what I was thinking: that she was what I’d been looking for, that she embodied the life I wanted but had never had. It was crazy.

I began to wonder if she was maybe
too
perfect, haughty and spoiled and impossible to reach.

The first time we pulled an all-nighter at work—she and I and two other junior associates—she ran the show. We all sat at a conference table, and, deep in thought, she pushed her rolling chair back, about to set us straight on another fine point of the influence game.

Instead, she tipped over, slowly but surely, disappeared behind the edge of the table, and fell backward onto the carpet. I half expected her to wail or come back up in a rage. Instead I heard her laugh for the first time. And hearing her lie there and crack up—free, easy, unself-conscious and unconcerned about anyone or anything—instantly cut through my bullshit sour-grapes attitude. Every time I heard her laugh, I knew this was a woman who didn’t have time for pretense, who just took life as it came and enjoyed the hell out of it.

That laugh put me on dangerous ground. Whenever I ran into her I wanted to throw the memo I’d spent the last month working on out the window, drop to one knee, and ask her to run away and spend the rest of her life with me.

That probably would have been a better approach than what I ultimately did do. I was in the break room after a meeting, trying to discuss my Annie Clark strategy with the remaining Rhodes scholar without sounding like a smitten moron (and mostly failing). Unfortunately, Annie Clark herself was there, unseen, behind a pillar eight feet away, as the Rhodes scholar, a guy named Tuck I’d grown friendly with, gave me a not-unwise piece of advice about office romance:

“Don’t shit where you eat, man.”

“Charming,” Annie said, coming out from behind the pillar; she raised her bottle and pointed to the watercooler. “Do you mind?”

So I was a few runs down with regard to Annie Clark. But as I said: will in spades. I just needed a rally. And when I started picturing her beside me on a gentle July night in the backyard at the house up in Mount Pleasant I dreamed of buying, I resolved to hang on to this decent life I’d won even if it took my last breath. I was going to nail Gould.

The next time I saw Marcus—he was sipping coffee and reading in the dining room—after a few preliminaries, I asked him straight out.

“When’s the ask?”

“Has somebody been telling tales out of school?” he responded. The whole ordeal of surviving the first year at Davies was supposed to be a black box. Inquiring about what was inside was a little bold, but I think all the partners knew that we junior associates had started to piece together some clues about our fates.

“Three days,” he said. “Davies is going to pay Gould a visit. We’ve slowly been working on his confidants.”

“And if it doesn’t work? If he doesn’t change his mind about the loophole?”

“You’ve done everything you can, Mike. And I hope, for your sake, he says yes.”

I left it there. I could read it in Marcus’s face. Business is business.

I wasn’t about to sit around and count on hope and crossed fingers. Henry had tapped me because he thought I knew something about what made people tick. He’d said every man has a price, a lever you can use to force him to do your will. I had three days to find Gould’s.

I stepped back from the politics and policy research, the reams of Commerce Department reports, all the official Washington bullshit I thought I had to know to do my job. Instead I just thought about Gould, this dumpy bureaucrat living out in Bethesda, about what he wanted and what he feared.

Watching him the last few weeks, I’d noticed a few things that had stuck out, dumb stuff that I hadn’t thought was worth mentioning to the bosses because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what it meant. Gould’s house was modest for Bethesda, and he had a five-year-old Saab 9-5. But the guy was a clotheshorse—went shopping at J. Press or Brooks Brothers or Thomas Pink two or three times a week. He dressed like a high-society heel in a Billy Wilder movie: tweed everywhere and whales dancing on suspenders and contrasting-color bow tie. He was a foodie too and posted on an online forum called DonRockwell.com under the name LafiteForAKing, mostly bitching about waiters who didn’t know their place. Every week he dropped at least a few hundred bucks on lunch; he had a regular table at Central and favored the lobster burger.

But then, every other Thursday, like clockwork, this gourmet goes to Five Guys, which is a greasy slice-of-heaven burger joint. It started in DC, though now it’s all over the East Coast. He would always order regular fries and the little cheeseburger—just one patty—and leave with a doggie bag. I’m the last person on earth to begrudge someone a heart-stopper on a bun every now and then. But something wasn’t right. The leftovers suggested a superhuman restraint that I knew Mr. Gould did not have. And with the amount of money he was dropping on food and clothes, it didn’t add up. So I was suspicious. But mostly I was desperate, and maybe just swinging at shadows; anything to save myself.

By now I was one day away from Davies’s meeting with Gould: the ask. There was nothing for me to do but follow Gould and hope I caught a Hail Mary. I found him on the way out of his office, heading for Five Guys. Right on schedule. I’d like to think it was my uncanny, Columbo-like powers of detection—picking up on the nervous edge to his walk, the way he stared down at the table the whole time, the fact that his take-out bag was the only one I’d ever seen from Five Guys not stained half translucent with grease. Maybe it was just desperation and luck. Or maybe the honest life was starting to feel like too much pressure, and I just wanted to say fuck it and get myself caught doing something dumb. Whatever the reason, I had to find out what was in the brown bag Gould was carrying.

He went straight from lunch to his club—the Metropolitan Club, a massive brick building a block away from the White House. It was founded during the Civil War, and, with a few exceptions, every president since Lincoln has been a member. It’s the social center of the Treasury–Pentagon–Big Business set. The more liberal-arts-type folks—journalists, academics, writers—tended to cluster around the Cosmos Club in Dupont Circle. Membership in the Met was an indisputable marker that you were a somebody. Since I was a nobody, I had to improvise.

Gould walked straight through the entryway, past the reception desk, and turned left toward a sitting room. I tried to follow him. Four stewards, squat South Asians, stood at attention near reception. They stopped me like a brick wall. “May I help you, sir?” said one.

It took me a second to realize how
in place
I actually looked. My assistant had sent an Italian tailor to my office my second week of work. She told me not to take it personally, but I’d need a couple proper suits. I’d never actually met an Italian tailor (I thought they’d somehow all been converted to Korean dry cleaners sometime in the 1970s), but there he was, measuring my ass. At the final fitting, he actually said, “This is-ah nice-ah suit.” So I looked the Met Club part. That gave me a half second to improvise with the Gurkhas.

I scanned the plaques and photos on the wall beside the desk as discreetly as I could, looking for an appropriate titan of industry and government. Breckinridge Cassidy seemed old enough (the plaque said
1931–
) that the odds were he wouldn’t be around the club. I just hoped he was still around at all; maybe the club just hadn’t had time to note his expiration date on the plaque.

I checked my watch and did my best to look entitled.

“Breckinridge Cassidy,” I said. “Is he already here?”

“Admiral Cassidy hasn’t arrived yet, sir.”

“Very well. We’re on for drinks. I’ll wait in the library.”

I strode inside…and nothing, no frog-march out, no heave-ho by the collar and waistband. I was in. Fortunately, Cassidy was alive. Unfortunately, he was a fucking admiral and it sounded like he might actually show up any second. I took a spot in the library and noticed one of the stewards glancing at me every minute or so. The club had an open atrium with a beautiful double staircase. Everything about the place—the bas-relief wall decorations, the forty-foot Corinthian columns, the quiet servants at every door—made one thing perfectly clear: this was power’s home.

I thought I saw Gould on one of the mezzanines, then I glanced back at the reception desk. The steward wasn’t looking at me but was pointing my way and conversing with a very confused and formidable-looking Admiral Cassidy.

Time to go.

On the second floor, I caught sight of the back of Gould’s head and followed him down a set of stairs. From the faint chlorine smell and shriek of sneakers on hardwood, I knew I was heading to some sort of gym. Then I saw the sign. Squash, of course. The official pastime of DC heavies. I trailed him into the locker room.

You can only loiter fully dressed around a bunch of half-naked world leaders for so long before you raise a few eyebrows. So I stripped down, grabbed a towel, and found a nice spot in the sauna between the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a guy I didn’t recognize but who turned out to be the CFO of ExxonMobil, very chatty.