The Frankenstein Candidate (39 page)

There were several voicemails from journalists, radio hosts, magazine editors, and television networks, some offering up to $600,000 for a single, one-hour interview. Her future plans were still fuzzy. The money would be handy for whatever she finally decided. But she had promised her friend Kayla that Olivia Allen’s face-to-face with the public would come first on the Kayla Mizzi hour, and it would come for free. Whether it was Ambition or Compassion or Clarity or Rage that was driving her at the moment, Olivia was one who always kept her promises.

“Did she have boys with her?” Olivia asked. She was back at home for a weekend and a bit, relaxing with her daughters, watching Gary do household chores.

Since she nailed Victor Howell, there had not been one decent conversation between them.

“What? Who are we talking about?”

Olivia responded with a stern gaze.

“Yes, she used to drop off her nephews at school…why?” Gary seemed relieved that at least the silent treatment seemed to be over.

“Georgia probably noticed how fond of them you were…the boys.”

“I am truly sorry. Anyway, it’s over now.”

“What was her name?”

“It’s over, Olivia, it really is.”

“What…was her name?”

“Francesca. Francesca Oliviera.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Why are we going back into this? It’s over.”

He dropped the garden rake he had been holding. He sat next to her, held her hand.

“I love you, Olivia. And I love Georgia and Natasha. And I never want to leave.”

She felt him squeeze her hands. Her rage had subsided but nothing had taken its place. She felt empty. She wanted to trust him again but her mind was not a machine at her command. She got up, and switched on the television instead.

A young boy was on camera, recounting a sexual abuse story. Then there was another. And one more. Pedophiles were going to get freed by the dozens, the narrator said. She recognized it as an advertisement placed by the Republican Party. “Folks, this…is what you would get with Stein’s commandment of dignity,” the narrator said.

“Just a total misrepresentation of his position,” Gary said.

“I know. The dirtiest campaign in history is about to enter its climax,” she exclaimed as she switched off the idiot box.

It was Sunday night, August 30. Raul Fernandez, a trucker, was by himself in a dive bar in Temple City, Los Angeles County. It was nearly midnight, and the bar was required to close at one a.m. The two men in dark grey pinstripe suits who came in through the front door looked badly out of place, like financial or lawyer types whose car had broken down on the way to somewhere and they had stayed the night. The bartender noticed the contrast but kept going about his business—he had lost a waitress that day, he had tables to clean, cash to count, and books to balance. People came, people went, and as long as they behaved, it was none of his business.

The men ordered a beer each—Golden Eagle, the stuff that was coming out of India these days, but with that name, everyone assumed it was quintessentially American. It sold well. Breweries in America were broke. His malt whisky came from Puerto Rico, the scotch from Cuba, and the beer from India. People would not drink it if it came from China, otherwise they did not care—the cheaper the better.

The suits were with Raul for over an hour. The bartender let them stay beyond one a.m.—hell, business wasn’t good, and not all the tables were taken anyway. The suits left when the bartender started packing. Not Raul, though. He looked happy. Raul used to work at odd jobs to clear his gambling debts. Some people looked the other way when he didn’t produce immigration papers. But Raul had forged papers as well—papers that made him look like he was a legal immigrant from Cuba, but he didn’t like to use some identity that he didn’t know. “The guy could’ve been badder than me,” Raul used to say in his fumbling English.

Finally, Raul got up, a smile on his face. “I am gonna be rich one day,” he said just as he was leaving. The bartender didn’t want to know. It was none of his business. A week later he heard that Raul had found a new job in San Francisco.

Over twenty-six hundred miles away, just a few hours later, it was Monday morning in Virginia, and Francesca Oliviera couldn’t believe what the two men in dark grey pinstripe suits were telling her. In the time that she hadn’t seen Gary, she had lost interest in her design course, gone back to waitressing, and hadn’t even been to an audition for an acting role, let alone landed a job. Money was getting to be a problem. Landing men was easy, like a hobby. Landing money was another matter. Little did she know that her hobby could fetch her so much money. No, she was not being asked to become an escort or do porn films. She had considered both those options many times, but there was always the issue of people finding out and ruining her chance of a glorious acting career. What they were asking was easy. All she had to do, the men in the suits said, was confess to having an affair with her teacher at the architectural school to this magazine. She didn’t know that her tutor was a celebrity, but she did know that his wife was. She had pictures of him on her cell phone, a record of the calls he made—all that sort of thing. Still, he could lose his job, she thought, it didn’t seem fair. But they were offering her three hundred thousand, and she could hardly scoff at it. It was strange, at first she was threatened, perhaps to keep her away from Gary, and now the suits were eager to make her affair with him public. But then again, it was not so strange—she had seen his wife explode out of her political party. Francesca wasn’t dumb—she could join the dots. It made sense.

“Could you make it half a million?” she said—that way she could ease her guilt by sending Gary two hundred thousand if he lost his job. She still loved him. That sounded even better for the two suits. They smiled synchronously, as if they were one and the same, dictated by the same commands—theirs was a life of doing the bidding, like all the other suits. The suits left her with an advance of fifty thousand in cash and warned her to do exactly as advised.

Not far from Francesca and her meeting, an overwrought Bob Zimmerman was seated with seven other men in pinstripe suits around a large mahogany oval table in a dimly lit conference room. These suits looked older and more powerful than the two men who had visited Raul or the ones who were meeting with Francesca. They were the presidents of the ten largest financial institutions in the United States excluding IFG, Sixth National, and East Coast Atlantic.

The atmosphere was grim. Two younger men came in through the door, one with a bundle of documents that he handed over to Bob and the other with a pen and pad—it looked like he was the suit who would take notes.

“When did that happen?” one of the older suits asked.

“Started this morning,” piped in another.

“All orders of crude oil, natural gas, and international commodities are to be denominated in the exchange basket beginning today. The U.S. dollar is 20 percent of the basket, in line with the size of the U.S. economy compared to the world economy,” one of the young assistants said.

“Vice President Kirby needs an urgent report on the repercussions. Our figures indicate that the third quarter could also be negative…that’s four in a row,” Bob said.

“Kirby needs a report? What about President Young?” a banker exclaimed.

“He is very sick…they are holding it back from the media, could create a panic.”

“Any more than we already have?”

“Gentlemen, with the exception of Sixth, IFG, and East Coast…and we all know why they are not here, what is our collective capacity to shore up the greenback?” It wasn’t clear to the men why Bob Zimmerman was asking this of the banks—the Fed had to do this, they all thought.

“What about the bonds?” one of the bankers queried.

“What about them?” It was still only 9:20am, and markets had just opened. At another time, perhaps it may have been excusable that this chief hadn’t been appraised…but not today, not at this time, not in this hour of crisis, not for a man taking home $2.8 million annually before bonuses.

“They are all selling—the Chinese, the Japanese, the Saudis, the Russians.”

“What, in unison?”

“Where are the yields?”

“Treasury bond yields are in the sixes now…you have done well to keep up the buying side. We have seen future orders for six hundred billion this morning already,” Bob said. “Gentlemen, we cannot contain interest rates to below ten at this rate at the short end…fifteen at the long end.”

“Double-digit interest rates would ruin all of us!”

“Dealers have to buy the whole lot,” Bob said. “Make markets.”

“Make markets? Where would the real buy order be?”

“Thirty, forty, fifty percent yields…who knows?” another banker said.

“You are the backstop. There are no buy orders anywhere, Bob, and you know it.”

“The Chinese are taking a loss?” one of the bankers asked.

“Yes, at sixes they are, but they will recycle the money into farmland, stocks, shale gas reserves…they have all the deals lined up,” replied a younger suit seated next to Bob Zimmerman.

“We can’t possibly give you a fixed price on this one,” Bob said.

“But if we buy at sixes and sell to you at nines and tens, we would lose hundreds of billions. The whole system would go down. Everyone. Not just IFG, Sixth, and East Coast.”

“I know,” Bob said.

“We will buy. Buy the long bonds at four and five percent yields even…provided we can sell it all back to you at the same price at least, without profit for us. “