Turn of the Century (69 page)

The one ethical issue that has given Lizzie real qualms is the neurological game testing in England, measuring the dopamine and serotonin levels in the brains of people playing Warps. She commissioned those tests, in which the brains of a dozen young adults, human brains, were injected with radioactive dye and raclopride. Given the Brouhaha, Katherine, the company’s outside lawyer, advised her two weeks ago to put out a preemptive press release describing the London tests in detail. She did, including the possibility that an excess of dopamine may provoke symptoms of schizophrenia. Not even the Animal Salvation League expressed the slightest interest. The
Voice
mentioned the “diversionary press release” in one sentence, accusing “the Fine Technologies PR department” of “attempting to change the subject by pumping out positive news.” The Fine Technologies PR department! “Are they still up on the thirty-fourth floor, or do they work out of the midtown building now?” Bruce joked. He had been trying to jolly her out of her rage at Buster Grinspoon, whom she called “your sneaky fucking Linda Tripp partner,” for tape-recording their dinner.

Alexi tells her the Cordman, Horton limousine is downstairs. It’s kind of like cigarettes, she has decided: if she doesn’t pay for the limo,
it doesn’t count as a sin. Besides, it looks as if it might pour any second. On the way up Sixth Avenue she skims the papers Nancy has faxed over. The Cordman, Horton cover sheet lists “Telecopier” numbers instead of fax numbers, and the exchange for Nancy’s private Telecopier line is rendered as “KNickerbocker 3” instead of 563. Lizzie already looked at the interesting fact—“Near-term median valuation range: $70MM”—but now she looks at it again. When Microsoft was telling her in March that her company was worth $36 million, she was virtually offended. Now that Nancy McNabb is predicting that the world in general—“the market”—might be persuaded to value Fine Technologies at $70 million, she finds herself pleased.
But it’s not because of the money
. Maybe it’s because the Microsoft bait-and-switch humiliation has turned her into a seller. Maybe it’s Nancy’s draft red herring that makes it more real and thus somehow untroubling. Maybe sentences written by lawyers that drone on unreadably for sixty-five words—“This document contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, the impact of competitive products and pricing, product demand and market acceptance, new product development, reliance on key strategic alliances, the regulatory and media environments, fluctuations in operating results, and other risks to be detailed from time to time in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission”—are boring intentionally, word analgesics to numb anxious buyers and sellers.
Maybe it’s the limo
, she thinks, as they turn left toward Times Square from Fifty-first Street, swinging down Broadway. For a block, the rows of prices on the looming black Morgan Stanley stock ticker are racing south at exactly the same speed she is.

CORDMAN, HORTON, MERCHANT BANKERS:
brushed metal letters on a granite square, a pretty Scrooge and Marley serif typeface but unmistakably
now
, exquisitely subtle silver-gray against silver-gray. The sign does not say
EST. 1
960, of course. But in another twenty years it will.

The building is new, and looks as if it were built from an Erector set with a few stray Lego and Duplo bits stuck on the roof, but inside, on the thirty-third through thirty-sixth floors, Cordman, Horton’s offices are meant to suggest serious rooms from a century or two ago, Colonial Virginia with desktop computers, the State Department with better acoustics. Freshly milled wood paneling covers every visible perpendicular
surface, not dark, stained, wood-colored wood (so 1950s by way of the 1980s, so comically “old”), but painted in one of the twenty-two designated Cordman, Horton shades of cream and gray (the 1780s by way of the 1990s, guaranteed tasteful through 2005). If Andrea Palladio or Thomas Jefferson had designed cubicles for M & A executive assistants, wouldn’t
their
partitions be trimmed with dentils, and wouldn’t the staff vending area have an oculus?

Nancy and another managing director have their own reception lounge, the third Lizzie has encountered since she’s entered the building. The young woman sitting inside the wooden half cylinder, (evidently a miniature domeless U.S. Capitol building) is whispering into her phone—no rocket-ship headsets at a
merchant bank
—and she looks rattled, even a little scared.

She is one of Nancy’s “kids.”

“The cobbler guy
lost
them, that’s what I’m
saying.…
She won’t care it’s not my fault, it’s a TOT-Q thing, and last time they said she said I
wasn’t
‘taking ownership for total quality.’ … Yes, which is why you
have
to give me your psychic’s beeper number.… How come? If he has the power to visualize what Peter’s doing in California, why
couldn’t
he visualize where a pair of Manolo Blahniks are? I can give him like an
exact
description. One sec—Good morning, with whom do you have an appointment?”

“Nancy McNabb. I’m Lizzie Zimbalist.”

Another of Nancy’s assistants, not obviously quaking, appears momentarily to bring the visitor nearer to Nancy herself. Lizzie has to admit: she could get used to the hush and the fifty-dollars-per-square-foot-per-year plush, the multiple assistants, the mineral water appearing unbidden, the phased labyrinth of reception areas.

“Elizabeth!”

And the effulgent
glow!
The office is drenched in light, resplendent with light, making Nancy shimmer like a goddess. On a bookshelf behind her, the clusters of solid-geometry investment-banker commemoratives—dozens of Lucite cubes, Lucite pyramids, Lucite obelisks, and Lucite spheres and hemispheres in honor of the M & As and IPOs and follow-ons and convertibles for which Nancy has been responsible or taken credit. Lizzie forgets about the overcast outdoors. She is unaware of the PSP system. On the exterior of the thirty-third through thirty-sixth
floors, secreted in soffits above the windows of each corner office, banks of theatrical lights allow the workspace of every managing director to remain awash in perfectly angled rays of rich, dramatic “sunlight” from sunrise to dusk, regardless of the weather. PSP stands for Perpetual Sunlight Parity.

The women kiss, twice, and for an instant Nancy extends her arms and holds Lizzie by both hands,
regarding
her a little creepily, just as Mose did at the party.

“Are you excited? I want you to be excited.”

“I’m getting there,” Lizzie says, glancing at a young man standing in the doorway.

“Sit. You met my Grover? Grover is going to take notes, so that you and I can just dream out loud! Now. First off. We want you to be an internet company. That’s valuation maximization. End of story. I mean, you
are
an internet company—the game, which I understand is truly next-generation, 128-bit, and net playable, yes? Yes?”

“Yes.”

“So I think our story is: we’re platform-agnostic, but web-committed. And Y2KRx and ShowNet, that whole piece of the business, here’s our story on that, you’re going to love this, Elizabeth: Y2KRx was a huge e-commerce hit, right, so you have a unique e-commerce core competency,
and
Fine Technologies is the first company—this is the genius part—to migrate enterprise resource planning software over to the consumer and small-business side. Yes? How much do you adore it?”

“It sounds … plausible.”

“The Russell 2000 market cap is running eight times revenues,” Nancy says, by which she means the average high-tech company is deemed to be worth eight times as much money as it takes in in a year. The market values of normal companies, real businesses not contingent on some fantastical future, run to one or two or three times their revenues. But it is not unusual for an internet company to be valued at fifty times its revenues, or a hundred times its revenues, or even, at the maddest moments, a thousand times its revenues. “Eight might put us south of seventy-five mil, but with the internet story, I think we can end up north, nicely north. The KillerWare offering Thursday and the BeMyFriend-dot-com IPO tomorrow will tell us a
lot
about the
weather we’re facing out there, microcap-valuation-wise.” She pauses. “You have earnings, yes?” The question is an afterthought.

“We cleared a few hundred thousand last year, but it could be wiped out this year because of development costs on Warps.”

“
This
year,
last
year. Lizzie! Silly! We’re selling you based on
2002
earnings, 2003.”

In 2002 Fine Technologies is supposed to make a profit of $2.7 million. Lizzie regards her earnings projections as realistic, even conservative, but only relatively speaking. How many copies of Warps will she ship in 2001? Not one has been sold. Will ShowNet become standard software in TV and movie production, or moot, replaced the day after tomorrow by some miraculous PalmPilot add-on? She doesn’t know. No one knows. Earnings in 2002 are a fantasy, albeit a fantasy she has constructed scrupulously and in good faith. The numbers may turn out to be accurate, but if they do, it will happen by chance.

“You know, Nancy, I haven’t definitely decided to do this yet. Everything people tell me about running a public company makes me think I’d hate it. All the outside pressure. Everyone watching you. Everyone knowing everything.”

“So, twenty, thirty, thirty-five times earnings two years out.
Very
conservative valuation. I’d love us to file by August one. Shall we go eat?”

“I took it
slow with the actors because there are so many stage directions,” Gordon tells George. Gordon will direct the Tuesday and Thursday
Real Time
shows for the summer, while
NARCS
is on hiatus. Oz Delehanty, who worked with George at ABC News, will codirect
Real Time’s
Friday hours with Gordon—Oz in charge of the newscast, Gordon directing the acted, behind-the-scenes segments, most of which will be performed live.

“Gordon,” George says, “the
talent
. Not ‘the actors.’ Okay? They’re newspeople. I don’t want to have to say this to you every time.”

“George?” says Davey, one of the writers. “What did you mean before when you said Gore’s not a McGovernite? Is that like McWorld or McJob? Because he is like Mr. McGovernment. You know?”

Where to begin? George is reminded of the time at
Newsweek
in 1984, back when it still teemed with fact checkers (and McGovernites), that a fact checker not much younger than George didn’t understand what he meant by the phrase “zany SDS delusions about socialism” in a reference to the twentieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement. “By SDS,” he remembers the fact checker asking earnestly, “do you mean SDS the Norwegian telephone company, Statens Datasentral, or sudden death syndrome, the fungus that kills soybeans?”

“Gore
isn’t
a McGovernite,” George tells Davey, and leaves it at that. At least he’s one of the show writers (one of five, who will work Saturday to Thursday inventing the “off-camera” dialogue for Francesca and Jess and the correspondents), rather than a newswriter. Davey is the writer who fought hardest to write George into the show. But George ruled that as the producer of the fictional parts of
Real Time
as well as of its news hour, it would represent some impermissible blurring or smashing of the fourth wall if he played himself on the Tuesday and Thursday shows. For now, he has agreed to let them refer to an executive producer of the news hour, who will be called George, and exist only as a disembodied voice on phones and intercoms. “You know,” he told them, “like Charlie on
Charlie’s Angels
.” When he started each of his previous jobs, unsure how to do what he’d been hired to do, he remembers feeling as if he were writing parodies of newspaper stories, then parodies of newsmagazine stories, and finally of TV news stories, deadpan parodies with no jokes. That self-consciousness always withered away after a few months, like training wheels he outgrew. He assumes the same thing will happen with
Real Time
.

“Martha?” he says to the head show writer on his way back to his office for a sandwich. “The Francesca and Cole B-story scene in the opener just sits there.”

Cole Granger is one of
Real Time’s
three star correspondents. As an actor, he had a recurring role as a columnist on
Lou Grant
, but from 1990 on he’s been working as a TV news reporter in San Diego, where he’s won several local Emmys.

“I’ve been assuming that after Cole gets back from Tennessee with his Al and Tipper interviews,” Martha says, “we’ll work references to whatever happens there into that scene, and then pay it off on the Friday show when we run the interviews. Also, George—we
are
going to do the Deep Throat story during shakedown?”

“Write for now as though Deep Throat is in,” he tells her. “But leave open the possibility that it won’t run.” George pauses. “In other words, the actual situation.”

“Will we know about Deep Throat before the table read of the Friday show on Friday?”

“A table read? Fridays are
news
, Martha. Jess and Francesca can just read the Friday show off the TelePrompTer. We don’t want it to look overrehearsed.”

The Deep Throat story is based on the revelations of Sylvia Boudreau Shepley, a well-connected Georgetown woman who claims she knows the identity of Deep Throat, from Watergate. Mrs. Shepley, who’s sixty-nine, has become a devotee of a new, extreme Quaker sect whose animating idea is its motto—“No secrets, no lies.” Her new spiritual devotion to absolute truth, she says, has obliged her to spill the beans about the reporting of Watergate, “even though Bob and Carl will be upset.” Mrs. Shepley says Deep Throat was (in whole or in part, she’s not sure) George Bush. If Jude McAllister and his producer can corroborate it before the first Friday show, which happens to be the day before the anniversary of the Watergate break-in, it would be the perfect, killer story for the premiere week. So far, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have both refused to confirm or deny to McAllister that Bush was a source. Woodward laughed when George called him, but Bernstein, George thought, sounded a little nervous. “I know Carl,” Featherstone told George when he briefed him on the show, “from when I worked with Liz Taylor. Why don’t we just drop a hundred thousand or so on him to play along? I’m sure Carl could use the cash.” “If Bernstein were going to sell out Deep Throat,” George replied, “he could’ve gotten a couple of million from some book publisher a long time ago.”