“How’s Daniel?”
The tone of her voice changes to cautious.
“Why?”
“I think I may have seen him in Hollywood the other night. I think he was trolling for whores.”
“Goodbye, Meyer.”
CHAPTER 13
I AM AT my desk, trying to hack into websites of autocratic regimes. This is a new hobby of mine. I have gotten into a few, and then retreated, as visions surface of having my fingernails pulled out by irritated third world intelligence operatives. Perhaps I will give some thought to hacking in with no back-trace, using dynamically redirected IP addresses from anonymous server hosts in lawless places. Then, when I am in, I will do something mature like replace North Korea’s landing page with “HEY KIM—YOUR MOTHER SUCKS DONKEY DICK.” Should be entertaining for a minute or two.
“Meyer, the CEO wants you up in his office as soon as possible. Are you free now?”
This call, direct to my desk phone, is from Jim, the HR director. He never calls me. Ever. Then I consider the construction of the request. The CEO did not phrase it that way. He likely said, “GET MEYER HERE, NOW!” Then there is the wistful “Are you free now?” asked politely by the HR director, remembering his psychology courses as he unknowingly trained for a career that would have him being yelled at by the CEO until his retirement.
No, I am not free. I am busy hacking.
“Yes, sure, I can come now. What’s this all about?”
“Electronic fraud. I will come by your office and pick you up.”
If I refuse to shower in jail, or not wipe my butt properly, and smell really bad, do you think it would lower my chances of being raped? And how do I tell Grace? Innocent? Does Robin Hood still have any resonance? And does Daniel become Grace’s new Dad, exchanging looks with Bunny every time Isobel mentions my name? “Some people just go bad, darling, even those we think we know best. I wouldn’t get too upset. Would you like to go to Hawaii over the summer?”
Innocent would probably get it. He is studying film at college. He would immediately recognize the dramatic possibilities here. Good man, undone by hubris and incaution. Emerges transformed, gentler, contrite. With AIDS.
We are in the elevator, I can literally feel the blood draining from my face. There is a small twitch in my lip; it feels like I’m going to cry. I turn to the HR director.
“So, what’s the story?”
It comes out strangled, dripping with guilt.
“Don’t really know. Guess we are about to find out.”
Please God, I promise to be good and believe in you forever if you let me scrape by here.
“Meyer, sit down. Would you like something to drink?”
The CEO’s face is a mask. Why is he offering me something to drink? Is it like a last cigarette? The CFO, CIO, and security officer are already there.
“No thank you, sir.”
This time my voice is no more than a hoarse whisper. I can feel my legs buckling. I get to the chair just in time.
“MONEY HAS BEEN STOLEN FROM THIS COMPANY!” he roars, his face now transformed into a purple mass of throbbing veins, looking at me intently.
“Yes, sir.” This is all I can manage. My mouth is a desert.
He turns to the security officer. “I WANT THIS GUY FOUND AND THROWN IN JAIL FOREVER!”
Oh God, oh God, oh God.
Hang on. Wait a minute. He said, “I want this guy found …”
They haven’t found me yet! Handel’s Messiah roars in my ears. I breathe deeply.
The CEO turns to me. “Meyer, you know your way around the computer systems. If you wanted to steal money, how would you do it?”
My brain moves into overdrive. Idiotically, I am about to explain the methodology behind my little scam to him, when I realize that this would be a trifle foolish.
“How much?”
“What do you mean how much, Meyer?”
“Uh … the method would depend on how much was being stolen.”
“About 10 million has disappeared.”
Handel’s Messiah morphs into Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” My eyes fill with tears of relief.
“What’s the matter with you, Meyer. Are you crying?”
“It’s just so, so shocking, sir. …”
He nods, looking at each one of us in turn.
“Yes. Shocking, indeed.” He wheels around and glares at the CFO and the CIO. “Meyer here, not even one of the senior members of this organization, seems to understand the gravity of this. It makes him weep. Do you two fools understand the gravity of this?”
They both nod quickly. I can tell that the CFO is trying to make his eyes water.
“So, Meyer?”
“Sir, there are many ways to do it, but as you know, amounts that large have to be approved by you and the CFO personally, and sometimes by senior management or even the board, online and by signature and by resolution. I can only imagine someone has stolen your identities. I will need time to look into it. Aren’t you going to call the police?”
“MY FUCKING IDENTITY? HOW DOES SOMEBODY DO THAT?” Having used up all of his purple, he is now looking gray. Clearly, the theft of the CFO’s identity is of no consequence to him.
“I am not sure yet, sir. It is more complex than just knowing your password. There are both paper and electronic trails and fail-safes. I will need dig around, speak to the banks. I don’t have that sort of authority.”
“You do now.”
I am so happy I just want to shit. Not about the bank authority, but about escaping gang rape at San Quentin.
I root around in the banking and Accounts Payable modules. Pore over transactions. Something is wrong, because nothing is wrong; there are no suspicious trails, and the internal electronic books check out. This takes me about an hour of work to uncover. There are no crooks at the company. Besides me, of course. It has to be on the other side, the bank.
I speak to the bank, and they insist that the amounts reflecting in our accounts are correct. I present my new authority by yelling a little. They go back and recheck their transactions and their balances. Something is wrong, they demur. They will call right back. An hour later I get a call. An internal error, it seems. Impossible, I say, it’s all electronic, been working perfectly for years. No, they say. Some of their systems crashed the previous week, and some of the redundancies and checks failed, some data was corrupted. They had to re-input certain data by hand, only about three minutes’ worth of transactions during that period.
BY HAND? ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?
Apparently not. This is a big-brand bank. I am extremely pleased that I am not the CIO of this bank, who is soon going to be in hip-deep shit. This is why they have awful words like governance and business continuity. Governance and business continuity are good and upstanding and righteous things, designed and policed by salarymen with discipline and good intent and focus. Not really people like me. Somebody breached governance at the bank. And now they have made a $10-million administrative error.
Of course, this is all fixable at the push of a button. The quivering wreck at the end of the line is telling me that that it will be reversed immediately. But this is too good an opportunity to pass up.
“Hang on, please don’t do anything just yet, I have to make some changes at my end. I will let you know when I need the reversal. I will call you later.”
I call the CEO. He has, this once, allowed me to call his cell.
“Hello, sir.”
“HAVE YOU FOUND THE FUCKING CROOK YET?”
“It is complex, sir. Millions of transactions to go through. You know how technology is.”
“HOW LONG?”
“Give me a few days, sir. I promise you I will get to the bottom of this.”
I let him stew for two days, imagining the sweat gathering behind his neck when he has to explain the loss of $10 million to shareholders. Then I call the bank. They reverse the transaction immediately.
I have ruined his sleep for three days. Li
fe is good.
CHAPTER 14
LOS ANGELES IS a collection of communities, like most large cities where the metaphorical boundaries cannot contain but one point of view. LA has to deal with its multiple personalities, a schizophrenia of sort, and is particularly disabled by its veneer, the piercing shine that blinds the rest of the planet: that of celebrity and boundless opportunity. But, as always, the truth is more mundane. The city is widely spread over its coastal desert geography—but go almost anywhere and you will find normal people living normal lives, their friends and schools and shopping and recreation restricted to manageable proximity, excepting work, in which inconvenience often takes a back seat to necessity.
But there is one extended swath of city that exists in its own space-time continuum. It extends from the Hollywood sign in the hills above Los Angeles and along a thin strip all the way through Hollywood, West Hollywood, West Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica and their adjacents. It is here where the glisten is at its most sparkling, the smell at its most intoxicating. It is where wealth, celebrity, notoriety, youth, and beauty often collide with the clamor of less fortunate aspirants, whose proximity to the anointed few feed a rabid hunger and, often, a ruination of balance.
Krystal and I live within this terrain of dreams. I am silhouetted against the feted Hollywood sign, my small, precariously tilted and cheaply constructed stilt house grasping the canyon side with aging shafts of concrete. Grace is at the other horizon, a few blocks from the sea, but a world apart from the opulence nestling within whispering distance. Hers is an apartment in an old and modest building, built in the 1950s, functional and without conceit. Given the constraints of her teacher’s income, this is about as far as she can stretch.
I had insisted on taking Grace to lunch, undeterred by her lack of enthusiasm. The late Saturday morning journey takes nearly forty minutes, even in the absence of drive-time traffic. I spent this time ruminating on her and the mistakes of my youth. She was not a mistake, but my leaving her certainly was. Of this I am sure because the threadbare memories of our few years together are tinged with pale sunset melancholy.
She opens the door immediately when I ring, stepping out into the corridor and closing the door behind her, preventing my intrusive curiosity from taking stock.
She wears no makeup. No heels. Jeans and a nondescript T-shirt. Her hair is short and unkempt. She looks dazzling. One cannot look much younger than one’s chronological age—no amount of makeup or surgery or paint or sunscreen can deceive by more than a few years. The trick is to have beaten the odds, to have been graced with those genes that render you attractive, that keep you looking that way long past time’s ravage. The beauty industry never got that. It is not looking young that is important. It is simply being lucky enough to be well constructed. Like a great building. Ageless. Grace is that and more.
Her face, I surmise, has been built with mathematical precision, with pi and epsilon ratios dividing and intersecting distances and relationships between ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin, triggering some deep universal truth—science personified as beauty.
I lean in awkwardly and kiss her on a quickly offered cheek.
“So, Grace. You look, well …”
I cannot find the right words.
“Thank you. That was an articulate compliment.”
“It’s a pleasure. Perhaps I can finish the sentence after a few drinks.”
“And you, Meyer. How are you?” she asks as we make our way down to the car.
“I am good. Mostly.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Not really. Or it is, but I intend to sparkle today. I intend not to bore you.”
“OK. I’ll eat. You sparkle.”
We drive to Main Street in Santa Monica. Sit down in the first restaurant we can find, of which there are many, all displaying their modernity and jangling uniqueness and self-conscious design innovations without either modesty or irony.
“So, Grace, when did you last speak to Innocent?”
“Today. He was surprised we were having lunch. It worried him.”
“Why?”
“The only reason he could imagine is that you have bad news, like you’re dying or something. Are you dying, Meyer?”
“Yeah, a little bit every day. But no faster than anyone else.”
“So why are we having lunch?”
“I thought perhaps if we spent an hour or two together, I could remember why we broke up. Why did we break up?”
She picks up the menu and runs her finger down the list of options. She doesn’t answer my question at first. This is a small peccadillo of hers, I remember it well. She won’t be rushed into a response. She will busy herself silently with something until she has turned over the question, felt its weight, located its core. I wait. She has her head down as she scans the menu, and I marvel at the crown of her head, the impertinent whorl of bristles in the center. I want to run my tongue through it.
“Marriage was very constraining for you, I think. I suspect that you found its demands unreasonable.”
“What do you mean by ‘demands’?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Fealty, responsibility, shared labor, emotional honesty, tenderness, early nights. That sort of thing.”
“Right. I’ve forgotten. That was a daunting list for me.”
“For me too, Meyer.”
“Nice of you to say, but I think you were better at it.”
“Yes, well breastfeeding a child with colic will do that to a girl.”
“What’s new with Innocent?”
This is our terra cognito. We have spent over twenty years fretting and worrying about whether he was happy, smart, sick, fulfilled, drunk, disappointed, thriving. All of which he has been, at times, like any other kid. There was a time, at the beginning, when Grace and I talked not only about Innocent, but about everything. The life we would build and how we would get old and what movie to see and whether to buy the more expensive lamp for the bedside. This is one of the things that they don’t tell you about divorce, the throttling of subjects of common interest. First the split of the assets, of which there were pitifully few in our case, and then the life and times of Innocent, intricately tied to us, then, now, and onward.
“College boy. Sex, drugs, and the rest. Maybe a bit of studying when guilt catches up with him. You remember that, Meyer?”
“Yes, I do. With mean-spirited envy.”
We are sharing a single seafood salad. It is a brash affair bristling with rocket and watercress and red peppers and red onion and dwarfish carrots and avocado, garnished with slices of pear and grapefruit and guava segments and incongruous crumbles of feta, spread among shreds of cold crab, tiny blushing shrimp, and calamari rings. I stare at it with some bemusement. Its multihued Dadaist attitude alone is worth the price, which is considerable. It tastes, well, like seafood, vegetables, fruit, and feta. Which is a bit of a disappointment, considering the presentation.
“Anyway, I’m driving up to the Bay Area next weekend to see him.”
I stop chewing. A small stab of jealousy intrudes.
“Really? With whom?”
“Stop fishing, Meyer. Alone, as it so happens. I haven’t seen Berkeley in ages, and I miss my boy.”
“Where are you going to stay?”
“I was hoping Innocent would put me up, but he lives in digs with a bunch of other students and I am not sure I wouldn’t embarrass him. So I booked a B&B called Berkeley and Bay. B&B B&B. Get it?”
UC Berkeley was Innocent’s first choice. His SATs were up in the impressive percentile and admission was smooth. Money from me, I am pleased as punch. We had an earnest discussion about studying toward a set of skills that would find him an employment window in a declining America. This is the sort of discussion that parents have had with their kids forever and Innocent’s reaction was predictable.
“I’m not interested in money, Dad. I am interested in learning about the world.”
“You will be. Interested in
money, I mean. One day.”
“Maybe, but not now.”
“So what are you going to take?”
“I don’t know. Anthropology. Psychology. Sociology. Philosophy.”
“In my day, they were called the fuck subjects.”
Eyebrows shoot up, interested.
“Lots of girls in those classes. Lots of fucking.”
“Really.” Not a question.
“Yeah, but you knew that, didn’t you?”
“I suppose.”
“So the whole learning-about-the-world-thing has a caveat, doesn’t it?”
“Dad, learning about girls is also learning about the world.”
Learning about girls is the hardest subject of all, but I would let him find that out without my help.
I look at Grace’s excellent face, now delightfully distorted by thoughtful chewing. I decide on a small social engineering project.
I excuse myself and go to the bathroom. Dial San Francisco information on my cell phone. Book a room at the Berkeley and Bay B&B. Then I call Innocent.
“Dad. What’s up? Heard you were having lunch with Mom today.”
“Yep, she is sitting across the table from me right now. She says I should also come up and visit you next weekend. Thought I should check with you.”
“Dad, that’d be great. Can I have a word with Mom?”
“Uh … she’s just on her phone. I’ll get her to call you.”
I head back to the table.
“I just spoke to Innocent. He asked me to visit next weekend too.”
She looks at me suspiciously.
“Uh huh.”
“Really, he did. He wants you to call him, by the way.”
“Uh huh.”
“So, should we drive up together?”
“This is a gate-crash, Meyer.”
“No, really, he wants me to come too.”
“Do not think you will be sharing a room with me.”
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