by Rob Reid
“That’s alarming.” Fido’s obvious concern made it clear that Judy’s superpower was working its usual magic.
“Luckily, they’re crooks and not ideologues,” she continued. “So they’re willing to trade their weapons away. Cuba’s offered them a fortune in barter. But you have something that they want more than venison and cheap gin.”
Manda shot me a desperate look. As the daughter of an international relations professor, she knew Judy was claiming that an imaginary nuclear weapon had leaked from a nonnuclear nation into a breakaway region of Pashtun—which itself is a language, and not a country. She might have tried to nudge the conversation toward sanity, but having been cast as a Hungarian monoglot, she was in no position to do so.
I caught her eye and gave her a reassuring smile. I was no longer concerned in the least.
“So what do the terrorists want?” Fido asked.
“Freedom fighters, Senator. It turns my stomach, too, but we have to call them that to have any shot at a deal with them. What they want is the unilateral, retroactive, and unconditional suspension of the fines in the Copyright Damages Improvement Act. All fines ever accrued under the law revoked. In Abdulistan, and all points beyond. Infinitely beyond, in fact. That part’s important.”
“They want to suspend the Copyright Damages Improvement Act? But … why?”
“It’s their generalissimo,” Judy said, lowering her voice as if to foil Abdulistani bugs. “Macaca something. He’s some kind of techno anarchist. Lessig must have gotten to him.”4
Fido looked at Judy with a combination of alarm and desperate confusion. “But we can’t negotiate with terrorists!”
“Freedom fighters, Senator. And it’s not a negotiation. It’s more like haggling. There’s a difference. And we’ve only got a few hours to show them that we’re serious about striking a deal.”
“But … how do you think our friends will react to this?” Fido was getting frantic. The media magnates who drip out the trickle of feigned artistic validation that he so craves would rabidly oppose any change to the Copyright Damages Improvement Act—even if it meant that a few cities had to take it in the teeth from a “dirty bionuke.” Forced to choose, he’d probably do the right thing. But he’d desperately hate to enrage his patrons if he could possibly avoid it. It had been almost a year since two seconds of one of his songs had accompanied a scene transition in an Adam Sandler movie, and Fido was craving more Milk Bone.
“That’s the beauty, Senator—the labels will support this one hundred percent.” Judy looked slyly back and forth, as if verifying that we were alone. “It’s Bono. He’s the linchpin to the whole thing. He met Macaca at the TED Conference last year, and is negotiating with him right now. And he’s figured out a way to get the label people on board. The plan is to act like we’re giving the Abdulistanis exactly what they want. But then we’ll pull the deal at the eleventh hour—and placate them by putting on a huge festival to benefit their rain forest. It’ll be like Live Earth—only without Al Gore.” That last bit was a cunning jab at a raw nerve. Fido had been teed up to make a fleeting, but ego-stroking walk-on appearance at 2007’s Live Earth Festival. But Al Gore was Live Earth’s coproducer, and put the kibosh on this.
The whole performance was vintage Judy. And within twenty minutes, we walked out of there with the skeletal outline of a mock bill to eradicate the fines that were enacted by the Copyright Damages Improvement Act. It was even printed on Judiciary Committee stationery, because Fido’s assistant had set up a little office in one of the suite’s rooms. The odds of our draft actually becoming law were drastically lower than my odds of becoming the Shah of Peru. But it only needed to wow Paulie into giving us a couple of extra days.
Once we were back in the town car and heading toward our meeting with The Munk, Judy pulled the Guardian’s Foiler key chain out of her suit pocket. “So what’s this?” she asked, pinching the tacky thing between a thumb and a forefinger and holding it far from her body, as if it were a rat carcass.
“A Refined device in disguise,” I said. “It’ll prevent Paulie’s people from Wrinkling you against your will.”
“Not that you don’t deserve it,” Manda said. “I mean, were you trying to make the senator think that I’m a Hungarian stripper, or something?”
“I figured Romanian would be a bit far-fetched,” Judy said absently, as she pulled the key chain up to her eyes and gazed at it in fascination. “So this little thing can seriously stop me from disappearing into a—”
Puff of smoke.
No, she didn’t say those words—she disappeared into one. Strictly speaking, it was more of a puff of fog, I guess, because it didn’t smell like anything, and it left a moist residue on her seat. But whatever it was, Judy was gone, daddy, gone. And so was the draft outline of that law, which she had carefully stored in the attaché case that disappeared along with her.
* * *
1. When we were choosing a voice to narrate our piece, Manda asked me if Judy had any heroes that I knew of. I said no, but that Eric Cartman from South Park and Nixon were probably good candidates. Manda sampled Nixon’s voice via an online clip from his resignation speech, and it just kind of stuck.
2. Specifically, Vietnamese dong, because this was the only human cash in the stereopticon’s library, for whatever reason. Pugwash naturally insisted on calling them dawoooong, even after Google revealed that the Vietnamese themselves say something similar to our own pronunciation of the letters d-o-n-g. I retaliated by referring to the 100,000 dong bill (which we used because it’s the only green Vietnamese note) as “50,000 double dongs,” which aggravated Pugwash even more than I had hoped.
3. This kind of patronage amounts to a sort of asynchronous bribery. Since the music industry wouldn’t dare to secretly pay off a guy like Del while he’s writing the rules that govern it, it instead pays him off openly as soon as his reign is over, by hiring him into one of its leading companies at nakedly inflated wages. This amounts to paying him in arrears for obediently serving the industry’s interests during his term on the committee staff. All of this is based on tacit, unspoken understandings rather than a formal quid pro quo—so no laws are broken, the industry gets monumental influence for a bargain price, and everyone (mostly) stays out of jail.
4. Lawrence Lessig is a legal scholar whose writings challenge many aspects of today’s copyright regime. The media companies view his work with the sort of horror that the last czarist court must have had for Das Kapital.
TWENTY-ONE
STREET FIGHTING MAN
Manda and I just stared at the empty spot that Judy had occupied as the town car inched toward our meeting with The Munk. “So much for Guardian technology not sucking ass,” I finally said.
“Do you think she’s … okay?” Manda asked.
“I think so. Paulie could have sent my cousin to the ocean floor when he Dislocated him out of the cavern last night. Or to Pluto. But he sent him to a street corner. So he probably just put Judy someplace where she’ll be fine, but out of the way.” For the next few hours. Whereupon he’d basically sentence her and every other living person to death.
“That’s my sense, too.” Manda was silent for a moment. Then, “So now what?”
“We could … tell Fido that Judy’s been abducted? By an Abdulistani splinter cell? And that we need another copy of that document to spring her?”
Manda shook her head. “I’m sure Judy already stretched his gullibility to the breaking point. I can’t imagine he’d buy that.”
I nodded. “And I’m sure he’s in another meeting by now, and we’d never get access to him without Judy anyway.”
Manda considered this. “So what else?”
I thought hard. “I guess we could try to get something compelling from The Munk. He runs one of the world’s biggest music labels—so that could be almost as impressive as the document that we got out of Fido. The trouble is that he doesn’t know me. And we don’t have Judy with us. And we don’t have the stereop
ticon. And even if we could win the guy over, his label is just one of many, big as it is.”
“That doesn’t sound very promising,” Manda said. “Although if there’s any lever to pull in the entire music industry, he’ll know about it, right? So he might come up with a way to fix this mess that we haven’t thought of ourselves.”
“True. So should we go and tell him exactly what’s going on, and hope for the best?”
Manda shrugged. “Why not? If he doesn’t believe us, we’ll bail after five minutes, and try something else.”
I nodded slowly. This was better than nothing. Just. “Meanwhile, we should try to do something to derail Paulie down in Grand Central.”
“Like what?”
I thought for a moment, then it hit me. “Start a mutiny.”
Manda looked at me blankly.
“I’m serious. Everybody down there loves you. They also love humanity, and our music—and they don’t seem to like Paulie any more than we do. If you tell them what’s happening, I’ll bet they’ll rally to you.” I grabbed at my suit jacket pocket and found it empty. “Dammit—where’s the map to the transmission facility?”
“Pugwash has it,” Manda reminded me. “You wanted him in position at the Waldorf, in case we need him to go down there.”
“Right. Let’s get him on the line.”
I called Pugwash and put him on speaker, and we quickly formed a multipronged plan. I would meet with The Munk, and try to come up with something as compelling as the memo that we briefly had from Fido. Manda would meanwhile head straight to the Waldorf, and connect with Pugwash. The two of them would then go down to the Decapus settlement, start a mutiny, and corner Paulie. If that didn’t work, Pugwash would try to persuade Paulie to give us a bit more time. This was a perfect role for my cousin, because he’s actually a decent negotiator—and he and Paulie are cut from a similar cloth.
“How much time do we need?” Pugwash asked.
“Whatever you can get from him,” I said. “A week, a day, a few hours. Hell—twenty minutes, if that’s all you can manage. Everything we’re doing right now is strictly meant to buy us more time. So do whatever it takes to get some.”
“Whatever it takes?”
“Absolutely. Whatever it takes.”
The car pulled up in front of the Peninsula Hotel just as we were finalizing all of this (the three-and-a-half-block drive having taken over ten minutes in midtown traffic). We were there because The Munk famously does business out of hotel penthouses when he’s in town from L.A. There’s no practical reason for this, because unlike Fido, he has extensive offices available to him in New York. In fact, the headquarters of the label he runs are in New York. He just never shows up there, because slumming it under the same roof as his minions would subtract too much from the theater of being the boss. So instead, he has them navigate snarled traffic, oozing slush, or hellish humidity to reach his realm.
As Manda took off on foot for the eight-block journey to the Waldorf, I entered the Peninsula’s sumptuous lobby, and found my way to the elevators. Up on the nineteenth floor, the hallway outside of The Munk’s suite was practically blockaded by the torso of a guy who could single-handedly manage security in Detroit’s roughest nightclub. Essentially a building with feet, he stared at me for about fifteen seconds after I gave him my name, and then wordlessly opened the door. Inside, the bouncer’s twin took over as my minder. The place made the setup at the Four Seasons look slummy. It featured a grand piano in the living room, a dining room table set for ten, and a library that made the antechamber in Fido’s suite look like a small magazine rack. I also spotted a full-sized Jacuzzi through an open bathroom door.
The inside bodyguard showed me to a seat at one end of the living room. On the far end, The Munk was talking to someone on a landline. He’d throw in a threat or a creative expletive every so often, but his end of the conversation was mainly gruff monosyllables.1
“Ey. C’meee-y’h,” he said. His inside guard lumbered over to him. I was about thirty feet away, but clearly saw The Munk stuff a thick wad of cash into a Peninsula Hotel envelope. He spat out a slurry of vowels that indicated that the envelope was meant for a certain notorious rapper, and handed it off. The bodyguard pocketed it and lumbered out of the suite. A minute later, The Munk hung up and joined me on my end of the living room.
“So who’re you, and where’s Judy?”
I gathered up my nerve. “I’m an associate at her firm. As for Judy herself, I’m not sure where she is. She disappeared before my eyes about fifteen minutes ago—probably snatched by members of an advanced alien society who don’t want her meddling in a music rights issue that’s unfolding between Earth and the rest of the universe.”
The Munk stared at me silently. Taking this for encouragement, I dove into the rest of the story. Over the next several minutes he nodded or grunted after every few sentences, and muttered something like “the fuckas!” whenever I talked about Paulie or the Guild doing something egregious.
“Look, kid,” he said when I got to the end. “I know all about this stuff.”
“Seriously?” My heart raced. If the labels had their own histories with the aliens, it opened up all kinds of possibilities.
“Yeah, sure. You think there’s a market for our music anywheres that I’m not on to?” (dat ine nadawwwn ta?)
“I’m not sure I … understand.”
“Ah, Christ. I been talkin’ to these jokers fuh years. And yer space parrots aren’t the only ones pushin’ for this deal. I mean, take Mars.” (Mahhhz.) “Those guys want in on this thing in the worst way. And then there’s those guys up in—whassit called? Orion. Yeah, Orion. They been all over me, tryin’ ta get a piece a this. But I’m tellin’ ’em all—no deal. No deal, not even a meetin’.” He paused for effect, then pointed at me. “Until I get wit Judy’s people.”
So, the good news was that he was either accepting my story, or tacitly agreeing to play along with it. He’d done very well over the years believing practically everything that anyone from my firm ever told him in private (or at least pretending to).2 The bad news was that having bought into my pitch, he was doing what he always does when presented with a deal: he had invented two imaginary bidders, and was now trying to start an auction.
“Anyways,” he said, as if breaking some bad news, “the fact that these guys’re workin’ wit you. Hey, it helps. But I got shareholders to think of. So the deal’s gotta go to the top bidder. Just like always.”
So he was assuming that the aliens were our clients. And the whole thing about them annihilating Earth was of no concern to him, because, in his world, even the chummiest negotiations open with blood-chilling threats. For instance, I represent his people in talks with a Web start-up that operates entirely within the law. This is a company that the labels respect, and are dying to do business with. Despite that, the first meeting between the two sides consisted solely of the label folks railing at the start-up team about copyright laws, threatening them with lawsuits and prison, and discussing the high incidence of homosexual rape in the prison in question.
“So anyways—let me tell you about me,” The Munk continued. “It might help you understand my position.”
Here it comes, I thought.
“We didn’t have no astronomy teacher at my school. And I don’t know much about aliens, physiatry, or space travel.” He started wagging a finger. “But what I can tell you is this.” A long pause. “I’m—a street fighter.” A shorter pause. “So is every guy in my organization. And most of the guys at the other labels, too. We’re all just a bunch of street fighters.” A feckless shrug. “That’s all we know.” This was maybe the thousandth time I’d heard the street fighter confession since becoming a lawyer to the music labels. You’d think that every executive in the industry had come up from some remote section of the Bronx that was filled with crumbling tenements, angry teens, and switchblade emporia. Every year, the neighborhood would stage a street-fighting Olympiad. And only the victors were gra
nted internships at Arista Records.
Things continued in this vein for a few more minutes. Having established his credentials as a street tough, The Munk informed me that he did business by gut, always by the gut, not by no spreadsheet or Jap management technique, and looking me in the eye, he knew he could trust me, and that this was worth more than a stack of contracts in the world of tattooed, heat-packing reprobates that spat him forth. All of that said, in the starch-collared world that he’d joined, he had to do business by the numbas, and so while he’d sign right now and worry about the numbas later if it was up to him, he’d have to take this back to his numbas guys, and he’d be in touch soon, and by the way, he’d always wondered, is that Judy a dyke or what?
It took about twenty minutes, but I did manage to get a meaningless, but highly impressive document to bring back to Paulie. It was a memo expressing The Munk’s earnest desire to reach an agreement granting the Refined League unlimited retroactive rights to his entire catalog for all points one hundred forty-four light-years beyond the Earth’s stratosphere. It also said that he intended to use his considerable influence to rally the entire music industry into striking similar deals. His outside bodyguard turned out to be an outstanding typist, and once the document was done, he printed it up on stationery that must have cost five bucks a sheet.
As The Munk walked me to the door, he asked me if there was anything—and he really meant anything at all—that he could do for me personally, or for the industry at large, because while it was a vicious, crooked, two-faced business, at the end of the day he loved it, because he loved the music, and he’d do anything he could to help the bigger cause, particularly—and he said this last bit while fixing me with a meaningful gaze—in Washington.
I gave a knowing nod. D.C. is Judy’s beat, and she expects everyone to help with the care & feeding of the politicians. “Actually, I have a small request for you from Senator Orrin Hatch.3 I just met with him.”