Fixers

by Michael M. Thomas

  One other thing bothered me. Noble intentions tend to fall about when skeletons come rattling out of the closet. There’s a factoid going round that Artie’s worshipful attitude toward Merlin Gerrett conveniently omits. To be sure, Gerrett has created a lot of jobs, especially in and around his hometown, but he’s also participated recently in a massive destruction of jobs and communities. Last year, Gerrett was a major participant in a multibillion-dollar buyout of a famous global home products company. The word in the financial pages is that since the buyout closed, the private-equity firm that put the deal together has eliminated product lines, shut down plants, and fired tens of thousands of workers in this country and overseas, all in the interest of jacking up the investors’ rate of return.

  Of course, I didn’t point that out. I simply listened as Artie spelled out the Initiative’s plans for an organizing convention patterned on Philadelphia in 1787, and we left it that.

  Frankly, I’m at sixes and sevens. But what was I to do or say to Artie? I’m all for giving virtue and good intentions every chance, but what I possess is dynamite, and the targets I have in mind still seem well worth blowing up.

  Is the nation really that fragile? I just don’t know, and should that really deter me? Maybe we deserve to be blown up and let the next generation start over.

  I need to do some heavy thinking.

  DECEMBER 30, 2014

  I went to bed in a sulk and woke up in a sulk. It’s hard to accept Marina’s turndown. Still, what can I do? If I try to take the diary to a journalist I don’t know, either I have to find someone to make the introduction or make a cold call myself. In both cases, there’ll be some preliminary explaining to do, which risks tipping my hand. And suppose whoever I approach turns me down the way Marina has? Sees things the way she and Artie do, that everything provoked by the disclosure won’t be so much a healing catharsis but a destructive convulsion? Frankly, I doubt there’s much of a risk of rejection. Most journalists would sell their mother for a scoop of the magnitude I’m offering. So I’m inclined to see if I can find a discreet path to Matt Taibbi. He’s right up there with Marina when it comes to high-grade muckraking; he calls ’em as he sees ’em; he’s a really good, strong writer. But I want to think this over.

  Anyway, nothing can get done until the New Year. B gets here tomorrow, and her visit will take up my time and energy for the next couple of days. She leaves the morning of the 2nd; by then, my sulks will have faded—I know myself well enough to be sure of that—and I’ll be able to think clearly about what to do next. If anything.

  JANUARY 2, 2015

  Two hours ago, I took B over to the heliport, where a presidential chopper was standing by to convey her to Camp David. She’s probably arriving just about now.

  I have a lot to report since my last entry. Let’s begin at the beginning.

  After the usual airline problems, B got to my apartment midafternoon on New Year’s Eve. “Do you mind if we don’t go out?” were practically the first words out of her mouth. “I’ve had enough of people in the last two weeks to last me five lifetimes. I need a bath and I desperately need a nap.”

  “I can well imagine.” Her mother’s sudden death, looking after her father, the memorial service, all the people to be thanked, welcomed, wheedled, air-kissed, chatted with. Wears me out just thinking about it. I wasn’t particularly worried about canceling on Balthazar—I knew it would take them about five seconds to fill my slot from a waiting list that must stretch from Prince Street to Key West. So I persuaded her that there was plenty of time to bathe and then catch forty winks, and I left the plan in place.

  Which is what we did. As we both knew it would be, dinner was just great, and we were back at my place by 9:30, wide-awake and raring to watch.

  “So—what is it this year?” I asked. “My money’s on Dirty Dozen.”

  She smiled delphically, went into the bedroom, and returned with a fistful of DVDs. “I thought you might like to see the first three episodes of American Jihad, the new show. These are a little rough, still; we need to refine them down and take out a couple of minutes across the board, but they’ll give you an idea—and I’m dying to hear what you think.”

  In a way my Dirty Dozen guess wasn’t so far off the mark. American Jihad is about a bloodless (!) terrorist campaign waged by a small group of disaffected Americans against the plutocracy that has taken over this country and appropriated its wealth and its governance. On one side, you have the usual mixed bag of types: the core group is led by an retired professor of political science and his wife, a medical scientist, and their daughter, a teenage computer prodigy; other members of the cadre are IT and weapons experts, a former Special Forces operative, a CIA agent, the retired CEO of a major bank, and an aggrieved veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, along with various supporting characters with specialized skills. Most important, the Cadre, as it’s called, has access to the same tools as its targets, from private jets to offshore banks; it has unlimited money, multifaceted expertise, and deep technology.

  Their enemies list is made up of the types who are thrust into our awareness almost every day, thanks to their thirst for publicity and their (and their PR reps’) genius for getting it as well as what they get away with, which varies from vulgar exhibitionism to breathtaking greed to a total lack of real talent. The specific characters are heavily disguised, yet somehow recognizable. The first of the three episodes B brought for us to watch involves a lavish party in a pretentious, architecturally mediocre beachfront mansion—the Hamptons presumably, but it could equally be Malibu or the Florida Gold Coast. It’s the sort of vanity event dripping with self-proclaimed “socialites” that gets written up in glossy society magazines and websites. Everyone is strutting their stuff, posing for the camera, showing off how rich and important they are—until interrupted by a flight of three smallish crop-spraying drones that suddenly appear overhead. Earlier in the episode, we’ve learned about these drones; we’ve watched them being conveyed to the launching point by fake FedEx trucks, and we’ve watched them armed and launched. That we can figure out what’s coming doesn’t spoil our pleasure. Once overhead, instead of herbicides, they will discharge on the glitzy company a mist compounded of raw sewage and industrial adhesive.

  The scene is very well done. The camera lingers lovingly on the hysterical faces and shit-smeared finery of the partygoers, as the drones disappear out to sea. B tells me they flipped a coin between leading with this episode, or one in which a bunch of shit-spewing IEDs are set off at Art Basel Miami. They’re saving the latter for later in the season “because that way we’ll give the viewer a double bang for the buck: mess up a lot of crap people and wreck a bunch of crap art.”

  The second episode also centers on a party, this time one of those huge charity affairs where a ticket costs $10K and everyone shows up in couture and other adornments calculated to outglitter everyone else. It’s obvious that Claudio and his writing team had the Metropolitan Museum Fashion Gala in mind as a model, but here again, this kind of event takes place all over the world—it could easily be Venice or Newport. The weapon of choice in this episode is a strain of novovirus, the germ that not long ago incapacitated entire cruise ships with diarrhea and vomiting. In this instance, the jihadists, as they call themselves, infiltrate the catering brigade and dose the elaborate cuisine with the virus. I must say that I greatly enjoyed the spectacle of the crème de la crème puking and shitting all over each other’s haute couture as they fight their way to the loos. The actress playing the alpha female English fashion editor—the event’s big dog—gives an Emmy-worthy performance.

  The final episode is the most dramatic of all, and comes closest to crossing a line I’ll come to shortly. The opening shot is of a long shadow extending north into Central Park almost to Wollman Rink. The camera tracks the shadow southward to its source: one of the condo skyscrapers thrusting into the sky like enormous glass needles that have been built a few blocks south of the park, where Russians, Chinese, and other
flight-capital investors are buying $20 to $100 million condos as investments.

  The scene then cuts to the jihadists discussing a plan to launch a shoulder-fired Stinger missile into the building. The plan is to attack after dark from a boat in the East River, using a laser programmed to strike a darkened section of one the buildings, on the assumption that unlit equals unoccupied. The actual attack is a masterpiece of CGI. The follow-up, a montage of the building emptying out in a frenzy, purchasers calling from Beijing to cancel sales agreements and decorating contracts, moving vans halted in mid-journey, real estate brokers weeping into the telephone as panic spreads throughout the Manhattan luxury market, developers pleading with bankers for time, is very convincing.

  I liked what I was shown. Of course I would, since it goes after the sort of targets I would go after if I knew how, and if some of them weren’t among my clients. (I’m not unaware of my own hypocrisy.) The show was very carefully and cleverly edited to focus on what I’ve observed over time as the New Plutocracy’s Achilles’ heel: its overweening arrogance about how its great wealth empowers it, along with the class’s utter lack of humor about itself. These people actually think they deserve to be liked because they are rich, but few have relationships based on anything except deference bought with money—from headwaiters, money managers, interior decorators, and the people who sell luxury cars and watches.

  As entertaining as it is, a veritable feast of lighthearted schadenfreude, American Jihad has a serious—to my mind, perhaps deadly—political undertone. It tacitly endorses class welfare. As one character puts it in the first episode, “These rich cocksuckers are destroying civil society as we know it; civil society has to fight back and to make it so hot for the bastards they either behave or are driven back under whatever rotten log they crawled out from under.”

  “So what do you think?” B asked me after the third and final episode ended.

  “I liked it. I think going nonviolent is a very smart choice. Still, you need to be careful. Even nonviolence could put bad ideas into people’s heads. You don’t want to find yourself under fire the way the video game makers were when that kid shot up that school in Connecticut.”

  B smiled. “I’m glad you say that. The nonviolence angle is my doing, and I had to fight Claudio tooth and nail on it. As originally scripted, that episode with the drones did use napalm, and people were horribly burned. The special effects and facial makeup were terrifying; they made your average cable-TV zombie look like George Clooney.”

  “Do you have an episode planned about your loathsome Uncle Wally? I’d think he’d fit the bill perfectly.”

  B laughed. “Don’t think we didn’t consider it.”

  As we talked, my mind kept returning to the notion that, nonviolent or not, American Jihad is loaded with stuff that will have an impact on impressionable minds, starting with whom to hate and moving on to how and where to get hold of certain weapons and how to modify them. For instance, how to buy a Stinger in Romania and fit it with a guidance system developed in Turkey. This is information that might be put to lethal use by some scrambled egg out there who’s brimming with resentment and haunted by demons. I can see how, in the wrong hands, Jihad might exert a more dire influence than Grand Theft Auto times ten.

  “No doubt about,” I told B when we finally wrapped it up and got ready for bed, “you guys have a winner here. There’s a lot of rage out there, and you’re going to tap into it without directly inciting people to blow up Congress.”

  The next morning, New Year’s Day, I woke up early, clear-eyed and clearheaded, as if I’d gone to bed at 10:00 p.m. instead of 2:00 a.m. An idea had taken possession of me. Somehow, somewhere in the night, I came to the decision that whatever else may happen to the diary, I must show it to B. Given how our relationship has developed, this is simply too big a secret to keep from her. There are risks in showing it to her, but worse risks in keeping it from her, especially if I go ahead and seek out Matt Taibbi or another journalist to work with.

  I slid out of bed and left B sleeping. I got out my laptop and skimmed through the diary to make sure that I hadn’t missed any potentially troublesome or indiscreet personal and intimate stuff. I set the text up on an iPad I had kicking around (I have a bunch, each engraved with a different corporate logo, from a couple of years back when iPads were the business gift of the year). Now I was ready to go.

  I started the coffee machine, and soon the apartment was filled with the compelling aroma of an overpriced artisanal fair trade blend that I knew would arouse B. Sure enough, there soon came a few ladylike groans and snuffles from the bedroom, then the expected bathroom noises, and in due course B appeared, dressed in an old robe of mine, eyes still half-closed, following her nose like some classic goddess feeling her way through the Stygian underworld. She is a girl who just has to have her morning coffee; only then can life and awareness begin.

  She went off with a cup, got dressed, and returned, and we sat down to breakfast. We didn’t talk at first. I shuffled through the Times and the Post; B checked her cellphone for e-mail and read “the dailies,” as Hollywood calls its trade papers. She called Thayer in Boca, wished him a Happy New Year, put me on and I did the same, then B spoke to Claudio and wished the same to him and Frederick. After she hung up, she sighed how much she missed her mother. “You know something about Mother?” she said. “She understood differences.”

  “Such as?” I asked.

  “Such as that a ‘right’ isn’t the same as an ‘entitlement.’ She understood what privilege entails.” She paused. “I’m going to miss her horribly. I already do.”

  “We all will,” I said. “In that connection, there’s something I need to tell you about.” I placed the loaded iPad on the kitchen island between us. She looked at it curiously, then at me.

  “You need to read this,” I said. “It’ll take you a couple of hours, tops. Then we’ll need to talk.”

  “This sounds very ominous!” she exclaimed.

  “Fear not. You’re going to find it interesting, I promise you.”

  I watched her start the diary. I have to say I didn’t feel nauseously nervous the way my writer friends tell me they do when a wife or boyfriend is reading a manuscript of theirs a few feet away. After all, my stuff isn’t literary; it’s the facts that matter, not the style. I knew I was taking a chance, but I felt I had no choice. She could very easily decide that what I’d done was defraud her and millions like her, get up, and walk out the door and out of my life. On the other hand, without Mankoff and me, her candidate would probably never have gotten elected.

  My estimate proved more or less on the money. It was just before 2:00 p.m. when she got up and came back to the end of the apartment where I was working.

  “That was fast,” I remarked. I looked at my watch. “Just under four hours for something around five hundred pages. Yeoman’s work.”

  “I actually finished a half hour ago, but I needed to think this over,” she said, handing me the iPad. “You astonish me. I thought I understood you body and soul, but it seems you have unexpected depths—as an evildoer, at least. You could use an editor, of course.”

  “Forget the grammar and my writing skills,” I replied. “Evildoer? Moi?” I was trying to keep it light.

  “I’ve had to decide whether to walk out that door and never see or speak to you again. I’m not sure I’m suited to be the life’s companion of a bagman for Wall Street. You know how I loathe those people.” Pause. “Oh, don’t look so hurt. I’m kidding. We all make mistakes. You must have been a different person then—at least compared to the Chauncey I fell in love with.”

  She got up, came around, and gave me a kiss. “What matters, darling, is the simple fact of your showing me this, and what that says about our relationship. How could I not stick around?”

  “The latter would be preferable. There’s some other background you need to know, things that aren’t in there.”

  For the next half hour, I took her through what I’ve to
ld you about in this coda, Gentle Reader. I started with her mother’s death and memorial service and how it—and especially the First Lady’s performance—had affected me, and the determination my time in Boston sparked in me to put the diary in the public service. Then I went through my session with Marina and Artie in great detail, point by counterpoint. I confess I made myself sound eloquent and penetrating in argument and valiant and graceful in surrender, like the famous Velázquez painting, but what the hell: aren’t I entitled to some satisfaction? I didn’t say anything about the possibility of offering what I’ve got to another top-notch journalist, because frankly I wasn’t there yet.

  “Are you trying to inveigle me into interceding with Marina?” she asked when I finished. “You can forget that.”

  “Frankly, I’d never considered that,” I replied. This was true.

  “What’s more,” B continued, “I happen to think she’s right. I think what you have is a prescription for virtual anarchy and very likely violence.”

  “No more than that show of yours.”

  “That’s not at all the same. The country’s split down the middle. In a showdown, who’s to say the radical right won’t win?”

  I couldn’t disagree. “Marina thinks it will inspire the GOP to impeach the president,” I told B, “which will really shut the country down. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with that.” I suppose I could have added something about Marina’s involvement with this Rediscovery Initiative of the Gerretts’, but I make it my business not to go around spilling other people’s confidences. If and when Marina wants this association to be known, let her tell B herself.

  “You seem to think the president has no idea of this?”

  “At the time, I’m sure he didn’t. Now: who knows?”

  “What about his wife? I remember Mother telling me how close with Orteig the candidate’s wife was during the campaign. Do you think she knew?”