Fixers

by Michael M. Thomas

  I shrugged. “Maybe—but I really doubt it,” I said. “Certainly there was no opportunity for Orteig to consult with her; I didn’t broach Mankoff’s offer until I got him on the plane, and by the time I dropped him off in Chicago, we had a done deal. If Orteig had taken her aside afterward and whispered in her ear, my guess is she’d’ve kicked her husband’s butt and we’d’ve had a better president these past six years. Everyone says she’s one tough cookie and that he’s scared shitless of her.”

  “That was certainly Mother’s feeling—although she’d never have used that word. But that has given me an idea. Suppose …”

  It took about ten minutes for her to explain her thinking. My first reaction was: No way. But as B fleshed out her thinking, and I silently compared her plan to the alternatives, I began to come around.

  What she wants to do is to take my diary and show it to FLOTUS, and let the First Lady make the running, in private, with her husband.

  It seems that FLOTUS has been concerned practically from year one of OG’s administration that her husband was being undermined from within. That his policy and legislative difficulties weren’t strictly attributable to the unholy Washington triad: K Street, its Wall Street and corporate clients, and the idiots and bought men on Capitol Hill.

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “Mother told me. She and I had no secrets. She and the First Lady spoke regularly—two or three times a week, at the end. The woman’s desperate. The president refuses to accept what’s going on, and if he doesn’t, and doesn’t do something about it in the next two years, his legacy will be no better than the Clintons’.”

  So what? That was my first thought. Legacy shmegacy. Is this administration all about ego? “A fate worse than death,” I commented.

  “Don’t be silly. Mother used to say that the First Lady’s literally seething at the way things have gone and what history’s likely to make of her husband.”

  “And you think that the First Lady can use this”—I picked up the iPad and flourished it—“to light a fire under the president’s ass? Get him to use these last two years to turn things around? At least as far as history’s concerned?”

  “I do. This is a president who likes to talk things to death. But shove this in his face, and there’s no way around it. It’s all here in black and white. But he’s gradually come to realize that he’s been made a fool of. And he would rather hand the country over to Putin than let the world see that.”

  No way to disagree with that.

  “OK,” I said. “Suppose I let you take my diary with you to Camp David and you show it to FLOTUS. I’m not worried about it leaking, because if it does, the GOP’ll have a bill of impeachment on the floor within twenty-four hours, and nobody wants that. Do you think the First Lady can get the job done?

  B nodded vigorously. “Absolutely! Mother always said that she thought the president is secretly terrified of his wife. Give her a weapon like this, and … well … Don’t have to draw you any pictures, do I?”

  People say about bankruptcy that it happens gradually, then all at once. Mind-changes can work that way, too. That’s what happened to me.

  There are great, great journalists and powerful writers out there, but they’re pushing a boulder uphill, trying to pierce an impenetrable static of ignorance and partisanship. I was keen to give my diary to Marina because she’s a friend, and I like to do things for my friends, and I trust her to get the max out of the diary’s potential to stir things up. But now that she’s turned me down, I’m starting to see things clearly. Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is; today, if you want to effect real change, you have to go where the power is, and that’s not in the media. What real change did Jon Stewart ever effect? What policy was rejected because Paul Krugman said it should be? Would there have been a Watergate if Fox News and Limbaugh had been in business back in the ’70s? I think we know the answer. Sure, it’s a big gamble, but at times when so little in this country’s civic life becomes us, why not take the shot?

  Compared to what we might be, to the kind of exceptional country—the kind of exceptional people—we tell ourselves we are, America is in rotten shape. But it least it still works, sort of. We haven’t turned into Egypt or Russia or Brazil. Not yet, at least. But we might.

  “Why not?” I said, finally.

  And that is how it came to be that when B climbed aboard the Air Force One chopper this morning, an iPad with my diary on it reposed in her shoulder bag. Matters are now out of my hands. Che sarà, sarà.

  In its way, this is where I came in. Much has changed in the world and the nation since February 2007—one thinks of ISIS, of GOP nutcases controlling both houses of Congress, of Citizens United legitimizing practices I had to go to elaborate digital lengths to bring off—but on Wall Street little has: a few new games, “flash” trading, and a desperate chase after yield in the wake of the Fed’s zero-interest-rate bailout. A few new names—the banks once ruled, it’s the hedge funds and private-equity players now—but basically the same old extractive usuries, with the 1 percent capturing even more of what little is left. Rumors are circulating that the derivatives market is more attenuated and vulnerable than ever, thanks to a new clearing-house scheme and a bunch of credit “innovations.”

  Still, there’s hope. Who can tell? Perhaps people like Elizabeth Warren are having a bigger reformist effect than we perceive. The wails and whines we hear from Wall Street may not simply be propaganda; they may have some basis in fact.

  It’s a brave new world, no doubt of that. Technology has taken over, from smartphones to stuff like Uber and Airbnb, and Silicon Valley, today the dominant force in the economy, seems as careless of the community life of the nation as Wall Street was in its greatest heyday. In 2007, Forbes listed 946 billionaires in the world; this year I’m told the number will exceed 1,800. If one expresses this increase in terms of social and moral productivity, it looks inflationary to me, no matter what the Fed tells us.

  Any way you look at it, however, the next couple of years are going to be interesting. Of only two things am I certain: that the markets will fluctuate and that my beloved Mets will again finish at or near the bottom of the National League East.

  It may be that the First Lady can use my diary to put some fury- or shame-driven backbone into her husband, as B thinks she will, and that the last two years of OG’s presidency will finally put on parade the man people thought they were voting for in 2008. At the very least, I expect we’ll see a big shakeup in the White House. Fortunately for Orteig, he’s already out the door. Will Wall Street finally be led to the gallows? Will the SEC and other agencies finally begin criminal prosecutions for securities malefaction? We’ll just have to see. I doubt it—but Washington will definitely make it tougher for the pinstripers. At some point, you do have to walk the walk.

  It will be interesting to see if this Rediscovery Initiative that the Gerretts and other billionaires are funding, and that Marina’s hooked up with, can gain traction. Can good Big Money take on bad Big Money and prevail? I think the country’s ready for a legitimate third party—I know I am—and this may give the former mayor of New York the springboard he’s looking for (or said to be looking for) to take a shot at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It will take someone like him, with humongous personal resources, and self-confidence to match. People are saying that the next election will see upwards of $3 billion spent; the lousy $75 million I infused into OG’s first campaign would hardly make a dent. I like the guy all right; he’s smart and decent; my only concern is that he might do to the country what he did to New York City: turn it into a sandbox for real-estate developers.

  So there we are. I realize that to end this way must seem a bit of a letdown. The story should end more dramatically, with assassinations and prosecutions. After all that’s happened—all those years, months, days; all those schemes, plots, backroom dealing, and so on, you’d think I’d be able to supply a grander denouement. It looks as if T. S. Elio
t got it right with his surmise that the world ends not with a bang but a whimper. On the other hand, I can’t say I’m not a bit relieved. A smash ending often pulverizes everyone onstage. Look at the great Shakespearean tragedies, the Greeks—final curtains descending on stages littered with corpses. And I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that now and then I’ve wondered whether taking the diary public might incite someone to take out a contract on me.

  Time now to lower the curtain once and for all. These revels really are now ended and how and by what my little life will ultimately be rounded will be decided by fate and the woman I love. Who knows, maybe I’ll pop the question.

  So this is it for us, old soul. God knows when you’ll be reading this. Anyway, I wish you well, I wish us well, I wish the republic well; in its best moments, this is a country very much worth saving from itself, if that’s still possible and it might not be—so far have we fallen, so deeply have we been corrupted, so degraded are we intellectually. Still, there’s always hope, but that will require forces more convincing and formidable than I could ever set in motion.

  If I may rephrase the end of my favorite novel, here we are again then, boats against currents that drag us relentlessly into the future. There’s nothing left to say, Gentle Reader, except what I think Tiny Tim would have said for all of us, to all of us, were he alive today:

  God help us, every one!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A lot of research went into Fixers. My roll of honor of those who I honestly feel made a difference to the way this novel has turned out must start with Yves Smith, proprietor of the indispensable financial blog Naked Capitalism, and the journalists Matt Taibbi—whose reporting on Wall Street, crony capitalism, and the financial crisis hearkens back to the great muckraking journalists of Theodore Roosevelt’s era—and William D. Cohan, one of the few journalists writing out of the same deep, skeptical experience of Wall Street as my own.

  But at the end of the day, Fixers imagines connections between known sets of facts that add up to an alternative, plausible interpretation and explanation of the financial crisis and its aftermath. None of the central characters, the half dozen or so with speaking parts, is based on a real-life model.

  This brings me to the people who deserve real credit for doing what editors and publishers are supposed to do: help an author wring the book he wishes to write out of the book he has written, and then help that book to find a readership. The first is Mark Krotov, whose arrival at Melville House solidified that relationship. I have every confidence that he and his colleague Julia Fleischaker will help this novel find the readership we feel it deserves. The same goes for the founders of Melville House—Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians—with whom I have been working since they published my novel Love and Money in 2009. Indeed, it was a somewhat offhand suggestion by Dennis that prompted me to throw out hundreds of pages and rewrite Fixers entirely in the first person.

  Finally, there is my girlfriend, now my wife, Tamara Glenny. In trying to list the ways in which she has made such a difference, I run out of nouns and adjectives. She is a fierce line editor, wielding a blue pencil like a scimitar; as a copy editor, she can pick nits with the best of ’em; as a taskmaster, she knows exactly when to wield the carrot and when the stick. She has been by turns supportive, critical, thoughtful, argumentative, sympathetic, intemperate, caustic, demanding, selfless, witty, and loving. Everything one craves in a wife and an editorial helpmeet.

  I can’t close without a shout-out to my children and stepchildren, their spouses and children, and certain old friends. Just knowing you’re out there has kept me going.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MICHAEL M. THOMAS is a former partner at Lehman Brothers, and the bestselling author of nine novels, including, most recently, Love and Money. His commentary and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and in a regular column for The New York Observer. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.