The Art Of The Next Best
Book Four and a Half of The New Pioneers
by Deborah Nam-Krane
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE ART OF THE NEXT BEST
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE GOLDEN BOY RETURNS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE ART OF THE NEXT BEST
Jack Donnelly had listened to the man across from him for the last ten minutes. He answered the questions without nervousness, but Jack knew that he wasn't getting the whole story. And one thing he had learned was that the less he knew going into something, the likelier he was to have that something blow up in his face later.
Jack folded his arms across his broad chest. "Let's be straight, okay? On paper you're overqualified, and your references are excellent. So tell me why you'd rather slog away for me when you could safely stay in academia. And don't BS me about how unsafe your university is right now, because politics is always going to be more unstable than anything else. Even in this city."
Martin Shepard smiled at Jack from across the table. He put his hands on the table as if to show that he didn't have anything dangerous with him. "I voted for you in the last election."
Jack leaned forward. "Why?"
"It was time for a change."
Jack scoffed. "Come on, we both know I wasn't the ‘change candidate’."
Martin grinned. "I voted for that guy too, but he didn't make it past the primary."
Jack laughed. “What do you have against Cervino? You came here for college, so it's not that you were screwed by the public schools. Cervino's been good to people in the South End and Back Bay, and as far as I could find out you're not connected to any of the developers he's tangled with. So, again, why?"
Everything on Martin's face relaxed except for his eyes. They were sharp and focused. "I don't like the way the man does business."
"I'm serious, I'm not running for mayor again."
"But you are running for an At-Large Council seat, and that’s the job you really liked.” Jack lifted his chin but said nothing. “And even if you're not made president again your voice holds sway."
"I didn't stop Angelo every time he brought something before us."
"That would have been impossible. But you didn't mind embarrassing him when you had to. And you're going to support his opponent in the next race."
"You know this for a fact? Because- no joke- I don’t know who’s running yet. Besides, I'm one of the lucky ones: Cervino beat me and made me take my medicine, but he didn't ruin me and run me out of town." They both knew whom he was talking about but neither said his name.
Martin leaned forward. "Because even Angelo Cervino has his limits. And you can’t wait to remind him of that.”
Jack grinned and stuck out his hand. "Welcome aboard."
Martin shook his hand. “Thank you very much.”
~~~
Three months before, Mitchell Graham was watching the Red Sox at Martin’s house. Neither was much of a baseball fan, but Mitch’s wife Emily was hosting a Girls Night In with Martin's young fiancee Jessie Bartolome, their good friends Zainab Hendrickson and Miranda Abbot and, of course, their favorite girlfriend, his young daughter Hellie.
Mitch had arrived before Richard, Michael, Vijay and Jordan (Carlos was boycotting the game out of loyalty to the Yankees) and Martin was on his second beer. "Son of a bitch!" Martin repeated over and over, and that was the nicest thing he had to say. "In one week I've found enough that I don't know why a federal grand jury hasn't at least indicted him. What do you think I'm going to find in a month? I knew Cervino couldn’t be the saint everyone thinks he is, but I didn't think he’d shaken hands with the devil so many times."
Mitch's hand froze mid-air as he was passing Martin his next beer. "The devil?"
"The one and only," Martin said as he grabbed the bottle.
Mitch groaned. "Oh man. Promise me you are not going to mention Alex Sheldon in front of Richard or Michael tonight."
Martin scoffed. "If I'm not going to talk about it with Jessie, why would I talk about it with them? Just keep me well-hydrated tonight."
~~~
"Tell me about David Hwang," Martin asked when he met Zainab for coffee a week after the Sox game.
Zainab smiled and sighed. "A nice, smart guy who could have done a lot of things."
"One of the few people who wasn't a total scumbag from SGC?"
Martin never understood why Zainab's face flushed a little bit every time someone brought up the University's Student Government Council. "Yes," she said after a moment. "He liked hard work, and he did it well. He was elected president for a reason."
"And he was working for Lucy for a while, right?"
"Yeah, but don't ask me to explain that relationship." Lucy was Zainab's mother-in-law and Jessie's aunt and guardian. “Distant parent” was an understatement. She kept firmer boundaries than anyone else Martin knew, but the few times she had mentioned David Hwang it had been evident that she felt the kind of affection for him that most people reserved for a child who had won their respect as an adult. If Richard and Jessie had had a closer relationship with Lucy they might have been resentful; as it was, they were pleasantly surprised that she could form normal relationships.
"It seemed like he did what he was expected to."
"And if you work for her, you're expected to be phenomenal." She smiled again. "I was more impressed by what he did as a community organizer. That car sharing program was a great idea and it's still helping a lot of people."
Martin laughed. "And the fact that it shamed a lot of other people didn't hurt either."
Zainab snickered. “He had my vote after that, for sure.” She pursed her lips. "Why are you so interested in David? Weren’t you guys in the same department?"
Martin shrugged. “Probably, but he was taking all the hard Honors classes before I decided to get serious.” He smiled. "But I still voted for the man when he ran for councilor and mayor. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so bitter after an election.”
“Don’t get me started,” Zainab said after she sipped her latte. “He was thisclose, and instead we got Jack Donnelly, whom the Globe basically endorsed as Cervino Two. There are some things I will never understand.”
“Mmm,” Martin vocalized. “So tell me how married life’s treating you and Richard so far?”
~~~
For a little while, David Hwang had looked like the golden boy of Boston politics. While serving as President of the University’s student body he had also pitched an idea to Lucy Bartolome Hendrickson, the most powerful member of the University’s board, to give comprehensive assistance to students and their families from elementary school through the end of high school. The students that made it through would be granted a full scholarship to the University. Lucy knew a little something about long term investments; if someone like her thought it was a good idea, it wouldn’t be long before other universities followed suit.
But that kind of change was going to take a while, and David had seen a lot of low-hanging fruit that c
ould be picked in the meantime. He joined a community development organization in Dorchester and within three months found himself on the front page of the Boston Globe for the innovative car sharing program he’d worked out with Quick Wheels—and the way the Department of Transportation had been put on the defensive for their shoddy service to Mattapan and the outer parts of Dorchester and Roxbury. David was being whispered about as a potential candidate for the City Council in the blogosphere within days...and then just as abruptly the coverage stopped. Martin could have sworn that he had seen David leaving the building that housed Lucy’s office that week and looking as if he’d just missed having his head handed to him.
Jessie had snorted when Martin mentioned it. “Should I call him and give him tips on how to blow off her BS?”
“Babe, if you can’t get that across to Richard, I don’t think Hwang stands a chance.”
Jessie shrugged. “Everyone has to learn sometime how to tell people to screw.”
Those words echoed in Martin’s mind a few years later as he came across Alex Sheldon’s name while he was doing research for his thesis. Jessie had had to put on that hard shell of armor way too early, and it was Alex Sheldon’s fault.
Michael Abbot had almost raped Jessie when she was fifteen, but by the time Martin had met Michael, he had already forgiven him. It wasn’t Michael’s fault that he had been raised by the man who might as well have killed his parents, and it wasn’t his fault that he spent every waking breath knowing that. It wasn’t hard for Martin to see how that could twist someone. Michael had shown remorse by putting himself in the line of fire to protect Jessie (and Miranda), and he’d been working for two years before that to get better. Now he went to AA and therapy regularly, and he was a devoted husband and father. Martin could see that he was a good man who had made mistakes, and it was a crime that he should have had to have suffered as much as he had as a child.
(It also didn’t hurt that Michael knew about his confrontation with Detective Robert Teague, the scumbag who’d seduced Jessie while running the most incompetent investigation imaginable into her mother’s murder. Martin forgave Michael, but he knew how to set him straight if the need arose.)
Martin had not forgiven Alex Sheldon. It hadn’t been enough to cause the deaths of four people and then blackmail Lucy for most of her adult life; he’d also controlled and damaged their children.
But maybe he thought he was doing the right thing...
“For God’s sake, would you go to sleep already?” Jessie murmured as Martin tossed and turned.
Martin was grateful to stop hearing his own thoughts. “Or we could do something else if we’re both up,” he whispered in her ear.
“There’s my smart guy,” Jessie said as she giggled and rolled over.
Martin hadn’t thought he’d be researching Alex Sheldon, but he recognized the name of one of his holding companies when he was researching the beginnings of the gentrification of the South End in the early 1990s. He dug back further and found the story of the leveraged buyout of the factory in Mattapan in the late 1980s. It was one of Sheldon’s early successes—and it had meant the loss of hundreds of jobs.
Then there was another factory that had been emptied out less than five years after one of his “investments”. The building was still there on Washington Street, sitting there like a dried out husk and reminding people of what it used to be. The South End, in the perversity it liked to dress as nostalgia, kept it there as part of its charade about keeping some of the character of what the city used to be. “If they could declare it a landmark, they would,” Martin muttered to himself.
Much had been made about the difference between Cervino and his predecessor Fletcher, and Cervino had added to that with his flourishes about “cleaning house”. But what had always struck Martin once he’d moved to Boston was that Cervino was the guy who could make things run on time. If he thought it was important- or if you could get his attention and persuade him that it was- he could make it go.
In many ways, a smart politician resembled a smart business person; if it worked, there was no point in breaking it. Alex Sheldon had worked, at least by a certain definition of “work”.
It occurred to Martin as he pored over the documents, microfiche and old magazine articles that he could simply ask Richard, Miranda or Michael (especially Michael), but it wasn’t worth opening old wounds. Michael could give him access to better information than he’d ever find in a library, but Michael would have given him an answer without facts. Martin needed his facts before he had his answer.
There was the play area at Children’s Hospital and the wing at the Museum of Fine Arts that bore his name. A major donor to the Republican Young’s campaign PAC when he ran for governor...and then an even larger donation to the Democrat Kirk’s campaign during the next cycle. But those were big, splashy expenditures, and Alex had never struck Martin as splashy. He kept looking; it was the little things he dug into because that was where someone like Alex would have dug too. Donations to almost every city councilor’s campaign for the last twenty-five years. And then the mayoral campaigns. “Even Fletcher, you son of a bitch.”
Boston was many things and all at the same time. The mayors and most of the at-large councilors were expected to bridge those distances in public life, but not the district councilors. Alex didn’t donate to them out of political affinity; he donated for influence.
But wasn’t Boston the small ball BS someone like him would want to avoid? Or was it?
There was no point in researching Alex’s career before he took over Gerald Hendrickson’s investment firm. Thanks to Teague he knew that his initial investment had been in a South Korean electronics firm and the seed money had come from Gerald himself. The price had been Lucy delivered to his unsuspecting son Jim, and none of that would have been possible if Jessie’s father Tom hadn’t ratted out his own sister. His price? Enjoying the look on Alex’s face as he described raping Lucy’s girlfriend.
“Douchebags,” Martin muttered to himself.
But what had he done then?
The local press couldn’t shut up about Alex Sheldon after 1989 when he was named Boston’s Most Eligible Bachelor. Hindsight was perfect, but Martin couldn’t believe that no one had seen through Alex’s strategy to seem aloof and secretive and then annoyed by the “honor”. That had only whetted the media’s appetite. The deals were even bigger, and the women on his arm were even more beautiful...though none ever matched Tatiana Hamilton, Miranda’s mother.
But it was the eight years between his initial success and his explosion into national and international media coverage that were harder to dig into. When the Globe or Herald mentioned him, he wasn’t on the front page of the business section much less the paper as a whole. And most of the time his name wasn’t mentioned at all, just his holding companies.
“And why are you so cheerful?” Jessie asked when they were laying out the takeout on the coffee table. “I asked if you were okay with Thai food and you said yes.”
“Pad See Ew is my life,” Martin said absently.
“Then smile.”
“I can’t,” he whined. “I have to look through eight years of financial prospectuses tomorrow.”
“Better you than me, my man,” Jessie said as she forked Pad Thai into her mouth.
A month later, he understood.
For all his reputation as a brilliant investor, Alex had never taken anything other than a well-calibrated risk. The investments he’d made had been safe, easy bets. And for someone who saw business as war, the safest bet was an enemy who couldn’t fight back. Even better: one who wasn’t worried about an attack.
The factory in Mattapan was an anomaly; not the buyout or the jobs lost but the fact that he let his name be associated with it. There was an angry editorial—not an opinion piece, but an editorial that the entire board signed off on—that condemned what they knew was the beginning of the decimation of a community. But then nothing...until a week later when the fluff piece about
his selection as Boston’s Most Eligible Bachelor was published.
It had been an experiment to see how much damaging publicity he could withstand.
Martin strummed his fingers on the desk, then decided he needed to take a walk on Columbus Avenue.
He remembered what he had read as he started out at the Roxbury-South End line. The area surrounding the University was very late to gentrify, which he’d always thought of as odd. Lucy was a good investor, but she also knew how to hurt someone where they lived, and everyone knew Alex lived in his bank account.
Alex Sheldon made his “strategic investments” where he did because he could. No one was looking, and if they were he had bought himself a shrug. Boston was—and could still be—a machine if you knew where the right buttons and levers were.
But Martin had to give credit where it was due. Alex was nothing more than a clever hacker who could figure out how something was built and how it could be taken down; it was the engineers who should bear the greatest burden.
Mayor Dan Green had fervently tried to patch the machine together as it started falling apart after years of disrepair. His successor Ron Fletcher had made a big show of how hard he was trying to fix certain parts while using an outdated repair manual. But it was Angelo Cervino who had calmly figured out where the wiring was most vulnerable and where his biggest gains could be made.
He was a politician who had looked at areas that were festering, put on a couple of bandaids and let people thank him for not being his predecessor. For his first three terms, that had been enough.
And Alex Sheldon had been donating to Cervino from the moment he set foot in office.
He looked back through the financial records political donations. Almost every candidate for councilor and mayor, but not Jack Donnelly or David Hwang.
Martin didn’t have to ask why David Hwang wouldn’t take money from him Alex. He was Lucy’s protégé, and if he’d needed the money, she would have helped him find other donors. Besides, Alex had fled Boston by that time.
But what about Donnelly?
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