“OK. So the crime involves multiple parties and is organized — that’s why the bureau is involved. But it sounds more like some issue that a press-happy district attorney would take up on behalf of the donors who also happen to be voters, who might later make him governor.”
She answered, helping me see the real issue. “It goes beyond stealing from a citizen. It is theft from charitable organizations that are tax exempt. Each donor, every donor, has the federal government as a partner because the donation reduces the donor’s tax bill. Uncle Sam does not like people stealing from him and expects us to do something about it. Not-for-profits are subject to surprise audits and scrutiny because of the government’s partnership with the donor base.”
“How did the bureau get involved with the CID Society?”
“We were tipped off by an administrator at an academic research facility. I didn’t ask which one because my source would have stopped talking to me if I had. A detail-oriented lady noticed a mismatch between money promised in a grant and money received. When she made a routine application for more money, the balance of the money granted, she was told that the grant had been reduced. Apparently, this was not the first time that this had happened with the CID but it had never happened with any other grant from any other VHA.”
I considered her words and wondered what Ron would say if he were here.
We watched more people come in and head to the ballroom. I looked for Alison Montgomery but did not see her. Most of the crowd was a little senior in age, which made sense to me. Philanthropists tend to be older, having made enough money to be generous. And, trust fund babies don’t go to old-people parties. I spotted Chicken Woman. She was wearing a beige dress that to me looked like an upright, ambulating tube, a bad cannoli, cut horizontally at the top and bottom. It needed to be longer as there was too much poultry exposed and about to be inflicted on an unsuspecting crowd. I had pointed her out and made my observation to Marilena.
“Thomas, that’s not nice,” she said, but with mock sternness.
“Yeah, to chickens.”
PARTY PEOPLE
We walked through the doors of the 15,000 square foot, third-floor ballroom trying our best to slip by unnoticed. With Marilena in tow, the probability of this happening was extremely low. By moving quickly, we did manage to go through the ballroom doors and off to one side of the room without being snared into a conversation. I snatched two flutes of Champagne from a tray as it moved past us. Across the room I saw Suzie talking to a hotel employee, obviously still at work for her employer long after office hours. I knew that it wouldn’t be long before she came our way. Not necessarily because of me, irresistible as I am, but because she would want to size up my date. When it comes to scoping out the opposite sex, men get all the heat and deservedly so. However, the real scrutiny that women undergo is from members of their own sex. And whereas, men tend to be generous in their assessment, especially if it has been some time since they had sex, women in my experience, can be very critical. I have learned that a woman going to an event like this one, an event where they are going to be seen by many other women, will dress and make themselves up not for their male companion, but for the other women who will be critiquing everything about them. I was fairly sure, even allowing for my personal bias, that my date was an exception. Given Marilena’s level of self-confidence, I didn’t think she worried too much about the more catty qualities of the sisterhood.
As predicted, Suzie appeared next to us. I made introductions, making sure that Marilena knew Suzie’s business relationship to Ron. I didn’t reveal that Marilena was an agent with the FBI. As I was speaking, I did notice Suzie’s appraising looks at Marilena. At one point, Marilena looked away, and I got a smile along with an emphatic nod of approval from Suzie. She seemed happy for me. Go figure.
“Are you getting Ron’s affairs straightened out?” Suzie asked.
“He had things pretty squared away, so for the most part it has been no problem,” I answered, dodging the question.
“I was a little surprised to see you here,” she continued. “You were the talk of the office all day after you left. We had seen Margaret Townsend mad before, in fact most every day, but never quite that mad and powerless to do anything about it. The entire administrative support staff was ready to marry you.”
“He has that effect,” Marilena said. I wasn’t sure if the effect she was talking about was making women mad or making them want to marry me. Both scared me. The girls laughed. I gave them a “whatever could you be talking about” look of complete shock. They laughed some more.
“Do you know many of these people?” Suzie asked.
“I might recognize a face or two. I don’t think Marilena will know anyone here.” Marilena agreed with me by shaking her head. “Who is here from your office?” I asked. Marilena stopped taking in the room and focused on Suzie.
“I think that all of the senior management team will be here. That’s everyone who reports directly to Alison Montgomery,” Suzie spoke quietly. “There will be others from the home office but from further down the food chain. In those cases, it will be because they have some specific role to play tonight.”
“Such as,” Marilena asked.
“Sometimes, somebody has a presentation to make as a part of the formal program. But the most common reason that a department or program lead is at an event like this is money.”
I raised my eyebrows.
She continued, “There will be targets in the crowd. People who the society are after to fund a specific program or make a family endowment.” She shrugged in an apologetic way, “It’s what Ron told me that he had figured out after he came to work here. Not-for-profit is a tax election, not a business model.”
Her words didn’t surprise Marilena in the slightest, but they made me think. I had known that Ron had become disillusioned after a year on the inside of a VHA, but I didn’t think he had crossed the line into cynical. I asked myself again if he had needed me and I hadn’t been listening.
I had done my time at many military formal affairs — too many. At those events, I knew what to expect as the interactions were a function of rank and unspoken role assignment, the product of generation after generation of officers forced to attend, the groupings a pyramid of authority with those in the same layers coalescing with each other. To say that those events were predictable to the point of being incredibly boring was not putting it strongly enough. Because of them, I did not attend similar functions in the civilian world unless I absolutely had to. One commonality between the military and civilian soiree is that three people trying to have a confidential and delicate conversation, whether they intend to or not, can appear to others as if they have entered the conspiracy-zone. The three of us, almost as one, recognized that this had occurred. It was comical to me that in unison, we took a ten-second conversation intermission, and purposefully looked around the room, anywhere but at each other, before resuming, hoping that others would see that we were not engaged in subversion.
I suppressed a smile when I thought that a little military social structure would help us right now. If the power players would all merge together, then we would not have had to sift through the commoners to pick them out. I missed rank insignia.
“There’s someone you should know,” Suzie said.
“Who,” I asked.
“See the man walking in the door? The short, Middle Easterner with the neatly trimmed beard and a little too much good life around the middle. That’s Omar Sayyaf. His title is Chief of Internal Operations, and he is a very sharp operator. His bio says that he is a summa cum laude Columbia grad with a graduate degree from the London School of Economics. He is the invisible hand behind a lot that happens at the society.”
“Is he tight with Townsend?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think that they’re friends, but they have to work together. I’m sure that he gives back as good as he gets. Ron liked him a lot and told me that Omar was very smooth and great at working behind
the scenes to get things done. In some ways, I think that Ron wished he had some of Omar’s political skills. Also, Ron and Omar were the only two of Alison’s thirteen direct reports who were men. Most of the other senior execs don’t like him. Everyone down at my level thinks that it is because he actually is smart and has skills. The hen house has got to be a tough place for him. It’s going to get worse unless Ron gets replaced by a man.”
I was a little shocked by Suzie’s gender-based attack. I would have thought that as a woman, she would have been happy that several women had made it to the top. Marilena laughed softly.
“Suzie, do you see the look of confusion on Thomas’ face?”
“Yeah, he doesn’t get it,” Suzie replied while unsuccessfully trying to contain a growing smile.
“Thomas, let me explain,” Marilena began. “Your enemies have always been men. The confrontations physical, direct, and violent. Most men seek direct remedies, even those who are not soldiers, and believe that direct confrontation is the correct course of action. Most often, by the end of the day, the combatant male parties can be found in the pub next door buying each other a drink. They punched each other, made their points, and got on with it. It’s a generalization and there are exceptions, but this is the typical, simplistic male approach to dispute resolution, at least from a woman’s perspective. These same traits are seen in highly successful female business people. They are driven, and there is no time in their lives for pettiness either. With some women, however, it is not this way. Because you have never had a woman as an enemy, you haven’t analyzed us as potential adversaries. Again, we are talking generalizations, but most women can be far more devious than most any man. Suzie and her coworkers see it every day and recognize the behavior. There are women who never let a dispute die, and they hide their feelings and their plans with incredible duplicity, fooling their adversary into complacency. A normal male, if there is such a thing, confronted by a group of ambitious females as a peer or a subordinate, doesn’t have a chance. To survive takes one with the skills that Suzie attributes to Omar. From what you have told me about Ron, he was never going to understand the sorority rules.”
My thoughts about this were interrupted by Suzie.
“Look! There’s Sylvia Canfield, a perfect example of what Marilena is saying,” she said pointing her out with her eyes, making me leave my thoughts about complexity of the power struggle between the sexes.
A full-figured, middle-aged woman in a very bright green dress was speaking to an elderly couple while making tremendous gestures in the air with her hands. She was putting a lot of energy into conveying something to them. The hair she had piled on top of her head bobbed with each accentuated point.
“She’s working the Caruthers over,” said Suzie.
“Who are they,” I asked.
“Their son and grandson have CID, and they’re loaded. It’s drilled into all of us to make the most of family members when raising money. Rich family members get big time attention from us,” Suzie responded.
I guess the look I gave her was a little sharp because she followed up with, “I know. It bothers me too, sometimes. But, the society leadership tells us that if the end is curing the disease, then the means are justified, no matter what they are.”
“What does Sylvia Canfield do?” Marilena asked, changing the topic of conversation.
“She is the Vice President for Chapter Relations. Kind of like a Chief Operating Officer for the external part of our organization, the chapters, and responsible for our relations with them. Did you know that we are organized into about seventy, geographically based chapters, each having its own charter, board of directors, and each organized as a separate not-for-profit entity? The chapters do most of the fund raising and interact with our constituency. This event is sponsored by one of them, the New York City Chapter, and everyone here from my office is a guest. The organization that Ron and I work for,” she paused briefly with a painful look as she realized her error. “Sorry, that Ron worked for — is the umbrella organization that the chapters have joined. The chapters refer to us as ‘the national.’ We prefer ‘the home office.’ We take a share, just under half, of what the chapters raise and spend it on research, national programs, and the costs to run our offices and pay the staff. We’re kind of like a clearing-house for research dollars. I think everyone agrees that it would not be efficient for each of the seventy chapters to have its own relationships with the prominent researchers.”
“How do the chapters get along with the home office?”
Suzie gave us a devilish smile and said, “Not well at all. We fight back and forth all the time.”
“Over what?” I asked.
“Everything. But the big issue that drives most of the underlying conflict is that they think that because they give us over a hundred million dollars, almost fifty percent of what they collect, that they should have some say about what we do with it. That we should be accountable for how we spend it. Don’t tell anyone, but a lot of the rank and file at the home office agree with them, including me. The home office executives don’t think that we should have to answer to them. It can get really ugly. We have more than one chapter planning to secede from the union. If one does actually leave, others will follow. It’s supposed to be a secret but everyone knows.”
“What do you think of Canfield?” I asked.
“I don’t like her.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the way she treated your brother. At first, they were close friends. Unlike his predecessor, who wouldn’t travel at all, to any chapter, for any reason, Ron was always willing to help out anyone at the society. He jumped on a plane whenever he was asked to go to a chapter and explain all the good things we were doing in research and what we have learned about CID. He treated all the chapters the same. It didn’t matter if they were a big money raiser or a small chapter in North Dakota. But at the end, Sylvia wanted more because she was behind the curve bringing in the money. She wanted him to ignore the smaller chapters and go only where the big money was. Worse than that, she wanted Ron to become P.T. Barnum. It was his style to deliver a balanced message about how far we had come in research but to never mislead. She wanted snake oil and was going to make him sell it or else.
“You see, it wasn’t his commitment, it was his honesty. She flat out wanted him to lie about the progress being made and to make predictions about when we would have a cure. She would scream at him, and one time I overheard her yelling that he was the single biggest obstacle to the society’s making its financial goals. Two weeks ago, in a senior manager’s meeting where I got drafted to take minutes, she told everyone that he needed to be replaced with a team player. That until he ‘retired or died’ the Research and Clinical Trials Department was keeping the society from meeting its goals! She said it right in front of him! I wanted to slug her! Your brother saw how pissed I was and put his hand on my arm to keep me in my seat. He just smiled at her and didn’t even respond. When I asked him later about it, he said that he hoped that everyone in the room knew the truth and that he didn’t need to dignify her attack. She really hated him.”
Marilena sensed my anger and warned me with a simple, “Thomas.”
“I’ll be good.” I was going to make it a point of meeting Canfield. Marilena sighed as somehow she read my mind.
A PRESIDENTIAL PERSPECTIVE
We had avoided mingling during the entire, obligatory, thirty minute mingle period. With Suzie available to point out the various players and give us some background, the no-mingle plan had been a better option than stumbling from person to person and hoping for the best. An announcement was made that we should “Please move to our seats so that the evening’s festivities could begin.” Suzie launched us toward the stage at the far end of the room and in the general direction of the President’s Table. She had not been to the President’s Table, but she knew it would be up front, and as she put it, “a long, long, long way from us worker bees in the way, way, way back.” She
promised to look for us later.
Weaving our way forward with the initial influx of guests and society benefactors, we located our assigned seats at our assigned table in the area up front assigned to the overindulged pseudo-dignitaries. I felt like a sellout. I looked forward to meeting our server and telling him or her to call me by my first name. If that upset my dinner companions, then all the better, as it would reduce the odds of being invited back. The table had seats for twelve, and, surprisingly, we were almost the last to arrive whereas the tables we had passed had only begun to find their occupants. Apparently, if you are invited to sit at the President’s Table, you want to make sure that you get there early lest some pesky varmint jump your claim. I wasn’t sure why this was a concern as each seat had a name card. There was only one remaining seat to be had after ours. The card in front of that still empty chair simply read, “Alison Montgomery” in an oblique font; her husband, soon to be introduced to me as Mark Wilson, was already ensconced in the partner seat. He sat a little back from the table, in his place as the well-practiced subordinate, not to outdo his wife. Marilena had the seat next to him. I had not connected with Montgomery’s assistant to provide Marilena’s name. Her card read, “Colonel Briggs’s Dinner Companion.” That seemed to be the high-society equivalent of “A Player to be Named Later.”
Marilena was gracious and engaging, making introductions on her side of the table while I worked mine in a less gregarious manner. As I had anticipated, Marilena’s arrival had given the male guests at the table, even one octogenarian, a reason to appreciate the event. Their spouses seemed decidedly less happy, failing in their efforts to hide this behind forced smiles. One woman elected not to even go this far — no smile, but a significant glare at her husband who was intent on mentally mapping Marilena’s form through the diaphanous dress. If she wore it again I should probably make it a point to keep a nitroglycerin pill or two on hand.
Death of a Cure Page 13