First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “But you’re talking about materials tests needing years to complete. Perhaps if we showed that similar substances—terra-cotta tiles and silicon cells, to be exact—have long been used in building and in power systems with no ill effects?”

  “Used together?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And with what glue or bonding agent?”

  “Ummm …”

  “You see?” Weems put up his hands—and smiled. “There are imponderables here.”

  Braden leaned forward. “Roofing mastic!” he barked in exasperation.

  “Have you tested it in your particular application?” Weems simpered.

  I thought Mike was going to hit him.

  “No, we haven’t,” I cut across.

  “Well, then your filing can hardly be said to be complete, can it? I’m afraid it will be impossible to make an accurate assessment until you provide more complete data.” Weems sat back. Clearly, with the way inflation was going, by the time we complied with the Insurance Commission’s testing and reports, that half a mill in financing wouldn’t buy us a photocopier to make the necessary submittals in sextuplicate.

  Braden and I parted company in the lobby of the commission’s building in Sacramento. I never found out what he eventually did with that shipment of solar cells. Ate them, I guess.

  “Your problem,” Birdsong told me, when I explained why the deal fell through, “is trying to start a legit business just before the tide turns.”

  “What tide, Billy?”

  “All energy is circular,” he said with that Indian sangfroid of his. “There are easy times, cycling into hard times. In the easy times, all the energy is flowing your way. Banks, the stock market, the government are all flooding with cheap money and pushing opportunities at you. You have to be stupid not to make a buck. In hard times, it is all ebbing away and everybody has a reason why not—why you cannot get a loan, a license, a permit, a share of the market. Nobody can make money right before the turn. Either at the end of a flood, when the opportunities are pretty much used up by the suckers who just fall into them, or at the end of an ebb, when the nos have been said so often that nobody can hear yes.

  “The time to make money,” he said, “is during the change, at the point of maximum instability. Then the suckers get shook out and the opportunities are there for only the smart ones to see.”

  “Why, Chief,” I said, “you’re a natural-born doctor of economics. And a poet to boot. How come you never made any money?”

  “Who said I never did?” he answered, looking at me darkly. Birdsong hated being called “Chief”—which I only did because the project had fallen through and I was mad at everybody.

  For awhile, I thought about going back to the law, but by then I had another idea—setting up as a color consultant. When Braden and I had needed a marketing brochure for Solar Tile, Inc., a slick young designer from one of the China Basin firms was sent to us on call to dummy up the graphics. Looking over his shoulder, I discovered that printer’s ink came in only a short range of primary colors, but each ink maker’s system mixed them differently to generate the thousands of hues a customer might want. And each printer, of which there were hundreds in the San Francisco area alone, had his own way of combining screens of those primary colors as an alternate way to make those same hues. And each color showed up slightly differently on the many different paper stocks—coated, uncoated, matte finish, textured and laid, off white, near white, antique white—all of which were available from the dozen or so paper houses. It took an expert to make an accurate color match, and then only with the right sample books. And that was just in printing.

  For brand-name firms, which often had to coordinate brochures, films, videos, uniforms, truck and sign paints, neons, crockery in the executive dining room, carpets in the headquarters lobby, et blinking cetera, matching colors to the company identity could be a nightmare. Unless they called in the color consultant, who had all the right sample books. And getting those books was just a matter of talking to the manufacturers’ reps.

  It took me a month to make the contacts; rent office space; paint, paper, carpet, and light that office in purples and bronze-tone greens; get an Insurance Commission ruling that, no, the damages proceeding from an error in color matching were not liable to exceed my bond of $2 million, of which I had to put up one percent; and, waving my rainbow business card, make a series of cold calls on my catalog of Fortune 1000 customers.

  It took me two months to discover that most of the world is just color blind enough, or budget-minded enough, not to notice that the uniforms of their counter clerks are two shades off the paint on the wall signs behind the counter.

  And I was fast running out of excess spendable.

  “Thank God you didn’t get your hands on our money!” Anne said, after the collapse of Solar Tile, Inc., and then the color consulting.

  “Yeah, we might have made something of it.”

  “No, Jay, not you. You’re just not the entrepreneurial type. You would never make it outside a big company like Petramin or the law firm. You need a structure to operate in and to protect you from your impulses.”

  That’s how she saw our marriage. Some kind of shell that would strap me down and protect me from my impulses.

  What Anne Corbin, nee Caheris, didn’t realize was that for the last thirteen months, I had been exercising those impulses pretty thoroughly. San Francisco is an exciting town: All sorts of young, brainy, sophisticated women come to find work and romance. Too late, they discover that the ratio of themselves to the single, unattached men who also vibrate AC is about the same as the ratio of sparrows to jays at your average country bird feeder. Is it any wonder that the jays are bandits? When I got tired of Anne, I could take my pick of the young professional women wandering up from the Financial District. I always ate for free.

  Toward the end, Anne began to suspect. She had to. A trace of perfume, a mismatched phone reference, an expense account that didn’t tally. I never was too careful and she never was that dumb. But it wasn’t my peccadillos that finished the marriage.

  While I was waltzing around with the venture capitalists and the Insurance Commission, Anne was racking up a tidy fortune. How, I never knew. She had her own money with a team of brokers and never tried for the Big Kill, which was my own personal strategy. She just played for twenty thou here and fifty thou there. You would think that inflation and taxes would eat that for breakfast, but no. Her accounts kept sopping up money and expanding faster than the economic quicksand could gobble them down.

  The end came when there was one of those periodic blowouts in the financial market: insider trading, stolen secrets, a few smiling faces, and the rest losers. Anne sat on the edge of the bed and chewed her nails.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “But you’re my wife, Anne.” I sat beside her, put an arm around her shoulders. “Your trouble is mine. That’s what a marriage means, doesn’t it?”

  “All right.” She took a deep breath. “One of the brokerages where I have money, Anderson Durandy-Coopertine, went under investigation today. The SEC is going to be opening accounts and naming names, under the new Daylight Laws. …”

  “And your name—?” I prompted.

  “Our name.”

  “But I never …”

  “Most of the accounts were in my married name.”

  “But did you do anything?”

  “That doesn’t matter, does it? I—we—profited from the results of ADC’s trading. The SEC is very clear about implied consent.”

  “But I never saw a penny.”

  “The law is clear about marriages, too.” She held me in a level gaze.

  If I had been faster or smarter then, I would have filed a divorce on her the next day. A man in my position, trying to make his way as an entrepreneur in a fast-changing world, could not afford the stain of scandal. A reputation for looseness with money and secrets repelled the ve
nturists, at least when they saw it in someone they were about to trust with money and secrets. I felt my life, and my wife, had to be above suspicion.

  But I wasn’t fast or smart, then.

  Anne grabbed the Porsche and the nest egg from our fund manager—which must have involved forging my signature on the release alongside hers—and disappeared. It was, I suppose, simply those three things she had wanted. We never had a great deal of money. After Lawyer Day and the enterprising schemes, we didn’t have any security. And there were no little Corbins coming along. So she tried to provide the money and security for herself. What she did for children, I never learned.

  Of all my wives, Anne was the one I loved the best. She understood me. She certainly wasn’t afraid of me. She could accept me as a unique and self-sufficient person, not as some imaginary “husband” or “lover” acting out her dialogues on the screen of her mind. But when the marriage wasn’t giving her what she needed, she knew when to leave. Anne was a realist. And, I believe, she was the person most like me I’ve ever met.

  Six months later, she surfaced with a Mexican divorce decree in absentia, which I certainly could have broken in any Stateside court she cared to name. Except, by that time, I was out of the country getting my head regrooved.

  “Martin Luther”: Twelve Points

  The following text, written in felt tip on onionskin, was found nailed to the oak-panel doors of Knox, Schnock, Hughes & Thayer’s offices in San Francisco:

  “Twelve things they don’t teach you at Harvard Law:

  “1. A lawyer is someone paid to lie in support of a particular point of view. Sorting out the truth with a lawyer is like sorting balloons with a pitchfork.

  “2. Politics is the pursuit of law by other means.

  “3. Truth and ‘reasonableness’ are always negotiable.

  “4. Advantage is everything. The strength of your position is more important than the accuracy of your facts.

  “5. Precedent is everything. A crackpot statute or a vague judicial decision is more useful than an army of verifiable facts.

  “6. A certain compromise is better than an uncertain victory. Thirty percent of nothing is still nothing.

  “7. Keep meticulous personal records. Even on a contingency case, you charge by the hour.

  “8. ‘Other people’s money’ is a term invented by a lawyer.

  “9. Just because a person is guilty doesn’t mean he’s not entitled to a strong defense. The guiltiest people need the best lawyers—and usually can pay for them.

  “10. Someone is always responsible for an ‘act of God.’

  “11. Don’t trust the short words. The longer the words you use—and the more words—the more elbow room you’ll have for shifting your meaning(s) in the face of adversity.

  “12. Don’t trust a jury, even one you’ve picked yourself and paid for. People can be obstinately open minded.”

  Lady Anne Meers: Sunrise, Sunset

  Yes, I was married to James Corbin—except he was “Jay” then—for about eighteen months in the mid-Nineties. God, it was so long ago. We were just children, really. Spoiled children.

  The times were too good. And too bad, if you know what I mean. You could have made it if you were a saint: lots of material for practicing your sainthood on. Or if you were a devil: ditto. There was a lot of money floating around, and nice things to buy, and loose people looking for a charge. But not many ideals. You had to bring those with you or you were fresh out of luck.

  Which was Jay, saint or devil? I think he wanted to be both and got pulled two ways. He couldn’t be crooked enough to make a good devil, and he saw too many possibilities to make a saint. Still, Jay had a keen awareness that he was Somebody. He didn’t know who, not yet. But he had reached that disagreeable stage where he was sure the sun rose in his navel and set in his arse.

  That made living with him difficult. I’ll tell you, and I don’t care how politically important he’s become, with how many armies to back him up, Jay Corbin is the most selfish man in the world.

  Sure, he has that “friend to all the world” smile, that blank check of responsibility for everyone he touched, that well-known code of honor. But it’s all to serve his ego, you see. Watch closely: If a deal, an agreement, a treaty, a marriage—anything—won’t work his way, it just doesn’t exist for him.

  You remember that about Jay Corbin, or he’ll bite you every time.

  Chapter 8

  Jay Corbin: The 13th Kata

  “Why do you come here?” Master Takusan Matsu asked.

  “I wanted to find you, to study with you,” I answered. “I want to learn the thirteenth kata. I need it in order to advance in rank.”

  The Master spoke clear English, almost without accent. I had been afraid we would have to talk through the Tourist Ministry translator, a smiling young dolt who, in bringing me up the mountain, had told more about his impressions of America—gained mostly from “terrevision” and rock videos—than he did about his beautiful countryside.

  We had driven the rental car, an old Toyota Coronet, from the steaming cities and the crowded suburbs around Nagoya into the spine of mountains that runs down the back of the big island, Honshu. When the road to Hakusan National Park ran out above the public campgrounds and the cluster of country inns, we walked up a narrow, rocky path. The gripper soles of my Pivettas were doing an excellent job, but the translator’s city shoes were giving him grief.

  Five hundred feet above the end of the road, we came to a clearing in the pines. Set into it were a spring, a circle of stone-and-thatchwork cottages, and a theater stage—or it might have been an oak-planked boxing ring without ropes. The clearing was arranged so that for most of the day sunlight focused on the stage’s well-sanded floorboards.

  “Why do you come here?” the Master asked again.

  “I want to finish my training. I learned everything I could from Sensei Kan, but it’s not enough, not complete. I know I’m missing something essential, something deep. There has to be something more. And I hope you can provide it.”

  Takusan Matsu had taught my old teacher, Sensei Kan from the shopping mall dojo in Monterey. Matsu was the master of our style: more than forty years ago, he had blended the karate teachings of his masters into a single discipline of mind and body. Kan had learned it from him and I had learned from Kan.

  In Monterey, we had heard stories of how a Japanese karate master was tested. First he was supposed to perform forty-eight hours of continuous movement, doing katas, calisthenics, sparring, running, jumping—just no sitting still. Then he was to stand at the center of a free-for-all battle with fifty other black belts; against each of them Matsu had to score two points, landing technical, almost-touching death blows on his opponents, while he himself absorbed no more than one blow from all of them together. … Or those were the tales we heard.

  The legend of this man had grown to the point that we all believed he was a hundred and ten years old. That he drank boiling water without blistering his throat. That he could shinny backwards up a rope like a monkey, leading with his feet and pushing with his hands while his bald head hung toward the hard ground. That he could deliver ten death blows in half a second. That he worshipped wood spirits and believed they inhabited modern technology such as telephones and carried messages along the wire. Some kind of spook, he was supposed to be.

  He looked remarkably normal here and not a day over sixty-five. He was wearing gray sweatpants with a red stripe on the side, a yellow nylon windbreaker with a tee-shirt underneath, and Nike running shoes with white ribbed sweatsocks. No silk robes, not even a karate gi. Matsu had the sleepy, hooded eyes of an old turtle. He looked at you by looking past you. The movements of his hands, his jaw, his feet were as precise and slow as a turtle’s. I was asking myself if this was a mistake, someone other than our legendary master?

  The coterie of dedicated and slightly vindictive young disciples I had imagined would surround him was nowhere to be seen. Just one dull-eyed boy who swept the
theater stage.

  “Why do you come here?” the Master asked again, mildly.

  “My whole world has collapsed. I want you to tell me what has gone wrong and how to put it right.”

  And that, finally, was the truth. What Anne took when she flew to Mexico, both in love and money, was nothing compared to what the Twenty-eighth Amendment had done to my security and my fortunes, not to mention the rest of the country’s. Some call it the Repudiation Amendment; to others it’s the Debtors’ Delight.

  For half a dozen years, we had debated the effects of a repudiation of the national debt. The economists were about evenly divided—between forecasts of gloom over money markets that would be dashed by a landslide of worthless Federal paper, and joy at the prospect of money markets that would no longer be sucked dry by an impoverished government able to commandeer capital at need and pay for it in promissory scrip. The politicians talked on both sides of the question, confident that in the battle for ratification their party could fight the good fight and retire in righteous defeat—that is, that nothing would happen. The media trumpeted every opinion, trembling and exulting by turns. Sensible people were certain that, like most momentous questions, the Federal deficit and the national debt would remain unresolved for their lifetime. We lawyers merely rubbed our hands, knowing there would be pay work for us no matter how the question fell out.

  And when West Virginia finally voted to ratify and seal the three-fourths majority, with the Twenty-ninth Amendment—repeal of the power to tax—not far behind, the U.S. economy just fell apart. Anyone with a stake in the government was going to suffer: Holders of “Savings Bonds” (what a joke!) would see their assets vanish in a cloud of shredded paper; contractors for defense and large civil works would watch their stocks plummet. In the weeks while West Virginia debated, the smart money moved out of these and hundreds of other areas. The banks grew fat on parked cash, then crashed when the Federal Reserve folded up like a magician’s cabinet. When the banks fell, the economic structure of the country went into free fall.