Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  Mose doesn’t drink, so Lizzie spends her time after dinner alone in her room. The first night, examining the label of a forty-five-dollar half-pint of bad Australian Riesling, she was startled by a recorded announcement from the refrigerator informing her that because she removed a minibar item for longer than six seconds, she would be charged for it. It was more comical than Mission: Impossible, more sinister than Get Smart. Each night after midnight, looking out over the little park, Chinzan-so Garden, smoking her dollar-apiece cigarettes, she feels a little like a spy. (Languor is so rare at home.) During the days, she mostly goes off to her own appointments in the Shinjuku neighborhood with computer and video-game businessmen, who all seem to find her obscurely amusing. (She discovered at her first meeting that there is no word in Japanese for millennium.) Mose and Saddler go to their appointments with bankers, politicians, and chairmen of media and entertainment companies. Mose may be negotiating deals, but Lizzie certainly is not, unless the agreements she’s striking are too subtle for her to register. Randy goes golfing with Japanese TV executives. And Gloria Mose, who has arrived from India, spends her days talking to printers about the lavish children’s book she’s privately publishing about the angels of aborted fetuses, and shopping for a particular kind of gray, acid-etched, iron-free glass that’s unavailable in the United States and Europe because the fabrication process makes the workers who manufacture it sick.

  At night, the Moses, Saddler, and Lizzie dine together. (Randy goes out drinking with Japanese TV executives.)

  “The quite wonderful thing,” Gloria is saying, “is how restorative Calcutta always is. It feeds my soul. Especially seeing the work my people are doing.” She sponsors a convent of European nuns who persuade pregnant low-caste Indian women they’ll go to hell if they submit to abortions. (“Gloria’s nuns,” Harold said to Lizzie during the flight over, “are Mother Teresas without the clinics, and every one as angry as a ferret.”)

  “Did you know,” Gloria says to Lizzie and Harold, pointedly ignoring Saddler, “that the little tattoos and colored bits Indian women wear all have meanings? I never realized. Isn’t that clever?”

  Lizzie is pleased the subject has changed from abortion. “What do they mean?” she asks.

  Gloria looks at her as if Lizzie had asked why she wears dark glasses indoors or why she keeps herself so hideously skinny. “I haven’t a clue, Elizabeth. Now my daughter, Caroline, in 1992, was the very first person in London to get one of those tattoos, with all the little straight black lines, like they have on packages in shops …”

  “UPC,” Saddler says, wedging into the conversation. “Universal Product Code.”

  Gloria, never turning her face his way, continues. “Caroline had this thing tattooed on her bum when she was seventeen. At first I was appalled. But then Tatler called it chic. And she was the first.”

  “What product was her bar code for?” Lizzie asks.

  “I haven’t a clue. But by 1995—dear, what year was Blair?”

  “Ninety-seven,” Mose says.

  “By 1997, that little magazine Wallpaper was calling it a cliché.”

  “What?” Lizzie asks.

  “My stepdaughter had the thing lasered off her ass,” Mose says. “Needless to say. At great expense. To me. Although you can still make it out—like a fuzzy dalmatian’s spot.”

  This is evidently an established routine. Gloria turns to Lizzie and says, “Harold says I love my dalmatians more than I do him. And he knows Clement and Neville do not have a single fuzzy spot on them.”

  “You have dalmatians?” Lizzie says.

  “Two perfect boys. Harold gave me a pair of puppies right after we were married, but they did have”—she shakes her head as if she’s tasted something bitter—“extremely irregular spots. Poorly spaced. Oddly shaped. Mottling around the edges. And some pink around the eyes. Those two went away, and I ran through three more dogs before we got Clement and Neville from the Goldsmiths. The graphics are glorious, that’s why we love the breed. But it’s terribly difficult to get them just right. Harold,” she says, “did I tell you I went to old man Goldsmith’s retirement affair at the Connaught the day before I left? Extraordinary! It was like some big Jewish bar mitzvah.”

  In one sense, women like Gloria make socializing a breeze. They do all the active work. But as Gloria chatters on during the main course and through dessert about Jews and abortion (“Fifty million abortions every year around the world, and I don’t hear the Jews caterwauling about that”), and wonders aloud if Tokyo is more “urban bricolage or urban pasticcio,” Lizzie sees night after night of this looming ahead like a sentence. She realizes she has too hastily understated the rigors of just showing up and smiling.

  Outside it is already miserably hot, and Kuala Lumpur is awash in a dank brown miasma of car exhaust, industrial fumes, and smoke from distant forest fires that their VIP handler at the airport said have been burning since New Year’s. “Malaysia boleh,” the limo driver said when Mose asked how business has been since the economic crash three years ago. When Lizzie asked the concierge if he thought the forest fires would be put out soon, first he blamed Indonesia, but then he said, “Malaysia boleh, Malaysia boleh.” Lizzie wonders if it’s a pidginized “Bully for Malaysia!” or “Boola-boola!”

  It’s five-thirty in the morning. Hank, Randy, Harold, and Lizzie are seated around a table in the living room of the Moses’ hotel suite, staring at a speakerphone. They’re listening in on the Mose Media Holdings quarterly conference call, which is originating from the Fifty-ninth Floor, where it’s five-thirty in the afternoon. Three executives—Arnold Vlig; the chief financial officer; and the vice president for investor relations—are attempting to persuade several hundred stock analysts, mutual fund managers, hedge fund operators, and large individual investors to please, please hold on to their shares of the company’s stock. The price at the close today was 45½, down a point.

  Lizzie has never listened to one of these conferences before. She’s surprised at how scripted it seems. The executives read opening statements, like at a congressional hearing or a trial—but a really convivial congressional hearing, a happy trial. The only downbeat passages are the legal boilerplates. When the investor relations woman says, “If you have a question, press one,” Lizzie smiles. (No one else does.) The third time the CFO says “actual results may vary,” like a fast-talking small-print announcer at the end of a TV ad for a prescription drug, she smiles again, alone. Even the putatively extemporaneous answers sound cobbled together from pre-scripted modules. Someone asks if there is any chance the company will abandon the network television business. “Giving guidance now,” says Brad, the CFO, as if he’s about to reveal a fascinating secret, “the network is off to a super, super, flying start this quarter.” In Kuala Lumpur, Randy smiles and nods. “Last quarter, as you know,” Brad says, “we did encourage sobriety overall. This fall, our key drivers of revenue growth will be internet products …” Randy, Hank, and Harold all turn to look at her.

  She hasn’t left the hotel all day. It’s 112 degrees outside, and the smoke and the gases only get soupier toward evening. However, because “it’s Malaysia,” Mose said, rather than Japan, they can force people to come to them for meetings.

  “Jimmy!” Mose says as the Malaysian man approaches them in the bar. J.K. “Jimmy” Wong is a deputy at the Ministry of Energy, Telecommunications and Posts. He apparently also has some nebulous ex officio position in a semiprivate television channel. Wong and Mose embrace in a manly fashion, hands on elbows, hands on forearms, hands on shoulders. The two of them are going off to dinner with some Malaysian government and military people. Lizzie will eat in the hotel with Hank Saddler. Gloria has the vapors, and Randy is having his driver take him “straight from the links over to meet Harold at General Rahmat’s compound.”

  The small talk concerns the forest fires, which Jimmy Wong tells them have destroyed 110,000 homes and killed 9,000 Malaysians in the last three months.

  “Bad
news, but less than the flood and the typhoon,” says Jimmy Wong.

  “One man’s bad is another’s good, Minister Wong,” Mose says. “Floods and typhoons are a key driver of our Asian business, Jimmy.”

  Mose says to Lizzie, “Cards. Most of Jimmy’s citizens can’t afford fancy flowers and funerals, but they spend big on condolence cards, great condolence posters.”

  “People like the big, colorful picture-cards,” Wong says.

  Harold raises an index finger. “You know what I say …”

  Lizzie wonders if even a Malaysian government official with a British accent will appreciate a curling analogy.

  “… there’s always a bull market somewhere—the trick is finding it.”

  Wong smiles and sips his Scotch.

  “We ferry in with the relief workers,” Mose explains to Lizzie, “and our guys go hamlet to hamlet, selling.”

  “You’ve never seen such a customer-focused business,” Saddler says. “It’s very moving.”

  “It’s like your American slogan in Vietnam,” Mose says to Lizzie and Hank, “you get their hearts and minds, and their money follows.”

  “True,” Saddler says.

  “Jimmy,” Mose says to his pal, “Lizzie and Hank would get a tremendous kick out of that fantastic bar you took me to last time over toward Petronas Towers.” He turns to Lizzie. “It’s called Wall Street. Huge bank of video monitors, Bloombergs. The prices of the damn cocktails change all the time, according to global currency fluctuations—your martini’s 14.68 ringgit one minute, the second one’s 14.82. It’s very amusing.”

  Jimmy Wong suddenly looks unhappy. “Wall Street is closed. Since 1998.”

  “Ah,” Mose says. “I was over in ’97 working up some schemes with Jimmy and his friends for the prime minister’s Vision 2020 project. The prime minister had such plans, didn’t he, Jimmy? Multimedia supercorridor, cybermart, cyberjaya, the Multimedia University … Rough timing for poor Dr. M., eh?”

  “Malaysia boleh,” Wong says.

  “What does that mean?” Lizzie asks.

  “ ‘Malaysia can do it.’ A Malay phrase. Malaysia boleh.”

  “Malaysia boleh,” Hank Saddler repeats, and puts his little fist in the air. “Yay!”

  So Lizzie was right about the meaning, even if her imperialist etymology was mistaken.

  “Malaysia boleh!” Wong says. “Unless the Jewish speculators attack us again, like in ’97 and ’98.”

  “Yes, well, you won’t have that to worry about with us.”

  Should she say something? She doesn’t even know what angle Mose is working here, what his J. K. Wong deal is all about. But it’s not Mission: Impossible; it’s closer to Z. Should she? Gloria is English, and you’re supposed to cut them some slack for anti-Semitism, the way you’re supposed to accept chronic dissembling in Morocco or smile when Kazakhs fart at the end of a meal. But Harold is Canadian. Would George say something? George would want her to say something. She must.

  “What Harold means, Mr. Wong, is that, as a Jewess, the next time I exchange secret messages with my superiors in Jerusalem, I’ll make them promise to remove Malaysia from the hit list whenever they’re planning on destroying some Asian economies.” She smiles as warmly as she knows how.

  Saddler looks as if he’s going to vomit or cry. Wong is baffled, maybe alarmed. Mose forces a chuckle and says, “The lady is yanking your chain, Jimmy. She’s joking.” He gives her a look. “And all I meant, of course, is that Mose Media Holdings is in the communications business, not the currency speculation game.”

  Lizzie shuts up for the rest of drinks. Wong tells them how his government is adapting one-ounce American model airplanes and flying saucer toys as MAVs—micro–air vehicles—for military and intelligence-gathering purposes. Mose tells Wong that Malaysia should imitate the U.S. Army, and establish an advisory group of private businessmen with whom they can trade ideas and technologies.

  “Our company just joined the Army board in the States, and it’s a remarkable partnership—Disney got to use some of the Army’s top-secret bulletproof glass on their new studio in Times Square, and the Army is using high-tech new Disney microphones to listen for sniper fire.”

  “It is a super, public-private, win-win–type program,” Saddler pipes in. “I liaise with them almost every month. You know, Disney sent one of their TV directors from ABC down to Washington to teach the generals how to direct a war! Isn’t that fantastic? Because you know, with all the tons of video pictures the commanders have rushing at them now, from their smart bombs and wingtip cameras and so forth, the guys just weren’t dealing, not in a twenty-first-century way.”

  “Warteurs,” Mose says for Lizzie’s benefit. He glances at her. The muscles around her mouth form a smile.

  “Harold,” says Wong, reminded by Saddler’s testimonial of his own cutting-edge public-private video project, “the Malaysian boy, the little entertainment mogul in Negri Sembilan, has been taken care of. His unauthorized disks and videos have been eliminated. The American salesman’s as well—jazz privé.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Wong,” Harold says. “We appreciate that.”

  “Is that the visionary Canadian media mogul Harold Mose?” says a British voice from the shadows.

  “Good sir!” Harold bellows. He stands and hugs the tall, handsome, smiling man who has arrived at their table. Wong stands and shakes the Englishman’s hand.

  He turns to Lizzie. “Farley Lyman,” he says.

  “Elizabeth Zimbalist.” She’s never heard of Farley Lyman.

  “Sir Farley Lyman,” Harold says. And to his friend: “Elizabeth is our new cyberpresident, dragging us into the twenty-first century to save us from the fate of predigital dinosaurs like you.”

  “A pleasure,” Lyman says. “And tragic that you won’t be dining with us tonight. Gentlemen,” he announces to Mose and Wong, “I’m afraid we’ll be late for General Rahmat and his friend if we don’t get going.”

  The men leave. Only six more months, she thinks, and I can cash out. As Saddler pays, she keeps thinking about Wong’s assurances to Mose about “jazz privé.” Private jazz? Is it the Asian VH1 concept Harold has been discussing? Or some internet music scheme? And then she realizes: not jazz privé, Chas Prieve, the conniving and disgruntled Chas Prieve, corporate blackmailer, alleged pornographer, failed Fine Technologies West Coast vice president.

  “He’s a great war hero, you know,” Saddler says, “Sir Farley. And such a gentleman too. Ah, the English.”

  But Lizzie’s not listening. She’s thinking about Harold Mose’s weird interest in Chas Prieve. And about the six months.

  “Hi,” she says into her phone.

  “Where are you?”

  “Sydney. Driving from Darling Harbour to Homebush Bay. How are you, sweetheart?”

  “Asleep. What time is it?”

  He’s still in bed at nine o’clock? “It’s almost six here,” she says. “P.M. It’s already dark. How was L.A.?”

  “Horrible.”

  This is the second time she’s called him. She’s decided the morning, his time, would be best, before his mood has all day to become ingrown and nasty.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Guess who I’m having dinner with?”

  “Mel Gibson.”

  “Zip Ingram! He’s doing some big Home Again shoot down here. Harold wants him to help set up this cable channel they’re trying to put together. Isn’t that wild?”

  When I striate this raw, pus-filled area here, Mr. Mactier, before I apply the hot saline, does that sting a little?

  “Yeah. Say hi. Have fun.”

  “George.”

  “Oh, that’s just fantastic news, honey! It sounds like a really exciting opportunity for Zip, and for the company, too! Congratulations!” He stops. “There. Is that better?”

  “I’ll talk to you later, George.”

  This conversation is no worse than the others.

  In Australia as e
lsewhere, Lizzie hasn’t had much to do, except to demonstrate by her presence in meetings that Mose Media Holdings is a forward-looking, twenty-first-century enterprise. The main business here seems to involve the summer Olympics, which are two months away. Because Mose didn’t establish MBC until most of the Olympics marketing deals had already been struck, the company is left with the dregs, although Hank Saddler is doing his best, as they arrive at the restaurant, to keep spirits up; he’s auto-spinning.

  “The torch relay is so old-fashioned, really,” he says when the talk turns enviously to Murdoch and Fox.

  “What about the cultural events,” Gloria Mose asks, “couldn’t you sponsor those?”

  “Fairfax has them,” Randy tells her, pretending that Gloria might acknowledge his existence. “I think it sounds like we have a shot at that webcast opportunity, though.”

  At a meeting this afternoon, it was suggested that MBC might be able to buy the “semiexclusive internet advertising rights” to badminton, synchronized swimming, race-walking, and certain Paralympics events.

  “Yes,” Hank Saddler says. “and that wheelchair rugby star they mentioned, the fellow who got paralyzed playing normal rugby—that sounds lovely. Real Chariots of Fire.”

  Zip is already inside at the table. The moment he spots the Mose group arriving, he stands and upends an empty wineglass, holding it with both hands. And then he begins singing into the glass, shouting, “ ‘G-L-O-R-I-A, Glo-o-o-o-o-o-ri-a, I’m gonna shout all night …’ ”

  Since Gloria Mose’s facial expression is always contemptuous, Lizzie has wondered how she’d manage to express exceptional contempt. Her face grows more taut than usual. She raises her chin a centimeter. Her dark glasses, shields before, transform somehow into offensive weapons, like one of the kids’ robot action figures.

  “Hello, Edward,” she says to Zip. Zip met her thirty years ago. He was a third-tier rock-and-roll photographer. She was a tobacconist’s daughter who enjoyed posing nude for tiny, third-tier rock-and-roll photographers, and later giving free Laker Airways tickets and in-flight bathroom blowjobs to tiny, second-tier freelance newsweekly photographers.