The 500: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  “Smart dog,” Marcus said.

  “What can I do for you, boss?”

  “On your eight o’clock,” Marcus said. I peered over and saw Congressman Eric Walker of Mississippi, who at thirty-two was the youngest member of the House of Representatives.

  Bummer. Marcus had invited me to this shindig, but he hadn’t told me I’d be working. I had been wondering why he’d asked me, since these folks were a few rungs above me on the social ladder. Now it made sense.

  “You thought I brought you here because of your glittering personality?”

  “I thought maybe you missed me.” I glanced back at Walker. “Don’t worry. I’m on it.”

  I made my way to the sunroom, where the bar was set up, and planted myself in Walker’s vicinity without being too obvious about it. With chagrin, instead of Maker’s Mark, I ordered a tonic and lime, the official drink of keeping your wits about you while others wash theirs away.

  Speaking of: I felt a palm pound on my back, took my drink, and turned to find Walker and a practiced handshake. The bull enters the arena.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “Can’t complain.”

  “And if you could, who’d listen, right?” I said.

  “Amen to that.”

  We clinked glasses.

  Toro!

  I’d been hanging out with Walker for a few months now. He had a medium-stakes poker game and on weekends he liked to pick off the fund-raising tarts of Georgetown.

  As he and I caught up, I noticed Marcus passing through an entryway on the other side of the sunroom, taking us in through his peripheral vision. Marcus was shepherding me along in the business, and he had played Yenta to my growing friendship with the representative from Mississippi. Walker was all manners around most Washingtonians, but Marcus had watched him long enough to know he liked to loosen up around the younger guys. That’s how I got tapped.

  Walker was a comer, and he was on track to join the 500—a little piece of slang they used around Davies Group. I usually heard it only when somebody slipped up, because officially it didn’t exist. It wasn’t too hard for me to figure out: it was a list of the five hundred people inside the Beltway with real power, the select who ran Washington and, by extension, the country. The Davies Group wanted to be damn sure it was chummy with every one of them. I’d been rising at the company, getting more risks, more responsibilities, more leash. Walker was my next assignment.

  And what exactly was the job? Well, when you got right down to it, the work I did for Marcus was a confidence game.

  He had brought me into his office a few days after I made senior associate. “Don’t let it go to your head,” he said.

  “I won’t,” I replied. “Fortune favors fools, and I got damn lucky catching Gould.”

  He looked relieved. “Then I can skip the part where I convince you of that. We’re in the business of changing men’s minds. How do you figure we do it?”

  “Stumble across piles of dirty money in gym lockers?”

  “When appropriate. But for the most part it’s a grind.”

  And so began my long education in the trade. Actually, it was more of a refresher. My dad used to run cons. He went to prison when I was twelve, so what I got from him directly was very little: overheard snippets of conversation before he closed a door, glimpses of forged papers before he chased me out of the room with his hand cocked back to hit me, though he never really unloaded.

  Crime runs in families, but I’ve never met anyone who intended to pass it down. As my mother told me, everything shady my father did he did so that I would have legitimate opportunities, would never be tempted to follow in his footsteps. But vice sticks around, permeates a place, like years of cigarette smoke. As well-intentioned as he may have been, as much as he tried to hide the seamy side of his life from us, my older brother, Jack, and I absorbed everything. And once he was gone, there was nothing to hold us back.

  Your average adolescent boy is up to enough criminal mischief that it would have been hard to tell we were bound for something other than garden-variety pyromania, shoplifting, and sneaking into construction sites and our own high school after hours. Our crew was a set of boys, mostly children of my father’s friends, who were always trying to one-up each other. If Smiles, age fifteen, took his father’s Lincoln out for a joyride, then Luis would take his neighbor’s BMW. You can see how things might get very hairy very quickly. And by the time I was sixteen, and my brother and his friends were around twenty-one, there was really no question that the hard core of them were moving deeper into crime and would never go straight. Community college or what, managing the deli at Food Lion? No. They had the cars and girlfriends and drug habits and gambling thirsts that called for fast and easy money, no union dues or payroll tax.

  At first I tried to stay out of all this, since I didn’t have the maniac impulse shared by the rest of the boys (although when they dared me to do anything, jumping off roofs and so on, I wouldn’t back down. I was more afraid of losing face than breaking my neck). In the back of my mind I always thought of disappointing my father. I tagged along when they would let me, mostly keeping my head down. When singled out and pressed, I would join any mission (we called them missions, like we were the A-Team and not a bunch of hoods). For most of my teens, though, I was more geek than crook. My main criminal passion was taking apart and reassembling locks and deadbolts. It was fun, done more for curiosity than profit, and not unlike the science labs I was really getting into in school.

  With my father off in prison, my brother got more and more into cons and grifts. Maybe it was a way of connecting with my dad. I loved hustles too, loved the logic of them, the neat mechanisms of a well-laid con, like a loaded spring behind the bail of a mousetrap. But Jack had the boldness I lacked, and that was a necessity for shaking people down. My father had it too. It’s the willingness to make a scene, to stand in the middle of a restaurant screaming and acting indignant and cheated when the indignities and cheats are all your own doing. When my brother allowed me to come along on one of these cons, I’d hide my shaking hands and, desperate to impress him, play the part, shouting to the whole restaurant that I’d given the guy a fifty and I could prove it.

  I was a typical younger brother; I would have done anything Jack asked me to. After my mother got sick, any compunction about stealing went out the window. There was no question that we would do what we had to to pay those bills. And one night, when I was nineteen, and the best lock pick by far that he or his friends knew, he asked me to pull a little job for him. I said yes. It wrecked my life so profoundly that only now, ten years later, was I finally getting it back on track.

  The more Marcus taught me, the more I realized my new line of work was very much in keeping with the family business.

  Here at Davies, instead of casing, we “assessed” our subjects. The hook became “development,” the roper and the shill became “access agents,” the take became the “ask,” and cooling the mark and the blow-off became “termination.”

  I must say, the lingo sucked. Instead of the Jamaican switch, the rag, and the old pig in a poke, we had the “501(c)(3)s,” “PACs,” and “affiliated committees.”

  But despite all the old-fashioned grifter jargon I liked to collect as a kid, the fact was I knew shit about the real core of both businesses, which was gaining men’s trust and getting them to do what you wanted. My father always tried to keep me out of it. I guess he thought if he was crooked enough, he could afford to keep me clean. That made me an eager student as Marcus taught me the straight world’s version of everything my father kept from me.

  If there was one thing to learn about human-asset recruitment—the jargon Marcus occasionally let drop for what we were doing—it was this: MICE. That stands for money, ideology, compromise/coercion, and ego. For our purposes, those were the only reasons anyone did anything. It was the foundation for everything Marcus was walking me through, the finer points of all of Henry’s talk about levers and owning me
n.

  Marcus put it up on the whiteboard in his office and asked me if it made sense. I looked it over for a minute or two, shrugged, and said I’d give it a try.

  “Let’s say there’s a guy named, I don’t know, Henry, who wants to control some sap named Mike.” I walked back and forth in front of the board. “Money, that’s easy: Mike grew up without two nickels to rub together and is now drowning in debt. Ideology: poor Mike still buys that Horatio Alger American-dream bullshit that the meritocracy will always reward hard work and brains. Ego: Mike’s blue-collar faux humility is just a cover for his conviction that he’s the smartest guy around. On top of that he’s got a monster chip on his shoulder about his incarcerated father and seedy past holding him back from the good life he deserves. In short, Mike is a sitting fucking duck.”

  Marcus was laughing by this point. “You forgot one,” he said.

  “Compromise and coercion. What do you have on me, Marcus?”

  He played it coy, said nothing, and wiped the board. “Moving on to the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002…”

  It turned out he had plenty.

  MICE: those four points became my bible.

  Money’s straightforward, and, though we can quibble about life philosophies, it can get most people pretty much anything they want as far as achievement and status are concerned. Ideology is getting people to believe in what you want. It’d be nice to think that it was the real trump card (and Americans always have thought that, Marcus explained), but mostly it comes into play in the negative. You can’t get somebody to do something if he can’t rationalize it to himself. The villain in every movie has to think he’s the hero.

  Compromise and coercion are getting the goods on someone. Americans as a rule try to avoid these approaches because they violate some basic notions of fair play (the Yankees think they can win everybody over with money and ideology), but it was bread-and-butter to the Chinese and Russians.

  Ego is playing on someone’s beliefs that he’s somehow been shafted by life, that he’s smarter than everyone else, or more hardworking, or more honest, and so he deserves a better job, more money, more respect, a better-looking spouse, whatever—beliefs that I imagine are held by about 99.99 percent of the population.

  Now, you may have noticed, like I did, that a lot of this theory—about Chinese and Russians, access agents and terminations—sounded a little hard core for government affairs work. I’d thought lobbying was more about wrangling loopholes over steaks. In fact, I was getting a distinct vibe about William Marcus, the man with no past.

  I decided to confirm it one day. Marcus was out in back of the office smoking, which I should have taken as a sign not to mess with him because he only broke out the Camels when he was in the weeds. I walked up behind him as quietly as I could, toe-heel, toe-heel, like they taught us in the navy in a random drill about sentry removal (not that I spent a lot time assassinating sentries—most of what I remember about the service was watching 8 Mile over and over and trying to sleep despite the sound everywhere of guys jacking off).

  I was actually pretty sure about what would go down and didn’t expect to get too close to Marcus, but still, the speed of it surprised me. One second, I was up on tippy-toes, all sneaky behind him, and the next—so fast it felt like somebody had cut a few seconds out of a movie—I was on my face in the gravel with Marcus standing over me holding my palm between his thumb and index finger. He had twisted my arm into a precisely torturous angle that made any movement, even breathing, so painful that I briefly considered giving up on respiration. I looked up at him, and he was utterly bored, the cigarette held loosely between his lips, inflicting my agony with such one-handed ease he might have been flipping channels on a TV remote.

  He let my arm unwind. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “Startled me.”

  “Don’t mention it,” I said, playing down the red raging soreness running from hand to shoulder. “I think I figured out what I wanted to know.”

  “Smart.”

  I stood up. “So what did you say you did before you joined Davies Group?”

  “Trade adviser,” he said, completely deadpan, and dusted me off.

  “Of course.”

  So what do you get for the former CIA badass boss who has everything? I started getting my expenses in on time, that’s for damn sure, and strictly by the book.

  It was smart of Henry Davies to bring in old spooks and use their skills not to turn Soviets but to bring around pols. It sure explained a lot of the jargon Marcus used. There were plenty of intelligence guys around the navy, but I’d never met any of the operator types, the Special Warfare Group SEALs dudes, so it was pretty cool taking lessons from Marcus. I asked him one day, “Are you ever going to teach me any…you know…”

  “Monkey tricks? Killing people with an envelope? Shit like that?”

  I guess that’s what I meant.

  “Nope,” he said. Instead he gave me a copy of a journal article: “Adaptive and Maladaptive Narcissism among Politicians,” and a twelve-page psychology syllabus. Because all the sexy stuff was a distraction, party tricks. What the job required was a decent grasp of human nature and an iron-ass patience for both doing your homework and watching your prey.

  Clearly, someone at Davies Group had done a good workup on Representative Walker. Before I met him, I knew him from the psych profile Marcus gave me: the gambling thing, the causes in Georgetown he “supported,” the crowd he ran with, a couple of hobbies.

  Marcus asked me my plan for getting control of Walker.

  “Waiting for another tip-off from the Hamburglar isn’t going to cut it?”

  “Nuh-uh,” Marcus said.

  “Any suggestions?” I asked.

  “Go make friends,” he said. He gave me fifteen hundred dollars out of petty cash and sent me out to get acquainted with Walker. It wasn’t about dead drops or brush passes or whatever cool spy shit I wanted to learn. After all the psychology and jargon, it comes down to this: make him trust you, make him want to help you, make him your friend. That’s the job. Hanging out with the bright young things. Tough life, huh?

  The first time I really made any headway with Walker was at a preppy haunt on Wisconsin Ave. in Georgetown, a members-only bar. The crowd was mainly wealthy Southern ex–frat boys, guys named Trip and Reed with mop hair and year-round flip-flops. They were into shorts with blazers, driving around in open-top jeeps, and alpha-male-ing super-bitchy Fox News–looking blondes.

  Politicians, and CEOs to a lesser extent, aren’t like you and me. If you really want to understand how they think, go down to the leadership self-help section of the bookstore and you’ll see a ten-foot shelf of books on how to fake a persona. Pols wear one mask for general consumption—TV and voters—and another for friends and acquaintances. There might be some real personality hidden down under all that, but I tend to believe that after all the years of polling and folksy anecdotes, they forget it themselves.

  So far I’d known only Walker’s professional guise: a charming Southern gentleman, Christian enough to get by but not Bible-thumping enough to alienate moderates. The file Marcus had given me on Walker was filled with psychological mumbo jumbo: early-life self-esteem issues, overcompensation, hypersexuality. It’s not an uncommon profile among politicians. I’d heard similar rumors about him. Walker and I shut the bar down that night, and after a few hours drinking with the guy, I was starting to think maybe the hype about him being a skirt-chaser was a little overblown.

  Then I noticed him eyeing a college girl across the room: twenty years old, tops. After last call, I asked him where he was heading. In that easy Mississippi drawl he told me, “I’m fixing to get hip-deep in sticky,” then set out after her.

  I didn’t know, and didn’t really want to know, what that meant, but I had a decent guess.

  That was the first time he loosened up around me, and it got worse from there. I could barely understand the profane shock-jock creole of sex slang he deployed, which was probably f
or the better. I figured it was mostly talk. I had a bit of a short fuse when it came to ungallant behavior around women, the one good thing my dad passed down. Aside from going overboard on the locker-room chatter, he was a fun guy to hang out with and a welcome break from the bureaucrats’ cocktail-party circuit.

  Tonight, chez Chip, Walker was shape-shifting as per usual. After some gentle ragging on another rep about his party’s chances in the midterms, he lowered his voice to a murmur, scanned the room, and asked me if I was going to get into any “strange.” A fetching young woman arrived within earshot, and without missing a beat he turned the charm back on and engaged her in a perfectly chaste conversation about the relative merits of Yale versus Brown.

  “I’ll put in a good word for you,” he said, sent her along with her tresses bouncing, and resumed the conversation on the finer points of a venereal subject I’m not even going to mention here. He thought he was being quieter than he was. I could see he was getting drunk, gulping down one glass in order to start a new one.

  Marcus caught me on my way to the bathroom. “Stick with Walker tonight, no matter what,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “It’d be best if you stayed close to him. Trust me.”

  Typical sphinx bullshit from my higher-ups at Davies. I knew very little about what we wanted with Walker, only that he was on track to be a heavy and would be good to know. I had picked up some hints, stuff I maybe wasn’t supposed to be aware of, and the few details I got from Marcus were like pulling teeth. We had a client, some dude from Bosnia or Kosovo—I could never keep those war-torn nineties’ hellholes straight—who wanted a few amendments stuck in an upcoming foreign relations bill so that he could have cheaper exports or something. It was just another boring little loophole no one would notice. The trick was to wait until the House and Senate passed their different versions of the bill and the conference committee jammed them together. That’s the real sausage-making on the Hill, and the closest thing you can find to the smoke-filled rooms of legend. Walker was likely to be a junior member in any upcoming conference on foreign relations, so it made sense to bring him in.