The Unfolding, page 10
Networks. That’s the key to the whole caboodle. He is fully engaged for the first time in a long time and thrilled with the feeling. This is how it used to feel, like anything was possible.
He moves from the file cabinets to his favorite tool. He grabs the heavy black knob of his dual-barreled Rolodex and gives it a spin. The Rolodex is the true power broker’s tool, and as with all things, he has rules that must be applied. You don’t remove the card of the deceased; you simply mark it with a slash of black marker and the date of death. All cards contain name, birth date, contact info, name of personal assistant, spouse(s), children, and any other pertinent info—allergic to nuts, etc. Methodically, he works his way through the alphabet, starting at the letter M (the midpoint), as he believes that familiarity and fatigue can set in when always beginning the same way.
He’s asking himself who would be an asset to this undertaking. Who has imagination, insight, and money to burn? Who might be at a stage in life where they don’t feel as compelled to play by the rules, who for reasons of their own or a philosophical, moral, or cultural inclination might desire a change of game plan? Who likes a challenge? Who can be trusted?
By seven a.m. in the East, he’s on the phone with Tony. “I don’t know what it looks like from where you are, but on this end, it’s an official apocalypse. We’re going to have to do something.”
“Like what, ask for a recount?” Tony says, reminding the Big Guy of the call they made last time around to Florida’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, whose father, George W. Harris Jr., was an old friend.
“No. Something bigger,” he says. “More long-term. I want to bring together a few people to start talking about it. Now that the game is over, can you come out?”
“Where?”
“Where I am sitting right now, your home away from home, Palm Springs.”
“When?”
“This weekend.”
“Is it that much of an emergency?”
“Tony, you’ve been in DC too long. We barely got out of 2000 intact. And now this? When are you going to look outside and see what color the sky is?”
“At the moment, it’s a lovely nonpartisan light gray,” Tony says.
“Well, where I am, storm clouds are gathering,” the Big Guy says. “When are you gonna stop hugging the center line? You’ve been doing it since Nixon departed; it’s not exactly becoming to a man of your caliber.”
“I goes along to get along,” Tony says.
“At some point you’re gonna have to stop doing other people’s bidding and have the courage to do some of your own.”
“All the more now that we’re officially lame duck; there are things to be done—my future awaits.”
“My point exactly.”
“I was half kidding,” Tony says. “As Alfred North Whitehead said, ‘True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.’ ”
“Your education has held you in good stead,” the Big Guy says. “I have a few names to run by you, a core group to see if my idea will hold water.”
“What kind of names?”
“Men I would trust with my life.” There is a pause. “I’ll just say the names, and if they pass your bar, no need to respond.”
“I hate this game,” Tony says. He and the Big Guy have been having these kinds of one-sided conversations ever since All the President’s Men came out.
The Big Guy begins. “Edwin? Roger? Martin, not the one who first comes to mind but the quiet one? Albert?”
Tony interrupts. “With Edwin, you’d be fishing in troubled waters; he’s about to be indicted for fraud. Roger is Roger for better and worse. You can’t go to Martin, there’s something fishy going on with his private life.”
“You want to say more?” the Big Guy asks.
“I’m at the office. In the tank. Even big fish feel rough seas.” The fish idioms are Tony’s revenge for hating the game.
By the time they are done, the Big Guy has a short list of names, the “first wave,” he calls it, and Tony has agreed to take the red-eye out on Friday night. “Anthony,” the Big Guy says—he only calls Tony Anthony when he’s dead serious; he doesn’t even realize he’s done it. “Anthony, they were crying in Phoenix.”
“Their tears are not lost on me.”
“There’s one more I’m interested in,” the Big Guy says. “A guy who was there last night, he seemed to know his way around.”
“What’s his name?”
“Well, that’s the funny thing, I didn’t get his name but I got his phone number—DUpont 7-8354.”
Silence.
“Interesting. DU in 2008. Old-school.”
“Exactly. He talked about rain on Mount Weather,” the Big Guy says.
“I’m at the office,” Tony says, cutting him off.
“Let me know what you find out and I’ll see you on Saturday,” the Big Guy says, hanging up.
After Tony, he calls Bo McDonald. The Big Guy would be the first to say that he doesn’t know Bo McDonald terribly well, but he has known him a long time, and he knows his history. If ever there was a man one would characterize as sound or reliable, it would be this guy—his father was one of the founders of the OSS and the kid grew up knee-deep in it. William McDonald VII, known as the Boy Prince, worked “with” Washington until he got fed up with the bureaucracy and returned to California and started an aerospace corporation. His father’s old friend Howard Hughes taught him to fly planes when he was a kid. “You ready to kiss the sky?” Hughes would ask the boy, while simultaneously slapping a Hershey bar with almonds into his hand like it was cold hard cash. “I loved Howard,” Bo would often say. “Loved him until there was nothing left to love.” And if anyone speaks of Bo’s short temper, the comment is always followed by the disclaimer that Bo is the way he is because he has nothing to lose and nothing to gain. There was never a chance that he could do enough to impress the only man who needed impressing—his father, William McDonald VI, aka Big Will.
The McDonalds were members of a generation of men who climbed mountains before breakfast because they believed it built character. They were of the variety who called one another “boys” until their fathers died. Bo was among the last of the boys raised to run an empire, and as outdated as that might seem, it gave him the kind of perspective the Big Guy thinks is perfect for this situation. He knows Bo is fond of him. And he knows that after a third marriage went sour, Bo sold what remained of his aerospace interests, including the plans for an outfit that was going to make reusable spaceships designed for commercial travel to the moon. He bought himself a vineyard somewhere up near San Francisco. In magazines like Cigar Aficionado, he is depicted as a gentleman farmer, if that’s the right word for someone who’s got a thousand acres and is looking for more.
The Big Guy waits till the sun is up in Sonoma before letting his fingers do the walking on the telephone dial. “Bo,” he says, in an ebullient voice. “Bo,” like he’s about to bestow him with some kind of award. “It’s Hitchens. Good to catch a glimpse of you the other night.”
“You still in Phoenix shaking off your dick?” Bo asks. They’d run into each other in the men’s room.
“I’m in Palm Springs, wondering what you’re doing this weekend; maybe you’ll come down for some golf and a conversation?”
“What are we having now; isn’t this a conversation? What time is it?”
“Apologies about the hour. Did I wake you?”
“Not possible,” Bo says. “I haven’t slept more than ten minutes in at least five years. What is it you want to talk about that’s so interesting I’ll have to leave the house?”
“Freedom,” the Big Guy says, almost as though it’s a suggestion or an open question.
“Are you hitting me up for money to conserve some kind of puffin sanctuary? Or lakes on the moon, Sea of Tranquility?”
“I’m asking you to help me figure out how to save the world—otherwise known as the Democracy of the United States.”
“Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”
“I was trying to be discreet.”
McDonald grunts. “What’s the weather supposed to be like?”
“Nice,” the Big Guy says. He has no idea what the weather is supposed to be on the weekend, but it’s almost always nice.
McDonald is well-bred enough not to ask who else will be there. He simply asks for the address and what time they’ll be gathering.
“Eleven in the morning on Saturday.”
“What’s the nearest airport?”
“Bermuda Dunes. That said, sometimes I use Thermal, which goes way back; it was an old military base. For a while they called it Desert Resorts and now it’s Jacqueline Cochran.”
“Thermal indeed. That was General Patton’s purview,” McDonald says.
And the Big Guy wonders, Is that true? Patton in Palm Springs?
“Saturday at eleven,” McDonald says, and hangs up.
“Is the golf any good?” Henry Proctor Kissick wants to know. “And who else is coming?” H. P. Kissick is a guy who needs a lot of information. He’s not versed in the lingo of rain and mountains and unique area codes. Why does the Big Guy want him? He wants Kissick because they can’t all be from inside the box. At the moment, all the Big Guy has is money and a desire for things to be different, which he’s smart enough to know, if used correctly, equals authority and then some. He needs Kissick because Kissick is exceptionally good with money. He was an economist who became a tax lawyer, and in his first job at a white-shoe law firm, he noticed something about how the firm was doing its accounting, made a change in the system, and saved the firm something like eighty million dollars in the first year. Then Kissick realized that if he could do things like that for others he could do it for himself. He started his own company, insuring the assets of others, making money off anxiety, off the what-ifs. He and the Big Guy have made hundreds of millions banking on people’s stress. Insurance companies take in more premiums than they pay out, but the real play is in investing the float, the money they’re holding in anticipation of future claims. Imagine that, making millions off the anxiety of others. Kissick lives in the suburbs of Nowhereville, Florida, in a modest house with his wife and their five children, all girls.
At 7:45 a.m. Charlotte is still sleeping. He leaves a note in her bathroom: “Gone Out/On an Errand.”
At 8:00 a.m. the Big Guy is in the grocery store. He could have made a shopping list for Craig, the house manager, or the cleaning lady, but he’s so excited about his plan that he wants to do something. There aren’t many 8:00 a.m. customers. One of the clerks asks if he is okay. “More than okay, I’m inspired,” he says, loading his cart with mixed nuts, pretzels, goldfish, the little cans of soda they have in hotels and on planes.
“You’re up to something,” Charlotte says when he gets home with bags of groceries. A can of ginger ale tumbles to the floor and they look at it like it’s a grenade that might go off. He waits a moment and then picks it up, dented but not leaking.
“Indeed,” he says. “I’ve invited a couple of guys to come hit some balls this weekend and talk about next steps. I should have asked you before I went ahead, but you were sleeping and I didn’t want to lose momentum.”
She shrugs. “What kind of next steps?”
“I wasn’t kidding when I told you I can’t live like this, watching everything I worked for come undone and this country turn into some kind of socialist experiment or, worse, just weaken and leave itself open to being overrun by who knows what, could be Russians or aliens from another planet.”
“Ah.” She nods. “Your plan to save the world.”
“It’s incumbent on me to take the necessary measures.”
She makes a face.
“It’s not personal,” he says. “I’m not doing it for myself. It’s on me in the larger sense. Me, meaning men like me, men who have the ability, the means, that’s what I’m talking about, the means to take action.”
“Who?” she asks. “Besides Tony.”
“Bo McDonald,” he says.
She’s surprised. “The guy whose father was a spy and who killed himself because he couldn’t get it up anymore?”
“I’m not sure about the last part.”
“I am.”
“Who else?”
“H. P. Kissick.”
“Kiss-it Kissick?” That’s her private nickname for Kissick because she thinks he’s endlessly kissing up to the Big Guy.
“He’s very smart. I put in a couple of other calls, but I’m going to keep it small for now.”
“A regular brain trust you’re putting together. It’s fine,” she says. “You know I don’t care. I’m half teasing you.”
He sighs. “It really isn’t like me to just invite people.”
“I know. And the good news is, it doesn’t matter. I’m leaving.”
He looks baffled.
“Maybe you forgot? I scheduled myself for a cleanse.”
“Did I know?” He doesn’t usually forget.
“When you made the plan to go to Phoenix, I booked it. I figured, win or lose, I’d have eaten too much cheese and would need a good cleaning out.”
“You didn’t eat any cheese,” he says.
“Yes, but it was everywhere. In every room. It’ll be good for me. I need to get away.”
“Will you at least stay until Tony arrives?”
“You’ll be fine,” she says. “If I stay, I’ll be anxious and tempted to eat. I’m already thinking of scrambled eggs and toast. Fixated on it.”
“Let me make it for you.”
“Our activity last night left me very hungry this morning.”
“I’ve heard that can happen.” He smiles.
She doesn’t.
“Maybe I should go a day early. Given it’s a weekday, I bet they have room and I could check in a day ahead of schedule and get a jump on things.”
“You need to eat something.”
“If I have an egg, just one egg, do you think it will ruin the cleanse?”
“No, I’m sure some people stop at In-N-Out Burger and check in on a full stomach. I bet they’re so anxious about not getting any food that before they enter they stuff a Double-Double in the piehole.”
“That’s disgusting. And I can’t believe you said Double-Double to me. You know that I feel the same way about a burger that other people do about truffle pasta, once a year, maybe twice. A Double-Double, what I wouldn’t give to just eat one without having to think—at what cost?”
“It’s human nature. People need to eat in order to survive.”
He cooks her an egg. He wants to get this right. He takes out the small pan, fries her an egg, toasts a piece of bread, and puts it on a plate with a few slices of tomato, a sprinkle of salt and pepper, and brings it to the bedroom.
She’s not there. The sliding glass doors are open.
She is outside on the diving board—naked.
“I wanted to see what it felt like to be you,” she says, bouncing on the board. Her breasts jiggle up and down. He wonders whether the neighbors can see.
“I called Green Valley; they can take me today. I don’t have to wait until tomorrow. Isn’t that great news?” She jumps into the pool.
When Charlotte is gone, he is bereft.
Whatever happened in the last two days, call it a rekindling of what once was, has left him stunned and wondering—was it real?
The house is silent. Whatever happened, it was so unfamiliar, so unusual, that he and the house can hardly hold it. The place is a mess. The egg pan is in the sink, cold and greasy. He scrubs it. Then he makes the bed, tidies her bathroom, makes a circle all around the house, cleaning up after her. It’s unlike Charlotte to leave a mess; she lives like a ghost; you’d never know she’d been there. For a moment, he finds it sexy, a sign of life, and then it makes him anxious and he’s compelled to put everything back in its place.
Tony calls back. “Regarding DUpont 7-8354. His patois is that of having attended the same school.”
“Can you repeat that in English?”
“He’s one of us.”
“And I suppose asking for his name would be pushing the boat out?”
“See you on Saturday. I would offer to bring crab cakes but they don’t travel well.”
The Big Guy is at the dining-room table with a stack of what Charlotte calls recipe cards and what he calls index cards. Funny how women have one name for something and men another.
He likes writing things down—instructions for how to make something, a cake or a new world order. Every idea gets its own card. Whole treatises are drafted on these cards—not just instructions for sour cream coffee cake or lemon drop cookies.
He writes his welcome: “Have a seat, make yourselves comfortable. Get something to drink, have a slice of salami.”
Then he digresses and gets lost in his thoughts, remembering his grandfather, who felt a man should win on personality, not possessions. That said, the old man, Millard Hitchens, was fond of boiled Valencia peanuts and carried a brown paper sack of them everywhere he went. The Big Guy remembers thinking it wasn’t classy enough, but everyone seemed to love talking about his grandfather and his boiled nuts. When he thinks about it now, it occurs to him that the peanuts were something that he’d grown up with in the South. No one up North ate boiled peanuts. They were a conversation starter, a way of making a connection. His grandfather often bragged that he could talk to anyone about anything. The Big Guy was closer to his grandfather, who made his money in extruding metal and later plastics, than to his father, who was kind of an ass. His grandfather was an old-school Southern gentleman who had a lot of respect for men who got their hands dirty, working men. He made his money off the labor of others. His father, who moved North at sixteen, liked to make his money off money itself. The two men didn’t get along, and as a young man, the Big Guy was often put between them—as referee. He’s never gotten over how his father took advantage of the Big Guy’s wedding by making a deal with Charlotte’s father and uncles that allowed him to recover helium from her family’s gas fields. Historically, Charlotte’s family had been resistant to outside investors but the marriage made him kin. Later, his father bought out a uranium mining operation in that same area, and to show his gratitude, he offered the Big Guy part of the deal and actually made a sizable profit off his own son. At the time the Big Guy hated him for it—now he just chuckles. Clearly the Big Guy learned a thing or two from both of them. He now owns the helium company in its entirety, and one of the first investments using money his grandfather left him was buying more Walt Disney stock. When the Big Guy was a child, his grandfather gave him a thousand shares as he believed it was useful for children to understand “where the fun came from.” Taking a cue from his father’s way of doing business, the Big Guy would double down on Disney whenever he had extra money. The day after JFK was shot, the stock market went down almost 3 percent and closed early so people could mourn, but before it closed, the Big Guy bought in. He did the same thing with the Cuban Missile Crisis and when Nixon resigned, and then again when Reagan was shot. When others pulled back to “wait and see,” he went forward, like a looter. It’s not the kind of thing he brags about—but if pressed, he will tell you that he always loved the elephant. What elephant? The Republican elephant? “Not that elephant, the real Dumbo,” he would say. “I love Dumbo. But I don’t like being taken for a ride.” He had plenty of other investments and punch lines but that one gave him the biggest kick. Meanwhile, he’s noticed that the market is down about five hundred points this morning—but he’s not buying.
