You walk out with your scratch-away ticket and see a rusty Buick with a duct-taped rear light, a man in a bandana chastising his woman for being on the pipe. That’s private shit, that’s private fucking shit we do out alone bitch. These children is in harm’s way now bitch.
I turned the page to busts of four chemotherapy patients. A man in his fifties, shirtless, lying on a complicated machine. A phone number in the lower left corner, below the website and QR code.
I knew Colin was at the kitchen table, demanding that Mae let him FaceTime me and I could hear her explaining that FaceTime does not work when someone was miles above Nevada. I resisted the urge to log on.
Brenda swung by with the drink cart, pouring more Margaux carafes of tepid coffee, sugar packets crammed into Styrofoam cups.
Where did the sugar come from, Colin would have asked.
A plantation outside of Sao Paulo, and maybe the baron had a small warehouse on site for the unhung art, and maybe he had someone to do his clothes and sipped Drambuie and stalked his own art collection afterhours. I saw the patchy byways bisecting the jungle, the sea voyages, the names of all the ports of call, expressionless customs officials, the sugar on the docks. There was an import quota allocated to Brazil.
He would giggle through missing front baby teeth as I described those eighteen-wheelers long-hauling all that sugar from the ports into cities like Charlotte and Raleigh, the minor notes of America.
Where are those, he would say.
All around us.
At the last radiant edge of America, Lars and Fung were waiting for me, their lone counsel, retained to translate them out of the headlines. I wanted to barge into the cockpit and steer the plane backward, walk back into the house, recite all the facts of her to Colin. This is how she sketched you when you were just a week old. Or maybe I would have shut off the phone last night and missed this flight altogether. We would drive into the tallgrass peninsula. I made a note to myself to show him more pictures of her. I saw the desert below, empty and scathing. The border of Nevada looks like the border of California. We are never where we are. She loved these kinds of flowers, hyacinth. One time I called her the hyacinth girl and she made me purple cupcakes. He giggled. When you arrived, you had a full head of bloody black hair, not even crying, not a whimper. You are a good boy, don’t cry. Please try not to cry. Mommy held you this way. Put your hand there. Think of her. You will hear her when you pray. Just close your eyes.
So I flew.
chapter two
Long Bridge Management was headquartered two blocks south of Central Park in a high rise beside the Harry Winston store at the corner of West Fifty Sixth and Fifth Avenue, a city block without beggars clotted with Medici wealth.
It was the precise spot in Manhattan certain to inflame international NGOs, envious Greenwich hedge funds, anyone who did anything altruistic at all in the past decade for the heavily-indebted countries of equatorial Africa; Argentina analysts and think-tank types; a Reagan vs. Mondale majority of the media—and this even included British press, particularly The Guardian, although The Economist published, on cue, each winter, its restrained, frigid diatribe about the “vulture fund,” a deceptive phrase meant to describe their business practice of buying up the distressed debt of poor countries and rapaciously litigating their way towards full payment on the bonds, plus accrued interest, of course. Their coverage was lopsided—never mind that the brutal despots of these countries and their even more brutal sons had siphoned off large quantities of the national patrimony, oil, diamonds, precious metals, had left their country to rot, ruling afar from their Mayfair mansions or their St. Germain pieds-à-terre.
The Peninsula hotel was right there on Long Bridge’s block, or, if you preferred—which I did—you could stroll across Fifth Avenue to the St. Regis.
Despite myself, I found that I liked Alan Newman right away, his Old Testament omniscience, although I would still put him through the standard rigmarole for the fun of it.
We had met in late October of that year, a phone call that had been rescheduled repeatedly after belligerent volleys of emails between assistants that spanned too many days. He was an unnaturally calm man, smooth baritone, one of those perpetually unwrinkled gentlemen who stay pristine whatever the weather, his mind alive, in dialectic with itself, a distance runner’s physique verging on enfeebled.
During the OneSpeak crisis Alan hovered above it all, King Solomon, a man who had gracefully exiled all forms of stress from his life. Those at my firm who met him universally said he would excel at delivering a terminal cancer diagnosis to a small child’s mother.
“As you well know, Long Bridge specializes in assessing and adjudicating risk,” he said. “We make bets on our judgments. We get right up to the line and back away when we sense a death blow. We are not wrong very often. Often we are spectacularly right. Evidently, this is why so many people hate us.”
Miraculously, the Long Bridge partners had managed to stay out of public view for much of the past decade, a hermetically sealed outfit, infallible Mandarins ruling from behind the high walls of the Forbidden City; that I was even on the phone with Alan was, in itself, a remarkable rarity, something worthy of Georgetown cocktail circuit chatter.
I had known how this conversation would play out ever since Alan’s ambiguous first email to me, a correspondence so purposefully elliptical it seemed crafted as sport by law professors. I knew where the note would lead but was anyway prepared to steer the call towards a formal engagement.
Those who resist specifying the precise nature of their media quandary are usually mired in a slow-motion saga, their ambiguity a tell-tale sign, and I had some sense that he would be calling with a crisis. Invoking crisis, you shed accountability, ensured self-preservation: to endow a crisis with artificial mystery was to inflate it beyond manageable dimensions, a mess demanding professional oversight. Thus, for having recognized the need for a P.R. firm, you could even win some credit.
My firm was a clean-up crew, albeit white collar and excessively expensive. Unlike their legal counsel, we were never cosseted, and for that inequity I had decided after Monica died to charge a “Fuck You” price, enough to force a reappraisal of our pedigree, but mostly because I didn’t care if they turned us away; the less I cared, the more I charged, and, to my surprise, the more they paid us to handle the live grenade of the news media.
“When it was unfashionable to do so, my firm invested $390 million in a tech startup,” said Alan. “We made over $4 billion five months later. The market snatches up mythology. There was no product per se, just an algorithm. We gamble but tell investors we are ‘taking calculated risks.’”
“And you are looking to my firm to handle your reputational challenges?” I interrupted.
The trick was to throw underhand pitches—warm them up a little before the heat, and, if you could, try and seem a little naïve. The trick was Hawthorne’s, who I had been working with now for almost fifteen years. After I interviewed him the first time for the job, he sent along a thank you note the next day on personalized stationary, initials embossed in a Roman font, and, in his final sentence, had said that he deemed me a “fine fellow,” which endeared him to me permanently.