Margaret drifted in, quiet as a feather, removed the empty espresso cup, left a cup of lemon verbena tea in its place, three gag-sized multivitamins, a shot glass of soda water.
I tried to imagine the kind of debris left behind by hackers in the forest: gold foil condom wrappers strewn around the base of the redwoods; I made a mental note to dig out my Rachmaninov CDs. I told Hawthorne to hold on, wait here, I have to piss, and I walked deliberately fast, trying as best I could to avoid all forms of incidental social interactions with subordinates, slipping my gaze just beneath the rays of eye contact coming from the bank of interns along the corridor that ran from my wing of the office to the bathrooms. Inside, two of our senior executives were swapping stories about a fishing trip in which one of the senior executives had caught eight small sharks with his son, eating one grilled, Cajun style, for lunch, while the other marveled at it all as some out of reach pursuit, although I was paying him more than twice what I was paying Margaret and right then and there I remembered that he ate microwaved scrambled eggs in the office each morning in bad suits; I also recalled telling Hawthorne we couldn’t bring him along anymore to client pitches. I came back and relayed to Hawthorne the shark story. He was reading another Paul Theroux New Yorker short story, snacking on the almonds left on the sofa.
“Mark, I thought about it,” said Hawthorne. “The Joel James situation. It will ignite the passionate haters from the European accounts, forcing some of them to start looking elsewhere, thin the herd a bit, and it will fatten up Joel’s already swollen ego to the point of insufferability, which will—you mark my words—within the next six months, instigate some kind of personal crisis and this will humble him enough that he might start listening to Oscar, who, I have it on good authority, got slanderously drunk at his sister’s wedding in Nevada and committed an extramarital indiscretion. He was already not very well-liked by the Panamanians or the Bahrainis, who are paying on time and taking their cues these days from Heather, who—thank God—we promoted last year yet, of course, now she’s going to pop out a bambino and go out on maternity leave, which would leave us saddled with Oscar and the Panamanians and a recalcitrant Joel James, who, also on good authority, told the New Zealanders that Oscar was on his last legs here and that they needn’t work too closely with him anymore, that it was okay for them to just call him up direct, that he was their man in Havana, so to speak. What kind of sharks were they?”
“Lemon sharks, I think. Heather is pregnant? Isn’t she divorced?”
“In vitro. April. Did I mention Francois was coming to lunch? Flew down from Teterboro on the corporate jet to discuss the rebrand. It’s been moved to a private room. I read the article about him you sent me. I’ve never worked with a former hairstylist. They are the most disorganized client I have ever worked with. They would not thrive in a Germanic society.”
“We live in a Germanic society. Do you think we can get away with referencing this in our introductory remarks? The hairstylist part?”
“Don’t see why not. Probably a terrible idea, too. I like it. There’s another thing.” Hawthorne sounded giddy. “Earlier this morning, I got off the phone with Gloria and she finally got it all set up. We will be having a special audience tomorrow with Yoweri Museveni, after his speech at the Library of Congress. Noon, or shortly thereafter, you know the Africans. Location TBD, you know, security. Well, what do you think? Another kill tomorrow for the wall?”
“Is that Ghana? I think Gloria is an outstanding referral source. We should be paying her more. What are we paying her for all of this?”
“Whatever it is, we should pay her more.”
Gloria’s long service as a trade negotiator meant she knew the heads of every regime on the continent, and had befriended a smattering of key advisors like the Nigerian Finance Minister. Whenever Gloria was about to introduce me to a head of state, it was always with the proviso that “they were grossly misunderstood right now” by the likes of Foreign Affairs magazine and Fareed Zakaria, code for saying what they really wanted was for us to book them on Charlie Rose for a long, truth-packed, one-sided format to proselytize over the misunderstanding, which is not at all the Charlie Rose format—or really anyone’s format—though it did not preclude us from accepting these assignments on condition of our own proviso (explained always to the exceedingly polite and frail aide tasked by his president as our liaison); Charlie Rose, we told them, might actually ask very direct questions, but we, of course, would cheerfully and earnestly preview with the president the anticipated interview.
“By the way, Gerard was pleasingly appreciative of the raise you approved yesterday, Mark. Mentioned something about now being able to buy an engagement ring for a girl he has been dating for several years. Can you believe that? We live in a day and age when making a previous salary of $110,000 leaves you unable to buy an engagement ring. Tragic times, really. Museveni is an anti-homosexual and won’t lift a presidential finger to overturn a law that bans gays from being gay and doing gay acts, which the law makes punishable by death; but don’t worry, Mark, according to Laura and Marcus—yes, I pulled them into this—no one legitimately believes they would actually execute any of them. But petitions are floating around from gay groups and celebrities to the State Department. This will be tricky. We’ll need to pay for a few opinion articles. I’ve already called Gary. We’ll need to assemble a chorus of Museveni supporters. It’s a big misunderstanding, Mark. The Africans, Gloria says, confuse homosexuality with pedophilia, which is justifiably abhorrent, but they do not distinguish between the two and so this whole mess is being misreported by the press as a bounty hunt by Museveni against the gays.”
“Right. Don’t we have the lunch tomorrow with Francois and the team? I don’t suppose we can cancel that.” I waited for a confirmation but got none. “Well, I suppose we will just spend the day hustling around then. How long is the audience?”
“He’s giving us fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes for $2 million. I’m thinking we should charge that just because we should.”
“It seems absurd.”
“It is for sure absurd.”
“Not the money but that we have to have a special meeting at all.”
“Precisely. They’ve got the balls to hypothetically execute their gay pedophiles but the president cannot hire a firm recommended by a trusted American advisor without meeting its principals.”
“It’s a lopsided pool of attention, and we are going to experience a strange, surreal, absurd fifteen minutes tomorrow after lunch with Francois that is all of those things too,” I said, envisioning myself saying many times in the meeting, Loren Ipsem Dolorum.
Sally McGee walked in, my head of HR. She had a nervous affliction, could have been mild Tourette’s, her face would twitch every few seconds or so and her lips would purse into a kiss followed by rapid blinking. She began as my assistant, came in on her first day eight years ago with what appeared to be a tackle box for her lunch box and a wardrobe scoured from one of those Georgetown consignment shops that recirculated the Ralph Lauren suits of embassy row wives. Coco Chanel gone fishin’. She knew about my condition and protected it.