Hawthorne was smirking.
“So,” she said, standing in the doorway. She typically could anticipate whatever I was about to say and thus she began nearly every conversation we had with “so.”
“Whatever on the Joel James idea, Hawthorne. You decide.” I turned to Sally. “We might be promoting Joel James. If so, twenty percent seems fair.”
I said, “The Elliot guy was quite fascinating. In about seventy-two hours, after their investment gets tarred and feathered in The Wall Street Journal, he should be calling us waving the white flag.”
“It will be a pointless and obscene fee,” said Hawthorne.
The truth was that White & Partners did not need any new clients; we were brimming with engagements already, and we couldn’t find people fast enough to keep up with all the work.
The firm was twelve years old, employed 150 people, had performed some personal work for President Clinton (we would have happily done work for President George W. Bush but his crowd was famously insular to the point of professional incest). We represented seventeen foreign governments, the uncorrupted countries who grotesquely overpaid, and took on clients the way an Ivy League school scrutinized prospective freshmen. After the Ecuador fiasco three years ago, I insisted that all potential clients submit an Application of Consideration. Once a particular engagement was determined a “good fit,” there was the matter of the cost, a set fee normally in the low millions, to be paid up front upon execution of the contract. If the wire was not received within twenty-four hours of the signed contract, the agreement was null: we would not commence an iota of work until payment was received.
Since this process had been put in place four years ago, there had been only one botched new client: Wal-Mart. They had wanted a firm to reengineer their reputation, something around their corporate refrain of “Save Money, Live Better,” a perfect Demi-glace of messaging, the base for their state and national media defense of their importation of goods manufactured in China. They ended up hiring a firm on K Street staffed with diabetic-looking men in double-breasted suits. When their work with this firm went awry—and it only took a month for them to get caught paying think tank scholars five thousand dollars each for writing opinion articles—the story of Wal-Mart, a Fortune 1 behemoth, hiring a “back-up firm” had spilled into The Wall Street Journal (we leaked it), and the article named us as the firm that had demanded Wal-Mart submit an application to be considered as a client. Our legend inflated to such proportions that every Upper East-side rentier was calling to retain our counsel for his wife’s food allergy awareness foundation or former college roommate’s S.E.C. mess, their brother’s doomed proxy battle with Carl Icahn.
After the Wal-Mart saga, we received twenty Applications for Consideration from Fortune 250 companies the following Friday. We accepted only half of those applications from this batch, but added seventeen million in new revenue that month alone. We hired thirty more professionals and talked about opening a fifth office, Berlin, mostly because Hawthorne had a fetish for East Berlin art galleries, among other fetishes; maybe Mexico City, mostly because I had harbored delusions of retiring to its Pacific coast, deteriorating pleasantly in an adobe home bushy with Bougainvillea, Manny, my gardener-confidante, pruning the vines on the pergola, dispensing trans-generational wisdom. I had postponed the discussion. We had so much excess cash on hand that I had instructed our CFO to buy two million dollars’ worth of gold when it was $500 an ounce. So, at the start of last year, we had six years of operating capital, securitized as gold bars in a vault somewhere.
I preferred to be a behind-the-scenes leader, a presence but not a force. I feigned some token humilities: avoided Italian loafers; wrote with pens lifted from the local hospice; eschewed public speaking invitations; hung Colin’s art on my office walls. Outwardly, I kept an even keel, for Colin’s sake, but, inwardly, all of this was as meaningless to me as discarded ribbon. I knew that everyone who worked for me—even those who were jealous—genuinely admired what had been accomplished at the firm, but I could fathom how they didn’t see right through to the bone of it. Simplicity eludes us all.
The Capitol Hill papers wrote fretfully about White & Partners, unable to explain the nucleus of our explosive growth. At The Palm, industry competitors flung their dagger glances my way as my lunch guests observed the buzzing room in glee. Around this time, I had stopped wearing ties altogether, which pissed off detractors even more. People I had never met tweeted about me. I had grown very secure in my seraphic standing in town, and I acquired a few theatrical eccentricities: when gravitas was called for, I somberly deployed the meaningless Latin filler text for websites under construction—Lorem Ipsum Dolorem; no one ever seemed to notice. In my condition, this emboldened me to clamp down on the serial abuse of adverbs in all written correspondence with engagements, which led to the ousting of a longtime employee, Barbara Hiller, who I knew had been speculating about the origins of my success for a while and whom Hawthorne had pegged as the source of media leaks, the mole for The Washington Post’s story on the “Adverb Mandate,” written as straight-faced as if it was the Watergate scandal, dilating every innuendo about anything to do with White & Partners, all harvested from unnamed sources, dispatched as an alert on all subscribing mobile phones.
I didn’t care: a scandal in Washington was as evanescent as it was inevitable, rarely triggering a complete excommunication. Even if there were more professional missteps, White & Partners had adamantine bona fides.
We shared a building with the bureaucrats of the GSA. In the underground garage, there were lots of Honda Pilots and rusted out Corollas comingled with my staff’s gleaming fleet of European cars. I had technicians from Bang & Olufsen install 300-watt speakers with adaptive bass linearization in the hallway, the reception, the bathrooms, the kitchen, zone-controlled, staff-curated playlists, usually a mix of classic rock, gangsta rap, and Hollywoodized hip-hop. It was the music of an invading army running rampant through eleven thousand square feet of class A office space on the top floor of a trophy building in the commercial district of DC, $125,000 a month, views of the Capitol, the kind of sonic rabble deployed in ’89 against Noriega. There was not an immediate uprising. Given that White & Partners was a despotic nation, the criticisms and vituperations of those who felt victimized by the profane lyrics or the noise levels—or both—took their opposition underground. Soon—maybe three days later—The Hill ran a tabloid story on White & Partners’ “new fascination with misogynistic and oppressive hip-hop music that had sharply divided the DC-based consulting behemoth.”
“So, you wanna do this?” Sally said. She was looking right at me.
“Joel is deserving. Let’s do this please, if you don’t mind.”
Margaret peeked in and frowned; it was her signal for a critical interruption.
“It’s Hanna. She says she must speak with you.”
Sally rolled her eyes and got up and left.