"You may be right," he said. "I'm not going to bust your, uh, balls on this. But I like you and I want you to be careful out there. Maybe we're a little behind the times. Or maybe other people have gotten too far out in front of themselves. Some things never change. Death, taxes —and somebody always pays for lunch."
Aldridge took his cigar case from the table and selected a smoke. He examined it fondly and lit up. "Ever heard of Jimmy Ling?"
"No." She could feel a story coming on. God, was she glad she wasn't going to have to hear any more of these stories.
"Jimmy Ling was the Mike Milken slash Bernie Melman of his time, which was basically the early seventies. Sounds Chinese but he was actually Texan..."
While he paused to puff his cigar, Trina picked up an orange cracker and spread it with orange cheddar spread; it seemed appropriate that in this place they served a kind of cheese and a kind of cracker that hadn't been seen elsewhere in the city for years.
A uniformed security man steamed into the grill room. "Are you all right, sir," he asked, staring at Trina.
"Do I look endangered?" Aldridge's withering scorn communicated itself to the guard. "Please escort my friend here to the lobby if you think you can manage it."
"Do I get a final request," Trina asked. bure.
"Finish the story."
"Well, briefly, Jimmy Ling started out of his garage with three thousand dollars, and within a couple years Ling-Temco-Vought had become I think the fourteenth largest corporation in the country. Bought up a lot of companies, and he did it all with leverage. Invented this special one-stop process where instead of borrowing the money and then going after the company he'd offer the stockholders paper. Soft money. He'd trade bonds—subordinated debentures—in exchange for their stock. People started calling the bonds Chinese paper. Some of us think of it as the original junk bond. Face value looked good. But then interest rates shot up and there was nothing behind the paper. Ling-Temco-Vought collapsed like a ton of fool's-gold bricks. It was basically a house of cards in the first place."
He drew deeply on the cigar, blew out a great gout of smoke. Melman, Trina noted, continued to speak while he was smoking his cigar. Not that she was quite sure what that might mean. The security guard, after Aldridge's dressing-down, stood at attention throughout this recitation.
"Chinese paper, huh?"
Aldridge shrugged. "Just a story. Only fifteen years ago, but nobody remembers it."
"I'll keep it in mind." She stood up, holding out her hands as if for cuffs, which gesture served to increase the embarrassment of the men.
"For what it's worth," Aldridge concluded.
Trina handed her cigar to the security man, who took it instinctively without knowing what to do with it, then marched out of the grill room ahead of him.
Aldridge hoisted another orange-smeared cracker and called out to the barman for one more drink. Basically, kids like Cox scared the hell out of him. He and many of his peers had more or less drifted into investment banking and finance; they had come from schools and families where it was a respectable option, like the ministry for genteel British families of the nineteenth century or the military for a certain type of southern family. And like career officers who dutifully march off to war, he and his fellow bankers soldiered on through the mud and gore of the seventies when the stock market took heavy losses and interest rates climbed sick-eningly like casualty figures in a losing battle. Hard times. They'd held enough ground to counterattack when the battle turned around in the eighties, and suddenly they had to run to keep up with the front. But these new kids, the class of '80 or whatever it was, they were carpetbaggers. Opportunists without a sense of history, or of allegiance to institutions. Terrifying when you thought about it, kids in suspenders who believed they were entitled to make millions, as scary in their way as the remorseless child murderers who inhabited the ghettos to the north, who'd pull the trigger on anyone who stood between them and their momentary desires.
"Fucking kids," Aldridge was heard to mutter as the barman brought him his drink. It would be time to get out soon, retire with his legally-sanctioned, criminally excessive gains. He would be forty-four in a few days.
Bull Soames, old pal of his from Salomon Brothers, waddled over, Chivas in fist.
"What the hell was all that about, Nick?"
"Brief glimpse of the future, Bull."
22
"What's the deal here—you don't let minority-type people sit at your front booths?"
The hostess's brittle carapace of attitude was visibly pierced by this remark, although she herself was Asian. She glanced nervously between the row of front booths and her appointment book. "Julian always saves a booth for me up front," Washington added, appealing almost simultaneously to the mutually exclusive notions of an elitist social hierarchy and a democratic standard of fairness. This contradiction seemed to escape their hostess, who, after a moment's tortured hesitation led them to the table Washington requested.
In his opinion, life was too short to eat a meal in an unfashionable restaurant, and this was the most talked-about downtown establishment of the season. It was remarkable not so much for its fixed as for its transient decor, their fellow diners appearing to have been selected by an interior decorator. A sleek feline prettiness prevailed. The movie actors and columnar fashion models wore ripped jeans and T-shirts, and everyone else wore black. The lighting was brilliant, as if to facilitate photography. Russell would normally be happy to be here, though he had what he considered to be larger issues on his mind.
In his blue business suit, Whitlock was conspicuously out of place. "How's the food here," he asked, after they were seated.
"We don't come here for the food," Washington said. "In fact, it's hip to say you hate the food."
"So why do we come?"
"We come here so we can be abused by that hot little Asian piece and then beg for attention from these arrogant mannequins slumming as waiters and waitresses. Because it's happening. Because at any given moment there is one single place which is the dead center of hip consciousness and at nine-thirty on a Wednesday night in May of 1987, this is it. So dig it, Whit. And try not to look like you just got off the fucking bus."
Whitlock did not appear convinced. "It's a little early to celebrate," he said, after Washington waved to the waiter and ordered a bottle of champagne.
"We're not celebrating yet," Washington said. "We're just drinking. Once we start celebrating, you'll know it, chief."
Russell had confided his plan earlier in the week. Washington had extracted a series of concessions and promises and then brought a lawyer to lunch for a final discussion, wheedling and negotiating to the point that Russell was nearly sorry he had ever approached him at all. But he was a good editor and he had superb political instincts. It was David Whitlock, though, whom Russell really needed. He knew all the numbers, was as intimate with the financial details of the company as anyone they would be up against. And if there was something wrong with Mel-man's campaign, Whit would spot it.
"I feel more than a little uncomfortable about all this," Whitlock began. "I was sitting in front of the computer last night running numbers and projections and models, and I suddenly realized I was trafficking in inside information. I have access to stuff that someone outside couldn't get at."
"That's true of any management buyout situation."
"Well, maybe it's not illegal, but is it ethical? We're going to buy stock out from under people who don't know what we know. Is that fair?"
"It's the nature of markets," Russell said. "Nobody has to sell."
"Fuck fair," Washington said, "I want to know if this is going to work. What does your computer tell you about that, Whit?"
"It's feasible. Russell's right that the company's undervalued. Shit, so is Exxon. I'd still like to know where you're getting the rest of this cash."
"It's there," Russell said. He did not particularly want ei
ther of them to know that Melman was giving him almost ten percent of the equity, subject to future performance goals. As sort of a side bet, Russell had purchased a hundred thousand dollars' worth of the stock, taking the full fifty thousand dollars of his brand-new credit line and doubling it with a margin from his broker—shares that would leap in value at the announcement of a tender offer. Trina Cox was getting a small piece of the action; Melman, who was raising most of the capital through the banks and keeping most of the equity for himself, had authorized Russell to shave off a thin slice for Whitlock, if necessary.
"Where's there?"
"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then—"
"The other side can raise money, too. Harold and Kleinfeld and the rest. If they mount a successful defense, we're out on the streets. And what about loyalty?"
"How do you spell it," asked Washington.
"Harold's done a lot for you two. He's done a lot for publishing."
Washington rolled his eyes, and then a silence fell as they all seemed to contemplate the figure they were reluctant to cast as antagonist in the proposed drama.
"What's he done for me lately?" Washington said, breaking the spell. "Besides shooting down my last two books? Harold's mainly been jamming me up."
"Ditto."
As if witnessing something unseemly, Whitlock turned away while Washington and Russell slapped hands and clinked glasses. "Is that who I think it is?" Whitlock said suddenly, nodding sideways toward the next booth at a screen actress with frizzy blond tresses and lips almost pneumatic in their fullness.
Leaning forward, Washington said, "If you come in with us, we'll make this the official company cantina, we'll have her in our booth, we'll have her sitting in your lap, Whit, because we'll be such bad motherfuckers every girl in town will want to know us. To know us is to blow us, you hear what I'm saying? Once we hit the big money, I personally guarantee you'll have to have the pants of your suits let out in the crotch. We'll make you an honorary Negro. Shit, you can buy new suits—we'll have old Paul Stuart himself come down to the office and measure you personally. We'll be too busy and important—"
"Is that why we're doing this?"
"That's why anybody does anything."
"I thought I heard Russell just yesterday talking about Literature and socially conscious publishing."
"That's because he's a repressed white boy, he has to say that shit to fool himself. You're too smart for that, Whit. You're a businessman, right? You went to bidness school, not like this turkey here, this culture vulture. You live in the real world, you know what makes it go 'round. This is America, land of opportunism."
Russell was pleased to see that Washington was already on the job. Explicitly disingenuous—speech for him was always to some extent a performance—Washington nevertheless had the ability to convince, if only to the point that you felt it would be very stuffy to believe completely in your own position, or for that matter in anything. It would be so uncool. In this fashion he often managed to conquer. Nobody wanted to be left out. Like Hamlet, Whitlock would always find sound reasons for both sides of the argument; ultimately it would take an appeal to his emotions to win him. Now, with Washington on Russell's side, it came to this: Did he want to be one of the boys?
After Whitlock ventured off in search of the men's room, Washington asked Russell if he'd told Jeff what was afoot.
"Not yet."
"I wouldn't let him hear it from anyone else," he said, as Whitlock reappeared.
A tiny elfin figure passed in front of their booth, a young blond man dressed entirely in black, his long, pale face bisected by heavy dark glasses. He fluttered a hand at Washington.
"Aren't we important tonight," he said.
"Every night," Washington said.
To Russell: "Still looking over my book proposal?"
"We're looking hard at it," said Russell. Who was this guy?
"I'm thrilled."
"Who was that," Whitlock asked. "I thought Truman Capote was dead."
"Got reincarnated as a gossip columnist," said Washington.
"What," asked Whit.
"That's Johnny the Baptist. Chronicler of quips that pass in the night."
"Shit—that guy," Russell muttered. "I think I lost his proposal."
"Is he going to write about us," Whit asked. "What if Harold hears about this?"
Washington rolled his eyes. "About what? Three guys nobody's ever heard of who work together having dinner? Stop the presses. Anyway, don't worry, he never writes about anybody who dresses like you."
Fearing that Whit was becoming isolated, Russell took the black linen sleeve of Washington's Versace jacket between his fingers and said, Speaking of dress, did they let you wear clothes like this up at Harvard? Didn't they teach you about oxford cloth and tweed?"
"They tried. And I tried to teach them how to dance."
"Obviously a standoff."
"Yeah, but we always had girls from Brown to console us," Washington countered. "They used to cruise up from Providence just desperate for real male companionship."
"You were welcome to most of them," Russell said.
"Very chivalrous of you."
When Washington excused himself, Russell leaned closer to Whitlock. "Listen, on top of everything else we've talked about, I can promise you one percent of equity if the deal goes through and a flat hundred thousand if it doesn't. I'm making it real easy for you, Whit. You're getting a free ride."
"It doesn't feel easy."
But as dinner progressed, Whitlock relaxed. He warmed to the role of innocent abroad, refusing to take his surroundings for granted, complaining about the brightness of the light and the delicate size of the portions. He kept asking the waitress for a pair of sunglasses and an electron microscope; for dessert he facetiously requested three and a half grams of sorbet. But he snapped to attention and earnestly pumped the hand of Julian Heath when the elegant, distracted owner of the restaurant came over to say hello. Whitlock understood, despite his relative social innocence, that the owner of a fashionable restaurant was a personage whose importance was roughly equivalent to that of a magazine editor, a symphony conductor or a painter with a one-man show at the Whitney, although as it happened this one wished to be known for his sculpture and bitterly resented having to be civil to sculptors and painters who did not own restaurants, as well as filmmakers, rock stars, novelists and the fashion lemmings who followed them around. Doing a restaurant was something Heath had backed into, practically, a way of paying the rent until his sculpture took off, but now the place he'd opened a few years back for the SoHo art crowd had become so successful that he was stuck with it, stuck with a five-year lease and the label of restaurateur. This, his second restaurant, was even hotter than the first. It didn't seem fair to him: if it had failed he'd have been in his studio right now hammering steel instead of stopping here to schmooze with Washington Lee, though Washington was okay, he had spent a lot of money in Julian's restaurants, was good-looking and amusing and a spade to boot, and he usually brought the same kind of people with him—at least until tonight. It was policy at the restaurant to hide the suits in the back corner. What the hell was this crew doing at the front booth?
"Okay, okay," Whitlock said as Heath escaped, having succeeded in igniting small fires of self-satisfaction in the breasts of the three publishing colleagues. "I surrender. Order champagne. You knew I'd say yes, so let's get it over with."
23
The buzz enters through his lungs and spreads like an electric current into the bloodstream, passes Go and collects two million dollars, rockets up the spine, deposits it at the back of the skull, where it explodes in a burst of white phosphorescence—that prickly feeling in the scalp is what it feels like to step onstage in front of the screaming people, plugged into the main source, tapping into power absolute and burning with that pure, white light...
But the light fades. The
light always fades, the buzz modulating into raspy static; the tingle that started on the inside of his skull has moved deep into the folds of his brain. Ace leaned back and rubbed his head against the wall as if that might soothe the sudden itch—a fiery, subcutaneous rash which must at all costs be scratched.
Holding a blackened glass pipe, he was sitting on a warped linoleum floor in a room with five other people, three men and two women. There was an old bathtub in the middle of the room, painted green long before and flaking now, filled with soda and beer cans, cigarette butts, plastic wrappers, glass vials and organic refuse. From within came the rustle of paper, sounds of scratching and mastication. Claws.
Oh, man, he thought. Ugly.
At one end of the dim, narrow room, a fat man in a distended Billy Idol T-shirt perched on a tall chrome stool that appeared to have been uprooted from an old luncheonette, filling the doorway with his bulk. At the other end of the room was a second, closed door. The steel had been crudely blowtorched at chest level and fitted with a sliding panel. Behind the door a sweating homeboy huddled like an astronaut inside an armored capsule, a former bedroom also paneled in steel; a shoulder-wide triple-bolted steel hatch opened to a hole punched through the brick wall of the adjoining tenement, providing a handy escape route.
Two brothers in fishnet shirts slouched in the corner, looking psychotic—Ace glanced away real quick, lest they think he was dissing them. A white boy gazed longingly at the oracular glass pipe in his hand: in his football jersey he looked as if he'd just driven in from the suburbs, a boy who was going to be late for geography class the next day. After staring for several minutes at the blackened, empty tube, he stood up, tacked over to the rear door and, with all the dignity he could muster, knocked on the little steel panel. The panel slid back and a voice barked. "Yeah?"