Turn of the Century (89 page)

The pharmacy calls and says they have some photos developed from film that was dropped off a year ago, and that they’ll be destroyed if he doesn’t pick them up. It is an excuse to leave the house. But now, walking back down Water Street, he finds in among the snapshots from last summer at Lake Marten and the ninth-wedding-anniversary barbecue the kids cooked, a picture of a man he’s never seen before. The man is a youngish, good-looking Asian in a sharp suit, blowing a kiss toward the camera. It looks like he’s in Madison Square Park. George stops. The pharmacy must have given him somebody else’s photo accidentally. No, there he is on the negative strip between a frame of Sarah and one of the Land Cruiser. It’s from their roll. Lizzie took the picture.

Late one night, after the first trucks have already pulled in to start unloading huge, whole, dead fish across South Street, he has a strong hunch that Lizzie is going to call him in a few hours, after he is asleep. He decides to call her for the first time, in Jakarta. There is no answer in her room. It is the middle of the afternoon in Indonesia. He awakes at noon. He waits until three and then dials again. He knows what’s going to happen. He knows. The phone in her room rings and rings. It’s three
A.M
. in Jakarta, and Lizzie isn’t in her room. He knew it. He sits, staring at
Al & Monica
with the sound off, for a full half hour. (She’s surprisingly good as a talk-show host. George wonders if they cast Al
Roker in order to make her look slim by comparison.) He calls back at three-thirty—three-thirty in the morning, Jakarta time—and there’s still no answer. He knew it. Then he calls right back and asks the operator to leave a message for Miss Zimbalist.
“Ahhh,”
the operator says. He wonders what
Ahhh
means.

She laughs. She says they drove directly from the U.S. embassy to stay overnight at the ambassador’s beach house. She says, “Honey, that’s absurd, I can’t tell you how absurd. You are being paranoid. But I guess it means you still love me.” She brought up 1988, and said that maybe he’s just working out “old, impacted guilt” over New Orleans. “You’ve got enough to worry about without being paranoid too,” she says. What does that mean—“enough to worry about”? “I am not having an affair with Harold Mose. Or Gloria Mose or Hank Saddler.” She is emphatic and extreme, volunteering unsolicited denials. It reminds George of Bill Clinton. It reminds George, now that he thinks about it, now that he’s thought about it for most of the night, of the ad for the Chelsea Girls’ ersatz-peephole web site.
No fakes or setups. This is the real thing. We promise. And you can see it all for free. These girls are totally unaware that you’re watching them
.

The technology would work great right now for terrorists who want to remain safe at home—for bombers of abortion clinics and federal buildings and Israeli buses who want to watch their car bombs go off, to see the survivors stumble out dazed and bloody, to count the ambulances screaming in. For remote-control postattack reconnaissance, command and control for the insane, it would more than suffice.

And soon it will empower everyone. The internet will have fulfilled its revolutionary potential. Then each of us will be omniscient, everyone a Big Brother, and all barriers transparent. For now, however, it’s like trying to race a Model A across the continent in a week—possible, but only very theoretically. The odds against Lindbergh were long, too. Such an undertaking has its own old-fashioned American mechanic’s nobility, doesn’t it? The failed attempt is preferable to the gnaw of passivity. Even the accursed victim can redeem his victimhood.

But alas, developing nations are developing nations. The sharpest pictures, where detail can be made out, are not the sorts that get transmitted
from the streets and squares of Third World cities. These on the screen now seem especially hazy, cities in the mists. And nearly all the images are panoramas or close-ups, postcard views or individual rooms and corridors, neither of which are ideal for his purposes.

At first he is brimming with beginner’s-luck hopefulness, ready for eureka. The U.S. embassy in Jakarta is on a street called Merdeka Selatan, and then right away he finds two cams operating on Merdeka Selatan. One of them is even pointed in the right direction, with a color image clear enough to apprehend the gender of passersby. After watching sixty real-time images over four and a half hours last night (midday in Jakarta), he thought he lucked out. There was a shot of two women and three men stepping from a Mercedes in front of the embassy. He stored the image and looked closely, but it was impossible to tell.

If she happens to step into information sciences classroom 112A at the University of Jakarta, he will have a stunningly clear picture. But he’s not mad; he knows the odds are long. Still, there are at least fourteen cams in the city, including four at the university, two at a giant shopping center called Block M, one on Merdeka Square near her hotel, and one, called the Mikrolet-Mikrolet-cam, mounted next to the driver inside a public bus. The bus image is George’s favorite, aesthetically and sociologically. (It’s possible she’ll get on a bus. She takes them in New York.) Given the rate at which fresh pictures arrive from each camera, it is easy to make the circuit among the fourteen Jakarta-cams, one after another, and never miss an image. There is a surprising comfort and solace in that. Casting into the pond is still fishing, even if you never hook a bass. He is watching her, even if he can’t see her.

Lizzie hasn’t had
a cigarette since Tokyo. All the smoke in the air makes it easier to quit, aversion therapy on a massive, inescapable scale—the
smokes
, plural, as she has learned here. In Indonesia, seams of coal as well as trees and brush are on fire, so the smoke in Jakarta is more sulfurous than the smoke in Kuala Lumpur. On the other hand, the Jakarta smoke has a slightly sweet top note of burning peat. During dinner at the ambassador’s beach house last night, Mr. Hatta, the Indonesian deputy information minister (who’s also an army lieutenant general) portrayed “our zone of fire” as a kind of fascinating adventure-travel destination, since the coal started burning when lightning struck “at a time before your Christ.” Mr. Hatta also mentioned “some very eye-row-neek advantages of the fire,” such as endangered orangutans being driven from the forests into villages, where they’re slaughtered and eaten “by the starving peasant folk.” He agreed to put in a good word with both his cousin, who runs the national TV channel, and his wife’s brother, who runs the private HTI, Happy Televisi Indonesia, about buying MBC’s programs, including
NARCS
.

They have arrived at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. She is heading home. Whisking in self-important Mercedeses through unmarked
back gates, passing armed men who stiffen and quake a little instead of scowl, Lizzie finds the VIP routine tolerable for occasional, brief, playacting stretches. It isn’t the Mose
lifestyle
she finds unbearable (unless Gloria Mose is defined as a lifestyle feature), it’s this business itself, big business, business that is only deal making—the deals transacted with smug, hard, murky men. She is a shopkeeper at heart, as Ben Gould says. Fine Technologies is a gemütlich $102-million shop selling notions.

“There she is,” Saddler says as they drive onto the runway toward the Mose jet.

“It is a lovely machine, isn’t it?” Harold says.

The idea that she’s sleeping with Harold Mose is so off, so farfetched, that it makes her wonder about George’s judgment. Even paranoid fears ought to be in the ballpark. If she were going to have an affair, hell, she’d sooner have it with …

She looks around the limo … at Hank Saddler reading his DHL-ed copy of
Teen People
 … Randy, bobbing his head in time to the Garth Brooks DAT piped into his ears …

No one here, including Harold Mose. Harold, she realizes, has become less attractive by the day. He seems a little older and homelier after his explanation of the Malaysian condolence-card business, and homelier still after he pandered to Jimmy Wong’s Jew-baiting, and tittered about the orangutans.

During the trip, he’s revealed a dozen of his habitual fudges to her, microcrimes like “the little accounting time-travel hocus-pocus” he said they’ve pulled for years. A shell corporation in Tonga straddling the 180-degree meridian, the international date line, allows Mose Media Holdings to get away with booking big sales from the next fiscal quarter in the current quarter, in order to make current revenues look larger. And he told her about how MMH pushes hundreds of millions of dollars in “marketing costs,” especially the MBC’s, off their income statements and onto the books of various friendly Asian telephone and television companies. (“Partners,” Mose called them, and “strategic allies,” not “accomplices.”) For their trouble, the executives of the Asian companies are awarded cheap below-market Mose Media stock warrants, which they can sell for a profit. “It’s half the reason Arnold let me start an American network,” he told Lizzie. “It turns
out
everything
in TV is a ‘marketing cost.’ ” Hearing Mose’s tangled, whispered confidences aboard the jet gives them, in Lizzie’s mind, an extra patina of darkness and slime. When she e-mailed Ben from Jakarta to get a reading on whether this cost-shuffling scheme is criminal, he replied, “It’s a fucking rig. But legal, probably.”

Mose is confiding in Lizzie more and more, and she is afraid she understands why. When she didn’t put up a fuss over
Real Time
, she made her bones, proving to Mose that she is a grownup, steeped in realpolitik and focused on the main chance. She still doesn’t feel (very) guilty about not standing by her man and quitting. But she detests its implications. She hates that it makes Mose believe she’s like him.

“Captain Sam tells me it’ll be a fifteen-hour flight to Los Angeles today,” the Cindy Crawford flight attendant says, “and I’ll be presenting some dinner ideas as soon as we’re in the air, including a fantastic fresh pork satay.”

They are already high, rocketing northeast. Saddler has stuck in earplugs, and he’s wearing a huge, silky black sleeping mask.

“Captain Sam wanted me to tell you that if you look out, you’ll be able to see the equator. If the equator were real. Another glazed carambola nugget, Ms. Zimbalist?” the woman says, holding a Josef Hoffmann silver tray in front of her.

“Thank you.” No, it is not the interludes of profligate living that Lizzie minds so much.

“I got a fax from Arnold this morning,” Mose says. “Your friends in Redmond are apparently interested in our digital portfolio. Part of a ‘strategic alliance’ with WebTV, maybe something more.” He sips his virgin gimlet. “What do you think, Elizabeth?”

She thinks:
It’s August now
. She thinks:
Change of control
.

Alone on Water Street
these last weeks, George has been extrapolating. He sees the time, not at all distant, when traffic has been reduced to nothing but these friendly motorized logos. The streets will be devoted entirely to clean, efficient trucks—UPS, DefEx, DHL, FedEx. The delivery drivers will be people’s only direct contact with strangers. Life is migrating indoors quickly, so quickly, to computers and cables and phone lines. And this new economy, prosperity itself, now requires that the transformation proceed. Ten years from now, maybe twenty, the only people on the streets in any numbers will be the smokers, the homeless, and the uniformed drivers of tidy, squarish trucks. And the human drivers’ days are undoubtedly numbered.