Turn of the Century (92 page)

He left, although he still feels tossed out. It was the first day the kids were back at St. Andrew’s. She came home early to change on her way to a black-tie extravaganza at the Custom House. By the time she got upstairs, he had sprinted from their bedroom up to his office. An hour later, she knocked on his door.

“You’re watching an awful lot of TV during the day,” she said.

“Is that an accusation? And I’m not.”

“You were just now.”

“No.”

“I felt the set. It was hot.”

“You’re the one who lies about smoking cigarettes. To your own children.”

And then there was no stopping. They shouted. They cursed. She reminded him that his paranoia about her Mose files erased from his PowerBook turned out to be nothing—Max had confessed to deleting
them accidentally. And she said Sarah told her she saw him dialing *69 one night after Lizzie got off a phone call. She said she found one of their monthly E-ZPass records, which lists every date and time (and the direction and the
lane
) that the Land Cruiser crossed the Triborough Bridge or the Henry Hudson Bridge or drove through the Holland Tunnel. It was covered with mutlicolored circles and arrows and checks and question marks. All three kids and Rafaela told her the marks weren’t theirs.

“And what the
fuck
were you thinking when you asked Erika Sperakis about renting out a fucking surveillance satellite? Huh, George?” She dropped a piece of MBC stationery onto his desk.

It was then that George decided to abandon his denials. Erika was the producer at
Real Time
in charge of the logistics for the Bohemian Grove story, including the Sovinformsputnik satellite pictures. George had called her to ask about resolutions, advance booking, and costs. Erika gave Lizzie the information to bring home to George.

“It’s Exhibit A time, is it? Okay,” he said, opening his desk drawer, and rummaging to find her mysterious snapshot of the Asian man blowing a kiss. “Who’s
this?
” he asked triumphantly.

“Kenny Chang. Pollyanna’s little brother. This was supposed to be part of the scrapbook I made for her birthday last year.” She looks at George. “Why, am I being accused of sleeping with Ken Chang, too? He’s gay. And you are fucking nuts, George. I cannot stand this anymore. You act like a zombie all the time, and now I’m stalked! By my own husband! I feel like I did when I was five, after the Tate killings.”

Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered in 1969, not far from where the Zimbalists were then living. For days, the neighborhood was in a horror-movie panic.

“Oh, I get it,” George said, grabbing at a new opportunity to go on the offensive. “You’re one of these nuts who holds me responsible for paroling Manson, except you think I did it all just to get back at you by recovering your poor little childhood bogeyman memories. Who’s the fucking paranoid, Lizzie?”

“And you’re committing felonies. If the SEC knew what you’ve been doing, they’d indict you tomorrow.”

“What? You
are
fucking insane. And the SEC doesn’t indict. Get your facts straight.” He had no idea what she was talking about.

“Two days ago I found a whole printout of stocks in the wastebasket—Mose, TK Corporation, all of my companies, bid prices on certain dates, sales prices—three thousand shares here, four thousand there. You’ve got a goddamn inside-trading portfolio, George! Do you want us both to go to jail? Are you trying to destroy this family every way you know how?”

On the one hand, this accusation restored some of George’s composure, because it was entirely untrue. On the other hand, it made him nervous: what had she found?

“Show me this list,” he said.

“I burned it and flushed it down the toilet.”

He stared at her. That very morning, he had called Warren Holcombe, Pollyanna’s Warren, the only shrink he knows, and asked if he could come by sometime. He remembers staring at Lizzie and at that moment thinking,
You are crazier than I am
.

“I destroyed it as soon as I found it. To protect you, George. It scared me.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about. I have never bought or sold a share of stock in my life.”

She just shook her head. Then she said quietly, “George, listen to me: I have never slept with Harold Mose. I am not sleeping with Harold Mose.”

“Yes, you are. Don’t lie to me, Lizzie.”

And that had been that.

Every weekday since September fourteenth he has gone to the house at three-thirty to be with the kids. And every day by six-thirty he leaves, back to the Winnebago for the night, to avoid seeing Lizzie.

That is, to avoid being in Lizzie’s physical presence. Back in the RV at the little table, he’s got his PowerBook. There’s a web-cam on lower Second Avenue not far from the Yoga Place. He looks for her there. There’s a web-cam over in the tourist blocks of the Seaport, and he checks in there. But except for that one time on Fifty-seventh Street, he hasn’t had a sighting.

Zip has no TV in the Winnebago (“TV without cable, man, is the most depressing spectacle I can imagine”), and the newspapers aren’t delivered, so George has come to rely on the computer for his news. He’s been following the rumored Microsoft–Mose Digital deal. The latest wrinkle, according to a report today on TheIndustry.com, is that
Microsoft will buy all the MBC shows that Mose owns or controls, to run exclusively on WebTV. Including, the story says, “the sophomore-slumping noir police series
NARCS
.” So if Mose and Lizzie have their way, he thinks, his successful creation will be shrunk into some pathetic internet novelty. And his only real asset, a half share in the syndication revenue that Emily might someday derive from her half ownership of
NARCS
, will wither away to nothing.

If George happened to cross the highway right now, to walk three blocks east and two blocks south, he would pass a parked Mercedes S1000. If he happened to look inside the front window of Hirst Sensation, the new bar on Ninth Avenue with the artfully charred interior, he would have a whole month of fresh suspicions to sort out. He would see his best friend with his wife, sitting at a table drinking and talking. He would assume they were talking about him, and he’d be right.

“Thanks for meeting me down here,” she says.

“Hey!
Up
here! It’s practically my neighborhood! I thought you were working on Fifty-seventh Street full-time now.”

“I am, but with all this talk about a Microsoft deal for Mose Digital—”

“Is that more Henry Saddler bullshit or is that real?”

She gives him a look.

“Hey!” he protests. “I don’t own a single share of your dog company anymore!”

“Yeah. You got out right at the top during the summer, didn’t you?”

“Not quite,” he says, smiling. “Close.”

In the last month, Mose stock has dropped from $45 to $34 a share—a graph line now tracing the Gulf Coast of Florida, currently around Tampa and still heading south.

“How’d you know, Ben?”

“It’s been obvious since last winter that Mose was doing a roll-up. Kind of a clumsy one, frankly.”

“You mean by buying my companies?”

“Yours to get Wall Street excited. (Which worked for a quarter.) And the weird, boring ones nobody cares about—that Indonesian printing company, the Canadian free weeklies, all those—to fake some earnings growth.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I assumed you knew. I guess I thought you were privy to the plan. So, is he selling you to Gates?”

She shrugs. “Anyhow, because of the rumors, my people down on Eighteenth Street need some hand-holding. The prospect of becoming Microsoft employees has them a little unnerved.”

“It wouldn’t affect their lives.”

“They really hate Microsoft, Ben. I mean, it’s almost religious.” She looks around, then leans toward him. “You know that hack on
Slate
a couple of weeks ago? The fake sweepstakes about the presidential election and encryption law or whatever the fuck it was that stayed up for a whole day?”

Ben nods, and listens very closely. He has wondered about that. He noticed a particular line in the
Slate
hack—“Grand prize: two perfectly dead Tamagotchi Frankensteins! Contest ends 11/29/00!”

“Three of the kids who work for me did that,” she whispers. “They’re the Wacko Practical Jokerz. That’s what they called themselves in the communiqué the next day.”

“So I read. Are you going to turn them in?”

She shakes her head. “One of them is a very sweet, very smart girl—George grew up with her parents. You might have met her at our party last spring.” Lizzie whispers again. “She was already prosecuted for a hack last year out there, in Minneapolis. She’s a
kid
. She’d go to prison, Ben.”

“She told you about the
Slate
thing?”

“No, a German boy who works for me, one of her gang.”

A waitress brings their drinks.

“So tell Uncle Ben, Lizzie. I am not going to trade on it, I promise. I’m just interested. Mose Digital going to become Micromose?”

She waits a couple of seconds to answer. “A couple of weeks ago in Aspen, at the Forstman Little thing, Harold told me probably yes. They’re certainly doing due diligence like they’re serious.”

“You want to run it? Are you going to stay?”

She finds herself smiling, a huge ungovernable smile, as she shakes her head no. “ ‘Change of control’ is my loophole,” she says.

“Hey! This must make our boy George happy, right? His lost princess about to wrestle free from the clutches of
both
evil trolls? And take their chests of jewels with her!”

Her smile disappears. “I haven’t talked to him in two weeks, Ben. I haven’t seen George since the night he left.”

Fanny Taft has come east for a few days to interview at NYU, Cooper Union, Rensselaer, and MIT. When Lizzie tells her George moved out of Water Street, Fanny asks if it would be okay if she visits him on the pier. Lizzie tells her yes, of course, and gives her his cell-phone number.

She knocks on the sheet-metal door. It sounds to George like the knock on the door of a poor person’s house. In his three weeks here, it is the first knock he’s expected. It’s the first one not from a cop, a tourist, a homeless person, or a delivery-truck driver. Fanny is wearing a professionally produced T-shirt with the silhouetted life-size heads of Bill Gates and his number two, Steve Ballmer. A red
X
, simulating paintbrush strokes, is imprinted over their faces. George smiles at the shirt, reminded once again of the glory of late capitalism, in which there is no consumer urge, not even an anticapitalist fashion urge, too odd or small-bore for the marketplace to satisfy.

“Who’s the bald guy?” he asks.

“Ballmer. He’s like Gates’s chief henchman.”

After the briefest of small talk, George rather too emphatically poses a hypothetical question to her about a way he’s imagined to “hack into a certain company’s phone system” to keep precise tabs on one of its employees all day long as he—“he”—walks from office to office.

Fanny says she doesn’t know much about phone phreaking.

“Ah. Doesn’t matter. It’s just a brainstorm I had. For the same project I was working on over the summer. I was curious. I have another idea, for pagers, sort of like the prank you and Willi did. I just don’t know what to do with it yet.”

“For your TV show?”

“You know person X is going to be with person Y at a particular time, right? In some very intimate circumstance. You send a message to person X’s pager—either an actual message, with words, or a callback number that person Y would know. The idea would be to send a message to person X in the hope that person Y would see it and freak out, be angry at person X, conclude that person X has somehow betrayed him. You don’t understand, do you? I wasn’t clear. Okay, instead of person X, call her Mary. Mary is in bed with her coconspirator, literally in bed—”

“George?”

“What?”

“Lizzie loves you. She wants to be married to you.”

He does not say anything.

“She loves you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Yeah.”

“She does. And she’s not having an affair with anyone.
Trust
me. She’s
not
. Trust her. We talked for a long time, and she was like, ‘If you can make him believe that, I’ll be in your debt forever.’ So, believe it.”