Turn of the Century (95 page)

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” Willibald says.

“Like
Emmentaler
,” says Humfried.

“Swiss cheese,” Willi says automatically for Fanny’s benefit.

Humfried shakes his head and points at the screen. “Look at this poor dummy. All the passwords are
so
stupid! ‘Joseph Beirn II’ is ‘JoeB2.’ This guy Petersen in Mexico—’Viva’! It makes me feel bad almost. It’s like, you know, grabbing chocolate from
ein Kind
 … ?”

“Stealing candy from a baby,” Willi says, watching Big Bob’s latest software download from Karlshorst. “Stealing candy with Kalashnikovs.” He looks over at Fanny and grins. “With our partner, Bonnie. Who’s Clyde, me or Humfried?”

“We’re not ‘stealing’ anything, okay?” Fanny says, unamused. “We’re not hurting anybody. It’s just a pie in their faces.”

“Okay,” says Willi, chastened. Trying to be comradely, he asks, “Fanny, how come you think we’re not getting precisely the same keystrokes from Buttsniffer as we were from Big Bob’s sniffer? Those small variations when you hacked the DNS servers?”

“RTFM, Nazi boy.”

Is this perfect?
This is perfect
, Lizzie thinks. She’s watching a very pink sunset, in the backyard, where she just checked her e-mail with one of the wireless ShowNet PowerBooks. Rafaela is doing the dishes from lunch. Max and LuLu are just home from school, watching their snack-linked, prehomework half hour of television. Sixty-seven degrees and sunny on the twenty-seventh of November—Los Angeles imported to New York for forty-eight hours. In the real L.A., people can’t help but take the balmy good fortune for granted, or else allow their heads to fill with blissed-out nature joy every waking hour—smug or dopey, their choice. But here she is, unemployed, at her two-million-dollar home on a warm weekday afternoon. Sitting outdoors, barefoot and happy, on a handsomely rotting chaise lounge. Thinking, but not very hard, about money and a video that her unemployed husband has gone upstairs to find. Everything about this moment is L.A., she thinks, and she’s enjoying it only because she knows it is an evanescent blessing (like all blessings) that will last barely long enough to appreciate.

One of the e-mails was from [email protected]. Lizzie misses Fanny and Alexi and Bruce and, collectively, the eighty other employees of Fine Technologies. “Dear Boss,” her e-mail begins.

Lizzie knows about Fanny’s crush on the German, but “think of me
wed?
” Fanny marrying Willibald might be a fruitful idea for a low-budget dark comedy, but would be a travesty and a tragedy in real life. (“If you marry Willi or anyone else before you’re 21 I will have to personally
kill you
,” Lizzie e-mailed back. “And Hank Saddler is probably a pedophile, and definitely a weirdo, so watch yourself.”)

Lizzie feels a moment of envy for Willibald and Humfried. Unlike her ex-employees, who (thanks to Lizzie) got stock in the Mose takeover, she is still contractually forbidden from selling any of her shares in Mose Media Holdings until the six-month anniversary of the acquisition. That date is December 29, the last weekday of 2000. The accountant has told her she is insane if she doesn’t wait to sell at least until after the New Year’s weekend, but Lizzie fully intends to cash out on the twenty-ninth, tax consequences be damned. Max mentioned
on Friday that Mose was down to 26⅜. She didn’t know the market was open the day after Thanksgiving. (Just as she didn’t know until two months ago that Max has made a hypothetical fortune this year in a web-site “rotisserie league” stock-picking game. It was a printout of Max’s imaginary purchases of Mose Media stock that made her accuse George, the day he walked out, of committing inside-trading felonies.) So her 498,000 shares are now worth only $13 million (on paper, pretax) instead of $24 million (ditto). But she’s with her husband at nightfall in their house on the Seaport.

“Daddy?”
LuLu shouts from an upstairs window suddenly.

“He’s somewhere up there,” Lizzie shouts back.

“Miss America, the blind girl, just mentioned Daddy’s TV show on
And Another Thing!
She was talking about Charles Manson going free!”

“Okay, sweetie, thanks,” Lizzie says. “I’ll tell him.”

The foghorn in the Buttermilk Channel groans its sad but never saddening sound just as George comes outside with a big, goofy, embarrassed smile. He’s holding a Jaz disk between his thumb and index finger as he walks back toward her.

“You
found
it,” Lizzie says.

“It was in a Baggie wrapped in gaffer’s tape up in the crawl space. The scary thing is, I literally can’t remember hiding it. I really thought I must have thrown it away. It’s like whole days are erased from my memory.”

“Good,” she says.

He hands the disk to her and sits down beside her. She sticks it into the drive. An icon, a red letter
M
over a bleeding heart, pops onto the screen. She gives George a look.

“I know. Your Chas is a high-production-value kind of guy.”

She clicks on the skull and crossbones. A video image appears.

“It’s just his face,” Lizzie says, sounding confused, surprised, disappointed.

“Wait,” George tells her.

“That’s funny,” she says, touching the screen, “you can see the tip of his white pine right there, behind him.”

For a moment, the image becomes jerky and confusing. Then it resolves, a wider shot.

“Yowza,”
she says.

“Ta-dahhh.”

“He does it standing up?”

“I know. I guess that’s why the camera on the computer zoomed back, to try to capture more image. He confused it.”

At the bottom of the screen, just above the burned-in video date, Helvetica text gushes in, scrolling across the lower edge of the image—
HI! IT’S ME, ELIZABETH!
—from right to left, whorish imprecation after whorish imprecation—
YOU CAN JUST WATCH
—as the man on the screen opens his mouth and juts his pelvis every couple of seconds, almost dancing.

“You see,” George says.

The image is surprisingly sharp and fluid, given that it is a second-generation copy of a picture transmitted by cable from a computer on West Fifty-seventh Street down to a loft in Chelsea and then by copper telephone wire across America and the Pacific to Malaysia. And although Lizzie is blushing, and George is no longer smiling, their moods are blithe. They’re watching a video recording of Harold Mose masturbating in his office on the Fifty-ninth Floor of the Mose Media Holdings tower.

At the end, the little camera tried desperately to follow him as he stumbled over to his wastebasket, then out of the frame, presumably to his bathroom. Lizzie clicks the image away. They look at each other for a few seconds.

“I guess this is a rueful smile,” George says, smiling ruefully. “You realize, it wasn’t
just
this. I was hating you pretty good before this arrived.”

The cartridge is ejected with that brief, pleasingly lubricious electromechanical hum.

“I guess we can put this in a safe-deposit box with the rest of the family cyberporn cache,” Lizzie says. “A legacy for the grandchildren.”

George smiles, stands, and shakes his head again. Lizzie is referring to Sarah’s pornography adventure. After George’s dinner with Fanny and Willibald in August, Willi decided to prove to George that he could indeed install a sniffer on the cable modem at Water Street. He did, and recorded all the internet traffic going in and out of their house (and random neighbors in the financial district) for the next month. He sniffed George’s Manhattan web-cam stalking, and he sniffed a dozen of Lizzie’s e-mails to Pollyanna—which had been the bedrock for Fanny’s faith in Lizzie’s fidelity.

Willi also sniffed some of Sarah’s telecommuting work for Felipe Williamson’s brother’s web site. Although C. Girls is indeed a “free, advertiser-supported hair-and-makeup database,” as Sarah told them, most of the company’s revenues derive from ChelseaGirls.com, the live online pornography web site. Chelsea Girls’ key selling point is that its naked women are “100 percent Ivy League college girls and grad students,” and that they are “the sluttiest, horniest eggheads locked in the Ivory Tower!” Most Chelsea Girls wear prop glasses while they’re working, Sarah explained to her parents that terrifying October afternoon when George and Lizzie confronted her with the sniffer evidence, but too few of them can convincingly simulate even the dirty talk of a grad student egghead. Sarah’s job was to serve as one of their Cyranos, as Philip Williamson’s brother calls them, and sit at a keyboard typing out the faux-educated online responses of the faux-orgasmic women probing and clutching their own bodies according to the whims of their $9.95 wankers downstream.

“Did you ever do that?” Lizzie asked, feigning cool. “Take your clothes off for the camera?”

“
Mo
-ther! Are you joking? No-o!”

Then George asked Sarah when she started the Cyrano work at Chelsea Girls.

“May,” she told them, “right around the time of that big party you guys had.” It was probably stupid to care, George knew, even as he was hearing the answer and feeling deep relief. But the recording of Mose, according to the date at the bottom of the video image, was made April 3. And when Sarah told them she gave most of her fourteen-dollars-an-hour earnings to Rafaela “for her people down there,” George and Lizzie felt prouder than they let on.

What Sarah hasn’t told them is that the money she funneled through Rafaela, $4,663 in all, went to buy thirty thousand rounds of AK-47 ammunition for the Zapatista guerillas. She hasn’t told her parents because she doesn’t know. Nor do any of them know that Felipe Williamson’s brother, Josh, buys his thousands of hours a month of phone service for Chelsea Girls from a reseller principally owned by Roger Baird, Nancy McNabb’s husband. And Roger Baird has no idea that one of his largest customers, Chelsea Entertainment, is a pornographer.

Hanukkah is still three weeks away, but the menorah is already up in the $ offices, filled as it is each year with candles cast in the shapes of Santas. “We don’t have a menorah in Greenwich, Daddy,” Sasha said yesterday, not meaning to gloat, Ben doesn’t think, about her mother’s return to Methodism. Cast on the plain Sheetrock back wall of the Big Room, the long pink rectangles of light at sunset remind Ben of the Malevich his ex-wife took to Greenwich and then sold. The problem with this time of year, when it gets dark by four-thirty, is that Ben’s twilight tendency to moodiness sometimes kicks in before the market closes.

“So, do you want any more?” Billy Heffernan asks. “He’s got 3,000 December 115 puts for 1¼.”

Ben thinks:
Don’t get too greedy
. He thinks:
Resist the candy trades
. The options desks at Goldman Sachs and First Boston have been on the wire with Heffernan all afternoon, pressing more loads of Microsoft puts on him. It’s against the law to own more than 10,000 options, either puts or calls, on most stocks. But for Microsoft and a few other big, heavily traded companies, the limit is 50,000. Ben owns 24,200 Microsoft puts. He could legally double his position.