Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (15 page)

In the café of the toy museum, Mark spent ten minutes trying to compose a postcard to Leo. His pen floated over the white rectangle. What could he possibly write?

You would like this museum,
he began. But no, that wasn’t what mattered.

I’m sorry I put you in my stupid book? I’ve also been using some of your stuff in these seminars I give? Which are bullshit, by the way? I miss you? You sound crazy these days? We once had the world by the balls, you and I? I’m lonely? I’m in trouble? I’m lost, like you, but in a different way?

No. It was too late for any of that. It seemed to Mark that all of life was either
There’s still time
or
It’s too late.
He tore up the postcard.

He spent another hour poking paragraphs around the screen. But now he’d lost the thread he’d been pulling on. Who cares about what he remembered from his childhood? A teacher in high school once told him that until you can describe clearly what it is you mean, you don’t really mean it. That was the last great thing he had been taught in a classroom.

It was time to make his way to Straw. He went back to the flat to clean up. Mark always tried to bring his A-game to these Straw sessions. Not that Straw really seemed to notice what Mark brought. And maybe
A-game
didn’t really describe what Mark brought. What Mark brought was a big, elaborate, flattering lie.

Mark had been James Straw’s life coach for a year now. It was an easy arrangement: he was required only to find the man’s rambling soliloquies compelling, pretend to see meaning in them, then offer some not too transparent but not too opaque homily or parable that confirmed what Straw already thought. Straw treated these sessions as if they were genuine therapy and vented about the stresses of being hyperwealthy. Clearly, Straw had suggested Mark’s London sabbatical mainly because he, Straw, was going to be in London for a few months and didn’t want to be without access to Mark.

And there was something going on other than life-coaching. After a session, Straw might take Mark to lunch or dinner at some private club or his Mayfair town house. They would cross London in Straw’s armored and motorcycle-escorted Bentley. Last week, after a session and a boozy lunch, Straw brought Mark to a shirtmaker on Jermyn Street where he ordered for Mark twelve dress shirts in a chromatic range from white to cream, all with double cuffs and eyelet collars, and bought him also the little silver barbell things that joined the collar tips behind the necktie.

Cleaned up and steeled with a line of crushed Ritalin, Mark left the flat again. He liked crossing London by tube. If he was in the right mood, he could feel himself carried along on the human tide, and the experience imparted a pleasant anonymity; it made the leaf-in-the-stream stuff apparent, and he felt that he was connected to the sweaty straphangers—the adolescent transgressively sexifying her school uniform, the suave subcontinental with his head bobbing to the tinny Hindi that Mark could just make out.

But despite the Ritalin zing, Mark’s mood was sour. Weaving around the abject tourists trying to work the ticket machine in the tube station, Mark resented them intensely and would have personally banished each one to the gulag for the offense of getting fatly in his way. He was not a leaf in a stream but a stone in a dark pool, sinking, and there was really no hope for humanity, because everyone’s out for himself and there’s no way around that.

“You were right about the Chileans, by the way,” said Straw once they’d taken up their classic analytical positions—Straw supine on a couch and Mark in an Eames chair, facing some degrees away—“I mean, that I shouldn’t have gone into business with that lot. An unsavory people, the Chileans.” They were in Straw’s double-height great hall of an office, on a fog-spangled corner of the SineCo building in Canary Wharf.

Mark could not remember formulating or articulating any opinion about Chileans or about going into business with them; he didn’t know what Straw was talking about. This was always happening with Straw. In such situations, you have about thirty seconds to say to someone
I don’t know what you’re talking about,
before your remaining silent rather commits you to the lie of pretending to understand. Mark was committed.

Luckily, James Straw was so deferred to that he never seemed to consider the possibility that a person he was speaking to might not be following his every Straw-centric turn, so he never asked for any confirmation. He had assistants whose job it was to de- and rebrief anyone leaving a Straw meeting to make sure that the poor schmuck understood what he had just been instructed to do. But Straw’s relationship with Mark was different. Straw considered Mark’s ear and counsel a relief from the pressures of his day and life (no one understood him, basically). Mark definitely got the sense that a few of Straw’s legion of assistants resented Mark’s having cut the line, particularly the elfin Swiss named Nils. So Mark had to watch out for those guys. It worked because his sessions with Straw were private; there was no one else in the room to hear just how transparently flattery-based Mark’s approach to Straw was. Straw spent their hour-long sessions complaining about inept inferiors and scheming competitors and greedy siblings and “communist” government regulators. Mark would simply listen, nod, and every few minutes say something like “Have you considered that these people might be motivated by jealousy or that they lack your grasp of the bigger picture?”

The trick was the careful and well-timed echoing-back of Straw’s own ideas and phrases—
the bigger picture
came up regularly. In fact, in the year that Mark had been life-coaching Straw, he had constructed only the vaguest idea of what Straw’s workday consisted of or how SineCo churned out its billions. Syndicates acquired companies, or cornered sectors, or consolidated holdings. Mark did understand that Straw was something of an objectivist, though the man had never heard of Ayn Rand (he read exclusively nautical-adventure fiction and mass-market management theory), and over time, Mark heard himself agreeing by nods and
I see
s with an ever more market-based and owner-operated notion of how the world should be run.

Since coming to London, though, Straw had begun to talk more during their sessions about the nature of his business empire. Lately, he was very excited by a new branch of SineCo he was calling the Core Vision Department. Mark assumed that such a department would churn out PR claptrap about the core vision of the company, something about how everyone should be empowered by choice and leveraging knowledge and improving access et cetera. That had been a large part of Mark’s job for the biogenetics company in Cambridge: writing very abstract copy about the value of innovation.

But when Straw explained further, Mark had to wonder why he was staffing this Core Vision Department with expensive new hires from the cream of the digital-slacker class. Straw was poaching code-writing princes from computer science departments and subcontinental shantytowns and billing-software companies and failed music-downloading sites. He mentioned three hundred new hires in the past month. That was no PR department. It piqued Mark’s curiosity.

Today, Straw was very excited about the Core Vision thing. But it seemed to Mark that Straw was now calling it New Alexandria. He was apparently describing some sort of Tolkienesque realm where knowledge could be stored and protected. He kept saying that what was needed was all the information in one place; then everyone with access to that information would be able to make perfect decisions.

“Imagine it, Mark,” said Straw from his couch, “all those other operations, muddled by imperfect markets and stunted by the bureaucrats—they will all become obsolete. With a single stroke! And New Alexandria will stand alone. The world will never be the same.”

Mark had long ago blown past the point at which he could say:
I’m sorry, what the fuck are you talking about?
But there was a limit, even for Mark, to what one could pretend to understand. What were the other operations, and how were they muddled by markets and stunted by bureaucrats? By
bureaucrats,
Straw usually meant anyone in the public sector, from the president to the postman.

“It does sound extraordinary, James,” said Mark. “But, to be honest, I’m not certain I understand what you mean. You’ll have to go back a bit. If you could.”

At this, James Straw turned quickly on his couch and craned to face Mark. Straw was in good shape for a man his age, but this was the lithe maneuver of a much younger man. Mark found it jarring.

“No. There is no way you could understand it. Not yet. Forgive me, Mark. There is a part of this that I have had to keep even from you. I have partners in the project, great men. Men of vision and risk, like the two of us. But there are rules, procedures.” He waved his hand before his face and shrugged a shoulder, as if to acknowledge the strange reality that even he, James Straw, could be bound by rules and procedures.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Join me on board
Sine Wave
next week, will you? By then I will have secured the necessary permissions. Can you?”

Sine Wave.
Straw’s yacht. At last. Was Mark supposed to say that he would need to check his calendar? Some pretense that Mark was very busy with other professional and intellectual pursuits had always been part of his thing with Straw. But no, this was different; this was new waters.

“It would be my pleasure, James.”

“Excellent.” Straw rose from the couch and crossed to his desk, stabbed at the intercom. “Gertrude. Mark will be joining me at sea next week. Arrange for it. Let’s say Tuesday.”

“You will be at Bilderberg on Tuesday, sir.”

“Balls,” said Straw. “How long is that?”

“Two days in Aberdeen, sir. You are tentative for Thursday transfer to—”

He cut her off. “Yes, yes, fine. Arrange transport for Mark for Friday.”

“Very well, sir.”

Leaving the SineCo building, Mark had a veritable spring in his step. The invitation to the yacht felt like a game changer. Straw had been stingily withholding that invitation for a year, dropping lines about, like,
the passage to Majorca
in such a way as to arouse interest from Mark and saying,
I must have you aboard sometime,
but then not summoning an assistant, which was how Straw alchemized wish into reality. Mark was deeply excited simply to join the tiny subset of people who’d ever set loafer on the megayacht. He had read about
Sine Wave
in the
Wall Street Journal.
Straw was not the kind of man who allowed his yacht to be photographed or featured, so the only photos in the article were long-lens exteriors. Still, the vessel was said to have ten decks and two helipads, a tennis court, anti-pirate devices, and a crew of Italians in crisp whites. Also a driving range, an herbarium, and a surgical theater.

But hours later, the springy step was gone. It was a night with a wicked slope.

He walked home from Straw’s office and dined in some fuck-off restaurant in Canary Wharf. Mark loved a good fuck-off restaurant. He loved the stuffy, expense-account places with the board-presented menus and the bread rolls swaddled in ironed napkins and the chilled butter pats brought on saucers. He loved the trendy, dismal, haute-cuisine joints with the square furniture and the pixie waitrons and the cracked mirror decor. He loved displaying to waitstaff, with his charm, his informed questions, and his swift decisions, that he was a person happy and allowed to spend a hundred pounds on dinner for himself. Eating alone in an expensive restaurant, reading a magazine or a book, he thought he must look powerful and intriguing—an important business traveler, or maybe a tragic young widower.

But that’s not what happened tonight. Tonight there was something off about everything. He’d come in too early and he was nearly alone in the posh restaurant, which turned out to be a steakhouse, all brass and carpet. The staff hadn’t even really finished their opening chores; he could hear a radio playing in the kitchen and he could smell a bleachy bucket behind the bar. The pretty waitress was
not
taken with him. That was clear. She saw the
Superyachts Monthly
magazine that he hadn’t hidden well enough beneath his notebook, and she raised her eyebrows in a tiny, devastating way.

No, no, it’s not like that,
he wanted to say to her.
I’m not some schlub pressing my face to the glass. I bought this magazine because the world’s fourth-richest man just invited me aboard his yacht. And they were out of
Megayachts Monthly
. The yachts in this magazine are
smaller
than the one I’m going to be on next Friday.

But then the stern part of him yelled at the stupid part of him, the part that cared whether this waitress knew how close he was to power.
Don’t you also want to tell her that the only reason you’re so close to power is that someone misunderstood the one good thing you ever wrote,
the stern part yelled,
and that you’re stuck in a lie that’s going to bring you down or eat you up?

And like a child running upstairs to get away from his parents’ screaming, the real Mark, who was neither the stern one nor the stupid one—who was both—ordered a fifty-quid bottle of Rioja and a rare steak. He needed to work on the Blinc manuscript. He tried to write in his notebook, tried to at least look like he was writing in his notebook. But he knew what he really looked like: he looked like a man drinking quickly, alone, in the early evening.

He left that place after the bottle of wine and wandered west, into Brick Lane eventually. It was real evening now, and the city was full of life. He found a busy pub and drank thick pints at the bar. He realized that he was bothered by something from before the yacht invitation. James Straw had been keeping things from
him?
That was unsettling. Mark knew that there was plenty he didn’t know, situations he needed help with. This Blinc book situation, for example, had definitely gotten away from him. But with Straw, he had at least been certain that he knew more than the old man about what was going on between them. Now he wasn’t so sure.