Memoirs and True Confessions of a Disinformation Warrior (Part II)

Part I is here.

Part III is here.

 

DAY THREE

The next time I opened my eyes, it was morning. I was shivering without the blankets, which lay in a heap on the floor next to my cot. I wrapped myself in the blankets and went to the window, where I rested my forehead against the cool metal bars. Dark clouds threatened rain. I felt restless and irritated. I did a few stretches and paced my cell to help me focus. Then I picked up the blankets and folded them.

             I felt sickened by the damp metallic smell in the cell, so I took the cleaning supplies from the shelf and methodically scrubbed the sink and toilet. Then I stripped my bed and wiped the mattress. I remade the bed, tucking the bedsheets tightly, military style. I stopped abruptly when I heard a clanging sound from the cell above mine. I waited for the clanging to stop, then resumed my work. I washed the rag and then used it to wipe the floor.

             I’d gotten about a quarter of the way across the floor when a key rattled in the door. I stood up, still holding the rag, and waited. It was a warden bringing my breakfast. After he left, I sat at the table and ate my breakfast, listening to the sounds of the prison. I was just drinking the last of the room-temperature coffee when the key turned in the lock.

            It was Potato Face. “I need your tray,” he said.

What kind of shifts do you work?” I asked.

            “I work the hours I choose.”

            I stood up and handed him the tray. He didn’t like taking it from me. He clearly expected me to put it on the floor. In what was obviously a subtle power game, I stood extending it to him. He relented and took the tray.

            “What’s your name?” I asked.

            “Puddintane,” he said.

            That was unexpectedly juvenile. I consciously dropped my voice a few decibels and as slowly and calmly as I could manage, I said, “That’s beneath of you.”

            My tone stopped him. I pressed my advantage. “Why would you be afraid to tell me your name?” I asked.

            I suspected he wouldn’t like me implying that he was afraid—and he didn’t. “I’m not afraid.”

            “Then tell me,” I said in the same tone. “What’s your name?”

            He considered this and said, “Dylan. What’s it to you?”

            “Just curious. How do I know that’s really your name?”

            “Why would I lie?”

            “I can think of a few reasons,” I said, but he wasn’t staying for conversation. He turned, left, and slammed the door. I heard the key turn in the lock.

            I had no appetite. I’m not an early-morning sort of guy. At home, I’d have a cup of coffee first thing, then breakfast later in the morning. For most of my life, that had meant a cup of black coffee. A few years earlier, Susan bought one of those fancy latte machines, and she operated it with impressive efficiency. I never learned to use it—but each morning upon waking, I had a freshly steamed latte. I didn’t eat breakfast until later.

            I resumed cleaning the floor where I’d left off. When I’d finished, I rinsed out the rag, washed my hands, and sat at the table.

            That was when I saw what appeared to be a piece of white paper stuck under the plastic breakfast tray. When I pulled it out, I saw it was a sealed envelope, addressed to me, but there was no stamp or postmark. I tore open the envelope.

            Inside was a slip of paper that said: “DON’T TRY IT.”

            My hands were trembling when I put the paper down on the table.

            Potato Face was obviously messing with me. The question was whether “don’t try it” was a lucky guess, or whether someone who was surveilling us knew I had presented Susan with a plan to escape. I didn’t believe that every chair in the visiting room was wired. I thought someone was watching Susan and Ken.

A different warden came to unlock the door so I could visit the shower room. This guy had small, beady eyes. Three inmates were already in the shower. I ignored them. I took a long, very hot shower. Nobody tried to hurry me.

            I had just returned to my cell when a key rattled in the lock again and my door swung open. Wardens didn’t bother knocking. The guy who stood on my threshold was the same beady-eyed guy who had let me go to the shower room.

            “You have a visitor,” he said.

             I slipped my prison identification card into my pocket. He stood aside as I walked out of the cell. He closed the door, and directed me down the stairs and then toward the front of the prison. He followed behind me.

            Susan was waiting for me in the usual place in the large visiting room. About a half dozen people were there, two inmates and their families. As was my habit, I carefully looked over the room before joining her, checking to see if anything was different. When I satisfied myself that nothing was different and that the hum in the room was loud enough for us to speak, I sat down next to her.

             I came right to the point.  “Something weird is happening.”

            She listened as I told her that the guy I thought of as Potato Face, who had arrested me, had also brought my dinner tray the night before, and my breakfast tray with a sealed letter that had been mailed the day before with the ominous warning, don’t try it.

             “It seems to me that either someone is watching us,” I whispered, “or the writer of the letter took a wild guess and is trying to spook me.”

            Susan looked around. “I don’t think anyone can hear us here,” she said.

            “I meant watching us as in spying on us. Spying on you. Watching what you’re doing. Did you talk to Eliza or Ken on the phone yesterday about anything important?”

            “I was careful not to do that. I called them when I was driving, but just to arrange to get together. We talked about our plans in their condo.”

             “We have to assume we’re being watched. It’s also possible someone has a tap on your phone.”

            “Oh, wait,” she said. “I remember something. I was at home one time when I talked to Eliza. The only thing I told her, though, was that Sam had no interest in trying to get out. I also told her that you often say you created a monster and the monster is out of control.”

            We sat in silence, thinking. Our only neighbors were above us and below us. The condo above us was owned by a Russian businessman who was rarely there. The condo below us was vacant. At least, it was.

            “Is the condo below us still vacant?” I asked.

            “I’ll check.”

            “I think it’s more likely that someone is tapping our phones. Oh, and Potato Face says his name is Dylan.”

            “That should help me figure out who he is,” she said. She paused and looked around before continuing. “We’ve been screening prison officials for the perfect target. Ken is getting full background checks on each of them. He thought he should go into his office at Pike Enterprises today, just to see if anything unusual is going on. Oh, and I went to visit Sam. He said he didn’t call you from a company phone. He called you from his private phone.”

            That eliminated the obvious answer to how Phillip knew I was planning to meet Sam at the airport. What was left was that our phones were tapped or someone was spying on us, or both.

“Is there anything else I should do?” she asked.

“Yes. In the locked box in the closet there is a file marked Pike Transactions History. Photocopy everything. Keep the originals in the box and mail the copies to Jessica Harris.”

            “The journalist?”

            “I’ve been talking to her.”

            Susan didn’t ask any questions about it. She was like that. She just took for granted that I knew what I was doing, and that what I was doing was right.

             “Anything else?”

             “Yes. There’s another file in the drawer of my desk labeled D.C. I’d like you to also photocopy the contents of that folder and send the copies to Jessica Harris as well.”

             D.C. stood for “disinformation campaigns.” The contents of that file were what I meant when I told Phillip that I had insurance. Nobody really cared about Pike’s shady deals and connections to Russian oligarchs. On the contrary—for a lot of his supporters, that was his appeal. They were disgusted with what American democracy had become. It was dysfunctional. The government no longer represented them. The most hardcore of Pike’s supporters might cheer his lies, but very few people like to be duped. In the file labeled ‘D.C.,’ I had records, for example, of the times Pike conned his supporters into giving him money for bogus causes, complete with documentation that Pike and his family knew the causes were bogus and they were duping their supporters.

             “You really are ready to blow it all up,” she said.

             “I’m ready to tell the truth,” I said.

             We were sitting so close that our shoulders were almost touching. Of course, we weren’t supposed to touch. The wry thought came to me that pushing up against the rules—testing authority—was exactly what I’d spent my life doing. It shouldn’t be a surprise that here I was, locked in a prison—even though it wasn’t bending and breaking the rules that had landed me here. It was consorting with people who had the mentality of gangsters who had also managed to grab too much power.

             “I’d better get going,” she said—but neither of us moved. Then she looked over at the clerk, gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, and squeezed my hand.

             “I’ll come back tomorrow morning,” she said. She stood up and walked briskly from the room.

            The clerk watched her walk out. Then he picked up his phone and made a call. I looked at the clock. It was 9:30. A few minutes later, a different warden came for me.

            It struck me that the warden’s uniforms didn’t cause them to lose their identity as they did with the inmates. I assumed that was partly the way they held themselves, proudly, sometimes with a swagger—and perhaps because their uniforms gave them the appearance of military men.

            This warden took me back to my cell.

            I wondered how someone gets to be a prison guard. I thought back to the boys I knew in Baskerville and wondered which of them might have ended up as prison guards. It occurred to me—and the thought made me smile—that there were possibly people who’d known me as a child in Baskerville who would not be surprised that I was now locked in a prison. Take, for example, my third-grade teacher, Miss Pannish, who had once ordered me to stay after class and write one hundred times on the blackboard I would never again shoot rubber bands in class. I could imagine her saying, “I knew that one was no good.”

            I remembered a story I’d heard from a college history professor. Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his taxes because he didn’t want to support the Mexican-American War, which he called an unprovoked act of American aggression. When he was arrested for refusing to pay taxes—according to what had sounded to me at the time like the stuff of legend—his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him in jail and said, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau responded by asking, “What are you doing out there?”

            The professor who told the story obviously approved of violating tax laws if doing so was to protest laws that were wrong. At the time, I had challenged the professor. “So you think law-breaking is acceptable?” I asked.

            “Lawbreaking can be a form of protest,” he said. “But you have to be willing to do the jail time to make your point.”

            Most people in Pike’s orbit who bent and broke rules were not doing it in protest. They believed they were acting on principle. They bent the rules they didn’t think should exist. Personally, I always assumed one day the conservatives would gain enough power to entirely dismantle the administrative and regulatory state, thereby allowing people whatever business deals interested them. It would then be widely understood that people who grew wealthy did so because we were the ones capable of governing.

I had finished my lunch when a key rattled in the lock. The door to my cell opened. It was the same warden who brought me back from my visit with Susan. I wanted to see Potato Face again so I could try to goad him into giving me more information about who he was.

             “You have a visitor,” he said. “I think it’s a lawyer lady.”

             I assumed it was Jessica. This guy walked next to me until we got to the stairs, and then he directed me to walk ahead. I assumed that the reason for making the inmate walk ahead was to that the inmate couldn’t attack the guard from behind, which could be particularly treacherous in a staircase. Attacking a guard seemed to me to be about the stupidest thing an inmate could do—but I figured plenty of inmates in this place didn’t have all their marbles.

            Jessica sat in a different room today, but the interior was almost identical: Cinderblock walls with paint that was yellowed, scuffed, and stained. A metal table with two chairs. Nothing on the walls except an air vent.

            Satisfied that nothing was amiss, I sat down.

             “You have a creepy way of looking around,” she said.

             “Habit,” I told her. I didn’t add: Habit no doubt intensified from being locked up in here.

             “I asked my wife to mail you two files,” I told her. “I’ve kept evidence over the years of Pike’s shady business practices and what I’ve called a series of disinformation campaigns. I’ve considered it my insurance. You’ll find confirmation of everything I’m telling you. But I do have an important favor.”

             “You don’t want me to reveal the contents of the files until you give me the word,” she said.

             “Right. I’ll let you know when it’s safe. If I’m dead, check with my wife.”

             She watched me steadily for a moment, and then said, “Understood.”

            “We left off when I was about to enter law school,” I said.

                         “And you hated law school.”

                         That startled me. “How did you know?”

                         She smiled. “Your type is bound to hate anything to do with rule of law.”

                         “I resent that,” I said—although I didn’t really resent it. It was exactly the kind of comment I expected from her.

             She opened her notebook, turned on her tape recorder, and positioned it to face me. “I’m ready,” she said.

* * *

My First Million

The cliche is that people who study law fall in love with the law. It was even part of the law school dean’s welcome message to my entering class in the fall of 1975. By the end of the second week of classes, I had already concluded that there was, in fact, nothing I liked about the study of law. I didn’t mind the workload. I didn’t mind having to spend most of my waking hours studying. I didn’t even mind the intense competition.

             The part I hated was that we were all expected to bleat out the same talking points. The professors were basically well-dressed, well-spoken hippies. Liberal doesn’t begin to describe their politics. They were radicals, every one of them. They praised the Supreme Court decisions I had grown to hate—rulings that strengthened and enlarged the federal government.

             I amused myself by intentionally riling the sheep. In class, I argued that the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Constitution required police to read suspects their rights was absurd because there was absolutely nothing in the Constitution about reading people their rights. “The Supreme Court was just making things up,” I said.

             “The victims of police overreach were mostly Black,” one of my classmates told me sharply. She was a stout heavy-set girl who reminded me of Missy Little.

             “The Supreme Court was still making things up. The skin color of the defendant doesn’t change the fact that there’s nothing in the Constitution about reading a person his rights.”

             My classmates were predictably horrified.

             I joined the Conservative Society, a small but passionate group, so I could find like-minded friends. One of my Conservative Society friends was Sam Bates, a guy from Queens with an accent that made him sound a bit like a gangster. He asked me to join a study group. I politely declined. Sam was savvy. I had the feeling he had a lot of street smarts. But he didn’t strike me as the sharpest knife in the drawer, if you know what I mean. I figured I’d do better studying on my own.

             I kept two notebooks: In one, I recorded law school orthodoxy, the things I needed to write on exams to please the professors and earn high grades. In the other, I kept arguments debunking the very doctrines I was supposed to bleat back like a sheep.

I finished my first semester of law school with all A’s. When the second semester began, students talked about their grades, but I kept mine to myself.

             Sam didn’t return to school for the second semester. I waited a week to see if he’d show up. When he didn’t, I called him. One of his roommates answered and said he had moved back to Queens. He gave me Sam’s address. I kept meaning to write to him but never did.

             In March it was time to apply for summer jobs. My grades landed me a sought-after job as a summer associate in a major New York City firm, Fletcher, Sullivan, Stern, and Palmer, known colloquially as Fletcher Sullivan. Very few first-year students received job offers from major firms. The summer salary the firm offered would be almost enough to pay for my second-year tuition.

             When the rumor went around that I would be a summer associate at Fletcher Sullivan, my classmates suspected that I’d nailed the first semester grades, but I never confirmed. They still mostly avoided me, but now I sensed grudging respect.

             The firm was located in New York City. Fletcher Sullivan rented a block of dorm rooms at the University of New York for the summer associates, an easy walk from Fletcher’s midtown office. The firm covered the rent—a perk of the job. Rochelle and I were assigned to a unit in the married student building.

             I worked on the fifth floor of a midtown Madison Avenue building. I wrote legal memos on the fine points of corporate and tax law. I read legal briefs written by opposing counsel and wrote rebuttals. The work was tedious, but the perks were great. The firm gave us Broadway tickets. Partners treated us to lavish lunches.

             It was late afternoon on a Thursday in July, and I was trying to puzzle out a section of the tax code when the phone on my desk phone rang. It was Sam Bates.

             “Hey, man!” I said. “What happened to you?”

             “I’m working in New York,” he said. “I had to make about ten phone calls until I found you. I want to introduce you to my boss.”

             “Who’s your boss?”

             “The real estate developer and investor Arnold Pike.”

             Everything I knew about Arnold Pike came from reading tabloid headlines while standing in line in grocery stores.

             “I told him about you,” Sam said. “Charlie Rocklin also told him about you. He wants to meet you. Are you free?”

             I looked at my watch. It was four-forty. “Sure,” I said.

             “Be at the corner of East 43rd and Fourth in about half-hour,” he said.

I was standing at the corner of East 43rd and Fourth when a silver Cadillac pulled up to the curb. The license plate bore three letters: AJP. A uniformed chauffeur, who appeared to be about thirty-five and had the husky look of a gangster, was driving.

             Sam, in the back seat, unlocked the door for me. I slid inside next to him. The moment my door was closed, the car lurched forward into traffic. The interior was plush and gray had a new-car smell, layered with something light and floral. It was my first time in contact with obscene wealth. I looked at Sam, impressed. He was suntanned and relaxed and wore an expensive gray pin-striped linen suit.

             “Is this your car?” I asked.

             “It belongs to Pike.”

             The driver was listening to the traffic updates on the radio.

             “So tell me,” I said. “What have you been up to?”

             “Pike offered me a job if I passed the real estate exam. The test was a snap after a semester of property law and contract law. Last month I made three thousand dollars in commissions plus my salary.”

             “Three thousand?” That was an astonishing monthly salary in 1976.

             “Yup,” he said. “Think of that. One semester of law school. I’m twenty-three years old. And I made three thousand dollars last month in commissions plus my salary.”

             “What are you selling?”

             “Office space. Renting apartments. I help Pike with his deals. Putting together real estate deals means cutting through lots of red tape and pulling a lot of strings.”

             My bullshit sensor flashed red. There was obviously something un-kosher about this setup.

             The Cadillac stopped in front of a building on Lexington Avenue with art deco ornaments. We slid out of the car. The car zoomed away.  We entered the building through tall glass doors. A doorman behind a desk greeted us. The lobby was done in traditional colors: deeply stained wood furniture, burgundy carpet, and gold-tinted mirrored elevator doors. The air had the scent of freshly cut flowers.

             We rode the elevator in silence to the top floor. The doors opened to a Penthouse office lined with windows offering a panoramic view of Manhattan. A large, good-looking man was sitting behind a large desk, speaking animatedly on the phone. He had reddish hair, and boyish movie-star looks. He looked a little like Robert Redford, but his face had a softness to it. He seemed to be rambling a bit, but that could have been because our entry distracted him.

             Facing his desk was a plush white couch and two chairs. Sam and I sat on the couch. From what I could gather from Pike’s side of the conversation, he was trying to find out who in the organization had talked to a reporter without permission.

             He hung up, and then reached across the desk and we shook hands.

             It’s hard to describe the feeling of sitting across from Arnold Pike. Some people just exude star quality. Pike was magnetic.

             “Sam says you’re one of the smartest people he ever met,” Pike told me. “He also said you’ve made some waves at the Benjamin Franklin Law School.”

               “I think I annoy a few people,” I said.

             “If you’re not making a few waves or annoying a few people,” Pike said, “you’re accomplishing nothing. I believe in accomplishing things. Sam might have told you that I own and manage 22,000 apartment units. I have three major real estate projects in the works. One is a convention center over the Penn Central Transportation Company’s 34th Street yards. I acquired the development when the railroad went bankrupt. My architects have drawn up plans for a $90 million center. We want to replace that run-down piece of junk convention center on the Hudson.”

             Pike talked rapidly. I felt dazed and a bit lost. He spoke with an air of self-consciousness as if he were performing.

             “Last week,” Pike said, “I purchased an old department store near Central Park. Next, I’m planning the construction of an apartment complex on Penn Central’s 60th Street yards.”

             I had a hunch about how to deal with Pike. I looked him in the eye and said, “What’s your plan after you own Manhattan?”

             He looked at me with new respect. Sam also shot me an admiring look.

             “Maybe one day I’ll run for president,” Pike said. “I’ll fix what’s broken in this country. I’ll get rid of all the stupid and corrupt laws hampering cities. Make no mistake. They’re all corrupt. I can pick up that phone,” he pointed to the phone on his desk, “and get around any of those rules. The rules are there so politicians can make a buck helping their friends around them.”

             It was a cynical—and I believed realistic—assessment of the regulations churned out of regulatory agencies.

             “Charlie Rocklin also tells me you’re brilliant,” Pike said. “Charlie is a mover and a shaker. I’m always looking for good people. I only hire the best. If you want a job here, you have a job.”

             “Thank you, sir,” I said.

             “You had a year of law school,” Pike went on. “You can read contracts, right? That’s helpful. I need people who can drive hard bargains. School helps, but it isn’t everything. I graduated at the top of my class at the Harvard Business School, but,” he shrugged modestly, “nothing I learned there helps me in the least.”

             Once again, my bullshit detector flashed red. I knew he hadn’t graduated at the top of his business class at Harvard. I resisted the impulse to glance at Sam. If anything, Pike probably graduated at the top of his class from the Los Angeles School of Acting.

             “We’re going to do great things in this town,” Pike said. “We’ve already done great things. Sam can tell you about what we’re doing. I’m a tough boss, but I overlook mistakes. The only thing I ask for, other than competence and hard dealing, is loyalty. I don’t care about the law degree as long as you can read a contract and pull off a good negotiation. A real estate license is essential of course.”

             I searched for a response that was non-committal without rejecting the offer.

             “I think I should finish law school first,” I told him.

             “Not a bad idea,” he said. “Not at all. I can always use good lawyers as well. A friend of Charlie’s is a friend of mine. When you graduate, give me a call and we can talk.”

             Pike handed me his card—a gold embossed card with PIKE ENTERPRISES written across the top, and his name and telephone number underneath. I thanked him and slipped the card into my breast pocket.

             Pike stood up, signaling the end of the meeting. Sam and I stood up as well. We all shook hands, and then we stepped into the elevator. We didn’t speak again until we were out of the building.

             “What did you think?” Sam asked.

             “It’s tempting. It’s not like I’m in love with law school.”

             “That was how I felt,” Sam said.

             “Pike didn’t finish anywhere near the top of his class at the Harvard Business School,” I said.

             Sam shot me a look. “He says he did.”

             “He didn’t. How did you meet him?”

             “My dad went to school with his dad. My older brother knew Pike when he was in school. He was a bit of a troublemaker. Okay, he was a hell-raiser. He feels the way you do about rules and regulations.”

             “Your dad went to school with rich kids?” I asked.

             “They weren’t so rich then. I mean, they were well off but nothing like now.”

             “Is the enterprise legit?”

              “Totally, except for the part about bending rules now and then.”

             “Well,” I said. “Behind every fortune, there is a crime,”

             Sam turned to look at me, startled.

             “Balzac,” I told him.

             “Ha!” he said. “I thought it was the Godfather. Bob, you knew just how to talk to him.”

             “Guys like him are easy to read,” I said.

             We were going separate ways, so we each hailed our own cab. That evening, I moved Pike’s business card from my wallet to the locked safe where I kept important documents.

             The following afternoon I took a break from work and went to the main branch of the New York public library system. I sat at a table in the reference room, scrolling through the microfilm, reading up on the Pike family.

             Evidently, Pike’s grandfather had left Germany in the late nineteenth century. He went West and operated saloons. Given the location of the saloons and the income they generated, it was likely that they were in fact brothels. After he earned a small fortune, he moved to Queens. He had a premonition that Queens—which was then rural and sparsely populated—would see a building boom. He bought several pieces of choice real estate, but he died before he could build his real estate empire.

             Sylvester Pike, Arnold’s father, made a large fortune building houses in the 1950s. Returning World War Two soldiers were eligible for home loans under the GI bill, so there was thus a sudden demand for single-family homes. Sylvester earned his wealth—not because of the quality of homes, which were adequate and standard—but because he exploited loopholes in the vast tangle of red tape and legislation that had been set up during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era.

             The Federal Housing Authority—the FHA—a Roosevelt-era agency, offered building loans, so Sylvester took out government loans to build the houses, which he then sold to returning soldiers. FHA regulations allowed builders to recoup part of their expenses, so Sylvester set up shell equipment companies. He rented himself equipment at inflated prices and billed the government for the expense—an expense that he never, in fact, incurred. When Sylvester submitted the costs, he added a 5% architecture fee, even though there had been no architect. Thus he submitted inflated cost estimates, did the work for millions less than he reported, and pocketed the difference.

             He was hauled before the Senate oversight committee and accused of public corruption. He said he had provided full value to his customers, and he did everything he was contracted to do. He insisted he had done nothing illegal. Just because he’d done the architectural drawings himself didn’t mean that he’d cheated anyone. Wasn’t he entitled to just compensation? He was completely indignant and accused the Senators of trying to besmirch his reputation. He threatened to sue for defamation.

             He was found not guilty of public corruption because at the time, there were no laws against what he had done. Then at some point in the late 1950s, he formed a sort of cooperative agreement with New York’s most infamous gangsters, who in turn partnered with the Genovese and Gambino crime families. Through his crime family connections, Sylvester Pike was able to purchase masonry and other building supplies at low prices. As far as I could see, that was the extent of the partnership—which is pretty tame, as far as crime family connections go. Sylvester’s son, Arnold, was his favorite child and was groomed early to take over the family business.

             Next, I searched through New York’s criminal history and the history of the crime families. The Pike family name didn’t appear in any indictments or supporting documents. I also checked city records of marriages, deaths, legal notices, and criminal records about the Pike family. I found nothing unusual.

             I was in my second year of law school when Larry decided to run for public office. The year before, in anticipation, he had moved to Richmond, Virginia, and worked in the state offices. He announced himself as a candidate for City Council. He called on Charlie to help him on the promise that Charlie would not play any dirty tricks unless he cleared them with Larry first. Charlie told me about that one evening on the phone. “I told Larry fine,” Charlie said. “I know how to play it clean, too.” I donated to Larry’s campaign and signed up for Larry’s campaign newsletter.

             During the summer after my second year of law school, I once again worked at Fletcher Sullivan. In August, Fletcher Sullivan handed out permanent job offers. My offer was in an envelope with my name handwritten on the front. It was the standard first-year associate offer. The salary was $40,000 per year. Rochelle and I would be able to live in luxury.

             I hated my third year of law school as much as I had hated the first two years. To say I was not enthusiastic about starting work at Sullivan would be an understatement. One evening over dinner, I said to Rochelle, “It just doesn’t make much sense for me to take an associate position that I’ll hate.”

             “Maybe there’s another legal job that you would like,” she said.

             “Maybe,” I said.

             But I couldn’t think of one. I wanted both money and power. I didn’t want to draft dull legal memos. I wanted to be where the action was.

             Larry won his election. I saw the results in the morning edition of The Washingtonian. I called him immediately.“Congratulations, man,” I said. “Way to go.”

             “Arnold Pike basically bankrolled my campaign,” he said. “I was surprised. It was only for Richmond City Council. But he said any friend of Charlie’s is a friend of his. He said he always has an interest in talented young politicians.”

             “What do you think of Pike?” I asked Larry.

             “Definitely rough around the edges. Crude. Arrogant. He could use a good public relations director. But he can’t be all bad. Why?”

             “I’m thinking about working for him,” I said. “In real estate.”

             “Lots of money in that,” Larry said. “Charlie thinks Pike’s the greatest. Charlie thinks one day he’ll run for president. He’ll turn Washington, D.C. on its head.”

             “You could do that,” Rochelle said that evening over dinner after I told her Larry was now a city councilman.“You could run for office.”

             “I’m not the type,” I said. “I’d rather be the power behind the throne.”

             “You’re going to do it, aren’t you,” she asked quietly.

             “I think so. You don’t think I should?”

             “I don’t. I think it would be a mistake. Bob, you can do anything at all. Why work for a horrible person like Arnold Pike?”

             “He’s wealthy. He builds housing projects. He donates large amounts of money to good candidates for office.”

             “I guess,” she said, but she didn’t sound persuaded.

             The next day, during a break between classes, I went to a pay phone and called Pike’s office.  A secretary answered. I explained who I was. She asked me to hold.

             A few minutes later, a man came to the line. He said, “My name is Ray Miller. I’m Pike’s chief assistant.” He had a New York accent and used that brusque tone used by so many New Yorkers.

             “Pike gave me his card more than a year ago, “ I said. “He told me a job was waiting for me in his organization. I think the idea was that I’d work in real estate with Sam Bates.”

             “You’re the Franklin law student who is friends with Sam and Charlie Rocklin?”

             “That’s me.”

             “Give me your number and I’ll get back to you,” he said.

             I gave him my home phone number and we both hung up.

             He called me at home that evening. “Pike authorized me to offer you a starting annual salary of $60,000 plus commission if you pass both the New York real estate exam and the New York bar exam. He needs help negotiating real estate deals. You’ll basically be doing the kind of work Sam is doing.”

             $60,000 plus commission?

             When I recovered, I said, “I accept.”

             I had not planned to accept on the spot. I also hadn’t expected to be offered a salary like that.

             “You’ll be working in the Pike Enterprises building in Brooklyn with Sam,” he said. “We hope to move the entire enterprise into the city within a few years. We can start you before you get your bar results, but not before you have your real estate license.”

             Rochelle showed no reaction at all when I told her—but then, she wasn’t really the type to get excited or emotional. “I’ll start looking for a teaching job in Brooklyn,” was all she said.

             Rochelle found a teaching position and an apartment for us. The apartment was a two-story Brooklyn brownstone townhouse, built in the 1920s, with crown moldings and hardwood floors polished to a sheen. We moved into the townhouse in June.

            I spent the summer after graduation studying first for the bar exam, and then the real estate exam. I used the second bedroom for an office. Sam was right—after studying law, the real estate exam was a cakewalk. It was basically watered-down property law, contracts law, and agency law.

             While I studied, Rochelle decorated our place. She had a curious way of making decisions. She’d spend days or even weeks considering a particular color or a particular piece of furniture. Then, when she made up her mind, she was done. It was as if the process had taken so long, and finally reaching a decision was so difficult that once her mind was made up, she was finished. Rochelle making a decision was like a stubborn bolt finally sliding into place.

             I admired her taste. She went for the elegant and understated. She liked soft, restful colors—greens and blues. “Ocean colors,” she called them. The furniture was comfortable with a touch of the feminine. The chairs and couches she selected had curved backs, the wood stained a soft gold. Shortly after we moved to Brooklyn, I asked Rochelle what kind of car she wanted. She said, “A blue one.” I bought her a blue Ford 200.

             I started working in September. I spent time negotiating deals, taking on project management responsibilities, and occasionally selling condominium units. Pike was a showman rather than a businessman. Other people did the work, and he threw the parties and managed his public relations.

             The first time I was invited to one of Pike’s parties—before I understood what kinds of parties Pike threw—I brought Rochelle along. We arrived to find the party in full swing. Pike had rented a full floor of a hotel including the ballroom and indoor pool. There were hundreds of people in the ballroom including dozens of very young women. They were scantily clothed. I’m no expert, but many of them appeared underaged. The strobe lights were flashing. The band was playing a song with a heavy beat. The display of food was mouthwatering.

             Rochelle was clearly uncomfortable. “Should we go?” I asked her.

             “Yes,” she said.

             Once outside, we hailed a cab. She settled in. The cab driver hit the gas and we lurched forward and then back. She adjusted herself in the seat and looked out the window. It was a warm summer night and night had fallen, but the city was as vibrant as if it was high noon. Cars, taxis, and buses careened around corners. When the lights changed, the crosswalks were thronged with people. The stores and buildings were lit. Stores and restaurants were open. Rochelle pretended to be captivated by the lights of the city.

             She didn’t say anything until we got home. She put her purse on the table just inside the door and turned to me. “Is it worth the money to work for someone like that?”

             “I like the work,” I told her.

* * *

             “Why?” Jessica asked. “What did you like about it?”

             “The work was thrilling. Pike offered a lifestyle of wealth and luxury.”

             It occurred to me that maybe there was nothing special in any of this. Maybe I was just another person who had fallen into Pike’s spell and therefore met my ruin.

             “In person,” I told her, “he’s captivating.”

             “I find that hard to believe. On television, he comes across as a moron. I find everything about him completely repulsive.”

             “Pike arouses strong emotions in everyone. People either love him or hate him. They either worship him or believe he’s the devil incarnate. I can tell you this: If you fall under his spell, something happens to you. When you are around him, you feel like you’re part of something big, like you can change the world. You are above the rules that constrain ordinary mortals. He makes people feel excited and alive. You really start to think that he possesses the urgent and only truth. He offers the chance for success. In exchange, all he wants is loyalty. He doesn’t return the loyalty, but he demands it.”

             “Go on,” she said.

*  *  *

Rochelle and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary at an Italian restaurant called the Culina. The Culina was the perfect restaurant for an intimate talk—and there was something I wanted to know. Our table was on the second floor with a view of the city skyline. The interior was modern—large windows cased in steel, walls painted a deep greenish gray—none of the stereotyped Italian restaurant decor. The tables, though, were perfect for intimate conversation. Each was set off by itself.

             I put my hand on hers. Some guys have a gift for conversation. I could think of no subtle way to ask my question, so I just asked: “What about children?”

             She shrugged and looked toward the kitchen and pretended she was eagerly waiting for our food. I might not be the world’s best conversationalist, but I knew when something was off.

             “I thought you wanted children,” I said.

             I could see from the firm set of her lips that she didn’t want to talk, and nothing would persuade her to budge. Rochelle appeared all soft and watery, but underneath, she had a core of stubbornness. I didn’t know what else to do, so I dropped the subject. It wasn’t like I was dying to have children myself. I was really just curious.

             After Pike built his third luxury condo building in New York, he wanted to know why I hadn’t purchased a unit. We were in his office after a meeting when he demanded, “What are you doing commuting in from Brooklyn?”

             “Rochelle teaches in Brooklyn. I’d rather be close to where she works.”

             “What does she teach?”

             “High school biology.”

              He pointed his finger at my face and said, “That wife of yours shouldn’t be teaching high school science. She should be a fashion model. She has the look. She has the longest, most fantastic hair I’ve ever seen. I’ve got the contacts to get her started if she wants.”

             Pike’s second wife was a fashion model. His first wife had been an actress—the kind who was drop-dead gorgeous, but you never heard of her or remembered seeing her in any movies.

             “Thank you, but I don’t think Rochelle wants to be a model,” I said. Actually, I knew for a fact that she didn’t want to be a model. I was tempted to say she likes dolphins just to watch Pike’s bemusement.

             In the next presidential election, Ronald Reagan ran against the incumbent Democratic president. Rochelle liked Reagan because his message was upbeat, and he promised to stand up for old-fashioned values. I liked him because I understood that his intent was to dismantle the regulatory state.

            Rochelle and I followed the campaign the way sports fans follow sports. It was good to have common ground again. I felt optimistic that Reagan would win. He brought warmth and optimism after Nixon’s cool cynicism. Indeed, he coasted easily to victory, painting his opponent as a geeky, unlikeable, and out of touch with average Americans.

             Pike got us tickets to a victory bash at the Century Plaza hotel in New York. Everyone was ecstatic. A new decade was dawning. In his landslide victory, Reagan showed that he could put together a new winning coalition. Even Rochelle had a second glass of wine.

             Rochelle and I were sitting in a small couch facing a window with a panoramic view of New York. I took her hand. A few years had passed since the last time I’d asked her, so I tried again. “What about children?”

             A look of deep pain passed over her face.

             “What?” I asked.

             “I can’t. I just can’t.”

             I struggled to understand what she meant. For a moment, I thought she meant she couldn’t talk about it. Then it occurred to me that she couldn’t have children. I was aching with curiosity. When did she find out? Why didn’t she tell me?

             She turned away. “I don’t think this is a good time to talk about it.”

             I let the subject drop. I wanted to say something comforting, so I said, “It’s okay, Rochelle. I can do fine without children.”

             “I’m glad,” she said softly.

             About that time, Pike completed another luxury apartment building in midtown Manhattan. Phillip put the real estate team to work selling units. One day Sam came into my office and said, “We’ve had inquiries from Russians wanting to buy Manhattan real estate.”

             Russians? Manhattan real estate?

             “Nobody in the Soviet Union has any money,” I said.

             “Apparently some people do. There are closet capitalists over there making a bundle. A guy named Leonid Muratov is sending an emissary. I have enough on my plate. I just sold six units at full price to one of his associates—”

             “Six units?” I asked. “Nobody buys six units at full price. That’s six million dollars.

             “They pay cash,” Sam said. “Do you want to take it, or not?

             “Sure,” I said.

             The emissary consisted of three Russian businessmen. Two had a smattering of English, the third was fluent in English. We sat in a conference room with a long polished wood table and a tall window with white leather chairs. The guy fluent in English told me that they had the cash because Muratov’s company did business in New York.

             It was a lie. What was more, it was a transparent lie. Moreover, the guy didn’t care if I knew he was lying. I looked over the paperwork. The cash—large amounts of it—were coming from the Soviet Union through a German bank. I didn’t trust anything coming out of the Soviet government. The Soviet government was a bastion of corruption. But cash was cash, and Muratov had it.

             The transaction took five weeks. I read each document in the two-inch stack of paperwork and made changes where I thought they were necessary. I followed the book exactly—with a single exception. I didn’t demand to see the origins of the money. At the time the laws about verifying the origins of money were murky and easily gotten around. I figured it was none of my business. What happened in Russia was no concern of mine. If Muratov wanted to smuggle that money out of the Soviet Union, it wasn’t my problem. My earnings from the sale would put my net worth over one million.

             I didn’t tell Rochelle about the transaction, but I didn’t hide what I was doing, either. I often made business phone calls from home. She must have heard me mention Muratov’s name because one evening after I got ready for bed, I found an FBI notice on my bedside table. According to the notice, an intelligence agency reported that Muratov was swindling his fellow Russian citizens who wanted to emigrate. Apparently he told people who needed to emigrate that he would sell their possessions for them and send them the money. Instead, he pocketed their money.

             “They’re all a bunch of thieves over there,” I said.

            “Why do business with him?”

            “If I don’t, someone else will,” I said. “And I’ll put the money to good use.”

             Disapproval, like a shadow, passed across her face. That was when I remembered that she was an idealist, like Larry. I, on the other hand, was a realist. Money was power, and the way to be safe was to have more of it. I made a mental note to protect her by keeping talk of business out of our home.

            “I know,” I said. “You’re right. I should be more careful.”

            The deal closed on a Thursday in March. The day was windy and cold. I bundled up and walked the six blocks to Tiffany and Co. The clerk was a young, clean-cut, baby-faced man, polite and eager. I told him I wanted to select a gift.

            “What is she like?” he asked.

            “Understated,” I said. “Classy.”

            “Does she wear earrings? Bracelets?”

            “Just her wedding band. Occasionally small pearl or diamond earrings.

            “I have just the thing,” he said. He showed me a pendant about the size of a dime. It was made of four gleaming diamonds set in a cloverleaf hanging on a delicate platinum chain.

            It was exquisite. I asked the price. It was also expensive.

            I bought it. I slipped the box into my pocket, walked outside, and hailed a cab home.

            I found Rochelle sitting on the couch with a suitcase at her feet. My stomach lurched.

            “Rochelle?” I said.

            “I’m leaving.”

            I felt off-balance. I sank into a nearby chair. “I closed the deal today,” I said.

            ‘I know,” she said. “I saw the deposit in the account.”

            Not knowing what else to do, I pulled the box from my pocket and opened it. She didn’t move.

            “It’s blood money,” she said.

            “I would have quit if you had told me you felt this strongly.”

            “You can’t quit,” she said.

            “What do you mean I can’t quit? Of course, I can quit.”

            Her expression changed, softening a bit. “You think you can,” she said. “But you can’t. You’re trapped by your own fears. You can’t live a normal life. You feel you have to protect yourself, with money, with power. You need to build a wall around yourself to keep out some imaginary boogeyman.”

            None of what she was saying made sense to me. “Is there someone else?” I asked.

             She seemed startled by my question. “No,” she said softly. “But one day there will be.”

            “Where are you going?”

            “I’m staying with a friend until I can get my own place.”

            She stood up. I stood up as well. I wanted to stop her but I knew I couldn’t. I wanted to help her, but I knew she wouldn’t let me. “If you need anything—”

            “I don’t.  I’ll be fine.”

            She picked up her suitcase, and without a backward glance, she was gone. The last thing I saw was her long honey-colored hair billowing like a cape.

            I tried to get her back, of course. I felt it was something I needed to do. If I didn’t at least try, how could I live with myself later? I didn’t know where she was living, so one day I went to the school where she taught. When the final bell rang dismissing the students, I slipped into the school and went to her homeroom classroom. I found her standing by her desk, organizing papers.

            “Bob, please,” she said. “It won’t work.”

            “If I give it all up and go to work for Fletcher, Sullivan, will you reconsider?”

            “You’d be miserable at Fletcher, Sullivan,” she said.

            “No, I wouldn’t. I ought to know.”

             She shook her head. I stayed a moment or two longer until the silence became unbearable, and then I turned and left.

            She took almost nothing with her—just her clothing and personal items—almost as if she had long known she was a temporary visitor in someone else’s home. The divorce was easy. I tried to give her a generous settlement, but she wanted nothing, so we hired a lawyer to draw up the papers for us. There was a waiting period, a sort of marriage limbo, or a kind of purgatory when you’re not really married, but you’re not yet divorced.

            I started dating right away, but my heart wasn’t in it. Sam set me up with some women. He took me to parties. I went along. I drank too much. I did what most men probably do when their wives leave them: I threw myself into work and spent long hours at the office. I worked into the evenings, and then accepted invitations to Pike’s parties, or went out with friends.

            Not long after Rochelle left, the real estate development team finished construction on Pike Towers. I hadn’t paid much attention to the construction, so I was unprepared for the sensation of standing on Fifth Avenue and gazing up at the finished building. If you crossed the Palace of Versailles with a piece of modern architecture, you’d get Pike Towers. It was gold. It glittered. It reeked of opulent wealth. And yet, with its elegantly curved lines and towering height, it blended into the New York skyline. The building was like Pike—showy and gaudy and commanding.

            I gave up the townhouse in Brooklyn and bought a condo in Pike’s building. The unit I bought was sixteen hundred square feet, with two bedrooms, an office, a living room, and a dining room. The windows faced east, offering a view of the East River. My unit had a private elevator to the lobby and a private garage.

            Charlie was frequently in New York on business, so he, too, purchased a unit in Pike Tower. His consulting business had expanded now that he’d taken on two partners—both political operators as savvy as he was. I frequently met Charlie for a late-night meal, reminiscent of our late-night dormitory meetings. Larry was then running for Congress. Pike donated generously. I did as well.

            One balmy evening in June, about six months after Rochelle left, Charlie, Sam, and I were sitting at the bar attached to the lobby of Pike Towers.

            “If Rochelle had just told me that she was thinking about leaving,” I said, “I would have mended my ways. I would have left the job.”

            “Rochelle couldn’t take the truth,” Charlie said. “She wants to live in an ideal world where everyone makes nice. The world isn’t like that. The tough and competent people make money. We need the money to fight the encroaching evil of communism.”

            Sometimes it helps to have a friend who is a realist. “I guess,” I said.

            “That’s my man,” Charlie said and patted my shoulder.

            Charlie and Sam turned the conversation to sports. I had the feeling Sam and Charlie stayed out later that evening than usual because they knew that I didn’t want to be alone.

The eighties were good years, politically and professionally. We were all riding high. I had never felt as optimistic about the future of the country. It was the decade of conservatism. President Reagan rolled back taxes. My wealth increased with Republican power.

            Other Russians wanted to buy property in New York. Like Muratov, they had a lot of money to spend and weren’t worried about cost. I sold them Pike luxury apartments at inflated prices. I got richer and started moving my money offshore. I used my wealth to help a sensational ratio talk show host, P.J. Wiley, rise to fame—

* * *

            “Yeah, I know about that,” Jessica said. “You’re the guy who bankrolled P.J. Wiley.”

            “You’ve been doing your homework,” I said. “Actually, he got started on his own. I helped catapult him to national fame.”

            “I wouldn’t brag about that if I were you. You do really have an affinity for disgusting human beings. How did you meet him?”

            “Through Charlie.”

            “I should have guessed.”

* * *

 Charlie called me one evening while I was going over the final paperwork for a real estate transaction. He was then in Virginia working on a Senator’s campaign. I assumed he wanted to hit me up for a campaign donation. Instead, he said, I have something for you to listen to. There’s this guy out in Topeka, Kansas with a local radio show. P.J. Wiley.”

            “Never heard of him,” I said.

            “Mark my words. One day every person in this country will have heard of him. P.J. Wiley is the answer to Walter Cronkite and boring news. I’ll mail you a tape.”

            The tape arrived a few days later. I inserted it into my portable cassette player, sat on the couch, put on earphones, and listened.

            “Want to solve the nation’s problems?” bellowed a man with a deep, melodious voice. “That’s easy. Liberals shouldn’t be allowed to use keyboards, typewriters, word processors, or email. They shouldn’t be allowed to speak in public at all. They shouldn’t be allowed to own or buy guns. If you accomplish those things, we will have a sane, calm, orderly country. Take their keyboards away. Take all their guns away. Take their guns and keyboards and I guarantee you’ll reduce crime by more than 90 percent.”

            He then launched into a monologue deriding the Clean Air Act, the latest piece of liberal legislation to make it to the Senate floor. “The stupidest thing I ever heard,” he bellowed, “is thinking that if you call something the Clean Air Act you’ll fool people into thinking that it’s going to get the air clean. Have you seen all the exemptions in that Act? I’ll tell you about those exemptions. Those exemptions mean that the air stays dirty, but the companies that can bribe the officials or figure out how to maneuver their way around Washington will make a profit. The companies that spend their time actually working instead of lobbying will get shafted. The liberal elites in Washington will make sure their friends get the exemptions. Like all two-thousand-page pieces of legislation, this Clean Air Act is a Godawful mess.”

            I stopped the tape and called Charlie. “The guy is outrageous,” I said.

            “Exactly right,” Charlie said. “He’s shocking, fun, funny, and entertaining. P.J. understands that people are frustrated and dislike what they don’t understand—and who can understand a two-thousand-page piece of legislation?”

            It took eighteen months and cost four million dollars to get P.J. his own show based in New York City. Three of those four million were mine. I knew the investment would pay off—and it did. The guy who arranged the deal with a major radio network was Phillip McHugh. He explained in his heavy Bronx accent that in arranging the deal, he was not working in his capacity as a Pike Enterprise employee. He said he was freelancing—a transparent lie.

            You can see how effectively different parts of our coalition scratched each other’s backs: Pike’s organization got P.J. a national audience, and then P.J. later helped Pike take national politics by storm by throwing his support behind him.

            One morning I sat in Phillip McHugh’s office with billionaire Robert Fuoco signing the papers to get P.J.’s radio show on the air. More specifically, the papers we signed set up a corporation to launch P.J.’s show.

            “You’ll both see a good return on your investments,” Phillip assured us.

            He was right—as I knew he would be. Over the next fifteen years, my initial investment of four million dollars would grow to eleven million. My offshore accounts were growing rapidly.

            I didn’t spend much time actually listening to P.J.’s show after it launched. I read transcripts, kept track of what he was saying, and measured the results. We learned from P.J. Wiley that the more outrageous the lie, the faster it spread. Go Big became our motto.

About this time, there arose a husband-and-wife team, the governor of a small Southern state, Eddie Heller and his radical wife, Jocelyn. Eddie Heller ran for president. He would never have secured the 1992 Democratic nomination if not for a fluke. The incumbent Republican president was so popular nobody believed a Democrat had a chance, so the Democratic frontrunner, a former mayor of New York, dropped out of the race. It was pretty clear that he intended to wait and run when there would not be an incumbent to compete with.

            The Hellers terrified me. Eddie was the embodiment of the 1960s counterculture. He’d literally spent the 1960s smoking pot, wearing hippy clothing, and avoiding the draft. People said he was likable, but he struck me as the type who might sell snake oil at carnivals. He did a good job faking the I’m A Nice Guy Routine—

* * *

            “I met him once,” Jessica said. “He is a nice guy.”

            “He’s a phony,” I said.

            She shook her head. “You are so cynical. Go on.”

* * *

Heller’s wife pretended to be a moderate, but she was a militant feminist. They were basically communists who wanted to regulate the rich and seize their money to give to the loafers. The Hellers were precisely what I’d spent my life afraid of. They threw me back to the feeling I’d had as a child that unseen satanic forces lurked just out of sight.

            P.J. Wiley went after Jocelyn Heller. “Eddie Heller married Jocelyn because she’s a controlling bitch who was able to mastermind his political career. But who wants to sleep with a bitch like her? It’s no wonder Eddie plays around on the side. The Hellers make a big deal about their pet cat, but it’s obvious to anyone who looks at Jocelyn that Eddie also has a dog.”

            Eddie Heller got lucky again when a cocky third-party candidate siphoned off millions of conservative votes, thereby splitting the conservative vote between the third-party candidate and the incumbent. As a result, Heller won the presidency.

            A few weeks after Heller was sworn into office, Charlie called me. “We’re swinging into high gear,” he said. “We have to nip this presidency in the bud.”

            Charlie and a small band of dedicated conservatives raised a fortune and spent every penny sniffing out scandals. They looked at every check the Hellers had written and scrutinized every tax form. They accused the Hellers of driving a staffer to suicide. When it came to light that the Hellers had been part of a large real estate deal in Eddie Heller’s hometown, they accused them of self-dealing. In making these accusations, they tapped into the widespread assumption that anyone involved in a major real estate deal was engaging in some form of self-dealing.

The election of Eddie Heller coincided with the break-up of the former Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Russia declared itself a new democracy and adopted a Constitution similar to ours. Trying to privatize the nation’s resources and industries resulted in a wild scramble for power. Chaos set in. What happened next was that a small group of men took control of the nation’s industries and resources. They became known as the new Russian capitalists.

            These new Russian capitalists talked a lot like various parts of the American conservative coalition. Like the small-government conservatives, they were rebelling against an all-controlling bureaucratic government. Like the religious right, they talked about restoring religion, family, and traditional values. Karl Marx had called organized religion the opium of the people and the communist government had adopted atheism as its official religion. A segment of the Russian population was tired of being told they shouldn’t be religious.

            Putin talked about returning Russia to a time when the nation was pure and innocent before it was transformed into a totalitarian state by those who sought to trample personal liberty in the interests of power. As I knew from my college Russian history class, there was no such golden era in Russian history. Feudalism and Imperial Russia under the Czar hadn’t been exactly a cakewalk for the common people.

            America, in contrast, did have a golden era in which governments were local, the power of the federal government was minimal, and personal liberty was at a premium—

* * *

            “When would that American golden era be?” Jessica said, “Presumably before the 1960s, when, in your opinion, the unraveling of America began. So, would our golden era include slavery or racial segregation, or the fact that women were not allowed to vote, and minority communities had their rights trampled?”

            She crossed her arms over her chest and gave me a stern look as if daring me to respond and defend myself.

            I knew better than to take the bait. I met her gaze and waited.

            “But please go on,” she said. “We’re up to the part where Russia’s wealth and resources were controlled by a small group of white men, your friends, the new Russian capitalists.”

* * *

People started calling the Russian capitalists oligarchs because they became fabulously wealthy. Their critics argued that they became wealthy because they took control of the nation’s industries and resources, which they then plundered for their own enrichment. Charlie’s theory was that the competent rise to the top and take control.

            By the late 1990s, P.J. was airing in every rural area in America. Meanwhile, Robert Fuoco was buying up rural television and radio stations. Each radio station featured P.J. There were places where Fuoco’s station was one of the few stations people could get. Listeners had a choice: P.J.’s radio show or country music.

            Charlie fed information and ideas to P.J., who then passed the ideas to his audience. P.J. told his audience that the federal government was so corrupt there was only one thing to do: tear it all down and rebuild. It all had to go. The agencies. The piles of regulations. The corruption. The deeply inbred socialism. It was too corrupt to be fixed so it had to all be burned to the ground. He told his audience that liberalism was like poison. He encouraged his listeners to cheer the right-wing movements all over Europe springing up to stop the spread of global socialism. He reduced the intricate complexity of international relations and politics to one word: globalism. He told his audience that it was all corrupt.

            As Charlie predicted, the liberals quoted P.J. as often as the conservatives. They quoted him in outrage, thereby giving him even more airtime, expanding his reach, and bringing him even more fans who were secretly sick of the liberals’ virtue signaling and peddling of hope porn. Here was the kicker. Despite P.J.’s popularity and Fuoco’s purchase of television stations, Heller’s popularity remained high. There was some trick we hadn’t discovered yet.

* * *

That was when we heard footsteps approaching. I assumed a guard was coming to tell us visiting hours were over. “You’ll be back?” I asked. Again, I heard the pleading in my voice. I added, “We should be able to finish tomorrow.”

            “I’ll be back.” What I felt was a relief. One more day was all I needed to get to the important parts of the story.

            The guard opened the door. She adjusted her back on her shoulder and walked away toward the front of the building. How deeply frustrating that I couldn’t just walk out the door as well.

             “You can go to your cell or the courtyard,” the guard said to me.

            “The courtyard,” I said.

            Once there, I sat by myself on the same bench as the day before. A few inmates were walking the perimeter. Another handful was standing in a group, talking.

            It occurred to me why Phillip wanted me to sign and videotape a confession. Forcing me to sign a bogus confession would trap me forever. I’d have little choice but to remain forever loyal to the regime. Adopting a lie often had that effect on people. I sensed it was already happening with Sam. Once a person adopted a damaging lie, he became complicit in a way that made him want to defend the regime as a way of justifying their own complicity.

            A warden came into the courtyard and said, “Number 319 has a phone call.”

I stood up, deeply startled.  “Me? I have a call”

            “Yup. That way,” he pointed to the entrance. I walked in the direction he pointed. He came behind me. When we reached the front office, the clerk handed me the receiver of his desk phone.

“Hello?” I said.

             “It’s me,” Susan said briskly. “I just got home.” I could hear her breathing. Then she said, “Someone broke into our condo and searched.”

            “What?” I steadied myself against the counter.

           “I don’t think the burglar took anything. Just searched.”

            “Where were you when it happened?”

            “I was at Ken and Eliza’s place.”

            “Thank you for telling me,” I said. I spoke tersely to signal that I couldn’t say anymore. A clerk was watching me.

            “I’ll come back in the morning,” she said.

            “Come early,” I said.

            “Of course.”

            We said our goodbyes and disconnected. When I put the receiver back down, my hand was shaking. I took a deep breath to control my trembling.

            The warden who brought me said, “I can take you to the TV room or the courtyard.”

            “Thanks, but I’ll just go back to my cell.” I needed to think this over.

            We hadn’t gone far when the warden walking behind me abruptly stopped. “Wait,” he said. I stopped and turned around. He took a phone from his pocket and answered it. “Okay, I’ll bring him back.” He put the phone back into his pocket and said, “Another call. Same person.”

            We pivoted and turned back to the office. “You know,” he said, “each call beyond one per day costs you ten bucks.”

            “I understand,” I said.

            We reached the office. The receiver was again on the counter. I walked over and picked it up.

            “Susan?” I said.

            “Yeah,” she said. “They took the locked box from the closet.”

            That was the box that contained my insurance—the file with the records of the wrongdoings of the Pike Administration.

            “What about the files in my desk? The one labeled D.C.?”

            “They didn’t get that. I’ll explain tomorrow.”

            “Okay,” I said.

            We said our goodbyes and hung up.

            The walk back to my cell seemed interminable. My knees felt so weak that I had trouble with the stairs. I held the railing and stopped a few times to rest. I glanced back once at the warden who was escorting me. He was waiting patiently. He had a baby face and looked about fourteen. I figured he was in his mid-twenties. He probably assumed my shakiness was due to my age. My hair was gray, after all, and my shoulders were slender.

            I resumed walking. At last, we reached my cell. I leaned against the wall while he unlocked the door. Then I stepped inside. I felt grateful when the door closed behind me. I needed to be alone.  Someone had already brought my dinner tray. I sat in the chair at my desk. My legs felt too shaky to pace the cell, and the last thing I wanted to do was lie down. I pushed the tray aside. I put my elbows on the table and rested my forehead on my hands.

            When I’d had that long talk with Phillip on my first day here, I’d mentioned to him that I had insurance of my own. Sending a thug in search of it was something Phillip would do. If he was after records that were damning, he’d gotten the wrong file. Not that it mattered too much. Jessica had copies of all the contents.

            The question was—how did the burglar know that Susan wasn’t there just then? Most people are home on a Saturday. Someone must be watching her.

            I understood then that Susan, Eliza, and Ken were in danger. Of course, plotting to get me out always carried risks—but the fact that someone was watching Susan closely enough to know when she was and wasn’t home and no doubt still had access to the apartment raised the danger level.

            I had to call the plan off. I really had no choice. I’d have to tell Susan in the morning when she came. I would send a message to Phillip telling him I planned to sign the confession. That should at least relieve the pressure on Susan long enough for the three of them to get out of the country. It was time for me to be noble. I’d sign the confession to allow Susan, Eliza, and Ken to get safely out of the country—but the moment I knew they were safe, I’d renounce the confession. Jessica had the entire story. Let Pike sic his goons on me. I no longer cared.

            There was enough money in my offshore accounts to keep Susan, Ken, and Eliza in luxury for the remainder of their lives.

            Once I made the decision, I felt almost weightless. I had much less to worry about. The future became simpler. In the morning I would tell Susan that she, Eliza, and Ken needed to leave the country. If I could join them later, I would. Meanwhile, I would stay here, sign the confession, and take my chances.

            Sometimes I thought Pike and Phillip were more bark than bite. If so, it was possible that after the whole thing died down, I’d be able to join Susan abroad. It was easy to overestimate Pike because he presented himself as a strongman and used, shall we say, unorthodox methods—was all-powerful, but the reality was that Pike and his minions were mostly inept. They bungled the simplest tasks. The only thing Pike was really good at was creating a narrative. He was terrible at actually solving problems, but he was good at branding. He was, in essence, a gifted con artist.

            I understood, of course, that Pike commanded what was essentially a paramilitary. If he turned his goons against me, anything could happen. But he forgave people who got back in line and paid proper homage.

            I was trapped. Rochelle’s long-ago words came back to me: You’re trapped by your own fears. Then I heard Jessica’s voice saying: You hated Baskerville. You were stifled there. Your parents were stifled there.

            Perhaps I always had been trapped. The thought occurred to me that my imprisonment was some kind of cosmic joke, and I was locked up in steel walls now as a metaphor for how I’d lived my life.

            I paced until a warden came for my dinner tray. Exhaustion from the lack of sleep since arriving and the stress of it all caught up to me. I felt so tired that the muscles in my back ached. I picked up the blankets and, one by one, shook each one out, and then wrapped them tightly around my shoulders. I lay back on the cot, which squeaked under my weight, and stared upward at the ceiling. The wind rattled the window panes. At what felt like regular intervals, a twig or leaf hit the window. Each time, my heart thumped.

            The light was dimmed for the night. The night sky was so black that the metal grating disappeared. In the stains on the ceiling, I saw shapes, the way you can see shapes in the clouds. First, I saw what looked like a bird with wings spread. As I stared, the stain seemed to take on the shape of a dragon complete with bat-like wings and the tongue of a snake. When I closed my eyes, I still saw the dragon, now with beady yellow eyes.

            I shook my head to get rid of the image. The next time I looked at the stains, I saw a butterfly—a Papillon, the butterfly that had inspired the title of Henri Charrière’s memoir. I wondered if seeing a butterfly was a good omen.

            I was jolted from that pleasant thought by a clanging sound from the cell above mine. I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. I didn’t think there were many more days of this I could tolerate before going completely mad.

            I must have fallen back to sleep because the next thing I knew, I heard a loud knocking.  I sat up and listened, but there was only silence. Had I dreamed of the knocking? I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was the inmate in the cell above me again. I stood up and went to the door and looked out the spy hole. The corridor was empty. I watched for several minutes to make sure. Still nothing. Potato Face is playing with me. I pushed the thought aside. It was absurd. More likely, the person in the cell above me had dropped something.

            I had no idea what time it was. I laid back on the cot, closed my eyes, and listened to the sounds in the prison.

            My thoughts whirled the way they do when you’re half asleep, with random images coming to me. I thought of my childhood home and Rochelle’s beautiful hair and I felt an odd stirring. I wasn’t the type to dwell in the past. Retelling my David Copperfield crap was taking a toll on me. Thinking of Rochelle, I felt the stirring of long-suppressed regret and a longing for the things I’d lost.

            The knocking of water pipes and the swishing of air in the vents remained low and steady enough that I felt lulled and drifted back to sleep. The next time I woke up, the early light of dawn was streaming in through the window.

            I closed my eyes. The image that came to me was Rochelle as she looked when I’d first met her, in a blue dress and a silver ornament in her hair, looking like an angel. I was in such tumults, it made no sense that I should think about her now. Perhaps I wanted to show her that I was willing to sacrifice myself for the greater good. See, I wanted to say. Maybe I wasn’t as bad as you thought I was. Maybe I had some good in me.

 

To continue reading, click here for Part III.