For a man who worked at a glass desk in a glass office in a mostly glass building, Mr. Russert wasn’t as transparent as I would have preferred. Not that he needed to be given all the attention he had garnered since his startup in Watsonville, aptly dubbed the Russert Growers Company, grew into a successful business seemingly overnight. The character of agriculture on the coast was different from that of other places in the Republic. Rather than relying on a nomadic underclass of poor whites and Latinos to do their picking, coastal growers brought in foreign laborers from Indonesia and the Philippines, spry little men with their own languages who worked on guest visas for ten months at a time, flying home once a year to check in on their families and reapply. With no parcel program in place, the arable land of every county eventually came to be split among the same half-dozen or so large ag companies. Mr. Russert owned one of the newest and most controversial operations in the country; before I met him, he had made waves in Santa Cruz for buying up twenty thousand acres in just over two years. Now he was beginning to expand into other territories. On the morning of our first meeting, I found him sitting alone in his scantly furnished glass sanctuary, clad in a simple ash-colored shirt with no tie and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. My initial impression of him offered nothing substantial by which to gauge his attitude, but I remained optimistic that he would confirm my earlier suspicion; that, in his role as upstart newcomer, he would be more willing to accept the kinds of propositions his competitors might deem too risky, and therefore unsound.
He looked me once over and said, “All right. Now that you’ve got my attention, maybe you could go ahead and tell me who you are.”
“My name is Elliot Temple, and I’ve just come from the State of San Joaquin. That’s all I’ll say for now. You understand I have to be careful about compromising myself.”
Russert shot me a confused look that lasted until the moment he adjusted the almost invisible frames of his eyeglasses. “Where did you graduate?”
“I don’t have a degree.”
“Interesting.”
“I entered the job market early. The classroom environment was too stifling for me.”
“Interesting.”
I recognized the look he was giving me then. It was one I received often, living in the Bay Area, whenever it became known that I was somehow traversing this globe without the benefit of a BA. Often incredulous, occasionally envious, but always baffled that a species such as me was not yet extinct in this part of the nation.
He said, “Well, Temple. What can I do for you?”
“As I explained over the phone, I’ve recently come into a situation where I would be able to facilitate the sale of a large tract of quality farmland. In an area of the country where no private enterprise has flourished since before disbandment. And I believe I could negotiate a very reasonable price for you. Much less than you would normally pay for a hundred and twenty acres.”
“In San Joaquin?”
“Yes. Don’t ask me which county, though.”
Russert reached across the desk to a glass decanter full of water and raw asparagus. The asparagus stalks were bound together in the style of a Roman fasces and caused a gurgling sound as he poured. He sipped from his glass and slid the other one over to me.
He said, “Mr. Temple, either you’re trying to cheat me, or you’ve been cheated yourself. I’ll be polite and give you the benefit of the doubt. The simple fact is that no one could buy a farm in San Joaquin for all the money in the world. The government’s got that whole valley nationalized as part of the parcel program. Country bumpkins packing peaches in rented sheds. That’s what the land is earmarked for.”
“This isn’t a parcel. It’s a cooperative, the biggest of its kind. The government makes a special exception for co-ops. They can transfer the lease to anyone, including a private company like yours. All you have to do is buy them out.”
“Sure. But I wouldn’t really own the land, would I? I’d be at the mercy of the Ag Bureau. I’d still have to pay rent every month, and sell my produce for a fraction of what it’s worth.”
“In the beginning, perhaps, but then things are more than likely to work out in your favor. You know as well as I do that once the Vandeman Act passes Congress and the parcel program is phased out, all that land in the valley is going to be worth ten times what it is now. I’m giving you the opportunity to step into a new world and plant your flag before anyone else. And I hope I was right in assuming you’re an ambitious man, the kind of man who wouldn’t back down from the chance to build an empire up from the ground.”
Russert laughed. “A hundred and twenty acres is hardly an empire. With all the mountains between here and the valley, it’s more like a far-flung outpost. Probably more trouble to maintain than it would be worth.”
“As a businessman, Mr. Russert, I can understand why you would try to play hard to get, but I wish you would draw the line at being disingenuous. You can’t sit here and pretend your pushing into Gilroy and Hollister isn’t part of some grand forward-thinking strategy. I don’t need to convince you of what an opportunity this is; you’ve already realized it yourself. The grower who succeeds in spreading eastward down the middle of this country will have all the blessings of heaven and earth at his disposal. You’ll have your army of Asians, the most fertile land on the planet, and equidistant access to the markets of San Francisco and L.A. From there, nothing will be out of your reach. You could probably become president of the Republic if you wanted.”
“Flattery and daydreams are two things I simply don’t have time for.”
“It’s not flattery to suggest that a powerful man could become more powerful. Nor is it daydreaming to imagine that same man using his power to gain even more.”
Russert turned and brushed his hand over the computer hibernating in a built-in compartment at the center of the desk. Immediately the machine bloomed for him, unfolding silently and contorting itself until the keys were right within reach. He moved his fingers over the screen. Then, as abruptly as he had turned to the device, he shut it away again. The rain, which had been trickling lightly when I first arrived, finally started to pick up, slamming the windows with intermittent gusts of wind rising up from the sea wall thirty miles to the west.
He said, “The state of agriculture in this country. It’s like something out of the Dark Ages. I truly believe that a hundred years from now people will look back at this point in our history and wonder how we ever allowed so much valuable land to go underutilized for so long. All that wasted potential. Future generations will mock us for it, and rightly so. Like the Chinese with their Great Leap Forward.”
“The valley is a backward place in an otherwise forward-thinking country. That’s what my father believed.”
He said, “There’s one part of this I can’t put my finger on. You. What’s your stake here? You say you’re in a position to help me buy this place cheap, but clearly you’re not the one with your name on the lease. Which means you’re going through all this trouble for a measly ten percent on the deal.”
“I was thinking more like forty percent.”
“Forty? Jesus. That’s a hell of a finder’s fee.”
“True, but that’s between me and the other party. I wouldn’t ask you to front my commission in addition to what you’d already be paying.”
“Well. Isn’t that gracious of you?” He stood and turned to the wall and looked out at the rain splattering on the outside glass. Seizing the moment, I removed the flask from my pocket and mixed a shot of vodka in with my asparagus water. It had been a few hours since my last drink and I needed to keep my head together. Russert said, “Tell you how I see it. Seems to me like you’re nothing but a middleman in all this. What’s to stop me from going behind your back and dealing with the tenants directly? A co-op that size couldn’t be too hard to find, especially now that I know your name. And whoever the other party is, I can’t imagine they’re very eager to carve forty percent off the top just to pay your end. So I bet I could negotiate a better deal without your help. What do you think of that?”