You’re kidding, right?
No. You’ve got to eat, and so do I.
I’m in D.C.
I bet you are. End of world yet?
Close.
Coming up here soon therefore?
True.
And must eat, even as world ends.
True.
Dinner? Breakfast?
Dinner. Tuesday.
So she was getting ready to go to dinner with Larry on Tuesday, cutting short any number of other critical items on her to-do list, when Gen Octaviasdottir pinged her.
“You know the people who had Mutt and Jeff kidnapped?” Gen said from Charlotte’s wrist. “The security firm we think was involved with that? It looked like they worked for Henry Vinson, like I told you. And that made sense, given everything we knew. We’ve had all those people under surveillance. But on the night of the tower riot, I got talking to a man who worked for that firm, and he told me some stuff, and I’ve had my assistant checking out what he told me. And it looks to be true. Pinscher Pinkerton worked for Vinson, but Rapid Noncompliance Abatement came into the picture later. And RNA’s head guy, Escher, has been working for Larry Jackman.”
“Whoa.” Charlotte tried to comprehend. “What does that mean?” Then it hit her. “Fuck! You mean Larry’s been the asshole behind all this?” A sudden fury at him made the world go red, yet another physiological reaction common to all. She saw red!
“Well, but it’s more complicated than that,” Gen told her as her vision came back. “Come on down to the common room and I’ll explain it to you in person.”
“Okay sure. I’ve got to leave soon, but it’s to go see Larry Jackman. So I need to hear this!”
“You most definitely do.”
There was a little restaurant in Soho where they used to go in the old days. Charlotte thought it was a little strange Larry had suggested it, but she liked the food and didn’t want to be muddying the waters with any countersuggestions, given how busy he must be. The waters were going to get muddy enough as it was.
It was a tiny place, a kind of interspace between two buildings that had been captured as another set of rooms, maybe in the nineteenth century. Behind the long bar was a model of the Manhattan skyline made of liquor bottles. A waitress seated them in the upstairs room, overlooking a courtyard like an air shaft, brick-walled, with a single tree surviving improbably down below them. Being protected from the hurricane winds, it still had its summer leaves. Looking down on the leaves was like looking at some kind of brilliant Chinese artwork.
“So how’s it going?” Charlotte asked when their drinks had come.
Larry lifted his glass of white wine, clinked it against hers.
“Your householders’ defaults are causing a panic,” Larry said, looking at his glass. “You won’t be surprised to hear.”
“No.”
“Did you ask your friend Amelia Black to start it?”
“I don’t know her that well.”
“She seems like a complete idiot,” he complained.
“No, not at all. She’s pretty sharp.”
“You’re kidding.”
“She has a cloud persona, that’s all. Maybe you could put it that way. Do you know the story about Marilyn Monroe?”
“No.”
“One time she was walking down Park Avenue with Susan Strasberg and no one was paying attention to them, and Marilyn said, ‘Do you want to see her?’ And then she changed her posture and the way she was looking around, and all of a sudden they were mobbed. Amelia is maybe a little like that.”
“I don’t see how that would work.”
“Maybe we should stick to numbers.”
He accepted the rebuke with a little hunching of the shoulders. Such joy, dinner with the ex, his posture said. Charlotte reminded herself to curb her tongue. Very difficult. Possibly a certain merry sadism was obtruding into her from below at the fact of her meeting her famous Fed Ex in these particular circumstances, but there was a higher purpose that she had to remember.
“I only mean,” she said, “that Amelia’s carefully disguised and possibly unconscious brilliance is not the point here. The point is the banks freaking. They were all leveraged to at least fifty times what they have in hand, right?”
He nodded. “That’s legal.”
“So it’s like they’re skybridges extending out into space without touching anything at their far ends. And now a hurricane like our Fyodor is hitting, and all these skybridges are waving around, about to detach and fly away.”
“An ornate image,” Larry noted.
“No one wants to walk on these bridges right now.”
He nodded. “Very true. Loss of trust.”
She couldn’t help smiling. “You always know economists are in deep shit when they start talking about trust and value. Usually when you say fundamentals to them they’re like interest rates and price of gold. Then a bubble bursts and the fundamentals become trust and value. How do you create trust, keep it, restore it? And what’s the ultimate source of value? I’ve been reading some of the history on this, I’m sure you already know it. Do you remember when Bernanke had to admit that the government was the ultimate guarantor of value, when he bailed out the banks in the 2008 crash?”
Larry nodded.
“A famous moment, right? Rising almost to the point of political economy, or even philosophy?”
“An infamous moment,” he corrected.
“Notorious! Horrible for any economist to hear! The ultimate put-down of the market!”
“Well, I don’t know about that. The view would be that the market sets the value, just by what buyers and sellers agree is the price. Free undertaking of a contract, all that.”
“But that was always bullshit.”
“You say that, but what do you mean?”
“I mean prices are systemically low, result of collusion between buyers and sellers, who agree to fuck the future generations so that they can get what they want, which is cheap stuff and profits both.”
This was what Jeff had taught her up on the farm, and what he had earlier tried foolishly to correct, or at least express, with his graffiti hacks.
“Well, even if that were true, what could we do about it?”
“It would take values, rather than value. It would take values setting the value.”
“Good luck with that.”
She stared at him. “Have you gotten cynical, or were you always cynical?”
“Isn’t that kind of a, you know, have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife question?”
“You would never beat anyone,” Charlotte said. “I know that. In fact I know you’re a good person and not cynical at all, that’s why I’m talking to you like this. I guess I’m wondering why you are trying to sound cynical right when you have the chance to do some good. Are you scared?”
“Of what?”
“Well, of making history, I guess. It would be a big move.”
“What would?”
“What we talked about, Larry. The time is now. The banks and the big investment firms and hedge funds are all coming to you begging for another bailout. They are envisioning 2008 and 2066, and why shouldn’t they? It keeps on happening! They gamble and lose, they can’t handle it, they come to you and cry, and threaten you with collapse of the global economy and a gigantic depression, and you create and hand over cash directly to them, and they bank it and wait out the storm, wait till other people get the ball rolling, and then they start gambling all over again. And now they own eighty percent of the world’s capital assets, and buy all the governments and laws, and you were part of that for many years. And now they’re doing it again. So they probably expect it will all go as it always has.”