The Sun King

by David Ignatius

  I TOOK HER IN my arms. She was crying. Most of the time, she contained the horror within her perfect shell, but now she was turned inside out. I had rarely felt so close to anyone as I did to Candace that day. And in spite of everything that happened afterward, I still count myself lucky to have walked together with her, backward in time, into that room.

  Before we left the house, she spent some time with her mother, and then some time alone, putting herself back together. We drove back to the paper, mostly in silence. Her face was a little puffy—a good cry will do that—but otherwise she looked fine. She was a resilient person—you would have to be to have lived her life, but it wasn’t simply adaptation to difficult circumstances. She had an elasticity to her; she was the tree that would bend in the wind but not break. That was the paradoxical gift her father had given her. She knew what pain was, and how to survive it. And I wanted to believe she had learned compassion, too.

  As we were nearing the paper, I asked her if she had ever talked about her father like that with anyone else. I wanted to be special to her, at least in that way. “Just one other person,” she answered, and I knew the rest. She had told Galvin. I think she wanted me to feel flattered, that I was the other member of that club, but it was another wound. I could not escape him. At every turn, his face popped up like a shooting-range target.

  FOURTEEN

  THE SAVANT PUT A LARGE SIGN ON HIS OFFICE DOOR THAT read IF YOU CAN’T SAY ANYTHING NICE ABOUT SOMEONE . . . THEN YOU’VE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE. It was intended to invite what are known in the intelligence trade as “walk-ins”—the spontaneous defectors who divulge secrets because they hate their wives or they’re angry they didn’t get promoted or whatever other flimsy reason might lead someone to betray his deepest secrets. The Savant was trolling for information off the dark side of the bridge; he did not scruple about his sources.

  Writing a column was not the typing exercise I had imagined. I wasn’t afraid of offending my friends (for I didn’t really have any), but I hadn’t reckoned with the realities of writing for a Serious Newspaper. Certainly I could write: “Newt Gingrich is a fatuous man who lectures other people about morality even though he dumped his first wife when she was in the hospital with cancer.” But the Sun had libel lawyers, who would warn that such a statement might be “actionable.” And the Sun had editors, who would ask whether that reference to Newt dumping his wife was, perhaps, gratuitous, and take it out. I could throw a tantrum—that was what real writers did, wasn’t it, when editors fiddled with their copy?—but that wasn’t really an answer. Inescapably, to be a newspaper columnist, I would have to choose my targets wisely.

  I once heard a story about a British journalist named Claude Cockburn. He was an aristocrat, an ex-Communist, a cad with women and in other respects an endearingly reprehensible fellow. It was said that when he was searching for a good subject to attack in one of his own columns, he once asked a friend, “Who’s the most admired man in the world?” The friend pondered for a while, weighing various luminaries from the realms of science, music, letters, and finally declared that the most admired man in the world was the kindly Alsatian doctor who had devoted his life to helping the poor and needy in Africa, Dr. Albert Schweitzer. “Well, then,” Cockburn replied, “let’s have a go at old Schweitzer.”

  It was this state of mind The Savant hoped to emulate. He wanted to know, as he sat that morning at his lustrous teak desk, who was the most admired person in Washington. Was it perhaps Ralph Nader, the sainted consumer advocate—the man who, by forcing automakers to build safer cars, had probably saved more lives than had been lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Nader had led a blameless, abstemious life. Rightee-o! Let’s have a go at old Ralph! Perhaps an inquiry into his sex life—CONSUMER GURU’S LOVE SECRETS. But on reflection, Nader was yesterday’s saint. He’d done his work. Nobody would care anymore if he slept with a dog.

  What about Justice Sandra Day O’Connor? The woman had practically been canonized! She had created the moderate center on the Supreme Court, saved Roe v. Wade, kept the right-wingers from putting the Constitution through the Veg-O-Matic. There was something infuriatingly admirable about the woman. Let’s have a go at old Sandra! Surely she was a closet cigarette smoker, or had cheated at line calls in tennis. But the Sun’s lawyers would want evidence; that was the problem with going after a sitting Supreme Court justice. The lawyers always stuck together. They were worse than the Gambino family.

  I skittered along in this way, looking for suitable subjects and then thinking of reasons why they were not so suitable, when into my lap fell the name-dropping exterminator. Actually, it was a suggestion from Candace. She mentioned during one of my increasingly frantic visits in search of ideas that her mother had an exterminator who was always gossiping about the bug problems of famous Washingtonians. He was a sign of what the city was coming to, she said—even the exterminators would soon be writing their memoirs. I got his number from Candace and called him at home. His name was Sanjay, and he was a garrulous Indian man in his late thirties. He knew my name from Reveal, he said. Exterminating was just a temporary job; he wanted to be a writer, too.

  After a little coaxing, the bug stories came crawling out. There was a certain prominent Washington lobbyist, reputed to be the President’s best friend, as a matter of fact. A fine fellow, no doubt, and very clean personally, but he had bugs everywhere. Big ones!—even the c-bugs (he couldn’t bring himself to say cockroaches), and mice too! The secretary of transportation also had bug problems, he was sorry to report. A lovely lady—salt of the earth—and the President’s difficulties certainly weren’t her fault. But still. . . . The secretary had been giving a dinner party one night when across the table crawled a large spider—dangerously close to the butter dish. It was a near disaster. The woman called the exterminators the next day and cursed them out! As if it were their fault.

  And the TV people, those news reporters. Some of them just left food right out on the counter, where the bugs practically had to eat it. And then they wondered what was wrong? He mentioned a particularly prominent television reporter who’d had an infestation of moths in her cereal boxes, and he had tried to tell her, Close the damn boxes! But she hadn’t listened, and the moths were still there—and she wondered why.

  It was a metaphor, the way he saw it, for the inner rot. You can’t lie to bugs, he confided. They can teach you a lot, if you pay attention. Bugs see things. The man was obsessed. I just let him talk. The Sun’s lawyers wouldn’t let me use real names—they seemed to think it was defamatory to say that people had big, fat, ugly bugs crawling all over their houses—so I took the real names out. But The Savant had his first column.

  GALVIN LOVED THE NAME-DROPPING exterminator. He arranged for me and Sanjay to go on The Anti-News the next day. Sanjay was a natural on TV. He looked just enough like an Asian version of the Maytag repairman to be believable, and he couldn’t stop talking. It turned out he had a whole lot more stories about the infestations of famous people’s houses. After the show, he asked me if I could help him get a literary agent, and everything seemed to be going great. But then the secretary of transportation sent a letter to the exterminating company, protesting the invasion of her privacy—(“Has this country sunk so low that even the kitchen cupboards of public officials are open to prying eyes?”)—and the exterminators promptly fired Sanjay.

  I felt mildly guilty and called Galvin, hoping we could help Sanjay find other work. But the publisher was ecstatic. This was a perfect story for the new Sun. A heartless bureaucrat had destroyed the livelihood of a working man. He proposed a Save Sanjay campaign. “We’ll demand that the secretary of transportation apologize for ruining this guy’s life,” he enthused, “and we’ll force the exterminators to hire him back. We’re the newspaper that fights for the little guy. The newspaper that won’t be intimidated! The newspaper with a heart!”

  He wasn’t kidding. He ordered up a front-page story the next day, over the strenuous protest of Howard Bacon. The stor
y recounted the sad tale of the intrepid, truth-telling exterminator—omitting the fact that he was even at that moment shopping his memoirs and looking for a movie deal. It ran under the headline EXTERMINATOR BUGS PRESIDENT’S PAL, and it made great reading. A box next to the story supplied the telephone number and e-mail address of the secretary of transportation, so that readers could tell her what they thought. Needless to say, an abject letter of apology was forthcoming within twenty-four hours, and Sanjay was offered his old job back—which he turned down; he was already working on a screenplay. All in all, it was a big win for the Sun.

  GALVIN STOPPED BY MY office one afternoon. He was jingling some coins in his pocket. He looked happy. “I love that movie,” he said, pointing to my Little Mermaid poster. “It always makes me cry.” Despite his genial mood, I assumed he must want something. Galvin was meddling in every department lately, and Bacon wasn’t the only person he was driving crazy. He had a kind of manic determination to remake everything in sight, as if he were rushing against a secret deadline. But he didn’t have any advice for me this time, it turned out. It was a social call. He wanted me to come have dinner with him, two nights hence. He said it would be a celebration, for a small group of friends.

  I NEEDED A SECOND column. The name-dropping exterminator had been such a hit that it raised the ante. I wanted something piquant for the next installment. Someone once observed that writing a column was like being married to a nymphomaniac—as soon as you were finished, it was time to start again. Much as it was against my nature, I sensed the need to do a little reporting.

  Topping my list of usual suspects was Hugo Bell, the shadowy prince of real estate. I was awed by his ability to mine the most obscure records and bring back nuggets of gold: Who was buying a fancy new house because of a fat book contract? Who was having to sell his fancy house because of an impending divorce? Who was getting sued by a neighbor for letting his dog run wild? Bell knew it all. I hadn’t seen him lately, and I wasn’t sure whether he owed me a favor, or vice versa, but he was worth a try.

  “Hey, buddy,” I crooned into the phone. “This is The Savant calling. Tell me something hot!”

  Hugo was deep into a crossword puzzle when I called—that was another of his quirks, the notion that it was an act of rebellion for a black man to do the New York Times crossword puzzle—and he wasn’t happy about being disturbed. But he had a few tidbits. Ted Koppel was thinking of selling his country place on the Maryland shore. Larry King was remodeling the bathrooms in his penthouse apartment. King Hussein’s comely former housekeeper was trying to sell her memoirs, inaptly titled The King and Me. None of it seemed quite right for The Savant. I asked if he had anything else.

  “How about bankruptcies?” he asked. “Lot of those on the way. Something spooky is happening in the real estate market. The last time I saw it was at the end of the eighties, before the commercial market crashed.”

  “What’s so spooky?” I asked. This didn’t sound like a column, but you never knew.

  “Well, in the last two weeks, you can’t find any buyers for the high-end properties—only sellers. That’s scary. And some of the deals that were pending last week have cratered. Money is tight all of a sudden. Lenders are nervous.”

  “Why? What’s the problem?” I was a fool when it came to business. I couldn’t see what was in front of my nose.

  “The economy is going soft, my friend. These rich folks are the canaries in the coal mine. Everything’s bopping along and then—wham!—they can’t get financing. Lenders are holding back. The squeeze is starting. The hand is on the throat. I can feel it. I’ve been here before.”

  “Who’s getting squeezed? Help me out. I need to write a column.”

  “Well, now . . .” He always saved his best stuff for last. “I might have some information for you about a certain local investment tycoon, a certain owner of two choice local properties, a certain financier whose finances are of mysterious origin. Would you be interested in that?”

  He had my full attention now. “Cut the crap. Have you got something on Galvin?”

  “Um-hmm.” He was purring. “Looks to me like your boss has a teeny-weeny money problem.”

  “I doubt that very much. The man is richer than God. Your friend Jack gave me all the details. He’s a billionaire.”

  “Maybe so. But Jack said he had a lot of debts too. And remember how I told you that he was using an unusual source of funds to buy those houses—in that the mortgage money was coming from an offshore bank in the Netherlands Antilles—where nice people do not go for mortgage money? You remember that?”

  “Of course I do. So what? A mortgage is a mortgage.”

  “Well, now. Were you aware that Mr. Galvin has put that choice property in Georgetown on the market for two-point-six million?”

  “Yes, I knew he had decided to sell the Georgetown place—he told me—but I didn’t know the price.”

  “That price will not remain the price, my friend, because the property is not selling. There is a glut of fine residences at the moment, as I told you, and no buyers. That is particularly bad news for Mr. Galvin, because he has an additional problem—or so I am reliably informed. Which is that the mortgage on his Georgetown home was purchased recently by another financial concern—which also just happens to have an offshore address in the Caribbean. And the new owners are foreclosing on the property, due to nonpayment of interest.”

  “Ridiculous. Nobody would foreclose on a billionaire.” I was trying to remember if Galvin had ever mentioned any business cronies who might have a piece of him. It was hard to imagine. Galvin didn’t seem like the sort of person who would let anyone do him favors. “Who bought the mortgage?”

  “Hard to know, from what I’ve seen. It’s just a box number in Willemstad. Could be anybody. But not anybody you’d like to know.”

  “How much does he owe?”

  “The principal is two-point-five million. The interest payments are in excess of twenty thousand a month.”

  “Does anyone else know this, Hugo?”

  “No. I believe I am the only local possessor of this information. And I sincerely doubt anyone else will follow me into the archives. So it’s all yours.”

  I am not secretive by nature, but I wanted to lock this one in a dark closet. Hugo duly promised that his lips would remain sealed, pending further word from me. It wasn’t that I wanted to protect Galvin or do him a favor. It was more that, at this stage, I didn’t understand what I had been told. I didn’t know what doors the information might unlock, or what might lie behind them. I did not, in truth, know whether I was grieved that my mentor had money problems, or pleased. That was the luxury afforded the journalist. It was possible—nay, desirable—to refrain from declaring allegiance and simply to watch.

  THE SAVANT EVENTUALLY FOUND something else to write about that week. I had gotten to know a Nigerian taxi driver a few years before who was running a liberation movement from the basement of my apartment building. (www.freenigerianow.com—“All Nigeria, all the time!”) His name was Kano, and he was a cultivated fellow. He collected Ibo poetry and folk tales, when he wasn’t driving the cab or posting political manifestos on his Web site. I didn’t know much about Nigeria, but I figured that if Kano didn’t like the crew that was running things in Lagos, there must be something wrong with them.

  Kano was becoming Washington’s favorite Nigeria expert—even though his political group, as far as I could tell, had no actual members. He was quoted regularly in newspapers, interviewed on NPR, called to testify before Congress. It seemed to me that he embodied one of Washington’s essential secrets, which is that in order to be powerful, it’s enough to be seen as powerful.

  One October night I came home from the Sun to find Kano sitting outside, surrounded by baggage and sticks of furniture. He had been evicted—for no reason whatsoever, he insisted, though I assumed it was for nonpayment of his rent. Here was another cause for the new Sun. I wrote up an account of his plight—PROMINENT AFRICAN DI
DDIDENT HUMBLED BY LANDLORD. Our photographer took a poignant picture of him, camped in front of my building with his motley belongings. He went on The Anti-News, too. Within a week, he was living rent-free in an apartment in my building, on one of the upper floors, overlooking the city. It was the apartment I had once coveted, actually, but I didn’t care. I was making so much money now, I could move into the Watergate if I liked. And it was another triumph for the newspaper with a heart.

  WAS IT POSSIBLE THAT people envied me, now that I was a columnist? That was a disorienting thought, as I began to receive notes on fancy stationery from my former Harvard classmates—people who had managed to get by quite adequately without corresponding all these years, but now just had to tell me how much they liked that last column in the Sun! I gobbled down the false praise, and then wanted to vomit it all back up so that I could return to my ordinary state of aggrieved isolation. I had a success disorder—that was my problem. Indeed, it was not inconceivable that, with a little work, I could land a guest spot on Jerry Springer.

  It was becoming more obvious with each passing year that we were hothouse flowers, we Harvard journalists. Poisonous daffodils of ambition. We had been watered and fertilized from birth to be special—but unlike our simple, sensible classmates who went off to law or business school and got rich, we inflicted our selves on the world. We were crazy; that was our secret—crazy with talent and insecurity. The ones who lacked in either category fell by the wayside, but the survivors thrived like intellectual kudzu.