The Sun King

by David Ignatius

  “But you don’t have to worry? Personally, I mean. You don’t have money problems?”

  “Me?” He laughed, and it seemed a genuine, involuntary eruption of mirth. “No, of course not. What made you think that?”

  “People talk. You know me, I’m a gossip, and people tell me things.”

  Galvin was still smiling. “What do they say, these people who talk?”

  “They say you’re being forced to sell your house in Georgetown, because some front company in the Caribbean is foreclosing on your mortgage.”

  He laughed again and shook his head. “Where do they get this stuff? I told you weeks ago that I was going to sell the Georgetown place. In fact, I told you that the first time I met you. The buyer is using an offshore account, I think, but so what?”

  “They’re not foreclosing?”

  “Come on. Do I look like a man who’s being foreclosed? No! I’m settling a debt with some people I’ve done business with. They’re acquiring the Georgetown property in settlement of the debt. It’s easier to do it that way, for tax reasons, than pay them cash. It’s good business. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do it.”

  It all sounded reasonable, and I certainly didn’t know enough to question him about specifics. And there was the look of the man—the house, the clothes, the wines. We had just poured over a thousand dollars down our throats. That was liquidity! How could he be hurting for money, even in a market that was getting soft?

  GALVIN KISSED CANDACE ON the forehead. “Wake up, my love,” he said. She awakened in that drowsy mental twilight where we think and say exactly what we really feel.

  “Hello, darling,” she said. She reached up her arms toward him and pulled him down, and kissed him on the lips. She was obviously unaware of my presence—unaware of anyone but him. “Let’s go upstairs,” she said.

  Galvin cradled her in his arms, resting his head gently against hers.

  I was already on my feet and tiptoeing away. I would have made it without anyone realizing I had left, if the dog hadn’t started barking. Maybe he wanted a kiss too.

  “Good night,” I called out. But there was no answer. They had waited a long time for this moment, and I don’t think anyone else mattered to either of them.

  SIXTEEN

  IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER JUST WHEN TED AMARA FIRST showed up at the Sun, but it wasn’t long after that intimate “celebration” at Galvin’s house. Amara arrived with the unassuming title of special assistant to the publisher. He was a lawyer who had lived until recently in Paris, but he lacked the sort of credentials that make people in Washington pay attention. Yet it soon became clear to everyone that he was a powerful man.

  Galvin insisted that he attend all the important meetings—that was part of it. But it was also the way Amara carried himself. He was short and dark, with the sharply drawn features of the Mediterranean, and he dressed in double-breasted suits that seemed at once too tight and too baggy. He had a nervous habit of biting on wooden toothpicks, which he cached in that ill-fitting suit jacket. Probably he was just trying to quit smoking, but the effect was menacing—you couldn’t help thinking, as you watched him chewing away on that toothpick, that he’d much rather be chewing on you.

  We hadn’t seen too many people like Amara around the newspaper, and it would have been easy to dismiss him as a thug, except for one thing: He proved to be very smart. The few things he said in meetings were precisely on point. And when Galvin sent him out to do a job, like talk with union representatives about contract issues, it would be done crisply and cleanly. He had an aura of toughness, an ability to signal others subtly that he meant what he said—which made it easy to get things done. It was enough, just to look into his dark, unyielding eyes, to know that he was serious.

  I was curious about him, naturally. I saw him one morning sitting alone in the cafeteria, reading a newspaper, so I joined his table. He seemed pleased to have company—I think people had been avoiding him for fear he might shoot them if they said the wrong thing—and he was surprisingly forthcoming. It turned out he had gone to Columbia Law School in the late 1960s and worked during the summers on various liberal causes—working in Allard Lowenstein’s campaign and directing a summer youth program in the South Bronx. He was a do-gooder, under that double-breasted suit! Or at least he had been, until he wandered into the world of international business in the early 1970s and discovered his true calling in life. Which, as near as I could tell, was to be a fixer—the guy who gets the deal done, subtly and quietly—please don’t ask how.

  “What does Ted Amara do?” I asked Galvin one day. “He seems like a very competent fellow, but what’s his job?”

  “He does whatever I ask him to do. Sort of like you—except he’s shorter.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “Ted has worked for me, off and on, for nearly twenty years. In the commodities business, you find many untrustworthy people. I needed someone like Ted, who could help me find out what was real and what wasn’t. That’s still his job. The newspaper business turns out to be a lot like the commodities business.”

  MY FIRST OPPORTUNITY TO watch Ted Amara in action came a few weeks after he arrived. Galvin was just beginning his effort to help the D.C. government, a project that would become an obsession for him. God knows why he directed his philanthropy in this direction—the District had the sorriest, most corrupt collection of local politicians you could find this side of Chicago. But Galvin had decided that the newspaper with a heart had a responsibility to its hometown. “Let’s do something for this city!” he kept telling people in the newsroom. He had convinced himself that the real cause of the city’s problems was racism—and that folks were down on the local politicians just because they were black.

  So Galvin decided to befriend the mayor, a black man named Alistair P. Marquand who had shown an uncanny ability over the years to upset and intimidate white people. Galvin took that as a challenge. He sent Amara to visit the mayor and invite him to the Sun for lunch, and the mayor, amazingly enough, accepted. It was to be a small gathering—for “healing,” Galvin said. Bacon wasn’t invited, nor were any reporters from the city staff. But for some reason, the publisher wanted me to attend. “Maybe you can find something good to write about,” he said. “Help counter all the negativism.”

  The mayor was dark-skinned with a well-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. He looked like a jazz musician. He wasted the first half of the lunch with a long diatribe about the “racist Sun,” and how the newspaper had investigated him up and down, harassed his friends, blocked his political initiatives. Even his precious daughter couldn’t give a piano recital, he said, without some Sun reporter barging in the door, and he was sick of it! Galvin listened intently for a while, nodding his head—he’d said a lot of the same things himself—but as the harangue wore on, he began to tune out. Ted Amara had been watching his boss carefully, and at a certain point he interrupted the mayor—just broke in, in mid-sentence.

  “We didn’t invite you here to talk about all that,” he said. “We want to talk about something else.”

  Mayor Marquand looked at him cross-eyed and muttered something like, “Fuck you.” But he stopped and listened. Amara had that effect. He was not a man to trifle with, and the mayor—who understood power instinctively—grasped that.

  “Mr. Galvin wants to talk about scholarships,” said Amara. Then he went silent again, and turned the floor over to his boss.

  “Fine,” said the mayor. “Let’s talk.” You had the sense that it took an effort of will on his part not to end each sentence with the word “motherfucker.”

  Galvin spread his big arms wide on the table in supplication. “Mr. Mayor, I want to do something good for this city. That’s why I asked for this meeting.”

  The mayor gave him a toothy smile that said Sure you do, white boy.

  “So I have a proposal for you. I am prepared to offer a thousand-dollar scholarship to every senior who graduates from the D.C. public schools next spring. They can use it at
any college, junior college or trade school they like. For any graduating senior who maintains a B average for the first two years in college, I will provide an additional five-thousand-dollar scholarship.”

  “Well, now,” said the mayor, his voice a bottomless pool of suspicion. “That’s mighty generous of you.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Galvin. “As a matter of fact, I can tell you precisely how much it will cost. Mr. Amara has prepared an estimate.” He reached into his pocket for a sheet of paper. “In the first year, assuming that all of the roughly four thousand seniors graduate, it will cost me four million dollars, and that’s likely to be an average annual cost. Assuming that two in ten graduating seniors keeps a B average after two years, that will be an additional eight million. So, over the next four years, I expect to provide nearly twenty-five million dollars in scholarship aid for District students, out of my own pocket.”

  The mayor shook his head and turned to his aide. “This man is crazy!”

  “I’m not finished. I also want you to help me distribute the money, Mayor Marquand. It will be a joint effort, by your office and the Sun. It is my plan to name these scholarships after you.”

  By now, the mayor was truly vexed. He didn’t understand the angle. Galvin didn’t look like the usual guilty white liberal, and Ted Amara certainly didn’t. “What’s in it for you?” he asked.

  “Healing,” answered Galvin.

  “Right. Well, healing’s a nice idea—amen to that!—but it’s not a twenty-five-million-dollar idea.”

  “I have a selfish goal too. I want to increase the Sun’s circulation. And it’s obvious to me I can’t do that without being generous to the people of this city. Because the simple fact is, we cannot have a healthy newspaper in a city that’s full of hate. It’s good business: The more black Washington prospers, the more newspapers I’ll sell.”

  It was hard for anybody to disagree with that—even our dyspeptic, race-baiting mayor. He shook hands with Galvin, although there was a look in his eye that said, I still don’t get this. What’s the scam? As the mayor’s party headed for the elevator, I saw Ted Amara slide alongside the mayor and lead him down the corridor for a brief, private conversation—which ended with both of them nodding their heads.

  HOWARD BACON KNEW ABOUT the visit moments after Hizzoner arrived in the building. You can’t keep secrets in a newspaper. When you have a whole enterprise devoted to gathering dirt and picking at scabs, some of that creative energy inevitably will be directed inward. Bacon also knew that I had been present for the mayor’s lunch, and he was furious—regarding that as disloyalty to the newsroom. What he required from me, as penance, was that I spill the beans.

  “What’s Galvin plotting with Marquand?” he demanded. He had summoned me to his office a scant fifteen minutes after the man’s departure. There was something feverish in Bacon’s demeanor these days. His washed-out face was bearing the blotchy red hue of permanent anxiety.

  I gave Bacon an account of the meeting, including the particulars of Galvin’s $25 million pledge of scholarships to be awarded jointly by the mayor and the newspaper. I described the mayor’s tirade, and the publisher’s appeal for the city and the newspaper to work together.

  “He can’t do that,” said Bacon. “It’s unethical. The mayor is a crack-head and a convicted felon, but even if he were a saint, it would still be wrong. Newspapers don’t get in bed with city governments. Doesn’t he understand anything?”

  “He understands the rules,” I said. “He just thinks they’re wrong.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Bacon was shouting; you could tell from the sound of his voice that he was losing his grip. “What am I going to do? This man is crazy. He’s running through every red light. Someone from The New York Times called me this week, to ask about Galvin’s campaign contributions. He’s giving thousands of dollars to candidates in the November elections—did you know that? Members of the House and Senate, local candidates, for God’s sake. He can’t do that! It’s totally unethical. He’s destroying the newspaper.”

  “I don’t know, Howard. Maybe not. I mean, circulation is up—I heard newsstand sales jumped another five thousand copies last week. And the stock price is up more than twenty dollars from when he bought the paper. People like the newspaper now. I hate to say it, but it has more energy. Maybe Galvin knows what he’s doing.”

  “Bullshit! He’s a menace. And I forbid you to put any good-news nonsense about these ridiculous scholarships in the Lifestyle section. We will not turn the newspaper into a propaganda organ for the publisher’s pet causes. If he wants people to know about them, he can run a house ad. Do you hear me? That’s an order.”

  I DIDN’T TELL GALVIN about Bacon’s outburst. It would only have hastened the inevitable final battle. Bacon holed up in his office the next few days, reading The New York Review of Books and talking on the phone with his editor pals in New York. Who needs this job, anyway? That was the attitude he tried to convey, but he wasn’t really the carefree type. A sign of the stress he was under was that he was losing weight. His trousers were hanging loose, and he had stopped shining his shoes—always a bad sign. He knew he was failing, but he didn’t understand why; the termite of middle age was burrowing into his soul, hollowing him out.

  CANDACE WAS WORKING LATE. She was trying to finish editing a long feature story about the insolvency of the Japanese banks. It was a classic Candace project. She had conceived the idea several months ago—deciding that the only way to make readers understand the severity of the financial crisis in Japan was to focus on one faltering bank and take apart its balance sheet. She had worked with our Tokyo reporter to find the right bank—one whose records had been pried open through a lawsuit. And inside this one institution, they had found uncollectable loans totaling more than five billion dollars. The story made you understand the make-believe world at the core of Japan Incorporated. It was a potential prizewinner, and Candace wanted it to be just right.

  I was working late that night too, trying to finish The Savant’s next column. This one was about a Salvadoran immigrant boy from a nice, hardworking family who’d gone to the hospital complaining of severe stomach pains, and the doctor had sent him home—too many hot tamales, he figured. It turned out the boy’s appendix had ruptured, and he nearly died. Now he’d hired a fancy K Street lawyer and was suing the hospital for $10 million. The American dream, updated.

  I was hoping to cadge a ride from Candace, since she was working late too. I was on my way to her office when I saw her entering the elevator. I ran down the stairs after her, still hoping to grab a ride. I was about to call out when I saw her dart across the street and embrace Galvin, who was standing in the shadows. He’d been waiting for her. They were going home together, obviously. He had his arm around her, and her head was nestled against his chest. They must have thought nobody saw them. I watched them walk away, their voices lost in the noise of the traffic.

  “I WANT TO SHOW you something!” called out Galvin’s jaunty voice through the telephone a few days later. “Meet me downstairs in five minutes.” It was midmorning, the normal time for my meeting with the assignment editors to plan the day’s agenda of puffery and character assassination. But they could manage that admirably without me.

  The publisher was waiting in the atrium, passing time with a group of schoolchildren who had come down from Gaithersburg to watch The Anti-News. They were crowding around for autographs—he was already a local star, thanks to the TV show—and he was scribbling his name as fast as he could, writing on notebooks and T-shirts and baseball caps. He was in one of his up phases this morning; I could see it in his eyes the moment I saw him in the lobby.

  “Let’s take a walk!” he said, grabbing me by the arm.

  We set out a brisk pace toward Dupont Circle. He talked with animation about the new business deals he was cooking up. It was the relentlessly upbeat tone of an infomercial. He was negotiating a partnership with one of the big phone companies to create a nationwide Internet lottery
—based on the success of the Sun’s bingo game. He was talking to Paramount about producing a nightly Get Real TV show—which would talk about what people really cared about, as opposed to what they were supposed to care about. The concept seemed to be Entertainment Tonight meets Wall Street Week. He was even talking to some investors about creating a national edition of the Sun, keyed to The Anti-News. So many deals. Rat-tat-tat. The look in his eyes was that of a teenage boy who has been playing video games too long and is firing the joystick at anything that moves.

  We had passed Dupont Circle now, and were nearing Florida Avenue. The complexion of the city was changing—from white to cocoa brown, as we entered the Hispanic and African American neighborhoods that bordered the northern edge of downtown. Galvin continued to rattle along with his plans and projects.

  “Are you all right?” I asked during a momentary lull.

  “Why? Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be all right?”

  “You just seem a little intense today, that’s all. I was wondering if anything was bothering you.”

  “Not in the slightest. My only problem is that I have too many good ideas. It’s like what Churchill said when someone asked him if he planned to drink a whole roomful of booze: ‘So much to do, so little time in which to do it.’ ”

  We were crossing Fourteenth Street. For decades, this had been the crossroads of black Washington. The Lincoln Theatre, which had hosted the great Negro entertainers of the 1940s and 1950s, was a few blocks away. A jazz club called the Bohemian Caverns was a little farther along, still vibrating with the ghosts of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Near the corner was the city’s premier all-night rendezvous, a tiny hole-in-the-wall called Ben’s Chili Bowl.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. Frankly, I wondered if he really knew where he was. White folks seldom ventured east of Fourteenth Street. It was unwise. The assumption hereabouts was that a white man on the streets was either stupid, or a cop.