“He wants something,” I said, “but he doesn’t know how to get it. That upsets him.”
She leaned toward me, her hand resting on her frizzy black hair. In the dark light of the bar, she looked softer, less like my sister. She asked what it was that Galvin wanted. She was giving me the treatment, but I liked it.
“He wants love,” I said. She nodded sympathetically. I said there was a particular woman I couldn’t name, whom he adored. But it wasn’t just that. He wanted everyone to love him. That was the truth. It would have been easier to make something up, but I wanted to be honest.
“Why do you like him so much?” she asked. To her, Galvin seemed like the sort of person who had tricked and cheated people his whole career. He was like the other tycoons—larger than life, but also smaller. She didn’t understand why someone like me would take him seriously. That was flattering, of course. And it made me wonder. Why was I drawn to him? The only answer I could think of was one that sounded ridiculous.
“Galvin makes me feel good,” I said. “He does that to people. He’s like a good officer in the army. He makes you want to follow him.” Was that it? Was it that simple? I wasn’t sure. Michelle was waiting, wanting to hear more. “He’s always interesting,” I offered. “I’m never sure what he’s going to do, and I doubt he really knows either. He’s inventing himself as he goes along. That’s part of his appeal—you want to know how the story will turn out.”
“He sounds like Gatsby,” she said, giving me a wink.
Come on, I thought. Why did every tycoon have to remind people of Gatsby? It was like calling every blond woman a real Marilyn Monroe. But she was waiting for an answer. It had been years since I’d read the book, and I tried to remember what Fitzgerald’s character had been all about.
“I don’t think so,” I said eventually. “Gatsby wanted respectability more than love. He wanted Daisy the same way he wanted a big house in East Egg, across the bay. Galvin doesn’t really care about that stuff. It’s different with him. He wants love.”
Hagel asked if we could talk again, if she came up with something damaging. Rumors were flying, she said. Would I help her track the information down? I thought about what that would be like, if something devastating surfaced about Galvin. He wasn’t used to failure. He wouldn’t know how to deal with it.
Yes, I answered, of course I would talk to her. I wanted to know. My investment in Galvin was as deep as any banker’s. But she never called me back. The New Yorker must have decided to drop the story, or maybe Ted Amara had paid someone a visit, you could never be sure. What I remember, though, is that I had the weirdest feeling after Michelle Hagel left the bar that night. I wished she were still there; you could almost say I missed her.
HUGO BELL ASKED ME to meet him for coffee. He had something hot, he said. That worried me. Hugo was a human version of the letter you want to leave on the table unopened for a while until it cools off. But he was useful; inside, there was always a valuable piece of information. We met in Georgetown, at a little place on M Street with plastic chairs and tables out front—one of the few tacky places left in the neighborhood. The rest of the street looked like a movie set: The old brick facades, which just a decade ago had survived in splendid decay, now served as fronts for megastores selling books and basketball shoes and designer clothing. M Street had been transformed from a place into a destination.
Hugo looked more prosperous than I remembered. He was wearing an Italian suit and carrying a shiny chrome briefcase. He had developed a new sideline that fall—doing opposition research for political candidates. It was amazing how much dirt you could find on people in public records, he said. And information was color-blind. It was all dirt, whether it stuck to a black man or a white man.
I asked Hugo what he had for me that was so hot.
“It’s official,” he said with relish. “Your boss has money problems.”
“That’s old news, and I’m not even sure it’s true.”
“Oh, it’s true all right. Your friend Mr. Galvin is liquidating assets—not just his own, but the Sun’s, too. It’s a fire sale. He’s going to have to report it in his next quarterly filing with the SEC, unless he’s a bigger crook than I think.”
“What’s he selling?” I was still dubious.
“The Georgetown house is history, for starters. The moving van has come and gone. The place is empty.”
“I know that. What else?”
“He’s selling land the Sun owns in Montgomery County—a big tract north of Rockville that the Hazens and the Crosbys bought in the fifties when it was just farmland. It’s worth north of thirty million dollars. He’s also selling timberland in Canada, and a paper mill up there. That could fetch a hundred million, maybe more. And I hear he may sell the old Sun plant in Northeast too, if he can find anyone to buy it. I’m telling you, he’s hurting.”
“I haven’t heard a word about it at the paper. Who’s handling the sale?”
“Not the same people the Sun used before. A new guy. The real estate people are upset. Someone named Amara.”
That’s when I knew it must be true. “His name is Ted Amara,” I said. “He’s Galvin’s personal lawyer.”
“Well, he’s a hard-nosed SOB, from what I hear. He’s demanding sealed bids and all cash at settlement. People are wondering what’s up.”
I WAS CURIOUS MYSELF, so I decided to ask the great man. I went up to his office, blew his secretary a kiss and walked into the room. He was sitting at his desk, studying the Bloomberg terminal he had installed a few weeks before. Most of the Asian markets were still spilling blood that week, and he had a gloomy, preoccupied look on his face.
“How can smart people be so stupid?” he muttered to the Bloomberg terminal. “This market doesn’t make any sense. It’s having a nervous breakdown. If you bought things that were cheap two months ago, you’re worse off today than if you had bought things that were expensive. That doesn’t make sense, does it?”
He wasn’t really expecting an answer. He was upset; you could see that in his eyes, and in the nervous way he was playing with Scotch tape—peeling pieces off the dispenser and rolling them into little tubes between his thumb and forefinger.
Something on the screen caught his eye. It was a summary of trading in foreign currency markets. “Excuse me a minute,” he said. He looked almost embarrassed to be conducting business when a colleague from the newspaper was around. He picked up the phone and called someone—a broker, I assumed, but it might have been Ted Amara. “We’re getting killed in Hong Kong,” he said into the telephone. A brief discussion ensued about whether to unload the position Galvin was holding, followed by a long pause and then Galvin’s order to hold fast.
“What did you just do?” I asked.
“I made a bet a few weeks ago that the Hong Kong dollar would fall, along with everything else in Asia. So far I’ve been wrong. The Hong Kong market’s up sharply again today. But it will turn around.”
There was a tautness to his face, with the skin pulled tight against his jaw. “What if it doesn’t turn around?” I asked.
“Then I’ll lose that bet. But I’ve got lots of others. Italian bonds. Brazilian coffee. Nigerian oil. American stocks. Some go up, some go down. They balance out.”
He said it with such certainty, it didn’t sound like betting at all. But there was that tight cast to his face, and the tension in his voice on the telephone a few moments before.
“Are you in money trouble?” I asked him.
He thought a moment. “Not really,” he replied. It wasn’t a reflexive answer, like the one he had given when I asked a similar question some weeks before. “I have what is technically called a ‘short-term liquidity problem.’ So does everyone who’s in this market. But so what? I’m dealing with it. I’m working my way out. Why do you ask? Are people talking again?”
I nodded. “The word is that you’ve got Ted Amara out hustling the Sun’s real estate.”
He smiled sheepishly, like someone who
had been caught playing a little trick. “Well, that’s true. I’m trying to clean up the balance sheet. The Hazens and the Crosbys bought all sorts of things they didn’t need. They lumped them all together and forgot about them. That’s silly. Why should the Sun own timberland and newsprint mills? Let someone else make paper, and we’ll buy it from them. Why should we be in commercial real estate? Let someone else develop our properties. What’s wrong with that?”
The business case sounded so reasonable, it was hard to disagree with him. And he never acted like a man who had anything to conceal. If you asked him a question, he always gave you an answer. And yet I knew that something was wrong.
“I have no business giving you advice,” I said, “but I’m going to do it anyway. You need to be careful. You’ve upset the applecart more than you realize. You’ve done things that make people angry. If you have any weaknesses, people are going to take advantage of them.”
“Of course I have weaknesses,” he answered. “I’m human.”
“But Washington isn’t human. It doesn’t forgive. You only get one strike here and you’re out. So you have to be careful.”
“I know, I know. But I like it here.” He smiled, as jaunty as FDR in the dark days of 1934. “I’m doing what I’ve always wanted. Everything will be fine. Don’t become a worrier, David. It doesn’t fit your personality.”
I looked out his big window. There was a low winter sun coming at the buildings almost sideways and casting shadows that seemed to stretch for blocks. It was disorienting. We’re used to seeing our world illuminated from above. We don’t recognize things when the sun traces a different trajectory, low and flat in the sky at midday.
CANDACE WENT INTO HER own kind of hibernation. She stopped coming by my office to gossip on her way down to the cafeteria. And she seemed less playful, less resilient to my teasing. Perhaps she had become so careful about her relationship with Galvin that it had rubbed off on other parts of her personality. I don’t know. But her reticence only increased my curiosity. I wanted to understand the bond between her and Galvin. It remained a mystery, frankly. As well as I knew each of them separately, I didn’t comprehend what had united them long ago, blown them apart, and then bound them together again.
My curiosity about Candace’s relationship was given an unlikely prod by her old friend, Ariane Hazen. She continued to hang around the paper, as head of the Sun’s charitable foundation. Galvin had been faithful to his pledge to keep her engaged, and she had more than once repaid him, by passing along information about problems in the community, or among advertisers. She even liked some of the changes he had made, especially the shower of money for the city that had accompanied the Racial Healing campaign.
I encountered Ariane one afternoon standing in line at the ATM machine across from the Sun. She seemed to have forgotten my absurd visit to her house in Cleveland Park the previous summer, when Galvin was first stalking the Sun. Now we were colleagues. I asked whether she’d seen much of our mutual friend and she said no, alas—Candace was spending all her time with the publisher. I gave her a wink. We were among the few who really knew what was going on.
“I don’t understand that relationship,” I ventured. “I don’t see why they got back together any better than I see why they broke up in college.”
Ariane said I would have to buy her a cup of coffee if I wanted an answer. She wasn’t going to tell me anything standing up. I took her to a Brazilian bar near the office that was always filled with fabulous-looking men and women putting the make on each other. They wisely gave us a table in the back, where the Brazilians wouldn’t have to look at us. Ariane ordered a piña colada, which instantly made me like her.
“Candace broke his heart,” she confided after several sips. “He wanted to get married after her father died, and she refused. And that was the end of it.”
“How do you know?” I asked. She didn’t, really. She was inferring, and guessing. But she knew what Candace had been like in the weeks before everything fell apart, because they had been together, here in Washington.
IT TURNED OUT THAT the two school chums had met at a party late in the summer of 1971, just before Candace went back to start her sophomore year. She looked terrible, Ariane had thought. She was thin, wary, with a sadness in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Candace had confided that she was seeing someone at Harvard—a man who was mad about her—but she never mentioned his name. It was only recently that Ariane had figured out she must have been referring to Galvin.
Her friend’s emotional frailty had surprised Ariane. Candace had always been the golden girl at school—the girl who won the academic prizes without ever seeming to study; who took the penalty shots for her team in field hockey because she had steady nerves. Ariane hadn’t seen her since she went off to college, and it was obvious that freshman year had taken a toll. She looked like the oldest nineteen-year-old in the world. The unnamed boyfriend was part of it, but there was more.
Candace said that her father had gone back into the hospital that summer. It was all quite mysterious, but Ariane understood that this wasn’t an ordinary hospital, where they took your appendix out and sewed you back together, but a mental hospital. There were other rumors about Mr. Ridgway, too—that he was having an affair with a divorced woman, that his drinking was out of control. His wife was embarrassed—trying to pretend that it wasn’t happening and telling lies to her friends. But Candace seemed to understand that her father was experiencing a kind of pain he couldn’t express, even to his daughter.
Ariane had sensed that her friend was coping by dividing her life into compartments; when one got too full to manage, she closed it and put it away. She had that ability to pretend that everything was all right, even when it wasn’t. But Candace’s boyfriend—whoever he was—was making that hard. His kind of love was a cataclysm—a vacuum that sucked you in so totally that you couldn’t breathe without your lover feeding you the oxygen.
And it had begun to frighten Candace. That’s what Ariane had seen. She was like a flower pressed between the pages of a book. Beautiful, perfect to look at—but flat and lifeless. And rather than surrender to that perfect nonexistence, she was on the verge of rebelling that September. She did that a few weeks later, when she exercised her only remaining power—which was to say no. And when she refused to marry her boyfriend, she broke his heart. That was what Ariane believed, at least.
I CALLED CANDACE THAT night, after I talked with Ariane. I suppose I was frightened for her. Galvin was still a typhoon of a man—still capable of sucking the air out of a person’s lungs. And he was more dangerous now. He wasn’t a charismatic undergraduate. He had built himself a pyramid that included a newspaper, a president, a city. But it was an unstable platform, and if Candace was with him when it all collapsed, she would get hurt. Or so I thought.
She answered the phone. I don’t know whether it was ringing at her house or Galvin’s, but it didn’t matter.
“I was worrying about you,” I said.
“That’s sweet. Why were you worrying?”
I explained that I had been talking that day with her old pal, Ariane. And I’d sensed how painful the breakup of her relationship with Galvin must have been. “I’m your friend,” I said. “I don’t want that to happen again. He’s moving so fast now, I’m afraid he’s going to crash. I don’t want you to be hurt.”
She didn’t answer, and I thought it might be because Galvin was lying next to her in bed, listening to what she said. But it probably wasn’t that. She was wondering how to answer me.
“I’ll be fine,” she said evenly. “Some things are just complicated.”
“Is he in some kind of trouble? He hasn’t been looking well, and he seems to be under a lot of stress.”
“I don’t know. There’s a lot he doesn’t tell me. He may be worried about money, but I’m not sure. Sandy keeps a lot to himself.”
“Be careful. The newspaper could get hurt.”
That was a strange thing for me to say
—I’d never given a damn about the Sun. But newspapers do that to you. They’re like old pets. You begin to love them, even though they drool and bark and generally make a nuisance of themselves.
“I’ll never hurt the newspaper.” Her voice had a tone of resignation and duty, more than passion. “I’m not just the publisher’s girlfriend,” she said. “I know where the lines are.”
IT WAS LATE—ELEVEN o’clock, the news hour. Once upon a time, the local rerun channel had taken pity on the newssaturated and broadcast old Baywatch episodes at that hour, so you could watch David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson in bathing suits instead of the newsreaders. But now there was no escape except to turn off the TV. And even then, the morning newspaper was lying on the floor reproachfully next to my bed. I wasn’t ready to go to sleep; talking to Candace had depressed me.
I picked up the Sun and began leafing through the Local News section. I never read the paper carefully, now that I worked there. That was the worst thing about newspaper work; it made life seem less interesting. It was all cut up into stories—you couldn’t find the real people anymore.
I came to the obituary page, something I rarely looked at, and found myself glancing at the “In Memoriam” notices. There were pictures of people who had passed away, in some cases long ago, accompanied by brief, heartsick messages. A wife and four daughters remembered a man who had died thirty-four years before: “Your memory is constant in our minds,” it said. “The hole in our hearts will never be filled.” Another had a picture of a young man, smartly dressed in his high school cap and gown, who had died eight years before at the age of thirty-one. His family had written a prayer—“A letter we cannot send you, your body we cannot touch. But, God, please take these words to the one we love so much.”
How strange people were; they thought God read the newspaper.
I leafed a few more pages to the Personals. Occasionally I scanned these for the colorful ways people chose to describe themselves. “Affectionate, voluptuous, likes travel, fit.” They never said “lonely.” On this evening, my eye wandered to a category I’d never noticed, called “I Saw You.” They were little notes, posted by people after chance encounters with someone who had caught their eye and made them think later, when they were alone, maybe that was the one. “Starbucks, Dupont Circle, 10/28, You: brunette, red coat. Me: sandy hair, leather jacket. You smiled.” “National Gallery, 10/30, 1 p.m. by the Rembrandt painting. You said hi. I was too shy.” “St. Mark’s Church, 10/25, you sat next to me. Are you single?”
The Sun King Page 18
