So he left. It was early December of his senior year. He told the deans he would return the next fall to get his degree, but needed some time away. They understood; the Harvard deans lived to say yes. He wanted to go to Asia. After some phone calls, he found work in Bangkok, and he never looked back. Harvard kept sending him letters for a few years, asking when he would return, but they stopped eventually. And then one year, Galvin began sending them letters, containing large contributions. That was his answer, or at least part of it.
“DID YOU REALLY WORK for the CIA in Bangkok?” I asked when he ended his tale. That particular detail intrigued me. It was like eating forbidden fruit—a sign of how totally Galvin had broken with the world of Harvard.
“Yeah. A little. Why not? It was fun, and I learned a lot. It was better than the Foreign Legion. I kept doing things for them when I moved to Hong Kong, and for years after that. The truth is, if one of their people walked into this room right now and asked me to help with something, I’d say yes—and ask what it was later.”
“And you never saw Candace again, after you went away to Asia—until you came to Washington?”
He looked at me curiously. “No. I saw a lot of her over the years. Who told you that?”
“She did.”
He shook his head and laughed. “That’s my girl! No, we stayed in touch. I was a regular source for her when she was overseas. I helped her win that Pulitzer Prize, if you want to know. It was a series about foreign bribery, right? Well, where do you think she got her information about foreign bribery? From a reliable source. We kept in touch, all right. That’s the reason I moved back to Washington. She was sending signals that the time might be right, after all these years, to try again.”
He stopped talking. The wind was playing on those ghostly trees, and you could hear a brittle little noise, like the sound of wind chimes, as the ice-covered branches blew against one another. I was angry at Candace for lying to me. I had known that she was a controlling person who used her beauty and intelligence to order the world as she wanted it. But I hadn’t thought of her as a liar until then. That knowledge was a kind of poison. It went to the heart.
“She’s investigating you,” I said.
Galvin looked up in surprise, not comprehending what I was talking about. “Sorry. I didn’t catch that,” he said.
“She’s investigating you,” I repeated. “She has a team of reporters, from the Sun, looking into your finances and your bribes and dirty deals. She’s going to publish the results.”
“Impossible!” he said with a dismissive gesture of his hand. “You must have misunderstood. She’d never do that. Not in my newspaper, without telling me.”
“It’s true,” I said softly.
“You’ll never get me to believe that,” he said. “Candace may have her problems, but she’d never publish an attack on me in my own newspaper. You’re just mad at her because she won’t sleep with you.”
He gave me a wink, and a punch on the shoulder, and that was the end of it. We chatted for a little longer, but we were both talked out. We never really had a private conversation again, after that morning. I will never forget the sight of him wrapped in his blanket in the sunroom, smiling and staring out at his trees and the riverfront—the ruins of his empire. He was a happy man. Whatever he had done for others, he had found a way to give that gift to himself, too.
TWENTY-TWO
CANDACE GATHERED THE INVESTIGATIVE TEAM AT HER house in Georgetown for a final report. She felt it was too sensitive a topic for us to meet at the newspaper. She’d kept the lid on so far, but if people saw this unlikely group together, word might leak out that the Sun was investigating its publisher. The lobbying would begin, for and against publication. Candace wanted a free hand; she claimed she hadn’t decided yet what to do. She was still hoping that, in the end, the charges against Galvin would prove to be baseless—and that the whole sorry business would blow away. I suspected she didn’t really believe that, but it was part of her survival kit—the ability to pretend she had other options on the eve of a stark yes-or-no decision. It allowed her to keep up appearances.
Christmas was just a week away, and Georgetown was crowded with shoppers as I drove toward Candace’s town house. I have always taken special pleasure in Christmas. How wonderful it is, that the good Christian folk are putting on this show for me—smiling at me for no reason in the street; giving me a hearty handshake; wishing me “Happy Holiday” and being polite enough not to add: “Jewboy!” Hard to beat Christmas for omnidirectional good cheer. And so cunningly staged at the time of the year when the days are darkest and the true prevailing sentiment is soulless misery. Jerry Springer once had a show called “We’re in Holiday Hell!” where he staged a mock Christmas dinner, and all the guests started screaming at each other and throwing things. Something real there; the authentic American spirit that lurks just below the “Howdy, neighbor!” smile.
Candace had put up a Christmas tree in her living room. It was beautifully decorated with handmade ornaments she had collected as a child—glass baubles; wooden elves and reindeer; cherubs made of gauze and foil. Atop the tree was an angel dressed in a purple robe with golden wings. Her perfect waxen face and blond hair were the image of Candace’s.
We three unwise men trooped awkwardly past the tree into the dining room, where Candace had laid out coffee and juice and a stack of legal pads—just like a breakfast meeting at a hotel. She seated us around her table and thanked us for coming. It was odd to see her so stiff and formal at home. She was wearing a pinstriped business suit: not the zippy designs she used to wear, with the short skirts that showed off her legs, but something plain. She wanted to hear what the reporters had discovered. Then she would decide what to do. whatever happened, she said, we needed to maintain absolute secrecy until she talked to Galvin. If we failed in that, we would do him a terrible injustice. She said it with absolute sincerity and conviction—and no sense of irony.
I’d already met the two reporters—Mark Taub and Henry Loden, back at that smoky bar. Taub was our Wall Street reporter; he had worked for The Bond Buyer before joining the paper, and he understood how financial markets worked. Loden was the investigative reporter; he was a more taciturn fellow, with a face pitted by acne scars and hollow, unforgiving eyes. His main job had been to investigate Galvin’s purchase of the Sun.
Candace turned to the Wall Street reporter and asked him to summarize what their inquiry had yielded. Taub wanted to impress the boss. He’d brought along lists and charts to help him explain the complicated structure of Galvin’s business empire and how it had evolved over time. He drew a picture that, for me, was already familiar.
Carl Galvin Corporation, known to the world by the initials CGC, had established itself as one of the world’s leading commodities brokers. Galvin had made his early fortune by betting that oil prices would rise. And he’d made many other smart bets since then, as other commodities grew scarce. Tin, copper, manganese, nickel, bauxite. As the world economy grew in the late seventies and early eighties, each had its momentary spike in price, as demand surged but supply remained constrained. In a few cases, Taub said, Galvin had helped create these market imbalances—by buying up available supplies of nickel, say, to create a spot-market shortage that drove up prices and made his holdings more valuable. But everyone did that in the commodities business, if they had the brains and the market power.
Candace kept nodding as Taub recounted his findings. She seemed to know, or suspect, most of it already. Taub repeated the stories I’d heard about Galvin’s derring-do in Africa and the Middle East. He’d probably busted sanctions in South Africa, Iran, Iraq and other places too, Taub said. But it was likely he’d done so with the connivance of his friends at the CIA, and he would never be prosecuted for any of that.
“His business is managing risk,” Taub observed. Galvin had learned over the years to balance exposure in one commodity or region of the world against another. If he was long on dollar-denominated oil contr
acts to Japan, he would short the dollar against the yen in the currency market so that he was protected either way in case of any sudden change. And he bet on longer-term trends too. He had been quick to see that fiber-optic cable would replace copper wire, and he had made millions shorting copper contracts. As his company grew, he inevitably became a market maker—which meant that he sometimes had to be on both sides of a deal. That was fine, so long as the markets were robust.
The only real danger for Galvin’s business was the possibility that all of the world’s major commodities might decline in price at the same time—oil, metals, chemicals, paper. But in an era of rapid economic growth, such a general decline had seemed impossible. Yet that was just what had happened in the 1990s. Against all odds, commodity prices had fallen through much of the decade. By the late nineties, when the Asian crash hit, the basic industrial commodities—oil, metals, chemicals and paper—were all plummeting toward catastrophic low prices. Some were selling as cheaply, on an inflation-adjusted basis, as they had in half a century. This was the one bet that Galvin hadn’t anticipated, and it had proved disastrous.
“But he’s still a wealthy man, isn’t he?” Candace asked. It was hard for her to understand the notion that Galvin could have made fundamental errors of judgment as a commodities trader. She had anticipated allegations of fraud and bribery, but not business mistakes.
“He’s broke,” said Taub. He had the flat, affectless voice of a midwesterner. “As near as we can tell, he’s been broke since the mid-nineties. When oil and the other commodities markets tanked, he went down with them. He never recovered.”
“Don’t let him fool you!” she exclaimed. “He must be hiding money, to keep it from his creditors. He’s probably still a billionaire; he’s just playing a shell game.”
Taub shook his head. “He may owe a billion dollars to other people, but he doesn’t have it himself.” He and Loden had talked to dozens of people—all of them looking for Galvin’s hidden loot, and they had concluded that there wasn’t any. “He kept stringing things along to maintain appearances, bringing in just enough money to roll over his debts. But he was in trouble long before he came to Washington.”
Candace arched her brows, still skeptical. “That can’t be. What about the two houses, and the parties, and scholarships and charitable contributions? That was real money.”
“Borrowed money,” said Taub. “His whole time in Washington was basically an act—a piece of theater. It’s easy to appear rich if people believe you are rich—because they keep lending you money. Khashoggi got away with it for years, before anybody realized he was broke. When Galvin’s creditors began to sense he was in real trouble, they tightened the screws, but there was nothing left to squeeze.”
This was a strange moment of truth for Candace. She’d gone searching in the forest of Galvin’s business affairs, suspecting that she would turn up some dreadful abuses of financial power. But she had encountered a far bigger surprise: Galvin’s wealth was an illusion.
“How did he buy the Sun?” she asked. She had watched that process unfold, every step of the way, and she had thought she understood it. “Where did the money come from?”
The answer came from Loden, the laconic investigative reporter. “He worked with his partner, Melvin Wolfe. They rigged the deal so that Wolfe’s stock would go up, no matter what.”
“I know that,” she snapped. Galvin’s fraud was a given, but not his poverty. “But whose money did they use?”
“Wolfe put up the collateral,” said Loden. “Then Galvin borrowed against it. Galvin didn’t have a dime of his own to put into the paper.”
“So who controls Galvin’s interest in the Sun? Him or his creditors?”
“Hard to tell,” said Loden. He explained that Galvin had been consulting the last few weeks with Ted Amara and his other lawyers. Their discussions were hidden from view, protected by private banking relationships and attorney-client privilege. But the rumor making the rounds at several law firms was that Galvin was tinkering with the ownership structure of the newspaper—creating new trusts to control the voting shares. Candace nodded. That didn’t seem to bother her—the notion that Galvin and Amara were taking precautions. It wasn’t part of her investigation.
The Hardy Boys continued their briefing for another hour or so. Neither of them had actually met Galvin, as far as I knew. That accounted for the bloodless tone of their narrative. They were like biographers who tell you every single fact they have gathered about the subject, but who somehow miss the essence of who he is. But we all knew what the story was now, even if we couldn’t put flesh and blood on it. Our magnificent publisher was bankrupt. He had acquired our newspaper by fraud. We were living in a journalistic house of cards, which was about to come down around us.
CANDACE LOOKED EXHAUSTED. WHEN she finally called a halt to the briefing just after noon, the reporters were getting their second wind; they looked as if they could go on for the rest of the day. But she didn’t need any more facts; she had to decide what to do with them. She thanked the reporters. They’d done the hardest thing any newspaper ever has to do, she said—which was to investigate itself. It was a badge of glory. As they were about to go, she told them to leave behind all copies of their notes, please, while she deliberated.
I was walking out the door with them, but Candace asked me to stay. She needed to talk. What she really needed was a drink. I poured her a glass of wine and made some tuna fish sandwiches for lunch, while she stared out the window at her garden. It had the barren emptiness of winter. She excused herself while I was toasting the bread, and went upstairs to change out of that awful pinstriped suit. She came back downstairs in chinos and an old cashmere sweater.
“What did you make of all that?” she asked.
I had been thinking about that same question, wondering how to put it all together. I understood how the little pieces fit—the money troubles and the fraud and the collapse of his business. But there was a larger design embedded in the picture that I had been struggling to see, and it was becoming clearer. The puzzle wasn’t really that complicated.
“He did it for you,” I said. “All of it. This whole crazy play was staged for you, because he loves you.”
She looked me in the eye coldly. She hadn’t intended for me to answer the question that way. “Maybe so,” she said. “But that’s irrelevant right now.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said firmly. “This is about you. You can’t pretend you aren’t involved. Galvin needs you. He’s in trouble. You should go see him. It bothers him that you’re staying away.”
“Not now,” she said. That same surprising coldness was in her voice. “I’m his editor. I can’t be his friend while all this is going on. I have to protect the newspaper. When it’s over, we can be together again.”
“That’s a Washington answer. It’s inhuman.”
She shook her head and bit her lip. She stared out again at the lifeless garden. “Don’t make this harder,” she said.
I looked at her, leaning against the window, hard as iron under her soft sweater. And I began to understand what it must have been like for Galvin, so many years ago, when he wanted to reach her but couldn’t break through. “This is what you do, isn’t it?” I mused aloud. “You’re so beautiful, people forget what a hard person you are. When they really need you, you go cold. You did this same thing to Sandy a long time ago.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say, David. Especially now.” She rose from her window seat and walked toward me. I had made her angry; that was good. “If you don’t want to help me, you should go,” she said. “This is too painful.”
I ignored her. I didn’t really care what she wanted. “Why wouldn’t you marry him back in college? I keep trying to figure that out. I asked Galvin, but I don’t think he really knows. That’s why he came back. He thought he could get it right.”
“I want you to leave. Right now. You’re making me angry.”
I stood there, as thin and useless as an old
stick but intent on blocking her escape. I wanted to hear her confess her rigidity and faithlessness, admit it just once. “Answer my question,” I said. “Then I’ll go, and you can do whatever you want to Galvin.”
She slapped me. That was all she had left. I could feel a red tingle on my cheek, and then a prickly feeling as the skin came back to life. “Fuck you, David!” she said.
“Tell me,” I repeated. Her defenses were gone. I knew she would answer. She needed to explain herself to someone.
THE NIGHT GALVIN HAD proposed survived in her memory like a photographic negative. The brightest color was the black of the night into which she escaped. She was a grief-stricken young woman of nineteen, still trying to say goodbye to her father—taking tranquilizers so that she wouldn’t cry all day. Her boyfriend had carried her off to a Hugh Hefner bachelor pad with a big picture window and a mirror over the bed, popped open a bottle of champagne and tried to give her a diamond ring. What was he thinking? That was a measure of his vanity, that he thought it was the right time to propose marriage.
Saying no had been the hardest thing she’d ever done. When she got outside the apartment building and was standing alone on Memorial Drive, she vomited. She went to the student health center, and they gave her sleeping pills to make all the circuits go dead, which was what she wanted. But that just masked the pain; she couldn’t escape it—she had to embrace it. She went into a place she called the white room. It wasn’t a real place, but somewhere in her mind—silent, warm, with walls that seemed to breathe in time with her. She had gone there once before, when her father died. When she was inside it, she knew that she would be safe.
Suffering had made Candace stronger—that was what Galvin hadn’t understood. He thought she was weak and needed his help, but she had been changed. The morning her father died, she had been called from class and brought to the office of the dean of students. Nobody told her what it was about, but she knew that someone must have died, and she remembered hoping that it was her mother. The dean of students handed her a telephone, and her mother was on the line. Mrs. Ridgway was sobbing, but Candace heard the words, “Your father is dead.” She didn’t say how it had happened. At first, Candace blamed her bitterly for that omission, but she relented. The poor woman had only found the body an hour before; the police were in the house, asking questions. Of course she had wanted to suppress the truth. So Candace heard it on the radio, in the taxi on the way to Logan Airport. The driver stopped the car and put his arm around her. He said he had a daughter too.
The Sun King Page 23
