The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  Sadly, for him, all of his own rigorous scheming was for naught. He managed, with some difficulty, to ingratiate himself to the republican Soderini who ruled Florence, but the Soderini were ousted by the Medici in 1512, so he was imprisoned and brutally tortured. After years in exile, he returned to Florence and, with time, managed to win favor with the Medici. He rose within their ranks as a playwright—this was when he wrote The Prince, though it wasn’t published until after his death. Then, in 1527, the Medici were ousted and Machiavelli found himself out of favor with the new leadership. He died without title or station, a man who’d spent his life chasing power, but never quite touching it. No master practitioner of the dark arts, he was most distinctive for his bad luck—for always finding himself on the losing side of history’s terrifying swing.

  Unfortunately for Machiavelli, and his latter-day disciples, people’s behavior isn’t ever as predictable as other natural phenomena, like gravity.

  Dante, meanwhile, in his own grand exercise of meretricious classification, decoded the human problem by sorting everyone into cleanly organized strata of sins and punishments. To one man, there was absolutely no morality. To the other, there was nothing but morality.

  As a reluctant student of these men’s thinking during his late adolescence, Vincenzo came to find their simplifications and misunderstandings purely aggravating. Economics alone, of the social sciences, seemed to have a legitimate claim on the scientific method in its study of human behavior. GDP could at least be measured, unlike Oedipal urges, or a certain culture’s tendency toward cruelty. The heart, the impulse, was arbitrary and faith-based, a phantom of a phantom, whereas logic and statistics were concrete and could, at least, be trusted to be accurate.

  Twenty minutes later, when Walter and Vincenzo walked into the lobby at Walter’s crass hotel, Walter said, “Next time leave the questions to me.”

  “What would you have asked?” Vincenzo said as they walked toward the elevators.

  “I wouldn’t have smacked him in our first meet and greet, to begin with. These guys, you need to coax them out.” When Walter talked, Vincenzo could see that he was quite different while on the job than when they were nattering around. Having never encountered this other Walter, the professional Walter, Vincenzo found the contrast between the two jarring.

  Upstairs, at the bar, they played two games of speed chess, but had to give up after that because it was only making Vincenzo’s headache worse, and because he’d made all available mistakes by now. Everything abominable had been done. They were defying medical advice and drinking Oban, which Vincenzo had been surprised to find on the bar menu.

  Vincenzo looked around at the people there, half expecting to see Ben among them, but he was nowhere to be seen. Still, it was disconcerting that Ben had come to Bolivia, too. It was more serious. Barging into someone’s hotel room was bad, following them to a different continent and leaving cryptic messages for them was more than that. “I don’t want to get into the particulars,” Vincenzo said, “but I think the US government has taken notice of me.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  Vincenzo shrugged.

  “Does this have to do with that reference you made in New York to the CIA?”

  Vincenzo nodded.

  “You worried that they’re going to put cyanide in your prosecco?”

  Vincenzo nodded again. “Maybe not cyanide, but I don’t know . . . I could backpedal, of course, could make our interactions here off the record. They seem to want me to either fade away or become an upstanding person again.”

  Walter sniffed his whisky, cast his eyes at the ceiling, and the vein beside his eye shifted to make room for the crinkled skin. “I have seen some strange things, so I’m reluctant to tell you that you’re delusional, but I think you’re delusional.”

  “I’m not delusional. This guy came into my hotel room.”

  Walter grunted, surprised. Then he shook his head. “Could it be your friends at Lehman, or someone else?”

  Vincenzo thought about this. It hadn’t occurred to him before that Ben might be working for Lehman. But no, that didn’t make sense, at all. Not quite. They didn’t really want Vincenzo, did they? Not enough to dispatch a ghost to chase him all the way to Bolivia. “That’s not it.”

  “In any case, I don’t think you’re going to get snipered tomorrow,” Walter said. “And, for what it’s worth, I do think it’s a little late to take a fire extinguisher to the charred bridges behind you.”

  “If the threats are real, they could cut off my visa.”

  Walter grimaced. “I could see them doing that. And it would be annoying.”

  “No, more than annoying—it’d prevent me from seeing my daughter. They could wreck my credit score, audit me—they could attack my way of life.”

  Walter frowned in thought. “That’s probably true.”

  “Anyway, I would like to be of some use, and I worry that I might have been too hasty in declaring war on the world. Maybe I should just stay here for a while, let things settle down?”

  “Stay in Bolivia?” Walter said, pursing his lips. “Are you thinking about that woman?”

  “Lenka?”

  “Her, yes, you were looking at her in a way.”

  “So were you.”

  “Doesn’t count, I look at all women that way.”

  “She had a boyfriend when I arrived yesterday, but they broke up somehow already.”

  “Good sign.” Walter raised an eyebrow.

  “No, it’s not that—they were talking on the phone earlier like a couple who are still dating. Anyway, she left town with Morales, so—” Vincenzo shrugged, had a sip of his whisky, which burnt as it went down. “I’m worried about you writing a follow-up piece while we’re here, because I don’t necessarily want to stir this up any more. I don’t want to make a scene.”

  “Here’s a hypothetical question: Do you want to save the world or do you want to save yourself?”

  “Does it have to be an either/or?”

  Walter blinked uncertainly, glanced at his near-empty glass, and, raising it, caught the young bartender’s eye and pointed at the emptiness inside. Then he looked Vincenzo in the eye and said, “Pretty much.”

  In 2002, when Vincenzo and Cristina went to Scotland for two weeks, they stayed at a bed and breakfast on Harris, the smaller of the conjoined islands: Lewis and Harris. Source of Harris tweed, the island was unbelievably small, considering its output of jackets; it was nothing but a grassy postage stamp bobbing in the dark waters of the North Sea. The inn where they stayed had hundreds of whiskies glinting on the walls, and although it was the middle of summer, there were only a handful of other guests. The Scottish bartender recommended Oban, because that was where he was from and his uncle worked at the distillery, and Cristina liked it, so that was what they drank.

  There was nothing much to do in Lewis and Harris. They hiked in the hills, watched the wind whip small waves up in little ponds. They visited the standing stones on Lewis. They went to a fly-fishing lesson, but neither one of them had any talent for it. The rain came cold and hard, blown in off obsidian waves. At night, they sat by the fire in the inn and drank tea, or Oban, and read books, played board games (not chess—Cristina was not at all interested in chess). They made love most mornings and every night. Often, they laughed truly and in a way that they hadn’t laughed in years, feeling just as alienated as they had when they were first in love, when they were first separated out from the world by their love in that sweltering July in Rome, when they first came to believe that they were special and different. In Scotland, it was partly the gigantic Scots themselves, their guttural and incomprehensible speech, and it was partly the overall solitude. A week later, on the heaving ferry back to the mainland, the gusts were especially violent, but Vincenzo and Cristina remained on the deck, stung by the wind, facing the battered sea, tasting the salty spray.

  Now, the taste of Oban scalding his tongue again, Vincenzo listened to Walter, who spoke with conf
idence, saying, “As I see it, there are probably people in the State Department who consider you a nuisance, but I don’t see anyone doing anything about it. They’ve got a lot on their plate right now.”

  “Good.” In his glass, Vincenzo could still smell the peat-smoke fire at that Scottish hotel. He shook his head, but the heavy memory didn’t shift.

  “You’re spooking yourself out,” Walter said. “There are no hidden consequences. Isaac Newton’s first law of motion: states of motion have a hard time changing. So, if you’re mobile, you’ll just keep moving; immobile, you’ll stay immobile.”

  Vincenzo snorted, not quite listening to him anymore. He unfurled the leather chessboard and started separating the pieces again although his headache was sharpening, and he felt drunker than he wanted to. Thinking about what Walter had just said a little more, thinking about it until its meaning coalesced, he finally said, “Who are you to talk?”

  “I’m not in your position,” Walter said as he started setting himself up as black. “I didn’t explode my life.”

  Vincenzo rolled his eyes. But Walter was swiftly distracted, and stopped setting up the pieces to look around the room at all the other reporters—all of whom, it seemed, knew each other, were drinking and laughing and talking amongst themselves. There were several pretty women among them. It looked, all in all, like great fun, reckless fun, like a convention of witty people who were experts at talking and listening and telling stories. But none of them were as old as Walter, Vincenzo saw. After a pause, Walter turned his mind back to the moment in front of them and finished setting up the chessboard, while Vincenzo gazed at his glass.

  13

  LOVE IS A CHOICE

  The day after Christmas, Vincenzo had hastily fired off a terse message to Leonora saying he’d be out of the country for a while, but hoped she’d enjoy the rest of her stay at Sam’s parents’ house. There was no point to the message, not that he could tell, and he regretted sending it.

  Now he received a reply, which he opened:

  Oh, Papito . . .

  Thanks (I think) for the message . . . . . . . . I don’t know what to say really. I know you are flawed and the rest of that, so you don’t need to do some demonstration with these odd e-mails. And I know you’re angry. God! Of course you are! And I know you feel guilty, too, and I wish you didn’t. But what am I going to do about it? I don’t want to be mean, but we’re in different places, you know, and I don’t know what to say to you. I’m in nyc and I have a boyfriend who is actually great (despite what you think!) and he loves me a lot, and you don’t know much about it. You think you know, but really you don’t. You don’t even try to know. You are too self-centered. Why are you that way? Is it just a guy thing? That’s what Sam says—that it’s about the male ego. He defends you. Did you know that?

  Anyway, what I think is that I think you’ve just been working so hard for so long that you don’t know anything else and that’s why you’re this way. So now you’re in Bolivia. How is that? Are you being treated like some rockstar-god? Did they have a parade for you? I read something online that said that some people think you did a great deed, something really selfless, by ratting out that guy at the Bank, like it was a big personal sacrifice. Is that right? I think it might be. But I don’t understand it, to be honest. I wish I did, but I don’t. Maybe one day you’ll explain it to me? I hope so. I love you.

  —Leonora

  It was a difficult message to receive. Vincenzo printed it out, just as he used to do with important e-mails at work. He read it several times. When did she become so strange and wise? He hated to think that she might have been that way for years and that he hadn’t noticed. Could it be so? Yes, of course it could.

  Though he did not intend to show it to Walter, it was bothering him too much, so he handed it over. Walter read the note and nodded, cast his squinting gaze at the ceiling, and drummed three fingers on his chin. “She’s great.”

  “I know this much, but what do I do?”

  Walter shrugged. “I have no idea at all. Really, you would know better than me.” He glanced down at the note again. “I can’t tell whether I regret not having children. I think about it, and pretend to have a theory, but I really don’t know.”

  “You should regret it.”

  “Maybe—I’m not sure I trust you on this.” Walter passed the page back, cleared his throat, picked up the menu, and perused it briefly, groaning under his breath at the awful choices. “I keep wanting to order the trout, but I don’t want to get any sicker.” Both men had come down with diarrhea the day after they arrived. Their digestive tracts had been a mess since. When they played chess their stomachs seemed to be carrying on a conversation beneath the table, some creaking and groaning dialogue, like whale-speak.

  The three days that Lenka and Evo were out of La Paz had been otherwise unremarkable. Walter and Vincenzo had wandered the city, which was not at all beautiful in the same way that most big cities in emerging economies were not beautiful. Haphazardly erected shanties clung to the mountains around the city. Everything was mainly made of concrete. Aging buildings seemed to pile onto one another on the steep grade—nothing looked like it had been built in the last ten years and nothing looked like it had been built more than fifty years ago. Everything was just old enough to be dated, and dilapidated. Mostly, Vincenzo relaxed. Walter had work to do. And it remained strange to see him work, to see how chiseled his focus was while he pursued a lead; further, to see what he dismissed and what he pursued. Of course he was good at what he did, had to be, but his casual command of this universe was startling. And, in it, Vincenzo saw that he’d been much the same—notably adept at work, reckless and inept elsewhere.

  After that first night at the Lookout, the bar on the top floor of the Presidente Hotel, they decided they needed to be much more vigilant about fighting off the altitude sickness. Those whiskies had turned out to be a grave mistake—that tint of intoxication was bullhorned the next morning into an angry hangover the likes of which neither had experienced in at least a decade. The hangover was literally painful—an experience, Walter noted, “comparable to un-anesthetized dental surgery.” Before the headaches began to recede, the two men’s digestive tracts started in, and they decided to take it easy, push fluids, and focus on chess.

  On a second visit to the Lookout, they realized they didn’t like the crowd, mostly international journalists, who tended to get raucous at odd hours, so they decamped to the much more subdued and tasteful Veritas at the Radisson, where Luz Elena—the doppelgänger—worked nights as the bar manager. Vincenzo had walked directly past her twice since he arrived, usually on his way (via a circuitous route) to the bathroom, and found that her shampoo was different from Cristina’s. Her scent was sharper, with a hint of rosemary or pine. Still, somewhat inexplicably, he felt tenderness for her scent—he loved it a little, even if it was foreign.

  The night before Lenka was due to return, Vincenzo and Walter played a game at Veritas and Walter trounced him with a surprising adaptation of the King’s Indian defense: violence and mayhem were foremost. Afterward, they were talking about chess, and how their games were less formulaic and predictable since Vincenzo had quit his job, when Vincenzo noticed that Walter was staring at her.

  “It is eerie, no?” Vincenzo said.

  “Does she work here?”

  Vincenzo nodded. “Her name is Luz Elena. Every time I see her I want to walk up and introduce myself. I want to say something, tell her about it.” Sometimes, he deliberately avoided saying Cristina’s name, because when he spoke her name it evoked for him the shape of the vacuum she’d left.

  “What would you say to her?”

  “I’d tell her about the similarity, I suppose, but it would be too bizarre. I would want to ask her questions, maybe.”

  “That makes sense. I want to talk to her, too, actually,” Walter said.

  “Yes. I wonder, for example—I know that people’s appearance is determined by the genetic code, so this woman Luz
Elena obviously has some portion of her genetic code in common with her, but I wonder if there are other similarities. I want to ask her if she hates beer, if she gets flatulent when she eats chocolate. Is she a late sleeper? Does she have unusually bad menstrual cramps?”

  Walter pushed out his lower lip, then said, “Yes, that would be inappropriate.” He had a sip of his coca tea and sniffled. “Look, I’m going to call my editor. You reset the board.”

  While Vincenzo started resetting the table, Walter took out his Blackberry and called his editor and asked if they would spring for him to move to the Radisson. Just listening to half of the conversation, it was clear that they said no. Apparently, the Presidente Hotel was listed as comparable in quality and it cost half as much. And although it wasn’t really a big deal, Vincenzo thought that it was better that he no longer had to argue about such things with his superiors. For all of his professional life he, too, had been answering to someone. And how strange, then, to be suddenly without anyone to report to, and to be without anyone reporting to him.

  When Walter was off the phone, Vincenzo said, “No luck?”

  Walter shook his head and looked at the board.

  “I don’t envy you,” Vincenzo said.

  Walter shrugged, he put his pawn to D4, and tapped the timer. Vincenzo was not faring particularly well at these slower games anymore. He’d become so accustomed to the rhythm of five- and ten-minute games that even a thirty-minute game threw him off. He simply didn’t have the patience for it. His mind was bored by thinking that hard for that long about anything. Vincenzo put his D pawn out to meet Walter’s, and Walter immediately moved his pawn to C4, for the Queen’s Gambit.