This Is How It Really Sounds

by Stuart Archer Cohen

  “That said, “‘American financial boss Peter Harrington.’” To his horror, he saw himself fill the frame, looking at Harrington joyfully, extending his hand, saying, audibly, “I know who you are! I really like your music!”

  Harrington felt shame at the words, that Gutterman had been proved right about his Pete Harrington obsession, but he couldn’t look away. Just as he’d remembered it, the musician growled, “Yeah, well … You’re a fucking dirtbag!” More characters appeared on the screen, translating the dialogue.

  The next part was excruciating. His attacker stepped forward and hit him with a blow that was industrial in its directness and efficiency. Even on the video, with the traffic noise and the voices all around, he thought he could hear the impact, like a wet slapping sound. His head rocked back, and he took several drunken steps to his rear before sitting down heavily on the sidewalk, clutching his nose. Harrington was kicking him. There were the fragments of Ernie and Mr. Ma’s legs in the left side of the frame, and then his attacker was walking away, with one last pan toward where he lay on his back, rolling to his side and sitting up as blood poured from his nose. And then Pete Harrington’s back, disappearing into the crowd.

  One last Chinese ideogram filled the screen as it faded to black, and Kell’s voice was flat as he translated it: “Justice.”

  Harrington sat there without speaking, overcome with self-revulsion. Kell picked up the silence.

  “I put in a call to Guardian Services this morning. They’re the people in Palo Alto who do our online reputation management. I asked them to see if something was out there, and they picked this up in a search of your name in Chinese. It was posted on a Chinese Web site, and on that site it’s only searchable in pinyin, which is how I imagine our friends from Red Dragon found it. There’s another one out there, too, from a different angle. Do you want to see it?”

  Harrington didn’t answer, and Kell went on, his voice iced with a disagreeable irony. “So you can imagine why our guests yesterday were feeling just a wee bit ill at ease, and why they found your story about the squash accident so very, very reassuring.”

  Harrington said in a low voice, “I told you I didn’t want to go to that meeting!”

  “You told me shit!” his partner shot back. “How could you blindside me with this? I’m your partner! And I’m supposed to be your friend!”

  “I’m sorry! It was embarrassing.”

  “You’re goddamned right it was embarrassing! Four of us sitting at a table, and I’m the only one who has no idea that you’ve just gotten your ass kicked by a washed-up rock star! What does that say about us?”

  “Oh. I see: you’re the real victim here.”

  “I am a victim here! Couldn’t you at least have thrown up a block or tried to hit him back? You look like a complete jackass!” Kell caught himself, bowed his head with closed eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, opening them. “That was out of line. Goddamned Gutterman is driving me crazy. You’re the victim, and you were embarrassed, and you figured it would all blow over in a couple of days. I get that. It’s everything else I don’t get. First of all, why him?”

  “He was holding eight million dollars in Crossroads when it collapsed. I think he decided to get revenge.”

  “Revenge? Are you kidding me? How did he find you?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I was keeping a low profile, but obviously I can be found.”

  “So this was premeditated.”

  “I have no idea. From that video it looked like he spotted me on the street and went straight for me.”

  “I don’t buy that. Who’s the old guy standing next to you at the beginning?”

  “Ernie? I met him at the Bar Rouge, remember? I invited him to lunch.”

  “Maybe he’s the one who set you up.”

  “No. Ernie tried to stop him, but his ankle gave out and he got in Ma’s way.”

  “So he tried to stop him, but the only guy he stopped was your bodyguard.”

  “Come on: he’s an old man!”

  “What’s he to you? Why’d you ask him to lunch?”

  “Because he’s interesting! Okay? He was in the OSS in the Second World War, and he was in Shanghai from 1946 to ’49. He has a lot of stories to tell, and I wanted to hear those stories. Is that wrong? Does everything have to be about money or available women?”

  “You’re implying that all I care about is money and women?”

  “Have we talked about anything else in the last three months?”

  The lawyer nodded his head evenly. “Fair enough.”

  “I’m definitely suing.”

  Kell answered calmly but decisively. “No. You won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You have no venue. The Chinese legal system will have zero interest in trying to extradite a foreign national from the United States for a fistfight, and any economic damage you suffer would be either in China or in the Caymans, where Metropolitan Partners is incorporated. There’s no venue.”

  “What about as a human rights violation? People sue in U.S. courts for that, don’t they?”

  “Peter Harrington, multimillionaire, suing for a human rights violation? You really want to whack that tar baby? This video’s already got six thousand views in China. It’ll go to six million the day after you file suit. Metropolitan Partners doesn’t need that kind of publicity.”

  “Can’t Guardian do something about it?”

  “I asked them that. They can keep it off YouTube—that’s easy—but there’s a million smaller sites out there with lower standards. There’s no copyright violation here. You could try some sort of legal full-court press and harass anyone who posts it, but that’s playing Whac-a-Mole. If you’re not a major movie studio, that’s going to get tiring. Another strategy is to try to bury the links, but that takes time, and if it goes too big, you can’t control it. I set up an eleven o’clock conference with Guardian so you can get it straight from them.” Kell hesitated and seemed about to broach a new topic, but stopped himself. “Let’s just see where it goes. We’ll see what Guardian can do. Maybe the whole thing will die down.”

  * * *

  The next day, it went viral.

  4

  Market Forces

  For Peter Harrington, watching the transformation of the video from an isolated Chinese blog into a worldwide cage match was deeply disheartening. In three days, his beating had been scattered like stars across the online universe. The posts had titles like “The Most Satisfying Video on the Net” and “Pete Harrington, You’re My Hero!” In weak moments, he would make the mistake of reading the commentary. “Did u see luk on b1tch’s face! Loco good!!!” or “Kick him again, Pete! He’s still moving!” There’d been an outpouring of hatred a year ago when the news of the fund’s demise had first come out, but he’d developed a thick layer of cynicism about the complainers, had even come to revel in his bad-guy image. Now, though, it was infinitely more personal. The comments were uglier, more visceral, coming not from financial professionals sniffing about their losses or leftists weeping about the cruel world, but rather from a howling mob of commoners, who cheered against him in the online arena in which the rock star defeated him again and again and again. Harrington saw his own astonished delight as the singer came into view, then the confusion, the pain, the blood pouring from his nose, the cowering as he lay on the ground, the look of defeat. He’d been called many things in the wake of the Crossroads collapse, most of them ugly, but he’d never been called “loser.”

  He’d hired private investigators to look into the attack, and their report had added an even deeper strata of humiliation to the event. The people from Kroll International had come over the day after the incident, while his nose was still swollen: a Chinese man and an American, both in their forties. He admired their ability to show absolutely no reaction to his puffy features. The American asked most of the questions with a cordial and vaguely sympathetic manner. He asked about Ma and about the security regimen he followed and arranged to
interview Ma in private. He asked about Ernie and the events leading up to the assault. He kept returning to the subject of Ernie.

  “Did you ever see a passport or credit card with his name on it?”

  Harrington felt stupid. “No.”

  “Could he have been in his seventies? Maybe an old-looking sixty-eight or sixty-nine? Because … you said he took down your bodyguard.”

  “I said he fell into my bodyguard. I didn’t say he took him down.”

  The two men looked at each other; then the American one continued. “Give us a few days, Mr. Harrington.”

  They were at his house again in twenty-four hours. The rock star had been easy to trace. He had entered the country two days before the attack and left two hours afterward. They still weren’t sure who Ernie was, other than a few references on the Internet and the address in Iowa. “However, we reached the family of the Ernie Sivertsen shown in that old Merrill’s Marauders unit photo. He died in 2002.”

  The financier nodded, feeling a tremor of dread.

  “We were able to pull the passenger list of Pete Harrington’s flight to China, and there is one passenger on the plane that interested us. His name is Charles Pico. He fits the age range: he’s eighty-six. He has a Service record, but he was honorably discharged in 1945 and we don’t have anything on him after that. We asked around. There was a Charlie Pico who has an extensive background in security, and evidently did quite a bit of contract work for the CIA over the years, although we’re still trying to confirm that. His last known address was in Los Angeles. But the friend I talked to thought he was dead.” He reached into a folder and pulled out a black-and-white photo. “Do any of these faces look familiar?”

  In the antiquated-looking image, five men lounged in front of a wall of high leafy stalks. Sugarcane. Three of the men had dark hair and beards and were in military fatigues. One of the other men had a handsome face that was vaguely familiar. The fifth was Ernie, with dark hair that needed cutting and a pistol strapped to his hip. He wore a loose white shirt and khaki pants tucked into boots. He was no longer hunched or foggy-eyed. He looked fiercely alive, and he was smiling.

  “Well, gentleman…” Harrington finally said, “you can tell your friend that Charlie Pico’s not dead. Who are these other people?”

  The Kroll operative leaned forward and slowly indicated each one with his finger: “This is Raúl Castro … This is Che Guevara … And this is Errol Flynn. It was taken in Cuba about 1958. Evidently the CIA was secretly running guns to Castro, and Mr. Pico was part of the operation.”

  In the silence that followed Harrington felt himself sinking into an even deeper sense of despair. Charlie Pico, he realized, was real. He truly was the living legend, a man he would have wanted to befriend and whose admiration he would have liked to have. Instead, Charlie Pico had viewed him as just another despicable mark.

  He said softly, “So you think they were working together.”

  “This is what we think happened: Pete Harrington hired Charles Pico to help him set you up. Pico approached you the night before, played on your goodwill, and then told your attacker where you would be the next day. Then he disabled your bodyguard so that your assailant could get a clear shot at you and escape, though in those cases the bodyguard usually stays with the client in case of a second attacker. That’s something a man of his experience would have known.”

  Harrington nodded, feeling sick.

  The Kroll men went on. “The next thing we looked at is the video, which corroborates our theory to some degree. There was one principal video, the one with the Chinese subtitles, and that was actually edited from two videos taken from two different angles, which we’ll call Video A and Video B. These are the three most prominent videos. They’re unusually high-resolution for cell phone videos, though it’s entirely possible they were taken by passersby that happened to recognize Pete Harrington. He does have some notoriety here in China, so it’s not implausible. How they identified you is another question, because your face isn’t immediately recognizable, at least in China. What’s also interesting is that neither video shows the old man. You could almost think that the people shooting it intentionally kept him out of the frame. In the three other videos that have surfaced, the quality is much lower and you see more of Charlie Pico and the bodyguard.”

  “Okay.”

  “So then we ask who took them, who posted them, and how they spread. We couldn’t really answer those questions. This isn’t a criminal investigation, and without cooperation from the Chinese justice system, we can’t access the metadata we need to determine those things. There was an aggressive linking effort in the first few days that we tracked, but it’s a pretty sensational topic involving two well-known people, so it’s not surprising that it spread quickly. There are no repeats of user names on different sites or user accounts that were set up an hour before the post. Those are the kinds of things that indicate an organized campaign. This appears to be a spontaneous event.” The agent shrugged apologetically, but Peter imagined he saw a trace of a smirk slither across his features. “People are interested in you, Mr. Harrington.”

  The Kroll briefing, coming on the heels of the humiliating business meetings with Kell and Shenzhen Red Dragon, sent Peter Harrington into a deep depression. He muddled around his house, too depressed to face Camille, until, like a bubble rising from the depths, in the space of a few hours, his depression swelled into outrage. Did Pete Harrington think some legal loophole would protect him? That he could hit him and just walk away? Within twelve hours of the second meeting with Kroll, Peter Harrington was staring at the vice president of Guardian Services blown up to life-size on his flat-screen TV. He looked like he was about twenty-five years old. They’d moved fast: Harrington was an A-list client with a lot of money to spend, and he was angry.

  Guardian had already developed a two-pronged strategy, the man said. Part of it was defensive: burying the links. They would help Harrington set up a scholarship fund: something on the order of about ten million dollars would be enough to get traction. They’d create a Web site and staff the foundation with a few employees who would set about giving away scholarships and grants to the needy. This would be touted across the Web in a dense thicket of Internet links and announcements. They’d work with a press agent to get media coverage. It wouldn’t make the bad links disappear, but they would counterweight them with pictures of happy kids with schoolbooks. Or they could set up an environmental fund: it didn’t matter which. Meanwhile, they would go after Pete Harrington’s reputation with an ice pick. “He’s definitely got a history,” the Guardian man said. “Paternity suits, assault charges, critics trashing his music. And that’s just a ten-minute Internet search. We’ll paint a picture of a washed-up rock star who assaults you in a desperate, pathetic attempt to get people to pay attention to him. We’ll hit Pete Harrington with that truth from a thousand directions, and we’ll hit him over and over and over. Roboposts on message boards, blog commentary, press releases, a social-media campaign. We will make him cringe every time he turns on his computer. I guarantee you: he will come out of this looking like a loser. We can put five people on it, starting whenever you say the word.”

  * * *

  Revenge was a petty motivation, but in the absence of anything more noble, it lifted his spirits. He was Peter Harrington, the man who had amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in five short years. Dispensing with a has-been like Pete Harrington would be nothing for him. Aside from his own feelings, though, Peter Harrington found he had a bigger problem with the video: it made the world remember who he was. Within a week of the attack, the whole universe seemed to know that he lived in Shanghai and was partners with Kell McPherson in a business dedicated to privatizing American public infrastructure and putting it into the hands of Chinese investors. The hate mail began to flood in. The volume became so large that Kell had to hire Guardian to screen the messages, and now, when a search was done on Metropolitan Partners, it immediately turned up page after pag
e of scorching hate posts and videos of Peter Harrington being knocked to the ground. Even some of the financial papers discovered a sense of irony, reporting on the attempt to buy up assets by some of the same people that had helped crash the economy in the first place. In America, a public television network was putting together a sensationalized “exposé” about their attempts to acquire the Akron sewer system and the Pennsylvania Turnpike with the working title “Return of the Predators.”

  * * *

  A week after the video first surfaced, Kell called him into the Metropolitan office. The day had already had a brittle start. At ten that morning Nadia had announced from Beijing that she didn’t want to see him anymore. The call had been expected, and he cut her off as she began her scripted explanation. “Let me know when you get back to Shanghai,” he’d said brightly. “I’ll send your things over to your apartment.” He didn’t really care: the night with Camille had brought home to him the emptiness of the relationship. Kell hadn’t asked him to attend any more business meetings since the debacle with Shenzhen Red Dragon, and he hadn’t seen his partner in several days, ample time to regret not being more honest with him. They shook hands, and Kell complimented him on the fact that his nose was back to normal, asked in a joking way how the Camille-Nadia balancing act was going. He received the answer with a philosophical toss of his shoulders. “Camille seems more interesting, anyway. And she can order for you at restaurants.”

  “Thanks for your support. What are we doing here?”

  “Yeah.” The lawyer glanced at the carpet, then up again. “Peter, how badly do you need this?”

  “What are you referring to?”

  “Metropolitan Partners, the venture—the whole plan for monetizing infrastructure.”

  “Is there an issue?”

  Kell seemed uncomfortable. “To be honest … lately, there has been something of an issue—”