A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

  Peter Mountford

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Article IV Report

  2. Plaza Murillo

  3. Hedged

  4. Santa Cruz Gas

  5. Election

  6. Altitude Sickness

  7. Mistakes Were Made

  8. Them

  9. Christmas

  10. Gambling on Boxing Day

  11. Gambit

  12. Maneuvers

  13. Endgame

  14. The Party

  EPILOGUE: A Room on the Tenth Floor

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A MARINER ORIGINAL • MARINER BOOKS

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON NEW YORK

  2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Peter Mountford

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue

  South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mountford, Peter, date.

  A young man's guide to late capitalism / Peter Mountford.

  p. cm.

  "A Mariner book."

  ISBN 978-0-547-47335-2

  1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Capitalism—Fiction. 3. Bolivia—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.O865Y68 2011

  813'.6—dc22

  2010025564

  Book design by Greta D. Sibley

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events; to real people, living or

  dead; or to real locales are either the product of the author's imagination or are used

  fictitiously for verisimilitude. While some of the information about the election of Evo

  Morales is true, Morales's role and the roles of his staff in the events of this book are

  entirely fabricated. Various aspects of the city of La Paz, likewise, have been altered.

  Other names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's

  imagination or are used fictitiously.

  For Jennifer

  1. Article IV Report

  Friday, November 25, 2005

  IT BEGAN WITH a single reedy voice calling out an incomprehensible refrain, some nasally phrase that would repeat all morning. Gabriel opened his eyes. The day's first light glowed pale at the edge of the curtains. He'd requested an eighth-floor room hoping to avoid this. He closed his eyes again, optimistically. Another voice—this one burpy, froggish—joined in; this phrase was shorter. What could they be selling at that hour? A third voice entered and they were a chorus singing some garbled tune, a puzzle of phrases intoned with the distinctive eagerness of street vendors across the world. Car horns added a percussive layer. A policeman blew a whistle, hoping to introduce order, but all he added was a shrill note. Still, the sound didn't truly find its center until the buses and micros joined in, shoving their way down the narrow roads. Gabriel knew that the noise had reached its peak register then: a din that would blast for sixteen hours. A symphony forever tuning up before its concert—it brayed him awake, brayed him to sleep. It was pure dissonance, but as he lay there he found that the anticipation of future harmony was palpable.

  Gabriel walked through to the bathroom, flipped on the light, and observed himself, hair askew, eyes puffy with sleep. Puberty had hit him young, at ten, but full-blown manhood seemed to be still in the offing. In college, he'd tried to grow an I-don't-care-about-all-that-shit beard, but he'd ended up looking weird, and the truth—that he cared a lot—became obvious because he wouldn't stop talking about the beard, so he had to give up and shave it off. Five years later, he was just as willowy, but he'd cut away the profusion of black hair and was shaving regularly.

  He brushed his teeth with bottled water and showered, making sure not to let any of the water into his mouth. Typhoid, amoebas, hepatitis, and dozens of other dangerous microbes swam in those pipes. The tap water even smelled different: chalky, it seemed. The water was so hard it swept the soap off his skin before he could lather up.

  Back in his bedroom with a teeny white towel wrapped around his waist, he slid open the curtains to see the crisp alpine light streaming down on the chaos below.

  The protests usually ended by lunchtime. If there was a march, it finished in Plaza Murillo, in front of the presidential palace. It had been this way since he arrived. The police stashed anti-riot gear in a dozen ministerial buildings on or near the plaza. Tear gas drifted through La Paz's narrow streets like morning mist. When the gas seeped into Gabriel's room at Hotel Gloria, it felt like a cloud of cayenne had been blown into his face. The first time this happened, he found that it took hours to dissipate, so when it happened again today, he abandoned his room. He took his laptop and went across the street to the Lookout, the top-floor restaurant at Hotel Presidente, where he could write in peace while his room aired out.

  No sooner had he sat down at the bar of the Lookout and opened his laptop than the bartender, Severo, told him that he'd already made enough pisco sours to get all the journalists in La Paz drunk. Gabriel smiled obligingly. It was ten in the morning and a few journalists were already gathering in the booths, drinking pisco sours. This was the end of the so-called Bolivian Gas War, and the fact that the war had been little more than a protracted series of protests did nothing to diminish the atmosphere of doomsday hedonism among the foreign press. Severo had latched on to Gabriel, who was set apart from the others by his youth, his ambiguous ethnicity, his fluency in Spanish, and, perhaps, the fact that he was Fiona's boy toy.

  He and Fiona had first met a week before, when they both arrived on that day's American Airlines flight from Miami. They had stood next to each other in line at the taxi stand, misty breath vanishing in gusts. She introduced herself and suggested that they share a taxi if he was headed downtown as well. They sat in the back seat of a cramped yellow car, which zipped down the winding road to La Paz, its engine emitting an ominous burning odor the whole way.

  Later that day, Fiona had gone behind the bar at the Lookout to show Severo how to make the best pisco sour in the world. "It's all about the quantity of egg white and the ratio of ice to liquid," she explained, delivering a tray of the cocktails to the table of journalists who were all there to cover the presidential race. "I slipped a Rohypnol into yours," she said to Gabriel and winked, and maybe it was just his first two pisco sours, but for a second he had felt as though he could fall in love with someone like her.

  Fiona's pisco sours were such a hit with the journalists that apparently Severo was now making them by the bucketful before his shift.

  Gabriel wrote for fifteen minutes at the bar before Severo said, "Where is your girl?"

  "Fiona?" How generous of him to call Fiona a girl. Generous too, if in a different way, to imply that she was Gabriel's. "I'm going to meet her soon."

  Severo nodded. "Is she a good journalist?"

  Gabriel said that she was great. He said that she seemed to get interviews with whomever she wanted. Then he qualified this by explaining that she worked for the Wall Street Journal.

  "Your newspaper is not so big?"

  Gabriel held up a pinkie finger to indicate the size, and Severo laughed. "Actually," Gabriel said, "I don't even have a newspaper. I am freelance." He didn't know the Sp
anish word for freelance so he just said it in English.

  Severo nodded, his eyebrows scrunched, and Gabriel could see that he didn't understand. It didn't matter to Severo. He just wanted to know whether he should be impressed. He just needed to know how to react. Gabriel said, "Not that many people read what I write, but the ones who do are big international investors."

  Severo seemed to appreciate that. "What do you say about us?"

  Gabriel shrugged. "I try to be honest."

  "Don't you think that things will get better?" Severo said. "I do."

  Gabriel grimaced. "I hope so."

  And Severo, who had seemed so blasé a few minutes before, so carefree, stared at Gabriel, a plastic jar of pisco sour in his hand, and said, "Please don't write anything bad about us." It was the most heartfelt thing Gabriel had heard all week.

  "I won't," Gabriel assured him. He made plenty of eye contact, to indicate his sincerity.

  But as it happened, he was mid-draft in a brief stating that the Bolivian government's reluctance to publish their latest Article IV report only reinforced his doubts about their future.

  The Article IV report was a candid—and therefore highly classified—analysis of a country's economy and problems, including a critical assessment of its policies, written by the International Monetary Fund. Gabriel had been trying to get his hands on a copy since he'd arrived. Most countries published their Article IV reports, even if these documents gave grim appraisals of the future. They published the reports ostensibly in the interest of full disclosure but really to assure investors they had nothing to hide. So the fact that Bolivia was so reluctant to publish its latest A-IV indicated, Gabriel wrote, "that this is probably among the most dour A-IVs in the country's history."

  To ensure that the report would not be leaked, the Bolivian authorities had asked that the IMF print only a handful of specially numbered copies and carefully restrict who saw them. Within Bolivia, President Rodríguez had a copy, as did the head of the central bank, the finance minister, and the vice president. President Rodríguez's unpopularity was such that he was no longer even talking to the press, so Gabriel didn't bother trying to contact him about the A-IV. The others wouldn't return his calls. A fifth copy of the report was in the hands of the IMF's resident representative, Grayson McMillan, who had agreed to meet Gabriel that afternoon. The snag was that Grayson didn't have the authority to give out the report. There was only one other copy that Gabriel knew of, and that was Fiona's. She had admitted she had it the other night, in a rare postcoital moment of tenderness. "The vice president gave it to me," she'd said.

  "Did he really?"

  "Yes, he really did. But I can't quote from it."

  "Oh, that's too bad."

  Gabriel didn't bother asking her if she'd let him see it. She was the only journalist with a copy and she'd be crazy to endanger her exclusivity by showing it to anyone, whether or not she was sleeping with him.

  What Fiona did not know, and had no way of knowing, was that despite what he'd been telling everyone, Gabriel was not actually a freelance writer. He was not a journalist at all, in fact. Not anymore. For the last month, Gabriel had been working as a political analyst for the Calloway Group, a hedge fund.

  Once he'd finished the first five pages of his report, Gabriel went to an empty side of the restaurant, got out his cell phone, read the finance minister's number, and took a deep breath. He attempted to assemble his ideas. He had not yet grown accustomed to interviewing these genuinely powerful people. For the past four years, when he'd been writing for the online financial paper Investors Business International, he'd felt like a hack. Now, at the Calloway Group, it was worse: he was expected to weasel sensitive information from these people. And the stakes were dizzyingly high. There could be tens of millions of dollars on the line. His boss, Priya, would not tell him exactly how much or where it was going.

  In theory, his job at Calloway wasn't so unlike his job at Investors Business International, except that what he wrote now wouldn't be published. Quite the reverse; what he wrote now was confidential. The less their competitors knew, the better. Gabriel's cover, such as it was, was that he was a freelance writer hoping to do a long piece on the Bolivian election for a magazine—it was precisely the kind of assignment he'd have been given by IBI a few months before.

  He took another deep breath, looked out the window. La Paz was a long and narrow city. It filled a craggy ravine on the eastern outskirts of the altiplano, or high plain: thirteen thousand feet high in this case. The steep faces of the canyon around the city were covered with slums. The slums were colored red by the cheap bricks of mountain mud the inhabitants used to build their shacks. Even farther up, toward the ridge, the hills were studded with clusters of shantytowns, home to only the most intrepid of the city's poor. The terrain was unforgiving, desolate, rocky; it looked primitive. It looked Afghani; it looked like al-Qaeda territory.

  Gabriel dialed the number, pressed Send. The phone rang once. A brief silence. It rang a second time. Someone answered. "¿Alo?" the voice said. A man's voice.

  "Hello, I am a friend of Fiona Musgrave," Gabriel said in Spanish. He spoke too fast, intending to make it clear he was fluent, because sometimes he had a slight hint of a gringo's accent. "I was hoping to talk to you about the Article IV report."

  "Fiona gave you this number?" the man responded.

  "She did."

  "You're a journalist?"

  "I'm a freelance writer," he said, leaving the word freelance in English again. He added a pause. "I need to speak off the record."

  "What kind of journalist wants to speak off the record?"

  This was the problem. Presenting himself as a freelance writer did not, it turned out, engender much enthusiasm with interviewees. Gabriel wanted to believe that if he told people for whom he really worked, they'd be impressed. He wanted to think that they'd give him the same star treatment they gave Fiona. But he couldn't risk it getting out that the Calloway Group was interested in Bolivia. He was lucky to have the job—more than lucky, in fact—and they wouldn't need much of an excuse to fire him. He hadn't even told his mother about the job. Still, he needed to entice the minister to speak somehow, so he went forward with innuendo. "Have you heard of the Calloway Group?" He said the Calloway Group in English, in an American accent.

  "The hedge fund?" The finance minister was still in Spanish. "You work for them?"

  Gabriel didn't answer the question. This was the plan, to imply that he worked for them but stop short of stating the fact directly. It was important that the minister know that the stakes for Bolivia were real; until now, few hedge funds had ventured near countries as backward and unstable as Bolivia. But it was also important that the minister see that the Calloway Group wanted to be discreet about their interest. "I'm just asking to take a look at the Article Four report," he said. "It'd be completely off the record. It's all just deep background for a long piece I'm researching."

  The minister let out a weary sigh. "Does Fiona know whom you work for?"

  "Fiona knows that I am a consultant." Gabriel paused again, in case the insinuation wasn't clear. "If you have another opinion, that's your business." Gabriel wondered if this was going well. It was hard to tell.

  "Why would I share a classified document with a hedge fund that has a reputation for vampirism?"

  "Excuse me?" Gabriel said. "I think you've misunderstood me."

  "I was with Morgan Stanley in 2001, and I remember Calloway. They'd nudge a price until it triggered a short spike. They'd milk the spike on the upside, and back down again on the fall to equilibrium. They were like feral animals during the Argentina crisis: went from a hundred percent long to a hundred percent short in seconds on a rumor that they themselves probably started. They may have done well, but we all found the strategy sleazy. There was no vision, no philosophy, except to play as fast and dirty as possible."

  "If they were interested in Bolivian industry, it'd be a very different thing," Gabriel said.

/>   "Right. They'd be looking at multinationals with significant exposure to Bolivian commodities, gas, I suppose, in the face of this unusual election?"

  Gabriel hesitated. The purpose of his cover was now clear to him. Based solely on his hint that he worked for Calloway, the minister had triangulated a very accurate reading of Calloway's investment strategy in Bolivia. With a tiny intimation, Gabriel had exposed everything Priya had wanted to keep under wraps. "I'm not going to speculate on what they would do here."

  "Right, right." The minister cleared his throat. "I'm surprised they sent you. Are you sure you didn't go to the wrong country? Brazil is a little to the right."

  "You don't want to show me the Article Four, I take it."

  "You are at the bottom of the list of people I would show that report to." His voice was hoarse. He sounded wrecked. He sounded exhausted.

  Eager to backpedal, Gabriel said, "I'm just a writer looking for material."

  "And I'm Ronald McDonald. But you don't need to worry. I won't tell anyone."

  Gabriel felt a great relief hearing that.

  The minister said, "I don't want to repel you people any more than I want to throw the door open to you. It's hard for me to imagine, but I do hope that people like your boss will eventually see the wealth available here to foreign investors. It is a very rich country if you are prepared to commit for the long term." His voice had been lifting there at the end, and he caught himself, shut it down. He sighed. He must have known he was talking to the wrong person.

  "I understand," Gabriel said. He didn't know what to say.

  "Anything else?" the minister said.

  "No. Thank you for your time," he said. Gabriel could hear that the minister was in traffic. Riding in a limousine through the squalor, probably. It had to be hard.

  "Fine. Don't call this number again." The minister hung up.

  Fiona answered the door in her white terry-cloth bathrobe, BlackBerry at her ear. She winked hello and slammed the door behind him. Gabriel sat down on the sofa, kicked his feet up on the coffee table. Fiona shimmied out of the robe and flung it onto the bed. She peeked around the curtain at the city. "I know," she said into the phone, "that's what I was saying, but we can always pad it if we're still short." Fiona had been the South America correspondent for the Journal since Gabriel was a freshman at Claremont High. And she was proud, he supposed, of her body—rightfully so.