“The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” Willibald says.
“Like Emmentaler,” says Humfried.
“Swiss cheese,” Willi says automatically for Fanny’s benefit.
Humfried shakes his head and points at the screen. “Look at this poor dummy. All the passwords are so stupid! ‘Joseph Beirn II’ is ‘JoeB2.’ This guy Petersen in Mexico—’Viva’! It makes me feel bad almost. It’s like, you know, grabbing chocolate from ein Kind … ?”
“Stealing candy from a baby,” Willi says, watching Big Bob’s latest software download from Karlshorst. “Stealing candy with Kalashnikovs.” He looks over at Fanny and grins. “With our partner, Bonnie. Who’s Clyde, me or Humfried?”
“We’re not ‘stealing’ anything, okay?” Fanny says, unamused. “We’re not hurting anybody. It’s just a pie in their faces.”
“Okay,” says Willi, chastened. Trying to be comradely, he asks, “Fanny, how come you think we’re not getting precisely the same keystrokes from Buttsniffer as we were from Big Bob’s sniffer? Those small variations when you hacked the DNS servers?”
“RTFM, Nazi boy.”
Is this perfect? This is perfect, Lizzie thinks. She’s watching a very pink sunset, in the backyard, where she just checked her e-mail with one of the wireless ShowNet PowerBooks. Rafaela is doing the dishes from lunch. Max and LuLu are just home from school, watching their snack-linked, prehomework half hour of television. Sixty-seven degrees and sunny on the twenty-seventh of November—Los Angeles imported to New York for forty-eight hours. In the real L.A., people can’t help but take the balmy good fortune for granted, or else allow their heads to fill with blissed-out nature joy every waking hour—smug or dopey, their choice. But here she is, unemployed, at her two-million-dollar home on a warm weekday afternoon. Sitting outdoors, barefoot and happy, on a handsomely rotting chaise lounge. Thinking, but not very hard, about money and a video that her unemployed husband has gone upstairs to find. Everything about this moment is L.A., she thinks, and she’s enjoying it only because she knows it is an evanescent blessing (like all blessings) that will last barely long enough to appreciate.
One of the e-mails was from [email protected]. Lizzie misses Fanny and Alexi and Bruce and, collectively, the eighty other employees of Fine Technologies. “Dear Boss,” her e-mail begins.
Edina is exactly the same boring happy happy white white shithole it ever was, and the pres. election makes my Groundhog Day grade-school deja vu TOO intense. (Although I don’t hate Bush–he reminds me of my principal a lot less than the other guy did.) The ankle bracelet finally came off 10/31 (yay!) & I am semi getting along with Moms. Guess what? Willi (yes!) and Humfried are staying at our house for a few days on route to Las Vegas and L.A. & SF–their Byder-Minehof [???] 2000 North American Tour they call it. (They say they want to spend all their Mose stock money “before it turns us into yuppie pigs.” And they say to tell you THANKS for the stock.) Speaking of Mose, btw, a nice guy named Henry Saddler from the company (sez he’s your friend?) e-mailed me for an “informal how-ya-doin’ online exit interview.” Anyhow, we’re having a total BLAST. Sometime I’ll have to show you some AMAZING code a friend of Willi’s in Germany wrote. SO HAPPY when I read about ya quitting after Microsloth bought out Mose Digital. (IMHO: Yes!) Anyhow, we’re all thinking of you a lot and miss the good old dayz at Fine Technologies. Think of me Wed! Filfre to write if you have time. Peace & Love, Fanny
Lizzie knows about Fanny’s crush on the German, but “think of me wed?” Fanny marrying Willibald might be a fruitful idea for a low-budget dark comedy, but would be a travesty and a tragedy in real life. (“If you marry Willi or anyone else before you’re 21 I will have to personally kill you,” Lizzie e-mailed back. “And Hank Saddler is probably a pedophile, and definitely a weirdo, so watch yourself.”)
Lizzie feels a moment of envy for Willibald and Humfried. Unlike her ex-employees, who (thanks to Lizzie) got stock in the Mose takeover, she is still contractually forbidden from selling any of her shares in Mose Media Holdings until the six-month anniversary of the acquisition. That date is December 29, the last weekday of 2000. The accountant has told her she is insane if she doesn’t wait to sell at least until after the New Year’s weekend, but Lizzie fully intends to cash out on the twenty-ninth, tax consequences be damned. Max mentioned on Friday that Mose was down to 26⅜. She didn’t know the market was open the day after Thanksgiving. (Just as she didn’t know until two months ago that Max has made a hypothetical fortune this year in a web-site “rotisserie league” stock-picking game. It was a printout of Max’s imaginary purchases of Mose Media stock that made her accuse George, the day he walked out, of committing inside-trading felonies.) So her 498,000 shares are now worth only $13 million (on paper, pretax) instead of $24 million (ditto). But she’s with her husband at nightfall in their house on the Seaport.
“Daddy?” LuLu shouts from an upstairs window suddenly.
“He’s somewhere up there,” Lizzie shouts back.
“Miss America, the blind girl, just mentioned Daddy’s TV show on And Another Thing! She was talking about Charles Manson going free!”
“Okay, sweetie, thanks,” Lizzie says. “I’ll tell him.”
The foghorn in the Buttermilk Channel groans its sad but never saddening sound just as George comes outside with a big, goofy, embarrassed smile. He’s holding a Jaz disk between his thumb and index finger as he walks back toward her.
“You found it,” Lizzie says.
“It was in a Baggie wrapped in gaffer’s tape up in the crawl space. The scary thing is, I literally can’t remember hiding it. I really thought I must have thrown it away. It’s like whole days are erased from my memory.”
“Good,” she says.
He hands the disk to her and sits down beside her. She sticks it into the drive. An icon, a red letter M over a bleeding heart, pops onto the screen. She gives George a look.
“I know. Your Chas is a high-production-value kind of guy.”
She clicks on the skull and crossbones. A video image appears.
“It’s just his face,” Lizzie says, sounding confused, surprised, disappointed.
“Wait,” George tells her.
“That’s funny,” she says, touching the screen, “you can see the tip of his white pine right there, behind him.”
For a moment, the image becomes jerky and confusing. Then it resolves, a wider shot.
“Yowza,” she says.
“Ta-dahhh.”
“He does it standing up?”
“I know. I guess that’s why the camera on the computer zoomed back, to try to capture more image. He confused it.”
At the bottom of the screen, just above the burned-in video date, Helvetica text gushes in, scrolling across the lower edge of the image—HI! IT’S ME, ELIZABETH!—from right to left, whorish imprecation after whorish imprecation—YOU CAN JUST WATCH—as the man on the screen opens his mouth and juts his pelvis every couple of seconds, almost dancing.
“You see,” George says.
The image is surprisingly sharp and fluid, given that it is a second-generation copy of a picture transmitted by cable from a computer on West Fifty-seventh Street down to a loft in Chelsea and then by copper telephone wire across America and the Pacific to Malaysia. And although Lizzie is blushing, and George is no longer smiling, their moods are blithe. They’re watching a video recording of Harold Mose masturbating in his office on the Fifty-ninth Floor of the Mose Media Holdings tower.
At the end, the little camera tried desperately to follow him as he stumbled over to his wastebasket, then out of the frame, presumably to his bathroom. Lizzie clicks the image away. They look at each other for a few seconds.
“I guess this is a rueful smile,” George says, smiling ruefully. “You realize, it wasn’t just this. I was hating you pretty good before this arrived.”
The cartridge is ejected with that brief, pleasingly lubricious electromechanical hum.
“I guess we can put
this in a safe-deposit box with the rest of the family cyberporn cache,” Lizzie says. “A legacy for the grandchildren.”
George smiles, stands, and shakes his head again. Lizzie is referring to Sarah’s pornography adventure. After George’s dinner with Fanny and Willibald in August, Willi decided to prove to George that he could indeed install a sniffer on the cable modem at Water Street. He did, and recorded all the internet traffic going in and out of their house (and random neighbors in the financial district) for the next month. He sniffed George’s Manhattan web-cam stalking, and he sniffed a dozen of Lizzie’s e-mails to Pollyanna—which had been the bedrock for Fanny’s faith in Lizzie’s fidelity.
Willi also sniffed some of Sarah’s telecommuting work for Felipe Williamson’s brother’s web site. Although C. Girls is indeed a “free, advertiser-supported hair-and-makeup database,” as Sarah told them, most of the company’s revenues derive from ChelseaGirls.com, the live online pornography web site. Chelsea Girls’ key selling point is that its naked women are “100 percent Ivy League college girls and grad students,” and that they are “the sluttiest, horniest eggheads locked in the Ivory Tower!” Most Chelsea Girls wear prop glasses while they’re working, Sarah explained to her parents that terrifying October afternoon when George and Lizzie confronted her with the sniffer evidence, but too few of them can convincingly simulate even the dirty talk of a grad student egghead. Sarah’s job was to serve as one of their Cyranos, as Philip Williamson’s brother calls them, and sit at a keyboard typing out the faux-educated online responses of the faux-orgasmic women probing and clutching their own bodies according to the whims of their $9.95 wankers downstream.
“Did you ever do that?” Lizzie asked, feigning cool. “Take your clothes off for the camera?”
“Mo-ther! Are you joking? No-o!”
Then George asked Sarah when she started the Cyrano work at Chelsea Girls.
“May,” she told them, “right around the time of that big party you guys had.” It was probably stupid to care, George knew, even as he was hearing the answer and feeling deep relief. But the recording of Mose, according to the date at the bottom of the video image, was made April 3. And when Sarah told them she gave most of her fourteen-dollars-an-hour earnings to Rafaela “for her people down there,” George and Lizzie felt prouder than they let on.
What Sarah hasn’t told them is that the money she funneled through Rafaela, $4,663 in all, went to buy thirty thousand rounds of AK-47 ammunition for the Zapatista guerillas. She hasn’t told her parents because she doesn’t know. Nor do any of them know that Felipe Williamson’s brother, Josh, buys his thousands of hours a month of phone service for Chelsea Girls from a reseller principally owned by Roger Baird, Nancy McNabb’s husband. And Roger Baird has no idea that one of his largest customers, Chelsea Entertainment, is a pornographer.
Hanukkah is still three weeks away, but the menorah is already up in the $ offices, filled as it is each year with candles cast in the shapes of Santas. “We don’t have a menorah in Greenwich, Daddy,” Sasha said yesterday, not meaning to gloat, Ben doesn’t think, about her mother’s return to Methodism. Cast on the plain Sheetrock back wall of the Big Room, the long pink rectangles of light at sunset remind Ben of the Malevich his ex-wife took to Greenwich and then sold. The problem with this time of year, when it gets dark by four-thirty, is that Ben’s twilight tendency to moodiness sometimes kicks in before the market closes.
“So, do you want any more?” Billy Heffernan asks. “He’s got 3,000 December 115 puts for 1¼.”
Ben thinks: Don’t get too greedy. He thinks: Resist the candy trades. The options desks at Goldman Sachs and First Boston have been on the wire with Heffernan all afternoon, pressing more loads of Microsoft puts on him. It’s against the law to own more than 10,000 options, either puts or calls, on most stocks. But for Microsoft and a few other big, heavily traded companies, the limit is 50,000. Ben owns 24,200 Microsoft puts. He could legally double his position.
“No,” Ben says, “uh-uh, that’s it.”
The brokers might turn out to be right, of course, and Ben Gould will wind up on the wrong side of a monstrous $3 million candy trade. Everyone who trades options, he knows and they know, are piranhas (the guys in the pit, massed and frenzied) or sharks. Ben prefers to think of himself as sharklike, discriminating and even dignified, striking at a few great big flailing, sanguinary trades. He’s a killer, but he is not a scummer, one of the rock people. He isn’t doing anything wrong here; that is, he isn’t doing anything illegal. He didn’t ask; they didn’t tell. He happens to know. He just happens to know. It’s a Perfect Trade.
How perfect will it be? Ben remembers writing the story in 1980 about Arrow Electronics, and how the stock price shriveled by half five minutes after those thirteen executives burned to death in Westchester. On the other hand, when Frank Gaudette died in 1993, the stock of his company wasn’t badly hit. Even though he was one of the top guys, he’d been sick for so long the market had discounted it—the death was de facto preannounced. Gaudette was head of worldwide operations at Microsoft, second only to Gates. But then again, that was seven years ago, a long time back. These days, on any given Friday afternoon, people bring down Microsoft two or three points on a whisper about something minor, like slow Asian shipments of Windows 2000. Ben knows what he knows. But in the end, who knows?
Tuesday, November 28
According to the big Vikings digital thermometer outside Jodie Taft’s kitchen window, it’s warmer this morning than it was yesterday, up to six degrees below zero. She hears the TV on downstairs. And she hears Fanny and the boys chattering as usual, up and at ’em already, at seven-ten! What is it with these kids and the computers? It’s a different world, that’s for darned sure. She steps carefully down the wooden stairs to the basement, balancing the three giant mugs of hot cocoa on a LoveMart bedside sex-toy tray.
“Cocoa time!” Jodie says.
“Thank you, Mrs. Tahhhft!” Willibald and Humfried say in unison, entirely earnest and grateful, not meaning to sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Eddie Haskell. They think Fanny’s mom is cute and nice and American. Jodie Taft thinks they’re cute and nice and, in their red fleece tops and with Willibald’s little blond goat’s beard, so Christmassy.
The kids have been awake most of the night, of course. Empty ultra-venti Starbucks cups as big as megaphones sit in a neat row at the back of one of the PCs, just beneath a homemade poster, printed in the inch-high letters of a funny-papers Microsoft typeface called Comic Sans Serif: REMEMBER WHERE YOU WERE ON NOVEMBER 29, 2000? WACKO PRACTICAL JOKERZ RULE! On the Sony in the corner, E!2 is showing a tour group of movie stars, live, trying to talk to a pair of toucans at the grand opening of Salvation, the swank rain-forest Eco-resort thirty miles from Selvapesta, Costa Rica.
“I want you to get some breakfast in you before you leave for school, young lady!”
“I’m taking two independent-study days, Mom. Today and tomorrow.”
Jodie Taft smiles as she climbs the basement stairs. She remembers the day thirty years ago—Goodness, she thinks, thirty years!—when she stayed up all night and skipped classes helping George Mactier set up the Henry Wallace High School Vietnam Moratorium demonstrations.
“Susan and Tim,” says the spiky-haired young TV correspondent to two of the movie stars in Costa Rica, “I know how nice it must be for you guys to kick back for a while here, after your week in the Zapatista territories. Tell me about the fighting—did you see combat?” “We did hear shooting one day,” the female movie star says, “when we were near Chabajebal with Barbra and her crew, but you know how difficult it is to tell what’s going on in that situation …”
Willibald, typing away, nods toward the TV. “See?” he says, “everything is the war in Mexico. I still think a bomb, an accidental bombing by the security forces, is the best. I do. It’s more amusing.”
Fanny, watching her terminal screen, shakes her head. “It might be. But I told you, I don’t want to do a
nything that involves government stuff.” She turns to Willi. “I can’t afford to do anything that gets the feds pissed off, okay?”
“Look! Look!” Humfried suddenly shouts. “On the TV!”
The on-air correspondent, who’s wearing a sleeveless khaki minidress, is now talking to a hulking bald man in a pink polo shirt.
“God,” Fanny says, “he looks like a Star Trek alien, with the evil grin and the slitty eyes and the big bulge on the top of his head.”
“Maybe they are aliens,” Willibald says.
“Wacko Practical Jokerz, heroes of the solar system!” Humfried says.
“So,” the woman on TV says, pointing her MTV and E!2 microphones up toward the man’s face, “is there a place for computers in the Costa Rican rain forest?”
“Francesca, coming down here makes you realize that there are still so many parts of the world, even in our own hemisphere, that need the solutions technology can provide.”
“Tell our viewers what you were saying before to Michael Stipe, the thing your boss said about the rain forest?”
The bald giant smiles. “Oh, Bill was just saying how being in the jungle here, and deep diving out there, makes him feel like we’re actually inside planet Earth’s operating system.”
“Interesting way of thinking about this important ecosystem, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft,” the correspondent says, stepping away, “here on a scuba vacation with his boss—the richest man on planet Earth.” The camera follows her, then pans down to find a pretty blond woman squatting, trying to feed a giant longhaired weasel. “The tayra want to eat lizard, señora,” a man from the resort is saying quietly to her, “he not like banana.” The correspondent squats down beside them. “Kim Basinger, it’s Francesca Mahoney, for MTV/E-squared Real Time News, who’s your friend here?”
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