The 500: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  “Revenge,” I said.

  Davies brought the earpiece of his glasses up to his lips. He was waiting for me to go on.

  “I mean Princip is dirt-poor, right? He has six siblings die, and his parents have to give him away because they can’t feed him. And he thinks the whole reason he can’t get ahead in life is that the Austrians have had their foot on his family’s neck since he was born. He’s scrawny; the guerrillas laughed him out of the room when he tried to join up. He was just a nobody trying to make a splash. The other assassins lost their nerve, but he…he was, well, pissed off like no one else. He had something to prove. Twenty-three years of resentment. So he’d do what he had to do to make his name, even if it meant killing. Especially if it meant killing. The more dangerous the target the better.”

  My peers looked away in distaste. I didn’t talk much in seminar, and when I did I tried to use polished, high-sounding Harvard English like everyone else, not the regular-Mike tone I had just slipped into. I waited for Davies to tear me up. I sounded like a street kid, not a young establishment comer.

  “Not bad,” he said. He thought for a moment, then looked around the room.

  “Grand strategy, world war. You are all getting caught up in abstractions. Never lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day it comes down to men. Someone has to pull the trigger. If you want to lead nations, you have to start by understanding a single man, his wants and fears, the secrets he won’t admit to and may not even be aware of himself. Those are the levers that move the world. Every man has a price. And once you find it, you own him, body and soul.”

  After class, I was in a rush to clean myself up and attend to the disaster back in my apartment. A hand on my shoulder stopped me. I half expected it to be Crenshaw, ready to humiliate me in front of the good people of Harvard.

  That might’ve been preferable; it was Davies, with that dagger stare and whisper voice. “I would like to talk to you,” he said. “Ten forty-five, my office?”

  “Terrific,” I said, my best attempt at calm. Maybe he’d saved the chewing-out for a private conference. Classy.

  I needed food and sleep, but coffee would cover both for a while. I didn’t have time to go back to my apartment, and without really thinking about it, I walked over to Barley, the bar where I worked. The only thing filling my head was that number, $83,359, and the endless pathetic arithmetic of how I’d never be able to pay it off.

  The bar was a pretentious box with too many windows. The only one in there was Oz, the manager, who bartended a few shifts a week. It wasn’t until I leaned against the oak bar and took the first bitter sip of coffee that I caught myself. I hadn’t come for caffeine. I cycled the numbers in my head: 46-79-35, 43-23-65, and so on. They were combinations for a Sentry safe.

  Oz, who was also the owner’s son-in-law, was skimming. And not just here and there, the usual retail “shrinkage.” He was robbing the place. I’d been watching him up his game for a while, no sale–ing drinks and pocketing the money, comping his regulars half their tabs and never punching a thing into the register. Fishing that large a volume of stolen money from the cash drawer every night must have been a little difficult, since he had to do it while we were waiting around to be tipped out. So I was certain, dead certain, that this asshole was now keeping it in the safe. I could just tell. Probably because his act was basically a clumsy version of what I’d be doing if I were him and hadn’t sworn off grifting a long time ago. The academic term is alert opportunism. It means that if you have the eyes of a criminal, you see the world differently, as nothing more than a collection of unwatched candy jars. I was starting to worry about myself, because now that I needed money, badly, it was all jumping out at me again: unlocked cars, open doors, loose purses, cheap locks, dark entries.

  As much as I tried, I couldn’t forget my apprenticeship, my ill-gotten expertise. I couldn’t ignore all those invitations to stray. People seem to think thieves have to pick locks and shinny up drainpipes and charm widows. Usually, though, they just have to keep their eyes open. The money is more or less left sitting out by honest folks who can’t quite believe people like me are walking around. The hidden key, the unlocked garage, the anniversary-date PIN code. It’s there for the taking. And that’s the funny thing: the straighter I became, the easier it was to be crooked. It was like people were constantly upping the temptations to keep testing me after all these years clean. As a harmless-looking grad student in a button-down, I could probably have walked out of Cambridge Savings and Trust with a trash bag full of hundreds and a revolver in my belt while the guard held the door and told me to have a nice weekend.

  Alert opportunism. That’s how I picked up that Oz was day-locking the safe, so he only had to dial in the last number to open it. It’s how I knew that that number was 65. It’s how I recalled that Sentry safes came from the manufacturer preset with only a handful of codes—called tryouts—and so if Oz’s code ended in 65, it was almost certain that someone along the line had been too lazy to change the original factory combo from 43-23-65. It’s how I noted that Oz was barely able to calculate a tip, let alone keep his skim straight, and that his drinking had gone from bad to worse: at 10:30 a.m. he was already halfway through a five-second pour of Jameson in a mug with a splash of coffee on top. And even if he did notice something missing, who would he tell? No honor among thieves, right?

  Oz had the cash drawers on the bar now. He took them into the office. I heard the safe open and shut. He came back out and said, “I’m going to grab some cigarettes. Can you keep an eye on the place?”

  Opportunity knocked. I nodded.

  I took my coffee, stepped into the office, and tried the handle on the safe. It was open. Jesus. He was practically begging me. Scanning the contents, I counted about forty-eight thousand dollars in bank bundles and maybe another ten grand or so in cash just piled up. Oz was way behind on the deposits.

  There were two plays: I could nibble away at his skim and keep Crenshaw off my back long enough to get my degree. Or I could just rip off the Band-Aid, come in before dawn and clean it out. The bar’s back door was like Fort Knox, but the front you could pry open with a Wonderbar in a minute and a half—typical. No one would get hurt. As long as there are signs of forced entry, insurance pays out. I checked the top drawers of the desk, then the corkboard, and sure enough, there it was, tacked to the wall in Oz’s third-grader handwriting: 43-23-65—the combination. Begging me.

  I needed to pay Harvard at least, that week. Or else no degree. All that work, gone. The blood was pumping. A thrill coursed through me. It felt good. Really good. I’d missed it. Ten years I’d been clean, the upstanding go-getter. I hadn’t strayed, hadn’t lifted so much as a malted-milk ball from the grocery-store candy bins.

  Standing in front of that open safe felt good. It felt way too good. It was in my blood. And I knew that shit would destroy me—like it did my dad, like it did my family—if I gave it the slightest chance. I looked over my button-down shirt, my loafers, Thucydides staring up from the cover of my book.

  “Fuck me,” I muttered. Who was I kidding? I was too damn respectable to be crooked. And somehow still too crooked to be respectable. I swallowed the last of my coffee, then looked down at the empty mug. I’d chosen honest a long time ago, to survive, and I was going to stick with it even if it killed me.

  I clanked the safe door shut.

  I had pictured Davies’s office like a World War II film set: a map room with man-size globes and him shoving around armies on table maps with a croupier’s rake. Instead, Harvard had put him in a spare office in Littauer Hall, all Office Depot cherry veneer and no windows.

  Sitting across from him, I felt an eerie bit of déjà vu. He seemed to grow as he looked me over, and I remembered, from a long time ago, what it was like to be standing dead center in the courtroom with a judge staring down.

  “I have to catch the shuttle back to DC in a few minutes,” Davies said. “But I wanted to talk to you. You were a summer associate at Dam
rosch and Cox?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re planning to work with them after you graduate?”

  “No,” I said.

  That’s pretty unusual. All the real work in law school is in the first year and a half, when you’re gunning for a summer associateship at a firm. Then they wine and dine and overpay you to do nothing in order to make up for the seven years of hell they’re going to make you pay as an actual associate. Once you’re in for the summer, you’re more or less guaranteed a job after you graduate unless you’re a major fuckup. Damrosch and Cox didn’t invite me back.

  “Why not?” Davies asked.

  “Tough economy,” I said. “And I know I’m not the typical candidate.”

  Davies pulled out a few sheets of paper and looked them over. My résumé. He must have pulled it from the Office of Career Services.

  “Your manager at Damrosch and Cox said you were excellent, a force of nature.”

  “That’s very kind of him.”

  Davies squared the papers and put them down on his desk.

  “Damrosch and Cox are a couple white-shoe fucking snobs,” he said.

  That was my working theory for why they didn’t hire me too, but it took me a second to process it coming from Davies. His firm had a rep that could easily out-white-shoe-fucking-snob the best of them.

  “You join the navy at nineteen, when most of your chums in seminar here probably went to get drunk in Europe during their gap year. Top noncommissioned officer. A year at Pensacola Junior College, then you transfer to Florida State and graduate first in your class in two years. Damn near perfect LSATs. Now a joint degree from the Kennedy School and Harvard Law. And”—he checked another paper—“you’re doing the four-year degree in three. How are you paying for it?”

  “Loans.”

  “About a hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

  “Give or take. And I tend bar.”

  Davies seemed to check the circles under my eyes. “How many hours a week?”

  “Forty, fifty.”

  “On top of class.” He shook his head. “I’ll ask you this, because you did a decent job figuring out what moved Princip. What lit the fire under you?”

  So apparently this was a job interview. I tried to think of the usual platitudes about my work ethic, summon my inner grade-grubber, but I really didn’t know how to play this one. Davies made it easy.

  “I’d prefer it if you didn’t bullshit me,” he said. “I called you in here because, based on what you said in class, you actually seem to know something about the real world, what drives men. What’s driving you?”

  He’d find out sooner or later, so I figured I might as well get it over with. It was expunged from the record, but I could never really erase it. People, like the partners at Damrosch and Cox, always managed to find out. It’s like they could smell it on me.

  “I got into some trouble when I was young,” I said. “The judge gave me an easy choice: join up or go to prison. The navy straightened me out, and the discipline took. I liked the routine, the drive, and I put that into school.”

  He lifted the files off the desk, dropped them in his attaché, then stood up. “Good,” he said. “I like to know who I’m working with.”

  I looked at him, puzzled by the “working with” bit. Usually when people caught a hint of who I really was, they showed me the door (“tough economy” or “not our kind of man”). Not Davies.

  “You’ll come work for me,” he said. “We’ll start you at two hundred a year. Thirty percent bonus based on performance.”

  “Yes.” I heard myself say it before I even had a chance to think.

  That night, I slept on a wheezing air mattress in my empty apartment. I had to get up every couple hours to pump it back up. Dawn was a long time coming, and at some point, I remember, I realized that when Davies said I was coming to DC, he’d been telling me, not asking.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MAHOGANY BOX wasn’t a coffin, but after I’d been trapped inside it for four hours, it started to feel distinctly tomblike. I found it hard to rest. That may have had something to do with the fact that most people in similar situations were lying on their backs, and dead. After a while, however, I learned that if I leaned my head forward and wedged it in a corner, I could catch a few winks.

  The story of how I found myself in that box is a bit complicated. The short version is that I was stalking a guy named Ray Gould because I was in love—with a girl named Annie Clark in particular, and with my new job in general.

  I’d been at the Davies Group for almost four months. The firm was a strange place, opaque by design. If you asked, they told you they did government affairs and strategic consulting. Usually that’s a euphemism for lobbying.

  Picture a lobbyist and you probably call to mind the bought-and-paid-for, tasseled-loafer-wearing scum who funnel corporate and special-interest bribes to politicians, take generous skims for themselves, and ultimately make the world safe for lung cancer and poisoned rivers. There are plenty of those guys. But the go-go days of the 1970s and 1980s, when payoffs and vice flourished, are long gone. Now most lobbyists spend their days clicking through PowerPoint slides about obscure policies while bored junior congressional staff check their BlackBerrys under the table.

  Those guys are the rabble. Comparing them to the folks at the Davies Group is like comparing Zales to Tiffany and Cartier. Davies is among a handful of strategic consulting firms that do very little formal lobbying. These outfits are run by Washington heavies—ex–House Speakers, ex–secretaries of state, ex–national security advisers—and they exert a far more powerful and lucrative influence through the Beltway’s back channels. They’re not registered as lobbyists. They don’t do volume. They don’t advertise. They have relationships. They’re discreet. And they’re very, very expensive. If you really need something done in Washington, and you have the money, and you know the people you have to know to even get a referral to a top firm, that’s where you go.

  The Davies Group is at the peak of that cozy little world. It occupies a mansion in Kalorama, set among the trees and old European embassies, far from K Street downtown, where most lobbyists duke it out.

  During those first days in DC, I started to realize that the Davies Group thought of itself less as a business and more as a secret society or shadow government. People I was used to seeing on the front page of the Post, or in history books, for God’s sake, would be strolling up and down the hallways or cursing at jammed laser printers.

  Davies, like the other principals, spent his days doing essentially the same work he had done while in government. He marshaled decades of bureaucratic mastery: knowing exactly which string to tug, which functionary to pressure. It was a miracle how he made this sluggish, awkward, all-powerful yet barely functioning apparatus—the federal government—come alive and turn his whims into realities.

  Once he’d had to answer to voters and donors and political parties. Now he answered to only himself. He was offered far more business than he could ever take and so had the luxury of taking only those clients whose cases fit with his own agenda.

  None of this was said outright, of course. You had to pick up all the routines and rituals by keeping your eyes open and asking the right questions. The Davies Group was old-school. Most consulting firms still keep a little gentlemanly patina—the suits, the library, the hardwood trim. But any gentility has long ago been squeezed out by the number crunchers. Everyone measures his life by cells on a spreadsheet: hours billed. You have to hit your numbers. From day one, you’re on the hamster wheel. At Davies it was different. There were no orientations, no quotas or guidelines. There were only a half dozen or so new hires. Some years there were none.

  They gave each new initiate an office, a secretary, and a paycheck for forty-six hundred dollars every other week. Beyond that it was up to you. You had to find the work. The principals and partners inhabited the third floor—to me it looked like a wing of Versailles—and the senior associat
es the second. We were the junior associates, new fish, and we were parked on the first floor with all the admin, HR, and research folks. Junior associate was basically probation. You had six months, maybe a year, to prove your worth to the company, or you were gone. No one taught you how to do it. You had to hustle your way past every associate’s door to learn the rules of the game, but you could never seem pushy. Tact and discretion were the cardinal virtues at Davies Group.

  You’d scrounge for any little project at first, and typically they’d have you do research on a mark—sorry, that’s the old Mike’s lingo—on a “decision-maker” the firm wanted to influence. That meant you had to find out everything there was to know in the world, public and private, about your mark, and narrow it down to only the things that mattered for the case at hand and nothing more. That went into a memo, one page maximum. The partners called it “boiling the sea.” And what mattered? We junior associates had no idea, but we knew we had damned sure better get it right.

  That was the worst part. The partners and associates knew that if they let you squirm, you would only work harder, desperate for a pat on the head. So they never said exactly what was right or wrong. A partner would just tent his fingers in front of his lips and say, “Why don’t you have another go?” then slide back across the desk the product of your endless nights and weekends at the office, always wanting more. If you were lucky, you would receive the rarest of gifts, a “not bad”—the equivalent of a panting orgasm at the Davies Group. And if you pulled the wrong grains of salt from the sea? You were gone. Sink or swim.

  I was going to swim. I’d been hazed pretty hard starting out in the navy, and if staring at a computer was the worst they had for me, I was going to be fine. If I was awake (which I was for eighteen or nineteen hours a day), I was working.