The 500: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  She walked up to a rock face formed by two massive boulders—each thirty feet tall—wedged together. “In here,” she said, and pointed at something between them that wasn’t even a crevice; it was maybe a crack. Inside, it was pitch-black. She wedged herself in and inched into the darkness. I followed. Eight feet in, we were totally blind. There was no space. You could feel your breath bouncing back off the wall in front of you, and hear, distinctly, the sound of rushing water ahead.

  “Watch your step here,” Annie said, a disembodied voice in the blackness. I brushed against her hand, and she took mine and led me around a sharp corner. We were in a pocket deep in the side of the mountain. Water dripped from overhead, ran down my face.

  “And then into this pool.” The floor fell away. We dropped into ice-cold water up to my belly button. The roof of the cavern sloped down, and the pool got deeper until there was about a foot of headroom above the surface of the water. It was getting a little claustrophobic and drown-y even for me, and I’d spent my fair share of time in windowless ship holds and had gotten suffocated by the best of them at the navy’s Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes.

  I was starting to wonder just how brass Annie’s balls were when that sweet voice informed me: “Okay, now we’re going to duck under and sort of swim through this little underwater tunnel. It’s about twelve feet, and then the current will take you the rest of the way and spit you out in this cave under the waterfall.”

  “Uhh…okay.” Except not okay. I’m not too proud to admit that sounded pretty fucking scary.

  “You trust me?”

  “Less and less.”

  She laughed. “Just hold your breath and don’t fight the current. Ready? Go!”

  I heard her inhale, then saw her drop under the surface. I dove down and slipped underwater along the smooth rock walls. I fought back panic. The tunnel was maybe two feet wide, too narrow to use my arms, and completely full of water. There was no way to come up for air. I could only move ahead by kicking. The current picked up, and a second later a wall of water plowed into me from the side and dragged me out into a larger stream. The sunlight hit me like a camera flash after so long in the dark. I shot out of a chute ten feet in the air and landed in a pool in a little open cavern behind the deafening curtain of the main waterfall.

  We both came up panting, eyes wide. I was so wired and glad to be alive I grabbed her in a bear hug. “Holy shit!” I said.

  “Right?”

  I probably said holy shit a few more times and then realized I was in a grotto with Annie. We were both feeling punchy from our near-death dunk. Of course it was too soon to try anything; overeager, I could have ruined the good thing I had going with my dream girl. But come on. A grotto. Under a waterfall. What else could I do?

  We looked each other in the eyes. Nothing from her—not a quick look away, but neither that gauzy smooch-me look. No guts, no glory. I got a little closer, a little closer, and…still nothing. No lean in, no lean back. A hundred percent poker face. Stand your ground, man. I closed the distance by 50 percent, 70, 90, 95… When you are on a very clear descent path to a kiss, maybe not at the very beginning of it, but certainly when your faces are two inches apart and closing, you expect that any halfway decent young woman will give you at least a little sign to tell you if you’re home free or blowing your chance.

  Nothing. I’ve never seen anything like it. She didn’t react.

  I was between the trenches, totally exposed, stranded in no-man’s-land. I wasn’t going to park one on Miss Annie Clark without getting a welcome sign, however tiny.

  So I stopped, an inch away from bliss. This was high stakes: dream girl, see her at work every day, and so on. I pulled back. She was still staring. Still the poker face.

  “It’s hard not to kiss you in a place like this.”

  “I’d have kissed you back,” she said. “I guess I was just curious to see how far you’d go.”

  I thought about this for a second, then ran my fingers through her hair above her ear, cupped her nape gently, and gave her the kind of leading-man, swelling-strings, knee-weakening kiss they just don’t make anymore.

  When she dropped me off at my house later that night, I asked when I could see her again.

  “We’ll see,” she said, and blew me a kiss. “I try not to shit where I eat.”

  I was reeling, still a little shocked that I had broken through with Annie so quickly and trying to square that badass girl from the mountains with the Washington sophisticate I knew from work.

  The whole romance had happened, and kept happening, so naturally.

  There were a few formal dates in the beginning where I tried to impress her with highbrow delights—tasting menus, wine bars, after-hours drinks at the Phillips Collection—but I was surprised by how quickly we fell into the habits of a contented couple. If we didn’t have to work, we could hang out the entire weekend at my place: walking through the neighborhood, spending half the day sitting outside a café, or just reading on the porch. We didn’t want to be apart. I watched happily as she colonized my bathroom, one item at a time—first a toothbrush, then a shampoo bottle—slowly staking her claim. My place was bigger than hers, and closer to work. There was no reason for her to go back to her one-bedroom in Glover Park. Like the apartments of most DC workaholics, it was sparsely furnished, with packed boxes hidden in the closets.

  One night about three months after that first kiss, she came over straight from work with a bundle of dry cleaning she’d had done near our office. We had a late dinner. I was sitting up on the couch, and she was lying down across it, her legs up on the arm, and her head on my thigh as I stroked her hair. She put her book down and looked over to her outfits hanging in plastic on the doorknob of my front-hall closet.

  “Would you mind if I left those here? It would probably be easier than running home at midnight all the time.”

  I looked at them thoughtfully. My strategy in the early days of the relationship was to not scare her off by blurting out “Marry me” whenever she looked me in the eye. I hoped we’d just grow closer and closer, more and more comfortable together, until I had nabbed her without getting into any of the tricky business of relationship talks. It had paid off so far. This was one of those moments when I had to consciously hold my tongue. The truth was, even that early on, I’d have loved for her to just move in.

  “I don’t want to crowd you or anything like that,” she said.

  “Please do,” I said. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” I leaned over and kissed her. She ran her hand through my hair and gave me a long, melting look that indicated the party would be moving to the bedroom.

  But then her phone rang. It was on the table, next to me.

  “Turn that off,” she said.

  I looked at the screen. “It’s Henry Davies.”

  She sat up. “Do you mind?” she asked, and then tried to play it off casually. “Just in case it’s important. I’m doing the ask on the head of the SEC tomorrow.”

  “Go for it,” I said, then silently cursed the phone.

  She answered and, after a moment, stepped onto the porch to take the call. She was out in the cold for about five minutes.

  “Sorry about that,” she said when she came back. She stood behind the couch, leaned over, pressed her cheek against mine, then kissed my neck.

  “What do you and Henry talk about all the time?” I asked. We were falling in love, sure, but we both still worked at Davies Group, and that meant a certain amount of jockeying for position, of searching out leverage. We just couldn’t help it.

  “That’s above your pay grade.” She gave me a troublemaker’s smile. “Now,” she said, and ran her hand across my chest. “Shall we?”

  I let the matter drop, then led her by the hand upstairs.

  The job, Annie: I had everything I’d ever wanted. It all seemed too easy. Because, of course, it was.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WELCOME TO THE DISTRICT, where the fun never starts. I c
an’t count the number of times during my first year in DC that some starched collar at some stick-up-its-butt schmooze-fest told me, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog,” then wheezed laughter. Supposedly the quote came from Truman. Whenever I heard it, I was made aware of two things: First, that social niceties were so lacking in DC that their absence had perversely become a point of pride. Second, that the guy I was talking to thought it was funny to announce that he would shaft me if I gave him half a chance.

  Well, at least they’re honest. It’s easy to make friends in the capital, but hard to make good ones, since the place is packed with barely distinguishable transient twenty-somethings who all work in the same industry—politics—where the essential skills are glad-handing and faked charm. Tuck, the Rhodes scholar who worked with me at Davies, stood out from the parade of acquaintances I acquired in DC.

  He was the scion of a Georgetown public-service dynasty: grandfather a former CIA director, father a higher-up at State. He was also on a fast track at Davies Group, yet, maybe because he was born into it, he seemed less obsessed with politics and power than the rest of our peers. We worked a couple projects together and late at night would blow off steam by taking a short break and throwing a football around on the Davies Group lawn. One night, around midnight, he overshot a pass straight into the compound that housed the Syrian embassy. I have some experience in getting over fences, so it wasn’t a big problem. He and I clambered over. Only in Kalorama can you enter the territory of a hostile nation to fetch your ball. We’d only just grabbed it when a flash of light shot out from behind a garage. I gave Tuck a boost and then vaulted over the wall just in time.

  After that, we started hanging out more outside of work. He knew everyone—rumor had it he was sleeping with the VP’s daughter—and introduced me around.

  When I first got to town, I’d thought parties were, well, parties. The kind where, if you got the right people and a certain groove going, magic things happen: people start dancing, there’s smooching on fire escapes, everyone’s still talking around a fire when the sun comes up—you know, fun. But even the twenty-somethings in DC party like married fifty-year-olds, all networking. Tuck was house-sitting for his parents one weekend and invited me over for a barbecue. It was a big Georgetown spread, with a pool in the back, and there were a lot of people there. We began drinking early in the afternoon, and I can’t remember if he or I started talking about a dip, but I stripped down to my shorts and dove in. I recall it being a fantastic idea in midair, and refreshing enough a second later. But when I came up for air, soggy and solo in the deep end under the moonlight, I saw no other bathers, only a scandalized crew that included about half the National Security Council’s Europe staff. I got the message: never enjoy yourself at a party.

  I kept that insight in mind as I headed to this night’s cocktail party. The host was a publisher, a well-connected fellow named Chip. That was way up there in the fierce competition for WASPiest names I’d heard at Harvard or DC. (Tuck was actually Everett Tucker Straus IV. The general method in preppy nomenclature is to start with something unbearably stuffy, like Winthrop, and then shorten it to something ridiculous, like Winnie.)

  Whenever I arrived at the front door of a place like Chip’s—near the U.S. Naval Observatory and the British embassy, another monster Georgetown estate—I had a twinge of that old feeling of being out of place, an interloper. When I rang the bell, I could almost believe that I was a teenage hood again, checking to see if anybody was home, listening for dogs, and clutching a handful of shattered spark-plug ceramic. (These are called ninja rocks in the trade. Even though they feel as light as peanuts, if you toss them at a window, something about the hardness of the ceramic will shatter the glass as surely as a heaved cinder block, but as quietly as drizzling rain. Magic.)

  Those days were long gone, of course. When the Filipina nanny opened the door, I looked down to see not my old burgling duds—canvas painter’s paints and a hoodie—but my gray Canali with a blue pinstripe and a nice straight gig line.

  You might think that given a calendar full of starched-collar nights, of counting drinks and watching what I say, I’d be bored stiff. And at first I was, but eventually I learned that there was a far different kind of fun happening at these quiet salons. Beneath the surface, the passed hors d’oeuvres and polite laughter, the real game is pinpointing weaknesses, extracting promises, gathering intel, avoiding commitments, planting doubts, and sowing rivalries. The well-behaved chatter is a full-contact sport. It comes down to who’s a matador and who’s a bull. It’s a game I was mastering, day by day. Not quite as fun as a moonlight dip, but it had its charms.

  A collection of Washington dons and socialites can be a little intimidating at first, but as I moved farther into the party, I started to see a few familiar faces, and soon enough I was chatting and cracking jokes, fully in the mix. It was now April; I’d been in DC for eleven months, and in that time the Davies Group had opened a lot of doors. This rarefied world was now my scene.

  In fact, the present company offered a not-bad recap of my short and mostly happy rise at Davies Group. Here, for instance, among a clutch of youngish ladies, was Senator Michael Roebling, announcing with a modesty that was almost convincing: “When you see the look in those children’s eyes, that’s ‘thank you’ enough.”

  That would be the Heartland Kids Fund, which we’d helped Roebling set up. There are dozens of ways to buy politicians legally—soft money to a PAC, bundling hard money…I could go on for hours. Yet those weren’t quite enough for Roebling. Most of that money had to go to campaign expenses, a term you can interpret liberally, but not liberally enough for the good senator’s appetites.

  When he couldn’t get enough personal kitty from legal graft, we offered him some advice and guidance in organizing his little nonprofit, which did, well, a little bit of feel-good everything: summer camps for the delinquents, Disneyland trips for the ailing, petting zoos for the simple-minded, you name it. Donations to a nonprofit are unlimited, exempt from all the reporting hassles that have made fund-raising such a drag over the past decade. And, since the board and staff of Heartland Kids were stocked with Roebling pals, the senator was free to spend however much of the money on the kids his conscience required and leave the rest for the feedbag: cushy jobs for the in-laws, retreat centers near his favorite fly-fishing spots, all-expenses-paid trips, and so forth. His conscience, it turned out, didn’t require much.

  It’s perhaps not the proudest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but at the very least the kids (and Davies Group, and me) got their cut of the lucre the senator was determined to get his hands on anyway. The Davies Group steered him toward making some good policy at the same time. I had learned that was the way it worked in DC. You couldn’t get anything done if you were a choirboy.

  Now Roebling pulled out a photo of a little kid in a wheelchair. The senator, a true humanitarian, was getting choked up. A young woman comforted him. He put his arm around her shoulders. I had to excuse myself before I threw up.

  And so on it went, around the room: this one needed to get a son out of a felony marijuana possession (Winnie Jr. had been following Phish); that one just wanted a membership in Pine Valley; she had to get her dimwit kid into St. Albans; and this poor stooped-over bastard had more wife than he could handle and sold out his principles on an immigration bill in exchange for help in getting Celine Dion to sing at the missus’s fiftieth birthday party.

  Those were the fun ones, the good anecdotes. More often it was simply a grind of finding out who—legislators, regulators, big-time CEOs, special interest groups, foreign governments—needed what favor and who could get it done for what price. Half the time we didn’t even have to search out the influentials. They came to Davies, knowing that we discreetly worked out deals between groups that could never admit they were cheek by jowl. The Davies Group was like a massive trading floor, connecting Washington’s wants and needs and taking a small percentage for its services.

&n
bsp; After a while, all the wheeling and dealing and naked self-interest can make you a little cynical about this town, make you feel like you need a long, hot bath. So I was glad when I looked across the room and saw a handsome man in his midfifties with his coat and hat in his hand, looking less than at ease among the chattering classes.

  It was Malcolm Haskins, an associate justice on the Supreme Court and a crucial swing vote on close decisions. He was a very rare sight on the DC social circuit. He looked as unassuming as a high-school science teacher. He avoided the Georgetown cocktail-party scene and was so scrupulous about his impartiality that he wouldn’t so much as eat a crab cake at a sponsored reception.

  Seeing him was a nice pick-me-up. The logrolling we did at Davies was an inevitable part of politics; it’s all there in the Federalist Papers. But even though I was immersed in all the deal-cutting, I liked knowing that there were men and institutions that stood apart and incorruptible.

  I examined a piece of modern art on the wall—a woman with four boobs, as far as I could tell—as I waited for the line at the bar to subside. A kinky brown mop of a dog materialized and started yapping and jumping all over me.

  It’s not that I hate dogs, it’s just that we don’t have the best history. I can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but somehow dogs always sniff me out as a home intruder at heart.

  A tight-faced woman walked over, grabbed the beast’s collar, and flashed me an apologetic look.

  At the same time I felt a stealthy presence beside me. It was Marcus, very much enjoying the show as the dog continued its conniptions.

  “Is that a Labradoodle?” he asked.

  “Schnoodle,” the woman said.

  Marcus smiled. “Adorable.”

  She pulled the dog, still all snapping teeth, away to another room.