The 500: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  “Bullshit. You weren’t testing me, you were fucking with me for the sake of it.”

  Marcus raised his palms: I guess we’ll never know. The great sphinx of Kalorama had spoken.

  The crew from the house—tweaker kid, Squeak, and Walker—were waiting sheepishly in the lobby of the police station. The girls and the old guy were gone. I’d already explained to Walker how Marcus had sprung us.

  “Do you think…uhh…you could give us a ride back?” Walker asked.

  “Sure thing,” Marcus said, as jolly as if we were at the end of a softball game instead of a vice sting. We all squeezed into Marcus’s Mercedes-AMG and vroomed back to the meth house. Apparently I was making a habit of returning to the scenes of my crimes.

  I’ve had my share of awkward car rides, but this was tops. Walker was still high, with purple circles under his eyes, trying not to grind his teeth and failing. Marcus turned the radio on. That helped things a bit, until about fifteen minutes in, when “Son of a Preacher Man” came on. I killed Dusty, and we rode the rest of the way in silence.

  After we dropped Walker off at his car, I could see that, for once, he was completely out of his trademark charm. He just looked defeated. “I don’t know what to say,” he said to me. “Thank you. And if there’s anything I can do to return the favor, just let me know.”

  “Hmm…” I said. I saw him get ready, almost wincing as if about to get punched, probably expecting a shakedown. We had enough dirt, between the drugs and the boys and the whores, to destroy him four times over.

  “Don’t mention it,” I said. “Just looking out for my friends. Tell you what, why don’t you take me out for a round at Congressional and we’ll call it even?”

  He stared at me for a few seconds. I could see the relief overtake him. He started beaming, took my hand and pumped it.

  “Absolutely,” he said, then walked over to his car. He opened the door, and as I walked away, he added, “Don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything I can do for you. I mean that. Anything.”

  Marcus had watched the whole thing from the driver’s seat. He gave me an encouraging clap on the shoulder as I sat back down in shotgun. Walker thought he’d just been sprung, but the trap was only beginning to close around him. The poor bastard thought he’d found a true friend in Washington.

  As we drove home, I couldn’t stop thinking about why Marcus hadn’t even warned me about what would happen at the meth house. There were some possible explanations. Making Walker believe that he and I were in it together: that made sense. Testing me, hazing me: maybe. But my mind kept coming back to money, ideology, coercion, and ego, and how Marcus had been so cagey with me when I asked him about the C—compromise and coercion—about what he had on me. As a side benefit of the past night’s follies, he now had some fairly potent dirt.

  The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. When I took down Gould for his brown-bag bribes, it was strictly about catching someone up to no good, causing him to knock it off and pass some good policy in the process. But there was something troubling about how easily Marcus bent the law tonight (though, granted, I was glad he bent it to get me out of jail). It seemed like I’d been encouraged to stay out of the way, even to help Walker along toward self-destruction, so Marcus and Davies could swoop in and profit from it.

  And Marcus’s whole story was too convenient: that he knew Walker would go on a tear, that he knew the cops would go after Squeak, that it all happened to come together perfectly to suit the purposes of the Davies Group. I don’t know if Marcus called the cops in, but it was one too many coincidences for me. I knew hardball was part of the job, that occasionally you had to hold your nose as you made a deal. But I was starting to wonder just how far my bosses would go to get what they wanted, and if perhaps there was a grain of truth in my father’s warnings.

  As I thanked Marcus for the lift home and headed back to the little dream house my job had won me, I put those worries aside. I was exhausted and my mind was still reeling from the whole fiasco. It just confirmed what everybody had been telling me about DC: if you want a friend, get a dog, and never have fun at a party, especially not with the Davies Group around.

  CHAPTER NINE

  AFTER ALL THAT, I still wasn’t off the hook; I’d stood up Annie. On the way back from Maryland, I watched the minutes on the clock count off like a ticking bomb’s toward 6:30 a.m., when Annie’s alarm would go off.

  If I made it home before she woke, I could rinse off in the shower and jump in bed with no one the wiser. But that was looking increasingly unlikely. At six, I-270 heading back into the District began clotting with morning traffic. When I picked up my car in Georgetown, I started praying she’d slept in.

  By six thirty, Connecticut Ave. was a parking lot. For me to get away with it, she’d have to be at least two snooze buttons in and still so deep asleep that she hadn’t noticed I wasn’t home.

  I don’t know why I even bothered worrying about it. I didn’t get home until seven. All was lost. Annie would be halfway out the door. I switched over to damage control, but my brain was too fried to come up with a good excuse. I wouldn’t lie, but I wouldn’t tell her the whole truth: I’d say I had to entertain Walker because of work, and he kept me out all night. I’d own up to it and take my lumps. A few days of sulking from Annie would be nothing compared to the other punishments of the night. I’d be fine.

  Except apparently I had more than Annie to worry about. Sitting on my front porch, reading my newspaper in my rocking chair, was none other than Sir Lawrence Clark.

  I said hello.

  He didn’t respond, just smiled. He had a good seat for the crucifixion.

  “Mike?” I heard Annie say through the open window in the kitchen. She opened the door. “Where were you?”

  “Working,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it later.”

  I hoped she wouldn’t notice Natasha’s glitter shimmering on my thigh.

  “Fine,” she said, looking pissed off but not like a lost cause. “My father wanted to have breakfast. Do you have time?”

  “Sure,” I said, still trying to get a bead on the situation. I at least wanted to be present to run interference on whatever Sir Larry was up to. Annie headed upstairs to finish getting ready.

  Her father was still smiling, clearly enjoying himself. He must have had a good read on what I was up to last night. I knew the guy would hang me the first chance he got, so apparently this was his play: catch me red-handed slinking home—and then what? Probably call me out on it and try to blow up the relationship with Annie on the spot.

  It was a pretty good play, maybe checkmate. He’d sure picked a good time to take a stab at me; after the night I’d had, I couldn’t think straight. But I wasn’t completely unprepared.

  “I’m looking forward to this,” I said, and smiled right back at the old man. His grin disappeared. I guess that’s when he started to realize he didn’t have me as cornered as he’d thought.

  “What are you planning on telling her?” I asked.

  “I thought I’d let you start by explaining where you’ve been all night.”

  “We could do that,” I said, and looked over the horizon, the clouds still stained orange by sunrise.

  “Or,” I went on, “maybe you could tell her about the fires in Barnsbury.”

  Clark’s jaw tightened. He stood and towered over me.

  “What about Barnsbury?” he asked. Menace and a touch of a lower-class accent crept into his speech. I started to wonder if Sir Larry had despised me from the get-go because he saw himself in me: a guy who had faked his way into a respectable life. Barnsbury was a blue-collar neighborhood in North London where Sir Larry had made a good chunk of his early fortune in real estate. It was also how I was going to keep him off my back. I’d gotten to him, which is what I wanted. I hadn’t been 100 percent sure whether I could threaten him with Barnsbury, but his reaction assured me I could.

  After I’d spent almost a year at Davies, getting leverage on peo
ple was second nature to me. Clark was an interesting case because at first glance he was squeaky clean. But shafting him became a personal passion of mine. I took Henry’s advice to heart: anyone can be gotten to if you find the right levers. Eventually, by going through old court cases from the UK, I came across a few lawsuits related to his earliest development deals in North London. They were all settled out of court, so there was nothing good on paper, but I called up a few attorneys who’d worked the other end of the cases. Their clients had been bought off, but the lawyers dished enough. Larry’s first deals were wreathed in smoke: three extremely convenient fires had cleared his tenants as Barnsbury went from a blue-collar burg to a super-gentrified outpost of London’s elite. Larry quintupled his investments and ultimately parlayed those riches into the billions he used to start up his hedge fund.

  I guess Larry, like most people, assumed that if a sin got buried—no paper trail, only the memories of a few aging barristers—it never happened. All the better. I didn’t mind the extra digging, and his false sense of security only made the dirt more potent when I dug it up.

  “Let’s not fool around, Mr. Clark,” I said.

  “What do you think you know?”

  “More than enough.”

  “You want money? Is that what this is about? That’s why you’re after my daughter? To get to me?”

  His heated reaction told me I had him. But as any con man will tell you, a burned mark is a dangerous thing. He’ll do anything for revenge. So now I had to cool him out. It’s a lesson both my father and Marcus knew well.

  “No,” I said. “Never. I only mention it because I want you to know that I’m looking out for you, and I’m on your side, and I have only the best interests of your family in mind.”

  I knew that Larry was extremely well connected in New York finance circles, but since he’d moved to DC, he’d been too busy chasing foxes around his estate to cultivate any real political juice. Which meant he was weak, and ill-informed, and maybe ripe for a bluff.

  “If I know about Barnsbury, you can bet others do. I just want to tell you that I’ll keep my eye out and make sure that no one—not the SEC, not the financial services committee—tries to tar you. Bankers aren’t the most popular folks these days. This is a heads-up. A peace offering.”

  The move was classic Davies: disguising extortion as protection.

  “So what do you want from me in exchange? My daughter?”

  “I don’t want you to give me anything. I just want an honest chance to prove that I’m worthy of Annie.”

  Annie opened the front door.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  Larry’s expression eased from anger to caution. “You know, Mike,” he said, “if you have to be at work, we can do this another time.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” I said.

  I could see that Clark was seriously thinking about what I’d said. I’d managed to get him off my case without leaving him so angry he’d stop at nothing to get back at me. A victory. And despite how exhausted I was, I wanted nothing more in the world than to sit down to an overpriced omelet with Sir Larry; for the free meal, of course, but more to watch the proud bastard squirm.

  It was a good reminder, after all the bullshit my bosses had put me through last night, that there were some great perks that came with working at the Davies Group, like being able to wrap a billionaire around your finger before breakfast.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I LIKED COLOMBIA. Apart from some guerrilla-controlled areas near Panama, it was pretty safe, a far cry from the shooting gallery it had been during the cartel days. The women were achingly beautiful, but I think my favorite part was the coffee. Colombians drink it all the time. Midnight in the dripping tropical heat, in some half-deserted town square, you could still find a guy walking around with a thermos offering tinto and finding takers. My kind of place.

  I’d been there for four days. Henry and I were the guests of Radomir Dragović. He was the Serbian top dog who had bankrolled the seduction of Representative Walker. He had a nice little modernist house on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, near Parque Tayrona. On one side you have the Caribbean, a gentle blue rolling out to the horizon. On the other side mountains rise up eighteen thousand feet. Picture the Rockies beside the Pacific, like Big Sur only four times grander, and you start to get the idea.

  People at work, Annie included, could only thinly disguise their jealousy that I had been tapped to jet down to paradise for some QT with Henry Davies.

  I assumed we were here to hammer out the details with the Serbs about exactly what loopholes they wanted jammed into the upcoming foreign relations bill. Walker was turning out to be just as accommodating in that regard as Marcus had predicted. But so far the trip had been mostly R & R. We’d been staying in a guesthouse in an old fishing port that rich European expats had turned into more of a pleasure town.

  The relaxation and free time felt almost eerie after nearly a year of working ninety-hour weeks at Davies. I figured two things: one, Henry was playing nice with me after the Walker imbroglio (cooling me out, as it were), and two, the fun wouldn’t last.

  The toughest part for me so far had been avoiding Rado’s daughter, Irin. She’d shown up a day after I had, with four of her glamour-girl friends in tow. I’d actually met her once before, briefly, at the party at Chip’s house with Walker, that crazy night when he took me to the meth house. She was the girl he’d been talking about colleges with. She was twenty or twenty-one. Apparently she’d done two years at Georgetown and was taking some time off to play Balkan Paris Hilton as she chose among Yale, Brown, and Stanford to finish her degree.

  Brainy, sure. But the first thing you noticed about her and her crew was that they were party girls—big sunglasses, designer labels, smoking in that fuck-you way young people do. Irin clearly led the pack. I think jailbait was a fair label for her—she had a very sexy, curvy, dark-eyed Mediterranean-temptress thing going. She wasn’t the most straight-beautiful girl I’d ever seen, but she absolutely nailed the trashy-troubled-use-me-up act. Most of her firepower came from her face, which was great-looking, of course—full lips and almond eyes—but more important, she had this look. Picture the expression a woman has at the end of a nice dinner, after a few glasses of wine: eyes that say Get me out of here and take me to bed. She had that look all the time. It was just her regular face. Very distracting.

  One day at the beach, I found myself on the business end of it. She’d been asking me about what I did and about what business I had with her father. “You work directly with Henry Davies?” she asked.

  It seemed like she was feeling me out to see if I was a big-timer. She sat very close, in a bikini top and cutoff jeans, and every so often, she would lean over to shoo away a bug, brushing her breasts lightly against my shoulder. All in all, it was a very convincing performance. The girl was sharp, you could tell, and those eyes melted me like a mind-control ray. But I’d seen enough in my time at the Davies Group to beware of curious women bearing big boobs, so I did my best to shut her down. Indifference wasn’t enough, however. She was working from the film noir guide to playing a hussy. After a few minutes of my giving her the runaround, she stared me in the eyes. “You scared of bad girls?”

  “Terrified,” I replied, and turned once more to my beach reading (“The Theory of Regulatory Capture,” a real page-turner). She took a few steps back, still fixing me with that bedroom look, then pivoted and walked off, sure to find some trouble at the shady end of the beach.

  It could almost have been comic, even endearing, to see the girl take delight in her newfound power: the way she could use sex like a crowbar against even the most self-possessed men. Except she didn’t seem like some playful Lolita. She had the practiced confidence of a courtesan. And who was I to talk? I had to sit there on the seawall, reading and playing it nonchalant as I waited for my traitor hard-on to finally give up hope.

  I had already met two of Rado’s subordin
ates—Miroslav and Aleksandar—in DC. They were garden-variety Euro-trash goons, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that Rado was a class act. He always wore a beautifully tailored suit, seemed to lack sweat glands even down here in the tropics, and was always saying things like “You’ll forgive me if…” and “whomsoever” with a little hint of an accent and totally making it work.

  His house was about half a mile above the village where Henry and I were staying. One evening, Miroslav, Aleksandar, Rado, Henry, and I were drinking prosecco in Rado’s garden and watching the sunset. Rado picked out a few herbs he would use in that night’s dinner, explaining their subtleties as he bruised them gently with his fingertips and smelled the oils.

  The whole house was open to the ocean breeze. He steered us back into the kitchen and laid out the finer points of steak tartare, namely: it was all about the freshness, of the eggs, sure, but mostly the meat.

  He took his jacket off (the first time I’d seen him in shirtsleeves), rolled his cuffs up to his elbows, and had Miroslav bring a side of beef from the walk-in fridge downstairs.

  “They killed Flor about two hours ago,” Rado said, and slapped the carcass lovingly. With a long knife of Damascus steel, he cut the tenderloin from the spine in one clean stroke, and set to work slicing off the fat and skin.

  “I like to do my butchering myself,” he said with a smile.

  I was itching to get down to business. Vacations make me anxious. I like to be busy, and after seeing Rado’s knife skills I wasn’t too keen on being in Irin’s sights. She had come downstairs in a see-through wrap and was making eyes at me from across the table as she ate an apple. Henry’s assistant, Margaret, had arrived as well.

  Rado kept the chatter going more or less nonstop through the six-course dinner. However delicious the grub, after sitting through disquisitions on the most succulent grilled Mediterranean songbird (warbler), the most trenchant of Emir Kusturica’s early films (Underground ), and the best rye for a proper Sazerac (Van Winkle Family Reserve), I couldn’t stop myself; I’d put my ass on the line to nail Walker for this guy and I just wanted to know what he wanted and how much he was willing to pay.