Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  “The Russians pay some fucking file clerk in the CIA three million bucks for a grocery bag full of Xeroxes,” he said, “and Peter expects me to become president of the United States on a lousy two hundred and fifty thou?”

  He was shouting. He was speaking Peter’s name aloud. He was abandoning the pretense that he was a free agent who sometimes got a little help from benevolent friends. All this was a startling turnabout. This red-faced, screaming dervish was not the Jack whom Morgan knew. She was nonplused. She thought she had better defend the cover story lest it unravel altogether.

  She said, “Jack, shut up. The comparison is ludicrous. The KGB has nothing to do with Peter.”

  “Right,” said Jack. “And you and I are America’s happiest married couple.”

  Morgan felt a stab of panic. She felt like a guilty wife whose husband reveals that he has known all along about her lover. Or so she said later, after she had had time to classify the anxiety that burst so unexpectedly to the surface. Did Jack know? What did he know? How could he know it? Was he going to drag it all into the open? Ruin everything? Embarrass her?

  With a calmness that surprised them both, she asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I’m tired of playing games and even tireder of being poor,” Jack replied, also calmer now but still angry; like a husband who is prepared to forgive for the last time, he was laying down the law. “But listen to me, Morgan. I want this problem solved or I’m gone.”

  “Gone? Where to? Are you crazy?”

  Jack laughed, a harsh bark she had not heard before. He said, “You heard me. What are they going to do, hunt me down to the ends of the Earth and shoot me? Have they got somebody else who has a chance at the White House? I got where I am on my own. You think I can’t get to the presidency, or somewhere else where I can make life hell for them, on my own?”

  “On your own, my ass. If you think that, you are crazy.”

  “Try me. I don’t need these fuckers, and I don’t care how many pictures of my slippery dick they’ve got. I’ll tell the world they’re the CIA trying to frame me because of their ties to the Mafia and the child porn trade. Who do you think will be believed?”

  Morgan knew he was serious. She knew he was right about the media’s reaction to the outrageous lie he had just invented on the spur of the moment. What a talent! She said, “I can’t believe this.”

  “You’d better believe it. Morgan, this is my message to Peter and his freedom-loving friends: Get the fucking money or get another boy!”

  With a sudden, violent gesture straight out of the movies—Steve McQueen in a rage—Jack swept some of Peter’s money off the table. Packets of banknotes flew across the room and bounced off the cork-lined walls.

  After a disapproving silence Morgan said, “Is that all?”

  Jack kicked the money. “Is that all? I want more. And I want it now.”

  “Oh? What amount do you have in mind?”

  “The whole twenty million we need to make this run. Up front. Now. They’re serious? Fine. So am I.”

  “Why now?”

  “Jesus, Morg, you’re the one who went to the Business School. If we hold it for four years and you invest it, how much will it earn?”

  “At fifteen percent, twelve million.”

  “That’s why. Three million a year. Twenty million up front or forget it.” He pronounced the amount slowly, with exaggeration: Twen-ty mil-yun. He said, “And that’s a down payment on the hundred, hundred and fifty million we’ll need for the fall campaign, beginning with the New Hampshire primary three years from now.”

  “You’re not planning to raise any money of your own, or get any from the party?”

  “You know I can’t count on that. The party hates me.”

  “If you’re nominated, they’ll have to help you.”

  Jack ignored her; they both knew better. He said, “I was promised money, all the money I needed. You are my witness. Nobody said anything about my raising money. I don’t have time to raise money and get elected at the same time. I want what I was promised. If I get it, Peter gets what he wants.”

  “And if you don’t get it?”

  “I’ll walk.”

  “Jack, be realistic,” Morgan said.

  “Morgan, don’t fucking reason with me.”

  “I’ll fucking shoot you if I have to, Jack. So shut up and listen. Leaving aside what can happen to you if you try, as you so quaintly put it, to walk, do you have any idea what problems are involved in cleaning up money whose origins you can’t explain? I go out of my mind as it is. How am I supposed to explain to Danny, let alone the feds, where I got twenty million dollars in tens and twenties? There’s got to be paper, transactions, explanations. Appearances must be kept up. Otherwise you’re naked to your enemies and you go to prison. For Christ’s sake, Jack, the Republicans are running the Justice Department. F. Merriwether Street is the U.S. attorney for this district of Ohio. We can’t just keep twenty million in a desk drawer. It has to be explainable, it has to come through banks—”

  “Then buy a fucking bank,” Jack said. “There must be one for sale somewhere in Ohio. God knows enough of them are failing or on the verge of it.”

  “A bank?” Morgan was astonished all over again by the mysterious workings of Jack’s mind. She said, “Who’s going to run it?”

  Jack replied, “You. Out of the back room, just like you run everything else. Danny can be chairman of the board.”

  Morgan said, “Jesus, Jack.”

  Jack mocked her, “‘Jesus, Jack’—”

  “No, I mean it, God bless your Byzantine mind. You’re a genius. That’s the solution.” Morgan was beaming, the proud mother now. “It’s so obvious. A bank!” She slapped her forehead. “Why didn’t I think of it?”

  “I’ll tell everybody you did,” Jack said. “All your idea, my pleasure, I hope you get a promotion. Just do it. I’m tired of being a poor boy.”

  All of a sudden he was not smiling, not trying to charm her, not retreating. He was commanding her, confronting her. Morgan saw a different man, as if the hidden Jack had suddenly appeared like some inner Danny to defend the old, timid Jack from a bully.

  Jack himself had not changed so much that he didn’t instantaneously note the slightest flicker of interest in any female eye, even Morgan’s. Now he noted the transformation in the female before him. He had not had a woman that day, which was already deep into its evening. Suddenly he remembered Morgan’s sweet cockeyed breasts, remembered their sweat-soaked spring afternoons in Cambridge all those years ago. Was it possible?

  As if in encouragement—surrender?—Morgan smiled at him. This was an actual female smile, misty with the hope of love. For a moment she was lovely. Lovely. He had always thought she could be beautiful if she let her hair grow, got rid of her scratched and smudged granny glasses, wore clothes that let you imagine her body. Morgan saw what was on his mind, just as so many normal women had done in the past. Morgan smelled Jack’s peculiar musk. Her lower body moved of its own accord. She turned this sexual twitch into another kind of gesture, bringing herself up short. But Jack was not fooled.

  Morgan realized, shocked by her own thought, that she was actually hoping that Jack would make a move. Jack saw this; she saw him see it. And then (Morgan apprehending this thought, too), he said to himself, Nah.

  In an instant his mind was elsewhere. Morgan was back in real time and space; she and Jack were once again what they really were, handler and asset, their wedding bands a pair of symbolic handcuffs. He looked at his watch.

  “Gotta go,” he said. “I have a ten o’clock interview with a TV reporter.”

  Morgan said, “Really? How tall is this TV reporter?”

  “About five-four,” Jack replied.

  “You’re disgusting.”

  Jack smiled and the gates of Camelot opened. He said, “Do you really think so, Morg?”

  7 Like most truly dangerous ideas, Jack’s was elementary. Its power consisted in
the fact that nobody had ever had it before. Peter was as entranced by the notion of owning his own bank as Morgan had been. It was the solution to all our money problems. He immediately gave his approval.

  “It was so obvious!” said Peter. “Dmitri, why don’t you ever have ideas like this?”

  He left the details to Morgan and me, with one proviso: “Keep the asset completely separate, completely clean,” he said. “I want fire walls, mazes, labyrinths between him and the money.”

  “But the whole idea is to get the money to him,” said I, never one to ignore the obvious.

  “Yes, Dmitri, it is,” Peter replied in his most tired voice. “But the controlling idea, in this as in everything concerning this uniquely valuable asset, is to find a way to get the money to him without letting him touch it, see it, or even smell it. He should not even carry a wallet!”

  Certainly. Understood. What could be simpler?

  “I am serious about the wallet,” Peter said. “Others should pay. Great men should not come in contact with coins and banknotes.”

  Morgan, at least, was undaunted. With Danny as her lawyer, she set up a dummy corporation and over a period of months used the $250,000 that she had picked up off the floor after Jack’s tantrum to purchase enough stock in a struggling suburban bank to take it over. She changed the institution’s humdrum name to the Columbus Bank of the Western Reserve, thus suggesting that this wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Ministry of State Security was somehow a sister institution of the U.S. Federal Reserve system. She fired the staff and hired new people through a headhunter. She wrote a new charter and reorganized the bank’s structure along sound, cutthroat, Harvard B-School principles. All negotiations for this complex transaction were handled, for a handsome fee, by Danny. When total control had been achieved, which happened swiftly, she appointed Danny as the bank’s general counsel at an annual retainer of $100,000 plus stock options.

  “General counsel?” Jack said. “No, chairman.”

  “Too risky,” said Morgan.

  “Danny? Risky? He’s the only one I can trust.”

  “Remember who he’s married to, Jack.”

  “That’s never been a problem in the past.”

  “True, but we’re talking about the future here, and we have not yet come to the end of time. Or to the end of Cindy’s story.”

  Jack had not understood his position. Because the bank had been his idea, he was territorial about it. He pressed. “It’s got to be Danny.”

  “No,” Morgan said. “I have another candidate.”

  “Morgan—”

  “If you’re Danny’s friend, you don’t want him to be the front man on this. So listen, will you?”

  “All right. Who do you have in mind?”

  Morgan told him.

  Jack whistled. “That’s a stroke of fucking genius,” he said. “But who’s going to talk to him? I can’t. You shouldn’t.”

  “Danny will do it,” Morgan said. “He’s our back-room guy. Are you beginning to see the reasons, the pattern, the thinking behind this?”

  Suddenly serious, Jack said, “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Then relax. This bank is a great idea, but it’s just a place to keep money, and money is a danger to you. Next to your cock, the biggest danger. You can’t have anything to do with the bank. You know nothing about it. You never talk about it with anyone but me, your spouse, because I’m the only person in the world who can’t be compelled to testify against you in a court of law. Don’t ask Danny anything. Agreed?”

  Deadpan, understanding that he was dealing with Morgan the controller, Jack said, “I’ll try to remember that.”

  8 That evening, after Cindy had gone home, Morgan’s candidate for chairman of the board met Danny Miller for a drink—ginger ale, in this case—in the room set aside for such meetings in the office suite of Miller, Adams & Miller. It was the governor. Danny had not seen him since his disgrace and fall.

  Danny was deeply affected by the hopeless look of the man, whose features seemed to have been moved in some subtle way from one place to another on his weak, sallow face. His eyes wandered. His expensive clothes, now marginally out of style, did not fit him as before.

  Danny said, “Governor, I’m sorry as hell for your troubles. So is Jack.”

  Since returning from the rehabilitation center, the governor had struggled to reestablish his career as a lawyer, but it had been an uphill struggle. Few clients were willing to entrust their affairs to a self-confessed alcoholic with a pill habit. Besides that, no one except his mother would have believed that the reasons stated for the governor’s resignation were the real reasons. The world of acquaintances the governor had created as a politician evaporated the day he left office. He brought very little business into his old law firm and little weight to its councils. And that was not all. While he was in the hospital his wife had found the Popsicle tape after prying open the locked desk drawer in which he had deposited it. She had immediately installed locks on the doors of his daughters’ bedrooms and soon afterward filed for divorce. He was broke, lost, confused.

  “That’s nice to know,” said the governor. “Why am I here?”

  “Because I need your help. Needless to say I haven’t discussed this meeting with Jack, and I never will. He knows nothing about it, and never will. But I know he’s been concerned about you, that he’s wondered how to put your talents to work again.”

  “That’s Jack all over,” the governor said. “So what’s this all about, and what does Jack really want from me?”

  Even Danny’s kindness had its limits. And he knew bravado when he saw it, and knew that the governor was in no position to refuse any reasonable offer. He said, “Governor, if you don’t want to have this conversation we don’t have to have it.”

  The governor was startled by this change in tone; after years of being deferred to, jollied, never jostled, he was frequently startled by what people now felt free to say to him. He said, “Sorry, Dan. Go ahead. You know I’m interested in anything you have to say.”

  “I hope so, because this means a lot to me and my client.”

  “If Jack’s not a party to this, what client are we talking about?”

  “The Columbus Bank of the Western Reserve,” Danny replied.

  The governor raised his eyebrows: The what?

  Danny said, “I am instructed to offer you the post of chairman of the board of directors, effective immediately.”

  The governor blinked. “This is flattering. But I’m not sure, Dan.”

  “The honorarium would be fifty thousand a year, plus stock options and expenses,” Danny said. “You won’t find your duties much of a distraction. Two meetings a month. Some representation work. We’d hope that you’d bring in the right kind of customers.”

  The old man’s face was a study—the governor was still in his early fifties, but “old man” was the term for him. Thanks to Morgan’s credit investigations, Danny knew he was hundreds of thousands in debt and had hardly enough income to cover his mortgage. He was on the brink of bankruptcy, and if he was smart he would file before his wife’s divorce settlement came through. The governor said, “Dan, why are you doing this?”

  “Because you’re the man the bank needs.” Danny really believed this; yet he could see that the governor himself had trouble believing it. Danny said, “Governor, to be frank, you’re still a name to conjure with in this state, even nationally. We need your reputation behind us.”

  That was certainly true, though once again Danny had no idea how right he was.

  The governor nodded and cleared his throat at length; hardly anyone called him “Governor” anymore. He asked for one last assurance. “Jack’s really not involved in this?”

  Danny said, “In no way.”

  “Can you make it seventy-five?”

  “Not now. But salary is not the bottom line.”

  “Then I accept.”

  “I’m glad. Jack will be glad—” The governor interrupted Danny with a
look of deep skepticism. Danny continued, “—when he reads it in the paper. He really does wish you well.”

  “That’s good to know,” said the governor. “When do I start?”

  “As soon as you sign this contract,” Danny said, handing it over.

  The governor took out his Mont Blanc Meisterstuck fountain pen and signed all three copies of the twenty-page document without reading it.

  This was a man, Danny thought, who no longer cared what happened to him. The governor handed the papers to Danny.

  He said, “You and Jack don’t match, you know. I’ve never understood the connection. None of my business, of course.”

  “That’s okay,” Danny said. “A lot of people say the same thing. Always have. But I know Jack better than anyone.”

  “Then you must know something the rest of us don’t,” the governor said.

  Two

  1 Peter’s sarcasm about my creativity notwithstanding, I did occasionally have useful ideas, and one night in Snowshoe, Pennsylvania, I broached a subject never before discussed between us. Morgan had just left us. That night, a wintry one, Morgan had been wearing her usual baggy trousers, sweatshirt, parka, and army boots. Her hair (have I mentioned that it was streaked with gray?) was tied in a bandanna, her granny glasses were covered with thumbprints and flecks of paint from the propaganda posters she had been silk-screening as a corporal act of solidarity with one of her feminist groups. Abortion Now! Save the Whales! U.S. out of [fill in the blank]! Gray hair or no, she was fresh and, by American standards, youthful. In certain lights, after certain turnings of the head, as when she smiled at one of Peter’s quips, she was mysteriously lovely.

  She had had such a moment on this particular evening, and Peter had taken note. I had seen the look in his eyes, the thought in his mind: What could I have made of this girl’s beauty if her mind had not been more useful to me? What might I make of her now?

  After she left us, but before her image faded from Peter’s memory—usually a process of milliseconds—I said, “Morgan does not look much like the first lady of Ohio.”