The 500: A Novel (3 page)

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 Damrosch 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 associates 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.

The money was enough to keep Crenshaw off my back, and even with me saving 20 percent (I was still convinced that any day the rug would be pulled out) there was more left than I knew how to spend. I had to get used to going out for dinner without coupons and having an apartment decent enough to invite people over without shame.

Money wasn’t the only draw. In my short time at Davies, I started getting perks I hadn’t even known existed, things I wouldn’t even have known to want. They had sent movers up to Cambridge to pack up my old place. Young guys, they were nice enough not to laugh at my picked-over apartment. It took them a half hour to convince me I shouldn’t help. All I had to do was pack a bag for myself and drive my fifteen-year-old Jeep Cherokee down to DC. The shocks were gone, so it lurched on the leaf springs like a seesaw anytime I went over fifty-five. Davies put me up in the firm’s corporate apartment on Connecticut Ave., a nine-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom with a den, a balcony, a doorman, and a concierge.

“Take as long as you want to find a place,” Davies told me the first day. “We’ll set you up with a real estate agent, but if you’re focused on working instead of going to open houses, that’s fine with us.”

Even if I hadn’t been trying to save money, there was nothing I needed to buy. The firm had a car service, and most days my coworkers and I ended up eating catered breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the office.

My first week, I met my assistant, Christina, a petite Hungarian. She was so tiny, neat, and efficient that I half suspected she was a robot. She kept catching me as I tried to run my own errands. I’d ask where the post office was, or the dry cleaner’s. She would extend her hand, looking a little put out that I’d try to do some task myself, then take what I was holding and do whatever chore I needed done.

“Sorry for the tough love, Mr. Ford. Don’t think of it as a luxury. Think of it as Davies making sure he keeps you on task and gets his money’s worth out of you.”

That made it a little easier. The fifty annoying errands you have to do when you move—standing in line at the DMV, waiting for the cable guy—they just got done. And it kept up after that, all life’s little hassles gone. That’s when I started to understand. I’d always needed money to survive, for bare necessities month to month. I never really stopped to think about what it really brought, those countless graces that people wrap up in the word
comfortable.

All that made me feel a bit uncomfortable, soft even. I liked to think of myself as hungry, driven. But when you have twelve interviews and fourteen hundred pages of documents to plow through a day, two weekly reports that can make or break you, and partners ready to drop by any time for a “little check-in” that could be your last, you don’t really have time to worry about going soft. I started to realize that Christina was right: some pad thai ordered in to the conference room and a Town Car home was a small price for Davies to pay to keep each employee humming along and billing out at two or three hundred bucks an hour, seventy hours a week.