The 500: A Novel (8 page)

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 can’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.

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.

“Smart dog,” Marcus said.

“What can I do for you, boss?”

“On your eight o’clock,” Marcus said. I peered over and saw Congressman Eric Walker of Mississippi, who at thirty-two was the youngest member of the House of Representatives.

Bummer. Marcus had invited me to this shindig, but he hadn’t told me I’d be working. I had been wondering why he’d asked me, since these folks were a few rungs above me on the social ladder. Now it made sense.

“You thought I brought you here because of your glittering personality?”

“I thought maybe you missed me.” I glanced back at Walker. “Don’t worry. I’m on it.”

I made my way to the sunroom, where the bar was set up, and planted myself in Walker’s vicinity without being too obvious about it. With chagrin, instead of Maker’s Mark, I ordered a tonic and lime, the official drink of keeping your wits about you while others wash theirs away.

Speaking of: I felt a palm pound on my back, took my drink, and turned to find Walker and a practiced handshake.
The bull enters the arena.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Can’t complain.”

“And if you could, who’d listen, right?” I said.

“Amen to that.”

We clinked glasses.

Toro!

I’d been hanging out with Walker for a few months now. He had a medium-stakes poker game and on weekends he liked to pick off the fund-raising tarts of Georgetown.

As he and I caught up, I noticed Marcus passing through an entryway on the other side of the sunroom, taking us in through his peripheral vision. Marcus was shepherding me along in the business, and he had played Yenta to my growing friendship with the representative from Mississippi. Walker was all manners around most Washingtonians, but Marcus had watched him long enough to know he liked to loosen up around the younger guys. That’s how I got tapped.

Walker was a comer, and he was on track to join the 500—a little piece of slang they used around Davies Group. I usually heard it only when somebody slipped up, because officially it didn’t exist. It wasn’t too hard for me to figure out: it was a list of the five hundred people inside the Beltway with real power, the select who ran Washington and, by extension, the country. The Davies Group wanted to be damn sure it was chummy with every one of them. I’d been rising at the company, getting more risks, more responsibilities, more leash. Walker was my next assignment.