The Dismal Science (2 page)

Since he didn't deny it, she said, “Do you still want to have that drink?”

He paused for effect, looked her in the eye, and said, as unconvincingly as possible, “Of course I do.”

She chuckled humorlessly, no doubt weary of men like him.

It was only once they were in the elevator going up that it dawned on him that this wasn't really a coincidence. She didn't really have a reason to be at either meeting. No, she was angling for something. Maybe a job.

They were not alone in the elevator, but he could smell Cynthia's perfume, too sweet, too conspicuous. So much honeysuckle; it brought back a sour stain of guilt, all the worse now that he'd lost the reason for that guilt.

Perhaps sensing where his mind was heading, she said, “How's your kid?”

He squinted at her. This not mentioning his wife—he didn't quite know what to make of it. Maybe she hadn't heard? Probably she had. Either way, he wouldn't bring it up. “She finished college and is in New York.”

Cynthia nodded.

“A waitress. Tattoos.”

She smiled in the repressed way that people do in crowded elevators, in the way she always did.

“Your husband?” he said.

“Fine,” she said. “Great.”

He nodded. But she wasn't wearing a wedding ring. There wasn't even a tan line.

The problem was that Peru shouldn't have been invited to the closed-door meeting. Peru's development was still too gestational. As if to underscore this, their delegate was dour in a shapeless sports jacket and khakis, while everyone else in the room wore suits. But this was the era of inclusion, apparently. Eastern European countries were tumbling into the EU and the field was everywhere more open, more noisy and confusing.

Not long after they had settled in, the Peruvian delegate set forth with a question, a statement really, about the Bank's commitment to global emissions reductions. The question was odd and awkward for a variety of reasons, not least that a Peruvian delegate would take up this non-Peruvian issue so publicly.

Here it was, naked and crazed, the hobgoblin of their era:
fairness
. A muddleheaded man, the delegate also produced a subordinate question about the long-term viability of the petroleum-based successes, which could seem like a weird dig at Brazil. Or maybe he was parroting Ecuador's recent noise about the Yasuni-ITT initiative. Of course, he just wanted to show that he was formidable, but he came off as far too confrontational and obsessed with the hegemon. Anyway, he was on the wrong subject.

Pablo Rendón, deputy director of the environment directorate at the
IADB
, and an old friend of Vincenzo's, had talked about the environmental policy downstairs. Pablo had said what was to be said, really. They were forging ahead despite the maddening intransigence—Pablo had put it more politely—of the
USA
. Bush had just made it clear that they wouldn't sign on to Kyoto, and that was the end of that.

But the question was out now—he'd gone bold and there weren't many people in the room, so they had to dignify it with a proper response.

“Look,” Vincenzo said, “I appreciate what you're saying, but the point remains that the growth is real.” Cynthia had sat away from the table, at the back, against the wall, and Vincenzo was distinctly aware of her presence. “Oil or no oil,” he went on, “those countries are buying time to develop a more sophisticated economy, and they're using that time well. That's my impression. Peru, also, your
GDP
comes from minerals, so it's—”

“But I'm talking about values, sir,” the man said.

“Values?” Vincenzo shrugged, as if amused, and scanned the room incredulously, but no one met his gaze. Many of them also looked bemused, even Cynthia. Pablo, an Argentinean who adored Scottish whisky—and was visibly hungover—rolled his eyes and glanced out the window. The conference room was on the fourth floor; the floor-to-ceiling windows faced Rock Creek Park, the sloping grass and the twisting roads, the tall trees, the band of forest snaking through the city. Far on the other side, toward Dupont, Art Deco apartments stood stately on the rim of the vale. It was hard not to stare out
the window. Noted for his pretty ice-blue eyes, Pablo was dull, had the suspicious languor of a lizard captured at midnight in the desert. Vincenzo waited another moment, hoping he'd wake up enough to put the delegate in his place, but apparently he'd already spent all his energy that morning.

So it fell to Vincenzo:

“Mister,” he said, “the question is vague and we have a lot of business ahead, so I don't know why or how we would start—”

“I'm concerned about the indigenous communities in the Amazon basin.”

“Because they have money now?” Vincenzo said. “That's what's destroying them? They have medicine and education and—”

“Have you even met these people?”

“No, why would I? I'm not a politician. I don't shake hands with people who work on oil rigs in the jungle. I'm not the pope or something.”

People chuckled a little, but Vincenzo didn't like his own tone, didn't care for his own line of argument. It was true, and it wasn't true. A more important question was why the US delegates were more or less denying climate change and refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol or contribute to the process. There were other valuable questions, too, about carbon swaps and so on.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Cynthia pick up her phone and start typing. Collecting himself, he went on: “These people in this forest, they want to be part of modern society to some extent. I know because they are showing up for work at these oil-drilling platforms. But you here, in this room”—he gestured at the glinting chandelier above—“you are going to
decide that they should remain in loincloths eating rodents and dying of the common flu?”

“You're making a decision, too,” the man pressed, “deciding that taking them from their community and putting them on oil rigs—you're saying this is good.”

Vincenzo groaned. “Let's just—I know you haven't been in these meetings before, so maybe you can just let things transpire naturally.” Again, he hated his own tone. He knew his condescending lines would be echoing in his head for days. “We should talk about this, but it's too complicated for today's meeting.”

The man glared at Vincenzo. And still no one came to Vincenzo's defense. No one said anything. What were they afraid of? Cynthia was still typing on her phone. So, with a rising voice, he said, “I can't believe we're having this conversation now, instead of the meeting we planned, but if we must! Let me see—history!

“For many thousands of years, the world has been moving from being a barbaric and brutal place filled with people who roam the woods with blades and clubs, to a place where people pull four-course meals from their freezer and zap them in a microwave. Is this sad? Yes, it is sad. It is tragic! Really! We have lost our souls, and I believe this. Is it beautiful, too? Yes, it is beautiful. Babies don't die from simple illnesses, and that is good. We can talk face-to-face to people on the other side of the planet, we can fly from here to Europe in half a day. We live in a time of miracles. So these people in the Amazon are going to do horrible work for Exxon for a generation or two. They might ruin that part of the jungle. Yes. They might be
miserable. Yes. But they might not be miserable, too. It doesn't matter. And yes, it
does
matter. We lose and we win. I don't know what's right, but, uh”—he looked at Cynthia, who had put down her phone, was biting back a grin.

“Look,” he said, “this is capitalism. We happen to think it works. We might be wrong, but we think it is the best option available, and that's why we are here. We have hope that this will work out.”

He looked around the room, and there it was:
life
. People were awake! Not just Cynthia, but the rest, too—everyone was sitting up a bit straighter. For the first time all day, the first time all week, they were listening; even Pablo seemed to have been roused. Not that it mattered, really, it was just a bit of throat-clearing before the real meeting began, but still: here they were, all awake together for one wonderful moment in that gleaming conference room.

Two hours later, at the Sheraton's vast bar, he and Cynthia parked on a pair of stools, the afternoon light gloaming at the distant window, and she told him about Brazil, her residence, and so on. She'd been pushed out of her last job, sort of, but her boss had been a lunatic, so it'd been for the best. Neither of them mentioned their families. It was a full hour before she finally brought up the thing that she had sought him out to discuss.

The Bank had tried a series of partnerships with mobile phone companies throughout Latin America to get more cell towers built in poor, underserved areas, but the companies had not been
incentivized properly and the rural customers hadn't understood how to partake. With no existing infrastructure, the phone companies hadn't been able to market the program, weren't even sure where to sell their products. Ultimately, it was still too expensive to figure it out. They'd hoped to get the Internet to tiny schools in the Amazon, mobile phones to doctors far from hospitals. It could have been great, but it wasn't great. The tranche was small and the debt soft, so Vincenzo had cut everyone's losses and killed it. In each country, the money was rolled into the general project fund—a bureaucratic purgatory for failed ideas.

Cynthia wanted to try it again in Brazil through the
UNDP
, but Vincenzo had been so adamant in mothballing it that no one, especially the mobile phone companies, would be interested in taking it up again. He'd done the same thing with a housing subsidy, and with a partnership between microbanks and water treatment companies. Elegantly drawn projects that he'd clipped. She wanted to revive all three grants in Brazil through her office. Thanks to her own nonperforming grants, she'd had budget overruns, and now it was clear that if she didn't allocate money by the end of the fiscal year, they'd cut her budget accordingly.

Fair enough, but no. It would be one thing if she had just wanted his leftovers. Instead, she wanted to plagiarize the Bank's work on the defunct programs and then contradict their assessment of the programs. And in order for her to do this, he'd have to publicly endorse her reinvention of these programs.

“I have ideas for how to fix them,” she said. She had begun to lay out her ideas for how to fix them, when he stopped her.

The fact was that there was no way he'd agree. It was a nice idea, in theory, but it was unseemly on so many levels.
If it worked, the Bank would be drawing attention to the fact that the
UNDP
succeeded
exactly
where they'd failed. If it failed, they'd all look foolish to their Brazilian counterparts. In any case, he'd be letting a different organization plagiarize the Bank's work. Still, it was a nice idea, in theory. In a better world, maybe.

“Where are you staying while you're here?” he said.

“Vincenzo, I remarried.”

“Then why aren't you wearing a ring?” he said and cast an eye at her hand.

“I could ask you the same.”

He nodded.