The Dismal Science (18 page)

“I wanted to talk to you in private,” Ben said.

“The phone is private.”

Ben smiled.

“What do you want with me?” Vincenzo pressed.

“You're in a peculiar place—you've got to make some decisions, and I wanted to discuss your options.”

This man was like Jonathan Paris's more dangerous double, his dapper doppelgänger. Vincenzo stood, feeling the need to urinate immediately—he gestured toward the bathroom. Ben waved him along and leaned back, glanced around the room. Peeing with the door open, Vincenzo tried to think of what he should say next, tried to think about the moves available, the strategy. If it were chess, he'd want to control the center of the board, but there was no center on this board. There was no objective, except autonomy, survival. He flushed, washed his hands, considered himself in the mirror: the expensive pajamas hanging loose on his wilted torso; he considered his sagging face, hooked nose, intense dark eyebrows flecked with white, the mottled dome. It was extraordinary to think that
now
that he was an unemployed widower in late middle age he was finally worthy of a talking to by the
CIA
.

Returning, he said, “Were you in the military?”

Ben smiled. “Marine Corps. How'd you know?”

“You people often come from military backgrounds.”

“Black people?” He had one eyebrow up, neatly arriving somewhere between incredulous and amused.

“I meant the
CIA
—or whatever you are.”

Ben chuckled and crossed one ankle over his other knee; he was wearing argyle socks, those awful inexpensive black
square-toed shoes. “It's not like that. You didn't ever serve, did you?”

“In the
CIA
?” Vincenzo said, hoping to be funny, and Ben obliged with another almost-smile. Then Vincenzo, wanting to continue steering for a while, disposed of subtext and said, “Do you kill people and, if so, is this how you do it—do you just walk into their hotel room and—”

Ben laughed warmly and shook his head. He had an incredible set of teeth, gleaming and perfect. “You think I'd just come in here and shoot you in the face?” He pointed an index finger at Vincenzo's face to demonstrate the event. He kept chuckling, covering his mouth with his hand and shaking his head.

“Who sent you?” Vincenzo said.

Ben winced as if charmed by Vincenzo's stupidity. Then, when Vincenzo's own expression didn't change, Ben said, “Look, nobody wants to censor you, but you must know that the US has a PR problem right now, generally, and more specifically in Latin America, and if you're going to make it your personal quest to further undermine our image in that region, we'd like to know. If so, it's no problem. Go for it. But we would like to know. And I want you to understand the kinds of things that might be in the pipeline for you in different scenarios. Like, I gather you're interested in working at Lehman Brothers,” he said and pointed toward Midtown, “and that can happen. The others, too, Tellus and so on.”

Vincenzo pursed his lips at Ben and nodded. It seemed a bit difficult to imagine that this person could have any sway over whether Lehman made him an offer.

“You don't believe me?” Ben said, reading his face.

“No, no, I do.” There remained the ominous question of how Ben knew that Vincenzo was considering those jobs in the first place. And if he was capable of reading e-mails, of finding his hotel room, could he not pressure the heads of organizations, even ones as powerful as Lehman Brothers?

“Have you read my e-mails?” Vincenzo said, hoping to reinforce his insistence on a strict no-subtext diet in this conversation.

Ben uncrossed his leg and then crossed the other leg, presenting another argyle sock, another square-toed shoe. As if he hadn't heard, he said, “If you're helpful, your visa will be extended indefinitely. If you apply for a green card, you'll get one.” It had not occurred to Vincenzo before that this was how it could be done, too. No guns and no high-tech gadgets needed. James Bond didn't stand a chance against people like this. “Your daughter's here, I'm sure you'll want more than sixty days per year in the country. If you were to want to be very helpful, as in, forthcoming with help, I can see how the rewards would grow in scope.”

Vincenzo had known people over the years who'd claimed to have had encounters like this, but there'd always been a kind of air of the improbable, a gauzy note of hyperbole. Now he saw how it was, and how it wasn't. And it was hazy, yes. It was absurd, and maybe that was part of the plan, just to make it seem sufficiently unlikely. A man entered your hotel room and knew slightly more than should be possible; he encouraged you to approach things in a somewhat different way. He presented a menu of rewards and penalties, all relatively modest, maybe, but meaningful enough to you to make a world of difference.

Vincenzo, curious about the stick that'd accompany these carrots, said, “And what if I were to tell my friend at the
Washington Post
about you?”

As if annoyed by this foolishness, Ben glanced away and shook his head firmly. “He's not going to write about this. That said, for the sake of argument, I'd see it as a very hostile way for you to behave. I wouldn't want to talk to you anymore. Your life would become immediately annoying: US visa out, problems with credit cards, rumors—I don't know, that kind of thing. It's easy for us, and we find it is effective. My boss once said”—Ben affected a gravelly New York drawl—“‘If you ever meet someone who seems too fucking unlucky, some dickhead who's got his own personal rain cloud on the sunniest day in June, chances are he pissed us off.'”

Vincenzo nodded, but he couldn't tell how much exaggeration was at work here; the whole equation was tainted by possibly suspect variables. Maybe that was the point. Maybe once this conversation was over, no matter what he did, nothing would happen to his life. Somehow, that seemed unlikely.

“This is unfortunate,” Vincenzo said.

“Could be worse.” Ben pointed his index finger at Vincenzo again and smiled.

Vincenzo didn't respond.

Ben winked, stood up, extended his hand again, but Vincenzo didn't shake it. Eventually Ben shrugged, retrieved the hand. “I'll see you soon. Have a nice trip,” he said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket; he used the handkerchief to open the door, and then pushed it back in his pocket, before walking down the hallway in the opposite direction of the elevators.

Vincenzo got up and stepped out, watched Ben enter the stairwell at the end of the hall, again using his handkerchief to grip the doorknob.

Then he went back into his room and closed his door and bolted it. Looking around his room, he took a deep breath. He looked at the light fixture in the ceiling, at the mirror, the phone. He looked at the bedside lamps. There was no camera, not that he saw. Then again, he didn't even know where to look, what to look for.

“How's New York, by the way?” Walter said on the phone later that day.

“Fine,” Vincenzo said as he contemplated whether someone in some maze of basement cubicles in Langley was listening in.

“Don't become a grumpy retiree—it's the geriatric equivalent to the sullen teenager. Teenagers and retirees have it made, everyone in between is fucked. We're the ones who should be complaining.”

“Grumpy? That's absurd. And who's old? Aren't you older than me by two years?”

“It's the other way around, you've held a steady two-year lead on me since we met.”

“Well, I'm in New York expanding my horizons.”

“How?”

He crossed his ankles, thought of those argyle socks, said, “I am staying at the W Hotel, flirting with the receptionists—I am visited by menacing
CIA
agents and I meet powerful
investment bankers and still I find time to buy meals for my daughter's boyfriend, a playwright who does not have a chin—this isn't grumpy at all. I have a new eight-foot-long rainbow scarf—”

“CIA agents?” Walter said.

“I was joking,” Vincenzo said. Then again, maybe they weren't listening? All good tyrants know that the threat itself, if convincing enough, should do the job of correcting errant behavior. The
CIA
didn't need to
actually
listen to people's phone calls, it just had to imply that it was listening and the people would dutifully go about censoring themselves.

There was silence on the phone because evidently Walter had not been appeased by Vincenzo's response. The self-preserving thing to do, the sensible thing, Vincenzo appreciated, would be to head back to Bethesda and lay low for a couple of months. He could then pursue modest options once the
CIA
and whoever else was offended by him were content.

Vincenzo waited a while and then said, “What do you think the snowstorm will do next? I think it will go out to sea, pick up more water, and then come back and hit us with it again. That is what I think.”

Walter noisily, slowly, sucked in a breath and then blew it out. He sighed somberly, said, “You okay, Vincenzo?”

“Yes, of course I'm okay. I was joking before. My question is: Are
you
okay? You sound like you're having trouble breathing.” Vincenzo didn't want to make a big deal about Ben. After all, they might actually be listening, and Walter did have a habit of transforming his conversations into articles in a very conspicuous newspaper.

Walter grunted. “Did you say you bought an eight-foot rainbow scarf?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus. Next thing, you'll be a line cook in that diner where she works.”

“Don't pretend to understand. Look, I'm not sure Bolivia is a good idea,” Vincenzo said.

Walter paused for a while and then said, “Well, I believe you sent an e-mail to them yesterday saying that it was a good idea and you were looking forward to it.”

“Well, I wonder if we could do it quietly, sort of?” Vincenzo had a scenario in mind where, by dimming the volume on the story, he'd satisfy Ben, Lehman, Evo, and Tellus. The only person who would not be happy would be Walter, who'd be the one being muted. “Maybe if I didn't say anything interesting?”

“Defusing the story by being boring?” Walter paused. “Maybe.”

Vincenzo heard nothing in Walter's tone, no innuendo at all, and it worried him. If he had to guess, he thought it might mean that Walter was lying, or scheming the situation in some other way that hadn't occurred to Vincenzo yet. He was out of his depth, here.

Then Walter sighed heavily and said, “Look, call me on the bat phone if you want to talk off the record.”

Was that code for something? Some kind of way they might avoid the detection of eavesdroppers? Maybe not? “I don't know what you're talking about—I have to go,” Vincenzo said and hung up.

A good game of chess isn't a war of attrition. It's not about standing a short distance apart and blasting each other to bits. A great player coaxes his opponent into troubling dilemmas less by taking pieces from him than by constricting the number of attractive options available. In the best games, the most artful games, each player has to see an exponentially expanding array of moves ahead. But the options don't really expand exponentially, if you know how to spot trouble brewing. A good player eliminates all the bad moves quickly, spends his time envisioning all the dozens of options branching down a few genuinely good paths; the options bloom and offer fruit, and a player's job is to locate the most attractive of all the branches—the one with the best fruit. Then he explores the next branch, the next, et cetera, until he isolates the most promising branch. But as the game proceeds, the branches gradually become fewer and fewer, their fruit less and less plentiful. The loser is starved subtly, an inch at a time. A player finds that with those branches that remain, he has to travel farther and farther before he can see something worthwhile. There are fewer flowers, virtually no foliage at all. When a player searches all of the available branches and sees nothing blooming, sees no fruit, no petals at all, he gives up—he resigns.