The Dismal Science (26 page)

The persistent question with Machiavelli, when Vincenzo read him in university, seemed to be whether he was a realist, or whether such self-interest is tantamount to a kind of malice. The question resonated throughout Vincenzo's subsequent studies of economics, which also presented its logic as pure and impartial, absolutely rational. Rousseau, meanwhile, thought
The Prince
a work of satire. Giving credence to this argument, Machiavelli wrote it in Italian, not Latin, so his intended readership was presumably not elite princes, but commoners. Still,
while Machiavelli's writing persona changed throughout his life, and he was not always so cunning, his view of the human being was always hard.

Sadly, for him, all of his own rigorous scheming was for naught. He managed, with some difficulty, to ingratiate himself to the republican Soderini who ruled Florence, but the Soderini were ousted by the Medici in 1512, so he was imprisoned and brutally tortured. After years in exile, he returned to Florence and, with time, managed to win favor with the Medici. He rose within their ranks as a playwright—this was when he wrote
The Prince
, though it wasn't published until after his death. Then, in 1527, the Medici were ousted and Machiavelli found himself out of favor with the new leadership. He died without title or station, a man who'd spent his life chasing power, but never quite touching it. No master practitioner of the dark arts, he was most distinctive for his bad luck—for always finding himself on the losing side of history's terrifying swing.

Unfortunately for Machiavelli, and his latter-day disciples, people's behavior isn't ever as predictable as other natural phenomena, like gravity.

Dante, meanwhile, in his own grand exercise of meretricious classification, decoded the human problem by sorting everyone into cleanly organized strata of sins and punishments. To one man, there was absolutely no morality. To the other, there was nothing but morality.

As a reluctant student of these men's thinking during his late adolescence, Vincenzo came to find their simplifications and misunderstandings purely aggravating. Economics alone,
of the social sciences, seemed to have a legitimate claim on the scientific method in its study of human behavior.
GDP
could at least be measured, unlike Oedipal urges, or a certain culture's tendency toward cruelty. The heart, the impulse, was arbitrary and faith-based, a phantom of a phantom, whereas logic and statistics were concrete and could, at least, be trusted to be accurate.

Twenty minutes later, when Walter and Vincenzo walked into the lobby at Walter's crass hotel, Walter said, “Next time leave the questions to me.”

“What would you have asked?” Vincenzo said as they walked toward the elevators.

“I wouldn't have smacked him in our first meet and greet, to begin with. These guys, you need to coax them out.” When Walter talked, Vincenzo could see that he was quite different while on the job than when they were nattering around. Having never encountered this other Walter, the professional Walter, Vincenzo found the contrast between the two jarring.

Upstairs, at the bar, they played two games of speed chess, but had to give up after that because it was only making Vincenzo's headache worse, and because he'd made all available mistakes by now. Everything abominable had been done. They were defying medical advice and drinking Oban, which Vincenzo had been surprised to find on the bar menu.

Vincenzo looked around at the people there, half expecting to see Ben among them, but he was nowhere to be seen. Still,
it was disconcerting that Ben had come to Bolivia, too. It was more serious. Barging into someone's hotel room was bad, following them to a different continent and leaving cryptic messages for them was more than that. “I don't want to get into the particulars,” Vincenzo said, “but I think the US government has taken notice of me.”

“Why do you think that?”

Vincenzo shrugged.

“Does this have to do with that reference you made in New York to the
CIA
?”

Vincenzo nodded.

“You worried that they're going to put cyanide in your prosecco?”

Vincenzo nodded again. “Maybe not cyanide, but I don't know . . . I could backpedal, of course, could make our interactions here off the record. They seem to want me to either fade away or become an upstanding person again.”

Walter sniffed his whisky, cast his eyes at the ceiling, and the vein beside his eye shifted to make room for the crinkled skin. “I have seen some strange things, so I'm reluctant to tell you that you're delusional, but I think you're delusional.”

“I'm not delusional. This guy came into my hotel room.”

Walter grunted, surprised. Then he shook his head. “Could it be your friends at Lehman, or someone else?”

Vincenzo thought about this. It hadn't occurred to him before that Ben might be working for Lehman. But no, that didn't make sense, at all. Not quite. They didn't
really
want Vincenzo, did they? Not enough to dispatch a ghost to chase him all the way to Bolivia. “That's not it.”

“In any case, I don't think you're going to get snipered tomorrow,” Walter said. “And, for what it's worth, I do think it's a little late to take a fire extinguisher to the charred bridges behind you.”

“If the threats are real, they could cut off my visa.”

Walter grimaced. “I could see them doing that. And it would be annoying.”

“No, more than annoying—it'd prevent me from seeing my daughter. They could wreck my credit score, audit me—they could attack my way of life.”

Walter frowned in thought. “That's probably true.”

“Anyway, I would like to be of some use, and I worry that I might have been too hasty in declaring war on the world. Maybe I should just stay here for a while, let things settle down?”

“Stay in Bolivia?” Walter said, pursing his lips. “Are you thinking about that woman?”

“Lenka?”

“Her, yes, you were looking at her in a way.”

“So were you.”

“Doesn't count, I look at all women that way.”

“She had a boyfriend when I arrived yesterday, but they broke up somehow already.”

“Good sign.” Walter raised an eyebrow.

“No, it's not that—they were talking on the phone earlier like a couple who are still dating. Anyway, she left town with Morales, so—” Vincenzo shrugged, had a sip of his whisky, which burnt as it went down. “I'm worried about you writing a follow-up piece while we're here, because I don't necessarily want to stir this up any more. I don't want to make a scene.”

“Here's a hypothetical question: Do you want to save the world or do you want to save yourself?”

“Does it have to be an either/or?”

Walter blinked uncertainly, glanced at his near-empty glass, and, raising it, caught the young bartender's eye and pointed at the emptiness inside. Then he looked Vincenzo in the eye and said, “Pretty much.”

In 2002, when Vincenzo and Cristina went to Scotland for two weeks, they stayed at a bed and breakfast on Harris, the smaller of the conjoined islands: Lewis and Harris. Source of Harris tweed, the island was unbelievably small, considering its output of jackets; it was nothing but a grassy postage stamp bobbing in the dark waters of the North Sea. The inn where they stayed had hundreds of whiskies glinting on the walls, and although it was the middle of summer, there were only a handful of other guests. The Scottish bartender recommended Oban, because that was where he was from and his uncle worked at the distillery, and Cristina liked it, so that was what they drank.

There was nothing much to do in Lewis and Harris. They hiked in the hills, watched the wind whip small waves up in little ponds. They visited the standing stones on Lewis. They went to a fly-fishing lesson, but neither one of them had any talent for it. The rain came cold and hard, blown in off obsidian waves. At night, they sat by the fire in the inn and drank tea, or Oban, and read books, played board games (not chess—Cristina was not at all interested in chess). They made love most mornings and every night. Often, they laughed truly and in a way that they hadn't laughed in years, feeling just as alienated as they had when they were first in love, when
they were first separated out from the world by their love in that sweltering July in Rome, when they first came to believe that they were special and different. In Scotland, it was partly the gigantic Scots themselves, their guttural and incomprehensible speech, and it was partly the overall solitude. A week later, on the heaving ferry back to the mainland, the gusts were especially violent, but Vincenzo and Cristina remained on the deck, stung by the wind, facing the battered sea, tasting the salty spray.

Now, the taste of Oban scalding his tongue again, Vincenzo listened to Walter, who spoke with confidence, saying, “As I see it, there are probably people in the State Department who consider you a nuisance, but I don't see anyone doing anything about it. They've got a lot on their plate right now.”

“Good.” In his glass, Vincenzo could still smell the peat-smoke fire at that Scottish hotel. He shook his head, but the heavy memory didn't shift.

“You're spooking yourself out,” Walter said. “There are no hidden consequences. Isaac Newton's first law of motion: states of motion have a hard time changing. So, if you're mobile, you'll just keep moving; immobile, you'll stay immobile.”

Vincenzo snorted, not quite listening to him anymore. He unfurled the leather chessboard and started separating the pieces again although his headache was sharpening, and he felt drunker than he wanted to. Thinking about what Walter had just said a little more, thinking about it until its meaning coalesced, he finally said, “Who are you to talk?”

“I'm not in your position,” Walter said as he started setting himself up as black. “I didn't explode my life.”

Vincenzo rolled his eyes. But Walter was swiftly distracted, and stopped setting up the pieces to look around the room at all the other reporters—all of whom, it seemed, knew each other, were drinking and laughing and talking amongst themselves. There were several pretty women among them. It looked, all in all, like great fun, reckless fun, like a convention of witty people who were experts at talking and listening and telling stories. But none of them were as old as Walter, Vincenzo saw. After a pause, Walter turned his mind back to the moment in front of them and finished setting up the chessboard, while Vincenzo gazed at his glass.

13

LOVE IS A CHOICE

The day after Christmas, Vincenzo had hastily fired off a terse message to Leonora saying he'd be out of the country for a while, but hoped she'd enjoy the rest of her stay at Sam's parents' house. There was no point to the message, not that he could tell, and he regretted sending it.

Now he received a reply, which he opened:

           
Oh, Papito . . .

           
Thanks (I think) for the message . . . . . . . . I don't know what to say really. I know you are flawed and the rest of that, so you don't need to do some demonstration with these odd e-mails. And I know you're angry. God! Of course you are! And I know you feel guilty, too, and I wish you didn't. But what am I going to do about it? I don't want to be mean, but we're in different places,
you know, and I don't know what to say to you. I'm in nyc and I have a boyfriend who is actually great (despite what you think!) and he loves me a lot, and you don't know much about it. You think you know, but really you don't. You don't even try to know. You are too self-centered. Why are you that way? Is it just a guy thing? That's what Sam says—that it's about the male ego. He defends you. Did you know that?

           
Anyway, what I think is that I think you've just been working so hard for so long that you don't know anything else and that's why you're this way. So now you're in Bolivia. How is that? Are you being treated like some rockstar-god? Did they have a parade for you? I read something online that said that some people think you did a great deed, something really selfless, by ratting out that guy at the Bank, like it was a big personal sacrifice. Is that right? I think it might be. But I don't understand it, to be honest. I wish I did, but I don't. Maybe one day you'll explain it to me? I hope so. I love you.