Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

They carried these plans out over the course of ten days, never knowing how close the Journal was to publishing its story. Helen spent the better part of those days on a different case, arranging photo ops for a hedge fund manager who had started a charitable foundation to overhaul public schools, first in the city and then, after what he viewed as his inevitable success at home, across the country. The photo ops had to be the sort at which no reporter could ask this client a question, for his chronic problem was that he couldn’t keep himself from publicly insulting the teachers, administrators, families, and even children he had supposedly devoted his time and expertise to helping. “Charity” seemed to Helen an odd word to use in connection with what seemed more like a campaign of aggression, but she tried to see the best in people, and surely the goal was a worthy one. She went to every ten-thirty meeting and offered her update when asked, even though what she was doing didn’t seem to her strictly like crisis management work.

She ate in the cafeteria with Shelley and Ashok once or twice a week. The food was remarkably good, and their youth gave her cover. Shelley was maybe twenty-eight, but what made her really imposing was her level of physical fitness. Her arms alone, at which Helen had to remind herself to stop staring, must have amounted to a part-time job. Ashok, whenever the subject came up, looked embarrassed and mumbled something about a gym membership that he never had time to use. Though Shelley in particular loved to pump Helen for her backstory, neither she nor Ashok ever made much reference to their own lives outside the office. Once, when Shelley got up for another Vitaminwater, Helen — curious how well these two work friends even knew each other — asked Ashok with a conspiratorial smile what was up with that tattoo on the back of Shelley’s neck. Not to sound like an old lady, but weren’t they generally supposed to be somewhere less visible? Did everything these days have to be so out there? He did his best to smile back at her before answering.

“She lost a child,” he said. “Those are his initials.”

And as chastened as she was by that, Helen never forgot Ashok’s weak but carefully complicit smile, which was obviously meant to help her feel less guilty in retrospect for having accidentally made light of something tragic. She was right about him, she decided.

Her salary was now almost ninety thousand a year, plus insurance and access to a car service and other assorted little freebies such as coffee that her colleagues didn’t even take into consideration but that Helen, not long ago, was penciling into her budget every week. Suddenly there was money in her and Sara’s lives that was not only sufficient but dependable. Certainly they could now afford to live somewhere nicer than the cramped two-room rental they’d been in since January. Looking for a place to live in Manhattan, though, was absurdly complicated and labor-intensive. Helen wasn’t really working longer hours now than she had been at Harvey’s office, but she did have much less freedom to take off for an hour or two in the middle of the day in response to yet another excited phone call from some broker.

“There’s Brooklyn,” Sara said when they were discussing it at breakfast one Sunday.

“Sweetheart,” Helen said, cutting in half a warm everything bagel, “I am going to let you in on a little secret. I am too old to figure out where everything is in Brooklyn.”

In the end, she decided that another rental, even if it were bigger than this one, would only put them through the trauma of packing and moving again; they would wait until it seemed reasonable to start looking for a place to buy. That day might already have been upon them had the sale of their old house in Rensselaer Valley, upon which their original plans had naïvely depended, not fallen through. The buyers had started postponing the closing with demands that escalated in ridiculousness — a second well test, a certificate from a tree surgeon, replacement of the foam insulation in the garage — and when Bonifacio began skeptically looking into them, he discovered that the husband had recently lost his job, and their financing had been pulled. He wanted to tell them to take a hike, but Helen had suggested waiting to see if they could bounce back and get approved for another mortgage. They couldn’t, though, and eventually they withdrew entirely, and Helen had earned her lawyer’s scorn by returning this time-wasting couple’s deposit even though they weren’t entitled to it. They had a one-year-old son.

In the end, the Journal mined the bugged phone conversations not for one story but for almost a dozen — one every day for a brutal two weeks, as if to manufacture the fiction that the tapes themselves were still being feverishly transcribed, with the most damning moments reprinted as eye-catching sidebars. It was a war of attrition, which Ashok and his team were ill-equipped to win. His grassroots offensive, however loving the craftsmanship with which it was faked, was roundly ignored. Finally the day came when the CEO of the chip company tendered his resignation, along with most of the board of directors. Apart from a hopeful uptick on the day the resignations themselves were announced, the company’s stock fell steadily through the floor.

Helen took no pleasure in the air of panic and failure that seemed to suffuse the Fishtank during these weeks. She lay low and took meaningless notes. Then one Monday morning Arturo began the ten-thirty meeting by announcing that the chip manufacturer’s reconstituted board of directors had just fired them, and the recriminations began.

“Did anybody besides me even look at that blog?” one group member said disdainfully. “It read like a child wrote it. Even the comments sections were full of people calling bullshit on it.”

“It didn’t matter who wrote it,” said another voice, “or how well. It’s an old-school tactic. It’s a Neanderthal, first-year-business-school-textbook idea. Ivy Lee would have thought it was stale.”

Ashok, clearly panicked, hit the table with the heel of his hand. “How nice to hear from you,” he said, “finally, after all these weeks. I certainly didn’t hear a word from you back when we were looking for ideas. Of course it’s much easier to wait like a vulture and then say how you would have done things differently. And Ivy Lee was Ivy Lee for a reason, by the way—”

“Enough,” said Arturo. He stood up from his chair, buttoned his jacket, and turned upon them a stare so ostentatiously cold that a less handsome man could never have pulled it off. “Nobody is getting fired over this,” he said, “so there’s no need to start eating each other. Look. We can argue about strategy in here all we want, but what we do outside this room — what we do in the world — is predicated on belief. Everybody has to pull together, everybody has to believe in the idea at hand just as you would if you thought of it yourself. Everybody has to not just understand but completely internalize what we are fighting for. You can’t be an impartial advocate. You are either all in or you are part of what we’re fighting against. Do you understand what I mean when I use the word ‘belief’? Not a performance, but the real thing. Not ‘I will act as if my client is in the right.’ The public sees through that in a second. And I see through it. Doubt is a cancer, whether it’s doubt in our strategy or doubt in the people we represent. The distinction doesn’t matter. Cancer is cancer. When you walk out of this room in a minute, do it with a sense of your mission on the other side. And if you can’t do that, don’t come back at all.”

He closed his briefcase and left the room. They watched him through the glass walls all the way to the elevator bank. “Wow,” Shelley said. “Extra hot when he’s angry.”