Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Whenever they met, his voice resonated in this way — it was as if he spoke directly inside her. His wild beard was shorn these days, though reddish-brown stubble still bristled on his cheeks when he smiled, fan lines crinkling around his eyes. Despite the cold, he wore no overcoat, just a navy turtleneck that smelled of cedar.

She intended to be furious, but he’d made her laugh already. Anyway, indignation fizzled when directed at Venn. “Can we go indoors immediately,” she asked with mock annoyance, “or walk very fast, preferably huddling together? I’m seconds from hypothermia here.”

“Hypothermia is good for you — everything goes warm. You moaner! Come on.” He took her hand and threaded it into the crook of his arm, his body dwarfing hers. Venn was like a devilish older sibling, offering that brotherly combination of wholly unreliable and utterly trustworthy. As they walked, she glanced obliquely at him, grinning. She allowed herself to be led along, paying no mind to her route for a change, the city shrinking away.

She’d seen so little of Venn since their arrival here from Barcelona. He’d come a couple of weeks earlier to set up the basics of whatever business had lured him to New York. So far, they’d had only one other meet-up in this city: a walk around Central Park, followed by drinks and talk and laughter at a bar under the Empire State Building. Cities changed; never their friendship.

But after that she’d not seen Venn for weeks, and realized that New York might be one of those places where he’d prove a rare presence. Patiently or not, she’d have to wait. He never had a fixed telephone number or a permanent address where she could find him, instead residing in the bed of his latest girlfriend, which changed frequently. Tooly had met many of them over the years, always variations on the same towering floozy. As an adolescent, she had viewed these perfumed ladies as womanhood personified, a state she’d one day achieve. Tooly was grown now and still hadn’t reached it, but she retained a sense that those were proper women, not she.

Venn led her along Canal Street, past a bakery selling cha siu bao , and pushed open the next glass door, entering the foyer of a six-story building. He pressed the call button for the freight elevator, whose sliding door opened upward with a clatter, revealing a wizened black man in calfskin jacket and woolen suit pants. Warmly, he greeted Venn, ushering them in, and turning the half-wheel that operated the elevator, dry cogs grinding, the rickety cage hoisting them toward the top floor.

“How are you, my friend?” Venn asked, hand resting on the elevator operator’s shoulder, his other surreptitiously slipping a ten-dollar bill into the man’s pocket.

“It’s all good,” he replied shyly, loving the attention from Venn.

“You don’t go crashing this elevator with my girl here, all right? We want a nice soft landing.”

“Nothing but the best, my man.”

They stepped out into a large industrial space, once a nineteenth-century factory, converted to a sweatshop at the start of the twentieth, and lately transformed into cubicles. A smutty skylight provided scant illumination, while the windows were blacked out to prevent reflections on the computer screens, producing a permanent dusk, just the flicker of TVs on the walls, broadcasting financial news. The space was divided into steel-and-glass units, each containing desks, telephones, beanbags, dartboards, and chattery young professionals kneading stress balls and procrastinating. The centerpiece, however, was a yellow school bus, whose interior had been stripped to turn it into the conference room.

Tooly wondered about the purpose of all this, but a gathering crowd required Venn’s immediate attention. He led them into the school bus, adults tripping on kid-size steps, banging their heads inside the darkened interior. For several minutes, Tooly waited by the goods elevator, hands clasped behind her back, tapping a rhythm on her behind.

An emaciated bike courier for a dot-com grocer appeared, shouting, “Some dude called Rob ordered a box of sour keys?” A dozen people barged from the bus and a feeding frenzy ensued around the candy, leaving Venn to deal with the stragglers.

A short guy with a long goatee drifted to his cubicle near Tooly. He stared at her. “And you are …?”

“Nobody,” she answered.

“Okay, let me tell you something. You’re standing right by my box, okay? I pay for it, right? And you’re, like, distracting me right now. If you don’t work here, then — with utmost respect — could you get lost?”

Hearing this, Venn squinted across the room at her, shook his head, then approached. “Dear, dear, dear,” he said, causing the man with the goatee to turn hastily. “You don’t talk to her like that. When you deal with Tooly,” he warned, “you’re dealing with me.”

The man swallowed hard. “Sorry, brother. Totally didn’t realize this was your friend.” Blushing, he turned to her. “Apologies. That was out of line. Just, you were—”

Venn interrupted, addressing her. “Ready to move on, duck?”

“Ready!”

With that, he led Tooly gently away, winking at her.

“What the hell?” she whispered. Venn had certainly landed on his feet here — she’d never seen him in an office like this. In Barcelona, he’d spent most of his time at a grim factory on the outskirts, where an associate produced metal hooks to hang jamón . The man employed illegal immigrants from Romania, which had inadvertently involved him with some serious criminals. He was just a small-business man, and Venn was the only person he’d ever met who dealt with tough guys like that, so he’d asked for help. Venn obliged, yet ended up sympathizing more with the factory laborers than with his own associate, so he’d moved on. Next stop, New York.

Glancing around demonstratively, Tooly asked, “But this place isn’t yours, is it?”

“Mine? I never own anything, duck.”

“Well, you seem to be running it.”

“Don’t I always?” He winked.

The property, Venn explained, belonged to a venture capitalist named Marco “Mawky” Di Scugliano, an ex-Bear Stearns guy, brought up in a family-run restaurant in Hammonton, New Jersey, called Spaghett’About It, where he had been shot in the stomach at age eleven for resisting an armed robbery. The bullet, Mawky claimed, had introduced him to Jesus. Also perhaps to the use of profanity, given his motto (printed on the back of every business card): “This is the fucking time.” The school bus had been his idea, a lifelong fantasy that required movers to bust open the roof and lower the vehicle in by crane, costing forty-five thousand dollars, though Mawky told people “almost a hundred grand.” This was to have been his headquarters, but the plan flopped owing to the impossibility of lighting a room with such high ceilings; plus, people were always banging their heads inside the bus, and it proved impossible to get ISDN up here, the only option being dial-up. So he’d dumped the place for a new one on Twenty-sixth Street, overlooking the East River, a space so massive that employees were issued Razor scooter boards just to reach the bathrooms. He had asked Venn to make something of this junker, and that led to the Brain Trust, a cooperative that cost members five thousand dollars to join, plus two thousand a month to rent “a box,” as the cubicles were known.

“Okay,” she said, “but what are they actually doing?”

“It’s a lab. Anything these guys come up with — any idea that turns into something — the creator gets a controlling stake in the resulting company. At the same time, all members of the Brain Trust own a piece, too. If a person is wealthy but unoriginal, they benefit — they just ante up for more shares. If they’re rich in ideas and poor in cash, they can sell their Brain Trust shares to someone else. They bet on themselves, but on the group, too. Unlike in a normal office, everyone here wants their colleagues to succeed. Anyway, that’s the theory.”