Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

He led her to a nearby box of two young women, former junior ad execs who’d quit to apply their wits to personal enrichment. One explained click-through ads to Tooly, rambling about “being first in the space,” “bricks-and-clicks,” and “online play.” Tooly responded with what must have been an absurd question, since the woman asked with dismay, “Wait, are you even on email yet?” (Tooly had tried it a couple of years earlier, but she avoided computers.) The ad women droned on about how a million clicks at six cents each would equal six million dollars in profit. Venn suggested that they check their calculations, and led Tooly to another box.

“This guy is interesting,” he said, tapping on the glass.

A programmer in a T-shirt depicting a Rasta mouse smoking ganja rotated in his desk chair. “Big guy! Wassup?” he said to Venn, indifferent that the monitor behind him was on an AltaVista search for “Maria Bartiromo” and “naked.” His idea was a website called www.totally-annoyed.com, on which anyone could post complaints about companies and receive real-time apologies. Presented as a service for customers, the site was secretly funded by corporations, offering them a way to hive off clients who pestered help lines and drown them in a never-ending blah of automated apology, all generated by an algorithm called A.S. (Artificial Stupidity) that varied the regrets automatically, leading customers down an unctuous road to nowhere.

The next box contained four chubby guys in button-downs, their workstations piled with ravaged pizza slices, Big Gulps, and Mentos wrappers. Theirs was a spot-the-celebrity start-up, in which members of the public would phone in with tips about the location of famous people around New York (and later, Hollywood, London, so on). The info would be fed to subscribers on their pagers or to cellphone update services. The guys had already spoken with an angel investor who’d bandied around the figure of two million dollars. The site, www.spotcha.com, was to go live by year’s end, and was guaranteed to become “ the kick-ass brand of the twenty-first century,” they promised, slapping high fives.

Venn led her onward.

“They’re not seriously getting money for that, are they?” she asked him.

“Nearly anyone is getting money who’s not an absolute clown.”

“And they don’t qualify?”

“These VCs sit around plotting how to earn off all the nerds they used to beat up,” he said. “They move these guys into offices, give them free Handsprings, Nerf guns — one geek could equal their yacht.”

“And the cooperative thing? That works well?”

“Not really,” he said, amused. “They’re all at each other’s throats. That’s what they were talking to me about before. This place is a comedy. But it has a view from the roof.” He led her up a narrow staircase.

It was windy up there, with glimpses of City Hall, the distant antennae of the World Trade Center, and water tanks on surrounding high-rises. The roof was covered with tar paper, its low wall overlooking Canal Street six stories down. Venn was a man of a thousand acquaintances and hundreds of lovers, yet she was his only friend. If Tooly had an area of expertise in the world, it was Venn; she had studied him for years.

He was brought up on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, a speck of rocky brushland eight hours from Vancouver via three ferries and an interminable drive through the forest. A hundred people lived on this island year-round, castaways by choice, many on a commune called the Happening, founded by American draft dodgers and a changing cast of artists and loafers. Traditional relationships were forbidden in the Happening — nobody “possessed” anyone in matrimony or otherwise, and parents didn’t exist, just brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, certain women favored certain children, and from this one deduced bloodlines. The boys were banned from owning toy guns and girls were allowed no dolls, though a jolly Swede produced marvelous little vehicles from wood, until a drug dispute forced him off the island. Around the nightly bonfire, the adults held forth about the world with a mixture of logic and lunacy, being at once highly educated and highly stoned. As the kids roasted marshmallows, the adults toked, recited poetry, danced badly, sang full-throatedly to the wilderness. Soon the children were sampling their parents’ stashes and sneaking into the cabins of seasonal residents. The preteens swam to the adjacent island, hopped the ferry to Vancouver Island, hitchhiked down the coast and slept on beaches, rolling tree leaves to see if they might be smoked to any effect.

In time, the Happening happened less: its founders were short on supplies; the kids got cranky. The adults could have sought employment on the mainland, but society was exploitative. So they pilfered from it, applying to the Columbia Record Club under false names, reselling the albums to a store in Campbell River. One mother and son specialized in defrauding chain restaurants in Victoria, while others burglarized island retirees whose homes they cased under the guise of neighborly visits. When someone heard that provincial law gave children under eleven immunity from prosecution, the parents had their youngsters shoplift to order in Vancouver. Unfortunately, most of them bungled and were caught, prompting two RCMP officers to visit the Happening for a stern chat. This petrified the other kids but not Venn. By his teens, he’d become the commune’s chief provider, a hero by dint of his gumption. A few of the grown-up women even made advances to him. But by age fifteen he’d wearied of this narrow life, surrounded by adults with unfinished college degrees, working as incompetent handymen and pseudosculptors, somewhere at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

With a fake ID and genuine manners, he trekked across Canada, sojourning in Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal, where he befriended a group of traveling Australians. After obtaining a passport that falsely stated his age as eighteen, he accompanied them home. It was his first time on an airplane and his first time out of Canada. Venn worked odd jobs on the Queensland coast for a spell, then did a summer at a mobile abattoir in the bush, butchering livestock for farms too remote to get their beasts to a slaughterhouse. At seventeen, he followed the backpacker trail through Indonesia, then Vietnam, a country whose war he’d heard about since childhood. He worked in bars across Southeast Asia. At twenty-two — just a little older than Tooly was now — he arrived in Thailand, managed a bar in Pattaya, then moved to Bangkok, where he encountered an aging Russian exile, Humphrey, over a chessboard. At which point began their long association.

Venn’s childhood at the periphery of the world had implanted a craving for its center, and he moved incessantly in search of vibrant locales. Over the past decade he’d tried Jakarta, Amsterdam, Malta, Cyprus, Athens, Istanbul, Milan, Budapest, Prague, Hamburg, Marseille, Barcelona, and now New York. His occupation changed as often as his location, from construction worker to supermarket butcher to club manager. He’d been the driver for a pawnbroker, the confidant of an aging mandarin, an independent contractor, an entrepreneur. He had no snobbery and worked lowly jobs, if needed. Yet the trajectory of his occupations charted a steady climb upward, as did the company he kept.

When Tooly first met Venn, his confederates were charlatans and crooks, drawn to him like worms from damp ground. They had intrigued her once. But criminals only enchant those who haven’t known many. Soon she found most of them repellent. But these days Venn’s cohorts were young Wall Street professionals, mini-masters of the universe playacting like mobsters, pulling up in hired limos outside the Old Homestead, each ordering a porterhouse for two, huge serrated knives spurting medium-rare blood across the tablecloth, wads of cash smacked onto the check, nobody asking for change. They were bullies in their sphere, naïfs beyond. So they idolized Venn, a man who’d seen the truly unsavory, who’d met those with really dirty money. He knew how to reach the bad guys, what to do if caught in a bind, how to procure documents, how one moved assets and boomeranged them back to place of origin. He represented access to an underworld. At least, that was the illusion he sold.