A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism Read online

  He took his laptop out of its bag and checked his e-mail. Nothing. It was Friday, and he was supposed to turn in his report tomorrow. When she finished her conversation, Fiona chucked her BlackBerry onto the sofa. "Tell me, Gabriel, why are you still wearing clothes?"

  "I've been gassed out of my hotel again," he said, not looking up from the screen.

  She lit a cigarette and flopped on the sofa beside him. "That's the advantage of a five-star hotel: airtight windows." She smiled. It was a joke. Sort of. Hotel Presidente boasted that it was the highest five-star hotel in the world, and though its elevation wasn't in dispute, the five-star status seemed, to the foreign press who stayed there, a hilarious example of Bolivian pride in the face of meager circumstances.

  Hotel Gloria, across the street, had a three-star rating but cost half as much, without much discernible difference in quality. Calloway would have paid for whatever hotel Gabriel wanted, but Hotel Gloria was modest enough to help him maintain his cover. So went his thinking. The décor of both the Gloria and the Presidente must have seemed terribly modern when they were decorated in the 1970s—all pumpkin shag carpets, cucumber walls, clunky chandeliers, and lots of tawny glass. It was a look that would have read hip and ironic in New York, and Gabriel was probably the only foreigner who found its sincerity in Bolivia refreshing. Unlike the others, he believed that the management of the hotels knew perfectly well how outmoded their décor was. It wasn't any funnier than the fact that their roads were falling apart. It just made an easier target.

  "What do you have planned for the day?" Fiona asked. Little puffs of smoke staggered out of her mouth as she spoke.

  "I'm meeting the IMF's resident representative at three."

  "Grayson! I'm meeting him at one." She put her cigarette back in the ashtray. She had ordered scrambled eggs for breakfast, and the plate sat, untouched, on the coffee table. "I'm having lunch with him. You better not scoop me!" She flashed a lupine grin, and he understood that it had been a joke: he could never scoop her. Not that it mattered, really. "Well, Gabriel," she said, "I've got forty-five minutes before I have to go meet him, so I suggest you undress."

  "I was just wondering if you have the vice president's number," he said.

  "No luck with the finance minister?"

  "No luck with him."

  "Well, I can't give out the vice president's number."

  He nodded, started typing. She made a little show of checking her watch. "Look," she said, "there are protests in Sopocachi today, and traffic will be awful, so if we're not going to fuck right now, I should get dressed."

  He looked up at her, blankly as possible, and, feigning befuddlement, said, "Right, um ... I just—" He gestured vaguely toward the screen.

  She smiled, barely. Stubbed out her cigarette. "Ouch," she said.

  "No, no, it's not—" he began, but he didn't finish because she waved him off. It was a funny trick, a special talent of hers, to come across simultaneously as mocking and genuinely hurt.

  Gabriel believed that Fiona's caustic streak was a big part of why she was still single; that, and the bizarre nudity. In the six days since they'd shared a taxi from the airport to downtown La Paz, she had been naked at least half the time he saw her. She wrote dispatches naked, ate room service naked, watched television and conducted conference calls naked. She had a hearty appetite for sex and fucked vigorously, as if it were an aerobic routine and he were a piece of equipment in her gym. At climax her volt-blue eyes squinted and her nostrils flared. When she smoked afterward, he could sometimes see her heart flexing in her rib cage. With Fiona, he was often aware that she was a living being, that her body was a strange thing, a sack full of organs and bones and fluids, everything in shades of pink and ivory and aubergine.

  She lit a new cigarette, stood up, and went over to her suitcase, which was splayed on the floor. "What should I wear to lunch?" she said. "I've heard Grayson's a dreamboat."

  "Buck-naked seems to work pretty well for you," Gabriel said. "Maybe you should show up in the buff?" Then, unable to resist, he added, "It'd simplify the exchange."

  She didn't bother answering. She picked up a gray skirt and a pair of vintage oxblood heels, sat on the edge of the bed, and started to dress, her cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, smoke rising into her eyes. He put his computer away and stood up.

  "You leaving?" she said from the side of her mouth, squinting at him through the smoke. She pulled on the skirt, zipped it at the side. She was not going to wear underwear, apparently.

  "Yeah, I'll see you after."

  "Do me a favor: bring your libido."

  Two months earlier, a young and overly eager fact checker at Investors Business International had forwarded the e-mail about the opening at the Calloway Group to Gabriel. Edmund, the fact checker in question, was ambitious in the way that young men often were when they'd just arrived in New York after doing well at a university where doing well was just the thing to do. So Gabriel's first thought was that Edmund was angling to replace him by revealing a tempting route out; it was a cynical theory, though probably true. He read the posting anyway:

  TO: [email protected]

  FROM: [email protected]

  SUBJECT: Fwd: Calloway posting...

  Regional Political Analyst (Latin America)

  The Calloway Group seeks a full-time contractor as a political analyst for the Latin America region. Responsibilities include making regular trips to Latin America, interviewing corporate and political leaders, writing reports and briefs on a range of financial issues in the region. Areas of investigation include: individual corporate, sector/regional, commodities, macro, forex.

  A successful candidate will be eager to spend six months or more per year abroad.

  REQUIREMENTS:

  Minimum 3 years' experience as a fi nancial journalist and/or analyst

  Fluency in Spanish

  Experience working in South America with political and business leaders

  Willingness to spend weeks/months at a time abroad

  Degree in economics (with macro, BOP, and quantitative analysis)

  COMPENSATION:

  $19,500 / month (6-month renewable contract)

  No min. investment for personal accounts in the Calloway Group's products

  Full health/dental, including international coverage

  Per diem while traveling

  Substantial bonuses (based on performance)

  Sitting there on the screen like that, so innocuously, the number seemed to lack proper emphasis: $19,500 a month? Could it be? It seemed absurd that such a thing could be possible. Some quick arithmetic and he saw that it would be $234,000 per year.

  It entered his consciousness like something illicit, like the offer of no-strings-attached sex from the attractive girlfriend of an acquaintance: the instinct was to start explaining his interest, how this was the girlfriend of an acquaintance, and not of a close friend.

  Once he'd processed the notion of the money, he scanned back up to the job description itself and was surprised to find that, on paper at least, he was qualified. So he sent in his résumé and some clippings. He wanted to forget about the position altogether, but he found it hard to shake the impression it'd made. The infatuation was as base as it was predictable. It was irrefutable, a deeply embedded thing. The hunger was in his design.

  He didn't expect to hear back, but two days later he got an e-mail from an Oscar Velazquez, requesting that he come in for an interview with Priya Singh, the fund manager.

  Calloway was a relatively small hedge fund, with about $1.5 billion pre-leveraged capital. Unlike many small funds, which had lower hurdles to entry, Calloway required each investor to pony up at least $2 million, though most of them had considerably more than that on the line. Until a few years ago, it had been run by a small group of quants and a single fund manager, Priya. Very little of the work took place outside of the office. But an increasing number of competing funds were able to nearly match their returns at
lower fees, so Priya began hiring analysts to go out into the world and investigate her murkier leads firsthand. Whether or not she paid any attention at all to what the analysts said, their mere existence helped justify Calloway's fees.

  The protesters were still outside the IMF's offices when Gabriel arrived. The leader had a bullhorn, but his words were lost in the fuzzy distortion, and the crowd looked befuddled. Meanwhile, peddlers bent under burdens twice their size hurried up and down the steep road, unconcerned. That high in the Andes, humans evolved huge torsos to accommodate their giant lungs and powerful hearts; they needed to have short and strong limbs, for better circulation while hiking. Their skin was hardened against the sun. A stout man in a tobacco-colored suit cut for 1971, wearing an era-appropriate haircut, sideburns included, stood nearby, watching; he was eating a sandwich, one foot on a young man's shoeshine box. The filthy shoe shiner sat on the pavement bent over the boot in question, his black ski mask pulled over his face. The uniform of lustrabotas (Bolivian shoe-shine boys), the ski masks ostensibly hid their identities, since the job was deemed lowly, but also served as a sign of solidarity among the boys.

  The IMF's offices were in a tall peach-colored building across from the Alliance Française in Sopocachi. The building was also home to the offices of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Needless to say, security was heavy; Gabriel had to leave his passport at the front desk. The guard who escorted him up used a keycard to illuminate the ninth-floor button.

  Up there, a female receptionist informed Gabriel that Grayson was still out to lunch. She led the way back to Grayson's office and told Gabriel to wait. There were two leather armchairs and a coffee table. There was nothing very fancy and nothing very cheap; it was intended to suggest honest middle-class values. Gabriel perused bookshelves full of outdated World Bank and IMF reports on assorted aspects of the Bolivian economy. There were no pictures of family or friends. No plants. Gabriel glanced around the papers on the desk and saw nothing clearly identified as the Article IV report. He wasn't going to dig around.

  The room's main feature was a large framed reproduction of a de Kooning painting mounted on the wall opposite the window. It came into Gabriel's vision like a giant fireball, all fuchsia and burgundy and canary, but forced flat. It was evidently meant to be taken as an advertisement of Grayson's unique manliness. The only other flair on display was a complementarily reddish world map on an adjacent wall. On closer inspection, Gabriel saw that the countries in the map were shaded by their infant-mortality rates. Africa was brick red; Asia a wacky multihued camouflage; and most of South America a healthy, if variegated, pink—except for Bolivia, which was arterial crimson (seventy to a hundred deaths per one thousand births). The map was doubtlessly intended to convey Grayson's concern for humanity, and provide something to contrast and complement the de Kooning. Grayson could, if outflanked by a journalist, point to the map and talk earnestly about how he put it there to remind himself of the mission's importance. Gabriel was still staring at the map when he heard "Hello!" and turned to shake Grayson's extended hand, noticing, with relief, that Fiona was not with him. She had probably dashed off to another lunch with another VIP.

  Gabriel had found that when interviewing a man older and more accomplished than he, it was best to stare into his eyes during the handshake and say, "A pleasure," and nothing else. He did this now. Grayson nodded once in reply and moved swiftly to his chair while motioning for Gabriel to sit. Every gesture was impatient and alert; he whizzed, he zoomed, but the commotion didn't disturb his crisp appearance. He wore a dark suit with a bright yellow pocket square and a matching tie, its double Windsor indecently engorged. His face was aquiline, almost aerodynamic, a human javelin. His hair had that uncanny quality common among politicians of looking dry but remaining set in a perfect part; if there was no gel, Gabriel wondered, what kept it in place?

  "Are you adjusting to the altitude? It can be a killer!" Grayson flashed a row of teeth that were as pale and shapely as dominoes. He had a powerful, orangey tan. Gabriel recognized beneath the glossy veneer a blinkered austerity baked into the man; the impression issued, specifically, from the healthy and grim folds in his brow. He had been at it for a while, and had learned to marshal his sympathies carefully.

  "The altitude was painful on the first day, but I'm fine now," Gabriel said.

  "Well, you're extremely young. Midtwenties?" he asked, but did not wait for a response. "Me, I've been here two years and I still get headaches all the time."

  "Are you sure it's the altitude?"

  The coif shook when he chuckled. Grayson was Irish, but with all his years in D.C. and the years abroad on mission, his accent was neutral. Like Pierce Brosnan's. Grayson pursed his lips. "And you're with—"

  "I'm freelance, actually," Gabriel said. "I used to write for IBI."

  "That's right! I just had lunch with Fiona; she said that you're a very serious young journalist and I should watch myself with you." The creases at the sides of his eyes folded in another grin. Gabriel detected a hint of alcohol on Grayson's breath and wondered what they were drinking at lunch.

  Grayson glanced at his monitor and clicked his mouse. "Excuse me, I'm expecting an e-mail." He clicked the mouse again, squinted at the screen. "Nope! Still not there! So"—he turned back to Gabriel—"what do you want to know?"

  "I was wondering if you have a copy of the Article Four report?"

  "I practically wrote it."

  "Can you show it to me?"

  Grayson smiled calmly. "As you probably already know, the only people with the power to disseminate it are the president, vice president, finance minister, and head of the central bank. There might be a couple other copies floating around, but I wouldn't know how to find them."

  "Would you be willing to tell me which one of those four men you think I should focus my energies on?"

  "To be honest, I don't think any of them will collapse under the pressure of your charm. If you had impressive credentials, maybe. Fiona probably has a copy."

  "She does," Gabriel said. Then, switching gears, he asked, "What about this rumor of a revolution? You think Rodríguez will manage to finish his term?"

  "It's funny you mention that. Yesterday, I had no idea. But now I can say that there is almost zero chance that Rodríguez will get kicked out."

  "What makes you so certain?"

  "Again, I can't say, but Fiona can. She didn't tell you?"

  Gabriel shook his head.

  "Well," Grayson said and took a deep breath. He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. "What else do you want to know?"

  "Let's see." Gabriel opened his steno pad and started flipping pages. While surveying Grayson's office, he had noticed that the windows were made of tinted two-inch-thick bulletproof glass, and he wanted to ask why, if the IMF was there to help, its representatives needed bulletproof glass, but that wouldn't have been useful. Instead, he glanced over his questions. None of them looked remotely interesting. As he sat there trying to think of something else to say, he could hear through the thick glass, very faintly, nine stories below, a mob chanting for death to the IMF.

  "What about natural gas, will it—" He was about to ask if it would be renationalized, but he knew the answer. It was precisely the kind of question that would be valuable to a journalist, because it elicited concise and information-rich quotes, but it just invited another well-educated guess about what might happen, so in the end it was irrelevant to a hedge fund. If Grayson couldn't provide Gabriel with any real information, any otherwise unavailable information, they had nothing else to discuss. Gabriel had come to find out if Grayson could help him get the A-IV, and he had his answer.

  "Will it what?" Grayson said.

  "Do you know the vice president?"

  Grayson chuckled, glanced at his monitor again; this time he checked the time in the lower right-hand corner. "He's not going to want to talk to you either."

  Fiona answered the door in her bathrobe again, her BlackBerry back at he
r ear. She stepped aside and Gabriel entered. She threw her robe off, as before, and wandered the room. She was talking to the person on the other end about Grayson McMillan, who was, she said, "an impeccably dressed divorcé from Northern Ireland. He's a doll, flirtatious, and witty as hell."

  The Grayson gossip continued thusly while Gabriel sat on the sofa, looking over notes and pretending not to eavesdrop. When he glanced up, he could see that there was a little cellulite on her thighs after all, though no more than he would expect on a girl his own age. For a forty-five-year-old lush, she looked remarkably, almost unbelievably, fit. She had an impressive strut too, he thought, and he wondered if her success as a journalist had anything to do with her sexual prowess. There had to be a reason other than talent and hard work; he hoped there was another reason. Fiona certainly brandished her sexuality in a bold way. She wore candy-colored thongs and had a fresh Brazilian wax, but it all registered several shades sadder than sexy. In bed she whimpered.

  Eventually, she hung up and flopped across her bed. Gabriel didn't look up from his pad.

  "Romeo, O Romeo?" she called.

  "Are you doing a bachelor-of-the-year piece on Grayson?"

  "Jealousy!" she chirped, as if locating a lost earring. She jumped up and bounded over. She tossed herself into the nearby armchair and planted her feet up on the edge of the coffee table. Her eggs were still there, still untouched. If the ashtray had been emptied, it had filled back up. Fiona put her face into a fake frown. "Tell me more, Gaby."

  He smiled, put the pad aside. "It's not jealousy."