Fixers Read online

  FIXERS

  Copyright © 2016 by Michael M. Thomas

  First Melville House Printing: January 2016

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com  facebook.com/mhpbooks  @melvillehouse

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61219-498-1

  ISBN (ebook): 978-1-61219-499-8

  Designed by Marina Drukman

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  This is a work of fiction. The principal characters, those with speaking parts, are wholly creatures of the author’s imagination and invention. The transactions and situations in which they are involved, however, are matters of historical record.

  v3.1_r1

  For Tamara—with love, gratitude, and so much else

  The law doth punish man or woman

  That steals the goose from off the common,

  But lets the greater felon loose

  That steals the common from the goose.

  —seventeenth-century English rhyme

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: The Secret Diary of Chauncey Suydam 2007–2010: Excerpts

  February 17, 2007

  February 18, 2007

  February 19, 2007

  February 20, 2007

  February 26, 2007

  March 6, 2007

  March 9, 2007

  April 8, 2007

  May 18, 2007

  July 19, 2007

  July 21, 2007

  August 9, 2007

  August 31, 2007

  October 16, 2007

  November 10, 2007

  November 16, 2007

  November 22, 2007

  December 15, 2007

  December 18, 2007

  December 22, 2007

  December 24, 2007

  January 1, 2008

  January 3, 2008

  January 8, 2008

  January 9, 2008

  February 25, 2008

  March 1, 2008

  March 10, 2008

  March 13, 2008

  March 14, 2008

  March 17, 2008

  May 10, 2008

  May 13, 2008

  June 8, 2008

  June 21, 2008

  July 31, 2008

  September 5, 2008

  September 8, 2008

  September 9, 2008

  September 12, 2008

  September 13, 2008

  September 14, 2008

  September 15, 2008

  September 21, 2008

  September 23, 2008

  September 25, 2008

  October 3, 2008

  October 9, 2008

  October 13, 2008

  October 24, 2008

  November 5, 2008

  November 20, 2008

  November 21, 2008

  November 27, 2008

  November 29, 2008

  December 17, 2008

  December 18, 2008

  December 23, 2008

  January 1, 2009

  January 7, 2009

  January 8, 2009

  January 18, 2009

  January 20, 2009

  January 22, 2009

  February 2, 2009

  February 7, 2009

  February 11, 2009

  February 15, 2009

  March 15, 2009

  March 18, 2009

  March 22, 2009

  March 27, 2009

  April 15, 2009

  April 17, 2009

  May 6, 2009

  May 10, 2009

  May 20, 2009

  June 20, 2009

  July 4, 2009

  July 17, 2009

  July 22, 2009

  August 6, 2009

  September 16, 2009

  September 19, 2009

  October 7, 2009

  October 13, 2009

  November 4, 2009

  November 17, 2009

  November 18, 2009

  November 30, 2009

  December 13, 2009

  December 23, 2009

  December 24, 2009

  December 31, 2009

  January 1, 2010

  January 4, 2010

  January 9, 2010

  January 19, 2010

  January 22, 2010

  February 15, 2010

  February 16, 2010

  March 7, 2010

  March 16, 2010

  March 22, 2010

  April 1, 2010

  April 17, 2010

  April 18, 2010

  April 21, 2010

  May 6, 2010

  May 7, 2010

  May 13, 2010

  May 10, 2010

  May 14, 2010

  May 15, 2010

  June 4, 2010

  July 15, 2010

  July 16, 2010

  August 6, 2010

  August 26, 2010

  September 5, 2010

  September 16, 2010

  November 10, 2010

  December 18, 2010

  Part Two: Chauncey’s Christmas Carol

  December 20, 2014

  December 21, 2014

  December 23, 2014

  December 24, 2014

  December 25, 2014

  December 28, 2014

  December 29, 2014

  December 30, 2014

  January 2, 2015

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  THE SECRET DIARY OF CHAUNCEY SUYDAM 2007–2010

  Excerpts

  FEBRUARY 17, 2007

  Gibbon records in his autobiography that the idea of writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire came to him while listening to “the bare-footed friars singing in the Temple of Jupiter.”

  My own authorial epiphany, the spur to keep a diary that will be a firsthand account of a potentially nation-changing scam that I have been asked to carry out, came twelve hours ago as I stood on the corner of Madison Avenue and 76th Street and watched a multimillionaire investment banker climb into a $75,000 Mercedes SUV to be driven north to his twenty-acre Connecticut estate, where he’ll spend the weekend hammering away at a collection of museum-quality harpsichords. That’s about as far from bare-footed as you can get.

  The man’s name is Leon Mankoff. My former CIA boss and mentor and a current consulting client, he’s the CEO of Struthers Strauss (henceforth referred to by its trading symbol: STST), the giant investment bank and globe-bestriding power in the world of high finance. A firm admired, envied, feared, and hated by its competitors, adored by its clients and people. I’m no special fan of Wall Street myself—but if “the Street” didn’t generate the kind of wealth that underwrites the philanthropies I advise on, I wouldn’t have a job.

  To jump ahead, let me tell you where I’ll be going with this. This morning, in the course of a coffee-shop breakfast, Mankoff asked me to fix next year’s presidential election.

  That make your jaw drop, Gentle Reader? It should. It certainly did mine. As I thought when he described what he had in mind, “Jesus, man! You’re talking about the biggest goddamn bait-and-switch in history!”

  The better part of an hour later, after he’d gone into some detail about what he has in mind, as I watched his car pull away, it occurred to me that if I go along with Mankoff’s plan, I’ll have the opportunity not only to be at the center of a defining moment in the history of American politics, but to furnish future historians with an accurate insider transcript of what was said, what got done, and why.

/>   I think the future will value such an account. The great story of our time, according to many observers, has been the takeover of Washington by Big Money, namely Wall Street, and the other private-sector “Bigs”: Big Pharma, Big Transportation, Big Realty, and the like. The record I intend to keep, if I accept Mankoff’s commission—and there’s still some heavy thinking I have to do about that—should shed new and penetrating light on how the power game is played.

  The exercise of power in America today is almost entirely an insider’s game that completely shuts out 99.9 percent of the population, which is never made truly privy to the backstage dealings that decide matters of great pith and moment—which in this great, shining republic generally run to the issue of who is to get what and for how much, with the bulk of the money coming from the full faith and credit of the American taxpayer. We groundlings are never told what was actually, exactly said and agreed, as opposed to what They—with a capital T—and their stooges in the media tell us. You might say I intend to bridge the gap between the true facts of the matter and what the public will have been told.

  People argue that untrained palates profit little from knowing how the sausage gets made, and presumably this is true of both pork and politics (no pun intended, although I recognize that today the two are one and the same). I disagree. In my book, knowledge is life, ignorance is death, and if you doubt that, just check out America’s politics in this year of Our Lord 2007. I think of myself as apolitical, with a diffidence born of contempt, but I flatter myself that I have some sense of what’s going on and going down in this great nation—certainly enough to conclude that if the United States and what it theoretically has stood for is destined to perish from this earth, the prejudice-driven, media-assisted ignorance of its citizens will have been a principal cause no less than the opportunism, hypocrisy, and venality of our corporate chiefs and elected representatives.

  If I go ahead, I will do my damnedest to set down only what I believe to be absolutely necessary to my reader’s understanding, although I may permit myself the odd splash of characterization, or local or historical color.

  So this will be my gift to history: fifty years from now, historians will have an accurate record of one of the most astounding political capers in U.S. history—provided I pull it off, as I think I can. I should also say that keeping this diary and ultimately making it available to history offsets certain moral qualms I have about the job.

  While I obviously have in mind such immortal diarists as Pepys, Herzen, or my special favorite, George Templeton Strong, a man about New York at the time of the Civil War, it feels more natural to me to use the first-person narrative tone and style and address the reader directly: hence “Gentle Reader,” as I shall call her or him into whose hands this journal may someday pass. I think I express myself best if I write in the same voice in which I’d tell this story to a friend over lunch.

  Now: let us begin.

  It all started last night, around 11:45 p.m. I was falling asleep over my bedtime reading and about to turn out the light when my phone buzzed. I recognized the number on the caller ID. It was Mankoff’s private number.

  This surprised me. I’ve known Mankoff for thirty-seven years; I worked directly for him for a good part of a decade, and never but never—except on one occasion when a foreign-exchange maneuver in Bolivia went the wrong way and we had to backtrack and start damage control at warp speed—have I known him to call outside office hours, notwithstanding that STST prides itself as being a 24/7/365 hive of activity, holidays included. The only thing Mankoff and I have on our plate right now is a proposal for a named chair in Baroque Performance at Indiana U.’s famous music school, which hardly warrants a midnight call.

  “I have a job for you, Chauncey,” Mankoff said when I answered. “Like the old days. Can you meet me tomorrow at Three Guys, seven a.m.?”

  Seven in the morning! On a Saturday! Anyone else, I’d object. But as I’ve said, Mankoff and I have a long-lasting relationship, and he’s been very helpful to me in building my consulting business as well as providing a nice office at a very decent rent. “The old days?” Our CIA fun and games? Had to be. “Sure,” I said. “For you, anything. Want to give me a hint?”

  “Bank of West Congo,” he said, then added, “with a bit of that Partagas operation of yours thrown in,” and hung up. Mankoff’s not much for small talk.

  Bank of West Congo was a coup he and I had pulled off not long before he left Langley for Wall Street. A $40 million (real money back then) politics-cum-finance chain-jerk that in 1986 destabilized a big chunk of Africa and secured all sorts of lucrative mineral and mining rights for people who Washington thought would help the cause of democracy, as it was then defined by certain friends of then-President Reagan who liked buying underdeveloped countries’ natural resources cheap. In such operations, “democracy” is synonymous with “Chevron” or “Shell” or “Total.”

  Looking back, however, I have to say that those friends, compared to today’s Clinton-Bush greedheads, seem positively socialist. West Congo had been a hugely effective sting, and great fun in the bargain, especially because we managed in the process to eviscerate a couple of Swiss private banks that were playing the long game on the other side. Of course our “clients” turned out to be complete crooks, but you can’t have everything, and the caper itself was flawlessly executed.

  I was surprised and yet I wasn’t that he knew about “Partagas” (named after the Cuban cigars), a Havana knockoff of Iran-Contra that I managed the year after Mankoff left Langley, involving some expropriated sugar properties and a phony transfer of title via Honduras, with $5 million ending up in a bank in Liechtenstein. Once CIA, always CIA: we old Langley types keep up with whatever’s doing at our alma mater. Even today, some fifteen years after I left the agency, I consider myself reasonably state-of-the-art in certain tricks and games when it comes to moving money covertly.

  Anyway, mention of the old days got the old juices stirring. I could hardly wait to hear what was on Mankoff’s mind.

  Mankoff’s choice of venue, Three Guys, is an upmarket coffee shop/restaurant on Madison Avenue across from the Carlyle Hotel, where Mankoff and his wife Grace are camping out at $2,500 a night while their six-bedroom duplex around the corner off Fifth Avenue is being done over by the decorator of the moment. That’s Grace’s domain; when it comes to lifestyle, Mankoff may dress the part and have the accessories the world expects of a man in his position, but basically he’s plain vanilla. He’d live in a yurt, provided there was room for a harpsichord or two.

  The Three Guys coffee shop is Mankoff’s preferred setting for breakfast meetings. It’s been around forever; he’s been going there for probably twenty years—since he and Grace first moved into the neighborhood. Smaller shots than he like the bowing and scraping over juice cleanses and egg-white omelets at the Regency or the Mark, but Mankoff isn’t one to show off in public. For him breakfast is about getting business done, not meet and greet.

  I set the alarm for 6:00 a.m., called my car service and told them to pick me up at 6:40. I live in a loft in Tribeca, just off Vesey Street. Although I had an uptown upbringing, I prefer living downtown. “Tribeca” still has a pleasantly bohemian ring, even if the name no longer fits the neighborhood, which has been gentrified beyond recognition, and when the weather’s nice, I can stroll home from my office in Midtown in an easy hour.

  As I fell asleep, I found myself wondering what exactly Mankoff wanted to talk about. He definitely had his game voice on. “The old days,” was what he’d said. Hmmm. Should I get up extra-early and iron the old cloak and polish up the dagger? I wondered. Well, tomorrow would come soon enough. I soon gave up speculating and drifted off.

  At this point, a bit of background is in order.

  My name is Chauncey Arlington Suydam III. I’m forty-six years old, about to turn forty-seven (DOB March 22, 1960). As you can guess from my name, I’m white, single, WASP to the core. I was born and raised on Manhattan’s Upper East S
ide; educated at the Buckley School on East 74th Street, class of 1973, then Groton ’77, then Yale ’81: always a year young for my grade.

  I’m what people of my parents’ generation used to describe as “a confirmed bachelor,” usually to describe homosexual friends, but don’t take the fact that I’ve never married as some kind of evidence that I’m gay. To put it frankly, the calculations that go into the marriage algorithm leave me puzzled and hesitant. I’ve come close to marrying three times—but either I or the ladies backed off, the last instance being four years ago when the object of my ravishment decided I wasn’t as rich as she needed me to be. I might also say this: my status has kept me out of the arms of a certain kind of woman who prowls Manhattan and other glitter spots in search of well-off early-middle-aged married men needing psychological help with their midlife crises and willing to pay handsomely for it. When I look at the emotional carnage these entanglements leave behind, I’m even more determined to go it alone.

  I can’t complain that I lack for companionship, male or female. I’m an undemanding friend, who doesn’t wear out his welcome or extort confidences, and people seem pleased to have me around. My acquaintanceship is organized in circles more wide than deep; some go back to very early days, to grade school and dancing school; there are a number from Groton, but surprisingly few from Yale (last year I went to my twenty-fifth reunion; it was awful! Everyone showing off how rich they’ve become). What is disconcerting about New York life is the way people drop in and out of each other’s lives, sometimes as the result of a quarrel, more often as the consequence of a change in material circumstances. Why relative wealth should make that much of a difference to warm friendships of long standing baffles me—but nowadays it seems to. I’m often approached by friends on whom Mammon has turned a cold eye and beseeched to explain “why so-and-so has exiled me from his life.” The only answer I have for that is that given the way money is made today, given the sort of people who seem most adept at making it, given the inescapable conclusion that money has been allowed to suffocate most other sources of human satisfaction, I’m not surprised that people disburse their “disposable” affections in terms of relative net worth.

  The “III” in my name isn’t an affectation but a form of salute to tradition and my father. It has never occurred to me to drop the roman numerals; in the world in which I was raised such incidentals counted for something, and perhaps it’s the best monument I can leave in place to a father I adored and to whom I owe so much. My father was “Chauncey Two,” Chauncey Arlington Suydam II, Senior Vice-President and Chief Investment Officer at the old Stuyvesant Fidelity Trust (now an unhappy part of Merrill Lynch), so I naturally became known as “Chauncey Three.” Never for a second have I felt diminished.