The 500: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

move—standing in line at the DMV, waiting for the cable guy—they just got done. And it kept up after that, all life’s little hassles gone. That’s when I started to understand. I’d always needed money to survive, for bare necessities month to month. I never really stopped to think about what it really brought, those countless graces that people wrap up in the word comfortable.
    All that made me feel a bit uncomfortable, soft even. I liked to think of myself as hungry, driven. But when you have twelve interviews and fourteen hundred pages of documents to plow through a day, two weekly reports that can make or break you, and partners ready to drop by any time for a “little check-in” that could be your last, you don’t really have time to worry about going soft. I started to realize that Christina was right: some pad thai ordered in to the conference room and a Town Car home was a small price for Davies to pay to keep each employee humming along and billing out at two or three hundred bucks an hour, seventy hours a week.
    I needed the money, and I liked the perks, but that’s not what pulled me out of bed every morning at 5:45. It was the ritual of shined shoes and a crisp shirt. It was crossing off eight tasks before 9:00 a.m. It was the soles of my Johnston & Murphy’s cracking across the marble floor of the Davies Group foyer and echoing back from the oak panels. It was walking through the halls and seeing wise men do work that mattered, seeing Henry Davies and an ex–CIA director in the courtyard laughing like old roommates and realizing that if I kept busting my ass, I might one day belong in their company. It was the same thing that had been driving me ever since a judge gave me a choice: the need to find something larger than myself to be a part of, some honest work to lose myself in; anything to hold off the criminal in my blood.
    I was going to do everything it took to make it at Davies, to make that respectable world stick. And that’s how I found myself sealed up in the mahogany box.
    Those first few months were like pledging a fraternity. Nobody said how exactly, but you knew you were being scrutinized at every step. Every so often someone would disappear and you had the feeling that in some clubby chamber at Davies Group the night before, ballots had been cast in secret, and black marks scratched beside the name of the unfit.
    That was the chatter among the junior associates, at least. I thought it was a little much. But the piece of it I did buy was that your first real assignment was do-or-die. In the government affairs business, when you’re needling some politician or bureaucrat to give you what your client wants, there comes a moment called the ask. No matter how byzantine the issue, it ultimately comes down to one question: Will he give you what you need? Yes or no.
    A partner does the actual ask. He is the august face of the company. The real work, however, is all left to the associate. And when you get your first case, you own it. If the mark says yes, you’re golden. No: you’re gone.
    William Marcus gave me my first real case. He had the office next to Davies on the third floor. It was the executive corridor. An oak-paneled boardroom ran along one side. On the other there were six or seven suites, each as big as my apartment, all looking down over the District from this hilltop perch in Kalorama. Walking that hall made my hair stand on end. I would flash back to drills and forward march with thirty-inch steps, head, eyes, and body at attention.
    The men on that hall had literally run the free world, and they daily, without a second thought, made or crushed the careers of dozens of strivers like me. Most of the principals at the firm had bios as long as your arm; that’s what the clients paid for. But Marcus’s background was a mystery. As far as I knew, I was the only junior associate he was keeping an eye on. It was either a very good or a very bad thing, and given the caliber of the