The 500: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t. But that wasn’t going to stop me. Because I had learned a few things along the way too. What I did have was will, in spades.
    So I got out of the office, away from LexisNexis and the endless Googling, to actually talk to some human beings (to many of my youngish peers, this was an art as mysterious as levitation or snake charming). I was working on the premise that official Washington, however peculiar, could ultimately be understood as a neighborhood like any other.
    About six different government offices had a say in the decision on whether the Kaiser could hang on to the loophole. But the final stop turned out to be a typical example of Washington bureaucracy: a sub-body of something called the Interim Interagency Working Group on Manufacturing at the Commerce Department.
    It took about a week to crack the working group. Everything was a little harder because Marcus had told me that for now there shouldn’t be any obvious signs we were working the case. I had to talk to about four or five junior staffers until I found a chatterbox, big ego, who knew nothing that mattered to me. He did, however, turn me on to a paralegal who moonlighted for fun as a bartender at Stetson’s—a U Street bar that the Clinton White House staffers used to frequent, though by now it had gone to seed. She was a redhead with a nice tomboyish thing going, as amiable as you could want, though she snored like a chain saw and had a habit of “forgetting” things at my apartment.
    She laid it all out. There were two figureheads who would sign off on it, but in the end, the real decision came down to three people on the working group. Two were typical agency staffers, human paperweights; they didn’t matter. The third—a guy named Ray Gould—was the actual decision-maker, the one who was keeping the Kaiser’s loophole open. Gould was a deputy assistant secretary (that is, under the assistant secretary under the undersecretary who was under the deputy under the actual secretary of commerce. Having fun?). I found myself saying these org-chart tongue twisters in all seriousness. If I needed something to keep me from thinking the whole thing was a ridiculous bit of policy trivia, I would just remember that nailing it meant fifteen million minimum to my boss and, more important, would save me from spending the rest of my life wiping down a bar and hiding from Crenshaw.
    Besides, I was starting to really enjoy myself. The characters were less interesting and the money was better, but otherwise this wasn’t all that dissimilar from the hustles I knew growing up. That had me equal parts excited and worried.
    I had my fulcrum. Marcus didn’t seem pleased with me, exactly, when I brought him Gould’s name, but at least he seemed a little less angry. He told me to start from scratch on making the case to close the tariff loophole. I had to tailor it all to a single goal: change Gould’s mind. I read Gould’s theses from college and graduate school. I found out what newspapers and journals he subscribed to, the charities he donated to, every decision he’d ever made that there was a record or memory of. I started zeroing in, fine-tuning every argument against the Kaiser’s loophole so it would appeal to Gould’s particular habits and beliefs. I boiled down the arguments over and over until I’d trimmed them to a single page. The previous memo had been uncut heroin. This was a designer drug. Gould would have to give us the decision we wanted.
    “You’d better hope so,” Marcus said.
    Even with all the reading and interviews, I couldn’t get a sense of the guy, of what made him tick, until I saw him in person. In profiling Gould, I may have gone a little overboard. I knew where his kids went to school, what car he drove, where he went on his anniversary dinner, his usual lunch spots. They were mostly high-end: Central Michel Richard, the Prime Rib, the Palm, but every other Thursday he would go to Five Guys, a burger place.
    The week