When a GS-15 invites you to dinner at an expensive restaurant and tells you it’s his treat, expect the unexpected. For the record, however, let me state at the outset the claim he made that he was paying proved to be, as is typical where members of the United States Civil Service are concerned, a blatant and shameless lie. Not that I had to pay – no, the entire meal went on his Treasury Department credit card. So first of all, I’d like to thank the beleaguered, long-suffering United States taxpayers for picking up our tab Citronelle.
Urquhart kept mum on the true nature of his hidden agenda until after dessert. Prior to that, he picked my brain about the bailouts, asking for opinions and advice on their various aspects. Doing that, of course, allowed him to technically justify charging our repast to a Treasury expense account. But when things at last devolved to a pair of snifters containing double shots of Rémy Martin Louis XIII, Urquhart got down to business, proudly producing a twenty page manuscript and leaning ostentatiously toward me, proffering it as if the thing were an original copy of the Magna Carta.
“Enjoy this,” he suggested, “along with your brandy.”
After taking a rather large sip from my snifter, I perused Urquhart’s gift – it was the first chapter of a novel, entitled The Ponzi Incident. Seeing that quickly convinced me another draught would be necessary in order to proceed any further. So, suitably fortified, I turned to Page One:
Murphy was not a man who kissed up to the political appointees at Treasury. They hated him for that, but respected him for what he was, and he knew it. And they knew it, too. As a matter of fact, everybody in Washington knew it, and so did everybody in every federal region throughout the land – Murphy was his own man, and not to be trifled with. Outside his window overlooking 15th Street, a driving sleet storm was keeping the weak sisters where they belonged. Yes, the lesser men who surrounded Murphy, and there were plenty of them – the lawmakers, the pundits, the contractors – they were all snuggly in their footie pajamas, at home with their blowzy wives, while here at Treasury, the Department’s foremost forensic investigator burned the midnight oil.
“Working late?”
Murphy’s eyes rose to meet a pair of twin meteors of feminine endowment, surmounted with hair as red as a radish in full bloom. “Who the hell are you?” Murphy said, shortly followed by his patented Irish winning smile.
“Your new partner,” the mysterious lady said as she used her own green Irish eyes to give Murphy’s rock-hard physique a slow once-over. He noticed. She noticed that he noticed. He noticed that she noticed, and noticed she didn’t care him noticing. Then she noticed that, too. “I think,” she said, “I’m going to enjoy working at the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
Experiencing another need for additional liquid sustenance after reading that, I paused for some, sneaking a peek at Urquhart through the bottom of my snifter. He was watching me like a dog watches a human grilling porterhouse steaks during a cookout. Throwing him a cursory nod, I resumed reading, delving a few pages deeper.
Suddenly, without warning, it all became blindingly clear. Contrary to what everybody else had thought, the crucial clue wasn’t hidden in the Annual Report footnotes at all! “No,” Murphy thought to himself, “it’s hiding in plain sight, just like the letter in that Sherlock Holmes story!”
And, as usual, Murphy was dead to rights. Because there, right on the spreadsheet on the screen on his computer, was the real evidence – the annualized rates of return for 2004, 2005 and 2006. They were all exactly the same, right down to the last decimal point! “They’re all 17.28 percent,” Murphy said, talking to himself, since there was nobody else around. His nostrils flared in anger as he resolutely set his perfect lantern jaw. “Jesus! How freakin’ likely is that?”
Noticing that consumption of Louis XIII brandy was obviously contributing to the enjoyment of my exclusive preview of his literary efforts, Urquhart took the liberty of ordering both of us more of it as I read. When I paused the second time, he pointed at my snifter. “Might as well kill it,” he opined. “There’s plenty more where that came from,” he winked, “courtesy of old Uncle Sam.” With that, I complied with his advice, then turned to Page Fifteen.
“You know, Murphy,” she said as she took a seat on his desk, so close he could smell the Chanel Number Five that she knew she shouldn’t be wearing at the office, “ever since I got here, I’ve wondered why you have this, great big honking… tower under your desk. I mean, are you retro or something?”
“Nothing retro about it,” Murphy said as he rolled his oversize tower out from under the desk. “I had this baby specially designed to my own specifications. It’s got eight multi gigahertz parallel processors, a petabyte of hard disk and two terabytes of nanosecond memory, and it’s all liquid cooled.”
“So what is it,” she said, “some kind of Mac?”
Murphy laughed his tough and hearty Irish laugh. “A Mac? Apple computers are for faggots who do artsy-fartsy stuff in San Francisco! This baby runs Windows Vista!”
“Oh my,” she said, “what do you need all that… amazing power for?”
“To run the spreadsheets that catch the biggest crooks on Wall Street, toots,” Murphy said.
Her hands crept to Murphy’s taught, manly shoulders. She rubbed, but he was too hard, much too hard for her. She laid her head on his shoulder next to his ear. Murphy was buried in a mountain of red hair like ketchup.
“Let’s see what else it can do,” she said as she slid off his desk and assumed the position astride Murphy’s dream machine.
That definitely called for another hit of Louis XIII. After consuming one, I went back to the beginning and read through all of Chapter One at my fastest rate, 750 words per minute. So it wasn’t long before I could hand his work back to Urquhart and nevertheless be able to honestly say that I had read it in its entirety. “How do you like it?” Urquhart anxiously demanded, a smile pasted on his face like a Halloween mask.
“I must admit,” I prevaricated, “that I can’t really find the vocabulary to describe it.”
“So you think it’s good?” Urquhart’s voice adopted a grating edge of expectation.
“It’s… certainly… unique in my experience,” I artfully dodged. “I take it that this fictional investment bank which is operating a Ponzi scheme in your novel is based on one or more actual cases?”
“You bet, Tom!” Urquhart cheerfully asserted. “That Madoff character, of course, and Allen Stanford, too. We filed a complaint against him just last week. That’s why I’ve been working like crazy to get the first chapter of my novel finished, so everything in it will be ripped straight from the headlines!”
“Uh, right,” I humored, “good strategy. Ah, look, you do know, don’t you, that everybody who cares about this sort of thing is painfully aware that the SEC never actually did anything remotely resembling what your hero, Dr. P.J. Murphy CPA MBI MSF PhD, does in the opening chapter of your novel. We both know that, for year upon year, the SEC in fact took no action whatsoever concerning Madoff or Stanford, despite numerous and repeated alerts, alarms and urgent warnings from the SEC’s federal contractors, respected mainstream business journalists, suspicious investors and disillusioned employees of both fraudulent enterprises. And furthermore, we also both know that the SEC did nothing to stop either of those guys, or anyone else engaging in similar activities, until the economy came completely unraveled and hiding such shenanigans behind a veil of continued growth thereby became impossible.”
“Yeah,” Urquhart agreed with an indifferent shrug, “but so what? This is fiction we’re dealing with here.”
“Yes,” I conceded, “but fiction based on real events is generally held to higher standards of plausibility than, say, a patently fantastic story about somebody who ages backwards or an obvious, juvenile fairy tale concerning events a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. What you’re doing here is like asking everybody to find literary value in a novel about the HMS Titanic in which an heroic executive of the White Star Line takes decisive action at the last moment to avert the ship’s collision with an iceberg; or, to willingly suspend disbelief to the extent necessary to accept a novel with the premise that Shackleton beat Amundson to the South Pole.”
Urquhart shook his head, bewildered. “You think that what I wrote is that… unbelievable?”
“That the United State Securities and Exchange Commission,” I asked, “really did anything at all to avert the alleged commission of the evil deeds with which Madoff and Stanford are accused? I seriously doubt that anybody in the entire world, outside the Capital Beltway, of course, could believe that.”
“And that’s important?” Urquhart countered, obviously seeking a way around this obstacle I had raised to his ambition.
“It’s very important,” I asserted. “If someone wrote a novel where a black man ran for President against a white candidate nominated by a party that not only already occupied the White House, but had also dominated United States politics for decades, and, as the story developed, the economy just happened to collapse and freeze up world financial markets a month before the election, what do you suppose editors and publishers would make of that? I’ll tell you what – they’d say that the premise is okay, but the novel sucks because nobody who can read is gullible enough to accept a plot twist based on a Deus ex machina that unlikely.”
“So you’re saying,” Urquhart whispered, “that writers can’t even be sure that if they use things that really happened in their stories, readers will find those things believable?”
“Not unless,” I clarified, “everybody knows the thing in question. So now, you could write a novel about a black man who runs for President against all odds and have a national economic collapse a month before the election sweep him into office – although I’m not sure what the point of writing such a novel would be. You could also write a story about a teenage girl who leads her people in victorious battle against ruthless foreign invaders, because everybody knows who Joan of Arc was. But you can’t write a story where an absent-minded professor’s sloppy laboratory technique results in a miracle drug, even though that’s exactly what happened when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, because hardly anybody knows that’s what actually happened and the whole idea of it happening that way flies in the face of the general notion most people have about how great scientific advances are made.”
“Gee,” Urquhart sighed, “I had no idea that getting people to believe in fictional stuff was so complicated.”
“Well,” I consoled, “don’t blame yourself too much. Up until tonight, your only experience with that subject has been watching guys like Madoff and Stanford show the world how absurdly easy it is to get people to believe in harebrained fantasies.”
“Yeah,” Urquhart capitulated, “I guess selling fiction is one hell of a lot easier job on Wall Street than it is down at Barnes and Noble.”
“Pays better, too,” I observed.