No sooner had Gretchen arrived to open up the office this morning than a plump, middle-aged gentleman walked in and asked to see me. When she informed him I wouldn’t be in until nine, he told her he would wait until I arrived. When she told him that I already had a solid slate of appointments starting at nine o’clock and running until noon, he told her he would wait until I had time to meet with him. On the whole, then, the fellow was quite obliging, but on one point, he was obstinate – he refused to give his name. “Call me ‘Mr. X,’” he requested, and Gretchen, who is used to displays of every imaginable eccentricity from my clients, cheerfully complied.
As it happened, I got to work at 8:30, so Mr. X did not have a chance to display his allegedly remarkable patience. After he paid Gretchen a discounted fee for a half-hour consultation in cash, I walked him into my office, where he chose the chair in front of my desk.
“So,” I began, “tell me, ’Mr. X,’ what can I help you with?”
“I suppose you’re wondering why I won’t give you my name,” he responded, leaning forward slightly with an odd squint.
“Not really,” I confessed with a shrug. “You’re hardly the first of my clients who paid cash and wouldn’t reveal his or her identity.”
“I’m going to tell you why, though,” he offered, “because it’s part of my predicament. You see, Mr. Collins, I work at the Treasury Department.”
“Do tell?” I replied. “I have a number of clients at Treasury, but I don’t recall ever seeing you at any of the meetings I’ve attended there.”
“I… well, let’s just say I keep a lower profile than most,” he confided. “You’ve been keeping up with events concerning, the, ah, AIG… affair, I assume?”
“Such as,” I offered, “the House Financial Services Subcommittee hearings yesterday?”
My guest’s right eyebrow began a slow, nervous tic. “Yes,” he muttered, “such things as those.”
“My favorite part,” I briefly mused, “was when Representative Gary Ackerman remarked that perhaps credit default swaps should have been called ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Insurance.’ His little anecdote about the two guys on a raft in an ocean storm was pretty clever, too, don’t you think?
Mr. X’s eyebrow twitch sped up considerably. “I think I may have missed that,” he told me with a scowl.
“Well,” I continued, “one of the guys says something like ‘My God, this is terrible, we’re going to die!’ So the other one sells him a life insurance policy. That captures the central paradigm of credit default swaps pretty well, doesn’t it?”
My guest’s left knee joined the party, bobbing up and down. “I suppose so,” he allowed.
“And then,” I remarked, “there was that flap about Chris Dodd, where he was accused of putting a loophole in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act that made it possible for AIG to hand out $165 million of taxpayers’ money in executive bonuses. Did you find it amusing to watch him deny it in the morning and then turn around in the afternoon and sort of admit he did in fact do it, but not exactly; and then go on to accuse some dingbat at Treasury of slipping the loophole into the bill while it was at the Conference Committee? Let’s see here,” I murmured, looking through the papers in my right hand desk drawer, “ah, yeah, there it is: ‘The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009, as such valid employment contracts are determined by the Secretary or the designee of the Secretary.’ Reading that, I’d say it certainly appears Dodd is telling the truth. Such a paragraph is obviously the product…” I looked up – my guest’s agitation had escalated to something resembling St. Vitus’ dance. “… of a dementedly convoluted, dangerously devious and pathologically Byzantine bureaucratic mind.”
“Mr. Collins,” he managed to blurt out between fidgets, “you are looking at the… the dingbat you just described.”
“You?” Without a doubt, I was reasonably astounded.
“Me,” he choked out miserably. “And that’s why I’m here.”
“And not a very happy camper at the moment,” I observed. “How come you’re such a nervous wreck?”
“Are you kidding?” He shot me a look of utter disbelief. “Haven’t you heard about the public reaction to the AIG bonuses and that bonus-enabling clause in the law?”
“Oh,” I nodded, realizing what he meant. “Are you talking about the people who are suggesting that the AIG executives who got those bonuses be strangled to death with piano wire, hung from the rafters with fish hooks through their private parts, or stripped naked and tied on top of a fire ant nest?”
Mr. X turned a light shade of pea green. “Yes,” he affirmed, “I am.”
“Oh, well, in that case,” I consoled, “don’t worry about it. Those folks are just blowing off steam. After all, you have to admit, it is pretty upsetting to watch the United States government bail out AIG with what amounts to an astronomical corporate welfare check and then watch AIG use that money to unjustly reward its top executives with huge bonuses they obviously don’t deserve. So it’s only natural for folks to congregate in large, sullen, angry mobs and tell the world, as represented by mobs of other people with cameras and microphones, exactly how they feel about the way the TARP companies have behaved. But those people aren’t actually serious about doing all those grizzly things to greedy, immoral, scumbag executives who reap massive, unearned fortunes while millions of American citizens lose their jobs and homes, and mostly because of what those executives did, to boot. They just say that kind of stuff because they’re hopping mad, that’s all.”
“Maybe so,” Mr. X conceded, his fidgeting subsiding slightly in reaction to my assessment. “But how do you think they feel about the guy who changed Senator Dodd’s amendment so those executives could get all that money in the first place?”
“Oh, I imagine they’re plenty mad at you, too,” I speculated, “but, just like the AIG executives, your name hasn’t been made public, either. So, even if there are a few, isolated nut cases out there who really, sincerely do want to throw you into a pit of starving rats, they’ll never know who you really are, now will they?”
“I… I guess not,” he agreed, calming down a bit more.
“By the way,” I inquired, “what ever possessed you to write that clause and convince somebody on the Conference Committee to insert it into the economic recovery bill when nobody was looking to begin with?”
“Oh, that,” he sighed, biting his lip and gazing out the window at the White House. “We… I mean, I… I guess… I was worried that if there were executive bonus contracts in place and Congress passed the Recovery and Reinvestment Act with Senator Dodd’s amendment in it the way Senator Dodd wrote it, then TARP companies like AIG might get sued by their executives for breech of contract. If they were prohibited by law from getting their bonuses, you see, then there might be lawsuits…”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but, may I ask, so what?”
“Huh?” My guest gave me a bewildered look.
“I mean,” I clarified, “so what if that happened? So what if some wealthy executives were to sue AIG or some other TARP company that, as everyone knows, wouldn’t even be in business if it weren’t for the federal government?”
“But… but…” Mr. X’s fidgets began to crescendo again. “Some of the executives might win their lawsuits…”
“In which case,” I pointed out, “the situation would be no worse than it is now, where all Congress and the President can do is flap their lips, shouting that those greedy old executives should pay back the huge piles of undeserved taxpayers’ money AIG gave them.”
“All that litigation,” my guest objected, “it would be a huge burden on the court system.”
“Me thinks thou doth protest too much, sir,” I challenged. “Is it perhaps possible that when you drafted that paragraph and arranged to have it inserted in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, you had – dare I say it – some sort of hidden agenda?”
“What?” His expression went blank.
“Face it,” I insisted. “Your argument that it was necessary in order to avoid a few lawsuits is pretty damn weak.”
“You think so?” Mr. X quavered uncertainly.
“Absolutely,” I vouched. “In fact, if you consider the supposed reasoning behind it for a minute, that argument hardly makes any sense at all. Why would the federal government in general, or the Treasury Department in particular, care if some TARP company executives sued their firms when they didn’t get their huge and shamefully unearned bonuses? And come to think of it, now that I pause to evaluate the underlying issues and questions, I can’t really imagine any sensible reason for putting that loophole in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Except, of course…” I threw my guest a meaningful glance.
“Except what?” He stared back at me, his fidgets returning to his face, one by one.
“What if…” I hypothesized, “somebody at Treasury had a relative… or maybe an in-law, who was an AIG executive?”
My guest’s fidgets surged again, this time to a greater intensity than ever.
“Or suppose….” I pressed on, “somebody at Treasury got a nice, big briefcase full of small, unmarked bills…”
Mr. X’s fidgeting began to give him the look of a one-man band playing the William Tell Overture allegro vivace.
“Or maybe…” I concluded, “somebody working for AIG got, shall we say, ‘the goods’ on somebody at Treasury…”
“The [expletive] set me up!” Mr. X exclaimed. “How was I to know she would make a video of me in that French maid’s costume?”
“And threaten,” I surmised, “to post it on a kinky porn site, unless a certain little paragraph got slipped into the Conference Committee’s final draft of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act?”
Mr. X doubled over as if he had been sucker-punched in the stomach. “That God damned little [expletive]!”
“Glass coffee table?” I queried.
Mr. X nodded, his head bowed. “That stinking [expletive]!”
“Latex?”
“Yes,” he sobbed. “Clothes pins, too.”
“St. Bernard?”
“Great Dane,” he whimpered.
“In that case,” I reasoned, “it’s pretty likely that you will be called upon to… ah, shall we say, render similar services in the future.”
“Oh, God,” he retched, “do you really think so?”
“Sure,” I opined. “In the old days, you could have demanded the photographic negatives and destroyed them. But in the digital age, there’s absolutely no way to get rid of visual evidence like that.”
“Christ,” he moaned, holding his head in his hands, “what else could those [expletive] TARP firms want?”
“Well, for starters, how about more of the taxpayers’ money?” I suggested. “And, of course, less accountability for what they do with it.”
“Yeah,” he grunted, “I guess those are pretty safe bets.” Removing his hands from his face, he gazed up at me beseechingly. “Mr. Collins – please, tell me – what can I do?”
“There’s only one thing you can do,” I advised. “Arrange to have yourself transferred as far away from Washington as possible. Get posted to the Denver Mint, for example.”
Mr. X went white as a sheet. “Leave Washington?”
“Correct.”
“Work in the boondocks? In a place like… [expletive] Denver?”
“Right. And the farther away,” I noted, “the better.”
Mr. X took a deep breath, then sat up straight, a man clearly resigned to his fate and taking personal responsibility for it. “All right,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “Got to bite the bullet, I guess.”
“Look on the bright side,” I encouraged. “Your Civil Service salary will probably buy a lot more out in the sticks. You know how expensive it is to live around here.”
“Yeah,” he whispered, “the cost of living is bound to be cheaper just about anywhere else.”
The phone rang. It was Gretchen, announcing the arrival of my nine o’clock appointment.
“Okay then,” Mr. X said flatly, rising and extending his hand. “Thank you, Mr. Collins.”
“You’re welcome, sir,” I replied as we shook.
He made ready to leave, but just at the last moment, I could see a thought forming in his mind. “If I get the hell out of Dodge, what do you think the TARP firms will do, if they don’t have me to slip clever little paragraphs into all of the new laws Congress is going to pass?”
“I don’t expect,” I told him, “that the young lady who made you a digital video porn star will have the least bit of trouble finding another federal government employee who has the required access to Congress and likes dressing up, playing with animals and doing odd things with common everyday objects.”
“It’s really that easy for them?” Mr. X asked with a grimace and a catch in his voice.
“Take a room full of federal civil servants,” I assured him, “and you can’t spit without hitting a pervert.”
He mulled my comment over for a moment. “Why do you suppose that is?”
Gretchen rang my telephone for the second time. It was three minutes after nine, and, at the prices I charge, I can’t say I could blame the fellow waiting for insisting on punctuality.
“Because people who actually like to fill out forms, who enjoy conforming to a norm well below that of even acceptable mediocrity, who sincerely want to kiss up to their incompetent bosses constantly, and who prefer to spend their time stabbing their co-workers in the back instead of performing productive work all tend to be mentally messed up in the same ways. Now,” I suggested, “in order that you maintain your, ah, confidentiality, I recommend you leave by that door over there instead of by the one you came in.”