The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

1999

BLINKING TO WAKEFULNESS, she glanced at her few possessions with estrangement: corduroys splayed across the floor, sweater and coat heaped on sneakers, bra twisted over a low-rise of books. She pushed open her bedroom door and clomped across the main room toward the toilet.

“Good mornink,” Humphrey said in his thick Russian accent. Seated on the couch holding a book, the old man nearly said more, but thought better of it, knowing Tooly to be grumpy at this hour, barely 11:30 A.M.

She lapped water from the bathroom faucet, then returned to her bedroom, pulled on her oatmeal cable knit and a dressing gown, its belt dragging along the cold concrete floor. At her window, she raised the blinds, contemplating their little-trafficked street under the shadow of the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn. The sidewalks were icy that November day. Shoes hung from the power lines, tossed up there years earlier by kids who’d long since grown into adults.

Much as Tooly wanted to impose her mood on the morning, she couldn’t resist Humphrey in the other room. He’d probably been waiting hours for her company. When she joined him, he had a steaming cup of coffee for her on the Ping-Pong table. She collected it, sat at the other end of the couch, and frowned in order to win a few minutes’ silence. He turned a page, pretending to read, though he peeked at her from under his overflowing eyebrows, raccoon shadows below his eyes, creases around his mouth, which kept tightening, ready to pounce on a conversation, then relenting. Humphrey, who was seventy-two, wore baby-blue slacks high around his gut, a polyester dress shirt of the small size he’d once been, and a loosened paisley tie, all from the thrift shop. Bits of stubble, like toast crumbs, adhered around his thin lips and prickled the cords of his throat; one ashen sideburn was longer than the other, giving the impression that he might tip over. “I’m so tired,” he sighed, “of being loved for my beautiful body.”

She smiled, took a sip of coffee, and plucked the book from his hands: The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld.

“I also have maxim in life,” Humphrey informed her. “My maxim is never let Tooly Zylberberg take book, because it goes and never comes back.”

“If I borrow a book and like it,” she contended, “it becomes mine by law.”

“I overrule this law.”

“I appeal to a higher court where I’m the judge, and I uphold the law.”

“System is flawed,” he observed.

“I have my own maxim in life: Why is it so freezing here?” She reached behind the couch frame to where he dumped his bedcovers each morning and dragged up his comforter, wrapping herself in it. (He slept on the couch and made efforts to move from it minimally. His seat was at the far end, amid a swamp of newspaper pages that he’d flung into the air in contempt. Under the cushion, he stuffed clippings and crosswords that over time had elevated him; each time he sat, newsprint crunched.)

Considering her swaddled in his bedcovers, Humphrey remarked, “You look like bear hyperbating for winter.”

“A bear doing what?”

“Hyperbating.”

“What is ‘hyperbating’? Sounds like a bear that can’t stop masturbating.”

“Don’t be disgusting pervert!”

“It’s a reasonable conclusion, Humph. There aren’t that many other words that end in ‘-bating.’ ”

“Plenty words end in ‘-bating.’ ”

“Like what?”

“Like … Like ‘riverbating.’ ”

“What is ‘riverbating’?”

“ ‘Riverbating’: when there is echo, you say it is riverbating.”

“ ‘Reverberating,’ ” she corrected him, “isn’t a word that ends in ‘-bating.’ ”

“Okay, I give you other.” He paused. “Here, I have it: ‘verbating.’ ”

“ ‘Verbating’?”

“When you speak something and I repeat it back same, then I am saying it verbating.”

“ ‘Verbatim.’ ”

“Yes, sure.”

Their current home was on the upper floor of a two-story storage space, with lightbulbs hanging from bare wires, the furniture damp. This main room served as kitchen, dining room, sitting room, and his sleeping quarters. She worried that he did this as gallantry, to ensure that she had the lone bedroom. Anyway, he was unmovable. Intermittently, she made efforts to clean the apartment. As for Humphrey, he was never renowned for tidiness. “My nature abhors the vacuum,” he said. In explaining his inertia, he cited a principle of physics that had yet to appear among the standard Newtonian laws: Slob Gravity. A slob such as himself, he claimed, struggles under a greater burden than others, being subject to a higher force of gravity. “More you are slob, more heavy gravity is.”

Over the years, he had amassed a huge library that was notable chiefly for its wretched condition. These were great works but pitiful volumes: disintegrating paperbacks of Kafka, Yeats, Goethe, Cicero, Rousseau. There were oddities, too, such as the user’s guide to Betamax, travel memoirs about countries that no longer existed, histories with half the pages and half the centuries missing, causing the Ming Dynasty to contest the Wars of German Unification with one swish of the page. Many volumes had come from garbage cans or boxes left on the sidewalk. This was less a library than an orphanage. His stated plan was to read everything ever printed. He claimed to be nearly there. Were it possible, he’d have read in the shower. But Humphrey’s books had little to fear from onrushing water, he and soap being on terms of only passing familiarity.

When they moved to this city several weeks earlier, Humphrey had gone immediately to explore the New York Public Library, awed by the ceiling fresco of heaven in the Rose Reading Room, at whose front bench he sat, watching readers submit chits for books. As in previous cities (their most recent being Barcelona), Humphrey’s next priority after books was finding the chess. This he located in Washington Square Park, where he watched ex-con hustlers facing off against nerdy grandmasters. He’d also discovered a Carmine Street store, Un-oppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books, where he could indulge another hobby, debating politics. He was still unconvinced about the Cold War. According to the world, capitalism had won that contest, but Humphrey called it a tie at best. He couldn’t see capitalism lasting. What was the point of any system, he asked, if it only encouraged the worst in humanity, elevating self-interest to a virtue? He described himself as a “Marxist, non-practicing,” and certainly seemed a Marxist in the sense of being broke.

His sole source of income was consulting for wealthy book collectors who sought to expand their hoards. He surveyed their shelves and identified which editions were lacking and where they might be found, marshaling his impressive recall of antiquarian bookshops around the world. The collectors (it was almost exclusively men who suffered this acquisitive hunger) viewed him as an idiot savant, a novelty act notorious for smelly clothing, thick accent, and gruff manner, along with rumors of an ancient stint in jail. Humphrey’s consultations were free, but the custom was to give him a volume of moderate value, which he immediately sold to Bauman Rare Books for spending money.

“Hungry?” He fetched a paper bag from the kitchen containing two stale croissants and one bruised avocado. Humphrey rejected the idea of meals, eating whenever he felt it appropriate, not because it was the ordained hour. His sleep followed the same principle: he remained up all night if reading, or slept till dark if the day offered nothing of note. To allow a clock to dictate one’s life was mere conformism. He emptied the bag onto the Ping-Pong table and invited Tooly to join him.

She dipped a croissant into her coffee, losing half the pastry in the mug, flakes floating, as he rhapsodized about his mushy avocado. Humphrey prided himself on the purchase of expired produce, which he talked supermarket stockers into saving for him. Despite moderate indigestion, he kept Tooly and himself going this way on almost no money. And Humphrey wanted nothing more than this existence: nibbles and books, gesticulating and pontificating, with Tooly there to answer back. “Movement is overrated,” he said.

She herself was subject to the laws of Slob Gravity, able to remain inside for days, her nose in books, consuming whatever vittles materialized on the Ping-Pong table. At other times, though, she marched outside, walking tirelessly around the city, marking her map, scanning for building doors left ajar and talking her way inside. Whichever condition — activity or indolence — held sway, Tooly struggled to break its spell. When slobbing around the apartment, she could barely propel herself farther than the bathroom and back. When striding block after block, she required a force of will to return home at all.

“Do you think,” she asked, following an hour of reading on the couch, “that I should get dressed at some point?”

“It’s nearly one P.M. — throw caution out of window.”

“If I threw caution out the window, I’d have to open the window. It’s too cold,” she said. “But I should get ready.”

He knew this meant a meeting with Venn. “Why you should go? Stay here. Is more comfy. You wait and I find you nice job.” Another of his pastimes was writing on her behalf to grand organizations, informing them of a young lady they must employ. She wished he’d stop this, but few of his correspondents answered anyway. When they did, Humphrey claimed it as the nearest miss. Yes, perhaps the U.N. secretary-general hadn’t hired her, but he had answered on proper letterhead.

“It wasn’t Kofi Annan who wrote back,” Tooly noted. “Some person in his office. An intern, probably.”

“Small details,” he said. “I beat you in chess?”

“I really have to go.” She sneezed, and his face lit up. Humphrey kept pharmaceuticals under his cushion, and prescribed to anyone who as much as cleared his throat. He especially loved treating her — he had done so often when she’d been sick in childhood. But Tooly couldn’t oblige with an illness today. “It was only dust.”

“Fine, fine — you must go to meeting? Go,” he said. “Just because I can at any moment fall, and my heart stops, and nobody here to call help? No problem. I wait on floor trying to breathe till you come home.”

“I ban you from falling over and dying while I’m out.”

“I die very quietly. I try not to bother you.”

“I know you’re joking, Humph, but I’m actually starting to feel bad.”

“Do what you like.” He leaned on her, rising unsteadily to his feet. “But I am going out. Cannot sit around all day. I have items and activities.”

“You idiot,” she said, grabbing him for a cuddle.

“Leave me, crazy girl!” He squirmed away, sweeping the mussed gray-black hair off his forehead. “You don’t go to see him. You come with me on book consult. No?”

“Sorry, Humph. And I’m walking there, so I should leave.”

“At least you take subway with me. It’s very colding outside.”

“For a Russian, you’re so whiny about the weather.”

“I am low-quality Russian.”

“I’ll accompany you to the station. But that’s it.”

When they stepped outside, she inhaled deeply and the cold air seemed to awaken her a second time. A burning smell was in the air — welding at the ironworks across the street. Their corner was dotted with industrial workshops, many in red-brick garages inside padlocked chain link fences crowned with razor wire. They cut down Hamilton Avenue, walking against the flow of passing vehicles. A few bereft brownstones gave onto the rusted expressway undercarriage, with the Red Hook projects on the other side.

Outside the station, Tooly stopped. “I have my own things to do, Humph.”

“How you can walk all way to Manhattan?”

“Stop trying to keep me here!” she said, laughing.

“I make law that it is illegal for you to walk today.”

“I veto your law.”

“Who gives you veto power?”

“You did.”

“I un-give.”

“I launch a coup d’état and write a new constitution that says I can go. There, done.” She kissed his wrinkly cheek; he wiped it away.

Striding off, she marched hard up the block, speeding to outpace her guilt. But it caught up, dragged her to a halt. Tooly drummed her lower lip. Couldn’t just leave him. She spun around and went back, fed her token into the turnstile. She found him seated on the platform, leafing through Hume’s Essays, Moral and Political.

“My darlink,” he said. They sat in silence. The low ceilings and joists down here, paint peeling — it was like stepping inside a mechanical object. “You are so capable and clever, darlink,” he told her. “You will do wonderful things in your life.”

“We’ll see.”

“You come back for me — very nice. But you go now,” he said. “You walk. I survive. Muggers don’t dare fight me.”

“You’d hit them with David Hume.”

“Worse: I read it to them.” His old brown eyes reflected her momentarily, then gazed up the tracks. A train rushed into the station, its scratched-up windows etched with gang signs and initials. She watched as he boarded alone.

She resumed her hike, dodging pedestrians and overruling traffic lights all the way up Smith Street, through downtown Brooklyn, across the Manhattan Bridge, her mismatched sneakers moving fast — red, then black, cold air gusting up her corduroys — pace increasing almost to a run, as she tried not to beam too stupidly at the thought of who awaited. On arrival at the Bowery, she looked for him; not here yet. Sweat budded across her upper lip, glittered on her forehead.

To occupy herself, she took out her felt-tip pen — a few new streets to add from this latest hike — and fumbled in her overcoat pocket for the map. But it was missing. Had it slipped out somewhere on the road? Damn! Weeks of effort wasted. Never get attached to objects, Venn always said. Aargh — where was he? She stood at the corner of Hester Street, shivering.

Minutes passed, and she promised herself to leave after just one more. That one passed; another began. She looked to the left, the right, behind her, back again.

“Well, well,” Venn said, cheeks broadening as he swept her alongside him in a one-armed hug. “Why’d you keep me waiting, duck? Come on.”

Whenever they met, his voice resonated in this way — it was as if he spoke directly inside her. His wild beard was shorn these days, though reddish-brown stubble still bristled on his cheeks when he smiled, fan lines crinkling around his eyes. Despite the cold, he wore no overcoat, just a navy turtleneck that smelled of cedar.

She intended to be furious, but he’d made her laugh already. Anyway, indignation fizzled when directed at Venn. “Can we go indoors immediately,” she asked with mock annoyance, “or walk very fast, preferably huddling together? I’m seconds from hypothermia here.”

“Hypothermia is good for you — everything goes warm. You moaner! Come on.” He took her hand and threaded it into the crook of his arm, his body dwarfing hers. Venn was like a devilish older sibling, offering that brotherly combination of wholly unreliable and utterly trustworthy. As they walked, she glanced obliquely at him, grinning. She allowed herself to be led along, paying no mind to her route for a change, the city shrinking away.

She’d seen so little of Venn since their arrival here from Barcelona. He’d come a couple of weeks earlier to set up the basics of whatever business had lured him to New York. So far, they’d had only one other meet-up in this city: a walk around Central Park, followed by drinks and talk and laughter at a bar under the Empire State Building. Cities changed; never their friendship.

But after that she’d not seen Venn for weeks, and realized that New York might be one of those places where he’d prove a rare presence. Patiently or not, she’d have to wait. He never had a fixed telephone number or a permanent address where she could find him, instead residing in the bed of his latest girlfriend, which changed frequently. Tooly had met many of them over the years, always variations on the same towering floozy. As an adolescent, she had viewed these perfumed ladies as womanhood personified, a state she’d one day achieve. Tooly was grown now and still hadn’t reached it, but she retained a sense that those were proper women, not she.

Venn led her along Canal Street, past a bakery selling cha siu bao, and pushed open the next glass door, entering the foyer of a six-story building. He pressed the call button for the freight elevator, whose sliding door opened upward with a clatter, revealing a wizened black man in calfskin jacket and woolen suit pants. Warmly, he greeted Venn, ushering them in, and turning the half-wheel that operated the elevator, dry cogs grinding, the rickety cage hoisting them toward the top floor.

“How are you, my friend?” Venn asked, hand resting on the elevator operator’s shoulder, his other surreptitiously slipping a ten-dollar bill into the man’s pocket.

“It’s all good,” he replied shyly, loving the attention from Venn.

“You don’t go crashing this elevator with my girl here, all right? We want a nice soft landing.”

“Nothing but the best, my man.”

They stepped out into a large industrial space, once a nineteenth-century factory, converted to a sweatshop at the start of the twentieth, and lately transformed into cubicles. A smutty skylight provided scant illumination, while the windows were blacked out to prevent reflections on the computer screens, producing a permanent dusk, just the flicker of TVs on the walls, broadcasting financial news. The space was divided into steel-and-glass units, each containing desks, telephones, beanbags, dartboards, and chattery young professionals kneading stress balls and procrastinating. The centerpiece, however, was a yellow school bus, whose interior had been stripped to turn it into the conference room.

Tooly wondered about the purpose of all this, but a gathering crowd required Venn’s immediate attention. He led them into the school bus, adults tripping on kid-size steps, banging their heads inside the darkened interior. For several minutes, Tooly waited by the goods elevator, hands clasped behind her back, tapping a rhythm on her behind.

An emaciated bike courier for a dot-com grocer appeared, shouting, “Some dude called Rob ordered a box of sour keys?” A dozen people barged from the bus and a feeding frenzy ensued around the candy, leaving Venn to deal with the stragglers.

A short guy with a long goatee drifted to his cubicle near Tooly. He stared at her. “And you are …?”

“Nobody,” she answered.

“Okay, let me tell you something. You’re standing right by my box, okay? I pay for it, right? And you’re, like, distracting me right now. If you don’t work here, then — with utmost respect — could you get lost?”

Hearing this, Venn squinted across the room at her, shook his head, then approached. “Dear, dear, dear,” he said, causing the man with the goatee to turn hastily. “You don’t talk to her like that. When you deal with Tooly,” he warned, “you’re dealing with me.”

The man swallowed hard. “Sorry, brother. Totally didn’t realize this was your friend.” Blushing, he turned to her. “Apologies. That was out of line. Just, you were—”

Venn interrupted, addressing her. “Ready to move on, duck?”

“Ready!”

With that, he led Tooly gently away, winking at her.

“What the hell?” she whispered. Venn had certainly landed on his feet here — she’d never seen him in an office like this. In Barcelona, he’d spent most of his time at a grim factory on the outskirts, where an associate produced metal hooks to hang jamón. The man employed illegal immigrants from Romania, which had inadvertently involved him with some serious criminals. He was just a small-business man, and Venn was the only person he’d ever met who dealt with tough guys like that, so he’d asked for help. Venn obliged, yet ended up sympathizing more with the factory laborers than with his own associate, so he’d moved on. Next stop, New York.

Glancing around demonstratively, Tooly asked, “But this place isn’t yours, is it?”

“Mine? I never own anything, duck.”

“Well, you seem to be running it.”

“Don’t I always?” He winked.

The property, Venn explained, belonged to a venture capitalist named Marco “Mawky” Di Scugliano, an ex-Bear Stearns guy, brought up in a family-run restaurant in Hammonton, New Jersey, called Spaghett’About It, where he had been shot in the stomach at age eleven for resisting an armed robbery. The bullet, Mawky claimed, had introduced him to Jesus. Also perhaps to the use of profanity, given his motto (printed on the back of every business card): “This is the fucking time.” The school bus had been his idea, a lifelong fantasy that required movers to bust open the roof and lower the vehicle in by crane, costing forty-five thousand dollars, though Mawky told people “almost a hundred grand.” This was to have been his headquarters, but the plan flopped owing to the impossibility of lighting a room with such high ceilings; plus, people were always banging their heads inside the bus, and it proved impossible to get ISDN up here, the only option being dial-up. So he’d dumped the place for a new one on Twenty-sixth Street, overlooking the East River, a space so massive that employees were issued Razor scooter boards just to reach the bathrooms. He had asked Venn to make something of this junker, and that led to the Brain Trust, a cooperative that cost members five thousand dollars to join, plus two thousand a month to rent “a box,” as the cubicles were known.

“Okay,” she said, “but what are they actually doing?”

“It’s a lab. Anything these guys come up with — any idea that turns into something — the creator gets a controlling stake in the resulting company. At the same time, all members of the Brain Trust own a piece, too. If a person is wealthy but unoriginal, they benefit — they just ante up for more shares. If they’re rich in ideas and poor in cash, they can sell their Brain Trust shares to someone else. They bet on themselves, but on the group, too. Unlike in a normal office, everyone here wants their colleagues to succeed. Anyway, that’s the theory.”

He led her to a nearby box of two young women, former junior ad execs who’d quit to apply their wits to personal enrichment. One explained click-through ads to Tooly, rambling about “being first in the space,” “bricks-and-clicks,” and “online play.” Tooly responded with what must have been an absurd question, since the woman asked with dismay, “Wait, are you even on email yet?” (Tooly had tried it a couple of years earlier, but she avoided computers.) The ad women droned on about how a million clicks at six cents each would equal six million dollars in profit. Venn suggested that they check their calculations, and led Tooly to another box.

“This guy is interesting,” he said, tapping on the glass.

A programmer in a T-shirt depicting a Rasta mouse smoking ganja rotated in his desk chair. “Big guy! Wassup?” he said to Venn, indifferent that the monitor behind him was on an AltaVista search for “Maria Bartiromo” and “naked.” His idea was a website called www.totally-annoyed.com, on which anyone could post complaints about companies and receive real-time apologies. Presented as a service for customers, the site was secretly funded by corporations, offering them a way to hive off clients who pestered help lines and drown them in a never-ending blah of automated apology, all generated by an algorithm called A.S. (Artificial Stupidity) that varied the regrets automatically, leading customers down an unctuous road to nowhere.

The next box contained four chubby guys in button-downs, their workstations piled with ravaged pizza slices, Big Gulps, and Mentos wrappers. Theirs was a spot-the-celebrity start-up, in which members of the public would phone in with tips about the location of famous people around New York (and later, Hollywood, London, so on). The info would be fed to subscribers on their pagers or to cellphone update services. The guys had already spoken with an angel investor who’d bandied around the figure of two million dollars. The site, www.spotcha.com, was to go live by year’s end, and was guaranteed to become “the kick-ass brand of the twenty-first century,” they promised, slapping high fives.

Venn led her onward.

“They’re not seriously getting money for that, are they?” she asked him.

“Nearly anyone is getting money who’s not an absolute clown.”

“And they don’t qualify?”

“These VCs sit around plotting how to earn off all the nerds they used to beat up,” he said. “They move these guys into offices, give them free Handsprings, Nerf guns — one geek could equal their yacht.”

“And the cooperative thing? That works well?”

“Not really,” he said, amused. “They’re all at each other’s throats. That’s what they were talking to me about before. This place is a comedy. But it has a view from the roof.” He led her up a narrow staircase.

It was windy up there, with glimpses of City Hall, the distant antennae of the World Trade Center, and water tanks on surrounding high-rises. The roof was covered with tar paper, its low wall overlooking Canal Street six stories down. Venn was a man of a thousand acquaintances and hundreds of lovers, yet she was his only friend. If Tooly had an area of expertise in the world, it was Venn; she had studied him for years.

He was brought up on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, a speck of rocky brushland eight hours from Vancouver via three ferries and an interminable drive through the forest. A hundred people lived on this island year-round, castaways by choice, many on a commune called the Happening, founded by American draft dodgers and a changing cast of artists and loafers. Traditional relationships were forbidden in the Happening — nobody “possessed” anyone in matrimony or otherwise, and parents didn’t exist, just brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, certain women favored certain children, and from this one deduced bloodlines. The boys were banned from owning toy guns and girls were allowed no dolls, though a jolly Swede produced marvelous little vehicles from wood, until a drug dispute forced him off the island. Around the nightly bonfire, the adults held forth about the world with a mixture of logic and lunacy, being at once highly educated and highly stoned. As the kids roasted marshmallows, the adults toked, recited poetry, danced badly, sang full-throatedly to the wilderness. Soon the children were sampling their parents’ stashes and sneaking into the cabins of seasonal residents. The preteens swam to the adjacent island, hopped the ferry to Vancouver Island, hitchhiked down the coast and slept on beaches, rolling tree leaves to see if they might be smoked to any effect.

In time, the Happening happened less: its founders were short on supplies; the kids got cranky. The adults could have sought employment on the mainland, but society was exploitative. So they pilfered from it, applying to the Columbia Record Club under false names, reselling the albums to a store in Campbell River. One mother and son specialized in defrauding chain restaurants in Victoria, while others burglarized island retirees whose homes they cased under the guise of neighborly visits. When someone heard that provincial law gave children under eleven immunity from prosecution, the parents had their youngsters shoplift to order in Vancouver. Unfortunately, most of them bungled and were caught, prompting two RCMP officers to visit the Happening for a stern chat. This petrified the other kids but not Venn. By his teens, he’d become the commune’s chief provider, a hero by dint of his gumption. A few of the grown-up women even made advances to him. But by age fifteen he’d wearied of this narrow life, surrounded by adults with unfinished college degrees, working as incompetent handymen and pseudosculptors, somewhere at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

With a fake ID and genuine manners, he trekked across Canada, sojourning in Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal, where he befriended a group of traveling Australians. After obtaining a passport that falsely stated his age as eighteen, he accompanied them home. It was his first time on an airplane and his first time out of Canada. Venn worked odd jobs on the Queensland coast for a spell, then did a summer at a mobile abattoir in the bush, butchering livestock for farms too remote to get their beasts to a slaughterhouse. At seventeen, he followed the backpacker trail through Indonesia, then Vietnam, a country whose war he’d heard about since childhood. He worked in bars across Southeast Asia. At twenty-two — just a little older than Tooly was now — he arrived in Thailand, managed a bar in Pattaya, then moved to Bangkok, where he encountered an aging Russian exile, Humphrey, over a chessboard. At which point began their long association.

Venn’s childhood at the periphery of the world had implanted a craving for its center, and he moved incessantly in search of vibrant locales. Over the past decade he’d tried Jakarta, Amsterdam, Malta, Cyprus, Athens, Istanbul, Milan, Budapest, Prague, Hamburg, Marseille, Barcelona, and now New York. His occupation changed as often as his location, from construction worker to supermarket butcher to club manager. He’d been the driver for a pawnbroker, the confidant of an aging mandarin, an independent contractor, an entrepreneur. He had no snobbery and worked lowly jobs, if needed. Yet the trajectory of his occupations charted a steady climb upward, as did the company he kept.

When Tooly first met Venn, his confederates were charlatans and crooks, drawn to him like worms from damp ground. They had intrigued her once. But criminals only enchant those who haven’t known many. Soon she found most of them repellent. But these days Venn’s cohorts were young Wall Street professionals, mini-masters of the universe playacting like mobsters, pulling up in hired limos outside the Old Homestead, each ordering a porterhouse for two, huge serrated knives spurting medium-rare blood across the tablecloth, wads of cash smacked onto the check, nobody asking for change. They were bullies in their sphere, naïfs beyond. So they idolized Venn, a man who’d seen the truly unsavory, who’d met those with really dirty money. He knew how to reach the bad guys, what to do if caught in a bind, how to procure documents, how one moved assets and boomeranged them back to place of origin. He represented access to an underworld. At least, that was the illusion he sold.

What rankled Tooly was how much time Venn had to spend in the company of creeps. “It’s the worst part about how we live,” he affirmed. “Always dealing with this awful outer circle of people. Hardly get to see my inner circle.”

“Your inner circle? Who’s that?”

“Well …” he said, pondering this, then smiling. “Actually, just you, duck.”

It didn’t matter that others had status and rank; he cared nothing about that. How else to explain his years of kindness to her and Humphrey. Indeed, Venn was fondest of outcasts who, like himself, recognized the pretense everywhere. He was a man who took no part in society, never voted. He was a being wrought of his own will, belonging to nothing. He’d not known or cared which of those bearded men wandering through his childhood had been his father. As for his mother, he’d kissed her goodbye. Family meant nothing more than did random names in a telephone directory. The relations that counted were those of choice, which made friendship the supreme bond, one that either party could sever, and all the more valuable for its precariousness.

He had no delusions about ending the long reign of fools in the world, yet he insisted on decency within the small realm that he could affect. She had seen him rent hotel rooms for addicts to whom he owed nothing, give loans to bums who would never pay him back. Once, he covered a flight home for a Filipina trafficked into prostitution in Cyprus. He intervened with great physical courage to protect the frail, such as whenever thugs bullied Humphrey, or the time a lustful drunkard in Prague tore off Tooly’s shirt. If Venn delivered violence, he did so without a shout or shove beforehand. He just struck. Aggression terrified Tooly. Yet she found herself wanting him to apply his violence sometimes, he alone imposing the justice that was everywhere absent.

The wind on the roof swept Tooly’s hair across her face. “Is there something I could do at this place?”

“There aren’t really jobs,” he answered. “It’s not that kind of situation.”

“What about a project for the two of us?”

“Our friendship is the project, as far as I’m concerned.” He looked down at the street. “What you need to do,” he said, “is go into advertising, like those girls downstairs.”

“Shut up,” she said, laughing.

In recent years, in recent countries, Venn had alluded to a project — that they’d soon work together, as she had longed to do since childhood. In fact, they had done small jobs when she was little, though it had taken her a while to realize it. He’d have her knock on strangers’ doors in new cities and ask to use the toilet. A minute later, he’d knock himself, claiming breathlessly to be the father of a lost little girl — had she come this way? He entered, touchingly relieved to find his girl, accepting a glass of water with thanks and making his targets’ acquaintance. By the time these strangers offered him something — say, a place to stay or a job — they practically forced it upon him. People loved his company, just wanted his presence.

For her help, Venn used to treat her at the best hotel restaurant in whichever city they found themselves. On the way, he stopped at a junk shop and bought them elegant used overcoats, then led her into the opulent eatery, waitstaff gliding before them to a table — it was his lovely daughter’s birthday, Venn declared, so treat her like royalty! He spun further yarns, captivating the management and drawing Tooly into his fibs. They consumed oysters and champagne (she sipping from his glass), pheasant and roast potatoes, cheese plates, and as many sweets as she pointed to on the dessert trolley. Once coffee and brandy had been ordered, Venn chaperoned her toward the washrooms. In hotel restaurants, these were typically outside the dining area through the lobby. Only after a few such banquets did Tooly grasp why they always went straight through the rotating lobby door, onto the sidewalk, and away. A steaming coffee and a glinting brandy snifter arrived at their table, along with the vast bill folded discreetly on a silver tray. That charming man and his adorable daughter must be in the washrooms still, the waitstaff reasoned. Nothing to worry about — they’d return. After all, those overcoats still hung from their chairs.

As Tooly grew older, she witnessed other shortcuts: how one might vacation for nothing by befriending a shy local of the opposite sex, earning free room and board, even a tour guide for a few days. Another game involved posting reward signs for a lost key inside a tourist-jammed train station. She put on a hiker’s backpack (stuffed with Humphrey’s laundry) and sought out the smokers — always easiest to start a conversation with. Any mean-faced jerk was her preference, the more unpleasant the better. She borrowed his lighter, sparked a cigarette, and complained that she had to fly home early because her grandma had fallen ill in Florida. While stepping away to the vending machines, she entrusted her backpack to the guy, then returned with a look of astonishment and something in her palm: Hey, is this that key on the reward posters? At a phone booth, they called the posted number. Frantic with excitement, the key’s owner promised to drive over immediately with the generous cash reward; he’d arrive in an hour. Alas, Tooly couldn’t wait — she had her flight to catch. However, the man on the phone (Venn) demanded that she wait. Appearing befuddled, she thrust the phone at her new acquaintance. Venn told him that this girl had just agreed on five hundred dollars for the key — give her the money now and I’ll refund you as soon as I arrive. Hell, I’ll quadruple it, if you stay put: two thousand in cash, plus the five hundred you gave the girl. Her unpleasant new companion sprinted to the closest ATM (Tooly helpfully pointing it out), and withdrew as close to five hundred dollars as possible. She gave him the key and hastened to the cab stand — no time for the airport train now! When, after an hour or two, the guy was still waiting, he irritably tried the number on the reward posters. It rang and rang.

But such high jinks had dwindled away — Venn came to see them as cheap, as did she. And he was occupied with more legitimate endeavors now. Yet he looked after her all the same, arranging her travel to each new city, finding lodgings for her and Humphrey. Weeks might pass without word from Venn. Then he’d phone. His voice — grin audible — immediately erased her disappointment that he’d not been in touch.

He was maddening, he was unpredictable, he was late. But he always arrived in the end. So, she waited.

“Any brilliant new ideas?” she asked.

“Lots, duck. But what are yours?” He gazed across at the rooftops. “I brought you here to see these kids downstairs — your age, more or less — coming up with things. You don’t want to end up like Humph. Need to make your own propulsion.”

Humphrey sent those ridiculous letters on her behalf (“Attention New York Times: I have young lady you must be interest in….”) because he was certain of her quality. Venn was more measured, and that wounded Tooly. But he was correct: she had produced nothing. Humphrey always claimed that the tumult of the twentieth century had ruined his prospects, that he’d been “cornered by history.” But Tooly had grown up in an era of relative calm, after all the proper history had ended. She’d been too young to understand the hoopla of the Berlin Wall falling or the protests in Tiananmen Square, her awareness dawning around Operation Desert Storm and the L.A. riots, countries splitting up and ruining all the maps, then the O. J. Simpson trial, a computer that beat humankind at chess, the cloned sheep named Dolly, an English princess dying in a car crash, the most powerful man in the world fornicating with an intern. They were scattershot events, none relating to any other, and certainly not to her.

What, she wondered, would it have been like to live in an important era? How would she have acted during world wars? Humphrey had raised her with World War II and Soviet totalitarianism as the signal events—that history was her place and time, far from the banality of this peace. These days, it was as if the whole world, even New York City, aspired only to be Seattle. She wished the present would impose itself on her and determine her course.

“Come,” Venn said, leading her back downstairs.

As they strode along Canal Street, he said nothing. She wanted him to speak, so that she might learn his mood — Tooly hated this quiet (though traffic blared beside them). Hated being useless to him, offering nothing. She had achieved things in this city, slipping into a few homes. But to what end? For a few minutes’ company? To peek at how college kids lived? Quizzing that student on 115th Street had produced nothing. He’d been harmless, which was the problem: you meddled with bastards, not with some shy kid.

Venn scanned for a free taxi, his attention shifting to the next appointment. This encounter was about to end. A long wait till the next.

She’d hoped this would be a full day together, the beginning of a fresh adventure with him — at the very least, a long meal or a long walk. But it was over already. With a presentiment of her coming solitude, she watched him.

But hang on. Don’t disappear.

“I did do one thing,” she blurted.

Before intending to, Tooly found herself describing Duncan and mentioning Xavi and Emerson — even the guy downstairs with the pig. To make herself sound industrious, she inflated everything, sketching a setting that was fat with potential. “I realize they’re only in college,” she said, “but they must have parents.”

“Most people do, you’ll find.”

“I got tons of stuff on them.” She searched her coat pockets for the crumpled ball of newsprint where she’d jotted notes upon leaving that apartment. She read aloud her scribbled fragments, watching Venn for the detail that would snag him, sharpen his gaze.

None did.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t apologize to me, duck. Never any need for that,” he said. “Look, if you want, keep digging around up there. Or give the boy lawyer a call sometime, see what comes of it.”

“I’m so stupid — I don’t even have his number.”

“How’d you manage that?” he asked, chuckling.

“You say I’m not supposed to write numbers down anymore!” Contrary to his preferences, Tooly had long kept a little phone book. She crossed out every number after they left a city, but he still preferred that they only memorize information — after all, the people they encountered were not necessarily types one wished to be connected to in writing.

“So you did get his number,” he asked, “but can’t recall it?”

“I didn’t even ask,” she admitted. “I hate getting numbers. They want mine back, and I never know what to say.”

“Say you’re moving and don’t have a new phone line installed yet.”

“Hey,” she exclaimed, nostrils flaring, “that’s what you always tell me!”

Grinning, he shut his eyes, lids flickering. Tooly frowned, meaning for him to see when he looked up. Instead, he walked on. She couldn’t stop herself hurrying after. “You idiot,” she said, threading her arm under his, inhaling the wet-wood scent of his sweater.

Venn was busy reviewing the scrap of scribbled notes about the students — how had he even taken that from her? “This paper smells like peanut butter.”

“My sandwich was in there,” she said, grabbing it back. “See — never worry about me writing stuff down; I can always eat the evidence.”

He burst into laughter, which caused such a surge of joy in her.

“It’s decided,” she announced. “I’m going back up there. And I’m getting something useful for us from these college kids. Okay? Just tell me what you’d like.”

“Little duck, you know what works.”

Venn touched her cheek, causing her to fall silent. He entered a taxi, leaving her alone on the caterwauling street.