One drizzly afternoon at the beginning of April, Fourpetal came back from lunch and slumped down at his desk, feeling as if all these greasy plastics that nuzzled him day after day — the grey acrylonitrile of his mouse pad, the blue polypropylene of his telephone earpiece, the black polyurethane of his (legendary) swivel chair — might as well just be stitched together into a gimp suit into which he could be zipped up for good. That morning, he’d emailed an executive called Jim Pankhead, who worked at Lacebark’s headquarters in North Carolina, to see if he had the latest draft of the statement Lacebark was going to make about the environmental impact of its operations in Burma. Just as Fourpetal roused his computer, an email arrived from Pankhead with the aphasic subject line ‘FW: Fw: Re:’. The environmental statement was attached, but Fourpetal also noticed that Pankhead had forgotten to delete the body of the email, which contained a long series of previous messages in the usual reverse chronological order. Pankhead and another colleague at Lacebark had been using Hotmail addresses to correspond; ever since Enron, Fourpetal knew, senior executives at a lot of American companies had moved to private email accounts for anything remotely indiscreet, just in case the Department of Justice came along one day to confiscate the corporate servers. Towards the end of their email conversation, Pankhead had asked the other executive to send him the environmental statement, and the other executive had sent it to him at his Hotmail address, so Pankhead had forwarded it to himself at his Lacebark address, and from there he’d just now passed it on to Fourpetal. After completing this uncomplex forensic reconstruction, Fourpetal scanned the conversation down to the bottom, where he found a medium-length email from Pankhead to the other executive squashed against a rampart of > signs:
I covered for you like a pro today, buddy — thank me later. The theme of the meeting was, obviously, what the fuck went wrong at Gandayaw? We had Bezant on a video link from London. He seemed like a meathead but he used to run half of Cantabrian which is apparently a big deal. He said Sweet wanted to blame it all on the cyclone but really he was botching everything way before Nargis and we should have fired him sooner. Also said he could assure us that in another few months he’d have the stable door securely nailed shut (except he didn’t put it like that).
Anyway, the cripple in Chiang Mai is asking for two million dollars to keep his mouth shut, which is hilarious. CFIUS are ruling on the bond deal with Xujiabang in August, and if they read in the NYT that we supposedly tortured the wives of a bunch of guys trying to start a union, the whole thing is going to fall apart, or, worse, subpoenas are going to start pounding us like Predator drones. Then Xujiabang back out, the world finds out we can’t service our debts next year, and we all get fucked in the eye sockets. The cripple would be asking for a hundred mil if he understood what he had. So, yes, we’re going to pay him.
As for the other thing, Bezant claims it’s under control. Harenberg keeps saying it’s ten times more important than the Xujiabang deal, which is ridiculous, but that’s Harenberg. No clue why Nollic trusts him with anything. OK, enough of that: still in for that fundraiser this weekend?
Fourpetal wasn’t all that surprised by Pankhead’s blunder because he had recently made a similar one himself: an ex-girlfriend of his friend Rich had written Rich a plaintive email about how the previous night she’d had to trudge all the way across Battersea Bridge at 4 a.m. in the rain with no pants on under her dress after bolting in tears from an imminent one-night stand because even five weeks after their split the thought of having sex with anyone else but him was still too upsetting, and Rich had forwarded it to Fourpetal with a few uncharitable comments, and Fourpetal had replied with a few more uncharitable comments, and Rich had replied with an unrelated YouTube video about a panda, and Fourpetal had forwarded the panda video to eleven people who he thought might appreciate it, including, as it happened, the ex-girlfriend in question, whose maudlin anecdote was still there at the bottom of the circular. It could happen to anyone. So to Fourpetal, a veteran, the next move was clear. But then he realised that the next move after that was clear, too, and the next move after that, and the next move after that. In fact, as soon as he read Pankhead’s email, a plan had come all at once into his head, a magnificent spontaneous birth, detailed and comprehensive and with appendices and footnotes.
Part one: he played Minesweeper for a few minutes and then wrote back to Pankhead, ‘Hi Jim, so sorry to pester you again but I really do need that enviro statement ASAP. Or if you’ve already sent it, many apologies — we’ve been having some trouble with our servers over here so a lot is getting lost.’ Almost instantly, he got a second email with the statement attached, but this time with nothing else below the subject line. Fourpetal judged from the speed of the reply that Pankhead must have realised his error and had been staring at his inbox in paralytic horror the entire time. Later that afternoon, he phoned Pankhead at his office and kept him on the phone with boring questions for as long as he could, because that seemed like the exact opposite of how he would naturally be inclined to behave if he’d read Pankhead’s email and was now wondering what to do about it.
Part two: he phoned a guy he knew who worked upstairs in management, and told him that he was about to give a background briefing to a sympathetic Independent journalist about the challenges Lacebark faced as an ethical company in an unethical industry. Which of Lacebark’s competitors would have the most to gain if it failed? Which executives held the real power at those companies? Which of those executives were known for sanctioning dirty tricks?
Part three: the next morning, before he left for work, he created an anonymous Gmail address of his own and emailed Donald Flory, the Senior Vice-President and General Counsel of Kernon Whitmire Copper and Gold Incorporated. ‘I work at Lacebark Mining. I have information relating to the Gandayaw Concession and the Xujiabang bond deal which could cripple or destroy the company if released. In exchange I want a job with you in New York — undemanding, high paid, lots of exotic foreign travel — and ninety thousand shares of Kernon Whitmire stock transferred to an offshore trust in my name. Are you interested?’
‘we are always happy to exchange ideas with like-minded professionals at other companies,’ Flory replied that afternoon, not from his Kernon Whitmire address but from yet another private account. ‘are you based in nc?’ he asked, meaning North Carolina.
‘No, but I’m flying there in a couple of weeks for a conference. Also on the way back I have an overnight layover in Newark.’
‘let me know your hotel booking in newark. someone will come to your room.’
At eleven o’clock on the night of the layover, Fourpetal stood at the window drinking whisky from the minibar and thinking about all the models he’d probably fuck in his new loft on the Lower East Side. From this distance there was something about the flat amber glare of the airport that strangled your sense of perspective, so that the jets looked like hatchbacks trundling around a supermarket car park, and farther on east all the towers of Manhattan cowered beneath the monstrous gantry cranes of Port Newark. This deal was top secret so perhaps they wouldn’t come until about midnight, he thought, lying down on the bed and turning on CNN. But midnight arrived, and then one, and then two, and there was still no knock at the door. At three, now pretty drunk, he turned on his laptop and wrote an email to Donald Flory: ‘Noones here what the fuck is going on. Im flying back to Londn in four hours.’ Then, wondering for the first time if he might have made some sort of serious error, he Googled Donald Flory again, and on a news website he found a picture of Flory at a recent press conference. He was shaking hands with Yangmin Gao, the jowly chairman of Xujiabang Copper and Gold.