"The Centurion?" He inquired sourly. I knew how he hated it.
"Jack, wouldn't kill you to rub elbows now and then with an actual capitalist. Don't worry. There won't be any photos to sully your reputation."
I suggested the place partly to pay my respects to a wounded ward after the day's carnage and partly for Jack's convenience. It was a combined press hangout and "new money" convocation, located just around the corner from his New York office in one of those old mansions right off Fifth, midtown. They'd just begun allowing the fair sex to cross their hallowed doorstep (after a lawsuit), a move certain diehards felt signaled the curtain raiser on the West's Decline. For my own part I'd actually put up Donna for membership as pan of the test case. We eventually established that the Centurion's unwritten membership criteria were actually pretty simple: in addition to being white and male, you also needed to be either rich or well-known. Being all four made you a shoo-in.
A couple of us fortunate enough to have friends on the circuit bench called in a few favors and arranged for a black, female judge to hear the case. The proceeding was over in time for lunch.
"Is eight okay?"
"Done," he said. "I'll be there on the dot."
He was late as usual, but I managed to pass the time. It was enough just to sip a Perrier and observe the shell-shocked faces of golden boy brokers presently mainlining martinis down the bar. Fortunately the place was on the ground floor so nobody could take a dive out a high window, but the crowd had all the insouciance of hookers working a Salvation Army convention. I checked over the room—lots of designer suits topped off by long faces—and wondered how many millions had been dropped that day by those present. Booze was flowing across the mahogany bar as if there were no tomorrow. Maybe there wasn't.
At a quarter to nine Jack O'Donnell marched up the blue marble steps, a man in from the war front.
O'Donnell was a big guy who looked every inch a senator, right down to the thirty-dollar haircut and the eight-hundred-dollar suit. I think it was his overcompensation for being Irish and being crapped on by the Columbia University administration most of his days. A so-so academic, he'd blossomed as a politician—firm handshake and steel eye—and had easily devastated the smooth-talking Long Island party hack the big money had thrown against him. The man was a straight shooter who believed the purpose of capitalism was to make a better place for all Americans, not merely enrich the unscrupulous or crafty few. As a result, his Senate harangues were a lonesome cry in the takeover/arbitrage/leveraging/executive-perk wilderness. His contempt for overpaid investment bankers was exceeded only by his disdain for overpaid corporate CEOs.
Anyway, we settled into the leather chairs of the back room while he ordered a medicinal Scotch, double. After his nerves stabilized a bit, I suggested he let me give him an informal rundown of what little I knew.