Truly Like Lightning Read online

  Maya handed him the thick sheath of her presentation. He accepted it graciously, and then slid it into his trash without hesitation. “I don’t like to read business and I don’t like paper trails,” he said, sounding much like his good friend, the current occupant of the White House. “I prefer-bal the verbal.”

  Maya swallowed hard and launched into what she knew from memory about Bronson Powers and his land. She told him to think of the Powers clan like the Mulhollands. “Like Chinatown,” he muttered reverently under his breath. She knew she had him then. A Hollywood story.

  She told him that the land was purchased for thousands and was now worth possibly billions—ripe to be stripped of its precious minerals—obviously gold, silver, and copper, but also, intriguingly, tungsten, which was suddenly rather valuable as a component of electric car batteries. Malouf’s Muppet eyebrows danced up when he imagined himself rubbing elbows with all the Tesla-proud celebs.

  Maya brought Malouf’s attention to the Opportunity Zone initiative tucked into the 2017 Republican tax cut bill. “Look at what Michael Milken is doing in Reno. You could do that in San Bernardino, with your connections—I bet you could get the area designated as an opportunity zone and qualify for a massive tax break.”

  “That’s the Mnooch.” Malouf smiled, referring to Steven Mnuchin, the former “Foreclosure King,” Lego Batman movie producer, and present secretary of the treasury of the United States. “He’s the best, a good friend.”

  Encouraged, Maya then spun scenarios of exclusive resort building. She saw Malouf recoil a bit at that because Praetorian had recently lost a billion dollars buying a resort management company that had been humming along very well, replacing experienced management and promptly running it into the ground. But, Maya said, we would be in on ground zero here. She brought up his archnemesis and feral competitor, Barry Sternlicht, and inspired visions of vanquishing him, and outstripping Vornado, Starwood, and Mack-Cali, even outflanking Blackstone. She kept reminding herself that Malouf had had a few bad years running, that the board was moving against him, that he needed her perhaps more than she needed him. Always vulnerable to the Hail Mary idea, Malouf, whose sequential thinking was not his strong suit, in times of stress would look that much harder for the lightning strike, the one in a million.

  When she was finished, Malouf licked his lips, visions of a thousand Mohegan Suns dancing like sugar plum fairies in his head. He tried to tamp down his excitement. He had made billions from buying cheap one-family homes, but when he had taken a big swing, like on Neverland, he had whiffed mightily.

  “Been there, done that, cashed out. San Bernardino is a shithole. Believe you me, I know.”

  “So was Vegas. So was Reno.”

  “So is Reno.”

  “Yeah, maybe Reno is a shithole today,” Maya persisted, “but again, let’s look at what Milken is doing there with the Trump/Mnuchin opportunity zones.” Malouf allowed himself a smile; he could be a world maker; in his mind, he already was.

  “Milken is a fucking genius. He’s OG. Thank goodness he stopped wearing the perruque, though, huh? I’m intrigued. I used to describe my present level of excitement as ‘half hard,’ but I don’t do that anymore, do I?”

  “No.” She smiled.

  He bit harder. “What’s the catch, then? What’s the plan? How can I help?”

  “Well, here’s the greatest obstacle and the greatest opportunity—this dude Powers seems to be a rabid Mormon, as I said, which I think is initially an impediment to selling, but, as in all epics, the impediment will become the opening.”

  “That’s a very philosophical position. Usually, when I am persuaded by philosophy, I lose money.”

  She settled in to tell the story. She knew that dealmaking was all about storytelling, the ones with the happy endings.

  “He’s got his own private world up in there. I took a ride to the outskirts of his property, it’s impressive in size and scope. He might have access to the Oasis of Mara—which would be worth untold millions—even the mineral rights alone. But there’s no record of the kids in nearby schools, so he’s homeschooling his kids, that’s the key here, which, if he were a Utah Mormon like most of these guys, would not be a problem, ’cause Utah has very lax homeschooling laws, but, aha, not so California.”

  “God bless California.”

  “Yes, because the Golden State has some of the strictest homeschooling laws in the country. Can you imagine the creationist, Book of Mormon, anti-science curriculum that’s being forced on these innocent kids? That is, if they’re getting any kind of instruction at all. I mean, on the happy side, we might have an Angulo family situation, and on the dark side, we might have another Turpin family deal here.”

  “Who?”

  “There are pictures in the presentation I worked so hard on that you threw in the trash,” she teased.

  “Oooooh, pictures … why didn’t you say so.” Malouf could enjoy taking the piss out of himself if he could be the one controlling the intensity and duration of the piss. It made him feel known, and liked.

  Maya got up and retrieved her presentation from the garbage and found the pages with the photos. She hovered over Malouf, pointing as she spoke, aware that their bodies were touching and that her left breast was making “unintentional” contact with the back of Malouf’s shoulder. She was momentarily insecure that her breast implants did not have enough give and did not feel real, but she soldiered on. “The Angulos are seven children that were raised in an apartment in New York for years, never allowed out by their parents. All they did was watch movies, thousands of movies. There was a doc made about them in 2015.”

  “A movie, huh? Cool. They look Indian. Who played them?”

  “No one. It was a doc.”

  “Right.”

  She turned the page for him. “And the Turpins here in California, kept thirteen kids locked up in a house for years. The Turpins will be in prison for the rest of their lives.”

  “Hmmmm, white trash. They need a housekeeper. I think I know where you’re going with this.”

  He didn’t really, it was her story, and an original, surprising one, and she knew he didn’t know it, but she stroked him anyway.

  “I’m sure you do,” she said as she went back to her seat across from him, “but let me lay it all out, ’cause I rehearsed it soup to nuts in the mirror at home. And this is where I need my eight-hundred-pound gorilla.”

  “Me?”

  “Of course.”

  He smiled and shimmied in his seat when his ass was kissed. “That eight hundred pounds is mostly muscle.” He winked.

  “I need access, through you, to a heavy-hitting board of education member, someone like that, who will do our bidding.”

  Malouf tapped all nine of his fingertips together in a kind of praying posture while Maya told herself not to stare at the deformed hand. Malouf liked his hands front and center. He knew it made people uncomfortable; he knew it gained him sympathy, revulsion, and engendered self-consciousness and a false sense of superiority in an adversary. And everyone was an adversary. “My adult kids went to Crossroads,” he said, peering over the fingers, “my kids go to Crossroads today, my unborn kids by the wife I haven’t met yet will go to Crossroads. I’ve donated hundreds of thousands. I’m on the board there. I know everyone in that world. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking we go in with the board of education, quietly, don’t make a big deal, find someone that can handle social services, and we go out to the desert and say, Look, Mormon dude, I don’t know if you’re like the Angulos or the Turpins, but at a bare minimum, your homeschooling isn’t up to par, in the twenty-first century you can’t teach that the ancient Israelites settled the New World, you can’t teach that dark skin is a sign of God’s curse and white skin a blessing.”

  “No, I suppose you can’t teach that,” Malouf said strangely.

  “Aside from the fact that you’ve got multiple wives, you gross, kinky motherfucker—”

  “Ho
ld on. You lost me there.” He held a beat, then smiled, and added, “Just kidding. Go on. Entangle me further in your web.”

  Maya chuckled and continued, “We come with the child abuse angle, and we will be saviors in the media if it gets out and gets to that, but we also come like we are on his side, the Mormon side. We say the board of ed is bent out of shape here and they want to take your kids away from you, and we want to think of a compromise.”

  “We do?”

  “Yeah. ’Cause we’re the good guys.”

  “We are.”

  “And we want to buy that land. We don’t want the government confiscating it.”

  “What’s the compromise?”

  “That’s where we get creative. We could say—sell us half of your stake in this land and we will make this headache go away and we promise not to develop or sell mining rights in the next twenty years, a promise we will break as soon as we want. You could make in one move what it used to take you a couple hundred deals to make; you wouldn’t be fucking with the little green houses on Baltic Avenue, you’d be building big red hotels on Broadway.”

  “That a Monopoly reference?”

  “I guess it was, yeah.”

  “Wow.”

  Malouf looked out the window to the sea, then looked back at Maya. “Maybe. You think the Mormon will take it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know him yet.”

  “He doesn’t know you.”

  “He doesn’t know me.”

  “Anybody else sniffing around?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “No Vornado? No Sternlicht?” The two competitors Malouf always felt over his shoulder like twin grim reapers. “No Tom Barrack? Colony? No Steve Dwarfzman?” he asked, referring to the diminutive Steve Schwarzman of the behemoth Blackstone.

  “I don’t see how. There’s barely any record of this guy or his land. He’s like a lost tribe unto himself maybe as far back as the turn of the century. I stumbled onto it and then I had to dig.”

  “How are his real estate taxes?”

  “No record of him paying them.”

  “But he’s not like that Ammon Bundy guy, is he? The cattle rancher guy who decided one day that federal lands belong to the people? I think he was Mormon, too.”

  “No, Powers owns the land outright.”

  “Astonishing.”

  They sat nodding at each other and blinking. “You know,” Malouf said, “I seem to recall rumors of Sternlicht trying to make a big play out there about ten years ago that didn’t pan out. Maybe this was that. Maybe this guy won’t sell.”

  “Maybe he won’t,” Maya guessed, “probably won’t.”

  “And if it turns out his kids are happy and it’s not like the, the … the white trash people.”

  “The Turpins.”

  “Turpins, yeah. If the kids are alright?”

  “Probably won’t have to sell either.”

  “So it could be a nothing burger.” Malouf sighed. “And where does that leave yours truly?”

  Maya went all in: “We take a gamble. You wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting if you didn’t gamble. You’re a gambler.” She saw him inhale the smoke up his ass, as he shifted happily in his seat; he held it in and felt its warmth, and she could see it felt good to him.

  “I am? I am.” He smiled. “Broad numbers?”

  “Upside is huge. Hundreds of millions. A billion. More. I almost don’t want to put a cap on it.”

  “Then don’t. Downside? Exposure?”

  “Not bad at all. Couple million for land that has to be sold for pennies on the dollar and no one else knows to bid on. A steal.”

  “So we keep it very quiet. Go on. What’s the play?”

  Darrin popped his head in the door. “Hey, boss man, you got five minutes?”

  Malouf turned on his number one, glaring with a mixture of boredom and contempt that froze the young man in the doorway. “Get the fuck out of here, Darrin, can’t you see I’m doing actual business with the lovely Maya Abbadessa?”

  “Sorry, Boss. Sorry, Maya.” Darrin skulked away like a dog.

  Malouf turned his dark eyes back to Maya. “You were saying before we were rudely interrupted by my former favorite courtier?”

  Maya could barely suppress a smile, and Malouf noted her glee. He winked at her to continue, and she did. “We say something like—‘Mr. Mormon, we don’t want you to lose any of your land, but we are having trouble seeing our way out of this dilemma. We are here to help.’”

  “How can we help?”

  Maya nodded at the inside joke. Malouf was responding like a trained seal to her well-timed prompts. “Exactly. And I came up with a gambit.”

  “A gambit beyond the half deal worth hundreds of millions?”

  “A gambit for billions that also aligns us with the educational policies of the great state of California.”

  “I miss the way Arnold used to say it, don’t you—‘Galeefvawnya.’”

  Malouf was the kind of golfer who liked to talk while other people were putting, to see if they could concentrate on the kill. It wasn’t mere gamesmanship, it was part of the game to him.

  Maya held firm. “We say, let’s make a wager.”

  “Who? You and the Mitt Romney?”

  “Yes, I’m betting a guy like this Powers—off the grid, mountain macho man with a harem, has got a pretty nice-size ego—”

  “Safe to say.”

  “Yeah, and pride goeth before a fall, so we say—‘You think you’re doing things so right here in your little world, but it’s not clear to the government at all’…”

  Malouf raised his hand. “I’m gonna stop you right there.”

  Maya felt whiplash; she had been ascending so fast, the glass ceiling hurt her neck. “What? Really?”

  “Oh, look at that face. The pout. You’re adorable when you’re disappointed, sexy.”

  “I don’t get it. You don’t like it?” She sounded to herself like a six-year-old whose parent has disliked her finger painting, and immediately hated herself for it.

  “I like that we are helping kids. I like that a lot. And I am a gambler, but I don’t gamble so much on things as on people. And I’m gonna gamble on you. I love you, so I love the play, and I don’t know it, which makes me love it more. Also, I’m thinking that a man with multiple wives does a fair amount of thinking with his dick, and your pretty face, not my mug, will encourage that bad habit to continue. At the very least, an old-fashioned dude like that underestimates women. Let him underestimate you. Capisce?” Oh, the bad Italian from the Palestinian man, the faux mobster talk, the Godfather references—seemed the only movies these Praetorian capitalists had ever seen besides porn were Godfather One and Two, Glengarry Glen Ross, Pulp Fiction, and Happy Gilmore. Odd because Malouf struck her as a man that would dig Citizen Kane.

  Malouf continued, “Is this gambit legal? I feel I should ask.”

  “Probably mostly. I wouldn’t call it illegal.”

  “Extralegal? Legal adjacent?”

  “I think it’s more like something the law hasn’t seen yet, and as such, it will be up to us to bend the legal criteria to our own demands. When the time comes.”

  “As a rule, I feel my good friend Mr. Koch’s dictum of ten thousand percent compliance to the law might be a little exaggerated, a little … fundamentalist.”

  “I’m aiming for somewhere around one hundred percent compliance.”

  “I have found the sweet spot to be around eighty percent. Nobody’s perfect.” He shrugged comically, like Jack Benny.

  “I can work with that.”

  “And don’t repeat that.”

  “Repeat what?” They laughed at how clever they were being.

  Malouf nodded and put his finger over his surprisingly full and sensuous lips for her to be quiet. “Seems to me,” he said, “that you’re a chess player. But you like to move people around the board rather than wooden pieces. Right? But you can gin up the old empathy when you need to, right?”r />
  Maya liked that description of herself; it flattered her. Though she also liked to think of herself as a lover and a nascent spiritual person. From somewhere deep in her mind she recalled the campfire story of the chimps and the bonobos, and that we humans were descended from both, so Maya felt both, the warrior-like chimp and the lovemaking bonobo; she was a chess player of human pieces with heart and sympathy for her vanquished and bloodied victims. The whole package. She snapped herself out of that self-aggrandizing revery. Malouf was floating compliments her way in order to distract her precisely like this. Obsequiousness from a man like Malouf caused her alarm to sound. She knew weaponized flattery was one of his sneakiest business go-tos.

  “How much time do you need? And how much capital?” he asked.

  “I might need a year,” she replied, “maybe a little more, maybe less, and the capital is nothing. Maybe a hundred K or so, maybe … You can keep the whole thing in-house, no loans…”

  He chuckled at the pittance she would need, a genuine laugh, like a little boy. “In-house is right, I have a hundred K in my couch cushions.”

  The GQ had remained open on Malouf’s desk to an ad where a young man with cut, wet abs whose beauty seemed generically familiar, wearing only a bathing suit and a glistening watch, stared out at them, seemingly issuing some sort of absurd and empty challenge. She didn’t know if he was selling a fragrance or a movie or a timepiece, or simply wanted a slap fight. Malouf snapped closed the magazine, like it had suddenly said something impudent, and swept it off to the side.