Pruitt-Igoe

Les Myers

Pruitt-Igoe

 
 
It’s always eight guys. No wives, no kids, always the weekend before Super Bowl, always at Steamboat, where two of us have houses. A doctor, two lawyers, a judge. The rest of us sell for a living. Everyone played a sport in college. Everyone’s very fit. Late forties, early fifties, skiing bumps like they’re fifteen years old. Downhill in the morning, cross-country in the afternoon, thirty kilometers around the lake at Catamount, balls to the wall. But the real competition begins at cocktail hour and continues into the evening. Rough-and-tumble conversation, tall tales told well—this is what gets you a permanent invitation to this event. So far the new guy is a washout.

His name is Taylor. He’s an acquaintance of the judge. Notice, I didn’t say friend. The judge—a relentlessly unpleasant little man who wrestled 125, second string, at Purdue, the least successful member of this group by any measure, his dismal salary public record, his petty corruption legendary—the judge himself will tell you with perverse pride he doesn’t have friends. So who is Taylor? And why is the judge, who never opens his wallet out here, suddenly grabbing checks left and right?

Somebody asks Taylor what he does for a living. “I’m a baker,” he says. Everybody nods. The humility is refreshing. So, Taylor, how’s the bakery business? “Plenty of dough,” he says with a tight smile, “everything is rising.” There’s an awkward pause. The guys look at each other. The judge comes to the rescue. He whips out his phone and pulls up an old photo, a younger, heavier Taylor, in short shorts, miles above the rim, ripping the ball out of the hands of a Kansas player. Holy crap, is that Danny Manning?

Taylor studies the picture like he’s never seen it before. “Second round, NCAA, 1987,” he says at last. “We lost by three.”

Taylor’s the real deal. He played for Charlie Spoonhour at Southwest before it became Missouri State. Did I mention he’s tall? He’s pleasant enough but a little too quiet for this group. The guys don’t know what to make of him. Unable to keep our names straight, he quickly gives up and starts calling everybody chief. Equally unforgivable, he doesn’t drink. On the lifts Friday morning, the judge quietly informs us that Taylor is a recovering alcoholic but fails to mention a more provocative detail: that he had been incarcerated recently. The judge and I hang back and ski with him the first few runs. He’s a little rusty on the downhill, but in the afternoon, around the lake, we can’t keep up with him. He’s been doing a lot of running, as it turns out. Two hours a day on a sixty-yard asphalt oval. In prison slippers.

Taylor and I are in adjacent rooms upstairs at the doctor’s place. I never sleep well the first night at altitude. I’m up at four. I walk by Taylor’s room. The light’s on. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed. He looks like a man waiting to be shot.

“Are you okay?”

“Doing fine, chief.”

The weather couldn’t be better. Cold and sunny in the morning, a few clouds in the afternoon, a couple inches of powder each night, but the mood is subdued. We keep getting separated, we can’t get a rhythm going, and then, Saturday, first run, the doctor catches an edge and dislocates his shoulder. He soldiers on, but during our lunch break he notices a worrisome swelling above his spleen. We spend the rest of the day in the ER getting him checked out. Sunday, some of the guys are coming down with colds. Everybody’s bickering. And of course we can’t stop thinking about the guy Taylor’s filling in for, dead a month ago, felled by cancer.

And now it’s Sunday night, the long weekend almost over. We’re sitting in the backroom at Lonnie’s Bistro, pounding appetizers and hundred-dollar bottles of wine. Lonnie pokes up the fire, clears some plates, and brings out yet another bottle from his meticulously curated private cellar. Tomorrow we all head back to St. Louis. Everybody’s glum about going back to work.

“Spiritus contra spiritum,” the judge intones, approving the bottle. We toast our fallen comrade once more, vowing to put guns to our heads rather than go out the way he did. Then the conversation veers abruptly to a bizarre piece of news in the papers just before we left, the murder of billionaire hedge fund manager Irwin Keller in north St. Louis. What was Keller doing in St. Louis? What the fuck was he doing on the north side? It’s a war zone up there.

I’m watching Taylor. He’s got some serious sunburn, but all of a sudden he looks really pale. The judge keeps looking at him, urging him to jump in. Now I see what’s going on. A story has been teed up. Taylor is about to take a reluctant swing at it. This is why he’s here. This is a command performance. This, as it turns out, is a sort of a perp walk.

“I’ll tell you what he was doing,” Taylor says at last. The guys put down their glasses and look at each other. The new guy’s finally talking. Taylor, the recovering alcoholic, reaches for the Pinot Noir. Hand shaking, he fills his glass and begins his story: “He was looking for Pruitt-Igoe.”

It was last May, the weekend before Mother’s day. I’d been out of prison just a few weeks. The judge over there, one of my victims, can give you more detail if you’re interested, but the crime wasn’t remarkable. I was a financial advisor. Striving for a certain lifestyle, I levered up, commingling client funds with my own. This worked until it didn’t. In 2008 I got wrong-footed in, of all things, some plain-vanilla trust preferred securities issued by one of our local banks. I got sixty months. I served thirty-six.

So I’m on a plane, on my way to Omaha, violating the terms of my release by leaving the state without talking to my parole officer. They could send me back to prison for this, but I don’t have a lot to lose at this point. The wife has left me, the kids have disowned me, the house has been sold for taxes. I’ve got exactly twenty dollars in my pocket and no idea where I’m staying tonight. The town is sold out for the weekend. Yes, I’m on my way to the Berkshire Hathaway meeting, Buffett’s big party, thirty-five thousand faithful shareholders trekking to Omaha to hear the Oracle pontificate. Not me. I’m looking for a job. A real job. This is complicated by a felony record and a lifetime ban from the securities industry.

I change planes at Midway and take the last seat. The guy next to me looks vaguely familiar. Late fifties, gaunt face, longish red hair under a Dodgers cap, jeans, a linty black fleece. He’s looking at the Financial Times, fidgeting, sneaking glances out the window.  The paper is three days old. It’s spotted with grease. We take off, half an hour goes by, the guy is still combing through the same article, marking it up with a blue Sharpie now, circling words, drawing lines between them. He’s making me nervous. Everybody’s a little nervous. This is just a few weeks after the marathon bombing in Boston. There’s a loud conversation in the seat behind us, about how lax security is at the meeting. Now I’m sitting there wondering if this nut sitting next to me has got a bomb in his shoe.

But then the flight attendant comes by, the guy says something, and I recognize the voice. This is no terrorist! This is Irwin Keller, the famous contrarian, who got his start backing up the truck on Union Carbide the day after Bhopal, and then, during the dot-com era, the guy you’d see on TV every day ripping into some puffed-up Internet wonder. Always right, but right too soon. He almost lost everything, but when the century turned, he did very well. He was out there shorting Global Crossing and Tyco and all that other garbage when nobody else was. He was the guy Jeff Skilling called a motherfucker on an Enron conference call. So what’s a billionaire doing in the cramped bulkhead seat of a discount airline? I’m trying to figure this out when a woman pops out of the lavatory. Early forties, dark hair, lots of gold, gym-toned arms, very tan, very sleek. She stands there glaring at us and then as she passes she makes this weird buzzing sound.  Zzzzz….

What’s that all about?

Keller shrugs, spins a finger at his temple and goes back to his paper. Now we’re starting to land. He pulls up his sleeve to check the time. Nice watch. I’m a big fan of vintage time pieces, I tell him. He gives me an appraising look. Original except for the crystal, he says. Paper face, hand-painted dial, manufactured in 1917, carried at Belleau Wood by a kid from Pennsylvania who didn’t make it home.

Tragic, I offer, perhaps with insufficient sincerity.

No more tragic than the lives of the girls who painted these things, he scoffs. He starts pointing at the numbers on the watch. Here’s a miscarriage, he says, his voice rising. A poisoned womb, a crumbling jawbone, necroses of the tongue and throat, breast cancer, head and neck cancer. Fucking Buffett ….. Keller is practically shouting now. Why won’t he talk about this? Why won’t he talk about Pruitt-Igoe?

Yes, he said Pruitt-Igoe, our Pruitt-Igoe, that infamous northside housing project,  that failed experiment in slum clearance and public housing policy, completed in 1955, demolished not even twenty years later. Built on the cheap, it started falling apart immediately. Thirty-three buildings, ten thousand people, most of them young, most of them black, racked, stacked and slotted in a high-rise concentration camp just five miles away from the comfortable suburban St. Louis home where I grew up. In our house Pruitt-Igoe was synonymous with hell, the place you end up when you hang out with the wrong kids, when you stay out late, when you do drugs. Get your act together, son, or you’ll end up at Pruitt-Igoe.

We’ve all heard the stories. Broken families, broken windows, broken pipes. Waterfalls of ice cascading down the sides of the buildings in winter. Kids pissing and defecating in the vestibules because nobody thought to put toilets anywhere near the ground floor. The elevators are always broken. Who wants to climb eleven floors to take a dump? The gangs, the playground firefights, rapes and murders in the trashed breezeways, rooftop snipers, babies rolling out of windows, the EMT killed by a falling TV. The ambulances stop coming, the cops stop coming. A horrible place. And yet, from the upper floors of those brutal towers, a remarkable view—downtown and the river and the turgid steel legs of the Arch growing together just three miles away. Eighteen times the earth flew around the sun, and as soon as the babies started having babies, they blew the place up. We all know something truly regrettable happened there, but what could this possibly have to do with Warren Buffett?

I get off the plane, make a few calls, and a few minutes later I’m walking into a Mexican restaurant in downtown Council Bluffs with some guys I used to work with. We all got into the business at the same time, the recession of ‘91, Dean Witter before it was Morgan Stanley, all of them working for themselves now, mostly on the West Coast. They drape a lanyard and meeting badge around my neck, welcoming me back like a conquering hero. They’re shoving drinks at me, laughing about what they refer to as my sabbatical. There’s some happy talk about helping me find a job. I let it be known I don’t have a room for the night. No problem. I can crash with one of them, unless they all get lucky, in which case, I’m on my own.

The meeting is an annual ritual for us, not unlike your ski weekend here, where we recite war stories and measure ourselves against one another. Now and again we bring clients in order to write the thing off. We wine and dine them, save seats for them in the hall, allow them to believe for a weekend that they are part of something larger and more enduring than themselves, allow them to believe, if they wish to believe, that we are righteous sons of Benjamin Graham, father of value investing. Which we aren’t. We pander to impatient capital, churn and burn, take no prisoners, and all of us loathe Buffett for that cynical, inflammatory canard about his secretary paying a higher tax rate than he does. We also share this: we were all on planes headed for New York the morning the towers fell. The firm lost six that day. There but for the grace of God….

The restaurant’s packed, lots of hungry shareholders in town, also it’s Cinco de Mayo. We set up camp in the bar. Baskets of chips and pitchers of margaritas arrive. I’m telling them about Keller. They laugh at how out of touch I am. They tell me about the rogue trader who sent the SEC crawling up his ass, the FBI raid on his Newport Beach office, and a month ago the CNBC interview where he does a Tom Cruise, jumping on chairs practically, screaming about financial repression and the demise of the gold standard, going off on Buffett, and finishing up with a tirade in which he calls out the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and a certain family of European bankers which secretly controls the Federal Reserve…. No, it’s not quite black helicopters and the Elders of Zion but you can see where this is going. A couple days later, end of the quarter, massive withdrawals. Pension funds, endowments, anybody not locked up is gone. Why’s he flying Southwest? Well, not because the Gulfstream is in the shop. The fucker’s on his way to broke.

But why does he have a hard-on for Buffett, and what’s this Pruitt-Igoe business? The questions hang above the table like piñatas. We bat at them for a while. Finally someone suggests Keller got his tit in the wringer on the Heinz deal, shorted a boatload of it just before Uncle Warren swooped in. No, everybody jumps down his throat. Check the facts, asshole, look at the 13Fs. He was long Heinz. He’s owned it for years. He made money on the deal. It’s not the fucking ketchup, and it’s not the old man’s liberal politics. How about plain old jealousy? Imagine you’re Keller, business sucks, but you’re still sitting on a billion dollars and you can’t even make the Forbes 400 anymore. You’ve put your name on a couple hospitals and a business school. So what? Fucking Buffet is curing malaria.

The judge interrupts, perhaps dissatisfied with the way Taylor’s story is unfolding. “This Pruitt-Igoe thing has been in the news. There have been rumors from the beginning. The army was conducting secret radiological testing on unsuspecting civilians. Pruitt-Igoe was ground zero. It was built as a proving ground. You’ve all seen pictures—what does it resemble? Soviet-era apartment blocks. You could pick the whole thing up and set it down in Moscow, nobody would notice.”

One of the lawyers nods slowly. “When I was a kid, we had a cleaning lady who lived up there. She knew Michael and Leon Spinks, the boxers. Their mom lived on the same floor. Odetta, this cleaning lady, she used to talk about how these trucks would come around, spraying for mosquitoes . . . in January.”

“And Keller’s watch,” says the doctor, leaning forward, “he’s talking about the Radium Girls, the dial painters. We read about this in medical school. They told the girls the radium was salutary.” He pauses. You can almost hear the sounds of cogitation, metal on metal, a steel-trap mind at work. “I bet this is connected to the baby teeth study,” he says at last, drawing blank stares all around. “Baby teeth,” he explains, “collected in St. Louis, back in the 50s and 60s, thousands of bloody-stumped little teeth, diverted from the tooth fairy, snatched from under slobbery pillows and mailed to Wash U. They were measuring fallout. Fallout lands on the grass, cows eat the grass, kids drink the milk….”

Lonnie uncorks still another bottle and asks if we’re ready to order. We wave him off. We get sidetracked into a long discussion about the nature of conspiracy theories, the doctor even more voluble than usual. Perhaps it’s the pain medication, perhaps it’s the over-priced wine. At any rate, he lays out in detail the biological explanation for the widespread appeal of such theories—haywire dopamine receptors, hyperactive pattern recognition response. The other lawyer, the trial attorney, cuts him off finally, turning to Taylor. “How do you connect Buffett to all this?” he demands. “He was still in grad school, sitting in Ben Graham’s class up at Columbia, when Pruitt-Igoe was built.”

Taylor smiles glumly, pours himself more wine, and continues his story.

The mariachis arrive. Somebody pays them to go away. We fill up on chips and guacamole and go through I don’t know how many pitchers of margaritas. At some point I get up and go to the bathroom. When I come back, there at the other end of the table, it’s the woman from the plane, the woman who buzzed Keller! This can’t be a coincidence, can it? What’s going on? Did she follow me here? I sit back and watch for a moment. Everybody’s hitting on her, so not a wife, not a girlfriend, probably not a client. Who is she? Compliance officer, someone says. The wisecrack gets passed around the table as we plan our evening. We’ll hit the strip club and then the casino, but first some of the guys want to drive out to Borsheims, pick out some jewelry for the wives, take advantage of the meeting discount.

We caravan west in three cars, across the river and up Dodge Street. I’m wedged in the backseat of a rented convertible with a couple of the guys and the woman, whose name is Moira, on my lap. The top is down. Lilacs scent the chilly air. The forsythia and redbud are maxed out. The colors are sharp, startling. My jacket covers Moira’s bare shoulders. Her hair brushes my face. I’ve spent the last three years in a cave, a cave inside a cave, shedding old skin, pupating, watching shadows play on the walls of my grim cell. Squinting into the setting sun, I am overwhelmed, nearly blinded by light and possibility.

As you know, it’s no longer an exclusive party out at Borsheims. For the price of a B share, anybody can get into this thing. They close down the whole mall for the event. A huge bar is set up in the atrium. It’s all ferns and skylights, pale wood, stone veneer. It looks like the lobby of a thriving mega church. The congregation is loud, roaring, conversations amped up by free cocktails. The food line winds around the bar and down the corridors, the mass affluent, assorted salt-of-the earth types, spearing meatballs and cheese cubes, heaping their plates with slices of rare beef. Also, a few Wall Street stiffs in suits, looking miserable. Everybody has to come to this thing once.

The kids from the B-schools are packed ten deep at the bar. Moira hands one of them some money to stand in line for us. A little waterfall spills into a pool nearby. We wait there for our drinks. I don’t see any coins in the fountain. Nobody makes wishes anymore, I shout at her. She can’t hear me. I try again. Nobody carries change anymore, she shouts back. Our drinks arrive. We bump and jostle through the jewelry store and outside, through the tent where the band is playing. At last we find a place to sit. At last we can talk. Who are you? I ask. If you work for Keller, she replies haughtily, you know who I am. Swear to God, I don’t. She doesn’t believe me. I try a different angle. How many times have you been to this thing? Too many, she says. I used to come with him. My parents were his first clients, then I was a client, then a lover, then, in six months, he destroyed a fortune it took generations to build.

That sucks. I slam my drink. What brings you this year?

I came to watch him blow himself up.

Not literally, one would hope.

One would hope.

What’s with the buzzing? You were buzzing at him on the plane. What’s that all about?

It drives him crazy, she says with a sly smile. It’s to remind him about Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein? The emerging markets guy at Goldman Sachs?

No, the other one.

I reach way back into my brain, way back to my undergraduate days. All of a sudden I remember this hoary failed Jesuit talking about the philosopher showing the fly the way out of the bottle. I snatch the name out of the air: Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Yes, she says, pleased with me, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Adolph Hitler’s grade-school classmate, central figure in a playground altercation which ignites a firestorm of hatred which will consume millions. Wittgenstein who recruited Burgess, Philby, and Blunt. Wittgenstein who handed the Enigma Code to Stalin…Wittgenstein, the last piece of the puzzle, the one piece Keller can’t fit.

Is she kidding? Does she take this stuff seriously? I can’t tell. I have to ask: How does a Jew get sucked into this conspiracy theory garbage, when so much of it’s anti-Semitic?

You think he’s a Jew?

He’s not?

She lets me dangle, then reels me in. Of course he is, she says with a laugh. All these hedge funds guys are. It’s a fucking cabal.

Why does he hate Buffett?

Buffett’s a Pollyanna, she says. Things aren’t getting better. Any idiot can see this. Second law of thermodynamics. No fire, no ice. The future is lukewarm.

She’s as nutty as Keller, no doubt about it, but as I said, she’s attractive. She’s got a hotel room and I don’t. Lukewarm, okay, I think I follow. So what happened at Pruitt-Igoe?

It’s not what, it’s who, she says. Who conspired to hush it up? And where does  responsibility lie now?  The dial painters were the first victims, the hapless brood of Pruitt-Igoe, perhaps the last. It begins with U.S. Radium and from there turns into a shell game. Standard Chemical, Radium Chemical, Radium Dial, Radium Service Co. of America, Radium Luminous Material Corp., Luminous Processes, American Cyanamid, Mallinckrodt and now maybe—don’t take this to the bank—Pfizer. They shuffle and shuffle. But they can’t make it to go away. Most of the people who lived there are still alive.

I go back inside for refills. When I come out, I can’t find Moira. Half an hour goes by. I’ve finished both drinks. I take out my phone and try to call the guys. My prepaid minutes have inexplicably expired. I’m fucked. I don’t even know what hotel they’re staying at.

Still looking for her, a little panicky now, I wander back into the jewelry store. I stop to watch the Cartier rep working this young hotshot and his glamorous girlfriend. The rep hands him this gorgeous tank watch, pink gold, silvered dial, signature sapphire set in the crown. How much? Twenty-five five with the discount. No tax if we ship it. The guy swallows hard. He’s showing it to the girlfriend when all of a sudden, boom, an explosion, then another one. The store goes dark. It’s just overloaded transformers popping, but everybody in the store thinks bomb. They’re yelling and pushing, and in the moment it takes the emergency lights to come on, I pluck the watch out of the guy’s hand. Ducking down to thwart security cameras, I let the surge of the crowd carry me outside. I’m home free when a hand comes down on my shoulder. I turn around slowly, in my mind already on my way back to prison, but it’s Moira and she’s got a drink for me and it’s miraculously intact.

We catch a ride downtown with a couple of kids who work for one of the Berkshire operating companies. Fasteners, we make fasteners, they tell us. We’re all about hooking up. Moira and I laugh. We’re making out in the backseat. Should I show her the watch? I’m not sure. I don’t think it would impress her, but the fact that I stole it might. In the end, confident I’ve closed the deal already, I leave it in my pocket.

The guys take us to the Doubletree. There are at least three receptions underway on the same floor. There’s a rumor Buffett’s in the hotel somewhere. I park myself next to an open bar and get absolutely hammered. Moira wanders off. At some point I stumble out to the lobby to look for her. Guess who I see. Yeah, Keller—same outfit, baseball cap, J.C. Penney jeans, linty fleece, but suspiciously bulkier, like he’s got something strapped on underneath. And guess who he’s talking to. Yeah, Moira. She’s jabbing him with a finger, shouting. He grabs at his chest, like a suicide bomber reaching for the detonator. I flinch. Nothing happens. Moira stalks off. Keller collapses on a bench. I sit down next to him. He seems to recognize me from the plane. I let him catch his breath, then I ask, So where’s Buffett? Behind door number one, number two, or number three?

He doesn’t return my calls anymore, Keller says bitterly, the same guy who was putting the arm on me just a few years ago to take the pledge to give it all away. Thirty years I’ve known him. I’ve been in his home, his basement. He’s an O gauger—Keller says this with evident disdain—huge layout, hundreds of feet of track. Twenty years ago, I called it. Someday this man is going to buy himself a railroad.

A brilliant move, I concede. He saw the potential of the Bakken shale early. He’s a genius.

Genius has nothing to do with it, Keller says, his voice rising. Buffett started early and stayed in the game. Deep moats, fat pitches, a little bit of luck. It’s that simple. Yes, he’s run up the score. So what? Money is nothing to him. Reputation is everything…. Keller pauses and gives me a meaningful look. Get to the hall early tomorrow, my friend, get a good seat. You don’t want to miss it—the big splat, the bone and blood of impeccable reputation meeting pavement.

How did you put it all together? I ask, egging him on. What aren’t people seeing?

Keller smiles. A big smile. He’s beaming. I’ve just made his day. Oppenheimer, he whispers, leaning close. Oppenheimer to Pulitzer, Pulitzer to Graham.

Ben Graham?

No, Katharine Graham, no relation, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post, a Meyer before she was a Graham, daughter of a Jewish banker, the woman some would say toppled our thirty-seventh president, that slippery bastard, Nixon, who stymied the Bolsheviks and the Gnomes of Zurich by slamming the gold window shut and opening the door for China. Everybody thinks Buffett met Graham in ‘73. Not so. It was ten years earlier, right after the supposed suicide of her husband, Philip Leslie Graham, who made the fatal mistake of revealing to the world JFK’s affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer, also no relation. Three months before the Cubans took Kennedy down in Dallas, Graham introduced Buffett to the Pulitzers, the CIA stooges who published the cover stories that allowed the Army to get on with their secret tests at Pruitt-Igoe. The Pulitzers introduced Buffett to Oppenheimer. At some point, Buffett overhears a conversation about U.S. Radium. He senses an opportunity, but does nothing. A couple years later one of the stunted daughters of U.S. Radium is in trouble, cash flow crunch, and maybe they want to offload some long-tail liability in a hurry. Buffett steps in, but first he tracks down Oppenheimer to get the whole scoop. Oppenheimer, who has huge misgivings about the tests on civilians, tells him everything. Buffett, too, has misgivings, but there’s a certain kind of deal he can’t walk away from no matter how much hair it has on it. And then it’s like Hitler rehearsing the Blitzkrieg in Spain, a dress rehearsal for what he’s done so profitably from time to time, most notably with U.S. Gypsum. Look, I’m a tolerant guy. The world needs vultures, I respect vultures, I’ve been called a vulture myself, but I can’t stand hypocrites. Keller taps his watch.  Buffett has to acknowledge his complicity in this atrocity and the ones that followed.

Yes, he’s nuts, but these conspiracy theories all have a measure of truth at their centers. In fact, there is little in what he has just told me that is demonstrably false. In any case we’re old friends now, Keller and I, and I’ve got an idea. I pull out the stolen watch. Make me an offer, I say boldly, handing it to him. He laughs. It’s a knockoff.  Not a knockoff, I protest. We go back and forth. How much? I ask for ten grand. How about five hundred? I swallow hard, knowing I won’t get any more than that on the street. Make it six hundred.

He starts peeling off bills. I’m putting the money away when all of a sudden there’s a commotion. One of the ballroom doors bursts open and there’s Buffett and his entourage. Buffett spots Keller. I actually see the old man wince, but he recovers and walks right over, hand out, and now the Oracle of Omaha is standing right next to me, close enough I could reach out and brush away the flakes of dry scalp powdering his collar, close enough I can see the tiny device nestled in a tuft of hair in his left ear. Keller gives me a knowing look and taps his own ear as if to warn: A hearing aid? Are you sure?

What are you doing here, Keller? Buffett chortles hoarsely. You’re not shorting, Berkshire, are you?

Only a fool would short Berkshire, Keller says. I’m shorting you, Warren Buffett.

That’s terrific. Buffett chuckles. He pumps Keller’s hand and turns away.

Pruitt-Igoe, Keller shouts at his back. We know all about it.

Buffett turns. Call me Tuesday. Debbie will put you through.

This won’t wait till Tuesday, Keller mutters, yanking again at the zipper on his fleece. Again, I flinch. Again, nothing happens. When I open my eyes, Keller is looking at me like I’m the one who’s nuts. At the same moment I spot Moira across the lobby. She’s been watching all this, clearly pissed. With me! She thinks I lied. She thinks I work for Keller! No, no! I chase her down the stairs and outside and down the block. No cabs. It’s really cold now. I toss my jacket over her shoulders again, completely forgetting about the money in the pocket, still trying to convince her I’m not Keller’s lackey. Then headlights flare and flash behind us. A Town Car pulls up, the back window slides down, Moira says something to the passenger and jumps in. The car takes off. I’ll never know for sure, but who could it have been but Keller?

I go back to the hotel and pass out under a table in an unlocked ballroom. Rousted by security at some point, I wander again into the cold night. Like the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp because the light is better there, I return to where Moira ditched me. There is of course no Moira, no jacket, no six hundred dollars.

At last I find what may be the only empty bed in town, a dumpster full of flattened cardboard. I crawl in and sleep soundly for a few hours. Then, suddenly, there’s daylight in my face and a greasy bag, the remains of a fast-food breakfast, lands on my chest. The cover slams down. Footsteps scrape away. They pause and come back. Somebody’s banging on the side of my can. Hey you, get out of there now!

Furious to be so rudely awakened, I climb out, ready to throttle the guy. Blinking, looking around, I suddenly see what’s going on. There’s a big blue Republic Services truck just down the street, headed this way. I could have ended up dead in a landfill. I stand there shaking, unable to speak, unable to thank the stranger who has just saved my life. It’s a pivotal moment, an intimation of the life-changing epiphany that is piling up already on the horizon of this day.

The meeting has been underway an hour when I finally take what may be the last seat in the house—top row, last seat, to the side of the stage, looking down at the board of directors assembled on folding chairs in front of the dais. From where I sit, a sapper with a good arm could lob a satchel charge and take out eight billionaires. Bill and Melinda are sitting on the end of the row closest to me, balls of blue light cupped in their hands, looking at their phones. Or are they? I start looking around and this same weird light is everywhere, not just blue, but red and green, too.

Are my eyes playing tricks on me? Still reeling from my brush with death, contending with a memorable hangover, I question my senses. I turn to the guy next to me. Do you see what I see? He edges away. The matron next to him reaches into a bag under her seat. Glow sticks, she whispers, explaining the mystery. She pulls one out and tries to hand it to me. The guy discourages her with a quick shake of his head. She pulls her hand back. Oriental Trading, she says with an apologetic look. They’re selling them at their booth in the expo hall, two for a buck.

I spend most of the day dozing. When I’m not dozing I’m looking around, trying to spot Moira, still hoping to get my jacket and money back. After lunch the audience thins. I move down, closer to the floor. Now it’s three o’clock. The panel of media sycophants, Sorkin, Loomis, and Quick, who have been lobbing softballs at Buffett all day, are apparently out of questions. The questions are all coming from the crowd now.

People have been waiting in line all day to ask the Oracle something. As the meeting winds down, I suddenly notice the station nearest me is next in the rotation and nobody’s there. If I move quickly I can grab the microphone, plead for Moira to return my coat, plead for my Morgan Stanley buddies to come rescue me. As I hurry down the aisle, someone with a heavy South Asian accent is asking Buffett a multi-part question that I don’t quite follow, but the old man’s answer is memorable:

No question about it. Our children will be healthier, they’ll be better educated, they’ll live longer, they’ll enjoy things we have only begun to dream about. But progressing, moving toward something as a species? Yes, possibly.

Close your eyes and imagine a train, one of ours, a great BNSF train, ten miles long, a thousand cars piled high with Powder River Basin coal, but no locomotives, not even a caboose. Now, you’ve got seven billion people on the planet, and somehow you’ve got them all here, exactly half on one end, half on the other. Everybody’s pushing but the train’s going nowhere.

Now imagine that a guy, just one guy, then a couple guys, then a few more, decide to stop pushing and take the long hike down to the other end to see what’s going on. Even as they walk something is changing. They get to the other end, add their shoulders and all of a sudden the thing lurches, and then, by golly, it’s moving, just a little, and before you know it….. It’s an old story. It’s been told a thousand ways—the terrific leverage inherent in the marginal event. Just one more of something can make all the difference. To a man dying of thirst, an ounce of water is worth all the gold in the world…..

But here’s what I think you’re really asking: Is progress somehow inherent in the train? My partner Charlie here, the Aristotelian, doesn’t think so, and I’m inclined to agree. He’ll tell you about the little rowboat he keeps at his place on the lake, and then he’ll ask you if you think the boat is inherent in the wood it’s made from. Of course not. And so this wonderful universe of ours, this reality we share, our home—was it designed to progress? Do we have any purpose beyond reproducing and surviving the next winter? Yes, I like to think so, but I’d add that progress, the possibility of it, lies in each of us, collectively and individually….

There’s a smattering of bored applause, but as I stand there, processing this, my knees go weak and at the same time my heart swells with something like gratitude. I have just been handed something far more valuable than the jacket and money I lost. I’ve been listening to Buffett for twenty years. Finally, something useful.

The spotlight swings toward me. Buffett coughs and looks at his watch. Last question. I clear my throat, I open my mouth, no idea what I’m going to say now, but then the light flies right over me! They’ve skipped my station! I’m as disappointed as I am relieved. Then I hear a familiar voice. I look up at the giant TV monitor. It’s Keller shading his eyes in the spotlight. He taps the microphone and begins:

Did you or did you not travel to the American Virgin Islands in 1965? How many times did you meet with Oppenheimer there? Why did you not attend his funeral? When will you tell us the truth about U.S. Radium? When you opened their books, did you or did you not see evidence of secret radiological testing on civilians in St. Louis and possibly right here in Omaha?

The rant goes on. The crowd starts clapping. Keller mistakes this for applause.

When will you share with us what you know about the false flag operation known as 9/11? Who was it that bought all those puts on United Airlines in the five trading days before the towers fell? And who was it that introduced you to Minoru Yamasaki, the designer of those towers, the designer also, lest we forget, of Pruitt-Igoe?

Everybody is clapping now.

Keller: Am I the only fucking one who sees this?

The microphone goes dead. The spotlight goes out.

Buffett: I think you’ve answered your own question, sir. Charlie?

Munger: I have nothing to add.

Two years go by before I see Taylor again. The ski weekend doesn’t happen anymore, or, if it does, I don’t know about it. We all go through some changes. I don’t see the guys much anymore. I’m working less than I did, trying out some new things. Twice a week I take a long lunch and go down to Soulard to help out at the sandwich window at St. Vincent’s. We feed sixty or seventy guys a day. I always feel better afterwards. Yes, there’s often some voyeurism at play in this kind of volunteerism, maybe some schadenfreude, definitely some better you than me, but also in my case, and I won’t even begin trying to explain this, some envy. For most of these guys it’s addiction and psychiatric issues keeping them on the street, but there are a few regulars who don’t fit the mold. For reasons known only to themselves they have gone off the grid.

I push a short stack of tinfoil wrapped sandwiches, baloney and cheese on stale bread, through the sliding window. “Kool-Aid or milk?”

“Water…you got some ketchup back there, chief?”

I lean out and look up. Way up. Yeah, it’s Taylor. It’s eighty degrees outside, the pear trees are blooming, the crabapples in the churchyard are fragrant masses of pink and green, but he’s all wrapped up in a greasy nylon army parka with an orange liner, just like one I wore in college. “Heinz.” I shove the bottle to him. “Fifty-seven varieties.”

“Fucking Heinz.” He laughs, recognizing me. I get someone to spell me at the window. I go outside and sit with him at the picnic bench under the crabapples. He fills me in. Inspired by Buffett’s parable of the train, he cobbled together a series of inspirational talks, each built around some uplifting anecdote from his prison experience, and then with seed money from the judge, he hit the road, touring as a motivational speaker for a while. When this endeavor failed to get traction, he enrolled in divinity school, also with assistance from the judge, who went to prison himself shortly after writing the first tuition check. Things went south from there.

He says he dabbles in ferrous scrap now. He sells piss, blood when he can. They dock you on the blood if you’re under a hundred fifty, he explains. He’s having trouble keeping his weight up. Yeah, he’s got some health issues, but he’s finally got the disability paperwork done, so he’s going to be okay. There’s a coffee-colored splotch on his cheek, a little bubbly ulcerated thing, maybe an inch across. I’m no doctor but even I can see this thing is ready to metastasize. I’m about to ask if he’s had someone look at it when he says to me, “Keller found what he was looking for.”

“What do you mean?”

He wads his untouched sandwiches into a ball and launches a three-pointer from twenty feet into the trash barrel. “You buy me a real lunch, chief, I’ll show you.”

He wants fried chicken, so I drive him over to Hodak’s on Gravois, where he changes his mind and orders the porterhouse, fries, slaw, onion rings and a chocolate shake. He finishes the shake, barely touches the rest. Right away, he hits me up for money. It’s always a challenge helping these guys. You know the cash is going straight into the till at the liquor store, but Taylor insists he’s been sober for six months. Okay, I’ll do what I can. I empty my wallet, thirty bucks altogether. He fans out the money and keeps an eye on it as he picks at the onion rings.

“Ever seen this?” He wipes his mouth and flips over a bill. I’m ready for a discursion about all the occult symbology that FDR and Henry Wallace added to the back of the dollar—the Novus ordo seclorum, the unfinished pyramid, the unblinking eye of the Great Architect. But that’s not it, not exactly. Taylor’s tapping the back of the new five. “What do your see here?”

I don’t see anything. I look again. “A dome maybe? The capitol dome?”

Taylor looks disappointed. No, sorry. Sorry for me. This con man, this homeless cancer-ridden alcoholic—he’s sorry for me?  What am I missing? What am I not seeing?

“They found Keller’s body over there.” Taylor points to a bus shelter on 20^th near Biddle. I hardly ever get up to the north side. I’m always amazed at how empty it has become, block after block with just a burned-out house or two.

“Word gets out about this crazy white guy camping in the woods. Somebody sees him taking cash out of a machine. They put a gun to his head, shove him in a car and start hitting ATMs all over town. They kill him when the card stops working.”

“He ran out of money?”

“No.” Taylor shakes his head, amused. “He was deep into his last billion, but nowhere close to broke.”

Continuing north we pass St. Stanislaus, where I remember attending a wedding years ago. Taylor points at the tree line behind the church. “There it is, our half a hundred-acre wood, right here in the middle of the city, Pruitt-Igoe.”

We make a left on Cass and then a quick left into the woods and follow a track of crumbling pavement. The edges of the site are used as a dump—old sofas, TVs, all kinds of garbage—but once you’re in the trees you might as well be out in the country. There’s a lot of scrubby stuff, mulberry, elm, ailanthus, but some good-sized specimens, too. Right away, I see a black cherry that must be fifty feet high.

I pull up next to a low brick building surrounded by a chain-link fence. We get out.  There’s a scrap of yellow metal, all shot up, nailed to a tree nearby. It’s a sign: Fallout Shelter. Taylor sees me looking at it but doesn’t comment on the irony. “Yamasaki built this, too,” he says, pointing at the building. “It’s supposed to be an electrical substation, but I’ve never seen any Ameren trucks back here. Hardly anybody comes here anymore. People are afraid of this place.”

We walk deeper into the woods. You have to look, but not too hard, to see evidence of what once stood here, broken sidewalk, a manhole cover, a lone streetlight emerging from the canopy.

“I’m up here one day,” Taylor says, “just wandering around, thinking about things, when suddenly I hear voices. I duck behind a tree and here come two guys, wearing space suits—white helmets, white gowns. They’re tall, taller than me, seven feet at least, jabbering in a strange language. One is carrying what looks like a weapon, a smoking weapon. What’s going on? Have the Martians arrived?

“It’s June, early June. Lots of pollen in the air. All of a sudden, I sneeze. The two guys turn around, staring through their helmets. Who are you, I blurt out, where are you from? They remove their headgear. It’s two black guys, their skin very dark against the white coveralls. Sudan, the one replies. Beekeepers, the other adds with peculiar intonation. We are beekeepers. Who, may I ask, are you?”

We crawl into a thicket of honeysuckle growing on what used to be a playground in front of the buildings on Dickson Street. There’s a pup tent hidden under it. Taylor dives into it and comes out with a veil and gloves. “Never use them myself,” he says, handing them to me. “These bees are mellow.” He reaches in again and now he’s holding what looks like a sloughed-off piece of the Tin Man, a blackened can with a spout and bellows. He fishes a wad of lint from his pocket, lights it and stuffs it in the can with a handful of pine needles. Soon, puffs of fragrant smoke emerge from our swinging censer. We proceed east to the bee yard, hidden in plain sight against the fence of St. Stanislaus, twelve tribes on three pallets, high-rise stacks of khaki and olive-green boxes, six deep. “Army colors,” Taylor notes. He pries up a corner of a box, weighing it in his hand. “The girls have been busy.”

He starts working frames apart, rifling through them as if looking for a misplaced file, sluggish bees crawling on the backs of his hand. He sets the supers aside. Now he’s in one of the deep boxes. “There she is.” He points with his hive tool. “A healthy queen. Perfectly normal except for one thing.” He indicates the dab of luminous paint on her back. “It’s a code, a year code. She’s old. All the queens here are old. No parasites, no disease, aging queens laying like it’s their first season…and yet the colonies don’t outgrow their boxes. The urge to swarm has been suppressed. Something incredible is happening here.”

“The experiments continue.”

“It’s hard to avoid that conclusion.” He replaces a frame and takes out another, turning so the light falls over his shoulder. “Even the Army doesn’t know what really  happened here. Dozens of secret tests going on at the same time, test inside test….”

“You think Keller saw this?”

He puts the smoker down and pulls out a wallet of translucent poly, a coupon organizer, from an inside pocket of his coat. He snaps off the elastic and removes a much folded newspaper clipping. It’s from the op-ed page of the Journal, a letter from Keller. It opens intriguingly enough: The Romans used to pay their taxes with honey…but then it quickly devolves into a familiar rant about monetary policy and meddling central banks. I scan down. Outside capital is fickle. I’ve returned what’s left and have completed my exit from the financial industry. I’m a beekeeper now. I’ve spent an indolent summer, watching over the grumbling hives. As I write this, two of the queen’s attendants, the unluckiest of their caste, yet no less diligent for the hand nature has dealt them, trudge out to empty the royal chamber pot; mortuary bees haul away the dead. Inside the boxes, low in the boxes, the girls are still dancing: There, there, over there, the truth is over there.

Winter will be here before we know it. The few drones lingering in the hives are about to get the heave-ho. But even as fall asters and goldenrod flare, the bees are still at it. They don’t stop till they have to.

There are some invaluable lessons here—about compounding numbers, comparative advantage, the amoral nature of altruism—and evidence enough to put to rest for good the case for free will. Mandeville was right. It’s our vicious nature that keeps things buzzing. To paraphrase Kanye West, we always worry about the wrong thing. It’s colony collapse we should fear most, the day we wake up to find that all the producers have checked out, leaving the looters to fend for themselves. Then who will make the bee bread? What will we do without the bees?

I’m guessing Taylor’s dead by now. In any case, I haven’t seen him, even though I’m spending more and more time up at Pruitt-Igoe. He was right. It’s as safe a place as you can find in the city. Hardly anybody comes back here. The Sudanese haven’t returned as far as I can tell. The bees are doing fine, but no one comes for the honey.

The kids are grown. The wife and I have called it quits. I’ve pared life back to the essentials. I’ve got an apartment downtown but spend less and less time there. I’ve pretty much stopped going in to work.

Mornings are spectacular at Pruitt-Igoe, the sun like a hot knife slicing through capped comb, through the Arch and the downtown skyscrapers and the goal-post spires of St. Stanislaus. I think proximity to this irradiated ground has affected the parish. They’re a little nutty in there, in the paper all the time—deliction, interdiction, and now excommunication. The Vatican has pushed them out to fend for themselves. I keep meaning to stop in and see what they’re up to but haven’t gotten around to it.

I sleep up here when the weather is good. Here in the middle of the city, I see deer, coyotes, turkeys. Every night the skunks come out to eye the hives in the moonlight. Right now, the black locust flow is peaking. The catalpas are kicking in, swaying, full-skirted, trailing clouds of perfume. Lord, how the bees love dancing with the catalpa. It breaks my heart.

I hear gunshots every night, gangbangers unloading on each other on the lawless streets that surround Pruitt-Igoe, but here in the woods it’s peaceful. City light makes it hard to see the stars, but the fireflies are amazing. They hover, they flash. My eyes travel dot-to-dot. Nubile shapes emerge. It’s those tragic worker bees, the Radium Girls, clean, industrious virgins, mouth parts flecked with luminous dust.

I’m sorry to hear Buffett has died. I think about him often. I imagine him alone in his narrow bed, Big Ben glowing and ticking on the nightstand. He, too, dreams about the dial painters, tipping delicate brushes with their lips before dipping them into the deadly paint. Working, working, rocking on their sunlit benches, pressing their powdered thighs together, rocking themselves to orgasm, dreaming about the doughboys who will look at these dials a last time before going over the top to die.

Is an unwitting sacrifice a sacrifice? I wonder about that when I think about Keller’s murder, when I think about the towers falling, the buildings slumping against each other, the dust blooming. The architect must have known how readily they would fail. Was the design flawed? Or is design the flaw? You can drive yourself crazy thinking about these things.

Yes, I’ve tasted the honey. It’s extraordinarily viscous and dark, delicious, but I wouldn’t recommend eating it on a regular basis. Something’s very wrong with it. You’ll have to trust me on this—it glows. Light leaks from the hives at night.

I’m standing at the corner of Cass and Jefferson, waiting for the light to change, crossing the street to catch the Number 32. I’ve got a bus pass. Otherwise, I’m broke. A car rolls up, a window slides down, a Good Samaritan hands me a bottle of water and a five-dollar bill. I am grateful. Keller was flat-out wrong about altruism. It’s these unexpected acts of kindness that move us forward as a species. I find it sad that he was presented with this wisdom, but couldn’t embrace it. He became deeply pessimistic, doubling down on gold the summer he spent here. I am rather more optimistic.

I hold the bill up to the light. It’s one of the new fives. The watermark under the new treasury secretary’s signature—this is what Taylor wanted me to see. And, yes, I see it now. It’s a skep, an old basket-shaped straw hive, enduring symbol of industry and cooperative thrift. The hive on the five. Some of us see it, some of us don’t.