Bay.
CHAPTER 9. Opportunity of a Lifetime
The true test of Indonesia awaited me at MAIN. I went to the Prudential Center headquarters first thing in the morning, and while I was standing with dozens of other employees at the elevator I learned that Mac Hall, MAIN’s enigmatic, octogenarian chairman and CEO, had promoted Einar to president of the Portland, Oregon office. As a result, I now officially reported to Bruno Zambotti.
Nicknamed “the silver fox” because of the color of his hair and his uncanny ability to outmaneuver everyone who challenged him, Bruno had the dapper good looks of Cary Grant. He was eloquent, and he held both an engineering degree and an MBA. He understood econometrics and was vice president in charge of MAIN’s electrical power division and of most of our international projects. He also was the obvious choice to take over as president of the corporation when his mentor, the aging Jake Dauber, retired. Like most MAIN employees, I was awed and terrified by Bruno Zambotti.
Just before lunch, I was summoned to Bruno’s office. Following a cordial discussion about Indonesia, he said something that made me jump to the edge of my seat.
“I’m firing Howard Parker. We don’t need to go into the details, except to say that he’s lost touch with reality.” His smile was disconcertingly pleasant as he tapped his finger against a sheaf of papers on his desk. “Eight percent a year. That’s his load forecast. Can you believe it? In a country with the potential of Indonesia!”
His smile faded and he looked me squarely in the eye. “Charlie Illingworth tells me that your economic forecast is right on target and will justify load growth of between 17 and 20 percent. Is that right?”
I assured him it was.
He stood up and offered me his hand. “Congratulations. You’ve just been promoted.”
Perhaps I should have gone out and celebrated at a fancy restaurant with other MAIN employees—or even by myself. However, my mind was on Claudine. I was dying to tell her about my promotion and all my experiences in Indonesia. She had warned me not to call her from abroad, and I had not. Now I was dismayed to find that her phone was disconnected, with no forwarding number. I went looking for her.
A young couple had moved into her apartment. It was lunchtime but I believe I roused them from their bed; obviously annoyed, they professed to know nothing about Claudine. I paid a visit to the real estate agency, pretending to be a cousin. Their files indicated they had never rented to anyone with her name; the previous lease had been issued to a man who would remain anonymous by his request. Back at the Prudential Center, MAIN’s employment office also claimed to have no record of her. They admitted only to a “special consultants” file that was not available for my scrutiny.
By late afternoon, I was exhausted and emotionally drained. On top of everything else, a bad case of jet lag had set in. Returning to my empty apartment, I felt desperately lonely and abandoned. My promotion seemed meaningless or, even worse, to be a badge of my willingness to sell out. I threw myself onto the bed, overwhelmed with despair. I had been used by Claudine and then discarded. Determined not to give in to my anguish, I shut down my emotions. I lay there on my bed staring at the bare walls for what seemed like hours.
Finally, I managed to pull myself together. I got up, swallowed a beer, and smashed the empty bottle against a table. Then I stared out the window. Looking down a distant street, I thought I saw her walking toward me. I started for the door and then returned to the window for another look. The woman had come closer. I could see that she was attractive, and that her walk was reminiscent of Claudine’s, but it was not Claudine. My heart sank, and my feelings changed from anger and loathing to fear.
An image flashed before me of Claudine flailing, falling in a rain of bullets, assassinated. I shook it off, took a couple Valium, and drank myself to sleep.
The next morning, a call from MAIN’s personnel department woke me from my stupor. Its chief, Paul Mormino, assured me he understood my need for rest, but he urged me to come in that afternoon.
“Good news,” he said. “The best thing for catching up with yourself.”
I obeyed the summons and learned that Bruno had been more than true to his word. I had not only been promoted to Howard’s old job; I had been given the title of Chief Economist and a raise. It did cheer me up a bit.
I took the afternoon off and wandered down along the Charles River with a quart of beer. As I sat there, watching the sailboats and nursing combined jet lag and vicious hangover, I convinced myself that Claudine had done her job and had moved on to her next assignment. She had always emphasized the need for secrecy. She would call me. Mormino had been right. My jet lag—and my anxiety—dissipated.
During the next weeks, I tried to put all thoughts of Claudine aside. I focused on writing my report on the Indonesian economy and on revising Howard’s load forecasts. I came up with the type of study my bosses wanted to see: a growth in electric demand averaging 19 percent per annum for twelve years after the new system was completed, tapering down to 17 percent for eight more years, and then holding at 15 percent for the remainder of the twenty-five-year projection.
I presented my conclusions at formal meetings with the international lending agencies. Their teams of experts questioned me extensively and mercilessly. By then, my emotions had turned into a sort of grim determination, not unlike those that had driven me to excel rather than to rebel during my prep school days. Nonetheless, Claudine’s memory always hovered close. When a sassy young economist out to make a name for himself at the Asian Development Bank grilled me relentlessly for an entire afternoon, I recalled the advice Claudine had given me as we sat in her Beacon Street apartment those many months before.
“Who can see twenty-five years into the future?” she had asked. “Your guess is as good as theirs. Confidence is everything.”
I convinced myself I was an expert, reminding myself that I had experienced more of life in developing countries than many of the men—some of them twice my age—who now sat in judgment of my work. I had lived in the Amazon and had traveled to parts of Java no one else wanted to visit. I had taken a couple of intensive courses aimed at teaching executives the finer points of econometrics, and I told myself that I was part of the new breed of statistically oriented, econometric-worshipping whiz kids that appealed to Robert McNamara, the buttoned-down president of the World Bank, former president of Ford Motor Company, and John Kennedy’s secretary of defense. Here was a man who had built his reputation on numbers, on probability theory, on mathematical models, and—I suspected— on the bravado of a very large ego.
I tried to emulate both McNamara and my boss, Bruno. I adopted manners of speech that imitated the former, and I took to walking with the swagger of the latter, attache case swinging at my side. Looking back, I have to wonder at my gall. In truth, my expertise was extremely limited, but what I lacked in training and knowledge I made up for in audacity.
And it worked. Eventually the team of experts stamped my reports with their seals of approval.
During the ensuing months, I attended meetings in Tehran, Caracas, Guatemala City, London, Vienna, and Washington, DC. I met famous personalities, including the shah of Iran, the former presidents of several countries, and Robert McNamara himself. Like prep school, it was a world of men. I was amazed at how my new title and the accounts of my recent successes before the international lending agencies affected other people’s attitudes toward me.
At first, all the attention went to my head. I began to think of myself as a Merlin who could wave his wand over a country, causing it suddenly to light up, industries sprouting like flowers. Then I became disillusioned. I questioned my own motives and those of all the people I worked with. It seemed that a glorified title or a PhD did little to help a person understand the plight of a leper living beside a cesspool in Jakarta, and I doubted that a knack for manipulating statistics enabled a person to see into the future. The better I came to know those who made the decisions that shape the world, the more skeptical I became about their abilities and their goals. Looking at the faces around the meeting room tables, I found myself struggling very hard to restrain my anger.
Eventually, however, this perspective also changed. I came to understand that most of those men believed they were doing the right thing. Like Charlie, they were convinced that communism and terrorism were evil forces —rather than the predictable reactions to decisions they and their predecessors had made—and that they had a duty to their country, to their offspring, and to God to convert the world to capitalism. They also clung to the
