“Earning sixty-five point five million dollars while also playing junior varsity polo is quite a feat.”

“Are you implying rich kids aren’t hardworking enough to do it all?”

“I’d never dare.”

Alfonzo wondered if he would have understood the implications if his best friend hadn’t been beside him as a guide. Who calls a bribe a bribe? How do you know a bribe isn’t a donation? What’s the difference between a payment and a payoff? It was rarely a matter of unmarked bills in briefcases. So many things look similar in the backwaters of Paperwork River, and that river flows into oceans of debt. City money finds itself offshore in the Caymans and the Seychelles. It boggled Alfonzo, though he should have known.

“Weren’t they rich already?” he asked.

“It’s never enough,” Mitchell ruminated. “The rich, who thieve to live, then go ahead and play a trick, a thousand tricks, that serve to rename their stealing ‘job creation’ and ‘CEO compensation.’ They call it ‘competitiveness,’ and they call it ‘natural.’ The law of nature. Eat or be eaten. If you want more, work harder. Respect the hustle. And what’s staggering is that we accept those words and parrot them back. They’ve trapped everyone in the conceptual net, so threats to capital are felt by every homeowner and pensioner.”

Mitchell was really getting going. “Not everyone believes, of course. But still, the net is there. Obedience-school loans, credit card debt, underwater cat condos. Not believing in it doesn’t win you an exemption. Debt holds even nonbelievers down. There’s always jail. The urge to stockpile wealth is a symptom of the disease, but it’s also the illness itself. The rich are sick, and if money were anything else, we’d see their hoarding for what it was. Nothing for them will ever be enough. Riches are rabies.”

Alfonzo sniffed. The sheets before him were blurred and smudgy. The problem was that, at this level, greed was nothing but a number. There was no visible blood, no death. We have to go on talking together, he thought, reminding one another about the ideology of violence and theft that lies beneath the numbers. We have to care and work as a whole herd to make it matter.

“Tell me the plan.”

Mitchell twisted uncertainly. “I have to believe that animals will do something when faced with proof they’re being robbed by those they elected to serve.”