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PART THREE 5 страница‘Hello. ’ ‘So what have you been hearing? ’ Beat. ‘Lafayette, Eddie. Everyone’s talking about you. ’ ‘About me? ’ ‘Yeah. I happened to be having lunch with Carl and a few other people today when someone mentioned they’d heard rumours about a day-trading firm on Broad Street – and some trader there who was performing phenomenally. I made a few enquiries after lunch and your name came up. ’ I smiled to myself and said, ‘Oh yeah? ’ ‘And Eddie, that’s not all. I was speaking to Carl again later and I told him what I’d found out. He was really interested, and when I said you were actually a friend of mine he said he’d like to meet you. ’ ‘That’s great, Kevin. I’d like to meet him. Any time that suits. ’ ‘Are you free tomorrow night? ’ ‘Yeah. ’ He paused. ‘Let me call you back. ’ He rang off immediately. I went over and sat on the couch and looked around. I was going to be getting out of here soon – and not a moment too soon, either. I envisaged the spacious, elegantly decorated living-room of a house in Brooklyn Heights. I saw myself standing at a bay window, looking out on to one of those tree-lined streets that Melissa and I, on our way from Carroll Gardens into the city, on summer days, had often walked along, and even talked about one day living on. Cranberry Street. Orange Street. Pineapple Street. The phone rang again. I stood up and walked across the room to answer it. ‘Eddie – Kevin. Drinks tomorrow night? At the Orpheus Room? ’ ‘Great. What time? ’ ‘Eight. But why don’t you and I meet at seven-thirty, that way I can fill you in on some stuff. ’ ‘Sure. ’ I put the phone down. As I stood there, with my hand still on the receiver, I began to feel light-headed and dizzy, and everything went dark for a second. Then, without consciously registering that I had moved – and moved to the other side of the room – I suddenly found myself reaching out to the edge of the couch for something to lean against. It was only then that I realized I hadn’t eaten anything in three days.
I ARRIVED AT THE ORPHEUS ROOM before Kevin and took a seat at the bar. I ordered a club soda. I didn’t know what I expected from this meeting, but it would certainly be interesting. Carl Van Loon was one of those names I’d seen in newspapers and magazines all throughout the 1980s, a name synonymous with that decade and its celebrated devotion to Greed. He might be quiet and retiring these days, but back then the chairman of Van Loon & Associates had been involved in several notorious property deals, including the construction of a gigantic and controversial office building in Manhattan. He had also been involved in some of the highest-profile leveraged buyouts of the period, and in countless mergers and acquisitions. Back in those days, as well, Van Loon and his second wife, interior-designer Gabby De Paganis, had been denizens of the black-tie charity circuit and had had their pictures in the social pages of every issue of New York magazine and Quest and Town and Country. To me, he’d been a member of that gallery of cartoon characters – along with people like Al Sharpton, Leona Helmsley and John Gotti – that had made up the public life of the times, the public life we’d all consumed so voraciously on a daily basis, and then discussed and dissected at the slightest provocation. I remember once being in the West Village with Melissa, for instance, about 1985 or 1986 – in Caffe Vivaldi – when she got up on her high horse about the proposed Van Loon Building. Van Loon had long wanted to regain the title of World’s Tallest for New York, and was proposing a glass box on the site of the old St Nicholas Hotel on Forty-eighth Street. It had been designed at over fifteen hundred feet, but after endless objections was eventually built at just under a thousand. ‘What is this shit with skyscrapers? ’ she’d said, holding up her espresso cup, ‘I mean, haven’t we gotten over it yet? ’ OK, the skyscraper had once been the supreme symbol of corporate capitalism, indeed of America itself – what Ayn Rand referring to the Woolworth Building as seen from New York Harbour had called ‘the finger of God’ – but surely we no longer needed it, no longer needed people like Carl Van Loon coming along trying to imprint their adolescent fantasies on the city skyline. For the most part, in any case – she went on – the question of height had been irrelevant, a red herring, as skyscrapers had merely been commercial billboards for the likes of sewing-machine companies and retailers and car manufacturers and newspapers. So what was this one going to be? A billboard for fucking junk bonds? Jesus. Melissa, on occasions such as this, had wielded her espresso cup with a rare elegance – suitably indignant, but never spilling a drop, and always ready if necessary to flip the axis and start laughing at herself. ‘Eddie. ’ She always calmed down in the same way, too – no matter how animated she’d become. She would lean her head slightly forward, maybe swirling whatever coffee was left in the cup, and go still and quiet, diaphanous strands of hair settling gently across her face. ‘Eddie? ’ I turned around in my seat, away from the bar. Kevin was standing there, staring at me. I held out my hand. ‘Kevin. ’ ‘Eddie. ’ ‘How are you? ’ ‘Fine. ’ As we shook hands, I tried to edge that image of Melissa from my mind. I asked him if he wanted a drink – an Absolut on the rocks – and he did. A few minutes of small talk followed, and then Kevin started priming me for the meeting with Van Loon. ‘He’s… mercurial – one day he’s your best friend and the next he’ll look right through you, so don’t be put off if he’s a little weird. ’ I nodded. ‘Oh, and – I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this – but… don’t pause or hesitate when you’re answering him, he hates that. ’ I nodded again. ‘You see, he’s really caught up at the moment in this MCL-Parnassus thing with Hank Atwood and… I don’t know. ’ One of the largest media conglomerates in the world, with cable, film studio and publishing divisions, MCL-Parnassus was the kind of company that business journalists liked to describe as ‘a megalith’ or ‘a behemoth’. ‘What’s going on with Atwood? ’ I asked. ‘I’m not sure exactly, it’s all still under wraps. ’ Then something occurred to him. ‘And don’t ask him - whatever you do. ’ I could see that Kevin was having second thoughts about setting this thing up. He kept looking at his watch, as if he were working to a deadline and time was running out. He drained the last of the vodka from his glass at about ten to eight, ordered another one, and then said, ‘So, Eddie, just what exactly are you going to be telling him? ’ ‘I don’t know, ’ I answered, shrugging my shoulders, ‘I suppose I’ll tell him about my adventures in day-trading, and give him a run-down of all the major positions I’ve held. ’ Kevin seemed to be expecting something more than this – but what? Since I couldn’t offer him any satisfactory explanation for my success-rate, other than to refer to some in explicable ability I seemed to have developed, all I ended up saying was, ‘I’ve been lucky, Kevin. I mean – don’t get me wrong – I’ve worked at it, and I do a lot of research, but… yeah, things have gone my way. ’ As far as Kevin was concerned, however, this kind of ill-defined bullshit clearly wasn’t going to be enough – even if he couldn’t bring himself to say as much out loud. It was then I realized that there was an underlying anxiety in everything he had been saying up to that point, a fear that unless he had some inside track on my trading strategy, and consequently some leverage with Van Loon, he was just going to end up handing me over to Van Loon – and that then, effectively, he would be out of the picture. But there wasn’t much I could do about that. For my part, I felt pretty good. I’d eaten a plate of pasta in bianco after my disturbing spell of dizziness the previous evening. Then I’d taken some vitamin pills and diet supplements and gone to bed. I’d slept for about six hours, which was as much, if not more, than I’d managed in a month. I was still on two doses of MDT a day, but I now felt fresher and more in control – and more confident – than ever before.
* Van Loon swept into the Orpheus Room as though he were being filmed in an elaborate tracking shot and this was just the last stage in a sequence that had taken him all the way from his limousine outside on the street. Tall, lean and a bit stooped, Van Loon was still quite an imposing figure. He was sixtyish and tanned, and the few wisps of hair he had left were a distinguished silvery-white. He shook my hand vigorously and then invited us both to join him over at his regular table in the corner. I hadn’t seen him ordering anything or even making eye contact with the barman, but a couple of seconds after we’d sat down – me with my club soda and Kevin with his Absolut – Van Loon was served what looked like the perfect Martini. The waiter arrived, placed the glass down on the table and withdrew, all with a lightness of touch – silence and near invisibility – that was clearly reserved by management for a certain… class of customer. ‘So, Eddie Spinola, ’ Van Loon said, looking me directly in the eyes, ‘what’s your secret? ’ I could feel Kevin stiffen beside me. ‘Medication, ’ I said at once, ‘I’m on special medication. ’ Van Loon laughed at this. Then he picked up his Martini, raised it to me and said, ‘Well, I hope it’s a repeat prescription. ’ This time I laughed, and raised my club soda to him. But that was it. He didn’t pursue the matter any further. To Kevin’s obvious annoyance, Van Loon then went on to talk about his new Gulfstream V, and the problems he’d been having with it, and how he’d spent sixteen months on a waiting list just to get the damned thing. He addressed all of these remarks directly to me, and I got the impression – because it was too pointed to be accidental – that he was deliberately excluding Kevin. I took it for granted, therefore, that we wouldn’t be going back to the subject of what my ‘secret’ might be, and we – or rather Van Loon – simply talked about other things… cigars, for example, and how he’d recently tried to buy JFK’s humidor, unsuccessfully as it had turned out. Or cars – his latest being a Maserati that had set him back nearly ‘two hundred large’. Van Loon was brash and vulgar and conformed almost exactly to how I would have imagined him from his public profile of a decade before, but the strange thing was I liked him. There was a certain appeal in the way he focused so intently on money and on various imaginative, flamboyant ways of spending it. With Kevin, on the other hand, the emphasis seemed to be solely on ways of making it, and when a friend of Van Loon’s joined us a while later from another table, Kevin – true to form – succeeded in veering the conversation around to the subject of the markets. Van Loon’s friend was Frank Pierce, a fellow veteran from the 1980s who had worked for Goldman Sachs and was now running a private investment fund. None too subtly, Kevin mentioned something about using mathematics and advanced software programs to beat the markets. I said nothing. Frank Pierce, who was quite chubby and had beady eyes, said, ‘Horseshit. If it could be done, you think someone wouldn’t have done it by now? ’ He looked around, and then added, ‘I mean, we all do quantitative analysis, we all do the math, but they’ve been going on about this other stuff for years, this black-box stuff, and it’s crap. It’s like trying to turn base metals into gold, it can’t be done, you can’t beat the markets – but there’ll always be some jerk with too many college degrees and a pony-tail who thinks you can. ’ ‘With respect, ’ Kevin said, addressing himself to Frank Pierce, but obviously trying to draw me out at the same time, ‘there are some examples around of people who have beaten the markets, or appear to have. ’ ‘Beaten the markets how? ’ Kevin glanced over in my direction, but I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. He was on his own. ‘Well, ’ he said, ‘we haven’t always had the technology we have now, we haven’t always had the capacity to process such huge amounts of information. If you analyse enough data, patterns will emerge, and certain of those patterns just may have predictive value. ’ ‘Horseshit, ’ Frank Pierce boomed again. Kevin was a little taken aback at this, but he soldiered on. ‘I mean, by using complex systems and time-series analysis you can… you can identify pockets of probability. Then you patch these together into some mechanism for pattern-recognition…’ – he paused here, less sure of himself now, but also in too deep to stop – ‘… and from there you build a model to predict market trends. ’ He looked over at me imploringly, as if to say Eddie, please, am I on the right track here? Is this how you’re doing it? ‘Patterns my ass, ’ said Pierce. ‘How do you think we made our money? ’ He leant his weight forward in the chair and with his stubby index finger rapidly identified himself and Van Loon. ‘Huh? ’ Then he pointed to his right temple, tapped it slowly, and said, ‘Un-der-standing. That’s how. Understanding how business works. Under standing when a company is overvalued, or undervalued. Under standing that you never make a bet you can’t afford to lose. ’ Van Loon turned to me, like a chat-show host, and said, ‘Eddie? ’ ‘Absolutely, ’ I said in a quiet voice, ‘no one could argue with that…’ ‘But? ’ Pierce snorted sarcastically. ‘There’s always a but with these guys. ’ ‘Yes, ’ I went on, sensing Kevin’s obvious relief that I had deigned to speak, ‘there is a but. It’s a question of velocity’ – I had no idea what was coming next – ‘because… well, there’s no time for human judgement anymore. You see a chance, you blink and it’s gone. We are entering the age of decentralized, online decision-making, with the decisions being made by millions – and potentially hundreds of millions – of individual investors all around the world, people who have the ability to shift huge amounts of money around in less time than it takes to sneeze, but without consulting each other. So, understanding doesn’t come into it – or, if it does, it’s not understanding how companies work, it’s understanding how mass psychology works. ’ Pierce waved a hand through the air. ‘What – you think you can tell me why the markets boom or crash? Why today, let’s say? And not tomorrow, not yesterday? ’ ‘No, I can’t. But these are legitimate questions. Why should data cluster in predictable patterns? Why should there be a structure to the financial markets? ’ I paused, waiting for someone to say something, but when no one did I went on, ‘because the markets are the product of human activity, and humans follow trends – it’s that simple. ’ Kevin had gone pale by this stage. ‘And of course the trends are usually the same… one, aversion to risk, and two, follow the herd. ’ ‘Pah, ’ said Pierce. But he left it at that. He muttered something to Van Loon that I didn’t catch, and then looked at his watch. Kevin remained motionless, staring down at the carpet, almost in despair now. Is that it, he seemed to be thinking, human fucking nature? How am I supposed to turn that to my advantage? What I was feeling, on the other hand, was acute embarrassment. I hadn’t wanted to say anything in the first place, but I could hardly have ignored Van Loon’s invitation to contribute. So what happens? I speak and end up being a patronizing asshole. Understanding doesn’t come into it? Where did I get off lecturing two billionaires about how to make money? After a couple of minutes, in any case, Frank Pierce muttered his excuses and left without saying goodbye to either Kevin or myself. Van Loon then seemed happy enough to let the conversation drift on for a while. We discussed Mexico and the probable effects the government’s apparently irrational stance was going to have on the markets. At one point, still fairly agitated, I caught myself reeling off a comparative list of per capita GDP figures for 1960 and 1995, stuff I must have read somewhere, but Van Loon cut me short and more or less implied that I was being shrill. He also contradicted a few things I said and was clearly right in each case to do so. I saw him looking at me once or twice, too – strangely – as if he were on the point of calling security over to have me ejected from the building. But then, a bit later, when Kevin had gone to the bathroom, Van Loon turned to me and said, ‘I think it’s time we got rid of this clown. ’ He indicated back to where the bathrooms were, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Kevin’s a great guy, don’t misunderstand me. He’s an excellent negotiator. But sometimes. Jesus. ’ Van Loon looked at me, seeking confirmation that I agreed with him. I half smiled, unsure of how to react. So here it came again, that thing, that anxious, needy response I’d somehow triggered in all of the others – in Paul Baxter and Artie Meltzer and Kevin Doyle. ‘Come on, Eddie, drink up. I live five blocks from here. We’re going back to my place for dinner. ’
* As the three of us were walking out of the Orpheus Room, I was vaguely aware that no one had paid the check or signed anything or even nodded to anyone. But then something occurred to me. Carl Van Loon owned the Orpheus Room, in fact owned the entire building – an anonymous steel-and-glass tube on Fifty-fourth between Park and Lexington. I remembered reading about it when the place had first opened a few years before. Out on the street, Van Loon summarily dismissed Kevin by telling him that he’d see him in the morning. Kevin hesitated, but then said, ‘Sure, Carl. See you in the morning. ’ We made eye contact for a second but both of us pulled away in embarrassment. Then Kevin was gone and Van Loon and I were walking along Fifty-fourth Street towards Park Avenue. He hadn’t had a limousine waiting after all, and then I remembered reading something else, an article in a magazine about how Van Loon often made a big thing of walking – and especially walking in his ‘quarter’, as though that somehow meant he was a man of the people. We got to his building on Park Avenue. The brief trip from the lobby up to his apartment was indeed just that, a trip, with all of the elements in place: the uniformed doorman, the swirling turquoise marble, the mahogany panels, the brass radiator-grills. I was surprised by how small the elevator-car was, but its interior was very plush and intimate, and I imagined that such a combination could give the experience of being in it, and the accompanying sensation of motion – if you were with the right person – a certain erotic charge. It seemed to me that rich people didn’t think up things like this, and then decide to have them – things like this, little serendipitous accidents of luxury, just happened if you happened to have money. The apartment was on the fourth floor, but the first thing that caught your attention as you stepped into the main hall was a marble staircase sweeping majestically up to what had to be the fifth floor. The ceilings were very high, and decorated with elaborate plaster-work, and there were friezes around the edges which took your eyes gradually downwards to the large, gilt-framed paintings on the walls. If the elevator-car was the confessional box, the apartment itself was the whole cathedral. Van Loon led me across the hallway and into what he called ‘the library’, which is exactly what it was – a dark, book-lined room with Persian rugs, an enormous marble fire-place and several red leather couches. There were also lots of expensive-looking ‘pieces’ of fine French furniture about the place – walnut tables you wouldn’t ever put anything on and delicate little chairs you wouldn’t ever sit in. ‘Hi, Daddy. ’ Van Loon looked around, slightly puzzled. He obviously hadn’t expected anybody to be in here. On the far side of the room, barely visible against a wall of leather-bound books, there was a young woman holding open a large volume in her two hands. ‘Oh, ’ Van Loon said, and then cleared his throat. ‘Say hello to Mr Spinola, darling. ’ ‘Hello Mr Spinola, darling. ’ The voice was quiet but assured. Van Loon clicked his tongue in disapproval. ‘Ginny. ’ I felt like saying to Van Loon, That’s OK, I don’t mind your daughter calling me ‘darling’. In fact, I kind of like it. My second erotic charge of the evening had come from Virginia Van Loon, Carl’s nineteen-year-old daughter. In her younger and more vulnerable years, ‘Ginny’ had spent quite a bit of time on the front pages of the daily tabloids for substance abuse and poor taste in boyfriends. She was Van Loon’s only child by his second wife, and had quickly been brought to heel by threats of disinheritance. Or so the story had gone. ‘Look, Ginny, ’ Van Loon said, ‘I’ve got to go and get something from my office, so I want you to entertain Mr Spinola here while I’m gone, OK? ’ ‘Of course, Daddy. ’ Van Loon turned to me and said, ‘There are some files I want you to have a look at. ’ I nodded at him, not having a clue what he was talking about. Then he disappeared and I was left standing there, peering across the dimness of the room at his daughter. ‘What are you reading? ’ I said, trying not to remember the last time I’d asked someone that question. ‘Not reading exactly, I’m looking something up in one of these books Daddy bought by the yard when he moved in here. ’ I edged over to the centre of the room in order to be able to see her more clearly. She had short, spiky blonde hair and was wearing trainers, jeans and a pink sleeveless top that left her midriff exposed. She’d had her belly-button pierced and was sporting a tiny gold hoop that glistened occasionally in the light as she moved. ‘What are you looking up? ’ She leant back against the bookcase with studied abandon, but the effect was spoilt somewhat by the fact that she was struggling to keep the enormous tome open, and balanced, in her hands. ‘The etymology of the word ferocious. ’ ‘I see. ’ ‘Yeah, my mother’s just told me that I have a ferocious temper, and I do – so, I don’t know, to cool down I thought I’d come in here and check out this dictionary of etymology. ’ She hiked the book up for a second, as though displaying it as an exhibit in a court room. ‘It’s a strange word, don’t you think? Ferocious. ’ ‘Have you found it yet? ’ I nodded at the dictionary. ‘No, I got distracted by feckless. ’ ‘Ferocious literally means “wild-eyed”, ’ I said, moving around the biggest of the red leather couches in order to get even closer to her. ‘It comes from a combination of the Latin word ferus, which means “fierce” or “wild”, and the particle oc -, which means “looking” or “appearing”. ’ Ginny Van Loon stared at me for a second and then slammed the book closed with a loud thwack. ‘Not bad, Mr Spinola, not bad, ’ she said, trying to suppress a grin. Then, as she struggled to get the dictionary back into its place on the shelf behind her, she said, ‘You’re not one of Daddy’s business guys, are you? ’ I thought about this for a second before answering. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I am. We’ll see. ’ She turned around again to face me and in the brief silence that followed I was aware of her eyeing me up and down. I became uncomfortable all of a sudden and wished that I’d gotten around to buying another suit. I’d been wearing this one every day for quite some time now and had begun to feel a bit self-conscious in it. ‘Yeah, but you’re not one of his regular guys? ’ She paused. ‘And you don’t…’ ‘What? ’ ‘You don’t look too comfortable… dressed like that. ’ I looked down at my suit and tried to think of something to say about it. I couldn’t. ‘So what do you do for Daddy? What service do you provide? ’ ‘Who says I provide a service? ’ ‘Carl Van Loon doesn’t have friends, Mr Spinola, he has people who do things for him. What do you do? ’ None of this – strangely enough – came across as snotty or obnoxious. For a girl of nineteen, she was breathtakingly self-possessed, and I felt compelled simply to tell her the truth. ‘I’m a stock-market trader, and I’ve been very successful recently. So I’m here – I think – to provide your father with some… advice. ’ She raised her eyebrows, opened her arms and did a little curtsey, as if to say voil& #225; . I smiled. She reverted to leaning back against the bookcase behind her, and said, ‘I don’t like the stock market. ’ ‘Why’s that? ’ ‘Because it’s so profoundly un interesting a thing to have taken over so many people’s lives. ’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘I mean, people don’t have drug-dealers any more, or psychoanalysts – they have brokers. At least with getting high or being in analysis, it was about you – you were the subject, to be mangled or untangled or whatever – but playing the markets is like surrendering yourself to this vast, impersonal system. It just generates and then feeds off… greed …’ ‘I-’ ‘… and it’s not as if it’s your own individual greed either, it’s the same greed as everyone else’s. You ever been to Vegas, Mr Spinola? Ever seen those big rooms with the rows and rows of slot machines? Acres of them? I think the stock market today is like that – all these sad, desperate people planted in front of machines just dreaming of the big score they’re going to make. ’ ‘Surely that’s easy for you to say. ’ ‘Maybe so, but it doesn’t make it any less true. ’ As I was trying to formulate an answer to this, the door opened behind me and Van Loon came back into the room. ‘Well, Eddie, did she keep you entertained? ’ He walked briskly over to a coffee table in front of one of the couches and threw a thick folder of papers on to it. ‘Yes, ’ I said, and immediately turned back to look at her. I tried to think of something to say. ‘So, what are you doing, I mean… these days? ’ ‘These days. ’ She smiled. ‘Very diplomatic. Well, these days I suppose I’m a… recovering celebrity? ’ ‘OK, sweetheart, ’ Van Loon said, ‘enough. Skedaddle. We’ve got business to do here. ’ ‘Skedaddle? ’ Ginny said, raising her eyebrows at me interrogatively. ‘Now there’s a word. ’ ‘Hhmm, ’ I said, pantomiming deep thought, ‘I would say that the word skedaddle is very probably… of unknown origin. ’ She considered this for a moment and then, gliding past me on her way over towards the door, whispered loudly, ‘A bit like yourself, Mr Spinola… darling. ’ ‘Ginny. ’ She glanced back at me, ignoring her father, and was gone.
* Shaking his head in exasperation, Van Loon looked over at the library door for a moment to make sure that his daughter had closed it properly. He picked up the folder again from the coffee table and said he was going to be straight with me. He had heard about my circus tricks down at Lafayette and wasn’t particularly impressed, but now that he’d had the chance to meet me in person, and talk, he was prepared to admit that he was a little more curious. He handed me the folder. ‘I want your opinion on these, Eddie. Take the folder home with you, have a look through the files, take your time. Tell me if you think any of the stocks you see there look interesting. ’ I flicked through the folder as he spoke and saw long sections of dense type, as well as endless pages of tables and charts and graphs. ‘Needless to say, all of this stuff is strictly confidential. ’ I nodded of course. He nodded back, and then said, ‘Can I offer you something to drink? The housekeeper’s not here I’m afraid – and Gabby’s… in a bad mood – so dinner’s a non-starter. ’ He paused, as though trying to think of a way out of this dilemma, but quickly gave up. ‘Fuck it, ’ he said, ‘I had a big lunch. ’ Then he looked at me, obviously expecting an answer to his original question. ‘Scotch would be fine. ’ ‘Sure. ’ Van Loon went over to a drinks cabinet in the corner of the room and as he poured two glasses of single malt Scotch whisky, he spoke back at me, over his shoulder. ‘I don’t know who you are, Eddie, or what your game is, but I’m sure of one thing, you don’t work in this business. I know all the moves, and so far you don’t seem to know any – but the thing is, I like that. You see, I deal with business graduates every day of the week, and I don’t know what it is – they’ve all got this look, this business-school look. It’s like they’re cocky and terrified at the same time, and I’m sick of it. ’ He paused. ‘What I’m saying is this, I don’t care what your background is, or that maybe the nearest you’ve ever come to an investment bank is the business section of the New York Times. What matters ’ – he turned around with a glass in each hand, and used one of them to indicate his belly – ‘is that you’ve got a fire in here, and if you’re smart on top of that, then nothing can stand in your way. ’
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