PART THREE 8 страница

All through the afternoon, as I watched these reports, I clocked up a bewildering number of reactions – chief among them disbelief, terror, remorse, anger. I vacillated between thinking that maybe I had struck the blow and dismissing the idea as absurd. Towards the end, however – and after I’d taken a top-up of MDT – the only discernible thing I could feel was mild boredom.

By mid-evening, I was quite detached from everything and whenever I heard a reference to the story, my impulse was to say enough, already, as though they were talking about a new mini-series on a cable channel, something adapted from an over-hyped magic-realist pot-boiler… The Dreadful Ordeal of Donatella Alvarez …

A little after 8. 30, I called Carl Van Loon at his apartment on Park Avenue.

Although the disbelief, terror, etc. of earlier had been uppermost in my mind for a good deal of the afternoon, another part of me had been riddled with anxiety of a different kind – anxiety about having blown my chances with Van Loon, about the extent to which this glitch, this operational malfunction, was going to interfere with my plans for the future.

As a result – and waiting for Van Loon to come to the phone – I was quite nervous.

‘Eddie? ’

I cleared my throat. ‘Mr Van Loon. ’

‘Eddie, I don’t understand. What happened? ’

‘I got sick, ’ I said – the excuse coming to me automatically – ‘there was nothing I could do about it. I had to leave like that. I’m sorry. ’

‘You got sick? What are you, in first grade? You rush off without saying a word? You don’t come back? I’m left there looking like a jerk, making excuses to Hank fucking Atwood? ’

‘I have a condition, a stomach condition. ’

‘Then you don’t even bother to call? ’

‘I needed to see a doctor, Carl. In a hurry. ’

Van Loon was silent for a moment.

Then he sighed. ‘Well… how are you now? ’

‘I’m fine. It’s taken care of. ’

He sighed again. ‘Are you… what? … I don’t know… are you getting proper treatment for this thing? You want the names of some top consultants? I can…’

‘I’m fine. Look, it was a once off. It’s not going to happen again. ’ I paused for a moment. ‘How did the meeting go? ’

This time Van Loon paused. I was out on a limb now.

‘Well it was a little awkward, Eddie, ’ he said eventually, ‘I’m not going to lie to you. I wished you’d been there. ’

‘Did he seem convinced? ’

‘In outline, yeah. He says he feels it’s something he can bring to the table, but you and me are going to have to sit down with him and go over the numbers. ’

‘Great. Sure. Of course. Whenever. ’

‘Hank’s gone to the coast, but he’ll be back in town on… Tuesday I think, yeah, so why don’t you come into the office some time on Monday and we can set something up. ’

‘Great – and listen, Carl, I’m sorry again, I really am. ’

‘You sure you don’t want to see my doctor? He’s-’

‘No, but thanks for the offer. ’

‘Think about it. ’

‘OK. I’ll see you on Monday. ’

I remained standing by the phone for a couple of minutes after the call to Van Loon, staring down at an open page of my address book.

I had a nervous, jumpy feeling in my stomach.

Then I picked the phone up and dialled Melissa’s number. As I waited for her to answer I could have been back in Vernon’s apartment – up on the seventeenth floor, still at the beginning of all of this, still in those last shining moments before I recorded a message on her answering machine and then went rooting around in her brother’s bedroom…

‘Hello. ’

‘Melissa? ’

‘Eddie. Hi. ’

‘I got your message. ’

‘Yeah. Look… erm…’ – I got the impression that she was composing herself – ‘… what I said on the message, that just occurred to me today. I don’t know. My brother was an asshole. He’d been dealing this weird designer thing for quite a while. And it occurred to me about you. So I started worrying. ’

If Melissa had been drinking earlier on in the day, she seemed subdued now, hungover maybe.

‘There’s nothing to worry about, Melissa, ’ I said, having decided on the spot that this was what I was going to do. ‘Vernon didn’t give me anything. I’d met him the day before he… er… the day before it happened. And we just talked about stuff… nothing in particular. ’

She sighed, ‘OK. ’

‘But thanks for your concern. ’ I paused for a moment. ‘How are you? ’

‘I’m fine. ’

Awkward, awkward, awkward.

Then she said, ‘How are you? ’

‘I’m fine. Keeping busy. ’

‘What have you been up to? ’

This was the conversation we would be having in these circumstances – here it was – the inevitable conversation we would be having in these circumstances…

‘I’ve been working for the last few years as a copywriter. ’ I paused. ‘For Kerr & Dexter. The publishers. ’

It was the truth, technically, but that’s all it was.

‘Yeah? That’s great. ’

It didn’t feel great, though – or like the truth, my days as a copywriter for Kerr & Dexter suddenly seeming distant, unreal, fictional.

I didn’t want to be on the phone to Melissa any more. Since we’d renewed our acquaintance – however fleetingly – I felt that I had already entered into a consistent pattern of lying to her. Going on with the conversation could only make that worse.

I said, ‘Look, I wanted to call you back and clear that up… but… I’m going to get off the phone now. ’

‘OK. ’

‘It’s not that-’

‘Eddie? ’

‘Yes? ’

‘This isn’t easy for me either. ’

‘Sure. ’

There wasn’t anything else I could think of to say.

‘Goodbye then. ’

‘Bye. ’

In need of immediate distraction, I flicked through my address book for Gennady’s cellphone number. I dialled it and waited.

‘Yeah? ’

‘Gennady? ’

‘Yeah. ’

‘It’s Eddie. ’

‘Eddie. What you want? I busy. ’

I stared at the wall in front of me for a second.

‘I’ve got a treatment done for that thing. It’s about twen-’

‘Give me this in the morning. I look at it. ’

‘Gennady…’ He was gone. ‘Gennady? ’

I put the phone down.

Tomorrow morning was Friday. I’d forgotten. Gennady was coming for the first repayment on the loan.

Shit.

The money I owed wasn’t the problem. I could write him out a cheque straightaway for the whole amount, plus the vig, plus a bonus for just being Gennady, but that wouldn’t do it. I’d told him that I had a treatment ready. Now I had to come up with one, had to have one for the morning – or else he’d probably stab me continuously until he developed something akin to tennis elbow.

I wasn’t exactly in the mood for this sort of thing, but I knew it would keep me busy, so I went online and did some research. I picked up relevant terminology and worked out a plot loosely based on a recent mafia trial in Sicily, a detailed account of which I found on an Italian website. By some time after midnight – with suitable variations – I’d knocked out a twenty-five-page, scene-by-scene treatment for Keeper of the Code, a story of the Organizatsiya.

After that, I spent a good while searching through magazines for real estate ads. I had decided that I was going to phone some of the big Manhattan realtors the following morning and finally kickstart the process of renting – maybe even of buying – a new apartment.

Then I went to bed and got four or five hours of what passed for sleep these days.

Gennady arrived at about nine-thirty. I buzzed him in, telling him I was on the third floor. It took him for ever to walk up the stairs, and when he finally materialized in my living-room he seemed exhausted and fed up.

‘Good morning, ’ I said.

He raised his eyebrows at me and looked around. Then he looked at his watch.

I had printed out the treatment and put it in an envelope. I took this from the desk and handed it to him. He held it up, shook it, seemed to be estimating how much it weighed. Then he said, ‘Where the money? ’

‘Er… I was going to write you a cheque. How much was it again? ’

‘A cheque? ’

I nodded at him, suddenly feeling foolish.

‘A cheque? ’ he said again. ‘You out of your fucking mind? What you think, we are a financial institution? ’

‘Gennady, look-’

‘Shut up. You can’t come up with the money today you in serious fucking trouble, my friend – you hear me? ’

‘I’ll get it. ’

‘I cut your balls off. ’

‘I’ll get it. Jesus. I wasn’t thinking. ’

‘A cheque, ’ he said again, with contempt. ‘Unbelievable. ’

I went over to my phone and picked it up. Since those first couple of days at Lafayette, I had developed extremely cordial relations with my obsequious and florid-faced bank manager, Howard Lewis, so I phoned him and told him what I needed – twenty-two five in cash – and asked if he could possibly have it ready for me in fifteen minutes.

Absolutely no problem, Mr Spinola.

I put the phone down and turned around. Gennady was standing over at my desk, with his back to me. I mumbled something to get his attention. He then turned to face me.

‘Well? ’

I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘Let’s go to my bank. ’

We took a cab, in silence, to Twenty-third and Second, where my bank was. I wanted to make a reference to the treatment, but since Gennady was obviously in a very bad mood, I judged it better not to say anything. I got the cash from Howard Lewis and handed it over to Gennady outside on the street. He slipped the bundle into the mysterious interior of his jacket. Holding up the envelope with the treatment in it, he said, ‘I look at this. ’

Then he took off up Second Avenue without saying goodbye.

I crossed the street, and in line with my new strategy of trying to eat at least once a day, I went into a diner and had coffee and a blueberry muffin.

Then I wandered over to – and up – Madison Avenue. After about ten blocks, I stopped outside a realtor’s office, a place called Sullivan, Draskell. I went inside, made some enquiries and got talking to a broker by the name of Alison Botnick. She was in her late forties and was dressed in a stylish navy-blue silk dress with a matching Nehru coat. I realized pretty quickly that even though I was in jeans and a sweater, and could easily have been a clerk in a wine store – or a freelance copywriter – this woman had no idea who I was and consequently had to be on her guard. As far as Ms Botnick was concerned, I could have been one of those new dot-com billionaires on the look-out for a twelve-room spread on Park. These days you never knew, and I kept her guessing.

Walking up Madison, I had been thinking in the region of $300, 000 for a place – $500, 000 tops – but it occurred to me now that given my standing with Van Loon and my prospects with Hank Atwood there was no reason why I shouldn’t be thinking bigger – $2 million, $3 million, maybe even more. As I stood in the plush reception area of Sullivan, Draskell, thumbing through glossy brochures for luxury condos in new buildings called things like the Mercury and the Celestial, and listening to Alison Botnick’s pitch, with its urgent lexical hammer-blows – high-end, liquid, snapped-up, close, close, close – I felt my expectations rising by the second. I could also see Alison Botnick, for her part – as she morphed fifteen years off my frame and mentally dressed me in a UCLA T-shirt and baseball cap – convincing herself that I was a dot-com billionaire. The flames were stoked further when I casually shrugged off her suggestion that, given the storm of paperwork required these days to pass the average co-op board’s screening procedure, I would probably want to avoid a co-op apartment.

‘The boards are getting very picky, ’ she said, ‘not that-’

‘Of course not, but who wants to be excluded without a fight? ’

She assessed this.

‘OK. ’

Our manipulation of each other into these respective states of acquisitive and professional arousal could only have led to one thing: viewings. She took me first to see a four-bedroom prewar co-op in the East Seventies between Lexington and Park. We went by cab, and as we chatted about the market and where it was ‘at’ right now, I had that pleasant sensation of being in control – and of being at the controls, as though I had designed the software for this little interlude myself and everything was running smoothly.

The apartment we went to view on Seventy-fourth was nothing special. It had low ceilings and didn’t have much natural light. It was also cramped and quite fussy.

‘A lot of these prewar co-ops are like this, you know, ’ Alison said, as we made our way back down to the lobby. ‘They’ve got leaks and need to be rewired, and unless you’re prepared to just gut them and start over, they’re not worth the money. ’

Which in this case was $1. 8 million.

Next we went to see a 3, 200-square-foot converted loft space in the Flatiron District. It had been a textile factory of some kind up until the’50s, had lain vacant for most of the’60s and from the way the place was decorated it didn’t look as if its present owner had made it much past the’70s. Alison said he was a civil engineer who’d probably paid very little for it, but was now asking $2. 3 million. I liked it, and it certainly had potential, but it was huddled a little too anonymously in a part of town that was still relatively dull and unexciting.

The last place Alison took me to see was on the sixty-eighth floor of a condominium skyscraper that had just been built on the site of the old West Side rail yards. The Celestial, along with other luxury residential developments, was – in theory – to be the centrepiece of a new urban rejuvenation project. This would roughly cover the area between West Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen.

‘If you take a look at it, there’s a ton of empty lots there, ’ Alison said, sounding like a latter-day Robert Moses, ‘from Twenty-sixth Street up to Forty-second Street, west of Ninth Avenue – it’s ripe for redevelopment. And with the new Penn Station you’ll have a huge increase in traffic – thousands more people pouring in every day. ’

She was right, and as our cab cruised west along Thirty-fourth Street, down towards the Hudson River, I could see what she was talking about, I could see the great potential there was for gentrification, for a huge bourgeois-boho makeover of the entire neighbourhood.

‘Believe me, ’ she went on, ‘it’s going to be the biggest land grab this city has seen in fifty years. ’

Rising up out of the wasteland of disused and neglected warehouse buildings, the Celestial itself was a dazzling steel-frame monolith in a seamless casing of reflective bronze-tinted glass. As the cab pulled up alongside a huge plaza at the foot of the building, Alison started reeling off stuff that she obviously felt I should know. The Celestial was 715 feet tall, had 70 storeys and 185 apartments – also several restaurants, a health club, a private screening room, dog-walking facilities, a ‘smart garbage’ recycling system… wine-cellar, walk-in humidor, titanium-sided roofdeck…

I nodded at all of this, as though mentally jotting it down for later scrutiny.

‘The guy who designed this place, ’ she said, ‘is even thinking of moving in himself. ’

The vast lobby area had pink-veined marble columns supporting a gold-toned mosaic ceiling, but little in the way of furniture or art works. The elevator took us up to the sixty-eighth floor in what felt like ten seconds, but must have been longer. The apartment she was showing me still had some work to be done on it, so I wasn’t to mind the bare light bulbs and exposed wiring. ‘But …’ she turned to me and said in a whisper as she was putting the key in the door, ‘… check out the views…’

We stepped into an open, loft-style space, and although I was aware of various corridors going off in different directions, I was immediately drawn to the full-length windows on the far side of this bare, white room. There was plastic sheeting on the floor, and as I walked across it, Alison following just behind me, the whole of Manhattan rose dizzyingly up into view. Standing there at the window, I gaped out at the cluster of midtown skyscrapers directly ahead, at Central Park huddled up to the left, at the financial district over to my right.

Seen here from an angle that had a dreamlike quality of the impossible to it, all of the city’s land-mark buildings were in place – but they appeared to be facing, even somehow looking, in this direction.

I sensed Alison at my shoulder – smelled her perfume, heard the gentle swish of silk against silk as she moved.

‘Well, ’ she said, ‘what do you think? ’

‘It’s amazing, ’ I said, and turned to look at her.

She was nodding in agreement, and smiling. Her eyes were a vivid green and glistened in a way that I hadn’t noticed before. In fact, Alison Botnick suddenly seemed a lot younger than I had imagined her to be.

‘So, Mr Spinola, ’ she said, holding my gaze, ‘do you mind if I ask you what line of work you are in? ’

I hesitated, and then said, ‘Investment banking. ’

She nodded.

‘I work for Carl Van Loon. ’

‘I see. That must be interesting. ’

‘It is. ’

As she processed this information, maybe slotting me into some real estate client category, I glanced around at the room with its bare walls and incomplete grid of ceiling panels, trying to imagine how it might look fully furnished, and lived in. I thought about the rest of the place, as well.

‘How many rooms are there? ’ I asked.

‘Ten. ’

I considered this for a moment – an apartment with ten rooms – but the scale of it defeated me. I was drawn irresistibly back to the window and gazed out again at the city – rapt as before, taking it all in. It was a clear, sunny day in Manhattan and just standing there made me feel utterly exhilarated.

‘What’s the ask price? ’

I had the impression she was only doing it for effect, but Alison consulted her notebook, flicking through several pages and humming in concentration. After a moment, she said, casually, ‘Nine point five. ’

I clicked my tongue and whistled.

She consulted another page in her notebook and then stepped a little over to the left, as though she were now positively lost in concentration.

I went back to looking out of the window. It was a lot of money, sure, but it wasn’t necessarily a prohibitive amount. If I continued trading at my current levels, and managed to play Van Loon the right way, there was no reason why I shouldn’t be able to put some kind of a financial package together.

I glanced back at Alison and cleared my throat.

She turned around, and smiled politely.

Nine and a half million dollars.

There’d been a certain amount of wattage in the air between us, but apparently the mention of money had somehow defused this and for the next while we wandered in silence through the other rooms of the apartment. The views and angles in each one were slightly different from those in the main room, but they were equally as spectacular. There seemed to be light everywhere, and space, and as I passed through what would be the bathrooms and the kitchen, I had swirling visions in my head of onyx, terracotta, mahogany, chrome – elegant living in a kaleidoscope of floating forms, parallel lines, designer curves…

At one point, I contrasted all of this with the cramped atmosphere and creaking floorboards of my one-bedroom apartment on Tenth Street and I immediately began to feel light-headed, constricted in my breathing, a little panicky even.

‘Mr Spinola, are you all right? ’

I was leaning against a doorway now, with one hand pressed against my chest.

‘Yeah, I’m fine… it’s just…’

‘What? ’

I looked up, and around, to get my bearings… unsure that I hadn’t had another momentary blackout. I didn’t think I’d moved – didn’t remember moving – but I couldn’t be 100 per cent certain that…

That what?

That from where I was standing, the angle wasn’t different…

‘Mr Spinola? ’

‘I’m fine. I’m fine. I have to go now, though. I’m sorry. ’

I started walking swiftly along the corridor towards the main entrance. With my back to her, I waved a hand in the air and said, ‘I’ll be in touch with your office. I’ll phone. Thank you. ’

I got out into the hallway and straight over to one of the elevator cars.

I was hoping, as the doors whispered closed, that she wouldn’t follow me, and she didn’t.

I WALKED OUT OF THE CELESTIAL and across the plaza towards Tenth Avenue, keenly aware of the colossal rectangular slab of bronzetinted glass shimmering in the sun behind me. I was also aware of the possibility that Alison Botnick was still up on the sixty-eighth floor, and maybe even staring down at the plaza – which of course made me feel like an insect, and more so with each step I took. I had to walk several blocks along Thirty-third Street, past the General Post Office and Madison Square Garden, before finding a taxi. I never once looked back, and as I got settled into the cab I kept my head down. There was a copy of the New York Post lying folded on the seat beside me. I picked it up and held it tightly in my lap.

I still wasn’t sure if anything had happened back there, but the merest hint of that clicking business starting up again absolutely terrified me. I sat still and waited, gauging each flicker of perception, each breath, ready to isolate and assess anything out of the ordinary. A couple of minutes passed, and I seemed to be OK. I then relaxed my grip on the newspaper, and by the time we were turning right on to Second Avenue, I had calmed down considerably.

I flipped open the Post and looked at the front page. The headline was FEDS PROBE REGULATORS. It was a story about goings-on at the New York State Athletic Commission and was accompanied by extremely unflattering photos of two NYSAC officials. As usual in the Post, across the top of the front page, above the masthead, there were three boxed headlines with page references for the articles inside. The middle one, white type on a red background, immediately caught my eye. It said, MEX PAINTER’S WIFE IN BRUTAL ATTACK, page 2. I paused for a second, staring at the words, and was about to flick over to the story when I noticed the headline beside it. This one – white on black – said, MYSTERY TRADER CLEANS UP, page 43. I fumbled with the paper, trying to get it open, and when I eventually got to the article, which was in the business section, the first thing I saw was Mary Stern’s by-line.

My stomach started churning.

I couldn’t believe she’d gone ahead and written something about me, and especially after the way I’d spoken to her on the phone – but then maybe that was why. The text of the article took up half a page and was accompanied by a large photo of the Lafayette trading room. There were Jay Zollo and the others, swivelled around on their chairs, staring into the camera.

I started reading.

Something unusual has been going on in one of the day-trading houses down on Broad Street. In a room with fifty terminals and as many baseball caps, guerrilla marketmakers shave and scalp their way to tiny profit margins – an eighth of a point here, a sixteenth of a point there. It’s a hard graft at Lafayette Trading and the atmosphere is undeniably tense.

I was named in the second paragraph.

But last week all of that changed as new kid on the block, Eddie Spinola, walked in off the street, opened an account and launched straight into an aggressive short-selling spree that left seasoned traders in the Lafayette pit gasping for breath – and reaching for their keyboards, as they followed his leads and swept up profits unheard of in the day-trading world. But get this – undisputed King Rat by the end of his first week, mystery trader Eddie Spinola has since gone AWOL…

I couldn’t believe it. I skimmed the rest of the paragraph.

refuses to speak… cagey with fellow-traders… evasive… elusive… hasn’t been seen for days…

The article went on to speculate about who I was and what I might be up to, and included quotes from, among others, a baffled Jay Zollo. A sidebar gave details of trades I’d made and of how various Lafayette regulars had benefited – one guy making enough for a down-payment on an apartment, another booking himself in for some long overdue dental surgery, a third catching up on alimony arrears.

It was a strange feeling, being written about like this, seeing my name in print, in a newspaper, especially in the business section of a newspaper. It was even stranger that it should be in the business section of the New York Post.

I looked out at the traffic on Second Avenue.

I didn’t know what any of this meant – in terms of my privacy, or of my relationship with Van Loon, or of anything – but there was one thing I was sure of: I didn’t like it.

The cab pulled up at my building on Tenth Street. I was so distracted by the Post article that as I paid the driver and got out, I didn’t notice the small group of what I would soon realize were photographers and reporters gathered on the sidewalk. They didn’t know me, didn’t know what I looked like, presumably only knew where I lived – but when I got out of the cab and stood there, staring at them in disbelief, it must have been obvious who I was. There was a brief moment of calm before the penny dropped, a two-second delay at most, and then it was Eddie! Eddie! Here! Here! Click! Whirr! Click! I put my head down, got my key out and surged forward. When are you going back to Lafayette, Eddie? Look this way, Eddie! What’s your secret, Eddie? I managed to get inside the door and to slam it closed behind me. I rushed upstairs into my apartment and went straight over to the window. They were still down there, about five of them, clustered around the door of the building. Was this a result of the story in the Post? Everyone wanting to know about the guy who’d beaten the markets? The mystery trader? Well if that was news, I thought, it was just as well no one realized I was the Thomas Cole the police were so anxious to interview in connection with the Donatella Alvarez situation.

I turned back in towards the room.

The red light was flashing on my answering machine. I walked over to it, wearily, and pressed the ‘play’ button.

Seven messages.

I sat on the edge of the couch and listened. Jay Zollo, pleading with me to get in touch with him again. My father, puzzled, wanting to know if I’d seen that thing in the paper. Gennady, pissed, declaring that if I was yanking his chain he’d cut my fucking head off, and with a bread knife. Artie Meltzer, all pally, inviting me out to lunch. Mary Stern, telling me it’d be so much easier if I would just talk to her. A recruitment company, offering me an executive position in a major brokerage house. Someone from David Letterman’s office – a booking agent – saying if I agreed I could be on the show tonight.

I flopped back on to the couch and stared up at the ceiling. I had to stay calm. I certainly hadn’t wanted any of this attention or pressure, but if I was going to come through it in one piece, I really needed to keep my wits about me. I rolled off the couch, got up and went into the bedroom to lie down properly. Maybe if I could just sleep for part of the afternoon, for an hour or two, I might be able to think a bit more clearly. But the moment I lay down on the bed and stretched out I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do it. I was wide awake and my mind was racing.

I got up again and went into the living-room. I paced back and forth for a while – from the desk to the phone, from the phone to the desk. Then I went into the kitchen. Then out again. Then into the bathroom, then out again to the living-room. Then over to the window. Then back again. But that was it, there was nowhere else to go – just these three rooms. Standing near my desk, I surveyed the apartment and tried to imagine what the place would be like with ten rooms, and high ceilings, and bare white walls. But I couldn’t do it, not without getting dizzy. Besides, that was somewhere else – the sixty-eighth floor of the Celestial – and I was here now, in my apartment…

I stepped back from the desk, a little unsteadily, and leant against the bookshelves behind me. I felt queasy all of a sudden, and light-headed.

I closed my eyes.

After a moment, I found myself floating – moving along an empty, brightly lit corridor. Sound was distant and increasingly muffled. The forward motion seemed to continue for ages, the pace slow and dreamy. But then I was gliding around a broad curve, moving into and across a room, towards a wide, full-length window. I didn’t stop at the window, but floated on – arms outstretched – through the window and out above the vast microchip of the city, while behind me, after a brief but inexplicable delay, the huge plate of bronzetinted glass shattered deafeningly into a million pieces…

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