PART THREE 12 страница

Eventually, however, the pressure became too much for me. It kick-started another panic attack, and left me no choice but to just grab the envelope and go – without even closing out my positions. This caused some degree of consternation in the room, but I think most of the Lafayette traders had come to expect the unexpected from me and I managed to get away without too much hassle. A good number of the stocks I’d bought had already gone up by tiny margins, so no one was worried or nervous – they were just unhappy at letting what they saw as an & #252; ber trader escape from their midst. On my way down in the elevator, my heart started palpitating again and when I got out on to the street I felt really horrible. I walked down Broad Street to the South Ferry Terminal and then over to Battery Park, where I sat on a bench, undid my tie and gazed out at Staten Island.

I remained there for about half an hour, taking deep breaths and fielding dark, unsettling thoughts. I wanted to be at home, on my couch, but I didn’t want to go through what was required to get there, which was negotiate the streets again, and the people, and the traffic. But after another while I just stood up and started walking. I went over to State Street and managed to get a taxi at once. I slumped into the back seat, clutching the envelope, and as the cab inched its way forward through the traffic, up past Bowling Green on to Broadway, and then past Beaver Street and Exchange Place and Wall Street itself, I had a fleeting impression that something quite odd was happening. It was difficult to put my finger on what it was exactly, but there was a very jittery atmosphere in the streets. People were stopping and talking, some whispering conspiratorially, others shouting across cars, or from the steps of buildings, or into cellphones – and in that curious way people have when some dire public event has taken place, like an assassination or an upset in the World Series. Then there was a break in the traffic and we surged forward out of the financial district, leaving behind whatever it was I’d picked up on. Soon we were crossing Canal Street and then a few moments later turning right on to Houston, where it was business as usual.

When I got home, I made straight for the couch and flopped down on to it. The taxi ride had been unbearable and once or twice I’d come close to having the driver stop and let me out. Lying on the couch wasn’t that much better, but at least I was in a familiar, controlled environment. For the next hour or so, I vacillated between thinking that the attack would pass, and thinking that… no, I was going to die – here, today, right now, on this fucking couch…

But when, eventually, I didn’t die, and had started to feel a bit less awful, I reached down from the side of the couch to pick up the remote control panel, which was lying on the floor. I zapped the main TV into action and surfed through the channels. It took me a few moments to focus, and to realize that something was going on. I went to CNNfn, then to CNBC, and then back again to CNNfn. I looked at the corner of the screen to check the time.

It was 2. 35 p. m. and since about 1 p. m. – apparently – the markets had been in freefall. The Nasdaq had already dropped 319 points, the Dow Jones 185 points, and the S & P 93 points, with none of them showing any signs of halting, let alone bouncing back. Both CNNfn and CNBC were providing minute-by-minute coverage from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, as well as from their respective studios – the main thrust of the story being that the tech-stocks bubble appeared to be bursting in slo-mo before our very eyes…

I went over to my desk and switched on the computer. I was curiously calm, but when I saw the quotes, and saw how far the share prices had plunged, I began to feel dizzy. I put my head in my hands and tried not to panic – and just about succeeded… probably by sparing a thought for all those traders down in Lafayette who as a consequence of following my leads would almost certainly have been wiped out as well. Though I was ready to bet that none of them had lost as much as I had, which was now more than likely somewhere in the region of a million dollars…

THE NEXT MORNING I WENT OUT to get the papers – as well as to do a provisions run to Gristede’s and the liquor store. The headlines ranged from things like OUCH! and NIGHTMARE ON QUEASY STREET to INVESTOR CAUTION AFTER MARKETS TUMBLE. The Nasdaq had rallied somewhat in the late p. m. – after a staggering lowest-point drop of 9 per cent – and was continuing to recover this morning. This was thanks to a few brokerage houses and mutual funds who’d seen the bottom coming and started buying on the dip. Some commentators were hysterical, talking about a repeat of Black Monday – or even of 1929 – but others took a more sanguine approach, saying that recent speculative excess in technology stocks had now been purged… or that what we had witnessed wasn’t so much a wide-spread correction as a cleansing action in the frothier parts of the Nasdaq. This was all very reassuring for the long-haul players, but not much consolation to the millions of small-time investors who’d bought on margin and then been annihilated by the big sell-off.

Poring over opinion pieces in the newspapers, however, wasn’t going to change anything. It wasn’t going to change the fact – for example – that my bank account had been cleaned out, or that I wouldn’t be able to trade any more at Lafayette.

Putting the newspapers aside, I looked at the bag of cash on the cluttered dining table and reminded myself, for the fiftieth time, that what was in that bag was the sum total of what I had left in the world – and that I owed it all to a Russian loanshark …

Gennady’s visit on Friday morning was going to be the next event of any significance in my life, but I certainly wasn’t looking forward to it. I spent the couple of days in between drinking and listening to music. At one point during this time – and more than half-way through a late-night bottle of Absolut – I got to thinking about Ginny Van Loon, and what a curious girl she was. I went online and searched through various newspaper and magazine archives for any references there might be to her. I found quite a lot of stuff, quotes from ‘Page Six’ and the ‘Styles’ section of the New York Times, clippings, profiles and even some photos – a sixteen-year-old Ginny out of her head at the River Club with Tony De Torrio, Ginny surrounded by models and fashion designers, Ginny with Nikki Sallis at a party in LA sipping from a bottle of Cristal. A recent piece in New York magazine repeated the story about her parents reining her in with threats of disinheritance, but the same piece also quoted friends saying that she had calmed down a lot anyway and was no longer ‘much fun to be around’. Ginny herself was quoted in an article as saying that she’d spent most of her teens wanting to be famous and now only wanted to be left alone. She’d done some acting and modelling, but had left all of that behind – fame was a disease, she’d said, and anyone who craved it was a moron. I read these articles over several times – and printed out the photos, which I stuck on my noticeboard.

Large chunks of time seemed to be drifting by now, during which I did nothing but idly surf the Net or sit on the couch and drink – becoming maudlin, confused, cranky.

When Gennady showed up on Friday morning, I was hungover. The mess in my apartment had gotten worse and I’m sure it didn’t smell too good either – though at the time that aspect of things wasn’t anything I was actually aware of. I was too miserable and sick to notice.

When Gennady arrived at the doorway and stood looking in at the chaos, my worst fear – or one of them, at any rate – was realized. I knew straightaway that Gennady was on MDT. I could tell from the alert expression on his face and even from the way he was standing. I knew, too, that my suspicion would be confirmed as soon as he opened his mouth.

‘What’s your problem, Eddie? ’ he said, with a mirthless laugh, ‘are you depressed or something? Maybe you need some medication. ’ He sniffed and made a face. ‘Or maybe you just need to get an air-conditioning unit in this place. ’

It was clear even from those few sentences that his spoken English had improved dramatically. His accent was still quite strong, but his grasp of structures – grammar and syntax – had obviously undergone some rapid transformative process. I wondered how many of the five pills he’d already taken.

‘Hello, Gennady. ’

I went over to the dining table, sat down and extracted a wad of cash from the brown paper bag. I started counting $100 bills, sighing wearily every couple of seconds. Gennady came into the room and wandered about for a while, surveying the mess. He came to a stop right in front of me.

‘That’s not very safe, Eddie, ’ he said, ‘keeping all your money in a fucking paper bag. Someone might come in and steal it. ’

I sighed again and said, ‘I don’t like banks. ’ I handed him up the twenty-two five. He took it and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He walked over to my desk, turned around and leaned back against it.

‘Now, ’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you about something. ’

Here it came. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. But I tried to play dumb.

‘You didn’t like the treatment, ’ I said, and then added, ‘It was just a draft. ’

‘Fuck that, ’ he said, with a dismissive gesture of the hand, ‘I’m not talking about that. And anyway, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. ’

‘What? ’

‘Those pills I stole. Are you going to tell me you didn’t notice? ’

‘What about them? ’

‘What do you think? I want more. ’

‘I don’t have any. ’

He smiled, as though we were playing a game – which of course we were.

I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘I don’t. ’

He pushed himself up from the desk and walked over towards me. He stopped where he’d stopped before and slowly reached his hand back into the inside pocket of his jacket. I was scared, but didn’t flinch. He took out something which I couldn’t see properly. He looked at me, smiled again and then with rapid a motion of his hand released the blade of a long flick-knife. He placed the tip of the blade at the side of my neck and moved it up and down, scraping it gently against my skin. ‘I want some more, ’ he said.

I swallowed. ‘Do I look like I have any more? ’

He paused for a moment and stopped moving the knife, but didn’t withdraw it. I went on, ‘You’ve taken it, right? You know what it’s like, and what it does to you. ’ I swallowed again, louder than before. ‘Look around you, does this strike you as the place of someone who’s taking the drug you took? ’

‘Well, where did you get it from then? ’

‘I don’t know, some guy I met in a-’

He jabbed the knife sharply against my neck and withdrew it quickly.

‘Ow! ’

I put my hand up to the point where he’d jabbed me and rubbed it. There wasn’t any blood, but the jab had really hurt.

‘Don’t lie to me, Eddie, because – and make sure you understand this – if I don’t get what I want I’m going to kill you anyway…’ Then he set the point of the knife to just under my left eye, and pressed it in, gently but firmly. ‘And in stages. ’

He continued pressing the knife, and when I could feel my eyeball starting to protrude, I whispered, ‘OK. ’

He held the knife in place for a moment and then withdrew it.

‘I can get them, ’ I said, ‘but it’ll take a few days. The guy who deals them is very… security conscious. ’

Gennady clicked his tongue, as if to say go on.

‘I phone him, and he arranges a pick-up. ’ I paused here and rubbed my left eye, but it was really to give me a moment to work out what I was going to say next. ‘If he catches a whiff of someone else getting involved in this, by the way – someone he doesn’t know – that’s it, we’ll never hear from him again. ’

Gennady nodded.

‘And another thing, ’ I said, ‘they’re expensive. ’

I could tell that he was excited at the prospect of scoring. I could also tell that despite his heavy-handed tactics he would go along with whatever I proposed, and would pay whatever I asked.

‘How much? ’

‘Five hundred a pop…’

He whistled, almost with glee.

‘… which is why I’m out of them. Because we’re not talking dime bags here. ’

He looked at me, and then pointed at the money on the table. ‘Use that. Get me… er…’ – he paused, and seemed to be doing some calculations in his head – ‘… get me fifty or sixty of them. For starters. ’

If I did end up giving him any, they would have to come from my stash, so I said, ‘The most I can get in one go is ten. ’

‘Fuck that-’

‘Gennady, I’ll talk to the guy, but he’s very paranoid. We’ve got to take this slowly. ’

He turned around and walked over to the desk, and then back again.

‘OK, when? ’

‘I should be able to get them by next Friday. ’

‘Next fucking Friday? You said a few days. ’

‘I leave him a message. It takes a few days for him to get back to me. Then another few days to set it up. ’

Gennady held the knife out again and pointed it directly in my face. ‘If you fuck with me, Eddie, you’ll be sorry. ’

Then he put the knife away and walked over to the door.

‘I’m going to phone you Tuesday. ’

I nodded.

‘OK. Tuesday. ’

Standing in the doorway, and as though it were an afterthought, he said, ‘So what is this shit anyway? What’s in it? ’

‘It’s a… smart-drug, ’ I said, ‘I don’t really know what’s in it. ’

‘It makes you smart? ’

I held out my hands. ‘Well, yeah. Hadn’t you noticed? ’ I was going to say something to him about his English and how it had improved, but I decided against it. He might get offended at the idea that I hadn’t thought his English was good to start with.

‘Sure, ’ he said, ‘it’s amazing. What’s it called? ’

I hesitated. ‘Er… MDT. It’s called MDT. It’s a chemical name, but… yeah. ’

‘MDT? ’

‘Yeah. You know, score some MDT. Do some MDT. ’

He looked at me for a moment, dubiously, and then said, ‘Tuesday. ’

He went out into the hallway, leaving the door open. I remained sitting in the chair and listened to him clumping down the stairs. When I heard the door of the building banging closed I stood up and went over to the window. I looked out and saw Gennady pacing along Tenth Street towards First Avenue. From the little I knew of him, the lightness in his step seemed, to say the least, uncharacteristic.

Looking back now – from the dead stillness of this room here in the Northview Motor Lodge – I can see that Gennady’s intrusion into my life, his attempt to muscle in on my supply of MDT, had quite an unsettling effect on me. I had lost nearly everything and I resented the idea that someone could so easily destroy what little there was left. I hadn’t wanted to take MDT at full throttle any more because I was scared of surrendering myself to another blackout, scared of being open again to that same level of darkness and unpredictability. But neither did I want to just give up and leave everything behind – and especially not for a circling vulture like Gennady to pick at and tear apart. Besides, the idea of Gennady on MDT seemed a complete waste to me. Suddenly the guy was able to speak comprehensible English? Big fucking deal. He was still a bonehead, a zhulik. MDT wasn’t going to change someone like him. Not the way it had changed me…

On foot of this realization, I decided I had to make one last effort. Maybe I could salvage something from the situation. Maybe I could even reverse it. I’d make another call to Donald Geisler and plead with him to talk to me.

What harm could it do?

I rooted out Vernon’s black notebook, found the number and dialled it

‘Yep? ’

I paused for a second and then rushed into it.

‘This is Vernon Gant’s friend again, don’t hang up, please … five minutes, all I want is five minutes of your time, I’ll pay you…’ – this came to me on the spur of the moment – ‘… I’ll pay you five thousand dollars, a thousand dollars a minute, just talk to me…’

I stopped, and there was silence. As I waited, I stared over at the brown paper bag on the table.

He released a long sigh. ‘Jeesus! ’

I didn’t know what this meant, but he hadn’t hung up on me. I decided not to push it. I remained silent.

Eventually, he said, ‘I don’t want your money. ’ He paused again, and then said, ‘Five minutes. ’

‘Thank you… very much. ’

He gave me the address of a caf& #233; on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope in Brooklyn and told me to meet him there in an hour. He was tall and would be wearing a plain yellow T-shirt.

I had a shower and shaved, knocked back a quick cup of coffee and some toast, and got dressed. I picked up a cab straightaway out on Tenth Street.

The caf& #233; was small and dark and nearly empty. Sitting alone at a table in the corner was a tall man wearing a plain yellow T-shirt. He was drinking an espresso. Beside his cup, neatly stacked, he had a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo lighter. I introduced myself and sat down. From his greying hair and the lines around his eyes, I reckoned that Donald Geisler was about fifty-five years old. He had the tired, gruff demeanour of someone who’s been around the block a few times, and probably a few different blocks at that.

‘OK, then, ’ he said, ‘what do you want? ’

I gave him a quick and heavily edited version of events. At the end I said, ‘So what I really need to know about is dosage. Or, failing that, if you’ve heard of an associate of Vernon’s called Tom, or Todd. ’

He nodded his head, pensively, and then stared at his espresso cup for a few moments. As I waited for him to gather his thoughts, or whatever it was he was doing, I took out my pack of Camels and lit one up.

I’d smoked more than half of the cigarette before Geisler spoke. It occurred to me that if we were supposed to be sticking to the five-minute rule, we were already way over time.

‘About three years ago, ’ he said, ‘three and a half maybe, I met Vernon Gant. I was an actor at the time, with a small company I’d co-founded five years before that. We did Miller and Shepard and Mamet, that kind of thing. We had some success – especially with a production of American Buffalo. And we toured a lot. ’

I knew immediately from the tone in his voice, as well as from the languid narrative route he appeared to be taking, that despite his earlier protests, he was in this for the long haul.

I discreetly ordered two more espressos from a passing waitress and lit up another cigarette.

‘Around the time I met Vernon was also when the company decided to change direction and mount a production of Macbeth – which I was going to take the lead in. And direct. ’ He cleared his throat. ‘At the time, meeting Vernon seemed like a piece of really good luck – because here I am scared shitless at the prospect of doing Shakespeare and this guy is offering me… well, you know what he was offering me. ’

Geisler’s delivery was slow and deliberate, his voice like gravel. It was an actor’s voice. I also got the impression, as he went on, that he had never spoken about this stuff to anyone before. His account of the early days of MDT was much fuller than Melissa’s had been but was essentially the same. In his case, he’d received the pitch from Vernon, been unable to resist and after a couple of 15mg doses had memorized the entire text of Macbeth – thoroughly intimidating his cast and crew in the process. He’d then gone on, over the early rehearsal period, to take a further dozen pills, an average of about three a week. The pills were unmarked, but Vernon’s partner, a guy called Todd, had shown up one day with Vernon and explained the dosage and something about what was in MDT and how it worked. This Todd character had also asked Geisler questions about how he was responding to the drug and if he’d been experiencing any adverse side-effects. Geisler had said that he hadn’t.

Two weeks before opening, and under intense pressure, Geisler had cleaned out what he had in the bank and upped his intake to six pills a week – ‘Nearly one a day, ’ he said.

I wanted to ask him more about Todd and what he’d had to say about dosage – but at the same time I could see that Geisler was concentrating really hard and I didn’t want to interrupt his train of thought.

‘Then, in the few days before we were due to open, it happened – my life fell apart. From a Tuesday to a Friday. It just… fell apart. ’

Up to this point, Geisler had kept both his hands under the table and out of view. I hadn’t thought anything of it, but now as he moved his right hand up and reached out to take his espresso cup, I saw that his hand had a slight but noticeable tremor. I thought at first that it might be a symptom of alcoholism, a morning-after shake, something like that, but when I saw him leaning forward, gripping the cup to make sure he got it up to his lips without spilling any of the coffee, I realized that he was probably suffering from some neurological disorder. He replaced the cup, very carefully, and then put himself through the laborious process of lighting a cigarette. He did this in silence, pointedly making no comment about the difficulty he was having. He knew I was watching, which almost turned it into a kind of performance.

Once he had his cigarette on the go, he said, ‘I was under a lot of pressure, rehearsing fourteen, fifteen hours a day… but then… before I know it, and out of the fucking blue, I’m having these periods of memory loss. ’

I stared at him, nodding my head.

‘I lost track of what I was doing for hours at a time. ’

Barely able to contain myself, I kept saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, go on, go on. ’

‘I still don’t know what I got up to, exactly, during these… blackouts, I suppose you’d call them… all I know is that between the Tuesday and Friday of that week – and as a result of what I got up to – my girlfriend of ten years left me, the production of Macbeth was cancelled and I was thrown out of my apartment. I also ran over and nearly killed an eleven-year-old girl on Columbus Avenue. ’

‘Jesus. ’

My heart was racing.

‘I went to Vernon to try and find out what was happening to me, and at first he didn’t want to know, he was scared, but then he contacted Todd and we met up. Todd was the technical one – he worked for a pharmaceutical company. I could never figure out what their story was, but it soon became clear that Todd was siphoning this stuff out of the labs where he worked and that Vernon was just the front man. It also emerged that Vernon had mixed up a batch of tablets and had been dealing me 30- instead of 15mg pills, which meant that my dosage had shot up dramatically without me knowing it. Anyway, I told Todd what had happened and he said that I needed to combine the MDT with something else, another drug, something to counteract the side-effects. That’s what he called these blackouts – side-effects …’

‘What was the na-’

‘… but I told him I wasn’t taking anything else, that I wanted to stop, and to get back to normal. I asked him if I could do that, if I could just stop – without there being any other adverse side-effects, and he said he didn’t know, he wasn’t the FDA, but that since I’d been on such a high dosage he wouldn’t recommend stopping outright. He said I should probably reduce my intake gradually. ’

I nodded.

‘Which is what I did. But not systematically, not according to any known clinical procedure. ’ ‘And what happened? ’

‘I was fine for a while, but then this started…’ – he held up his hands – ‘… and then… insomnia, nausea, chest and sinus infections, loss of appetite, constipation, dry mouth, erectile dysfunction. ’

He threw his hands up, this time in a gesture of despair.

I didn’t know what to say to him, and we were both silent for a while. I still wanted answers to my original two questions, but at the same time I didn’t want to be insensitive.

After a moment, Geisler said, ‘Look, I’m not blaming anyone but myself. No one forced me to take MDT. ’ He shook his head, and went on. ‘I guess I was a guinea pig, though, because I bumped into Vernon about a year later and he told me they’d sorted out any dosage problems they’d been having, that dosage had to be individually adjusted – customized, he said. ’ A sudden look of anger came into his face. ‘He even suggested I might like to try it again, but I told him to go fuck himself. ’

I tried to nod sympathetically.

I also waited to see if he was going to say anything else. When it appeared that he wasn’t, I said, ‘This Todd guy, do you know his surname? Or anything about him? Which company he worked for? ’

Geisler shook his head.

‘I only ever met him two or three times anyway. He was very circumspect, very careful. He and Vernon were some act, I’ll tell you – but Todd was definitely the brains. ’

I fiddled with the pack of Camels on the table beside my espresso cup.

‘One more question, ’ I said. ‘When Todd told you that you needed to combine the MDT with something else, with another drug, to counteract the side-effects, the memory loss… did he say what that drug might be? ’

‘Yes. ’

My heart jumped.

‘What was it? ’

‘I actually remember it very well, because he kept on about it, telling me that it would take care of the problem, that he’d just worked it out. It was a product called Dexeron. It’s an antihistamine and is used for treating certain allergies. It contains some… thing, some agent, that reacts with a specific receptor complex in the brain and in a way, he claimed, that would prevent the blackouts from happening. I don’t know exactly. I don’t remember the details of what he said. I don’t think I understood it at the time. But apparently you can get it over the counter. ’

‘You didn’t ever use it, though? ’

‘No. ’

‘I see. ’

I nodded my head, as though I were considering this – but all I was thinking about now was getting out of there as fast as possible and getting to a pharmacy.

‘… anyway, then, after Janine left me and I was kicked out of the company, ’ Geisler went on, ‘I tried to pick up the pieces, but that wasn’t so easy, because of course…’

I drained my coffee and desperately tried to formulate an exit strategy in my head. Even though I felt sorry for Geisler, and was horrified at what had happened to him, I really didn’t need to hear this part of the story – but I couldn’t just stand up and leave, either, so I ended up smoking two more cigarettes before I found the courage to say that I had to go.

I told him thanks and said I’d get the check on the way out. He looked at me, as if to say C’mon, sit down, have another cigarette, drink some more coffee, but then a second later he waved a hand at me, dismissively, and said, ‘Oh, go on, get out of here. And good luck. I suppose. ’

I found a pharmacy on Seventh Avenue, a few doors up from the caf& #233;, and bought two packs of Dexeron. I then took a cab home.

Once in the apartment I made straight for the bedroom closet and took out the MDT pills. I wasn’t sure how many to take, and I deliberated on it for quite a while. I eventually decided to take three. This was my last chance and it would either work or it wouldn’t.

I went into the kitchen and got a glass of water. I swallowed the three MDT pills in one go, and then took two of the Dexeron. After that, I went in and sat on the couch, and waited.

Two hours later, my CDs were back in alphabetical order. There were also no more crushed pizza-boxes to be seen in the apartment, or empty beer cans, or dirty socks… and every single inch of surface space was polished and gleaming…

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