PART FOUR 1 страница

OVER THE WEEKEND, I stuck to this new dosage regime, and monitored my progress fairly closely. I decided not to go out, just in case anything went wrong – but nothing did go wrong. There were no clicks or jumps or flashes, and it appeared that whatever was in the Dexeron actually worked – which wasn’t to say that I was in the clear, of course, or that I wouldn’t ever be having another blackout again, but it definitely felt good to be back. All of a sudden, I was confident, and clear-headed, and buzzing with ideas and energy. If the Dexeron went on working, my future path was laid out in front of me, brick by brick, and the only thing that I had to do was follow it, undistracted, unrepentant. I would re-acquaint myself with the MCL-Abraxas material and then I’d go and smooth things over with Carl Van Loon. I’d get trading again and make some money, and move into the Celestial Building. I’d eventually extricate myself from involvement with people like Van Loon and Hank Atwood and set up an independent business structure of my own – the Spinola Corporation, SpinolaSystems, Edinvest, whatever.

I couldn’t get Ginny Van Loon out of my mind as I entertained these thoughts, and I tried now to slot her in at some appropriate point along the way. She resisted, however – or the idea of her resisted – and the more resistance there was the more agitated I became. Eventually, I put these feelings aside, compartmentalized them, and moved on to the MCL-Abraxas material.

I read through all of the documents, and marvelled at how I hadn’t been able to understand them before. It certainly wasn’t the most exciting material in the world, but it was still relatively straightforward. I re-acquainted myself with how the Black-Scholes pricing model worked and did up the projections on the computer. I ironed out any difficulties there’d been, including the discrepancy in the third option that Van Loon had pointed out to me that day in his office.

The other thing I did over the weekend – apart from a hundred sit-ups each morning and evening – was to get back into some serious news consumption. I read the papers online and watched all the major current affairs shows on TV. There was very little mention of the Donatella Alvarez murder investigation, other than a brief appeal for anyone who might have witnessed anything to come forward – which meant, presumably, that the police had come up with no leads on Thomas Cole and were now clutching at straws.

There was quite a lot of coverage of the Mexico story. A number of high-profile attacks had taken place – on tourists, and on US citizens, chiefly businessmen, living in Mexico City. One company director had been shot dead and two others had been kidnapped and were still missing. These incidents were being directly linked to the foreign policy debate that was raging in the press – and in which the ‘i’ word was now routinely being used. What had yet to be plausibly constructed in the public mind, despite talk of safety concerns for US citizens, not to mention threatened Mexican expropriation of foreign investments, was a rationale for any invasion that might take place – but they were clearly working on it.

I also looked at how the markets had been performing since the big drop in tech stocks the previous Tuesday, and did some preliminary research for the coming Monday morning – which was when I planned to re-activate my account with Klondike.

Late on the Sunday evening, I was restless and decided to go out for a while. It was only when I hit the warm night air, and started walking, that I understood just how much better I really felt. Unlike before, I now had a strong physical sense of MDT, an almost buzz-like tingling in my limbs and head. At the same time, I didn’t feel intoxicated in any way. I just felt fully in control of my faculties – stronger, more awake, sharper.

I went to a few different bars, drank soda water and talked all night long. In each place I went to, it only took me a few minutes to start up a conversation with someone and then a few more after that to attract a circle of listeners around me – these people apparently fascinated by what I had to say, as I talked about politics, history, baseball, music, anything that found its way into the conversation. I had women coming on to me, too, and even some men, but I had no sexual interest in these people and tactfully deflected their advances by raising the polemical temperature of whatever discussion we were involved in. I am aware that this might make me sound obnoxious and manipulative, but it really didn’t play that way at the time, and as the night marched on and they all got drunker, or more wired, and eventually started dropping out, I felt more invigorated, and – frankly – like some kind of minor god.

I got home at about 7. 30 in the morning and immediately started sweeping through the financial websites. I’d shifted all of my funds out of the Klondike account on signing up with Lafayette – except for the deposit, which it had been necessary to leave in order to keep the account open. I was glad now that I’d done this, but as I eased my way back into trading throughout the course of the day, I found that I missed the company of other traders and the atmosphere of a ‘room’. Nevertheless, it was remarkable how quickly I regained the confidence to make big trades and to take considerable risks, and by Tuesday afternoon – when Gennady phoned – I had already notched up about $25, 000 in my account.

I’d forgotten that Gennady would be phoning and I was in the middle of devising a complicated trading strategy for the following day when the call came. I was in quite a buoyant mood and didn’t want any trouble, so I told him I’d have the ten pills ready for him on Friday. He immediately wanted to know if I’d have them any time before then and if he could come and collect them. Slightly irritated by this, I said that no, I wouldn’t, and he couldn’t – and that I’d see him on Friday morning. When I put the phone down, I gave some thought to how I was going to deal with the Gennady situation. It had the potential to become a very serious problem indeed, and although I had no choice but to give him the ten pills this time, I didn’t like the idea that he’d be out there, probably scheming his way up the Organizatsiya ladder – and also possibly even scheming against me. I would have to come up with something – a scheme of my own – and soon.

On the Wednesday, I went out shopping to get a couple of new suits. Thanks to a combination of not eating and doing hundreds of sit-ups, I’d lost a little weight over the previous five days – so I figured it was now time, finally, to inject some new life into my wardrobe. I got two wool suits, one of them a steel grey and the other a midnight blue – both by Boss Hugo Boss. I also got cotton shirts, silk ties, pocket squares, boxers, socks and shoes.

Sitting in the back of a cab on the way home from midtown, surrounded by scented, post-modern shopping bags, I felt exhilarated and ready for anything – but when I got upstairs to the third floor of my building I experienced again that sense I’d often had on MDT of being hemmed in, of not having enough space. My apartment, quite simply, was too small and cramped, and I was going to have to address that issue, as well.

Later on that evening, I wrote a lengthy and carefully phrased note to Carl Van Loon. In the note, I apologized for my recent behaviour and attempted to explain it by referring obliquely to a course of medication I’d been on but had now completed. I ended by asking him to let me come and talk to him, and enclosed the note in a folder with the revised projections I’d drawn up. I’d originally been going to have the package couriered to his office the following morning, but then I decided to deliver it in person. If I bumped into him in the lobby or in the elevator, well and good – if not, I’d wait and see how he responded to the note.

I spent the rest of the evening, and most of the night, studying an 800-page textbook I’d bought a few weeks earlier on corporate financing.

The next morning I did my sit-ups, drank some juice and had a shower. I chose the blue suit, a white cotton shirt and a plain ruby tie. I got dressed in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom, and then took a cab to the Van Loon Building on Forty-eighth Street. I felt fresh and confident as I entered the lobby and strode over to the elevators. People were whizzing by in all directions and I had the sensory impression of cutting my way through a dense fuzz of commotion. As I waited for the elevator doors to open, I glanced over at the section of the enormous bronze-tinted window where I had stood wheezing in panic with Ginny the previous week, and found it hard to relate to the scene in any meaningful way at all. Neither was there the slightest hint in the elevator car, as it hurtled up to the sixty-second floor, of my earlier fear and anxiety. Instead, I eyed my reflection in the steel panels of the car’s interior and admired the cut of my new suit.

The lobby area of Van Loon & Associates was quiet. There were a few young guys standing around chatting and letting off occasional volleys of boisterous laughter. The receptionist was looking at something on her computer screen, and seemed to be engrossed in it. When I reached her desk, I cleared my throat to attract her attention.

‘Good morning, sir. May I help you? ’

She showed a flicker of recognition, but also of confusion.

‘Mr Van Loon please. ’

‘I’m afraid Mr Van Loon is out of the country at the moment. We don’t expect him back until tomorrow. If you would…’

‘That’s OK, ’ I said, ‘I’d like to leave this package for him. It’s very urgent that it be brought to his attention as soon as he returns. ’

‘Of course, sir. ’

She smiled.

I nodded, and smiled back.

Stopping short of clicking my heels, I then spun around and headed over towards the elevators again.

I went home and traded online for the rest of the day, adding a further ten grand to my pile.

So far, the combination of MDT and Dexeron had worked really well for me, and I kept my fingers crossed. I’d been on it for nearly a week now and I hadn’t had the merest hint of a blackout. But for Gennady’s visit I decided to mess up my apartment a little, deliberately. I wanted to play down the intensity of high-dosage MDT and try to convince him that taking more than one pill every couple of days was actually dangerous. That way I could slow him down and give myself a little breathing space. However, I really had no idea what I was going to do about him.

When he came in the door on Friday morning, I could see that he had regressed a little. He didn’t say anything, but just held out his hand and shook it in a gimme motion.

I took a tiny plastic container with ten MDT pills in it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He opened it immediately, standing there, and before I could launch into my spiel about dosage, he had popped one of the pills into his mouth.

He closed his eyes and remained still for a few moments – during which time I stood still as well, and said nothing. Then he opened his eyes and glanced around. I had tried to make the place look untidy, but it hadn’t been easy – and there was certainly no comparison at all between how the place looked now and how it had looked the previous week.

‘You get some, too? ’ he said, nodding his head at the general tidiness.

‘Yes. ’

‘So you get more than ten? You tell me only ten. ’

Shit.

‘I got twelve, ’ I said, ‘I managed to get twelve. Two extra for me. But that was a thousand bucks. I can’t afford any more than that. ’

‘OK, next week, you get me twelve. ’

I was going to say no. I was going to say fuck you. I was going to run at him and see if the physical kick of a triple dose of MDT would be enough to let me overpower him and maybe choke him to death. But I did nothing. I said, ‘OK. ’

Because what if it went wrong and I got choked to death – or, at best, I drew the attention of the police? And was finger-printed, booked, keyed into the system? I needed a safer and much more efficient way to get myself out of this situation. And it had to be permanent.

Gennady held his hand out again, and said, ‘The seventeen-five? ’

I had the money ready and just gave it to him without saying anything.

He put it into his jacket pocket.

As he was going out the door, he said, ‘Next week, twelve. Don’t forget. ’

Carl Van Loon phoned me at seven o’clock that evening. I hadn’t been expecting such a quick response, but I was glad – because now, one way or the other, I could proceed. I’d been getting restless, prickled by an increasing need to be involved in something that would consume all of my time and energy.

‘Eddie. ’

‘Carl. ’

‘How many times are we going to have to do this, Eddie? ’

I took a relatively subdued comment like that as a good sign, and launched into a defensive broadside that culminated in a plea to let me get involved again in the MCL-Abraxas deal. I told him that I was fired up and brimming with new ideas and that if he took a good look at the revised projections he’d see just how serious I was.

‘I have looked at them, Eddie. They’re terrific. Hank’s here and I showed them to him earlier. He wants to meet you. ’ He paused. ‘We want to get this thing off the ground. ’

He paused again, longer this time.

‘Carl? ’

‘But Eddie, I’m going to be straight with you. You pissed me off before. I didn’t know who – or what – I was talking to. I mean, whatever it is you’ve got, some kind of bipolar shit, I don’t know – but that degree of instability is just not on when you’re playing at this level. When the merger is announced there’s going to be a lot of pressure, wall-to-wall media coverage, stuff you can’t imagine if you haven’t already been there. ’

‘Let me come and talk to you, Carl, face to face. If you’re not satisfied after that, I’ll back off. You won’t hear from me again. I’ll sign confidentiality agreements, whatever. Five minutes. ’

Van Loon paused for a full thirty seconds. In the silence, I could hear him breathing. Eventually, he said, ‘I’m at home. I’ve got something on later, so if you’re coming round, come round now. ’

I had Van Loon back onside within ten minutes. We sat in his library, drinking Scotch, and I spun out an elaborate tale for him of an entirely imaginary condition I was supposed to be suffering from. It was easily treatable with light medication, but I had reacted adversely to a certain element in the medication and this had resulted in my erratic behaviour. The medication had been adjusted, I’d completed the course and now I was fine. It was a thin enough story, but I don’t think Van Loon was actually listening very closely to what I was saying – he seemed, rather, to be mesmerized by something in the timbre of my voice, by my physical presence, and I even had the feeling that what he wanted more than anything else was just to reach over and touch me – and be, in a sense, electrified. It was a heightened version of how people had reacted to me before – Paul Baxter, Artie Meltzer, Kevin Doyle, Van Loon himself. I wasn’t complaining, but I had to be careful about how I dealt with this. I didn’t want it to cause any interference, or to unbalance things. I figured the best way to harness it was to keep busy, and to keep whoever I was exerting an influence over busy as well. With this in mind I swiftly moved the conversation on to the MCL-Abraxas deal.

It was all very delicate, Van Loon said, and time was of the essence. Despite a number of hitches, Hank Atwood was anxious to proceed. Having devised a price structure to bring to the table, the next step was to propose who should get the top jobs, and what shape the new company should have. Then it would be on to meetings, negotiations, bull sessions – the MCL-Parnassus people with the Abraxas people – ‘… and us in the middle. ’

Us?

I took a sip from my Scotch. ‘Us? ’

‘Me, and if it works out, you. Jim Heche, one of my senior vice-presidents knows what’s going on, my wife knows – and that’s about it. Same thing with the principals. Hank’s just brought in a couple of advisers, he’s being very cautious. That’s why we want this thing wrapped up in a couple of weeks, a month tops. ’ He drained the whisky from his glass and looked at me. ‘It’s not easy keeping the lid on something like this, Eddie. ’

We chatted for another half hour or so and then Van Loon said he had to go out. We arranged to meet the following morning at his office. We’d have lunch with Hank Atwood and then set the ball rolling in earnest.

Van Loon shook my hand at the door and said, ‘Eddie, I sincerely hope this works out. I really do. ’

I nodded.

On the way from the library to the main door of the apartment, I’d glanced around, hoping to catch sight of Ginny…

‘Just don’t let me down, Eddie, OK? ’

… if she was at home.

‘I won’t, Carl. I’m on this, believe me. ’

But there was no sign of her.

‘Sure. I know that. I’ll see you tomorrow. ’

The lunch with Hank Atwood went very smoothly. He was impressed by my command of the material relating to the deal, but also by my wide-ranging knowledge of the business world in general. I had no problems answering the questions he asked me, and I even deftly managed to turn a few of them back on Atwood himself. Van Loon’s relief that things were finally working out was palpable, and I could also sense he was pleased that my performance was reflecting well on Van Loon & Associates. We’d gone to the Four Seasons again, and as I sat looking out over the room, fiddling with the stem of my empty wine glass, I tried to recall the details of what had happened the last time I’d been there. But I soon had the weirdest feeling that what I was conjuring up, like a misremembered dream, was unreliable. It even occurred to me that I hadn’t been there before, not really, but had constructed this memory from what someone had told me, or from something I’d read. However, the sense of distance from that other time which this created was welcome – because I was here now, and that was all that counted.

I was enjoying it, too – though I only picked at the food and didn’t have anything to drink. Hank Atwood relaxed quite a bit as the lunch progressed, and I even saw in him a little flicker of that needy reliance on my attention that had become such a feature of earlier, similar relationships. But that was fine. I sat there in the Four Seasons and revelled in the heady atmosphere, reflecting occasionally – when I reminded myself who these men were – that what I was experiencing could well have been the prototype for an extremely sophisticated virtual reality game.

In any case, this lunch was to be the start for me of a busy, strange and exciting period in my life. Over the following two or three weeks I got caught up in a constant round of meetings, lunches, dinners, late-night confabulations with powerful, tanned men in expensive suits – all of us in search of what Hank Atwood kept referring to as ‘vision lock’, that moment when the two parties could agree on a basic outline for the deal. I met with various sorts of people – lawyers, financiers, corporate strategists, a couple of congressmen, a senator – and was able to hold my own with all of them. In fact, somewhat to the alarm of Carl Van Loon, I became, in a couple of respects, pivotal to the whole thing. As we approached the critical mass of vision lock, the few of us who were actually in on the deal became quite pally, in a corporate, cliquey kind of way, but I was the one who provided the social glue. I was the one who was able to paper over the cracks between the two markedly different corporate cultures. In addition to this, I became utterly indispensable to Van Loon himself. Since he couldn’t bring in his usual teams of people to work on the deal, he increasingly relied on me to monitor what was going on and to digest and process huge amounts of information – from Federal Trade Commission regulations to the intricacies of broadband, from appointment times to the names of people’s wives.

While all of this was going on, I managed to do other stuff as well. I made it most days to the Van Loon & Associates gym to burn off some of my excess energy, spending time on different machines and trying to do an all-round work-out. I managed to keep track of my Klondike portfolio and even got a little action in on the company trading floor that Van Loon had told me about. I bought a cellphone, which was something I’d been meaning to do for ages. I bought more clothes, and wore a different suit every day – or, at least, rotated six or seven suits. Since the act of sleeping didn’t feature too prominently in my life any more, I also got to read the papers and do research, sitting at my computer – late at night, and often deep into the night…

Another part of my life, and one that I couldn’t ignore – unfortunately – was Gennady. Given that I was so busy in this increasingly blurred continuum of waking time, I slipped into an easy routine of supplying him with a dozen tablets each Friday morning, telling myself as I handed them over that I’d address the issue before the next time, that I’d take steps to contain the situation. But how? I didn’t know how.

Each time he came, too, I was shocked by how much he’d changed. That smack addict’s pallor had gone and there was a healthy glow to his skin now. He’d had a haircut, and had started wearing suits as well – though they weren’t anywhere near as nice as mine. He’d also taken to arriving by car, a black Mercedes something or other, and had guys waiting for him downstairs. He had to let me know this, of course, and more or less directed me to look out of the window and down at his entourage, waiting on Tenth Street.

Another thing Gennady did which annoyed me, was to shake one of the pills out into his hand the moment he got them, and then pop it into his mouth – right there in front of me, as though I were a coke-dealer and he was checking out the product. He also used to dispense the rest of the pills into a little silver pillbox he had, which he kept in the breast-pocket of his jacket. He’d pat this part of his jacket and say, ‘Always be prepared. ’ Gennady was an asshole and I physically couldn’t bear to have him in the room. But I was powerless to stop him, because he obviously had moved up in the Organizatsiya, so how did I even begin to deal with that?

What I did was compartmentalize it, deal with it at the time and then move swiftly on.

I seemed to be doing a lot of that these days.

Mostly, though, my time was spent huddled in various offices and conference rooms of the Van Loon Building on Forty-eighth Street, with Carl and Hank Atwood and Jim Heche, or with Carl and Jim and Dan Bloom, the chairman of Abraxas, and his people.

Late one night, however, I found myself alone with Carl in one of the conference rooms. We were having a drink, and since we were close to agreeing a deal, he brought up the subject of money, something he hadn’t mentioned since that first night in his apartment on Park Avenue. He passed a comment about the commission rate we’d be getting for brokering the deal, so I decided to ask him outright what my share would be. Without batting an eyelid, and distractedly consulting a folder on the table, he said, ‘Well, given the scale of your contribution, Eddie, it won’t be anything less than forty. I don’t know, say, forty-five. ’

I paused, and waited for him to go on – because I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant. But he didn’t say anything else, and just continued staring at the folder.

‘Thousand? ’ I ventured.

He looked at me, and furrowed his eyebrows. He seemed slightly confused.

‘Million, Eddie. Forty-five million. ’

I HADN’T ANTICIPATED earning that kind of money so quickly – not having imagined, in the first place, that the MCL-Abraxas deal would be so lucrative for Van Loon & Associates. But when I thought about it, and looked at other deals, and at the way these things were structured, I realized that there was nothing unusual about it at all. The combined value of the two companies concerned would be somewhere in the region two hundred billion dollars. Based on that, our brokerage fee – point something of a per cent – would yield, well… handsomely.

I could do plenty, I thought, with that kind of money. I devoted quite a while to thinking about it, in fact, but it didn’t take me long, either, to feel aggrieved that I wasn’t in possession of any of the money now. It took me even less time to get working on Van Loon for an advance.

When he put the folder aside and I had his attention again, I explained to him that I’d been living on Tenth Street and Avenue A for about six years, but that I felt it was time for a change. He smiled awkwardly at this, as if I’d told him I lived on the moon – but he perked up considerably when I added that I’d been looking at a place in the Celestial Building over on the West Side.

‘Good. That sounds more like it. No disrespect, Eddie – but I mean Avenue A, what the fuck is that all about? ’

‘Income levels, Carl. That’s what it’s about. I’ve never had enough money to live anyplace else. ’

Obviously thinking he’d put me in an awkward position, Van Loon mumbled something and looked uncomfortable for a moment. I told him I liked living down on Avenue A and Tenth Street, and that it was a great neighbourhood, full of old bars and weird characters. Five minutes later, however, I had him telling me not to worry, that he’d arrange financing immediately so I could buy the apartment in the Celestial Building. It’d be a routine company loan that I could settle later, further down the line, whenever. Sure, I thought, nine and a half million dollars – a routine loan.

I phoned Alison Botnick the next morning at Sullivan, Draskell, the realtors on Madison Avenue.

‘Well, Mr Spinola, how are you? ’

‘I’m fine. ’

I told her I was sorry for having run off that day, making a joke out of it. She said, oh, not even to mention it. Then I asked her if the apartment was still on the market. It was, she said, and all the work on it had just been completed. I told her I’d be interested in seeing it again, that day if possible, and in talking to her about entering a bid.

Van Loon had also said he’d write a reference letter for me, which would probably make it unnecessary for Sullivan, Draskell to pry into my tax returns and credit history – and would mean, if everything went well, that I could sign the contracts almost immediately and move in.

This had now become the controlling dynamic in my life – immediacy, acceleration, speed. I shifted rapidly from scene to scene, from one location to another, with little sense of where the joins met. For example, I had to see several people that morning, and in different places – the office on Forty-eighth Street, a hotel uptown, a bank down on Vesey Street. Then I had a lunch appointment with Dan Bloom at Le Cirque. I squeezed in seeing the apartment again after lunch. Alison Botnick was waiting for me when I arrived up on the sixty-eighth floor – almost as though she hadn’t left since my last visit and had been waiting patiently for me to return. Barely recognizing me at first, she was then all over me, but within about five minutes, probably even less, I had put in a bid at a small but strategic amount over the ask price and was gone – back to Forty-eighth Street and another meeting with Carl and Hank and Jim, to be followed by cocktails at the Orpheus Room.

As this last meeting was wrapping up, Van Loon took a call at his desk. We were now very close to announcing the deal, and everyone was in an upbeat mood. The meeting had gone well, and even though the hardest part lay ahead – seeking Congressional, FCC and FTC approval – there was a real sense of collective accomplishment in the room.

Hank Atwood stood up from his chair and strolled over to where I was sitting. He was in his early sixties, but looked trim and wiry and very fit. Even though he was short, he had a commanding, almost threatening presence. Landing a gentle punch on my shoulder, he said, ‘Eddie, how do you do it? ’

‘What? ’

‘That extraordinary recall you’ve got. The way your mind processes everything. I can see it working. ’

I shrugged my shoulders.

He went on, ‘You’re on top of this thing in a way that I find almost…’

I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

‘… almost… I mean I’ve been in business for forty years, Eddie, I’ve headed up a food-and-drinks conglomerate, I’ve run a movie studio, I’ve seen it all, every trick in the book, every kind of deal there is, every kind of guy you can meet…’

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