No Way Back

by Matthew Klein

  She was crazy, of course; I see that now. Her husband was a paedophile, and he was being blackmailed by a Russian mobster.

  His wife knew about me. She knew about Jim Thane. That much is clear. She obsessed about me. She read about me somewhere, researched me, uncovered my secret. She knew about Cole, about what happened that night, in the bath. Maybe she read about me in the papers, that flurry of stories that appeared when the DA dropped the charges against me. Or maybe she heard it through the grapevine. The tech community is small, and people talk, and I know that they still whisper, about what happened that night. His son drowned, they murmur, when I walk into a room, and they think that I can’t hear. He was high, and his son drowned.

  This can be the only explanation: she blames me for what happened to her husband. She wants to hurt me. For I am the man who replaced her husband.

  A part of me understands. She may have been married to a sick man, but she loved him. And he was being tortured in front of her eyes – blackmailed by someone remote and unassailable. She was unable to strike at the real perpetrator, the man who destroyed her husband – Ghol Gedrosian – and so instead she lashed out at the one man she could find. She saved her hatred for that man, for me, Jimmy Thane.

  CHAPTER 30

  That night, Libby and I watch television in the living room, stretched on the couch. I soon lose interest in her reality shows, and when I mutter that I wish we could change the channel, she ignores me. I get up from the couch, and stretch, and wander to the sliding glass door leading to the patio.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asks, noticing me at last.

  ‘Just getting some air.’

  I walk outside before she can argue. I slide the door shut.

  The swimming pool is lit from below, and in the dark night, it casts dancing yellow light on the palm fronds that shield us from our neighbour’s gaze.

  The pool looks inviting, but I’m too lazy to go back upstairs for swim trunks. So I peel off my sweaty clothes right there, leaving them in a crumpled pile on the patio, and I dive, naked, into the water. I swim five laps.

  When I finish, I’m out of breath, but invigorated, and I pull myself from the pool and carry my clothes back into the house.

  ‘You’re dripping,’ Libby says, not even looking at me.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘And you’re naked.’

  I look down. ‘Hadn’t noticed.’ The carpet at my feet is turning dark with puddled water. ‘You’re acting very strange today, Jimmy.’

  ‘Am I?’ Maybe my meeting with Mrs Adams disturbed me more than I realized. ‘I’ll get dressed.’

  I’m about to leave her, and head upstairs, when my cellphone rings. The trill is sharp and startling. I see the phone glowing on the desk nearby, next to my laptop computer.

  I walk to the desk, still dripping. I open the phone, keep it an inch from my ear.

  ‘Hey, hotshot,’ says the voice, when I answer.

  ‘Tad?’

  ‘What are you doing right now?’

  ‘Just walking around naked.’

  ‘Good, good,’ he says, ignoring me. ‘I just got off the phone with someone interesting. Guess who.’

  Ghol Gedrosian, I want to say. But instead I say merely: ‘Who?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Really, Tad, I can’t guess.’

  ‘Dan Yokelson.’ He says the name proudly, as if I ought to know who it is, and ought to be deeply impressed. The name is familiar, but I can’t quite place it.

  ‘Come on, Jimmy,’ he says, when I’m silent for too long. ‘You know who that is, right?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘White Rock.’

  ‘White Rock?’ I say. And then I remember. White Rock is one of the largest hedge funds on the West Coast. A firm that happens to be run by a friend of Tad’s. An old Harvard MBA buddy, or so Tad has told me a dozen times. A billionaire. One of the Forbes Top 50 richest men in the world.

  ‘What’d you guys talk about?’ I ask.

  ‘You, partner.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Well, not you personally,’ he admits. ‘But Tao. He wants to do a deal.’

  ‘A deal?’

  ‘He’ll license your technology. What are you calling it nowadays? P-Scan?’

  I’m puzzled by what Tad is telling me, because hedge funds have no conceivable use for Tao’s technology. Hedge funds deal with wealthy customers. They handle big money from big institutions. They have meetings over lunch at the Four Seasons. They don’t operate retail branches, where strangers walk in from the street, requiring facial identification. There’s no conceivable way that Tao’s technology could be of any use to a firm like White Rock.

  ‘But they’re a hedge fund,’ I say.

  ‘They are,’ Tad admits, reluctantly. ‘They are. But he wants to do it. And I have his personal guarantee. It’s a done deal, Jimmy. He’ll license it for five million. How does that sound to you?’

  ‘How does that sound to me? It sounds... crazy.’

  I glance at the couch, catch Libby looking at me. She looks away quickly.

  I say to Tad, ‘What are they going to do with the technology?’

  ‘How the fuck should I know? Who do I look like, Carnac the Magnificent? He wants to pay you five million dollars. Take his money.’

  I think about it. Something doesn’t feel right. But then again, nothing about my job at Tao feels right any more.

  I give up my effort of keeping the phone dry, and I shove it between my ear and my shoulder. I lean across the desk, dripping onto the surface, and wake my laptop computer with a flick of a finger. I type a name into Google: ‘DAN YOKELSON’.

  The search returns an avalanche of results for Dan Yokelson.

  At the top, I see a section that says: ‘Recent news for Dan Yokelson’ and a collection of headlines.

  Now I understand why the name is so familiar: Dan Yokelson has been in the news a lot lately, and not just in the financial press.

  The bottom headlines give the backstory: ‘White Rock Executive Served With Wells Notice for Fraud’ and then ‘Possible Jail Time for Yokelson in Insider Trading Probe’.

  Those stories are dated four months ago.

  I see more recent stories at the top of the page, dated a mere ‘23 hours ago’: ‘Key Government Witness in White Rock Case Disappears’ and ‘SEC Likely to Drop Yokelson Prosecution’.

  Tad’s voice on the telephone brings me back. ‘Jimmy? Are you there?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘You don’t sound very grateful. You know what I had to do to convince him?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘What did you have to do?’

  ‘A case of Latour. A case, Jimmy. Do you know how much that stuff costs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither,’ he says, and laughs. ‘I probably should have asked before I told them to charge it on my card. But the point is: that’s what a Board of Directors does. We get you the deal. No matter what it takes. Remember that.’

  ‘I will, Tad. I’ll remember.’

  CHAPTER 31

  August passes.

  Agent Mitchell doesn’t call again, and I almost forget about the FBI man, and his search for the Russian meth dealer. I almost forget about Charles Adams, too, and his lunatic wife.

  I have pushed these things from my mind. Now they are just tiny dark smudges on the distant horizon – still there, but barely perceptible.

  It has been surprisingly easy to forget them, too. Surprisingly easy to focus on my own success.

  Success.

  What a strange feeling, to be successful. I’ve spent so many years failing, so many years stumbling from one disaster to the next, that I almost forgot what it’s like.

  To be a success.

  When I arrived at Tao, things seemed hopeless, the company’s problems insurmountable. Now, despite the odds, I’ve turned the company around. I was ruthless, it’s true – reducing headcount, cutting costs, changing direction. But my actions, while they hurt some
people, saved the company for everyone else.

  And, while it’s not a sure thing, yet – not by a long shot – I can feel triumph within my grasp.

  The trade magazine Banking Times runs a small news item about Tao’s beta-test with Old Dominion, and the nearly simultaneous deal with White Rock. This one-two punch is the validation we’ve been waiting for. The floodgates open. Now, every day, I receive new phone calls – from Wells Fargo, Chase, HSBC; it seems that everyone wants to work with Tao, wants to start their own pilot programme, using Tao’s amazing P-Scan technology in their own retail banking branches. No one wants to be the last financial institution without state-of-the-art biometrics.

  My answer to each request from breathless executives is the same. I explain how difficult it will be to arrange another deal, since Old Dominion bought exclusivity in the south-eastern United States. Oh, what’s that? Can we structure a deal that excludes the south-east? Well, I never thought of that. I suppose we can.

  The only thing keeping me from laughing aloud, joyously, into the telephone, during each of these calls, is the flickering memory of Stan Pontin, the can-do technologist at Old Dominion, whose untimely death preceded the signing of that very first deal.

  But that disturbing thought never lasts long – not when everything else is going so right.

  With the money coming into Tao’s bank account, no one really cares about the money going out. Joan Leggett stops asking about the cash that vanished under Charles Adams’s watch – which is a comfort to me, since it is surely the same cash sitting in my own personal bank account, the same cash that I’m living off, the same cash that I use to pay for our house rental, or the restaurant meals with Libby, or the increasingly preposterous gifts that I buy her: the Mercedes, the diamond earrings, the gold necklace, the Cartier watch, the David Yurman rings.

  Tad Billups’s weekly telephone calls are always the same – pep talks, really: Keep up the good work, Jimmy; Keep things calm, Jimmy; My partners are watching you, Jimmy, and boy are they impressed. I never ask which partners – the Silicon Valley VCs, or the Eastern European meth dealers with the foreign-sounding names. I don’t want to know.

  Even life around the house has improved. Libby’s sulking and night-time crying jags have petered out. Libby’s not Miss Sunshine – never has been – but at least nowadays she doesn’t seem to hate me – doesn’t stare at me as if I’m some stranger who woke up one day, uninvited, in her bed. Or, if I am a stranger, at least now I am one she has grown accustomed to.

  I see Dr Liago once each week, religiously keeping my appointment with him, not because I like him – or even think him competent – but rather because I want to avoid the wrath of Gordon Kramer. The little whispering doctor performs his mumbo-jumbo hypnotherapy – Relax and breathe, Mr Thane; Do not take drugs, Mr Thane; Lock the memories of your son away, somewhere safe, Mr Thane – and even though his sessions are both ridiculous and tedious, they are better than the alternative: a surprise visit from Gordon, and finding myself handcuffed to a parking-garage sprinkler while he screams and punches me and tells me what a good-for-nothing shit I am.

  I like this new feeling. I like being happy. I like being successful. It’s so new, and so good, and so right, that I ignore the voice, that soft and almost imperceptible voice, that nags on occasion. It comes at night, usually, in the dark, as I fall asleep beside Libby, with the teak-blade fan squeaking overhead. It’s a tiny voice. You’re Jimmy Thane, it says. You are Shiva, the destroyer. You are the wrecker. You are death. You can’t change who you are. You can’t start again.

  But that voice is very quiet. And I can ignore it, usually. And I can go to sleep.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 32

  The trouble starts on a Tuesday afternoon in September.

  I’m seated at my desk, and the phone rings. When I answer, Amanda is on the line. ‘Oh, Jim, you’re still here,’ she says, sounding surprised to hear my voice. ‘I wasn’t sure that you would be.’

  That’s a little jab at the new Jimmy Thane office hours. I have been taking it easy these past weeks, coming in late in the morning, leaving early in the afternoon – and when I do bother to show up, I tell Amanda airily to ‘Hold all calls’. I admit it’s hypocritical, coming from the CEO who tore his employees a new asshole that first morning he arrived, when they showed up twenty minutes past nine. But that was before I understood my real job. My real job is simple, and doesn’t require effort. It doesn’t even – for that matter – require showing up. My job is this: Shut up, take the money, and don’t ask questions.

  ‘You have a visitor,’ Amanda says. ‘Should I send him in?’

  Before I can ask who it is, I hear her tell the visitor, ‘Go ahead in. He says he wants to see you.’

  A moment later there’s a knock on my door, and a voice calls, ‘Special delivery!’

  Pete Bland fills the doorframe, toting a plastic shopping bag. He holds it up. ‘Present for you, Jimmy,’ he says cheerily. He walks in, without waiting for an invitation. He plops the bag on my desk. It crunches with the sound of ice. ‘A dozen stone crabs from the Gator Hut,’ he says. ‘Now we’re Even Steven.’

  ‘Last person who gave me crabs was a hooker named Angel. I still haven’t gotten even.’

  ‘Mind if I sit?’ he asks, sitting.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Actually, I was on my way out.’

  He looks at his watch. His eyebrows arch. ‘At three o’clock?’

  I lift the bag of crabs from my desk, lay it gingerly by my feet. A whiff of its contents wafts to my nostrils. Wharf at low tide. ‘You know how it is,’ I say. ‘Trying not to burn out. Reasonable hours. Work–life balance. All that crap.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ he says, in a voice that indicates that he is trying hard not to pass any judgement. ‘OK. Then I’ll make it fast. I came here for two reasons.’ He holds up two fingers. ‘One, to say thank you for all your billable hours. Tao Software is now officially my most important client. All those signed contracts... Good Lord, how are you guys doing it, anyway? Making an offer they can’t refuse?’ He laughs.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘That White Rock contract alone is putting Ashley through college. She wants to start calling you Uncle Jimmy, by the way. You don’t mind, do you?’ Before I can answer he goes on: ‘Don’t have a heart attack when you see our August invoice. It’s big, Jimmy. Really big. You guys will pay, right?’

  ‘I always pay my debts,’ I say. Which is not exactly true. Involuntarily I touch the nub of my missing pinky finger, where Hector the Bookie once educated me about the importance of timely repayment.

  ‘Number two,’ he says. ‘And this is the real reason for my visit. I mean, besides my desire to give you crabs.’ He pauses. ‘I found something you might be interested in.’

  ‘Oh?’

  He turns in his seat, to look behind him. He reaches for my office door – my room is so small, that he has no problem doing so – and he pushes it closed. He returns his gaze to me and says: ‘Remember when you asked me to investigate that house?’

  ‘What house?’ I’m about to say – but then I do remember. Before the intrusion of Ghol Gedrosian into my life, before that two-million-dollar gift from Tad Billups, before the mass lay-offs at Tao – before all that, I actually cared who was embezzling money from my firm. That was back when I thought my job was to turn the place around. Now I know better: my real job is to keep things quiet, and to keep cashing cheques.

  Whoever was stealing from Tao used a house on Sanibel as his base of operations – that house with the low-beamed attic and the preponderance of Russian speakers. I asked Pete Bland to do some digging, and to find out who owns it.

  ‘Well,’ Pete continues. ‘We ran a search, like you asked. And we found out who owns the house on 56 Windmere. I guess the file got misplaced, with all the excitement over the lay-offs. So I never showed you. Actually I didn’t see it myself until this morning.’

  ‘OK. Who owns it?’

&nbs
p; Pete looks uncomfortable. ‘I want to be honest with you, Jimmy. I feel like we’re friends. Are we friends?’

  ‘Sure, Pete, we’re friends. Friends that happen to bill each other. But friends.’

  ‘That’s why I was disappointed. I felt like maybe we weren’t. Like you were testing me.’

  ‘Testing?’

  ‘Or maybe this is what passes for Silicon Valley humour. You know, making the country lawyer do a little jig, while you guys laugh about it in the boardroom?’

  ‘I don’t understand. Who owns the house, Pete?’

  ‘Come on, Jimmy.’

  ‘Really,’ I say. ‘Who owns it?’

  ‘You want some timpani before I make the announcement? A drum roll?’

  ‘Pete—’

  ‘Fine. Hang on to your hat, Jimmy.’ He opens his briefcase, takes out a Manila folder, and tosses it onto my desk. ‘The house at 56 Windmere is owned by – get this, Jimmy – a Mr James Thane, from Palo Alto, California. That’s right. Pick yourself off the floor, Jimmy. You own the house. You’ve owned it for three years, free and clear. Paid cash for it back in 2007. As if you didn’t know.’

  I stumble from my office. I hear Pete behind me, calling, ‘Are you OK, Jimmy? Jimmy, what’s wrong? Jimmy, you forgot your crabs! You gotta put them in the fridge!’

  I ignore him. I need to get out of here. I need to go home. I need to find Libby. I need to tell her.

  Before this moment, I could make excuses, could tell myself stories – increasingly elaborate stories, I admit – about what I was doing at Tao. I wasn’t proud of my role, but I accepted it: to be window dressing for other people’s criminal activity. When I went to sleep at night, I could convince myself that, despite what was going on around me, I was doing my best to run a legitimate company. I was doing my best to save Tao.

  But now I know the truth. I’m not here to turn this company around. I’m not here to act as window dressing.