For Laura
Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Afterward
About the Author
Copyright
The only thing he could think to ask was: ‘Katherine, where are you?’
‘At Big Sur. Near the rocks.’ And then: ‘It will be easier this way, you’ll see.’
On the phone he heard the static, loud and soft, rising and falling. He finally understood the source of the noise. It was ocean crashing against the shore. ‘Better like what? What do you mean?’ But, inside, he already knew the answer. A sick feeling grew, and he felt a wave of nausea sweep over him. He said weakly: ‘Katherine, what are you doing?’
‘I love you, Timothy. Everything will be okay. You’ll see.’
‘Katherine, wait—’
Prologue
Later, standing over the dead girl’s body, the detective decided it made perfect sense. The case wrapped itself up neatly – in a bow, he would explain, to anyone who cared to ask. It was a simple story: about a rich man who had everything, but wanted more; a story about what happens to people who try to break the rules.
The dead girl lay in the kitchen of the rich man’s house, her skull crushed by a marble sculpture. Blood had drained from her corpse and gathered in a weird pool near her head, shaped like a cartoon dialog bubble emanating from her mouth, as if she was saying something big and important and red. But her eyes were vacant, and she was dead, and the detective concluded it was unlikely she would say anything important again.
A uniformed cop joined the detective and looked down at the girl.
‘Pretty,’ the uniform said. The girl was wearing a black cocktail dress, and even though a patch of skull was visible behind her ear, she was still obviously beautiful.
‘Anything?’ the detective asked.
‘Three wine glasses in the sink. Three sets of dishes. They ate steak, and what’s that stuff called? The green leaf that people eat?’
‘Lettuce.’
‘Arugula,’ the uniform said, as if he had known the answer all along. ‘Steak with arugula leaves. That’s what they ate.’
The detective stared at the bloody footprints on the floor – a single set, a man’s. Near the girl’s body a swab of red looked like a knee-print. The detective tried to make sense of it. Maybe the rich man killed her in a fit of passion, and then regretted it, so kneeled down next to her to whisper that he was sorry. Not an easy conversation, probably.
The detective’s suit jacket began to play Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture. He reached inside, pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open.
‘You find him?’ the detective asked.
The voice on the other end was tinny, washed in static, barely audible.
‘Only his car,’ the voice said. ‘Black BMW, right?’
‘Where are you?’
‘Wells. Mule Canyon.’
‘Same cliff as his wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘And him?’
‘Still looking.’
‘I’ll come down. Give me a couple hours.’
The detective closed the phone and dropped it into his pocket. He turned to the uniform. ‘They found his BMW. His body can’t be far.’
The uniform nodded. ‘Then that’s two.’ He paused, waited for the detective to respond. When he didn’t, the uniform said: ‘Three sets of dishes. Three wine glasses. Him and the girl—’ He indicated the dead woman in the cocktail dress. ‘That makes two.’
‘Yes,’ the detective said. He thought about it. But he didn’t have an answer yet. So he walked away to explore the rest of the house.
1
At half past nine on a Thursday morning, Timothy Van Bender learned that he had lost twenty-four million dollars.
The way he discovered the news was this: while he pried the plastic lid from his coffee cup, holding it over his desk to protect his pants from stains, he looked up and saw the Kid standing in his doorway.
‘Timothy,’ the Kid said, looking pale. ‘Where have you been?’
It was not an accusation. It was a plea for help. The Kid dripped with sweat. Wet cotton bunched under his arms, ruining what was once a crisp white button-down.
Timothy sipped his coffee and put down the cup. He looked at his watch. ‘I just got in. The line at the coffee place …’ He shook his head. For fifteen years his morning ritual had been to visit University Cafe, arriving there at 9.10 a.m. – exactly ten minutes after the rest of the world was required to start work. For fifteen years this ritual had been a success, allowing Timothy to whisk in, buy a bagel and coffee, and glide into his own office. But recently Northern California had changed: every twenty-two-year-old software programmer with long hair and questionable hygiene was now a paper millionaire, and everyone who worked in a cubicle with shoulder-high partitions had somehow become a white-collar employee who set his own hours. This meant that the 8.55 a.m. morning rush at the cafe had somehow turned into a 9.25 a.m. rush, with disastrous consequences for actual millionaires like Timothy, whose wealth pre-dated the Internet by decades, and whose assets were stored not in the ephemeral stock of some surely soon-to-be-worthless Internet shoe retailer, but in cold fungible cash.
Timothy thought about explaining all this to the Kid – that something needed to be done about the line at the coffee place, or the number of paper millionaires in Palo Alto, or the age at which people should be allowed to set their own workplace hours. But then Timothy noticed the sheen on the Kid’s face, and the perfectly formed sweat droplet hanging from the Kid’s chin. It clung there for a long moment and then fell to the hardwood floor. Timothy decided to say nothing.
The Kid looked over his shoulder, then closed the door. He stepped into Timothy’s office. ‘We have a problem.’
Timothy pulled the bagel from his brown paper bag. He unwrapped the wax paper, smoothed it over his desk like a tablecloth, and cut his bagel neatly in half with a plastic knife.
‘What kind of problem?’ Timothy said.
‘The yen,’ the Kid said. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
The way the Kid said it, Timothy probably should have heard. But he hadn’t. Timothy lived ten blocks away, in a Palo Alto home close to work. His commute consisted of a ninety-second car ride, and then a quick descent into the parking garage under his o
ffice building. No time for radio. No time for news.
‘Tell me,’ Timothy said, neither admitting nor denying that he had heard.
‘It’s shooting up. It hasn’t risen like this in …’ The Kid shook his head, shrugged. It had never risen like that. Not for as long as the twenty-five-year-old, with three years of finance experience, could remember.
‘Where’s it at?’
‘I don’t know. Seventy-five when I last checked. But it’s not stopping. The BOJ announced they might buy their own bonds. They’re going to try to reflate. It’s a new policy. The finance minister held a surprise press conference, and he … Jesus, I don’t even know where to begin.’
Timothy was a little confused himself. Deflate, reflate … buy bonds, sell bonds. It was a bit murky how these actions – or merely the talk of these actions, announced in the bowels of some ministry building in crowded Tokyo, six thousand miles away – could possibly affect his own life in sunny Palo Alto.
Timothy ran his hedge fund without worrying too much about what those inscrutable Japanese – or anyone else, for that matter – said they were going to do. He had a simple philosophy that made him money year in and year out: he bought things when they were moving up, and sold them when they were moving down. It was easy. And it worked nine times out of ten. There was no other way to beat the market. So many people worked so hard, poring over computer printouts, studying charts, examining the cryptic comments of foreign government officials like so many bird entrails. No, making money was easy if you didn’t think too much and didn’t work too hard. As the old saw said: The trend is your friend. And: Don’t fight the tape.
‘Listen, Kid,’ Timothy said. He corrected himself. ‘Jay. Listen to me. Don’t fight the tape. Remember, the trend is your friend …’ He let his voice trail off. This was a valuable lesson for the Kid, who needed a little seasoning. Timothy had hired him straight out of Stanford Business School. Jay Strauss was a bright Jewish kid, dark and swarthy. But he dressed well, in tailored suits and gold cufflinks, and apparently he had a good head on his shoulders. He had a Harvard degree in economics, and had worked at Salomon Smith Barney in New York after college.
Which is where Smith Calhoun was president. Smith was an old Yale classmate of Timothy, a great guy – not to mention an early investor in Timothy’s hedge fund. And so one thing led to another, and one day over drinks in the Four Seasons, Smith said: You ought to meet this Jewish kid; he’s graduating Stanford – I’d want him myself, but with the way things are going here at Salomon, it wouldn’t be right. Soon enough Timothy had his second full-time employee.
The Kid did all the leg work. He called himself the ‘Quant’, while Timothy was the ‘Face’ – the man who raised the money and presented himself to investors, family offices, wealthy people. Timothy would come up with an idea – like, for instance, shorting the Japanese yen – and then the Kid would figure out how to do it, what quantity to short, which brokers to call, where to set the limit price, how much margin would be required. It was a good division of labor, Timothy often thought, because it allowed each person to do what he was good at: the Kid dealt with numbers, Timothy with human beings.
Timothy looked up at the Kid, to see if his words about not fighting the tape had soothed him. The Kid seemed even more pale, and Timothy noticed he was trembling.
‘How much did we lose?’ Timothy asked.
‘Twenty-four.’
‘Thousand?’
‘Million,’ the Kid said. And then, to be clear: ‘Dollars. Not yen.’
‘I see,’ Timothy said. He felt light-headed. The room closed on him like a drawstring sack.
The Osiris Fund II, the fund Timothy managed and which employed the Kid, had started the year with around a hundred million dollars. Which meant that between the time Timothy went out to dinner the preceding night, and the time he opened his coffee lid this morning, the fund had lost a quarter of its value. Which further meant, for example, that Pinky Dewer, the earliest and largest investor in Osiris, had lost nearly eight million dollars while Timothy was eating tuna tartar and soft shell crabs at Tamarine. And which meant that Timothy himself, who had invested five million of his Van Bender dollars in the fund, had lost over a million dollars before dessert.
‘Twenty-four million?’ Timothy said again.
‘You wanted to make a big bet,’ the Kid said, suddenly defensive. ‘You said, “Make a big bet.” Right?’ He stopped, pulled back. More gingerly now: ‘Didn’t you say that?’
Timothy nodded. ‘I did.’
The Kid stared at him, waiting for some kind of instruction, some kind of order. In his life, Timothy had seen that look a thousand times before.
For as long as Timothy could remember, people looked to him as a leader. Some of this came from his deportment – thanks to Father’s constant needling, Timothy carried himself rigidly, never slouched, never crumpled under stress. Some of it came from genetic luck: Timothy had been born handsome, with a pleasant face and an easy smile, and people gravitated to men like that.
But part of it came from effort. Long ago, Timothy had decided that you could go farther in the world by being willing to say something, even if you were unsure about whether or not your words were right. It is the secret that all successful people eventually learn, but seldom want to share: the mere act of making a decision, of speaking, of taking a chance, is enough. Most people are frozen by fear of failure, but men like Timothy understand that failure, when it comes, is never a permanent state – you can always try again, after all.
When had he first realized this? Maybe he had always known it vaguely, subconsciously. But it had crystallized thirty years earlier, at Exeter. One night, Headmaster Tillinghast – with his buttery jowls, owl glasses and tiny slits for eyes – marched imperiously into the freshman dorm. He announced that everyone in the dorm would be punished equally, and severely, for a horrendous crime. Mickey the janitor, while doing electrical work in the dorm’s common room, had discovered an ounce of pot in the space above the drop-ceiling. Only by coming forward and admitting guilt could the culprit save his classmates from what would surely be a life-altering punishment.
That night, hours before Tillinghast was to mete out his sentence, the boys debated. Some wanted to turn in the actual pot-smoking culprit – the sad-faced, gangly Martin Adams – rather than face expulsion. Some boys cried, terrified of wrecked academic careers, parental disappointment, family shame. Expulsion was no idle threat: Tillinghast had done it to poor Chaz Dominick just a month earlier, for showing up to Latin with alcohol on his breath. Other boys – the minority – wanted to fight, to resign from the school en masse, to protest at the barbarous collective punishment.
Then the debate stopped and they turned to Timothy who, even at fifteen, always seemed to have an answer, and who understood the value of presenting it with confidence. ‘I’ll tell you what we need to do,’ he said, without knowing the words that would follow. ‘What we need to do is this.’ And then, magically, the words were there, and he explained it all clearly and forcefully: they would send a group of three boys into Tillinghast’s dark, oak-paneled office the next morning, and they would stand at attention, with their blue blazers and regimental ties, and they would admit, ruefully, that yes, they knew who had placed pot in the ceiling, and they regretted that they had to report such a thing about a former classmate, but their duty to the school required it, and so, they were turning in … Chaz Dominick, who had hidden the pot some months earlier.
It hardly mattered that the plan was little more than a hastily concocted scheme, or that it was neither honorable nor true, or that it pinned a crime on an innocent boy who was not present to defend himself – but, rather, what mattered was that it was a plan, a course of action, and Timothy had proposed it with great confidence and vigor.
Yes, Timothy had seen the look of the Kid many times before – that look of helplessness, of longing to know an answer, any answer. Timothy’s life had been a living proof that confidence alo
ne is the answer. Ninety percent of all doubts can be soothed by self-assurance. A solid handshake and a nice suit take care of the other ten.
This was how it had been at Yale, too, where Timothy never worked more than an hour at night – not when there were so many other pleasant distractions: cocktails, parties, time well spent with friends. But Timothy did not fail, or even do poorly; his special talent, as he came to understand it, was the ability to do well by doing the absolute minimum required.
Like all talents, this too required a fine judgment, an aesthetic sense, like that of a painter who knows to use the smallest dab of watercolor to great effect. Sometimes Timothy received good grades in a course by being a vocal participant in the classroom, raising his hand often, drawing tenuous links between Hamlet and, say, Thomas Jefferson – all without having read a page of the course work. In another class, the opposite approach was required: a Tantric stillness, a blending into the background and hardly breathing. In other classes, a well-timed bottle of Macallan twelve given to a Latin professor did the trick, or the purchase of dinner at Mory’s. The success Timothy continuously enjoyed – first at Exeter, then at Yale, then in New York, and finally at the helm of Osiris – was not the result of tricking people, or of buying them off. His success came from giving them exactly what they wanted: answers.
And so the Kid, having just witnessed Timothy lose twenty-four million dollars, and worried perhaps about his own young career, about the lead-lined suit he would be forced to wear as a reputation, stood there sweating, the circles under his armpits spreading, his dark complexion strangely sallow, his knees bent, weak, and near collapse. He too wanted an answer from Timothy.
Timothy calmly sipped his coffee. He took great care to keep his hand steady. He put down the cup, recapped it, and then refolded the wax paper over the uneaten half of his bagel.
‘I have a plan,’ Timothy said, as he waited for it to arrive. ‘Here’s what we are going to do.’
And then he laid out the plan for the Kid, who lapped it up eagerly, like a bulldog at a rain puddle, and agreed that it was a good plan, and was thankful to be given a task – any task – by a man who could still smile after losing twenty-four million dollars.
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