Limitless

by Glynn, Alan

  I was also aware – not to lose the run of myself here – that whenever an individual is on the receiving end of a revelation like this, addressed to himself alone (and written out, say, on the night sky, as Nathaniel Hawthorne would have it), the revelation can only be the result of a morbid and disordered state of mind, but surely this was somehow different, surely this was empirical, demonstrable – after all, at the end of my sixth day of trading at Lafayette, I had an unbroken chain of winners and over a million dollars in my brokerage account.

  That evening I went for a drink with Jay and a few of the others to a place on Fulton Street. After my third beer and half a dozen cigarettes, not to mention a torrent of day-trading lore from my new colleagues, I resolved to set a few things in train – changes that I felt it was now time to make. I resolved to put a deposit down on an apartment – somewhere bigger than my place on Tenth Street, and in a different part of town, maybe Gramercy Park, or even Brooklyn Heights. I also resolved to throw out all my old clothes and furniture and accumulated stuff, and only replace what I absolutely needed. Most important, however, I resolved to move on from day-trading and into a wider playing field, to move up to money management maybe, or hedge funds or global markets.

  I’d only been trading for little over a week, so naturally I didn’t have much idea about how I was going to pull something like this off, but when I got back to my apartment, as though on cue, there was a message from Kevin Doyle on my answering machine.

  Click.

  Beeep.

  ‘Hi Eddie, Kevin – what is all this stuff I’ve been hearing? Call me.’

  Without even taking my jacket off, I picked up the phone and dialled his number.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘So what have you been hearing?’

  Beat.

  ‘Lafayette, Eddie. Everyone’s talking about you.’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘Yeah. I happened to be having lunch with Carl and a few other people today when someone mentioned they’d heard rumours about a day-trading firm on Broad Street – and some trader there who was performing phenomenally. I made a few enquiries after lunch and your name came up.’

  I smiled to myself and said, ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘And Eddie, that’s not all. I was speaking to Carl again later and I told him what I’d found out. He was really interested, and when I said you were actually a friend of mine he said he’d like to meet you.’

  ‘That’s great, Kevin. I’d like to meet him. Any time that suits.’

  ‘Are you free tomorrow night?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He paused. ‘Let me call you back.’

  He rang off immediately.

  I went over and sat on the couch and looked around. I was going to be getting out of here soon – and not a moment too soon, either. I envisaged the spacious, elegantly decorated living-room of a house in Brooklyn Heights. I saw myself standing at a bay window, looking out on to one of those tree-lined streets that Melissa and I, on our way from Carroll Gardens into the city, on summer days, had often walked along, and even talked about one day living on. Cranberry Street. Orange Street. Pineapple Street.

  The phone rang again. I stood up and walked across the room to answer it.

  ‘Eddie – Kevin. Drinks tomorrow night? At the Orpheus Room?’

  ‘Great. What time?’

  ‘Eight. But why don’t you and I meet at seven-thirty, that way I can fill you in on some stuff.’

  ‘Sure.’

  I put the phone down.

  As I stood there, with my hand still on the receiver, I began to feel light-headed and dizzy, and everything went dark for a second. Then, without consciously registering that I had moved – and moved to the other side of the room – I suddenly found myself reaching out to the edge of the couch for something to lean against.

  It was only then that I realized I hadn’t eaten anything in three days.

  [ 12 ]

  I ARRIVED AT THE ORPHEUS ROOM before Kevin and took a seat at the bar. I ordered a club soda.

  I didn’t know what I expected from this meeting, but it would certainly be interesting. Carl Van Loon was one of those names I’d seen in newspapers and magazines all throughout the 1980s, a name synonymous with that decade and its celebrated devotion to Greed. He might be quiet and retiring these days, but back then the chairman of Van Loon & Associates had been involved in several notorious property deals, including the construction of a gigantic and controversial office building in Manhattan. He had also been involved in some of the highest-profile leveraged buyouts of the period, and in countless mergers and acquisitions.

  Back in those days, as well, Van Loon and his second wife, interior-designer Gabby De Paganis, had been denizens of the black tie charity circuit and had had their pictures in the social pages of every issue of New York magazine and Quest and Town and Country. To me, he’d been a member of that gallery of cartoon characters – along with people like Al Sharpton, Leona Helmsley and John Gotti – that had made up the public life of the times, the public life we’d all consumed so voraciously on a daily basis, and then discussed and dissected at the slightest provocation.

  I remember once being in the West Village with Melissa, for instance, about 1985 or 1986 – in Caffe Vivaldi – when she got up on her high horse about the proposed Van Loon Building. Van Loon had long wanted to regain the title of World’s Tallest for New York, and was proposing a glass box on the site of the old St Nicholas Hotel on Forty-eighth Street. It had been designed at over fifteen hundred feet, but after endless objections was eventually built at just under a thousand. ‘What is this shit with skyscrapers?’ she’d said, holding up her espresso cup, ‘I mean, haven’t we gotten over it yet?’ OK, the skyscraper had once been the supreme symbol of corporate capitalism, indeed of America itself – what Ayn Rand referring to the Woolworth Building as seen from New York Harbour had called ‘the finger of God’ – but surely we no longer needed it, no longer needed people like Carl Van Loon coming along trying to imprint their adolescent fantasies on the city skyline. For the most part, in any case – she went on – the question of height had been irrelevant, a red herring, as skyscrapers had merely been commercial billboards for the likes of sewing-machine companies and retailers and car manufacturers and newspapers. So what was this one going to be? A billboard for fucking junk bonds? Jesus.

  Melissa, on occasions such as this, had wielded her espresso cup with a rare elegance – suitably indignant, but never spilling a drop, and always ready if necessary to flip the axis and start laughing at herself.

  ‘Eddie.’

  She always calmed down in the same way, too – no matter how animated she’d become. She would lean her head slightly forward, maybe swirling whatever coffee was left in the cup, and go still and quiet, diaphanous strands of hair settling gently across her face.

  ‘Eddie?’

  I turned around in my seat, away from the bar. Kevin was standing there, staring at me.

  I held out my hand.

  ‘Kevin.’

  ‘Eddie.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  As we shook hands, I tried to edge that image of Melissa from my mind. I asked him if he wanted a drink – an Absolut on the rocks – and he did. A few minutes of small talk followed, and then Kevin started priming me for the meeting with Van Loon.

  ‘He’s … mercurial – one day he’s your best friend and the next he’ll look right through you, so don’t be put off if he’s a little weird.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Oh, and – I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this – but … don’t pause or hesitate when you’re answering him, he hates that.’

  I nodded again.

  ‘You see, he’s really caught up at the moment in this MCL-Parnassus thing with Hank Atwood and … I don’t know.’

  One of the largest media conglomerates in the world, with cable, film studio and publishing divisions, MCL-Parnassus was the kind of company that business journa
lists liked to describe as ‘a megalith’ or ‘a behemoth’.

  ‘What’s going on with Atwood?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure exactly, it’s all still under wraps.’ Then something occurred to him. ‘And don’t ask him – whatever you do.’

  I could see that Kevin was having second thoughts about setting this thing up. He kept looking at his watch, as if he were working to a deadline and time was running out. He drained the last of the vodka from his glass at about ten to eight, ordered another one, and then said, ‘So, Eddie, just what exactly are you going to be telling him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered, shrugging my shoulders, ‘I suppose I’ll tell him about my adventures in day-trading, and give him a run-down of all the major positions I’ve held.’

  Kevin seemed to be expecting something more than this – but what? Since I couldn’t offer him any satisfactory explanation for my success-rate, other than to refer to some inexplicable ability I seemed to have developed, all I ended up saying was, ‘I’ve been lucky, Kevin. I mean – don’t get me wrong – I’ve worked at it, and I do a lot of research, but … yeah, things have gone my way.’

  As far as Kevin was concerned, however, this kind of ill-defined bullshit clearly wasn’t going to be enough – even if he couldn’t bring himself to say as much out loud. It was then I realized that there was an underlying anxiety in everything he had been saying up to that point, a fear that unless he had some inside track on my trading strategy, and consequently some leverage with Van Loon, he was just going to end up handing me over to Van Loon – and that then, effectively, he would be out of the picture.

  But there wasn’t much I could do about that.

  For my part, I felt pretty good. I’d eaten a plate of pasta in bianco after my disturbing spell of dizziness the previous evening. Then I’d taken some vitamin pills and diet supplements and gone to bed. I’d slept for about six hours, which was as much, if not more, than I’d managed in a month. I was still on two doses of MDT a day, but I now felt fresher and more in control – and more confident – than ever before.

  Van Loon swept into the Orpheus Room as though he were being filmed in an elaborate tracking shot and this was just the last stage in a sequence that had taken him all the way from his limousine outside on the street. Tall, lean and a bit stooped, Van Loon was still quite an imposing figure. He was sixtyish and tanned, and the few wisps of hair he had left were a distinguished silvery-white. He shook my hand vigorously and then invited us both to join him over at his regular table in the corner.

  I hadn’t seen him ordering anything or even making eye contact with the barman, but a couple of seconds after we’d sat down – me with my club soda and Kevin with his Absolut – Van Loon was served what looked like the perfect Martini. The waiter arrived, placed the glass down on the table and withdrew, all with a lightness of touch – silence and near invisibility – that was clearly reserved by management for a certain … class of customer.

  ‘So, Eddie Spinola,’ Van Loon said, looking me directly in the eyes, ‘what’s your secret?’

  I could feel Kevin stiffen beside me.

  ‘Medication,’ I said at once, ‘I’m on special medication.’

  Van Loon laughed at this. Then he picked up his Martini, raised it to me and said, ‘Well, I hope it’s a repeat prescription.’

  This time I laughed, and raised my club soda to him.

  But that was it. He didn’t pursue the matter any further. To Kevin’s obvious annoyance, Van Loon then went on to talk about his new Gulfstream V, and the problems he’d been having with it, and how he’d spent sixteen months on a waiting list just to get the damned thing. He addressed all of these remarks directly to me, and I got the impression – because it was too pointed to be accidental – that he was deliberately excluding Kevin. I took it for granted, therefore, that we wouldn’t be going back to the subject of what my ‘secret’ might be, and we – or rather Van Loon – simply talked about other things … cigars, for example, and how he’d recently tried to buy JFK’s humidor, unsuccessfully as it had turned out. Or cars – his latest being a Maserati that had set him back nearly ‘two hundred large’.

  Van Loon was brash and vulgar and conformed almost exactly to how I would have imagined him from his public profile of a decade before, but the strange thing was I liked him. There was a certain appeal in the way he focused so intently on money and on various imaginative, flamboyant ways of spending it. With Kevin, on the other hand, the emphasis seemed to be solely on ways of making it, and when a friend of Van Loon’s joined us a while later from another table, Kevin – true to form – succeeded in veering the conversation around to the subject of the markets. Van Loon’s friend was Frank Pierce, a fellow veteran from the 1980s who had worked for Goldman Sachs and was now running a private investment fund. None too subtly, Kevin mentioned something about using mathematics and advanced software programs to beat the markets.

  I said nothing.

  Frank Pierce, who was quite chubby and had beady eyes, said, ‘Horseshit. If it could be done, you think someone wouldn’t have done it by now?’ He looked around, and then added, ‘I mean, we all do quantitative analysis, we all do the math, but they’ve been going on about this other stuff for years, this black-box stuff, and it’s crap. It’s like trying to turn base metals into gold, it can’t be done, you can’t beat the markets – but there’ll always be some jerk with too many college degrees and a pony-tail who thinks you can.’

  ‘With respect,’ Kevin said, addressing himself to Frank Pierce, but obviously trying to draw me out at the same time, ‘there are some examples around of people who have beaten the markets, or appear to have.’

  ‘Beaten the markets how?’

  Kevin glanced over in my direction, but I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. He was on his own.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we haven’t always had the technology we have now, we haven’t always had the capacity to process such huge amounts of information. If you analyse enough data, patterns will emerge, and certain of those patterns just may have predictive value.’

  ‘Horseshit,’ Frank Pierce boomed again.

  Kevin was a little taken aback at this, but he soldiered on. ‘I mean, by using complex systems and time-series analysis you can … you can identify pockets of probability. Then you patch these together into some mechanism for pattern-recognition …’ – he paused here, less sure of himself now, but also in too deep to stop – ‘ … and from there you build a model to predict market trends.’

  He looked over at me imploringly, as if to say Eddie, please, am I on the right track here? Is this how you’re doing it?

  ‘Patterns my ass,’ said Pierce. ‘How do you think we made our money?’ He leant his weight forward in the chair and with his stubby index finger rapidly identified himself and Van Loon. ‘Huh?’ Then he pointed to his right temple, tapped it slowly, and said, ‘Un-der-stan-ding. That’s how. Understanding how business works. Understanding when a company is overvalued, or undervalued. Understanding that you never make a bet you can’t afford to lose.’

  Van Loon turned to me, like a chat-show host, and said, ‘Eddie?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said in a quiet voice, ‘no one could argue with that …’

  ‘But?’ Pierce snorted sarcastically. ‘There’s always a but with these guys.’

  ‘Yes,’ I went on, sensing Kevin’s obvious relief that I had deigned to speak, ‘there is a but. It’s a question of velocity’ – I had no idea what was coming next – ‘because … well, there’s no time for human judgement anymore. You see a chance, you blink and it’s gone. We are entering the age of decentralized, online decision-making, with the decisions being made by millions – and potentially hundreds of millions – of individual investors all around the world, people who have the ability to shift huge amounts of money around in less time than it takes to sneeze, but without consulting each other. So, understanding doesn’t come into it – or, if it does, it’s not understanding how co
mpanies work, it’s understanding how mass psychology works.’

  Pierce waved a hand through the air. ‘What – you think you can tell me why the markets boom or crash? Why today, let’s say? And not tomorrow, not yesterday?’

  ‘No, I can’t. But these are legitimate questions. Why should data cluster in predictable patterns? Why should there be a structure to the financial markets?’ I paused, waiting for someone to say something, but when no one did I went on, ‘because the markets are the product of human activity, and humans follow trends – it’s that simple.’

  Kevin had gone pale by this stage.

  ‘And of course the trends are usually the same … one, aversion to risk, and two, follow the herd.’

  ‘Pah,’ said Pierce.

  But he left it at that. He muttered something to Van Loon that I didn’t catch, and then looked at his watch. Kevin remained motionless, staring down at the carpet, almost in despair now. Is that it, he seemed to be thinking, human fucking nature? How am I supposed to turn that to my advantage?

  What I was feeling, on the other hand, was acute embarrassment. I hadn’t wanted to say anything in the first place, but I could hardly have ignored Van Loon’s invitation to contribute. So what happens? I speak and end up being a patronizing asshole. Understanding doesn’t come into it? Where did I get off lecturing two billionaires about how to make money?

  After a couple of minutes, in any case, Frank Pierce muttered his excuses and left without saying goodbye to either Kevin or myself.

  Van Loon then seemed happy enough to let the conversation drift on for a while. We discussed Mexico and the probable effects the government’s apparently irrational stance was going to have on the markets. At one point, still fairly agitated, I caught myself reeling off a comparative list of per capita GDP figures for 1960 and 1995, stuff I must have read somewhere, but Van Loon cut me short and more or less implied that I was being shrill. He also contradicted a few things I said and was clearly right in each case to do so. I saw him looking at me once or twice, too – strangely – as if he were on the point of calling security over to have me ejected from the building.