by James Conway
“To know if you’d returned yet.”
“Listen,” Luhabe says. “If anyone else calls . . . anyone . . . do not tell them whether I’ve returned or have called. Tell them you don’t know where I am, that you just answer the phone.”
“Is everything all right, Miss Luhabe?”
“Yes. There’s been . . . Some unexpected things have come up today, and I’m going to have to take some time to address them . . .”
“Yes.”
“So I’m not going to be coming back to the office this afternoon, and perhaps tomorrow, as well.”
She parks a half block down the street from her house and walks through a maze of narrow alleys in order to enter her lot from the back. Clean clothes hang from a nylon line stretched from the back wall of her house to a metal post in the center of the yard. A well-tended patch of vegetables—carrots and broccoli and tomatoes—runs along the length of the concrete wall that separates her house from the neighbors. She climbs the back steps and gently opens the kitchen door.
“It’s about time,” her mother says as she enters the kitchen. “That child has been waiting for you all day.”
“Mother,” Luhabe responds. “I need you to pay attention. We have to leave. Someone just tried to kill me on the way here and I believe they’ll be back soon to try again.”
“Jesus, girl. What have you gotten yourself involved in?”
“I haven’t . . .”
“This related to your brother? Because he—”
Luhabe raises her voice. “Mother! I don’t know!”
“Who, then?”
“I don’t know. It was a few blocks from here. They shot at me and I lost them. I believe they think I’m wounded, or heading back to Sandton. But that won’t last. I need you to quickly pack a bag. Enough for a day or two.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll pack for Wendy.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the cousins.”
“Cousins?”
“Yes. To your nieces and nephews back home in Swaziland. We should be safe there. And Mother . . .”
“Yes?”
“Do you remember when Tau brought home the gun ? The fight we had over it?”
Her mother nods. “What of it?”
Luhabe looks down. Her daughter calls her name from the next room. “Do we still have it?”
Her mother nods.
“Then I would like you to pack it as well.”
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19 A.M.
1
New York City
Up before the sun, before the birds, but not before the money. Sitting in the park across from the gleaming fifty-two-story glass tower that has been his life for the past four years. Waiting for Salvado, thinking about Erin and Miranda and Danny Weiss’s last seconds on earth.
Help . . .
This time: 7 Trades. Not 28.
Brotherly . . .
DH . . .
Before he left Miranda’s apartment, he kissed her on the lips and left a note on her kitchen table. The note contained the protocol for future communication, a promise to make her happy, and a declaration of love.
Two years ago Salvado moved The Rising’s offices up from Wall Street to a location just north of Ground Zero, into 7 World Trade Center, the last tower to fall and the first to rise again. As if the name of the fund wasn’t heavy handed enough. The media covered the move as if it was a great act of patriotism, reinforcing his great American comeback investment ideology.
Sipping a cup of tea with trembling hands, he counts up to the twentieth floor, one of five occupied by The Rising and the location of Rick Salvado’s executive suite. Although it’s not yet 7 A.M., Havens knows that Salvado is inside. Salvado does all of his live TV remotes in a corner of his private conference room, in front of a window overlooking the Hudson, and this morning was no different. The omnipresent American flag on the stand behind Salvado’s right shoulder and the bronze corporate logo, of a rising arrow with an American flag at its tip, mounted on the wall behind it was the clear giveaway. Usually for that type of gig it’s just a producer and a cameraman, with questions coming from a talking head in a studio in Secaucus, or midtown, or CNN headquarters in Atlanta. Havens knows because after the sub-prime meltdown, he was often on camera alongside Salvado in that very conference room. Heroes of the disaster. Two of the few who got it right.
The lobby security guard looks up when he enters, waves as he passes holding his ID card face high. Instead of scanning his card at one of the turnstiles, he goes to the side gate, pointing to his shoulder and duffel bag. The guard nods and buzzes him through, undetected.
He gets off the elevator on twenty and stands in front of the glass doors that lead to the quant cubes. The receptionist’s desk on the other side is empty and will remain that way for another hour. To gain access he has to punch in his personal password, but he knows that any activity involving his identity will alert security if they are looking for him.
He uses Danny Weiss’s password instead and it works. In security’s eyes, Havens was more dead than Weiss.
He walks down the hall to the right, past the vacant receptionist desk and the small kitchen area. He stops at Weiss’s former cube space, which has been pillaged. His desktop computer is gone, replaced by an altogether different machine, and his filing cabinet is empty but for three empty green hanging folders. The fabric-covered cube wall has been stripped of Weiss’s random photos and news clippings, mostly pertaining to family and Weiss’s young friends. The only remaining evidence pinned to the cube wall is a pocket schedule for his beloved New York Mets, whose season ended without fanfare two weeks before Weiss’s life.
Havens removes the schedule and considers it. It’s devoid of writing except for one mark. In the box for Friday, October 21, there’s a set of red exclamation points, just as there was on the whiteboard in his apartment. Havens folds up the schedule and slips it into his pocket.
Back inside the elevator, as he stares at the panel of buttons, he can’t help himself. He presses 21.
* * *
Again he buzzes himself in with Danny Weiss’s password.
As he walks softly past the empty reception area and into the anteroom off of the main suite, he thinks of the first time he came here, for the third and final interview. It was supposed to be a formality. Salvado made him wait for almost an hour and a half, forcing him to take inventory of the artifacts, the awards and pictures, the eccentric accoutrements of massive wealth, curated to impress and unnerve.
That’s right, it’s a real Siberian tiger skin. Yes, that is indeed Lady Gaga staring at Salvado as if he is the star, the sparkling pagan godlike figure of the moment that has captured the public’s morbid fascination. Pics of Salvado with Kobe-Clooney-Gates-Greenspan-and-Sully, the hero pilot of the Hudson, hugging, hand-shaking, backslapping, uniformly framed and mounted on the Wall of Fawning Stars? Check.
Many months later Salvado told Havens that some wealthy people buy the time of stars to show that they, too, are stars, but he himself did it because, by buying them, by having them perform, for instance, at his wife’s fortieth birthday or the end-of-year bonus party, he reduced their glow in the firmament; no matter how outlandish the price tag, it demonstrated that they could be bought, and that he was one of the few people on earth who could afford them.
Havens stops on the Moroccan tile in front of Salvado’s refrigerator-sized humidor and thinks of the first Cuban, the Cohiba Behike they smoked in this very office, toasting the future: the Rising Fund’s future; America’s future; Havens’s future. “If you are as good as they tell me you are, we will do very well together. You will make your killing.”
That night, back at their apartment, when he told Miranda about the interview, she couldn’t believe it. “But you
hate cigars,” she responded.
“I know,” he answered. “But, you know, this was different.”
On the wall in the main lounge across from Salvado’s desk twelve high-def video monitors are silently playing. Nikkei, London, NASDAQ, NYSE, Hong Kong, Berlin. There’s one for Salvado’s spotlight plays, one for CNN, one for Reuters, one for MSNBC. The last one is a wild card, chosen to fit the mood, the moment, or a desired effect it will have on visitors. For instance, one day earlier this year Salvado summoned a trader who had been having a bad run and fired him while German S&M porn was looped on the wild card monitor. Later, when word trickled back to Havens, he wasn’t surprised. Salvado’s behavior had become increasingly boorish, especially toward underperformers. The incident made him think of something Salvado had told him soon after he joined the firm: Reputations are built upon anecdotes, but legends are made of stories.
Havens stops in front of Salvado’s gleaming onyx desk and stares at the empty chair. From this desk Salvado oversees more than two hundred analysts, traders, and managers, each of whom is acutely aware of the firm’s mantra: Be great or be gone. Also known as: Produce or vanish. Or: Get rich or get lost. At this desk Salvado often sits in front of a video camera and broadcasts a constant stream of obscenity-laced visual and audio commentary to his traders. While his trades once accounted for more than 50 percent of the Rising Fund’s profits, they now represent less than 20, though on any given day he may follow a hunch and make more than 75 percent of the firm’s moves.
However, to the public, the Rising Fund is still all about Rick Salvado.
Behind the desk is a framed LeRoy Nieman watercolor of Salvado riding a monster wave on a short board. It’s this image that was on the front of the fund’s latest quarterly letter. Despite Salvado’s being enormously popular and increasingly pro-American in his recent investment philosophy, the fund was underperforming. Havens believes he used the surfer image to remind the fund’s increasingly skittish clientele that this was the man who had made them so many millions these last ten years not just by looking at the horizon, but by riding the top of a wave and looking past it.
The significantly thinner boy-genius rogue Stanford dropout in faded board shorts, the renegade Big Kahuna who could see the way markets lined up and played out the same way he could read distant sets of waves, knowing what to ride and what to let pass.
What Salvado failed to mention in the report, and what he once confided to Havens, was that the commissioned Nieman painting was based on a photo taken the only time he’d ever surfed. A photo of the only time he managed to catch a wave that day, not at Mavericks or the Pipeline, but on a small break at a Costa Rican resort, and a moment later he tumbled headfirst into a jagged reef.
“You’ve got a bigger set than I gave you credit for.” Salvado comes out of the bathroom in a shirt and tie and a pair of boxers. Sometimes he works without pants in the morning, even during his TV remotes, because he doesn’t want to wrinkle them for personal appearances later in the day. Sometimes, if the markets are cooperating, he’ll go an entire trading session without pants.
Havens takes two steps forward. “Not really. I figure you’re too smart to try something here. Here, you just screw people. Outside you kill ’em.”
Salvado shakes his head. “What do you want?”
“The other night, in between talking to bimbos and suckers, you told me to come stop by so you could give me a more explicit rationale for the direction the fund is headed.”
“How’d you get in?”
Havens stands between Salvado and the panic button that’s mounted beneath his desktop. “A ghost let me in.”
Salvado frowns. “You’re in some deep shit, my friend.”
“Not as much as Danny Weiss, right, Rick?”
Salvado doesn’t respond, so Havens continues. “You remember Danny Weiss. Twenty-six years old. Idealistic. Geeky. Always smiling. Came from a good family, Rick, good parents, a kid brother and three sisters who will never see him again.”
“I know who he is. People are looking for you. I could have you arrested right now.”
“For what?”
Salvado stares at him.
“You won’t have me arrested because it would reflect poorly upon the fund. You don’t want Danny Weiss’s blood on you.”
“Blood on my hands? What about you?”
“This is true. Anyone who’s worked for you, or who’s made money because of you, knowing how you did it, what you’re capable of, their hands are covered in it, too.”
“You know, you were a freak. A social disaster. A quant in a hole when I discovered you.”
“Rourke discovered me.”
Salvado waves him off. “Rourke—hah! I made you rich and you do this?”
Havens steps forward. It’s work for him to get the words out. “I was different, you never let me forget that. But at least I could live with myself then.”
“This is not a pretty business. You know how it works. For every winner there is always a loser.”
“Is that what Danny was, a market loser? Another victim of bad economic times?”
“I don’t know what kind of deal you had with Weiss, but he broke every rule we have. He abused his privileges and committed a series of criminal improprieties. Because he’s dead I’ve chosen not to report him to the SEC, to pursue prosecution.”
“He broke corporate policy, so why not kill him, right?”
Salvado rolls his neck. “Jesus. You’re crazier than I thought.”
“No one deserves what happened to him. Except maybe you.”
“Calm yourself, Drew. Why are you here? To blame me for what your life has become? Shoot me? Make a citizen’s arrest? Because frankly I don’t understand the motivation. I know, since I’m not part of a mathematical equation, some complex algorithm, it must be difficult for you. Dealing with living, breathing human beings and all, but I’ve got a company to run.” Salvado takes a step toward his desk, but Havens steps toward him.
“Tell me,” Havens asks, inching closer. “Why are you doing this? It makes no sense.”
“That’s because you’re a social fucking disaster. All you know is numbers. Without numbers the world is a puzzle to you.”
“Weiss had a theory.”
“A dead man’s theory, thanks to you. A paranoid criminal’s delusional speculation. Why don’t you turn yourself in?”
“Weiss figured out what you didn’t want him to—the reason why you’re running this fund into the ground.”
“And you know better than anyone that a theory is nothing unless it is supported by numbers. Quantifiable, hard data.”
“It’s coming. All kinds of data. You know how I get when I lock in on something, the quant in the cave, right, Rick?”
Salvado pinches the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger, monitoring a pressure valve. “Listen, I’ll give you one more chance to . . . extricate yourself from this . . . scenario. Because you’re right: I can’t afford to attract undo attention to the firm. So what I’ll do, if you’re willing to cooperate, and by cooperate I mean go the fuck away, I will try to fix this. I can extricate you and make this extremely, mind-blowingly lucrative for you, too.”
Havens clenches his fists, incredulous. “You piece of shit. I have a hard enough time living with myself over the supposedly legal things we’ve done in the past, but gaming the market, killing—”
“Gaming the market? My God. Who doesn’t? Isn’t that our job? Isn’t that what we did last time, the time that made you rich?”
Havens shakes his head. “You mean the time we identified a flaw in the system and did everything in our power to put the fund in a position to capitalize on the misfortune of—”
“Please.”
“When we chose to exploit the situation rather than diffuse it?”
“It was wrong.”
“Even if we told them—the feds, the ratings douche bags, the brokerages, the banks—they wouldn’t have understood, and if by some fluke one of them did understand, he’d look the other way, or blame the Internet. The black boxes.”
“The black boxes don’t make moral decisions. We do. Why,” Havens presses, “why are you taking shorts that are the opposite of your own fund’s?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Why tech? Why new media? What do you know about what’s coming?”
Salvado answers as if reading from a textbook: “A hedge fund is an investment typically open to a limited number of professional or high-income investors. Hedge funds often seek to hedge investment risk using a variety of methods or strategies that are often the proprietary and covert inclinations of the fund manager—”
Havens interrupts, “Why are you zeroing in on a specific set of American-based securities, and why are you killing the person who executes the trade?”
Salvado, attempting to ignore him, continues reading from the imaginary text: “Most hedge funds are exempt from many regulations that govern ordinary investment funds—”
“Why now? Why do something like this when, my God, Rick, you’re rich beyond your dreams. If you don’t need to kill people for money, then what?”
Salvado glares at him. “Who the hell are you? I’m the manager and CEO of one of the best-performing hedge funds of the twenty-first century, the Rising Fund. Beloved by the media, the politicians. Within a span of ten years, after restarting this thing alone in my apartment in Santa Cruz, I have outperformed every broad measure of the markets and made more than forty-eight billion dollars for my thousands of valued clients, my employees, and myself. I am an American patriot betting big on an American rebound and I have sacrificed my life on this—”
