by James Conway
“The fund will turn around. Soon, Deborah.”
“I hope. Because right now its vibe is not very positive at all.”
“Oh, really?”
“Look at the numbers. I bet your clients are circling the wagons.”
“If they’re loyal, they’ll be rewarded. Same goes for you.”
“That sounds like some kind of threat.”
“You’ll know when I’m threatening, Deb.”
“Really? Did Danny Weiss?”
“What?”
“Anyone else at The Rising fall this week?”
He stands again. It’s light outside. He thinks, How’d I miss the sunrise? “What are you talking about?”
“The young guy. Weiss.”
“How’d you know about Weiss?”
“I read the paper; I follow all things associated with the fund, Rick. Until we settle, it’s kind of important that I do.”
“I barely knew the guy.”
“What about Drew Havens? How well do you know him?”
“Not very. Because apparently he’s a suspect.”
“Do you think Drew Havens is capable of murder, Rick? Because, you know, you told me he was probably the most decent person you’ve ever worked with.”
“I’m never surprised by the things that people are capable of. Including Havens. Including murder.”
“Why would Havens murder Danny Weiss?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
“You sound agitated, Rick. Are you having another one of your episodes?”
“Is this why you called, to torment me?”
“I called to see what is going on with my fortune. To see if you’re about to piss it all away.”
He doesn’t answer.
“I don’t like it when people come to my house asking questions about your psychological makeup. I’m a good liar, but . . .”
“Who?”
“Miranda Havens.”
“I thought they were through.”
“Apparently not. She was snooping on his behalf.”
“And you told her what?”
“Nothing of value. Like I said, darling, I want my money.”
“You’ll get your money.”
“Maybe, in light of things, I should get more. You know, for keeping my mouth shut.”
“Really? I thought our agreement has always been that you are to keep your mouth shut.”
“That was about money. Murder . . . murder’s different.”
“You’re right, Deb. That is different. That warrants a whole other sort of agreement, with a whole other set of rewards and penalties for anyone who threatens to break it.”
She lets this register, wrestling with the fear of losing her fortune and the fear of losing her life. “What are you up to, Rick?”
“Setting things straight is what I’m up to. Settling karmic scores. By the way, where is Mrs. Havens these days? Still in Westchester—is it Katonah?”
“I’m gonna go now, Rick.”
“And you’re going to keep your formerly pretty mouth shut, correct?”
“Sure,” Deborah Salvado answers. “Why change now?”
After his wife hangs up, he pockets the phone and slams his right palm against the window. He’s watching the river but is thinking about Miranda Havens and Deborah, his wife, and how to make them go away.
A moment later his office landline rings. It’s security.
“Gregory and Lisa from CNBC here to see you.”
He looks at his watch: 7:35. He’d forgotten all about the interview, and he never forgets an interview. They want to do a quick teaser remote about tomorrow’s inaugural DAVOS WEST (World Economic, Security, and Technology) Conference. “Sure,” he answers, already arranging sound bites in his head. “Send them up.”
He applies his own makeup. A touch of powder to his nose and forehead. A smidgen of gel to keep the graying curls on the side of his head from puffing out. He stares at himself in the mirror longer than usual, and usual is long to begin with. He wants to see what they’ll see. If they can detect a chink in the armor. Instability in the eyes.
“Hey, hey!” he says, bounding across the office. “If it isn’t the wacky morning crew.”
Lisa and Greg laugh. They’ve done this with Salvado dozens of times before, and with each interview the line between journalism and patronage fades a shade lighter. “We’re going on in five,” says Lisa, the producer. “Simple Q and A with Ron in the studio.”
“DAVOS WEST, right? The geek fest that’s making Comic-Con look like it’s halfway cool.”
“Right.”
“Live?”
“Actually, no. We’re taping for a whole package that we’re gonna air tonight. A conference-eve spectacular.”
“Hmmm.” Salvado thinks about what he’d say live now versus taped for later. Tonight. He thinks of one of the rules he actually believes from his best-selling book, Confessions of a Market Mercenary—Number 3: Context Is Everything.
“Between us, what I say now and what I would want to say tonight might be different.”
Lisa looks at Gregory, then Salvado. “You don’t want to do it?”
“Oh, I do want to do it. I just need your assurance, your word, that it won’t air until tonight.”
The producer and cameraman look at each other and shrug. “Sure,” says Lisa.
“I say this because it will be a reflection of activities I’m going to execute today, you know?”
“Sure, gotcha.”
Salvado continues. “Ron, too. No one back at the studio can use or comment or report until—”
“We won’t even start putting it together until after the markets close, so no problem.”
“Cool,” Salvado answers, walking over to the set. Then to Gregory: “The sky’s looking especially spectacular this morning. I was wondering if maybe you could shoot a bit more south, get the statue in frame just over my shoulder.”
2
Darien, Connecticut
Miranda Havens picks up on the second ring. “Deb?”
“We need to talk.”
“Well, sure. I can . . . whenever you want. Do you want me to come back up to Darien?”
“Not the best idea.”
“What’s going on?”
“When you have everything, you either get out or let the madness in.”
“Deb?”
“Rick said this to me once during a fight. I’d just found receipts for a sex junket he took to Cuba. Receipts and photos, the asshole. Soon after that, after yet another string of his rages about the government-sponsored ruination of his family, the slights from the media, I gave up and let the madness in.”
“I’m sorry about that, Deb, but . . .”
“In the days after he first moved out, before he came back to collect his belongings, I pored over his personal effects. Scrapbooks, letters, insurance papers, travel documents, and passports. Several. I was looking for evidence to use against him in our divorce trial, but what I found, Miranda . . . That kid’s murder—I’m terrified it’s just the beginning . . . and you know, I don’t want to be a part of the madness anymore.”
“Where do you want to meet?”
“Are you at your—”
“No. It became, well . . . unsafe. I’m in the city. Chelsea.”
“Hotel?”
Miranda pauses, at first reluctant to say exactly where she is.
“That’s awfully sentimental of you.”
“You know,” Miranda says, surprised that Deborah remembers, “the police came to my place in Katonah yesterday. And I’m pretty sure someone else did, too. The police think Drew killed Danny Weiss.”
“I know. It’s not righ
t. Is he okay? Is he safe?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t spoken.”
Deborah doesn’t believe this, but she doesn’t blame Miranda for keeping quiet. “So, where?”
Miranda thinks. The rooftop of the Gansevoort. “What about our place? You know, where we went for your birthday, when we were still friends.”
“Sure.”
“I’m curious, what does your husband have to say about any of this?”
“That’s why I want to meet. My husband is an animal.”
3
Newark
His dream is a memory embedded in a dream.
He’s with Miranda and Erin on a bright fall day, peak foliage season, roaming the grounds of Storm King, the vast outdoor sculpture park on the Hudson Highlands north of West Point. They are walking through a land sculpture called Wavefield by the artist Maya Lin. Acres and acres of grass-covered earth sculpted into the shape of the sea, of sets of waves up to fifteen feet high. Erin, who has recently begun to walk, trudges up one side of a wave and then rolls down the other. Over and over, giggling the entire time. For a while he stands atop the crest of a wave, shoulder to shoulder with Miranda, and watches Erin go two, three, four waves away. It’s in the trough between the fourth and fifth wave that the girl turns to look for her parents but cannot find them. She calls his name—“Da?” then “Da!”—and he is overwhelmed with fear and panic, the sense that he’s losing her, and he begins to sprint toward her. He bounds over one wave top and barrels down the next, calling her name, yelling that it’s going to be all right. Even then, he knew it wasn’t going to be all right. He and Miranda were having problems; in fact they were fighting that day, at the moment the girl walked away. It took less than a minute for him to catch up to her and pick her up in his arms, but in his dreams, in this dream, he never reaches her. She’s always one wave away.
He awakens sweat-soaked and facedown on a large sheet of paper covered with mathematical scribbling, more questions than answers. He stares at the walls, hoping that thirty-five minutes of nightmare sleep will help him notice a clue that he missed. It doesn’t. Five minutes later he’s in the shower. He wants to be washed, dressed, and ready to run when he goes online with Danny Weiss’s software.
He figures he has thirty to forty-five minutes before Salvado’s tracking software picks up on him and alerts someone that he’s poking around the universe of the Rising Fund. After that, probably another half hour before one of his guys makes his way out to the Newark Hilton.
He searches the news and financial sites and is relieved that nothing horrible seems to have happened in the financial world while he was jamming overnight.
He checks the Rising Fund stocks and sees that they are down again, but nothing out of the ordinary.
He searches his own name and finds a dozen articles on Danny Weiss’s death and sees that he’s been upgraded from person of interest to murder suspect. The photo of him that accompanies many of the articles was taken at a company party at Cipriani in 2010. He has a flute of champagne in his right hand, and his left arm is around Danny Weiss, who, as usual, is smiling. The picture reminds him that he hired Weiss because he thought he was qualified, but also because he was different. He knew that Weiss was something of an outlier on both an intellectual and ethical level, and that his idealistic qualities might ultimately conflict with the goals of the firm. But he hired him anyway, because he was selfish. He hired Weiss because he was everything that he himself no longer was yet should have been. He also hired him, he realizes now, because he knew on some level that Weiss might be the one who could blow up his career and convince him to abandon it once and for all. That, he concludes, is the narrative behind that business decision.
He’s all but given up on hearing from Sawa Luhabe, so much so that he almost deletes her forwarded message, which has a South African URL, in part because he assumes it’s some sort of identity-stealing spam from a fictional Nigerian prince. Only a second glance at the sender’s name makes him reconsider. He reads her words. What I Know Now, which was what, eight hours ago? Besides confirming that she was still alive, her note validates much of his findings about the trades in play.
He reads her recap of what happened in Dublin, the death of the trader Dempsey, and then about the death of Heinrich Shultz in Berlin, employee of Ithaka Investments. Ithaka, with a K, Luhabe notes, was the firm that placed the order with Dempsey in Dublin. Ithaka with a K also shares the same IP address as Siren, the firm that placed the previous four orders.
Siren is now Ithaka.
Havens searches Siren and Ithaka.
The first response is the Wikipedia entry for Odysseus. Odysseus, Wiki tells him, is the ugly King of Ithaka, and the hero of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey.
And of course the sirens of The Odyssey were famous for luring passing sailors to their island of Faiakes with their seductive song, only to be condemned to stay on the island forever. Knowing that the bones of sailors were scattered about the island, Odysseus had his shipmates put wax in his ears and bind him to the ship’s mast until they had safely passed.
Havens thinks of Salvado the other night at the club: “We’re on an epic journey, an epic tale that is still being written, and when it’s all over, it will be remembered as one of the great ones.”
He clicks back to read the last lines of Luhabe’s note:
I am safe for the time being. But I will never be safe unless this is resolved. In the limited time I’ve had to model this I have seen evidence that points to another forthcoming trade similar to mine at a yet TBD firm in Toronto, for the security NYCRE. With this in mind I would like to introduce you to each other. Each has contacted me separately and each seems to have skills and knowledge that complements the other’s. Drew Havens of the Rising Fund, meet Cara Sobieski of the U.S. government task force on terrorism and financial intelligence.
He immediately calls up Weiss’s chart and checks the numbers for Friday with the corresponding pages of The Odyssey.
“there form’d his empire; there his palace rose.”
There formed his empire—New York. NYCRE (New York City Real Estate) is the largest holding company of premier landmark New York properties, totaling nearly fifty billion dollars in assets. He starts to do a search on Sobieski, then decides it will take too much time; he should reach out and contact her right away. When he goes to his mailbox, he sees that she’s beaten him to the punch. Her message is brief:
Sobieski here.
Boarding LUFT #125 Berlin-Newark.
Meet?
He replies, Yes, then leaves his number. Flight tracker reveals that Sobieski’s plane lands at 11 A.M., and he makes a note of the terminal and gate. He takes another look at Weiss’s notes and sees further references to New York or Toronto, NYCRE, or what it all might be leading to. He imagines this is where Weiss’s research suddenly ended, and he wonders how Luhabe, a woman on the run half a world away, found him.
Once again he looks at the sheets on the wall. All of Weiss’s notes up to this point make sense. The stocks, the cities, and the dates align. What does not make sense is what they all mean, where they’re heading. He hopes that agent Cara Sobieski, and perhaps Sawa Luhabe, wherever she is, can help him figure out what they mean, and fast.
Because there is no city or stock symbol listed in the box for tomorrow. Other than the brief foreign number sequence, the only writing on Weiss’s whiteboard square for tomorrow’s date, Friday, October 21, and on the tiny Mets schedule from Weiss’s desk is a set of red exclamation points.
4
New York City
Laslow calls at 8:30 A.M. As planned.
“Tell me something that doesn’t make me want to puke.” Salvado, staring at the celeb handshake photos on his office wall, is disgusted by his presence in each of them.
“Okay. You’re still a mu
ltibillionaire.”
“Funny.”
“And we’re still alive.”
“Fine. What about the others? Any luck?”
“We have a bead on him in Jersey. The wife bailed on the Katonah apartment. We were waiting last night, but the police found her first.”
Salvado asks, “Where in Jersey?”
“Newark. The Hilton. Someone’s en route.”
“And I should be confident this will be taken care of because . . . ?”
“Because, to quote you, he’s a social misfit not capable of functioning in a world beyond numbers. There’s one more thing . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Your wife . . .”
“Right . . .”
“Well, she’s heading into the city.”
“Okay.”
“And the trace . . . I’m waiting for playback, but they think she’s been talking to the social misfit’s ex-wife.”
Salvado turns his back to the wall of photos and stares up at the monitors, a collage of talking heads and numbers, grim faces on trading floors staring at the large screens that control the future. “Well, I imagine that someone will have to . . .”
“So you agree . . . It has to be done?”
“Absolutely.”
He puts the phone in his pocket, turns back to face the wall, and smashes his right fist into a photo of him, Alan Greenspan, and Alicia Keys.
“Everything all right, Rick?”
He turns. Roxanne, his executive assistant, stands at the threshold between her desk and the beginning of his suite. “Could be better, Rox. Do me a favor . . . get Ryan Connerly at Goldman on the phone, will ya?”
* * *
“Connerly.”
“Yo. It’s Rick Salvado.”
“Captain America himself. What can I do for you?”
“I want to go long on NYCRE.”
“More? What makes you so keen on the future of commercial real estate?”
“New York real estate. Manhattan real estate. Landmark real estate, you dumb mick.”
