“Is that a serious question?”
“What I’m asking is did you just sit down for a minute,” Oskar said, “or are you having a heart attack or something.”
“I don’t think I’m having a heart attack.”
“If I leave you here and keep walking, are you going to throw yourself off a bridge?”
“He’s been arrested,” Joelle said.
“Yeah.”
“My husband’s going to see it, if he hasn’t already, and then he’ll say to me, ‘Oh my god, can you believe it?’ and I’ll either have to lie to his face, which isn’t going to be plausible because he isn’t actually a moron, or I’ll have to say ‘Well yes, honey, actually I can.’”
Oskar was silent.
“You ever think about why we were chosen?” Joelle asked. “For the seventeenth floor?” She still hadn’t opened her eyes. It occurred to Oskar that perhaps the FBI had already gotten to her, that maybe she was recording this conversation. What wouldn’t a mother with a young family do to avoid prison?
“I mean, here’s the question,” Joelle said, “and I’d be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts: How did he know we’d do it? Would anyone do something like this, given enough money, or is there something special about us? Did he look at me one day and just think, That woman seems conveniently lacking in a moral centre, that person seems well suited to participate in a—”
“I should go,” Oskar said. “I’m actually not feeling that well.” He stepped over Joelle’s legs and fled, jogging down flight after flight. There’s something a little nightmarish about tower stairwells, the repetitive downward spiral of doors and landings. When he emerged from a side door into the lobby, Oskar found himself in the midst of a small crowd, at least two dozen people trying to talk their way in. Something twisted in his stomach. These were Alkaitis’s investors. Several of them were openly weeping. Others were arguing with security guards, who had formed a small crowd of their own and looked confused and distressed.
“Look,” a guard was explaining, “I sympathize, but we can’t just let anyone—”
“You.” A woman had caught sight of Oskar. “What company do you work for?”
“Cantor Fitzgerald,” Oskar said. It was just the first company that came to mind.
“I didn’t know Cantor Fitzgerald had offices here,” someone said, but Oskar was already out on the sidewalk, where a separate crowd was assembling: news vans were parking on the curb and blocking traffic, men carried TV cameras with shockingly brilliant lights, journalists were moving in on everyone exiting the building.
“Did you work with Jonathan Alkaitis?” someone asked.
“Who?” Oskar said. “God no, of course not.”
2
Oskar walked by Olivia Collins as he left, but because she’d never been to the seventeenth floor—Alkaitis conducted his meetings on Eighteen—she didn’t recognize him. She was standing in the lobby with the other investors, trying to make sense of the altered world. She’d been here for some time, and the scene—the weeping investors, the camera people, the news vans pulling up outside—had the quality of a bad dream.
A few hours earlier, she’d been awakened from a nap by a ringing phone. “I’m sorry, Monica,” she said, after a moment of confusion, “I was sleeping just now, and I’m not sure I quite . . .” She went quiet, frowning, trying to understand what her sister was saying. “Monica,” she said, “are you crying?” She’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at her beloved tiny apartment, this place that she rented mostly with the proceeds of her investment with Alkaitis, but what Monica seemed to be telling her was that there had never been any investments at all, and in some fundamental way the situation didn’t compute. Olivia stood slowly—rising too quickly made her dizzy sometimes—and fumbled around in the mess of the closet for her waterproof boots, the handbag that she always meant to hang on a hook but never did, her winter coat. “Monica,” she’d said, interrupting her sister midsentence, “I’m going to go down to his office and see if I can find anything out. I’ll call you later.”
In the taxi, she applied bright lipstick and tied a silk scarf over her hair for added fortitude. She’d hoped to get into Jonathan’s offices, to talk to someone—anyone—but she was far from the first to have this idea. A crowd was gathering in the lobby of the Gradia Building. “It’s my life savings,” a man was shouting to one of the security guards, “you have to let me at least talk to someone, this is my entire life—” but the guards, four of them, were arrayed along the turnstiles and seemingly had no intention of letting anyone through. Olivia stood by the doors, unsettled by the crowd’s fury.
“Do you not understand?” A man was speaking to a guard who seemed to Olivia to be very young, although in fairness most people looked young to her these days. “All of my money has been stolen.”
“I understand, sir, but—”
“You have to calm down,” a guard was saying to a woman who was talking very close to his face.
“I will not calm down,” the woman said, “I will not be told to be calm.”
“Ma’am, I sympathize, but—”
“But what? But what?”
“What am I supposed to do, ma’am? Let a crowd of angry people storm the eighteenth floor?” The guard was sweating. “I’m just doing my job. I am doing my job. Step away from me, please.”
Olivia stepped forward as the other woman retreated. “I’m a personal friend of Mr. Alkaitis’s,” she said.
“Then call up there and get someone to come down and get you,” the guard said.
She called Alkaitis’s number, again and again, but no one picked up. The cowardice of it. She pictured them hiding up there behind locked doors, listening to ringing phones, doing nothing. She knew no one else’s extension. She stayed in the lobby for a long time, milling around with the others, falling in and out of conversations, and at first there was some solace in being with people who’d also been robbed, who were also in shock, but after a while the miasma of sadness and fury was too much to bear, so she hailed a taxi—the last taxi she’d take for a while, she realized, watching the numbers tick up on the meter—and went back to her little apartment uptown.
After the pandemonium in the lobby of the Gradia Building, her home was very quiet and still. Olivia closed the door behind her and stood for a moment in the silence. She set her keys on the kitchen table and sat for a while, drinking a glass of water and trying to adjust to the world at hand. After a concentrated search, she found her most recent bank statement and studied it carefully. Until today, she’d had two sources of income: Alkaitis’s investment fund and Social Security. If she was very careful, she decided, looking at the numbers, she could afford to stay in her home for two more months.
3
Darkness had fallen in New York, but it was still only three in the afternoon in Las Vegas, where Leon Prevant, the shipping executive who had once had the colossal misfortune of meeting Alkaitis at the bar of the Hotel Caiette, was trapped in a meeting that had outlived its natural lifespan but refused to die. His phone vibrated in his pocket. “Forgive me,” Leon said to the other attendees, “this is urgent,” even though it probably wasn’t. He realized his mistake as he left the room. Leon had been coming to this conference for fifteen years and his lanyard still carried the company name, but he was here as a consultant, and his current contract ended next month. His boss had been told to put a freeze on consulting contracts, “until the landscape looks a little brighter,” but when would that be? He had been laid off two years ago in the wake of a merger, and now, in late 2008, ships were moving across oceans at half capacity or less and could be chartered for a third of last year’s cost. The landscape—the seascape—was clouded and dim. In other words, it wasn’t an optimal moment to run out of meetings, even zombie meetings that should have ended twenty minutes ago. It was his accountant calling. Whatever she was calling about, surely it could wait, so he let the call go to voicemail, counted slowly to five, and re-entere
d the room with an apology for leaving.
“Everything all right?” His boss, D’Ambrosio, was still frowning at the report that Leon had given him.
“Perfectly, thank you. If you’ve all had a chance to digest the numbers—” He’d been hoping everyone would take a quick look at the numbers and agree to discuss them later, but the meeting was apparently immortal.
“We have, unfortunately,” D’Ambrosio said. “Bit of a bloodbath, isn’t it?”
“Well. As you can see, we’re facing a significant overcapacity problem.”
“Understatement of the goddamn century,” someone said.
“Obviously, we’re not alone. I had an interesting conversation this morning with a friend over at CMA. They’ve got ships at anchor off the coast of Malaysia.”
“Just sitting there?” Miranda had been Leon’s junior colleague in Toronto and then in the New York office, in the years before he’d been restructured into consultant status. Now she had Leon’s former title, office, and telephone extension, though not his former salary.
“For the moment, yes. Just waiting it out.”
“It’s an interesting idea,” D’Ambrosio said. “By ‘interesting,’ I mean ‘possibly the best of several bad options.’”
“We’d be creating this weird kind of ghost fleet.” This was Daniel Park, who’d worked alongside Leon in the Toronto office and was now director of operations for Asia. “Are we sure we don’t want to just scrap a few of our older vessels?”
“That strikes me as a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” Miranda said.
“But this downturn,” Park said, “this chaos, whatever you want to call it—”
“‘This period of sustained uncertainty,’” one of the Europeans interjected in ironic tones, quoting the morning’s keynote speaker. He was German and relatively new. Leon couldn’t remember his name.
“Right, yes, whatever euphemism we’re going with here, this thing could last years. Are we prepared to commit to potentially several years of staffing a fleet of unused ships off the coast of Malaysia?”
“The staffing would be light,” Leon said. “Skeleton crew, just enough men on board to keep it afloat.”
“If we do it, maybe we set a time limit,” the German said. Wilhelm, Leon remembered now, his name was Wilhelm, but what was the surname? It was troubling that he didn’t know. He’d known everyone in senior management once. “Maybe we put the ships out to anchor now, then commit to revisiting the question in a year, two years, and if we still don’t need them, we scrap the excess.”
“Seems like a reasonable course of action to me,” D’Ambrosio said. “Thoughts, objections?”
“There’s the question of the new Panamax vessels,” Miranda said. There was a collective sigh. The company had commissioned two new ships back in the lost paradise of 2005, when the demand had seemed endless and they were struggling to keep up, and the ships—under contract, paid for, two and a half years into the building process, and now extravagantly unnecessary—would be delivered from the South Korean shipyards in six months.
“I say we send them straight to the ghost fleet.” D’Ambrosio glanced at his watch. “Gentlemen, Miranda, I’m afraid we’re out of time. Let’s pick this up tomorrow. Wilhelm, if you could get us an analysis . . .”
The meeting finally unwound, the room breaking into small groups or rushing away to get to a conference session that had already started. Leon walked out alongside Daniel. “Are you going to the economic outlook panel?” Daniel asked.
“Skipping it, I think. I’ve been up to my neck in economic outlooks for the past four months.”
“Haven’t we all.” The corridor was several degrees colder than the conference room, the wintry chill of Las Vegas air conditioning. Two young hotel employees were clearing dirty mugs from the coffee and pastry stations. “I’m going to go call my wife,” Daniel said. “Catch up with you at dinner?”
“Looking forward to it.”
It was a pleasure to be away from other people for a moment, with no one making obvious proclamations about economic collapse or pulling him into hysterical conversations about the chartering horizon. Leon poured himself a hazelnut coffee and stepped out into the atrium.
Miranda had left the meeting ahead of him and was sitting some distance away on an industrial sofa, writing something in her legal pad. No, not writing, sketching: the pad was angled away from him, but he watched the movements of her wrist with some interest as he approached. She’d started out at the company as his administrative assistant, which all these years later seemed like a faintly unbelievable rumour. He cleared his throat, and she flipped a page over as she set the pad on the marble coffee table, so that he couldn’t see whatever she’d been working on. He’d seen her perform this motion a hundred times, at least, and as always, he made a point of not asking. Leon held strong opinions about privacy.
“You’re skipping the economic outlook session too,” she said.
“This entire conference is an economic outlook session. I decided coffee was more important.”
“I like your priorities. That’s an interesting idea, by the way, parking ships off the coast of Malaysia.”
“Do you mind if we talk about literally anything other than the economic downturn?” he asked.
“Not at all. I’m thinking about making an excuse and leaving early tomorrow.”
“What, you’re not enjoying the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic?”
“There’s something almost tedious about disaster,” Miranda said. “Don’t you find? I mean, at first it’s all dramatic, ‘Oh my god, the economy’s collapsing, there was a run on my bank so my bank ceased to exist over the weekend and got swallowed up by JPMorgan Chase,’ but then that keeps happening, it just keeps collapsing, week after week, and at a certain point . . .”
“I know what you mean,” Leon said. “It’s the surprise that bothers me, personally, the way everyone I talk to seems shocked by the downturn in the industry.”
“Yeah, so, true story, one of our colleagues pulled me aside today, I’m not naming names, and he said, ‘I just can’t believe what’s happening to our industry, can you?’ And I’m trying to be patient with these people, I really am, but I had to ask him, which part is surprising to you? Let’s break this down. What is it you can’t believe, exactly? That people don’t want to buy goods when the economy collapses, or that people don’t want to ship goods that nobody’s buying?”
“Predictable outcomes, and all that.” Leon remembered at that moment that his accountant had called earlier and absently checked his phone. She’d called again, ten minutes ago. “Sorry,” he said, “I think I have to call this person.”
“If you don’t see me at dinner, it means I successfully escaped.”
“I’ll be silently cheering you on from the sidelines,” he said as he rose, and wandered away from her, toward the glass atrium wall, toward the phone call that would split his life neatly into a before and an after.
“I’m going to assume you haven’t heard the news,” his accountant said, “or you would’ve called me already.”
“What news? What’s going on?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Obviously not.” He’d never liked her. Bit of a robot, he remembered Miranda telling him when he’d asked if she could recommend a good accountant, but the best I’ve ever worked with. She sees all the angles. Although what was the point of hiring the best accountant you’ve ever worked with if you’re going to ignore her advice and park all your retirement savings in a single investment fund?
“Leon”—and she didn’t sound like a robot at all, she sounded human and deeply shaken; she was conveying information, he realized just before she told him, that she very much didn’t want to convey—“Alkaitis was arrested this morning.”
“What?” He sank gracelessly into the nearest sofa, staring at an embankment on the other side of the glass, red gravel dotted with cacti under a garishly blue sky. “I’m sorry,
did you say—what?”
“It’s all over the news,” she said. “He was a con man. The whole thing was a fraud.”
“The whole . . . what?”
“It was a con,” the accountant said.
“What do you mean? All the money I invested, you’re saying . . . ?”
“Leon,” she said, “I’m so sorry, but your money wasn’t invested.”
“That isn’t possible. The returns have been excellent, we’ve been living off of them, we—”
“Leon.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “I just don’t understand what you’re telling me.”
“What I’m telling you is that Alkaitis was running a Ponzi scheme,” she said. “The money you gave him, he didn’t invest it. He stole it. Your account statements were fictional.”
“What does this mean?” he asked, but he knew what it meant.
“Your money’s gone,” she said softly.
“All of it?”
“Leon, it wasn’t real. None of it was real. Those returns . . .” She didn’t add that I told you seemed almost too good to be true, because she didn’t have to. They both remembered the conversation. How could he have been so stupid? He was staring at the sky, inexplicably out of breath. He didn’t remember hanging up on the accountant, but he must have, because now he was no longer speaking with her, now he was reading a news story on his phone about the arrest of Jonathan Alkaitis at his home in Greenwich that morning, about a Ponzi scheme’s collapsing when one too many investors pulled out, more arrests expected, the SEC and FBI investigating, and somewhere in that morass was Leon’s retirement savings, or rather the ghost of his retirement savings, the savings themselves having been spirited away.
“This isn’t a disaster,” he whispered to himself. Time had skipped again; he was no longer looking at his phone; he was standing by the wall of glass. The economic outlook panel had apparently just broken up, his colleagues spilling out into the corridor and mobbing the coffee stations, a rising tide of overlapping voices. He had to get out. He crossed the plains of grey carpet and floated down the escalator, through the lower atrium and past the casino, out into the thin air of the winter desert. The sidewalk was crowded and the tourists walked in slow motion. Why was a shipping conference being held in a desert city? Because Las Vegas hotel rooms are cheap. Because the desert is a sea. It isn’t a disaster, he told himself, we will not be destitute. He could say he was robbed and that wouldn’t be inaccurate, but on the other hand, these were the facts of the case: he’d met Alkaitis at a hotel bar, Alkaitis had explained the investment strategy, Leon hadn’t understood, and he’d given Alkaitis his retirement savings anyway. He didn’t insist on a detailed explanation. One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid. The strategy had seemed to adhere to a certain logic, even if the precise mechanics—puts, calls, options, holds, conversions—swam just outside of his grasp. “Look,” Alkaitis had said, at his warmest and most accommodating, “I could break it all down for you, but I think you understand the gist of it, and at the end of the day, the returns speak for themselves.” It was true, Leon could see it for himself, a steadiness in that column of numbers that appealed to his deepest longing for order in the universe.
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