Money to Burn

by James Grippando

  “You’re angry, aren’t you?” said Ivy.

  We were returning to the sailboat as husband and wife, riding down a bumpy dirt road in a battered golf cart with monster-truck tires. Ivy looked amazing in a sleeveless white dress that would have worked either for cocktails on the beach or a spur-of-the-moment wedding. We sat side by side in the jump seat, our backs to Rumsey as he drove. The tin-roofed spire of the little white church seemed to rise up out of the cloud of dust we were leaving behind.

  “I would never be mad at you for walking away from a grind like Ploutus Investments,” I said.

  “But I should have told you I was done with the hedge-fund world.”

  Two weeks earlier, Ivy had asked me to manage a chunk of money for her. It would have been nice to know her career plans before investing for her-not to mention marrying her-but I didn’t want to spoil the moment. “Let’s not talk about this now,” I said.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said as she leaned closer. “Do you think wild honeymoon sex would make it all better?”

  I smiled. “Let me go way out on a limb on that one and say yes.”

  We gave Rumsey the night off, spread out a blanket on the beach, and cooked dinner on a little hibachi. Given enough butter and lemon, even I could grill lobster. It was a perfect evening until an hour before sunset, when the townies showed up. Nothing against local partiers, but a bunch of drunks and the smell of ganja in the air wasn’t our idea of a wedding night. We took the dinghy back to the sailboat and motored out another half mile to more secluded waters. The hammock on deck was the perfect place for watching a sunset. We finished off another bottle of wine while rocking back and forth in each other’s arms. The sky went from pink to purple to midnight blue, and when the last of the clouds vanished on the horizon, the first star of the night appeared directly overhead.

  “We’re married,” I said.

  “To each other,” she said in equal amazement.

  The hammock rocked gently in the breeze.

  “You want to make a baby?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “You want to practice?”

  She raised her head and smiled.

  The waters were calm even this far offshore, but still I struggled out of the hammock and staggered across the deck. Apparently I had outpaced Ivy on the wine, and she was helping me more than I was helping her as we climbed down into the cabin. We were kissing and undressing each other as we fell onto the mattress.

  “Wait,” she said, her smile turning mischievous.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You are going to be one happy boy when I show you Valerie Bang-Bang’s wedding gift to us.”

  Events beyond that were hazy at best. There was more kissing and definitely naked flesh, and I seem to recall a joke about wedding-night performance anxiety. My next clear memory was that of waking in total darkness and checking the alarm clock beside the bed. It was 5:05 A.M. I reached across the mattress for Ivy, but she wasn’t there. I propped myself up on one elbow, then dropped back down to the pillow. My head was throbbing-way too much to drink. If someone had suggested amputation as a remedy, I might actually have considered it. I called for Ivy but got no reply. I rolled over and reached all the way across the bed. I was alone. Maybe she was in the bathroom. I was in desperate need of water.

  “I-veee.”

  I waited but there was only silence, save for the waves brushing against the hull. I forced myself to sit up, then pushed away from the mattress and let my feet hit the floor. When the world finally stopped spinning, I switched on the light, which was about as easy on my eyes as staring into a blast furnace. Squinting and still feeling a little drunk, I climbed halfway up the ladder. The breeze on my face felt refreshing. Sunrise was two hours away, and the deck was shrouded in darkness.

  “Ivy?”

  Too much wine could make me snore, so I was sure she was asleep in the hammock, away from the noise. I climbed up on deck and stepped toward the bow.

  The hammock was empty.

  I walked portside from bow to stern, then back again on the starboard side. No sign of Ivy. I knelt down, poked my head through the open hatchway, and called her name again. No reply. I checked the dinghy, which was floating behind the boat. It, too, was empty. Concern washed over me as I gazed out toward the sea. The setting moon was behind clouds, and there was no discerning the black water from the night sky.

  “Ivy!”

  I grabbed a handheld VectorLite from the cockpit and switched it on, the powerful beam sweeping across the gentle waves. I called her name again and again, louder and louder, but I heard only the sound of halyards tinkling against the barren mast in the wind.

  “Ivy!”

  MAY 2007, NEW YORK

  5

  THERE WAS A TIME WHEN PEOPLE ALL BUT WORSHIPPED GUYS LIKE me, but not anymore. We were the ones with the seven-, eight-, nine-figure investment portfolios, the private corporate jets, the yacht that had to be a Riva and not merely a Hatteras, the penthouses and vacation homes, and all the female companionship we wanted. Before Lehman went under and the billionaires came knocking for government bailouts, the major banks, hedge funds, and brokerage firms were swimming along in a sea of sludge so heavy with bad debt and corruption that we barely noticed we were all sinking together. The media have covered the fallout from every angle. Almost. When it comes to financial crimes, secrets, violence, and even murder, my Wall Street tale proves that sometimes you can clean up toxic waste, and other times it goes up in flames.

  Intense, hot, uncontrollable flames.

  It started on a fairly typical weekday, and I was on my way to yet another black-tie dinner-yes, that was “fairly typical.” This one, in the Grand Ballroom of the Pierre Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, was the annual Securities Industry News awards ceremony. A colleague at Saxton Silvers was up for Collateralized Debt Obligation of the Year. The CDO-a financial tool that repackaged debts supported by collateral (like mortgages) for sale to investors-had once been the twenty-first-century darling of Wall Street. The subprime crisis in late 2006 had changed all that, eerily enough right around Halloween. I nearly skipped this year’s award ceremony, embarrassed for my firm, unable to fathom how anyone could walk on stage to accept an award for an investment instrument that had nearly destroyed the global financial system. For Saxton Silvers, however, a win was a win, and you were nothing if not a team player. So there I was, answering the call of duty.

  Work had been my solace after Ivy’s disappearance-years ago. No one knew for certain what had happened to her that night in the Bahamas. Suspicion surrounded me at first-the husband was always the first suspect-but I passed a polygraph exam with flying colors. My undying hope was that Ivy would somehow return unharmed-a high-powered career woman who had jumped into marriage while on vacation, freaked out, and escaped to some far corner of the earth to sort out what the hell she’d just done. But there was never the slightest indication that she was alive. No sightings of her anywhere in the world. No cell phone calls. No record of any travel or credit card purchases in her name. Her newly opened, half-million-dollar account at Saxton Silvers-the money she had entrusted me to manage-went untouched. Eventually, the Bahamian investigators likened Ivy’s disappearance to the accidental death of Natalie Wood in the early 1980s. The only difference was that we had anchored our sailboat near “the wall,” as it is known to scuba divers-part of the continental shelf where shallow turquoise seas less than a mile from shore suddenly turned into a dark, shark-infested ocean. For two weeks search parties combed the beaches. But on day fifteen the official mourning period began. A fisherman reeled in a thirteen-foot tiger shark. The contents of its belly looked suspiciously human, and authorities determined that it was part of a woman’s shoulder and upper arm. A hair follicle taken from Ivy’s hairbrush provided a DNA match. Since shark attacks are rare, I took solace in believing that Ivy had drowned before meeting up with nature’s most efficient predator.

  The alternative still gave me nightma
res.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Cantella. You want the Fifth Avenue entrance?”

  “Cruise the block, Nick. Drop me off on Sixty-first.”

  The limo and driver were a bit ostentatious, but I had passed the point in my career when I could spend a third or more of my eighteen-hour day working from the backseat of a cab. Maybe I’d lost a little of my drive. After Ivy was gone, the relentless pursuit of money had seemed a little pointless-not a good mind-set for Saxton Silvers’ youngest-ever investment advisor of the year. I was looking for real purpose, and I was about to ditch Wall Street altogether to join the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

  Well, not exactly.

  But I had given more than just passing thought to getting out, which told me that I probably needed a change. So I called in a few favors and went to the Assessment Center, which sounded like something out of an old Woody Allen movie, but it was actually a boot camp for Saxton Silvers’ managerial prospects. You go in like a West Point plebe, and if you survive the stress, lack of sleep, and psychological games, you come out feeling like the newest member of an elite Wall Street fraternity-or like a made man in the mob. At the end of my three weeks, I was given the investment-banking equivalent of the secret handshake and Sicilian oath: I was invited to join management. But then came the kicker, straight from the lips of the assessment team leader: “And of course, we will assist in reassigning your book of business.” At Saxton Silvers, you were either a producer or a manager, not both. Investment advisors were expected to give up their clients in order to join management, which as far as I was concerned meant that management was more like the crock at the end of the rainbow-though my change of heart was not at all driven by money.

  Well, not exactly.

  But it had been one of those times in my life when the pot of gold was a distant second-to power. Or perhaps efficacy was a better word. Give up my clients? It seemed like a page out of the psychological playbook of Jim Jones, the doomsday cult leader who’d told his followers to hand over their wallets and follow him to Guyana, making it physically and financially impossible for them to say “See ya” when it came time to drink the Kool-Aid. So I told management to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.

  Well…not exactly.

  Luckily, my mentor had stepped in. A deal was struck. I was allowed to keep my best clients-I was still a producer-and the firm created a management position that I could hold until I agreed to drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak, and assume a more traditional post. Keeping one hand on the production side while transitioning into management wasn’t really a breach of company policy, we rationalized, because my newly minted position had no history, no precedent.

  My new charge was to position Saxton Silvers as the leader on Wall Street for investment in environmentally friendly and socially responsible companies. This, of course, was an instant source of sidesplitting laughs around the watercooler. Someone even taped the name MIKE QUIXOTE to my office door. It was a tough assignment, made even tougher by the difficulty in defining a “green” investment. One of the Harvard environmental fellows on my team calculated that each second of time spent on the Internet contributed 20 milligrams of CO2 to the environment, which is to say that if Al Gore invented the information superhighway, the inconvenient truth is that the carbon footprint of the IT industry is equal to that of the aviation industry. I let the academics argue over that one, and instead focused on turning the “windmill division” into a serious profit center for the firm.

  “Here we are, sir,” said Nick.

  The limo stopped. Nick jumped out to get my door, but I beat him to it. No matter how many times I told him that I could open my own door, he was too programmed to stop himself.

  “Don’t go too far,” I told him. “I won’t be staying long.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was after seven o’clock, and I was already late. I knew Mallory wasn’t going to be happy with me. After nearly two years of marriage she was beyond tired of these black-tie events, especially on crazy days like this one when I had to have my tux delivered to the office and Mallory had to ride alone and meet me there.

  My phone rang as I entered the lobby. This time it was my Asia team leader calling about the surprising surge at the morning bell for the Tokyo Financial Exchange.

  “Mr. Cantella?” I heard a man say as I rounded the corner.

  I quickly finished the call and tucked away my cell. In front of me were two men, each wearing a trench coat and an exceedingly serious expression.

  “Who wants to know?” I said.

  The older man flashed a badge. “Agent Fairchild,” he said. “FBI.”

  My heart skipped a beat. Nothing prepared you for a moment like this, especially in an era when finding a federal regulator on Wall Street was like finding a Walmart on Rodeo Drive.

  “What’s this about?” I asked.

  The agent put away his badge, but he didn’t seem inclined to answer my question. He grabbed my right arm, and the other agent took my left.

  “Come with us, sir,” he said, and they escorted me from the lobby.

  6

  MALLORY CANTELLA CHECKED HER WATCH. SHE WOULD HAVE BET her Jimmy Choos that Michael was going to be late, as usual, so there was no point getting upset about it. But with nearly a hundred of his closest friends and colleagues waiting, she couldn’t stop the stress from turning the back of her neck into one huge knot.

  Where the heck are you, Michael?

  By Saxton Silvers’ standards, Michael’s surprise thirty-fifth birthday party was hardly an exercise in keeping up with the Joneses. That would have meant five hundred guests at a society-page event-perhaps a re-creation of Havana’s famous Tropicana nightclub in its 1940s heyday, complete with a salsa orchestra, casino tables, showgirls in feather headdresses, and dinner catered by Bobby Flay. Mallory hadn’t even considered it. Michael wasn’t cheap, but a blowout to end all blowouts in celebration of an accomplishment as meaningless as reaching the age of thirty-five? Never. Not Michael. She had to keep it simple. The Pierre Hotel didn’t really fit that bill, but it was needed for the ruse-a venue she’d chosen to make Michael think that he was on his way to another dull black-tie business event. All would be well when he unwrapped the case of Montepulciano that she had been able to cajole from an obscure Tuscan vineyard by learning to pronounce it with feeling-“Mon-tah-pool-chah-no.”

  Assuming he ever gets here.

  Mallory downed a Cosmopolitan and was headed toward the bar for another when her best friend came over and grabbed her.

  “He’s in the building!” Andrea told her.

  Since marrying Michael, Mallory had struggled for acceptance by the Saxton Silvers “It girls,” and Andrea was the first real connection she’d made. It was probably because Andrea wasn’t in the club either. Andrea’s fiancé was new to the firm, the couple having moved from Seattle just eleven weeks earlier.

  “Are you sure?” asked Mallory.

  “Has my intelligence ever failed you?”

  It was true: Andrea’s information was consistently reliable, unlike the usual Saxton Silvers gossip that wound its way from the Pilates studio, to the coffeehouse, to the Madonna-inspired Power Plate workout, to the white-wine-and-salmon-tartare lunch at Barneys.

  Mallory hurried up onto the stage and grabbed the microphone. The band stopped, and the event coordinator flashed the lights to get the crowd’s attention.

  Exactly on cue, the main doors to the ballroom opened, and Michael entered in the company of two men wearing trench coats. The band immediately started playing “Happy Birthday,” and from the stage Mallory caught Michael’s eye as she led the crowd in singing to him. It had been Andrea’s idea to hire the actors to pose as G-men and haul Michael into the ballroom-a gag that Mallory loved. He looked genuinely stunned.

  “Happy birthday, Michael,” she said when the song ended. “I love you.”

  A long round of applause followed. A waiter handed Michael a glass of champagne, which he raised in a toast to his
wife as he mouthed the words back to her, I love you, too.

  It probably would have been too much to expect Michael to climb on stage and say those words into a microphone so that everyone could hear. It would have made Mallory’s night if he had, but it was enough that the weight around her neck was finally lifted.

  Mission accomplished.

  7

  AT ONE THIRTY A.M. I WAS STANDING AT THE WINDOW IN THE penthouse suite of the Pierre Hotel with a glass of champagne in my hand. If a sea of lights was a sign of life, then the city that never sleeps was living up to its name.

  I wasn’t from New York, hadn’t grown up wanting to live here, and fifteen years ago would have laughed in the face of anyone who told me that I would spend my thirty-fifth birthday looking down at Fifth Avenue and Central Park from the forty-second floor of a five-star hotel. Why on earth Mallory and I needed a two-bedroom suite for twenty minutes of birthday sex and a few hours of sleep wasn’t entirely clear, but that was the thing about having money and living in Manhattan. Cummerbunds were stupid, but I owned at least a dozen of them. Champagne gave me a headache, but some well-trained staffer had placed a glass in my hand as I entered the room, the hotel put it on my bill, and I said thank you. I suppose I also should have thanked the guy who had guaranteed me a clear view of my wet, naked wife by designing a shower stall with warm water running between double panes of glass to prevent fogging. I couldn’t explain this life-not to myself, and definitely not to Papa, who of course had been the first to call earlier in the day and wish me happy birthday. The call had ended the way our phone conversations always ended. “Tell your beautiful wife hello for me,” he said. “And love each other. That’s the main thing.” Coming from anyone else, it would have sounded like Pollyanna. But Papa was the real deal. To him, Wall Street was one big “Fonzie scheme,” no matter how many times I told him that Ponzi had nothing to do with Happy Days and Arthur Fonzarelli. Anyway, I took his meaning, and on some level he was right. But tonight I let myself feel the accomplishment of conquering the most amazing city the world had ever known, and like the song goes, “If I can make it there…”