On the day they conspire to put a bullet in my head, I experience an epiphany.

My epiphany is this: a fourteen-year career on Wall Street wears away at your soul, as assuredly as a stream against limestone. It pushes you to a place where you don’t fully recognize who you are, or how you got here. Everyone around you becomes a stranger, including — no, especially your own wife. Working sixteen-hour days in those glistening glass towers in Manhattan, engaging in mortal combat with some of the planet’s brightest and most power-obsessed bastards who have trained their full concentration on destroying you and stealing the business you’ve built up over the years — well, it hardens you. Wall Street eats its young, and today the beast has a particular appetite for a certain thirty-six-year-old maverick with seventy-eight people reporting to him (which would be me).

So today they plan to execute me. How do I know this? Well, last night at 9:30 p.m., an urgent BlackBerry message instructed me to report to Howard Ranieri’s office at 7:30 a.m. sharp for a mandatory meeting. That particular e-mail was no surprise; a head’s-up had come from a friend in HR that my employment would be terminated during this impromptu meeting.

My response: Bring it on, jerkweed. Bring it on.

Every morning for the past nine months, David Sherwin had disembarked from the Hoboken ferry and joined the flow of people on the walkway to the New York Mercantile Exchange. Chewing on an antacid from the roll in his pocket, he would shuffle along with the crowd, his mind on his meager market positions.

But today, David didn’t reach for the tablets. Instead, he tilted back his head and inhaled the faint saltiness of the river, barely discernable under the stench of diesel fumes from the ferry. The flat gray strip of water stretched away to the horizon, where it merged into the overcast sky. For an instant David was back five years, to when he’d first met Malia and other things weren’t so important.

Heedless of the heavy mist, David walked with an almost forgotten energy — dodging concrete barricades and posts topped with security cameras, threading through knots of traders, clerks, and Exchange employees — toward the fifteen-story concrete and marble box that housed the world’s most important trading floors for metals and energy. Everyone he passed was talking about the same thing. “It’ll be there in two hours”... “The Hub was evacuated this morning”... “Already Category Four.” David walked faster.

He passed three homeless men crowded under a concessionaire’s canopy, driven there by an earlier downpour. Propped up against the storefront, one of them wore a discarded trader’s jacket, the splash of yellow garish against the otherwise unremitting gray. Although he usually didn’t give to street people, David stuffed a bill into the offered cardboard cup and wondered if the man was the jacket’s original owner.

I’ll stop at Cartier on the way home. Malia had always wanted one of those watches, the kind with the twelve little diamonds around the face. Maybe I can get to the Porsche dealership before it closes. David pictured a low-slung convertible — red, her favorite color.

“Up for this afternoon’s game, Dash?” The familiar voice jarred David from his daydreams. “They’re playing the Dodgers.” Mike Vigneri, a fellow trader in the natural-gas pit, came up beside him. When things were slow, Vigneri sometimes ducked out before the closing to catch an afternoon game at Shea.

“Sure, if it’s quiet,” David said, knowing no trader would be leaving the Floor early today. Vigneri grinned at the joke.

David pushed through the revolving doors of the main entrance and strode across the marble lobby. He inserted his ID card into the turnstile slot and walked through the metal detector.

The Exchange was located less than two blocks from where the towers had stood, and security had been substantially increased since the attacks. In addition to the metal detector in the lobby, surveillance equipment had been installed on the Floor and around the building perimeter, public tours had been discontinued, and cops in flak jackets accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the premises. On elevated terror-alert days, a Coast Guard gunboat armed with missiles sat offshore in the murky Hudson.

“This hurricane is sending gas to the fucking moon!” Vigneri said as they changed into their trader jackets in the locker room. He rubbed his thick hands together. “Gonna be some serious money made today.”

“Yeah,” David said. If Vigneri only knew. He stuffed his pit cards and trade pad into a pocket of his bright blue jack t Except for the color, it looked like a med student’s lab coat. He clipped a yellow badge to his collar, just above his photo ID. The bright plastic pin was engraved with four letters derived from the initials of his name: DASH Traders called each other by their badge symbols and used them when writing up trades.

The badge meant David had a seat on the Exchange. Not an actual place to sit — on the Floor, only the clerks did that — but rather the right to buy and sell commodity futures on the trading floor. Exchange seats sold for two million dollars, or were leased for upwards of twenty thousand a month. The seat David traded on was owned by his wife.

At least it had been until two days ago.

David popped an antacid and closed his locker. “I’ll see you up there,” he said.

Although he usually took the elevator, today David bounded up the stairs, reaching the Floor five minutes before the opening bell. Crude oil, heating oil, gasoline, natural gas, propane, coal — the Exchange set the prices for the fuels that ran the world’s economies. Out of breath from the unaccustomed sprint, David pushed his way to his usual place in the natural-gas pit.

While other exchanges were going all-electronic, and overnight energy trading could be done by computer, during business hours the New York Mercantile Exchange still transacted business as it had for over a hundred years — buyers and sellers announcing bids and offers at the top of their voices.

As a rule, only a handful of natural-gas traders were usually in the ring this early. But today the pit was packed, the mélange of garish polyester jackets turning the space into a kaleidoscope. Traders who normally worked crude oil or gasoline pushed in next to the natural-gas regulars to get in on the action.

The room had a musty, damp-clothes smell, despite the cold drafts pouring from vents in the ceiling. As the electronic clock moved toward 10 o’clock, David could feel a surge of anticipation roll through the pit, more intense than usual.

His eyes went to the flat-screen television suspended overhead. The station was tuned to the Weather Channel instead of the customary Fox CNBC. The news crawl across the bottom of the screen read, Category 5—175 m.p.h. winds. David stared at the computer graphic, a swirl of neon red against a blue background. After Malia had gone to sleep, he had spent most of last night at his computer tracking the swirl as it moved across the Gulf. The tension in his shoulders eased as he saw the storm was still on course.

The seconds on the digital clock slowly ticked by. 9:58:17 9:58:42... David balled his hands into fists and jammed them into his pockets so no one would see them trembling. 9:59:36... 9:59:53... 10:00:00 The opening bell rang, and two hundred voices and two hundred arms were raised.

“Hundred Deece at eleven even, hundred Deece at even!”... “Take ’em all!”... “Fifty Deece at thirty!”... “Buy ’em!”... “Fifty Deece at eleven fifty!” Traders screamed, waved their arms, bounced up and down — anything to get noticed and make the trade.

Yesterday, natural gas had closed at ten dollars per contract. Overnight on the electronic market, the price had shot up a dollar. Now, seconds after the opening, it had jumped another fifty cents.

David saw a pair of glasses knocked from a trader’s face by an errant elbow. Their owner was unfazed. “Two hundred Novy at twenty!” he shouted, his hands moving as if he were throwing down gang signs. Novy and Deece were slang for delivery months November and December.

Instead of joining in the frenzy around him, David simply watched the quote board, where orange, green, and red numbers flickered against a black background. Natural-gas contracts were priced in dollars and cents, and normally moved up or down in one-cent increments. Today the price was increasing twenty, thirty cents at a time.

A hurricane was heading for the Henry Hub, the gas-processing plant in Louisiana where over a dozen of the country’s major natural-gas pipelines converged. The Hub had been shut down the night before as a precautionary measure, squeezing supply and driving up the price. If the pipelines were damaged by the storm, natural-gas delivery would be held up for weeks, possibly months, resulting in default on billions of dollars’ worth of delivery contracts.

According to the National Hurricane Center’s computer model, the hurricane would collide with the Hub in less than two hours. As the red swirl moved across the TV screen, the pit became a seller’s market, the price of natural gas soaring as the big producers bought back their outstanding contracts and the speculators who had sold short scrambled to cover their positions. The only question was, How far up will it go?

The rubber floor and acoustical padding on the walls did little to blunt the clamor. The din of the Exchange washed over David. Closing his eyes, he reveled in the sound of wealth being created. Mine and Malia’s

Beside him Vigneri completed a sale. Trading jacket straining at the seams, he scribbled down details on price, quantity, and delivery month, and the badge symbol of the trader who had bought from him on a pit card before frisbeeing it toward a man sitting behind a low counter at the center of the pit. Wearing a baseball hat and plastic goggles as protection from the flying pieces of cardboard, the pit card clocker frantically collected and time-stamped the cards. They were then rushed to the data entry room for transmission onto the wire services and entry into the Exchange’s permanent records.

We could go to Europe. Malia had studied French in college. David imagined the two of them sitting in a Paris café. Sunlight sparkled off the diamond trim on Malia’s new watch, and she was laughing like she used to.

Vigneri nudged him. “What’s up, Dash? Don’t you want in on this?”

“I’m already long.” David paused. “A hundred contracts.”

Vigneri’s jaw dropped. “Well, fuck me.”

Maybe I’ll fly Malia to Paris, give her the watch there. She couldn’t be mad at him then. He imagined her pink and glowing among the rumpled bedclothes in a romantic hotel. Perhaps they could finally start their family.

Malia’s father had been a natural-gas trader, too, doing well enough to retire to Bermuda after Malia left for college. He had kept his seat on the Exchange, though, leasing it out to various traders over the years. When he died last year, Malia had inherited it. Her father’s second wife had gotten the house and bank accounts in Bermuda.

After her father’s death, Malia had planned to continue leasing out the seat. But David knew the extra few thousand a week after taxes wouldn’t be enough, not if they were to have children. He wanted kids, but Malia claimed she wasn’t ready. Their discussions had become arguments, worsening each month. Malia’s parents, though distant, had provided her with a comfortable childhood — piano and riding lessons, nice house, trips abroad, private school. David figured his wife’s reluctance stemmed from not wanting less for their own kids. But that took wealth — real wealth — the kind her father had made. The old guy had never said a word, but David was sure that Malia’s dad thought his daughter had married beneath her.

“This is our chance, Malia,” he had said. After a few weeks she had given in, and David quit his job at a brokerage firm and became a trader in the natural-gas pit. That had been nine months ago.

But things didn’t work out as David had planned. Floor trading for his own account was worlds away from sitting at a desk taking telephone orders from clients. Although he had mastered the skills of buying and selling on the Floor, David wasn’t a “natural.” He didn’t have a feel for the market, and couldn’t anticipate its ebbs and flows. Before long, he had burned through their nest egg. With barely any capital left, David had been reduced to trading one and two contracts at a time, eking out less than his former salary.

But David was convinced more volume could improve his returns. “To make money, you have to spend money,” he had told Malia. But they had no access to additional funds — unless Malia borrowed against the value of her seat. A million and a half dollars of trading capital, the clearing firm rep had told him. But Malia wouldn’t hear of it.

“It’s all we have for our retirement,” she had said when David raised the subject. Despite his entreaties, this time she stood firm, and David had resigned himself to an existence as a one-lotter. Until the phone call from his brother last week.

In love with the ocean, Thomas Sherwin had dropped out of college with the aim of spending his life on the deck of a ship. He currently ran a fairly successful fishing charter business out of a small port town in Louisiana.

“Got the boats out of the Gulf yesterday,” Tom had told David. “All the signs point to a big one coming our way — warm water, cold mass descending, no wind shear. Even the old timers are leaving. Looks like it’s going to hit around where those pipelines are.”

Tom knew weather, especially hurricanes. His livelihood depended on it. When he said a tropical storm was headed through the ocean toward the Henry Hub, David believed him.

After hanging up the phone, David had been overcome with a peculiar sensation. A hunch, a gut reaction. The other traders talked about them all the time, but David had never really understood before now. It was an awareness of having arrived at an unmarked intersection in life, the sense that if he didn’t act, he would forever suffer the misery of what could have been.

Getting the money turned out to be easier than he had thought. David merely slipped the signature page of the loan documents into the stack of tax returns waiting for Malia’s signature. As usual, she scribbled her name without reading anything. His clearing firm accepted it without question.

The Exchange required all members’ trades to be backed by a clearing firm. To secure the guarantee, members pledged collateral — usually cash, sometimes a letter of credit or the deed to an Exchange seat.

David liked his clearing firm rep. Earl Kinder was a tall, middle-aged man with the dry understanding of someone who had heard too many lies and witnessed too many traders undone by the pits. Though a bit too cautious for David’s taste, he was one of the few who did business with one-lotters.

Kinder’s fingers had hesitated over the keyboard. “There’s no shame in being a one-lotter, Dash.”

A photograph sat on the clearing house rep’s desk. It showed a round-cheeked woman and two boys with Kinder’s red hair, standing among piles of leaves in front of a modest white house. David had studied it for a moment.

“I’ll be fine,” he said.

Kinder had started typing, pushing back from the computer less than a minute later.

“There’s your one-point-five, Dash. You know the drill. If you fall below your margin, start liquidating, or I’ll do it for you. Lose it all, and I have to pull your badge and sell the seat.”

David briefly clenched his jaw. A million and a half dollars was in his trading account, secured by Malia’s seat. At last I’m holding size. It was like holding dynamite. He could feel the power — and the undercurrent of danger, too.

“I’ll be fine,” he repeated. “There won’t be a problem.”

After leaving the clearing firm’s offices, David had gone downstairs to the Floor. At an unattended computer, he had logged onto the National Hurricane Center’s website. The tropical storm was following the path his brother had predicted. We are not concerned about the Gulf Coast and we expect little if any impact on the oil industry, read the latest bulletin. But David hadn’t been swayed. Tom always called storms right. His gut told him there was no reason to doubt his brother now.

With twenty minutes left before the close, David had commenced buying. Ten, fifteen contracts at a time, working his way up. Some of the traders had been curious about such volume from a one-lotter, but David explained he was doing a favor for a broker friend.

After the closing bell rang, David had flipped through his trade pad, slightly astonished. He owned a hundred natural-gas contracts. Every ten-cent change in price meant a loss or gain of a hundred thousand dollars.

On the ferry ride home, David had paced the deck, restless and jumpy. He wouldn’t be riding the slow, fat boat much longer. Maybe he and Malia would move to Manhattan, or better yet, Connecticut. Malia and their kids would have their own leaf-strewn yard.

An aptitude with higher mathematics earned him an enviable position at the nation’s most powerful bank, but he soon lost it to petulance. “No good will ever come of you,” said the paymaster as he tallied his severance, wagging an ancient finger. “Not by half are you as clever as you believe.”

With a smirk on his lips, the young man departed the bank’s gray, bunker-like offices. By the time he stepped into the bustle of Broad Street, he decided the events that had led to his dismissal required redress.

He told himself neither the prissy clerk who declared his work ill conceived nor the secretary who deemed his advances untoward was worthy of his consideration. The creaking paymaster was a cross-eyed dolt.

Soon he realized not even the attenuation of J.P. Morgan himself would compensate for the unwarranted assault on his character.

By the time he reached Cortlandt Street, he knew that only the institution itself would merit the full force of his intellect in the service of his sense of Justice. Taking the Sixth Avenue El uptown, he began his withdrawal into what would be a lengthy period of unwavering purpose.

When he returned to the corner of Wall and Broad streets twenty-one months later, on the third Thursday of September 1920, it was to execute a plan that, in his mind, was perfect.

It was waiting for him in front of the building, as always, eight quick steps across the sidewalk. Black, tinted windows, minimal chrome, a little bulgy in the haunches, like a 140-pound woman in a tight dress. One of a million, utterly anonymous. But special, too, his alone, for twenty minutes anyway. This one was freshly washed; he noticed droplets of water glistening on the bumper, catching the sparkle of the traffic light on the corner. He liked that. One night the car was so dirty he sent it away and threatened to take the firm’s business elsewhere. It wasn’t his call to make — Hackett handled all the vendors — but the frazzled dispatcher didn’t know that. He only knew he had a seriously unhappy customer screaming in his ear and a big account suddenly in play. They sent a limo to calm him down, no charge. It worked. The limo was superior to the Town Car, no question. He knew a lot of the big earners stayed with the Town Car after they made it, that whole low-profile thing. Not him. When he broke through he was getting a limo, and a retired NYPD detective to drive it and handle his personal security, one of those tough Irish guys with the blank expressions, the ones he saw in the Daily News all the time, escorting murder suspects out of their dreary apartment buildings in the Bronx. The car was as clean on the inside as it was on the outside, odor-free except for a hint of the driver’s cheap aftershave. He could live with that. It was a lot easier to take than the greasy stench of curried goat or whatever aromatic delicacies the Middle Eastern drivers wolfed down between calls. This guy looked American, an increasingly rare thing, and he was even listening to the Yankees game.

“Eighty-third and Third, right?” said the driver, in perfect Jersey, as they slid away from the curb.

He had planned to head straight home, but now he thought he might swing over to the West Side and see Heather. Maybe pick up some Chinese on the way from that joint she liked on Amsterdam, Hunan whatever. He checked his watch. It was 10:30 already. If his wife wasn’t asleep yet, she would be soon. Taking care of the twins wiped her out, with the full-time nanny. He didn’t really get that. His mother raised five kids on her own and did the old man’s books every night, too. She had more energy than ten of these hot-house flowers on the Upper East Side. And she was still going strong at seventy-eight, playing tennis every morning in the jungle heat of Miami, volunteering at Jackson Memorial in the afternoon, knocking off a bottle of cabernet every night with one or another of her widow buddies. Heather would be up, of course, studying for the LSAT or doing situps or making pies or writing one of her wacky poems or meditating or organizing her rock climbing equipment or IMing with one of her eight million close personal friends. She was a jammer, and that was fine with him. The last thing he needed was a girlfriend with nothing to do, calling him six times a day, sitting in front of the TV all night wondering why he couldn’t spend more time with her, carefully watering her boredom until it bloomed into glorious hysteria. Heather was too busy for that shit. He saw her three times a week, max. And forget about spending the night. She was in it for the sex, just like he was. Fucking her was like going to the gym for two hours, and that’s usually where he told his wife he was.

“Change in plans,” he said to the driver. “Let’s head for the Upper West Side.”

“Upper West Side. You got it.”

Then he remembered that Heather was having her period. Or was it his wife? One of them was, he was pretty sure. Could it be both? Was that possible? He hadn’t seen Heather since the Chicago trip. Or had he? Somebody had mentioned cramps recently, he knew that much. He should probably keep track of stuff like that, but then he’d have to start writing things down and that would put the whole arrangement at risk. He didn’t know anyone who had a setup as sweet as his — exhausted wife on the East Side, inexhaustible mistress on the West Side, the two of them separated by the great green expanse of Central Park. And there was no chance of a random encounter because he never took Heather to the East Side and Callie, his wife, hated the West Side. When she was thirteen, some old creep in a doorway waved his dick at her and her friends as they were leaving a movie theater on Broadway. Talk about making an impression. Twenty years later, the dominant image she had of the neighborhood that included Lincoln Center, the Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, hundreds of good restaurants, and at least a dozen great ones was of a droopy penis winking at her from the shadows. He knew it was droopy because he had questioned her once in great detail about the incident. Now, it was all he could do to get her to cross the park in a limo once a year for the charity benefit the Old Man threw every fall at the Metropolitan Opera.

He sensed a change in the world and suddenly the Hudson River was on his left, wide and flat and undeniable. New Jersey loomed across the dark water, a mile away at least. A hulking tanker pushed north against the current, the white streak of its bow wave pointing the way. Manhattan was an island. He liked that. Manhattan was an island, and he lived on it. It was a great castle, surrounded by a great moat, with many kings and many more princes. It was a kingdom, full of riches and treachery, where the game was played as well as it was played anywhere in the world. And he was one of the players. And he was winning. It wasn’t always pretty, it wasn’t always fair, but how could anyone expect it to be? When two people wanted the same thing, one of them was bound to be disappointed. The weak would always lose to the strong, that was nature’s way. If he beat someone on a deal, that was their problem, not his.

He reached across the seat to open the window — he wanted to feel the rush of air and smell the river and the summer night — but when he pushed the switch, nothing happened. He tried the window on his right, same problem.

“What’s with the windows?” he asked. “They’re not working.”

“Short circuit, I think,” the driver said.

“Can you open them from up there? I’d like some air.”

“No, sorry, they’re all on the blink.”

“Well, that’s fucked up.”

“Hey, at least the AC’s working, right?”

He thought about getting angry, but decided not to waste the energy. “Good point.”

They stopped at a red light and through the tinted glass he could see that the car on their right was also a black Lincoln Town Car, as was the car in front of them and the car behind them. He called in the order to the restaurant, checked his e-mail, and, finally, eighteen hours after he put it on and slid it tight, he loosened his tie. It was only Monday, and the week wasn’t going to get any easier, but he felt strong and in control. He put his head back and closed his eyes. Life. Was. Good.

He dozed for a bit and when he awoke they were bumper-to-bumper on the Henry Hudson, inching past the 72nd Street exit.

“Shit, driver, we need to get off here.”

“Must be an accident up ahead,” the driver said. “The traffic shouldn’t be so heavy this time of night.”

“Did you hear what I said? We have to get off here. The restaurant’s at 77th and Amsterdam, then we’re going to 82nd and West End.”

“Could be from the Yankees game, I suppose. Jersey fans heading home, fucking everything up at the bridge.”

“Hey, asshole, are you listening to me? The exit’s right there. Turn the fucking wheel and get us the fuck out of here.”

The driver eased the car past the exit and snugged it up against the thick stone wall that separated the highway from Riverside Park. As horns honked and cars squeezed past on the left, he turned to face the backseat.

“Don’t call me asshole, asshole,” the driver said.

It wasn’t possible that the driver had just called him an asshole. He knew it wasn’t possible because it just wasn’t possible. He knew that. And yet, even though it wasn’t possible that the driver had called him an asshole, the driver had in fact called him an asshole. He knew that, too. So he knew it couldn’t have happened and he also knew that it had happened. Hence, his initial confusion.

“What... did you say?”

“I said don’t call me asshole, asshole.”

Now he laughed, because it was so impossible it was actually kind of funny. And then the adrenaline hit and the confusion ended and things became perfectly clear. He loved this shit, for some reason, almost as much as he loved making money. Close encounters of the fucked-up kind. His wife called them run-ins — his confrontations with waiters, parking garage attendants, the people sitting next to them in restaurants or behind them in theaters — and she hated them. To him they were like training exercises, a way to keep his edge when he was away from the office. The world was full of people who didn’t keep their shit tight and he considered it his duty to straighten them out when the opportunity presented itself. The way he looked at it, he was a force for good, trying in his own small way to make the city a more organized, efficient, and civilized place by coming down hard on dopes like this driver, who thought they could say anything to anybody.

“You might as well drive straight to the unemployment office, motherfucker, because you just lost your job.”

He started to dial the dispatcher, but the driver reached back and snatched the BlackBerry out of his hands. Two things about this amazed him — that it happened at all, and how quick the driver moved.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” he said. “Give me my phone.”

But the guy didn’t give him the phone. Instead, with the same lizard quickness, the driver grabbed his wrist and yanked him forward. He came off the seat awkwardly and found himself kneeling, with his arms over the front seat. The driver banged on the handcuffs and shoved him back into the corner. Then a pistol appeared.

“You’re going to sit still and keep your mouth shut,” the driver said. “Do you understand?”

The barrel of the gun was a small black hole, deep as a well, and he couldn’t take his eyes off it. What would he see if the driver pulled the trigger? Would he see the bullet? Would he see a small flame? Smoke? Anything? Was it a real gun? It looked real. The handcuffs were real, heavy and solid. What the fuck was going on?

“Are you robbing me?”

“I told you to keep your mouth shut.”

“I’ve got eight hundred in cash on me. If you take me to an ATM I can get you another thousand or so. There’s a limit on daily withdrawals.”

The driver ignored him and eased back into the traffic. Was he being kidnapped? Is that what this was? But why him? He was just another trader. Sure, there were the Caribbean accounts, but nobody knew about them. Nobody. And kidnapping never worked in the States, anyway. Ever. It was a booming business in South America, but the FBI didn’t put up with that Wild West shit. He rattled the cuffs. Maybe it was a joke. There was nothing funny about the driver, but that was the point, wasn’t it? The more he thought about it, the more it seemed right. And he had a pretty good idea whose strange sense of humor was at work here — Christensen, that lunatic fucker. He had weird friends and he was always talking about crazy stunts, like the time he sent a bunch of hookers to his brother’s wedding or the time he had one of his cop buddies pull over his ex-wife’s new boyfriend and search his car with a drug-sniffing dog. The driver was exactly the kind of thug Christensen would know. They probably went to kindergarten together. “He’s a great guy,” Christensen would always say when he introduced one of these characters. Later on, he’d casually mention that the great guy just did a year for beating up a nun, but it wasn’t really his fault because he was on acid at the time and he thought the nun was a hallucination. Real handcuffs, real gun, real criminal at the wheel — this was Christensen at his excessive best, no doubt about it. So how should he play it? He’d been pretty cool so far, and that was a good thing. There was probably one of those lipstick video cameras running. Christensen expected him to fall apart, piss his pants, maybe even cry. Then he’d e-mail the clip to everybody and they’d all have a good laugh. Well, sorry to disappoint.

“Listen, pal, I don’t know who you are or who you’re working for, but there’s no reason we can’t be civilized about this. Why don’t you let me buy you a drink? There’s a joint on Broadway and 97th, McGuire’s. It’s dark and the bartender hates everybody who comes through the door. You’ll fit right in. We can sit in the back and negotiate a figure that works for both of us.”

“I told you to shut the fuck up.”

“Eat shit. I’m offering you a deal here.” This was actually pretty great, a perfect chance to show people how tough he could be. They’d send the clip around, all right, but they wouldn’t be laughing at him.

The driver left the highway at a pullout just north of 86th Street. He put the car in park and turned to face the backseat. The gun appeared again.

“You’re not listening to me, douche bag,” said the driver.

Jesus, where’d Christensen meet this guy? His head was the size of a cinder block and he had a lumpy scar that started in the corner of his left eye and ran down to his neck. The gun was like a toy in his big meaty hand. A bone-snapper with a rock for a heart. Born scary. Unless he was an actor. That was also a possibility. The city was full of them, all colors and sizes. He met a few when Heather took an acting class in the Village. Losers, every one. Broke, delusional, dedicated to their art, and destined for oblivion. He used to take them out to dinner, ten at a time. Fucking babies. They ate like Teamsters. Did anything to pay the rent. This guy probably did children’s theater in Brooklyn on the weekends, playing ogres and talking trees. He was good, though, really good. There was an emptiness about him, something missing, like a soul.

“Look, man—”

The driver cracked him across the forehead with the barrel of the gun. Blood gushed into his eyes and down the front of his suit. Dazed, in pain, he put his cuffed hands to his head. They came away slippery and warm.

“Oh... shit... what the fuck...”

“Am I getting through to you, now, asshole?”

“Christensen...” The blood kept coming.

“What?”

“Practical joke...” His white shirt wasn’t white anymore.

“A joke? You think this is a joke?” The driver coughed up an ugly laugh. “Trust me, motherfucker, this ain’t no joke. You made somebody very unhappy. Now you just lie there and bleed quietly.”

Back into the traffic, his head throbbing. Who was unhappy? Who was this fucking unhappy? He had pissed off some people over the years, but who hadn’t? Business was business. He’d been beat a few times himself. You suck it up and move on. You learn from your mistakes and let it go. You scream a little, maybe a lot, maybe you even make some threats. But that’s it. You take the hit. And you try not to get beat again. There was always more money to be made. Nobody got rough. Not really. He’d heard stories, but he figured they were just that, stories. Christ, the blood wouldn’t stop. He went back over his side deals — no way this was company business — from the last couple of years. What about that Australian, Elliott? He was a hothead, for sure. But if he was going to get crazy he’d do it himself, in person, no hired help. The South Africans? The Koreans? The Russians? All had reasons to be unhappy, all had threatened him in some way. But it was mostly bullshit about going to the SEC. It had to be the Russians. They lost the most. They were the scariest. But the driver wasn’t Russian. Wouldn’t they use one of their own people? It was hard to think, his head hurt like hell. If he could just think it through, he could figure this thing out. He could fix it, he knew he could, if he could just get to his office, get out of this goddamn car and get to his office, make a few calls, talk to people, say the right things. He had to make a deal with the driver. That was the first step. There was $25,000 in cash in the safe in the apartment.

“Listen to me, I can pay you. Ten thousand. Cash.”

“You’re some piece of work, you are,” the driver said.

“I know what this is about. I know who you’re working for. There’s been a misunderstanding. I can fix it, but I have to make some calls. I have to get out of this car. I’ll pay you.”

“You think you can fix this? You can’t fix this. This is unfixable.”

“Where are you taking me? Who are we meeting?”

“Your maker.”

“Twenty thousand. Cash. It’s in my apartment. On the East Side.”

“Thanks for the raise. Now shut the fuck up.”

“Twenty-five thousand. All yours. The Russians will never know.”

“What Russians? What are you talking about? And why are you talking at all?”

The driver turned up the radio as loud as it would go, reached back, pressed the gun against his knee, and pulled the trigger. It was like being hit with a sledge hammer and stabbed at the same time. He screamed and the driver screamed with him. The people in the car next to them looked over and saw the driver screaming. Just another crazy New Yorker.

“Everybody’s always talking about the Russians,” the driver said. “I don’t get it.”

Pain now. And the back of the driver’s head and the radio voices and the great steel towers of the George Washington Bridge and his bloody suit and the handcuffs and the back of the driver’s head and his eyes closed and the car moving faster and his knee with the bones shattered and on fire and the car moving faster and a little dream about the river and then moonlight and then, yes, just a little better. Okay, the driver didn’t want to hear it. But he was just the driver. There was bound to be another guy. There was always another guy, the guy who was really in charge. That was the guy he had to think about it. He was a serious guy, obviously hardcore. It wouldn’t be easy and it wouldn’t be cheap. All right, fine, whatever it takes. He could have it all. Yes, that was it. Give him everything. The Caribbean accounts, the Florida house, all of it. What the hell? Why not? He’d make it all back again eventually. And more. No way the guy turns down a deal like that. Four million total, maybe more. Not the most money in the world, but enough, a nice pile. The knee was bad, but he could live with it. Get a new one. Titanium. No problem. He’d be back on the tennis court in a few months.

They drove up the Palisades Parkway a few miles to a defunct rest area, its entrance blocked by a chain strung between two posts. The driver bumped over the curb and went around the post on the right. A hundred yards in was a small parking lot that overlooked the Hudson. There was a low wooden guardrail and ten yards beyond it was the edge of a cliff. Beyond the cliff there was nothing, just a 350-foot fall to the rocks. The guardrail had a gap where one of the crossbeams had been cut out. The driver stopped the car in front of the gap. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped down the steering wheel, the gear shift, and the front eat.

“Is your boss here?”

“He’ll be here in a minute,” the driver said.

“Good, I need to talk to him. We’re going to straighten this whole thing out.”

“Glad to hear it. Now sit back and relax.”

To keep the car straight, the driver rigged a piece of rope between the steering wheel and the brake pedal. He used a chunk of stone for the gas pedal and it all worked just like it was supposed to.

It was night, and the trading floor outside Michael Steinbach’s office was empty. The TV screens suspended from the ceiling, which had been playing CNN and CNBC nonstop throughout the day, were turned off. But around the perimeter of the floor, from behind closed doors, you could still hear the rapid patter of keyboards in use. Traders keep trading hours; hackers keep hacking hours.

Steinbach himself was a hacker, though he’d been known to put on the occasional position himself, just to show he still knew how. He’d written the original trading system the company used and devised the first of the company’s quantitative trading strategies, a pairs-trading algorithm that looked for mispricings across global equity markets. Arbitrage opportunities were few, small, and short-lived — but with a powerful enough set of computers hunting for them, you could make a business out of exploiting the handful you could find.

And a business is what Michael Steinbach made. Starting with a few million dollars from a single large investor, he parlayed his original pairs-trading strategy into a billion-dollar fund with a dozen different strategies and a staff of nearly one hundred. Each year, the company’s Human Resources team identified the top graduates in math and computer science from the country’s best universities with the same single-minded efficiency his computers used in locating trading opportunities on the world’s securities markets. Each year, the firm interviewed several hundred prospective employees; each year, the firm made zero, one, or two offers — no more — to join their quantitative research staff. A job as a quant at Quilibrium Investment Partners, L.L.C. was a prize not easily won, nor lightly cast aside.

Which made what Simon Kurnit had to do that much harder.

He stood with one hand poised to knock on Steinbach’s door, the other hovering inches away from the knob. It’s not that he had any doubt about the decision he’d made — he just dreaded having to break the news. But there was no way around it.

“Yes?” Steinbach shouted when Kurnit knocked.

Kurnit stuck his head into Steinbach’s office. “Is this a good time?”

Steinbach lifted his PDA from his desktop, glanced at it, and laid it down again. “For a few minutes.”

Kurnit came in. Steinbach’s desk was covered with papers, a mixture of computer printouts, pages torn from professional journals, and post-it notes filled with jagged scrawls. The man looked nearly as messy as his desk. His hair was nominally parted but flew away from his scalp in several directions. The whiteboard on his wall was covered with formulas and figures, and his fingers were smeared with its erasable ink. But the appearance of disorder stopped at the man’s eyes, which were penetrating and intense and felt as though they were systematically peeling you apart like a lab experiment on a dissection tray.

“What?” Steinbach said.

“Listen,” Kurnit began, “I’m sorry to do this — I wanted to tell you sooner — but...” He raised his hands, palms up, hoping for a sympathetic nod, a gesture, something — anything — that would make this easier. But he didn’t expect any help and didn’t get any. “I really appreciate what you’ve done for me—”

Steinbach’s eyes narrowed. “You’re leaving.”

“I don’t want to,” Kurnit said. “Honestly, I’m happy here, you pay me well, the work’s good. If it were just me, I’d stay forever—”

“But you’re leaving.”

“You know Maureen’s been looking for a teaching position, and it’s just... they’re hard to find in her field. NYU’s not hiring and Columbia, they just, they won’t hire you onto the faculty if you got your degree there, it’s their policy...”

“You make enough money,” Steinbach said. “She doesn’t need to work.”

“It’s not the money,” Kurnit replied, “it really isn’t. It’s just... she’s a teacher. That’s what she does, it’s what she’s always wanted to do. She put it on hold for me, for my sake; she spent the past five years here for me, but now... she got an offer from the University of Texas in Austin. It’s a good offer and... I’ve got to do this for her. You understand.”

If Steinbach did understand, he gave no indication of it. His face, generally affectless to begin with, was entirely blank. Except for those eyes, ticking away, trying to get under his skin.

“I’ve been offered a position at Blackshear. It’s not as good as the job here, but it’s... it’s fine. I’ll do fine. Obviously, I won’t take any of the algorithms I’ve developed here — I hope that goes without saying. I’ll start fresh there, do all new work. You’ve got my word.” Kurnit paused. “I’m sorry to leave this place, I’m sorry to leave you, but...” He didn’t have an end for the sentence, so he just stopped, looked up, and waited for Steinbach to say something. Anything.

Steinbach looked at his PDA again. “I’ve got a call in three minutes.”

Kurnit took an envelope out of his pocket. “I don’t know if you need a formal letter of resignation, but I wrote one, just in case. I’m giving thirty days notice, but if you need more — even, I don’t know, sixty days — I’m sure I could get Blackshear to agree.”

“Thirty is fine,” Steinbach said. And he reached out across the desk. At first Kurnit thought Steinbach was reaching for the letter, but after a second he realized the man was trying to shake his hand.

He stepped forward cautiously, reached out, shook.

“Simon,” Steinbach said, and something like warmth came into his voice, though it didn’t sound at all natural there. “You’ve done excellent work for us. Without you, we wouldn’t be trading warrants at all, and you know you’re responsible for most of the alpha in our foreign exchange strategy. It’ll be a real blow to lose you. The one thing I ask is that if anything changes, you remember you’ve always got a home here.”

A home? Quilibrium offered its employees many things: the possibility of making a fortune, the chance to work in an exciting, fast-paced environment, intellectual challenges... but no one would have used the word “home” to describe it, and certainly no one had ever heard Michael Steinbach talk about it in those terms.

Kurnit looked into Steinbach’s eyes and saw nothing there — nothing bad, nothing good. It was like looking into a computer screen after the plug has been pulled.

“I appreciate it,” Kurnit said. “You’ve always been good to me—”

Steinbach released his hand and turned back to his keyboard. Whatever warmth there had briefly been was gone. Kurnit waited for a moment before deciding that Steinbach had, with his customary grace, ended the conversation. Well, no matter. At least he’d gotten it over with. And it could have gone worse.

Kurnit stepped to the door. “Closed or open?” he asked.

“Closed,” Steinbach said.

When Kurnit had left the office and drawn the door shut behind him, Steinbach lifted his PDA again, screwed a foam-covered earpiece into his ear, and tapped a few times on the screen with a stylus. He had to let the phone ring seven times before it was finally picked up. It was only 9 o’clock, but the man sounded as though he’d been woken up.

“Perlow?”

“Who is this?”

“This is Michael Steinbach.”

“Oh, Mr. Steinbach, I’m sorry.” The voice woke up in a hurry. “What can I do for you?”

“Simon Kurnit just came into my office to quit. He says he’s following his wife to Austin, where she’s accepted a teaching job.”

“Aw, jeez.” Silence. “Did he say where he’s going?”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s not going anywhere. We need him here. And there’s no fucking way he’s taking what he knows to one of our competitors. Period.”

More silence. “What do you want me to do?”

“Kill the wife,” Steinbach said.

Make me rich.” Russ Ickes, newspaper reporter, whispered the code words into his cell phone. His heart began to thump faster. The insider trading scheme had been going so well. But things had changed.

“And?” Trip Pennypacker’s cool drawl sounded in Russ’s ear with the tiniest hint of impatience. You wouldn’t detect it if you didn’t know Trip well.

Russ felt himself starting to sweat. “Make me rich,” he stammered again. He didn’t understand why Trip insisted he still use the identifying code. Surely after all these years, Trip knew his voice. Russ himself would know Trip’s voice from just one syllable.

“You’re repeating yourself. You’re calling me late, after the market close, and I’ll have to use after-hours trading. That’s more conspicuous. What’s up, champ?”

“We have to talk, Trip.” Russ could actually hear his heart. His eyes zipped around the busy newsroom. No one seemed to be noticing him.

“I’m a little tied up now.” Trip had been too busy for Russ ever since they were in college. “What do you have for me?”

A squall of perspiration had erupted on Russ’s forehead. He took a shaky breath and choked out the red-alert code. “Trip, there’s Barney Rubble.”

“Barney Rubble?” Very little ruffled Trip, the guest of honor at the unending party that was his life, but he was ruffled now. “Barney Rubble, you say, champ? What kind of Barney Rubble?”

Russ grimaced from the saltwater sluicing into his eyes and from a sudden, stinging memory. Right after college, and before he started on Wall Street, Trip and his friends had jetted over to London for a fling. During their whirlwind of intoxication and fornication, they had encountered cockney rhyming slang, where “going to the Jack Tar” meant “going to the bar,” and “having Oedipus Rex with a twist and twirl” meant “having sex with a girl,” and “brown bread” meant “dead.”

When Russ picked up Trip and his pals from their return flight — Russ hadn’t been invited to the London blowout — they were joking away in rhyming slang. The revelers, who hadn’t bothered to bid hello to Russ or thank him for the lift home from the airport, suddenly started calling their driver “jam roll.” Russ laughed along, as if he was in on the joke. He stopped laughing when Trip playfully told him it meant “arsehole.”

Years later, when they set up their deal, Trip decreed they use cockney rhyming slang as an addition to their code, although he didn’t remember many of the rhymes. Russ did. They were burned on his brainpan as if by sulfur. “Barney Rubble” meant “trouble.”

“Big trouble, Trip, federal trouble,” Russ whispered. His heart slammed in his chest like an industrial press about to overheat. Huge wet blobs from his forehead rained on his keyboard. He skidded his chair back from the desk. “The U.S. Attorney’s office called. They want me to come in.”

The flat-out uncoded statement hung spinning in the air. Trip stayed eerily silent for a full minute while Russ listened to his hyper heartbeat. Russ was about to ask if Trip was still there when Trip said, “Come see me right now.”

The familiar self-possession was back in Trip’s tone. He might have been telling one of his female admirers to pay him a late-night visit. No one refused Trip.

“I’ll be right over.”

“Didn’t you forget something?”

“What? Forget something?”

“What do you have for me?” Trip asked nonchalantly.

“A time like this, do you think that—?”

“What do you have for me?”

“I... Okay, Chimera Genetics. But if we’re accused of insider trading—”

Trip hung up on him — to arrange, Russ knew, for the purchase of shares of Chimera Genetics. Chimera was an under-appreciated stock that had been flatlining at ten dollars for the past year, but when investors read Russ’s bullish story in the next morning’s newspaper, extolling Chimera’s new wonder drug in final clinical testing with federal approval imminent, that would change fast. They would bid the stock price up much higher, and Trip would be there to sell his shares to them, and to skim a creamy and very illegal profit.

“Are you all right, Ickes?”

The words were like an electric shock, and Russ swung round in his chair. John Featherstone loomed above him, disdain contorting his face as though he’d bitten into bad meat. “Are you all right?” his editor asked again.

“Who, me?” Russ sputtered. “I’m fine. Fine, fine, fine.” He shook his head to banish a disorienting image.

On the fifteenth of every month, outside an exclusive and vaguely dangerous club called Inferno, Russ met Trip’s business partner, Mr. Abercrombie. Abercombie, a Gothic beast of a man, would emerge from the club with a fat envelope of cash for Russ. He scared Russ witless, and seemed to know it, as he always asked the same question before disappearing back into Inferno: “Are you all right, Ickes?”

Hearing those words from his editor was an unnerving jolt. Unlike his old editor, forced into retirement now, Featherstone didn’t appreciate Russ’s journalistic talents, and usually treated him the way a cop does a juvenile delinquent. Concern wasn’t part of the equation.

“Well, you don’t look fine. You’re sweating like a pig, Ickes.”

“Uh, I’m not feeling well,” Russ said, aware that vast wet blotches had spread from his armpits. “I better go home.”

“First you’re fine, then you’re not — what am I going to do with you, Ickes?” Featherstone examined his waterlogged underling with gimlet eyes.

“I–I better go then,” Russ said. He got up.

“Well, your column is in, and it was... adequate. So Chimera Genetics is about to skyrocket, huh?”

“That’s what they say.” Russ grabbed his Italian suit jacket from the hanger hooked to the cubicle partition. He slipped it on to hide the damp stains mottling his handcrafted shirt.

“Hmmmm.” Featherstone tilted his head skeptically and peered at the reporter with the intensity of an engineer searching for a fatal structural design flaw. “Nice threads. You’re certainly dressing better lately. How much did this suit cost?”

Bile rose into Russ’s throat. He swallowed back the burning acid. “Uh, it was a gift. My birthday was last week. The big three-oh.”

“You used to dress like you shopped at the Salvation Army.”

The khakis Russ once wore were innocent of pressing and dry cleaning. Now his tailored trousers had creases sharp enough to slice a finger. “Things change, I guess.”

Slumping through the newsroom, Russ passed a cluster of other business reporters near the Bloomberg machine. None of them liked him, and he suspected they were jealous of his having “Street Talk.” Someone muttered, “Brain Distrust,” and they laughed.

Eighteen months ago, when Russ was angling for the “Street Talk” stock tip column, he’d sought visibility by telling people he was the great-grandson of Harold Ickes, the FDR Brain Trust guy. For whatever reason — maybe for his pedigree — the paper’s top brass gave him the column. But the publication had its share of nasty people, and they all had long memories, and not long ago — just after Labor Day — Russ had learned why lying to journalists was unwise. Someone on staff dug up that Russ Ickes was no relation to Harold. It was late October now, and when Russ passed through the newsroom, he ignored the snickers and walked

There was a bustle around the Metro desk, and Russ paused there. Another young woman — another pretty blonde — had been pushed off a subway platform onto the tracks and into the path of an oncoming train. This made it five. The murders had happened randomly at stations throughout the city, always late at night and with few witnesses. The cops had no leads. Russ thought about the trains roaring out of the darkness and the helpless figures on the tracks. A shiver went up his spine.

The air outside was bracing. It was past 8 o’clock, and the evening rush had subsided. With the sodden shirt chilling his skin, Russ moved moodily along the pavement. He had to compose himself before he saw Trip, but he couldn’t slow his pounding heart.

He wandered in slow motion through Midtown, and wondered how to handle Trip. People pushed past him with purpose and places to go. So many of them were stylish and good-looking — so much like Trip.

Russ’s mouth was achingly dry, and he looked down the block. He was approaching Inferno — Trip’s favorite club — and he knew it wasn’t just by chance. He sighed. He could use some liquid courage before facing Trip.

The beefy guard at the velvet rope wore a red greatcoat with black leather lapels. He was as welcoming as Russ’s editor. “We’re full,” he said.

“Come on — this place doesn’t get going until midnight.” Russ produced a hundred-dollar bill. “Come on... please.”

The guard regarded the bill as he might used toilet paper. “We’re full.”

“I was here three weeks ago.” This had no impact on the guard, but Russ pressed on. “I was here with my friend, Trip Pennypacker.”

The guard’s eyes narrowed. “You a buddy of Mr. Cool’s? He knows people here.” He unfastened the velvet rope and Russ pocketed the hundred and stepped forward. The guard’s face turned stormy. He stopped Russ and reached into his pocket to extract the bill.

The only other customers inside were three Japanese businessmen. The club’s craggy, cavelike walls were red, and paper flames flickered everywhere. By 3 a.m. the joint would be jammed with writhing dancers. Russ ordered a twenty-dollar Scotch from the scantily clad barmaid and remembered that Saturday night with Trip.

It was only because Russ had complained that he never got to see Trip that they had gotten together at all. Trip had grudgingly agreed to let Russ join his friends for dinner at Per Se — with the proviso that Russ not give his real name or say how they knew each other. Russ sat ignored by Trip’s trendy friends, and watched as a devastating blonde ran her hands through Trip’s hair and her lips over his neck.

The only thing Trip said to Russ the entire evening was that the two of them would split the check. Russ’s half was astronomical. Afterward, Russ tagged along to Inferno. He paid for a round of drinks — another enormous sum — and Trip and his friends vanished among the dancers, leaving Russ to get plastered by himself and at a huge price.

As he sat at the lonely bar now, Russ recognized the bartender from that night. Her little outfit was red leather. “Good to see you again,” he said to her as she put the glass in front of him. “I was in here Saturday, three weeks ago.”

“Great,” said the barmaid, who clearly saw nothing great in Russ.

Many men would be staring at her cleavage. Russ fastened onto her bored eyes. “I was here with Trip Pennypacker.”

Her blasé expression changed into something Russ couldn’t read. “Trip, huh? He’s your pal? You like him?’

“Trip? Sure — he’s the smoothest guy I know. Handsome, smart, charming, and the girls all think he’s pretty sexy.”

“Yeah?” she said. “And what about you? Do you think he’s sexy?”

“Me? Well, I, uh... Do you remember me from that night?”

“I remember — you were the little guy who bought drinks for Trip and his worshippers. Who was the bitch with him that night?”

“The blonde? Tiffany something. She’s a model. He has a million of them.”

The woman leaned over the bar, her breasts bulging against the red leather. “Listen,” she said, “Trip has run through too many girls in this place.” She made a fist and Russ guessed that included her. “And some of us are plenty pissed at him.”

Russ’s face burned, and his throat went tight. “Really?” he croaked.

“Really. And the thing we all learned about your pal is that Trip cares about just three things: Trip, Trip, and Trip. When the chips are down, you can count on that asswipe to be first out the door.” The barmaid unclenched her fist. “Why they keep letting him in here is beyond me.”

Russ swallowed hard and forced some air into his lungs. “Is it because he’s friends with Mr. Abercrombie?”

She pulled away from Russ. “Don’t know the guy. Never heard of him.”

He fished another hundred from his pocket. “Tell me who owns the club. Is it Abercrombie? Someone else?”

The barmaid eyed the bill, then held out a hungry hand. “Just a hundred?”

Russ brought out two more bills. “Deal?”

The barmaid took the money; it vanished in the pocket of her little skirt. She shimmied her bare torso. “Some people you never want to mess with own this club, baby. So there — I’ve given you a valuable piece of information.” The Japanese businessmen growled at her and she sashayed off. As she did, she turned back to Russ. “Better run along before I tell them you’re asking questions.”

If the barstool had turned into burning brimstone, Russ couldn’t have scrambled off it faster. He left the club at a near run, and didn’t slow until he reached the subway.

Russ looked up and down the nearly empty platform and remembered the chatter at the Metro desk. Just the kind of setup the city’s latest serial killer favored, he thought. Ten yards away, a heavily pierced, waiflike woman with spiky peroxide hair eyed Russ warily. Was she thinking about the killer, too? Was she wondering if it was him? Russ shook his head. No way, he thought, he didn’t fit the description.

All anyone knew about the killer was that he was white and big. No one had a clue about his motives, but several criminal psychologists opined in the media that he probably felt rejected by women and was striking back. Why pretty blondes was anyone’s guess. Russ didn’t know whether the guy went after peroxide blondes, too, but the pierced girl was taking no chances. She stayed well away from the platform edge — right up against the wall — as most women did these days. Pretty blondes, Russ thought, just the sort that Trip favored.

The Queens-bound train roared into the station with a hurricane rush of air. Russ stepped into the car and sat heavily on a plastic bench. The pierced girl got into another car.

As the subway rocketed into the tunnel, Russ thought about Trip and his ever-present women. He remembered the time, a year after college, when he let himself into Trip’s apartment and found his friend having sex with a girl on the living room floor. Russ had stood there mesmerized until she tarted screaming and Trip started shouting. Trip had never before lost that famous composure. After that, he took away Russ’s key. He told Russ that he didn’t want to see him again; that he was tired of him. This despite all Russ had done for him: the laundry, the errands, the rides to the airport. It counted for nothing, and Russ was cast out.

Until a year ago. Then, comfortably ensconced writing the “Street Talk” column, Russ had called Trip with a proposition. Finding him hadn’t been hard — Russ had followed Trip’s life avidly — but getting up the courage to call was a different matter. When he finally did, Trip treated Russ like a bill collector. “Is it something quick? I’m just on my way out.” It hadn’t been quick, but as Russ explained to Trip how “Street Talk” could bring them fortunes, Trip had found his patience. And that old charm. Now, Trip acted as if the idea was all his own.

The train slid into the station. Russ sighed raggedly and left the car. The platform was deserted. Long Island City cleared out by nightfall. The station’s old walls were as grimy as ancient evil. He trudged up the stairs. A dark forest of empty buildings greeted him. One sheet of newspaper spiraled spectrally down the deserted street. Despite the cool breeze off the dark river nearby, he was sweating again.

Russ stood before the slab of an office tower that housed Pennypacker Securities. At age thirty, Trip owned his own company. Office rents were cheap in Long Island City. Trip had leased two floors in a good building. Russ unclipped the cell from his Prada crocodile belt and, with shaking fingers, succeeded in stabbing out Trip’s number. He hadn’t loaded it into speed dial for safety reasons. “Make me rich,” he said when Trip answered. “I’m downstairs.”

“Come on up.”

Russ scrawled illegibly in the book, and the wizened security guard didn’t give it — or him — a glance. He took the elevator to the top floor. He had visited Pennypacker Securities only once before. Now, as then, an icily beautiful redhead met him at the elevator and escorted him back. Russ knew her name was Beatrice, and he followed her through a brightly lit area with circles of desks that resembled his newsroom. Young men barely out of their teens were working the phones with demonic energy. Russ recognized one of them from that night out on the town. He had Trip’s confident, preppy panache.

“Sir, this stock is about to pop,” he said. “And we can get you in on it.”

“The road to financial security, ma’am, is built on knowing which stocks are hot,” said another, nearly identical, young man

“Yes, I hear what you say, sir,” said yet another, a clone of the first two. “But understand I am going to build wealth for you. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Beatrice knocked on the open door to Trip’s office. Russ peered in. The office was swathed in darkness, but he could make out Trip’s silhouette. He was facing a broad window, looking out on the hypnotic Midtown skyline to the west. Russ looked too. There was the newspaper. There was Inferno. There was Russ’s new apartment. So many places Russ would rather be.

A Tizio lamp clicked on. Mr. Abercrombie sat on a long, sleek sofa. The lamp, a small furnace, lit the stony crags of his broad face. He turned to look at Russ, and gave what might have been a smile. The light caught his gold tooth and it glinted. He wore a black leather jacket and a crimson tie. Monster hands, matted with hair, rested lightly on his knees, as though poised to grab. “Are you all right, Ickes?” he asked. The almost-smile vanished. “You look like you swam here.”

Russ opened his mouth to respond, but no words came out. He heard Beatrice close the door behind him. He was alone with them.

Trip turned around. His sculpted hair was the color of champagne, and that amazing grin was, as ever, a treasury of enticing enamel. His shirt had exquisite blue striping — stitched in London, Russ knew. With a dancer’s grace, Trip took his seat at the steel-and-glass Boltz desk that held his laptop and phone.

“Take a load off, champ,” he drawled. Russ sat in the chair in front of Trip’s desk. Trip grinned at him. “Now, what’s all this I hear about trouble?”

Before Russ could speak, Mr. Abercrombie got to his feet. He loomed above the desk and straightened his leather lapels. “I’ll let you fellas have your talk,” he said, and he stabbed at Trip’s phone console with a thick finger. “Bea, baby,” he rumbled at the phone, “whip up one of those cappuccinos of yours for me, okay, hon?” And then he winked at Trip and was gone.

“So, tell me all about it, champ,” Trip said when the door had shut.

Russ licked his arid lips. “I told you, I got a call from the U.S. Attorney’s office. They want me downtown, tomorrow at 10.”

“Did they say what it was about?” Trip was supernaturally calm.

“Not a word. But what else could it be?”

How could Trip keep smiling? “Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that it is about... our arrangement. What are you going to tell them?”

A high-pitched hysteria invaded Russ’s speech. “I’m not going to admit that I’m involved in an insider trading scheme, if that’s what you mean,” he squeaked.

“And you’re not going to mention me either, right, champ?”

“Of course not. If it comes up, I’ll say that we went to college together but that I haven’t seen or heard from you for years. Unless...”

Trip’s smile blinked off. “Unless what, champ?”

“What if they have some evidence? What if they have your trading records, and see that you bought those stocks the day before the ‘Street Talk’ columns appeared in the paper? Then what do I do?”

Tapping a finger on the glass desktop, Trip nodded slowly to himself. “They’d still have to prove a link between you and me.”

“How hard is that? I write about a stock, you buy the stock right before. Sounds like a link to me.”

“They won’t have my trading records, champ. The stocks and the cash go through so many cutouts and offshore accounts — the feds don’t have enough accountants to even get to first base.”

“But they could know that there was unusual activity in those stocks just before my columns came out. They could know that was buying or selling, even if they don’t know who. They’ll figure benefited.”

“Sadly, champ, they will likely conclude that that someone is you. So I wish you the best of luck.”

Russ’s face grew slack. “What... what are you telling me, Trip?”

“I’m telling you, champ, that I don’t want to see you again. I have better ways of making a buck.” Trip favored him with another smile.

“You... you bastard. You ungrateful bastard!” Russ was yelling now. “Who do you think you are?”

Trip’s smile took a malevolent twist. “I think you’d better get out of my office before Mr. Abercrombie comes back.”

Russ glared at him. “Listen, you self-centered son of a bitch!” he shouted. “I’ll tell the feds every little last bit about you. I’ll destroy you!”

“You can prove nothing. Get out.”

“No? You don’t think I recorded our calls? I’ll give the tapes to the feds, and tell them what the code words mean. It’s your voice on the other end of those calls, Trip. And we have credit card charges for the same amount at the same time at Per Se. I bought you drinks at Inferno. People there saw us together. All that sounds like a link to me.”

Trip jumped to his feet. His eyes flared and his perfect lips drew back in a snarl. In all the years he’d known Trip, it was only the second time Russ had seen him lose that famous cool. A vision of the first time flashed in Russ’s brain — Trip’s bare back, the sweat in his blond hair. Trip smacked his hand on the desk, and the vision vanished. He was screaming now.

“You’re nothing! Nothing, nothing, nothing!”

Russ gathered his breath. “Or maybe,” Russ said, his voice shaking, “maybe I could gut it out and protect you. The feds can’t have proof that I bought and sold those stocks — because I didn’t. They can accuse all they like, but without proof... Maybe this is all just a fishing expedition.”

Trip spread his hands on the glass desktop and trapped his ire behind a set of white teeth. “You’d protect me?” he asked.

“I would, Trip. But we’d have to be much more careful about things. And I’d need more money.”

“More money,” Trip repeated. He nodded to himself and drummed his fingers on the desk. Then he looked at Russ with a sly light in his eye. “We’ll take it out of Abercrombie’s share. I’ll make an excuse about why the count is lighter. He’s not that smart.”

Russ’s eyes widened. “But what if he objects? What if he wants to see some proof — trading tickets or account statements?”

Trip laughed nastily. “The guy wouldn’t know a trading ticket if it jumped up and bit his ass, and he has no clue about how the market works. I could show him my cable bill and he wouldn’t know the difference. Look, if he complains, I’ll tell him we’re suspending operations until the heat is off. You and I will keep on with our arrangement, and I’ll pass you the cash directly.”

“And if, somehow, the feds link us? What then?”

Trip gave a graveyard laugh. “Then we give them Abercrombie. We tell them he forced us — threatened us at gunpoint. I mean, the guy has a criminal record like a phone book. Who are they going to believe — him or us? We just have to stick together, champ, just like we always have.”

Russ paused, gulping air. His vision was blurry and his voice was trembling when he spoke. “Trip, I... Don’t you know how I feel about you?”

Before Trip could do more than raise an eyebrow, there was a rap at the door. Beatrice looked in. “Your Los Angeles call,” she said.

Trip grinned and glanced at his watch. “No rest for the weary, champ. And anyway, you’d better get going. Don’t want to be seen loitering around here, after all. Unless there was something else...?”

Russ’s throat closed up. “Nothing else,” he said, then bolted through the door. There was no sign of Mr. Abercrombie, and Beatrice said nothing as he hurried by. In what seemed like no time he was in the empty subway station. He leaned back against the dirty tiles and tried to calm himself. Images of Trip reeled through his head.

He heard a low rumble and felt the building wind of an oncoming train. He smelled something acrid and opened his eyes. He wasn’t alone on the platform anymore. Mr. Abercrombie towered over him. And behind him, steaming with anger, stood Trip.

Abercrombie’s massive hand closed around Russ’s slender arm. “Get the other one, Trip,” he said.

Trip recoiled. “Are you crazy? I shouldn’t even be down here. You were supposed to take care of this yourself.”

“I said, get the other arm.” The fiery menace seethed out of Mr. Abercrombie, and Trip took tentative hold of Russ’s other arm. Russ felt the tremble in his hand.

“What are you doing?” Russ cried as they dragged him to the edge of the platform.

“You know the feds will crack you like a walnut, champ.” Trip’s voice was soft in his ear. “And I just can’t let that happen. I like the income stream from you, but the risk profile is up too much.”

The subway train sped into the station, a thirty-five-ton, stainless steel behemoth with harsh eyelike headlights. It rolled at them with inhuman force.

The train was almost upon them when Mr. Abercrombie dropped Russ’s arm and, with amazing agility for such a big man, took Trip by the throat. Trip let out a shriek and let go of Russ, who stumbled backward, away from the platform edge.

Trip’s hands flailed feebly at Mr. Abercrombie. His gorgeous teeth were bared in pain and panic. Mr. Abercrombie lifted Trip from his feet and tossed him to the tracks.

The subway motorman looked up in horror to see some-one stumbling off the platform. He hit the horn and then the brakes. The first car shuddered as it bumped over the body, and the cars kept rolling past amid the brakes’ banshee wail.

Mr. Abercrombie took Russ by the arm again and hauled him out the turnstile and up the stairs. Russ followed the massive form numbly, along the empty street and into a black car parked in an alleyway. Mr. Abercrombie got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “We gotta get out of here.”

“Trip,” Russ whispered.

“I gotta hand it to you, Ickes,” he heard Mr. Abercrombie say through a fog, “you had him pegged — how fucking quick he’d be to sell me down the river if he thought the feds were coming through the door. No fucking loyalty at all. I hate that. You had him pegged, all right. And that crap about the U.S. Attorney calling — that was nice touch, just like the thing with the intercom. Bea kept the line open and I heard the whole thing. You did okay tonight, Ickes — a real brain trust.”

Mr. Abercrombie’s huge hands worked the wheel. Sirens broke the night, coming in their direction. Russ felt water coursing down his waxen cheeks, and it wasn’t sweat. Abercrombie’s rumble filled the car.

“Bigger cut for everybody without Trip, and I won’t have to listen to the girls at the club complain no more either. And truth is, I was getting tired of that attitude of his. Not that smart. Sheesh, what an asshole.”

“I wanted to tell him—”

Three cop cars zoomed past, a carnival of light and noise. The black car continued toward the Queensboro Bridge. Russ sighed and Mr. Abercrombie shook his head.

“Like you said, Ickes, he served his purpose. And the way he treated you — an old friend like you — it was long overdue. It’d been me, I’d’ve taken care of it long ago. He had it coming, so enough with the guilt already. You can’t blame yourself. Trip is brown bread. Dead.” Mr. Abercrombie glanced over at Russ. “Are you all right, Ickes? Are you crying?”

“I wanted to tell him...”

“Hey, cheer up, pal — everything’s gonna be fine. We’re gonna make mucho bucks together, you and me.” With something almost like affection, Mr. Abercrombie dropped a gorilla hand on Russ’s shoulder, near his windpipe. He turned and looked at Russ. “Come on, champ. Make me rich.”

I should be sitting here trying to figure out how to say goodbye to my wife.

Instead, I’m sitting here thinking I should have known the wheels were fixing to come off this thing the instant I spit that cough drop onto the Contessa’s nipple in full view of the Hell Bitch.

That was all the omen a man could ask for.

I get to my feet and look down at Katy, all hooked up to her feeding tubes and what have you. Laid out like some old person. Instead of the vibrant and amazing young woman I married not all that long ago.

All I can think to say is, “I’m sorry, darling.”

She looks at me and her eyes are wet. “Don’t, Billy. Please don’t.”

She reaches for my hand and I let her take it and squeeze it and hold it to her sunken cheek, and I can feel her tears on my skin.

I bend down and kiss her forehead and whisper that I love her, and then I retrieve my hand and walk out of the hospital room and take the elevator down and go outside and hail a cab. I tell the driver to take me to the NYPD’s Midtown North Precinct house.

That’s when I see the guy walking toward me with his hand inside his coat.

As soon as she wedged her way off the crowded elevator on the forty-fifth floor, pregnant belly swathed in a navy Anne Klein duffel coat, with a sticker from the security desk on the lapel, she noticed the charge in the atmosphere. A mood of muffled tension and high-wire efficiency pervaded the reception area with its Oriental carpet, copies of Billboard and Variety arrayed on the coffee tables, and works of contemporary art hanging on the mahogany-paneled walls.

“Can I help you?” A receptionist with honey highlights in her hair and a small gold stud in her nose spoke to her from behind glass.

“I’m Nancy Arthur. I’m here to see Scott Locasio.”

“Have a seat, please.”

She went over and sank into a black leather sofa, her feet aching, her eyes drawn to a painting of a seated screaming man surrounded by a cage of lines. She studied it carefully, telling herself it couldn’t possibly be the original version of the Francis Bacon she’d written a paper on back when she was an art history major.

“He’ll see you now.” An assistant in stilettoes as thin as ice picks came striding up the hall, carrying herself with a kind of daunting confidence meant to convey a sense of both her own importance and the visitor’s provisional status.

Nancy struggled to her feet and followed her past a row of mounted platinum records and movie posters, feeling that familiar hummingbird flutter in her gut. Come on, you can do this. Don’t be such a girl. A great oak door opened onto a sweeping godlike view of northern Manhattan, a perspective that made the trees of Central Park look like the current occupant’s private garden and filled her with an uncomfortable mixture of envy and awe. Its majesty was only slightly undercut by the presence of a Styrofoam backboard in the corner and the brutal thump of hip-hop coming from a pair of four-foot-high Altec Lansing speakers.

“So you’re supposed to be the new coach, huh?” He spoke without taking his eyes off his computer monitor. A stocky, thick-necked young man in charcoal double-breasted pinstripes, with a pair of black suede Bruno Magli loafers insouciantly up on his desk. “No disrespect,” he said. “But if it was up to me, you wouldn’t even be here.”

“And why’s that?” She sat down before him without being asked, trying to stake a claim and accommodate herself to the deliberate thuggishness in his manner. A lot of them were like that these days. The new breed, who wore flashy jewelry to the office, listened to misogynist rap, and left copies of Maxim on their desks, in full view of their pregnant guests.

“I don’t think I need it,” he said matter-of-factly. “When I took over as head of worldwide media last year, this company’s stock was in the toilet. Now we’ve got three CDs in Billboard’s Top Ten, four of the top-rated shows on the networks, and the top-grossing game system in the country for the last three weeks running. Nothing wrong with the way I’m doing my job.”

“So why do you think the board hired me to work with you?”

He finally took his eyes off the monitor, to give her the

“I guess somebody thinks I need a little ‘seasoning.’” He made little quotation marks with his fingers. “They want me to work on my ‘sandbox skills.’ Apparently, Scottso might have hurt somebody’s little feelings when he took over. Like that has any relevance.”

“And you don’t think it does?”

“Revenues have been up every quarter since I came in. All these Ivy League bitches with their Harvard MBAs and their Yale degrees wouldn’t know a hit if it came up and bit them in the ass. Things needed to be shaken up. A couple of dishes got chipped along the way? So fucking what? I never knew this industry had so many pussies.”

She tried to cross her legs, knowing that she was being tested here. Pussies. Bitches The language of intimidation. If you protested, you were barred from the boys’ locker room. But if you put up with too much, you were a doormat for life.

“So you’re the only one with balls around here, I guess,” she said flatly, letting him know she could play if she really had to.

He snorted in contempt. “You’re the only one with balls,” he mimicked her. “Listen to you. Like you’re going to tell me about my business? And where’d you go to college, Princeton?”

“I did my graduate work in organizational psychology at the University of Michigan.” She started to stick her chin out and then caught herself. “Why is that important to you?”

“Organizational psychology.” He looked like he’d just licked a cat. “That’s like a tofu hamburger, isn’t it? What are you? You’re not in business and you’re not a real shrink. Who do you think you’re kidding?”

She felt the little form squirming and kicking inside her, not wanting to let on that she’d asked herself the same question at least once a week for the last twelve years. She wondered if he somehow knew this was the biggest account she’d ever landed. Twelve years of patiently handing out business cards, trying to spread her name around, billing for less than she was worth, trying to build on each of her little success stories. Twelve years of holding hands with brusque, socially underdeveloped executives who needed a coach to keep them from alienating colleagues and damaging their companies.

“Well, my understanding is that I have a mandate to work with you on your management skills,” she said, trying to sound firm. “And I usually don’t get called in if everything is hunky-dory.”

He fidgeted a little, his left loafer waggling on the edge of the desk.

“But how the hell can you understand my position? Have you ever even run a business?” He paused for effect, hoping to humiliate her. “I’ve got fifteen hundred people answering to me worldwide and I bet you can’t even balance your checkbook. And now you’re going to walk in here and tell me something I don’t already know?”

She had the sensation of finding herself pressed up against a cold wall. If she let him push her around now, she’d never gain his respect. Her eyes moved across the office, searching for something that would put them on more even footing. When everything else failed nowadays, she could usually make her pregnancy into a conversation piece, sometimes even a bond she could share with other women and family-minded men. But there were no photos of children here. Just shots of several different silicon-enhanced stripper-types accompanying him on Cancún vacations, fishing expeditions in the Florida Keys, and autographed photos taken with members of Bon Jovi and various sports luminaries she didn’t quite recognize.

Instead, with mounting unease, she found her gaze drawn to a life-sized cut-out in the corner, the figure of a barrel-chested man in a tuxedo with a picture of her client’s face imposed on the top.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Whadayya mean, what’s that? It’s the Don.”

“The Don?”

“Whaddaya, kidding? The Don. The Don!” He looked incredulous. “Don Corleone. From... The... Godfather Maybe you’ve heard of it...?”

He smiled as if he was addressing a child with special needs, and she nodded, mildly embarrassed, not daring to let on that somehow she had reached the ripe age of thirty-eight without ever seeing that particular film.

Oh, of course she’d heard of it. She even vaguely remembered her older sister and her middle school friends whispering and giggling about some tawdry bit of business on page twenty-seven of the novel it was based on. But the truth was, the story had never interested her enough to actually sit down and watch it, even though most of the men she worked with referred to it as some kind of sacred inviolate Ur text. All those dark muttering codes and oaths of masculinity, all those silly posturing threats from a bunch of frat boys. She could never take it seriously, even when her husband begged her to watch it with him.

“Ohhhh, so you’re the Don,” she said.

He looked pleased, perhaps hearing an undertone of admiration that she had not really intended.

“What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?” he mumbled. “Had you come to me in friendship, then this scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day.”

She froze in alarm, until she realized he must have been reciting lines from the film.

“You sound just like him,” she said.

Who was in this movie anyway? Marlon Brando? Al Pacino? She was more partial to films about women triumphing over adversity. A League of Their Own Pretty Woman.

“I better.” He laced his hands behind his head. “I must’ve watched it two, three hundred times with my old man.”

“Really?” She pretended to be impressed.

“Well, whaddaya want? You grow up in Bensonhurst, it’s like learning the Pledge of Allegiance.”

“Sure. A rite of passage.”

She watched the way his body language changed as he began to talk about it. How his feet finally came off the desk and he sat forward in his seat a little, looking her in the eye for the first time.

“You ever wonder...?”

He’d started to ask an earnest question but stopped himself, not sure if he was quite ready to show her any kind of deference yet.

“What?”

She saw him wrestle with an idea, his eyes narrowing as he tried to pin it down, a flush of boyish pinkness rising in his cheeks.

“Did you ever really wonder why Kay left Michael?” he asked.

She steepled her fingers, as if it was a question that had long troubled her as well.

“Well, why do you think Kay left Michael?”

She watched him for cues, seeing that she’d set off a circuit of associations. He looked down at a shrink-wrapped CD that had been lying on his desk and scratched at the edge of the cellophane with his fingernail.

“I don’t know,” he said, turning pensive. “She acts like she’s shocked when she finds out what he does for a living, but c’mon — like she didn’t know already from being at the wedding and seeing his father? What business did she think they were in, State Farm home insurance?”

“Maybe she just came to realize he wasn’t the man his father was,” she said glibly.

He looked as if he’d just been slapped. You could almost see the outline of a palm print on his cheek.

Why’d you say that?

She shrugged, not having really meant anything by it. But of course he was going to react. A therapist getting a rise out of a client by bringing up his parents was like a cook turning on a stove. If it didn’t occur to you, you were probably in the wrong business.

“So are you saying that if Michael could’ve learned to be strong like the Don, he wouldn’t have lost his family?” he said, again reading more into her words than she’d put in.

“Well, what do you think?”

In the course of just a few seconds, he seemed to have transformed from a truculent executive to a parochial school boy working up the nerve to raise his hand in class.

“Let me ask you something,” he said quietly. “And if you tell a soul I asked you this, I swear I’ll throw you out the window.”

“Okay.”

“If I hire you, can you teach me organization principles according to the Godfather?”

“Can I...?”

“Can you be a wartime consigliere? That’s what I’m asking.”

She weighed her answer as she looked around the room, calculating that there were at least six pieces of furniture present that would probably cover a year’s mortgage for their “classic six” co-op on the Upper West Side. The guy who took care of the plants in the office was probably making as much as she was. She tried to fight down her growing resentment, reminding herself that she was supposed to be here to help. Then she remembered a line from a spunky Meg Ryan comedy she’d loved a few years back, something Tom Hanks quoted from The Godfather

“I’m ready to go to the mattresses,” she said.

He grinned. “Bella.”

Fuck me, man. What is Cleto talking about? I can’t understand a word. He’s just barking all mad dog at me, spit flying from his mouth, sweat dripping from his big shaved head. He’s pissed. I can tell. His shirt is off and he’s pounding his chest with his fists, slapping the tattoo of the two skeletons buttfucking over his heart. He keeps saying stuff, but I don’t know what it means. He knows I don’t speak Spanish.

Naldo and Ramón. Those fuckers. They just rolled up on me and next thing I know my nose is broken, my bottom teeth are sticking through my lip, and I’m clotheslined by the driveway. Seeing stars. Really. Little bursts of light, like flashbulbs.

Amigos, what the fuck?

There must be some mistake. It’s me. Russell.

I want to say something but I can’t get any air. I think my jaw is broken too.

Cleto yelled some more and they stopped kicking me. Fucking Naldo and his cowboy boots. He kicked me so hard it feels like I have exit wounds. I’m pretty sure I broke a rib. Maybe two. And my shirt. Shit. My tofu festival T-shirt. What are they thinking? It’s collectible, man. The tofu festival only comes once a year.

I’m trying to tell them this as they pick me up off the ground. But they can’t hear me. It was a mistake only taking one year of Spanish in high school. If I could habla, I’m sure we could work this all out.

Naldo is holding me up, but I can’t see much. Something’s wrong with one of my eyes, like it’s dislocated. No, it’s my neck. I can’t hold my head up; it just bounces around like those stupid bobblehead dolls you get at Dodger Stadium. I can’t control the bobbling. It bobbles left, then right, then back. Bobble, bobble. I see the ground, the street. There are bright dark blotches on the pavement. My blood. Naldo’s boots. Bobble, bobble. The wheels of the car.

Why can’t I control my head?

Cleto helps me out. He grabs my hair and lifts my head up so I can see him. I start talking, but it just sounds like gargling. There’s too much blood in my mouth. That can’t be good.

Cleto looks me in the eye.

“You are gonna fuckin’ die, hijo de puta.”

I try to explain. Doesn’t he understand that it’s just a little correction? The market does this all the time. In another month everything will be back where it was, maybe higher. It’s certainly no reason to do anything drastic. Everyone, KLD Research and Analytics, Price Target, the Jaywalk Consensus, they all said hold Not sell. Hold.

Hold on tight, everything will be all right.

I try to explain this to Cleto, but my mouth won’t work. I sound like a cow. I’m mooing. Cleto looks at me and shakes his head.

“Throw this piece of shit in the trunk and let’s go.”

Now he speaks English?

Naldo and Ramon pick me up and throw me in the trunk of Cleto’s car. If I wasn’t already numb from the beating, that would’ve hurt. Naldo leans in and smiles at me. I try to talk again. Weren’t we friends? Didn’t I tell you to invest in Genentech (NYSE: DNA)? Didn’t you double your money when Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT) split?

Naldo whispers some advice in my ear: “Don’t bleed on

Cleto’s car, ese.”

Then he shut the lid.

Lethe, South Dakota. Not much to it. Not much more than a wide place at the end of an off-ramp — a frozen, flinty afterthought to the interstate, just right for gassing up, taking a leak, and heading out again. Not much to see besides the filling station and the quick-mart, the Sunset Motor Inn, the plow barn for the county road crews, and the Lethe Lounge next door. No reason to hang around.

“Not unless you’re lost or out of luck,” the desk clerk had said. She was maybe twenty, and her pimpled face was round and sort of vacant, but she’d got it exactly right. I made up a name and paid cash for the room.

Her mother taught her there could be something lovely in the way a rainbow would arc through a tub of soapy water, even as the smell pinched her nose and her hands cracked red from the bleach, from a hundred splinters off the cracking wood of the mop handle. A thousand rainbows could span that tub now and she wouldn’t bat an eye.

And there he was, how many paychecks for that almond-green felt derby of his, telling her once more that he would soon be covering her broken hands in rose milk and fine perfumes, a bauble for every bleach-brined finger.

“Say it all you want, my man. But that won’t make it so,” she said, looking out the browned window, the fading orange light streaking the building tops.

He laughed. He always laughed and it was charming once, that gentle burr, the lilt of the islands twisting through it like a stick of peppermint.

He had taken his hat off and unfastened the very top button on his coat. The room was hot and she herself, laid up all day with an awful pain, had settled on the bed so he might have the chair in the corner that came with the faintest breeze. Wearily, she opened two buttons on her dress, buttons tacky to the touch with the awful thick in the air, and reached for her hand fan, the one he bought her at the curio shop on Pell Street.

“I’ve walked this road before, my man,” she said to him. “I won’t walk it again without something more than a honey promise.”

Over the past year, she’d said it to him ten, twenty times or more. And he’d always nod, even laugh, and never press the point. And that ease, the kindness in it — sometimes it brought heat under her eyes when she thought about it and she hated him for it. How dare he do that to her, bring that out in her when he’d yet to make money enough to put more than a paper fan from Chinatown in her cracked hand.

Before 9/11 and after the millennium, when most of the dotcoms became dot-bombs, I got fired from my job as a Java programmer. To say I left Delivero.com on bad terms would be an understatement. It took two security guards to get me out of the office in Jersey City, and if the goons hadn’t shown up I probably would’ve killed Alan Silver, the CEO. Although Silver was too much of a coward to admit it, he fired me for one reason and one reason only — because his wife had a thing for me. He saw her hitting on me at the holiday party, and after that he used every excuse he could think of to get rid of me — lack of motivation, poor interpersonal skills, not a team player, tardiness. Yeah, right. It was because his slutty trophy wife wanted my body. That was it. End of story.

The job market was tight back then, with so many Net companies folding left and right, and it didn’t help that I’d left Delivero on bad terms and couldn’t get a recommendation. I’d made some money on stock options, but Silver, that cocksucker, had canned me right before annual bonuses were given out, costing me about fifty grand. I explored a lawsuit, but the lawyers I talked to either told me I didn’t have a case or wanted to charge me up the wazoo. After several months out of work, I was starting to go through my money and needed a source of income, so I became a full-time day trader.

I knew I could make big money in the stock market. Yeah, I know, who didn’t feel that way in the ’90s, right? To hell with baseball; trading stocks had become the new national pastime. But for me, it wasn’t a fad. I had a knack for picking winners, spotting trends, and timing the market, and I felt like I could clean up if I put my mind to it. I wanted to take this thing seriously. I converted the bedroom of my condo in Hoboken into a home office and moved my bed out into the living room. I opened a few online trading accounts, bought all the state-of-the-art software and an Aeron chair to sit my ass down on, and I got to work.

At first I had good days and bad, mostly bad. My instincts were good, but sometimes I got too cute, tried to hold onto positions to make big scores, when I knew I should’ve been conservative and gotten out. Though I never held positions overnight, so I didn’t get burned after 9/11. Actually, the market volatility after the attacks worked out great for me and I made big money on the swings up and down. I made more money going short than going long, and seemed to have a knack for spotting the stocks that were in deep shit. One day I decided to stop going long altogether and only sell short. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’d ever made.

I was a natural short seller. It fit my personality, I guess — I was good at spotting the bad in things. I knew when a stock was going to tank before any jackass analyst did, and I knew how to profit from the situation. And with all the Internet crapola out there, spotting trouble wasn’t exactly a chore. Net stocks were still trading at astronomical prices and I rode the suckers all the way down to bankruptcy. Some of the companies were such obvious losers that I broke my rules about not holding positions overnight and went short long-term. I wasn’t an idiot — I covered with options so I couldn’t get burned on the upside, but that rarely happened. It seemed like there were an endless number of dotcraps going belly-up and an endless number of opportunities to cash in.

In early 2002, when Bush and his boys were bombing the shit out of Afghanistan, I made my first million. But at that point I didn’t really care about the money. It was all about the action, about being right. Although I could’ve afforded some-place bigger, I stayed in my one-bedroom in Hoboken. I almost never went out; what was the point? The things I gave a shit about were the stock market and making money. I saw my friends less and less and I’d never been much of a family guy. I used to have girlfriends. Nothing long-term or serious, but I was a good-looking guy and when I went out to a bar or a club I had no trouble meeting women. Like Silver’s wife. Sometimes I thought about calling her up and taking her out and trying to nail her just for the hell of it. I could’ve, but the truth was I wasn’t interested. Sex just didn’t do it for me anymore.

I spent more and more time online and less time sleeping. It got to the point where I was spending eighteen to twenty hours a day staring at my computer screen. If I wasn’t making trades or doing research I was posting on stock message boards. My comments were always negative, always designed to inflict maximum damage on the companies I was shorting. I attacked management, put negative spins on positive news, and even wrote outright lies — anything I could do to help crush stock prices. I posted under multiple names — partly because the board monitors on sites like Yahoo and Motley Fool kept kicking me off, and partly because I wanted to create the impression for newbies following stocks that there was massive negativity about the companies. Still, everyone eventually knew who I was. I guess my posts had a style to them or whatever, because I became one of the most well-known stock bashers on the Internet.

My favorite stock to bash, without a doubt, was Delivero. Part of it was personal. I wanted revenge. I wanted to take Silver down, for him to feel some of the pain I’d felt when he fired my ass. But I also truly believed that the company had despicable business practices and was a perfect example of everything that was wrong with Wall Street. Somehow the piece of shit had managed to stay in business through the height of the Internet bloodbath, though its stock had plummeted from a high of eighty-four to around six bucks a share. Even when I was working for them, I knew their business plan was smoke and mirrors.

They wanted to be a competitor of Kozmo.com, that other brilliant company that thought delivering Ben & Jerry’s and VHS movies by bicycle was the wave of the future. The problem was that Delivero had no real growth plan and they were burning cash. They’d had a few awful quarters where their numbers didn’t come close to analyst estimates. But every time the company was in dire straits they’d raise more money in a new stock offering or announce a new “partnership,” and somehow the shares managed to tread water, even go up. I’d post like crazy on those days, about how Silver and his cronies were criminals and deserved jail time, but the idiot longs would circle jerk themselves, going on about how Delivero’s stock was going to a hundred a share and how I was the world’s biggest moron.

It got to the point where I felt like I was the most hated man on the Internet, and the disgust toward me was probably the most glaring on the Delivero message boards. There was a lot of bad blood on those boards from suckers who had got-ten in when Delivero was in the stratosphere and were desperately waiting for the stock to go back up. Yeah, like that would ever happen. They ganged up on me, called me a loser, a retard, the village idiot — every name imaginable that could get through the web filters. A lot of the idiots started calling me a “paid basher” and claimed I’d been hired by hedge funds to bad-mouth stocks all day. One nutcase claimed he knew for a fact that I received five cents for every negative post I wrote. It amazed me how angry I could get these guys, but I liked it too. I knew that in order for me to make money as a short, I needed jackass longs on the other side of my trades, and I thanked God there was no shortage of fools among Delivero’s investors.

As the months went by, and it seemed like another Net stock/ex high flyer from the ’90s went under every day, Delivero somehow stayed in business. The company was like a cockroach that you stamp on ten times but still won’t die. It had to be a combination of luck and pure stupidity from the delusional longs living in fantasyland who continued to buy the company’s worthless shares — there was no other explanation. It was so obvious to me that Delivero wasn’t in the business to make money — they were in the business to deceive stockholders. The company expanded to other cities, made new partnerships, floated more stock, and issued other bullshit PR releases to make the stock price go up. Then insiders, especially Silver, sold at every possible opportunity. Dipshit longs claimed that the sales were planned, part of the execs’ normal retirement plans — yeah, right. They believed that, there was a bridge I would’ve liked to sell them. Every three months I listened to the webcast of Delivero’s quarterly results and got nauseous as Silver, in his pompous, know-it-all voice, fed his crap to gullible analysts. Some dork from Morgan Stanley or Citigroup would ask Silver why he was lowering estimates for the next fiscal year and he’d go on about “new strategies going forward” and “adapting to the current landscape,” never answering the question, of course. Did the analysts give a shit? No sirree. They had their own agendas, pumping up garbage stocks like Delivero with their Buy and Strong Buy ratings to keep their clients happy.

When the WorldCom scandal hit, I thought Delivero would go down the toilet too. I was so positive that the company was history that I got out of all of my other positions and shorted the shit out of the stock. It had been trading in a recent range of four to six dollars a share. I profited on the short-term moves downward and covered on options when the stock ticked up. And everything I made, I plowed back into my long-term short position. Every morning when I woke up, I went online and checked for news on Delivero. I knew that one day the Chapter Eleven announcement would appear. It was only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, since I had no other stocks in my portfolio, I was able to focus full-time on my bashing of Delivero. I tarted posting at least five hundred times a day on various message boards. I attacked the business model of the company and its deceitful accounting, but my messages also became more personal, more focused on Silver. I wrote about how incompetent he was and about how he had an alcohol and drug problem. I posted that he was into child porn, that he had ties to Al-Qaeda, that his trophy wife was a transvestite. I knew my posts came off as bizarre and irrational — that was the point. I wanted to incite rage, to stir the pot — and it worked like a charm. There was no end to the number of longs who got sucked in and started arguing with me. Their posts were even nuttier than mine. Wannabe investors would visit the Delivero message boards and see all of the wacky posts from the longs and get the impression that a bunch of lunatics were investing in the stock.

I knew Silver read the message boards, or had employees who did, and would find out about my posts. I also knew that when I started focusing on his trophy wife, he’d know it was me posting. This was my intention. I wanted him to know who his enemy was, that it was me who was out to get him. It would make my ultimate victory even more satisfying.

Some longs — including Silver himself, for all I knew — now responded to my attacks by saying that I had a hidden agenda, that I had to be an irate former employee or have some other vendetta against the company. People put me on “ignore” and tried to block my messages, but I had multiple IDs and was unstoppable. I knew that my posts were having an effect, that I was influencing the stock price. On days when I wrote my most scathing attacks, the stock almost always dropped and I profited. I felt like I could manipulate the buying and selling on a whim. It was just a matter of how often I posted and how effective my bashings were. But there was no doubt that I was in total control of the company’s fate. If I wanted to change my position and go long I could’ve driven the stock up to twenty dollars a share in one month.

My new goal was to demolish the stock with my most furious attacks yet, to go for the kill. And I got some huge help one morning when Delivero issued a major earnings warning before the market open. The same analysts who had been cheerleading the stock for years finally woke up out of their fucking cocoons and reduced their ratings to “hold” and “sell,” and the stock opened down over two points. I cashed in big time on a day trade but I didn’t put the moolah in the bank, into money heaven; instead, I shoved it into my margin account and upped my short position even more. Armageddon for Delivero was on the horizon and I stood to make millions.

I increased the frequency of my postings. Sometimes I stayed up all night to influence foreign investors, and one day I set a personal record of one thousand posts in a day. Delivero’s stock was continuing to tank, sinking to under two dollars a share, and I knew it was all because of me.

Then a registered letter arrived at my apartment. It was from Delivero’s lawyers, threatening a lawsuit if I didn’t stop bashing the company. Silver was just trying to intimidate me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let that happen.

A week later, as the stock price continued to drop, I tarted getting threatening e-mails. They were from anonymous addresses, but I knew Silver was sending them. All of the notes basically said the same thing — that I’d better stop bashing or else. Some got more explicit, warning me that I’d lose limbs or die in pain.

I considered calling the police, but I was afraid of what might happen if I did. There were detailed records of me bashing Silver’s stock and I began to fear that I could go to jail for libel for some of the things I’d written.

I didn’t respond to any of the notes and stopped my onslaught, hoping the thing would die down on its own. Then, one morning while I was sitting at my PC, a brick shattered my window and almost hit me in the head. I looked outside and saw a black car speeding away, but I couldn’t catch the license plate. I didn’t bother calling the cops, figuring that Silver would just deny responsibility, try to make me look like the bad guy.

Then I left my apartment that Sunday afternoon to get a haircut and returned to discover a message spray painted on my bedroom wall:

I decided enough was enough. I was surprised that Silver had gone this far, but I remembered that he’d always had a temper, screaming at employees and firing them on a whim — hell, he’d fired me for no legitimate reason — and maybe the stress of his company going under was getting to him and he was snapping. How the hell did I know what was going on with him? All I knew was that he was starting to threaten my personal safety and I had to take some action.

Years ago, after an attempted break-in at my building, I’d bought a gun for protection. I decided I’d go talk to Silver face-to-face and try to get him to back off. If he caused trouble, started threatening me again, I’d show the gun, just to scare him and make him think I was more psycho than he was. I knew that beneath all of the tough talk, Silver was a big pussy and I could intimidate him easily.

The next day, Monday, I drove to Silver’s house in Bernardsville. They should’ve called it Snootyville. When I was working at Delivero I went to a company picnic in Silver’s backyard. It was one of the biggest, most expensive houses on a block of big, expensive houses. He probably blew three million bucks of stockholders’ money on it.

I waited in my car in a spot near his driveway. I figured he’d leave the office at around 6 or 7 and the drive from Jersey City to Bernardsville would take about an hour — an hour and a half with traffic. But at 9 o’clock there was still no sign of him. I knew he wasn’t out of town because I’d called his office earlier from a pay phone and his security said he was busy in a meeting. He was probably out with a client, making one of his bullshit deals.

Sure enough, at a little after 10 o’clock, his red Porsche pulled into the drive. The garage door opened and the car went in. I got out of my car and walked fast toward the garage. Silver got out of the Porsche. He looked like crap, like he’d aged ten years, but he still had that pompous, my-shit-doesn’t-stink quality he’d had when he fired me, and I remembered how gleeful he’d seemed that day, as if showing me the door was giving him a big fat boner.

When Silver saw me I knew he recognized me, even though he pretended not to. I told him I knew what he was doing, trying to terrorize me, and it wouldn’t work. Then he squinted, acting like it was all starting to click for him, and then he fake smiled, pretending he wasn’t scared shitless, but it was obvious he was. It was great watching him squirm.

He claimed he had no idea what I wanted from him and said a lot of other shit, trying to calm me down so he could have a chance to escape into the house and call the cops. I told him I wasn’t playing games and I took out the Glock. I have no idea why he grabbed at the gun, what he was trying to do. Maybe he didn’t know what he was trying to do either; maybe he just panicked. Who the fuck knows? We struggled for a few seconds, at least it seemed like seconds. Inches away from the man whose company I’d been bashing for years, I hated him right then the same way I had when he called me into his office and told me I was being let go. Let go, like I was a fucking fish he was tossing back to sea. I remembered how I could’ve killed him that day, and how I’d always wished I had, and then the gun went off. He fell onto the concrete next to the Porsche, blood spilling out of his chest.

I ran like hell. When I got into my car, I heard a woman screaming — maybe his slut wife — but I was pretty sure I got away before she saw me or the car.

The drive back to Hoboken was a blur. I still don’t know how I made it without getting pulled over, because I must’ve been speeding my ass off.

The rest of the night I was in a state of total panic. Even if no one could identify me, I knew I was going to be an obvious suspect. I’d been bashing Silver for years and all of my posts were online for the world to see. Toward dawn, I started packing. My only chance was to leave the country.

I went online to see if there was any news about the murder; it was all over the Internet already. Because of fear and uncertainty about the future, Delivero’s stock was tanking in the pre-market, down below a dollar a share. It was like a dream come true — it had become a penny stock. I put in an order to cover my short position at the market open. I stood to make about four million dollars. I just hoped the authorities didn’t freeze my accounts before I could have the money wired to me in Mexico.

Then I checked my e-mail and almost passed out. There was a new message from one of the e-mail addresses that I’d suspected Silver had been using. The note read:

I stared at the screen for a few minutes, realizing the huge mistake I’d made. It wasn’t Silver who’d been harassing me. The real scumbag was probably one of the hundreds of people I’d pissed off with my bashings.

I was a mess for a while, then I got even. I went to the Yahoo Delivero message board and rubbed it in to the dumbasses who were giving me all their money. I was in the middle of one of my best posts ever when the cops started banging on my front door.

Wall Street, New York, Monday, February 28, 2005

Magnus McKay, alpha male, writes: Lalita, teelak — that does mean “darling” in Thai, right? — I miss you. I know this sounds ridiculous, but those two short moments we spent together have touched something inside of me. I’m going to bring you here as soon as possible, if I can’t find an excuse to visit Thailand next week (I’m working on it). Will you wait for me? Magnus.

He sits back in his executive chair to rub his jaw, then he stands up to look down on the ants bundled up against the cold on the Street.

He is not officially the senior partner of Weisman, Constant and Draper, so they had to give him the second corner office. Nevertheless, here we have power expressed through space: seven hundred square feet, two sets of windows. He’d chosen the crimson trimmings to go with his famous suspenders, the rest he’d left to the interior designer.

Musing: Does his draft e-mail hit the right tone or not? Hookers are no different to everyone else, right? You adapt human resources techniques to make them feel special, and if they’re good you give them a glittering prize to aim for. Not that Lalita’s performances in that seedy short-time hotel had been in any way deficient. To tell the truth, he hasn’t stopped thinking about her for the past three days.

Reminiscing with twinges: She was beautiful, far too beautiful for that cheap go-go dive where he found her, quite by accident. He had been with Samson Lee’s main man in Thailand, Tallboy Yip. Normally, McKay would never take his pleasure so down market, for, as a frequent traveler to Bangkok, he had joined the best, most discreet, and most expensive of the city’s brothels; but Yip, who these days was almost as wide as he was tall — with thick degenerate lips in a lived-in mug — owned low-life tastes.

McKay had been on the point of making excuses and going back to his hotel, when he’d seen her gyrating around that stainless steel pole on the revolving platform with all the other girls, her long black hair reaching to the small of her back. When she passed by the second time he deliberately smiled at her. On the third turn she deliberately smiled at him. Within the law of contract his offer had been accepted: They had a deal. He bought her a triple tequila because she asked him to.

His first thought had been to use her merely as an excuse to lose Tallboy, for he was not really in the mood, having sated his lust in a threesome the night before. He paid her bar fine after ten minutes of talking to her, then said goodnight to Yip with a lecherous smirk which Yip appreciated: Uncontrollable lust was always an acceptable reason for cutting a drinking bout short. Magnus had let her lead him up a set of squalid stairs to the room, following her perfect body from behind. He watched her undress automatically in front of him; long hair covering dark-brown nipples when she stood up straight to face him; he noted that she was smiling with just the right amount of shyness. Should he have her after all, or should he merely pay her modest fee and leave without taking his pleasure? She saw his hesitation and went to work on him. Magnus McKay, veteran womanizer and whoremonger, had never known anything like it. He gave her a hundred-dollar tip. She took it in the spirit it was meant: a symbol of his intent to return for more.

The next night had been his last in Bangkok and he really didn’t have time for her; but he made time for her anyway, between checkout and airport. It was uncanny, she seemed to know more about his libido than he did. It was magic, no other word for it. This time he gave her five hundred dollars: serious money. They talked briefly, like business people, about the possibility of her making regular visits to New York at his expense: say once a month, business class. She immediately undertook to get a passport, as if she had been expecting such an offer. They exchanged e-mail addresses. That was only three days ago.

He checks himself in a crimson-framed mirror behind his chair. He knows how Thai girls like her think: a farang a foreigner, a lawyer who works on Wall Street, a forty-one-year-old bachelor in perfect shape who could solve her financial problems and those of her family with one flash of his platinum credit card.

A fool would succumb to narcissism, remind himself what an incredible catch he must be for a Third World hooker (tall, slim, handsome, rich, charm-enhanced American); but Magnus knows better than that. Hunting is what makes him run. In work he hunts for money, in women he hunts for that extreme performance which you only extract from a girl who believes she has found the answer to her prayers and a meal ticket for life. Magnus would play that white knight role perfectly, and, if she played her cards right, he would certainly give her the golden handshake when he grew bored. Hell, he probably would solve most of her financial problems, how much could it cost? Twenty grand, fifty at most? In the old days he’d spent that on crack in a week, and she was better than crack. Another twinge forces him to wrench consciousness out of his groin chakra.

Back facing his computer, he clicks on send, logs off of his personal account with Yahoo Mail, and, switching with ruthless discipline to his work mindset, returns to his business e-mail.

His sorting technique is primitive but appropriate for his practice: Anything not concerning the Thai-Chinese businessman Samson Lee, no matter how grave and weighty, he forwards to his numerous assistants; anything touching on his master, no matter how trivial, he works on himself. He knows he is Lee’s slave, but so what? It is symbiotic. Lee simply could not survive in the U.S. without a lawyer of McKay’s cunning and ruthlessness, for he is perpetually hounded by all the usual suspects: FBI, CIA, DEA, Inland Revenue. Samson Lee thinks McKay some kind of blue-eyed magus, for Magnus always finds a way out of the apparently watertight traps these agencies lay for his client. Magnus has lost count of the jams he’s gotten Lee and his five sons out of, frequently risking his career. But that is the deal. Roughly thirty percent of the firm’s income comes from the Lee family and nobody, absolutely nobody in the firm, so much as speaks to Lee’s secretary without McKay’s prior knowledge and approval. Samson Lee is the reason McKay got the second corner office.

Checking his solid gold Longines watch: 7:35 in the morning, which is the time Samson Lee likes him to start. In Bangkok it is twelve hours later, she’s probably started dancing already in that seedy bar, nearly naked in a G-string and flimsy bra — though sometimes she starts late. It is just possible she is sitting in an Internet café hoping to hear from him. In response to more prodding from his loins, he logs on again to Yahoo Mail. Yep, there it is, a message from Naronsip Wiwatanasan, a.k.a., Lalita:

A cool positive? McKay smiles. That’s exactly how he would have replied if he had been in her position. Clearly, she is a master of the game, like him. The secret to McKay’s success: He never fools himself; lawyers are whores too.

As it happens, his laptop includes a digital camera. He takes a snap of his face turned slightly to highlight the manly strength of his jaw, and zings it off to her.

Just then the laptop telephone beeps. This is McKay’s secret number which he gives out to no one except Samson Lee. Lee has an Asian addiction to video conferencing.

McKay’s only important client appears on the monitor, looking a lot more Chinese than Thai, with eyes so slit McKay wonders how any light ever gets in there: a vast moon face with near-circular wrinkles, small flat nose, cheap off-the-peg sweater.

“I can’t see you,” Lee snaps. McKay switches the movie camera function on. “That’s better.”

“Good morning, Mr. Lee,” McKay says with a big, bright, yes-I-do-love-to-suck-your-bum smile. He tried using “Samson” once at the beginning of the relationship, but it didn’t work for either of them. Lee is very conservative in the Confucian tradition. His sons are his slaves and his daughters marry whoever he tells them to marry. The Lees are certainly a centralized family, if not a close one.

“You’re going back to Bangkok on the next plane,” Lee says.

McKay maintains self-control, at the same time congratulating himself on his usual good luck. He is simply one of those hyper-neat guys who kind of constellate everything around them so that, even without his thinking about it, events conspire to conform to his will. The journey is twenty hours plus, and he can probably get on a flight that morning if he kicks ass. In other words, Lalita — naked — will be servicing him again in less than a day.

Keeping a straight face: “Certainly, Mr. Lee. What’s the problem?”

Lee looks directly into his digital camera. By making certain adjustments on his laptop McKay can enlarge those heavily lidded eyes until they almost fill the screen. He’s done this many times, out of curiosity. It never makes any difference. Even magnified as much as ten times, Lee’s eyes still have no life in them.

“It’s wet,” Lee says.

McKay pales somewhat and experiences a hundred-and-eighty degree mood swing. Maybe his luck isn’t so good today, after all. Wet?

“Well, now, Mr. Lee...” McKay begins.

“I already know what you don’t do,” Lee says.

This is a reference to something McKay witnessed at the beginning of their relationship. Shaken, he found a way to explain that it was very counter-productive for Lee to implicate his main and most trusted lawyer-fixer in that kind of thing. Lee had agreed, to his relief.

McKay doesn’t mind bending the rules for a benevolent billionaire, but he is not a sadist. Like every successful man and woman on the Street, he believes in dictatorship by the filthy rich, but as a civilized American he sees himself as a benign despot.

Question: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?

Answer: I have not the faintest idea, my culture forgot to tell me.

Yes, he has a sensitive side. Both parents were pious English Literature teachers martyred by the functional barbarism of these times. Without respect, money, power, or direction, they both hit the bottle. When they started having fist fights, they all knew the barbarism had won. His father jumped from a high window and his mother, unable to live without him, took an overdose.

In a nutshell, whatever kind of crook he was at heart, he was totally white collar. Whatever kind of crook Lee was, it was not white collar. That was why Lee was so rich: He took the barbarism all the way, sucked it all up. Even Magnus didn’t know how much dough Lee had. Officially, only thirty percent of the trillions of trillions of dollars washing around the international banking system every minute was illegal drug money, but that was certainly disinformation designed to keep the sober majority from panicking. The true figure was probably more than fifty percent, perhaps as much as seventy. Maybe everyone worked for Samson Lee without knowing it? Maybe that was why they would never legalize recreational drugs? Nobody loves Prohibition more than Al Capone. If not for criminalization, Lee would be selling secondhand automobiles.

“I still don’t do wet,” McKay says.

“The Spics have grabbed my son Hercules,” Lee says, as if relating an irritating but predictable occurrence.

McKay’s heart sinks: war. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Mr. Lee, but I don’t see—”

“Emerald Buddha Corporation,” Lee says. “Forty-nine percent. Sign before you get on the plane, or I’ll FedEx the docs to you in Bangkok if you prefer.”

McKay knows Lee is watching his face closely on the giant monitor hanging on a wall in his Long Island mansion. McKay knows Lee saw him swallow immediately on hearing the name. The EBC is Lee’s respectable front. Well, it is only semi-respectable since it smuggles illegal Buddha heads and other priceless icons stolen from Ankor Wat, but Lee keeps it scrupulously apart from his other businesses. It is his “face” for official America, and as such he’s been obliged to spend quite a few tens of millions on stock, which is not exclusively Khmer, but includes some museum-quality jade pieces; they look identical to world-famous missing items, once the property of the last emperor of China. McKay has hinted more than once that a good way for Lee to reward his extra, secret, and professionally life-threatening efforts on behalf of his master would be for Lee to simply hand over a chunk of EBC stock. McKay knows Lee has been keeping EBC for a rainy day, when he will ask McKay to go even deeper into hell as his legal representative. Well, today it’s raining.

McKay doesn’t know he’s been holding his breath until he breathes out: Did the man say forty-nine percent? That is worth about twenty-five million, but the best of it is: The little firm actually makes a very healthy profit, averaging more than sixteen percent net per year of stock value. Sixteen percent of twenty-five million is four million. That would almost exactly triple his average yearly income. He supposes he will get drunk or something to see him through Tallboy’s elaborate vengeance strategy, whatever it is. He sure will need a night with Lalita afterwards, though.

“Okay,” McKay says, “but why?”

“Because I can’t go myself and Tallboy is losing it. He has tactics but no strategy. He spends his time drinking whiskey and screwing whores. He doesn’t have your discipline. You don’t have to do anything — he’ll take care of the wet side — you just have to tell him when to start, when to pause...” Lee himself pauses at this point to lick his lips “... and when to stop.”

“I see.”

“I want Hercules back alive, not sliced up like a lump of salami. If he’s dead or crippled his mother will never stop bitching.”

“I understand that,” says McKay. Then, as an after-thought: “Which Colombian did you grab after you heard they’d grabbed Hercules?”

“The kid brother,” Lee says, and logs off. Secretaries will take care of the rest.

It wasn’t a baijiu headache, fortunately, but three hours of sake at the Japanese-themed year-end banquet had gone to work on Jordan’s head: a pinpoint throbbing pain, gradually increasing in intensity, just forward of his right ear. The waiters were pouring tea now, offering hope of a recharge, and Jordan knew he would need it to get in a final word. Fifty feet away, at the power table, Stack was still joined at the hip with Reingold and Zhu.

“Rumor has it Reingold’s mainly here to kiss Stack’s ass,” Fishman said, catching Jordan looking, referring to Steve Reingold, the head of Global Sales and Training. “Apparently he’s no longer the shoe-in for the CEO job.”

“Oh?” Jordan said. Fishman’s main attribute was that he was plugged in.

“Apparently, Beston seduced a couple of the board members over the past month,” Fishman continued. “He’s tight with Stack. The board is worried that if they pick Reingold, Stack will bolt, taking most of us with him. Reingold’s probably here to suck up to Stack, make sure he can keep him.”

“I thought Reingold had it sewn up,” Jordan said, feigning ignorance.

“So did everyone else,” Fishman replied. “But Beston crushed his numbers this year, and now he’s persuaded everyone he can hang onto Stack.”

“May the best man win,” Jordan said.

“And may we all get paid in the meantime,” Fishman added.

Fishman grabbed the sake bottle and, for the umpteenth time that evening, refilled everyone’s cup. Then he stood up and raised his own. “The night is as yet an embryo,” he proclaimed to the four junior members of the desk, trying to channel some frat lingo in a sad attempt to bond with them. “But before we move on, I would like once again to toast our fearless leader, Mr. Emerson Jordan, without whom we would all be living in hutongs.”

“To Emerson!” they shouted.

Jordan nodded his head in gratitude, embarrassed, hoping Fishman would leave it at that. But Fishman had been working up to this all evening.

“Those of you in fixed-income land,” he continued, louder, nodding toward six members of the emerging-market bond desk at the other end of the table, “may not be aware of the absolute killing that was made on the forex desk this afternoon. And to be sure that you show the proper deference to the god among men in our presence this evening, I would like to—”

“Thanks, Fishman,” Jordan interrupted, raising his own glass. “What Mr. Fishman means is that, once again, the Shanghai team at Whitney Gilman wiped the floor with every other division at the firm, and we should all drink to that.”

“To Shanghai!” ten of the twelve voices at the table concurred. They drained their glasses, set them back on the table. Then an eleventh voice, previously silent, chimed in.

“What I heard,” Joseph Wilson said, from the other end of the table, audible even over the cacophonous conversation of the banquet hall, “was that our resident ‘god among men’ got himself in a bit of a fix this afternoon.”

In the instant silence, Jordan looked down the table at Wilson, who was still holding a full cup. Jordan felt a stab of humiliation, and hoped Wilson wouldn’t take it farther.

Wilson was drunk, drunker than Jordan, drunker than most of them. His desk had had a bad year — the second in a row — and everyone knew that unless Stack made him a charity case, Wilson was done. That was why Wilson’s people were whooping at Fishman’s lousy jokes — they needed a lifeboat. Tomorrow, when Jordan’s team was getting their numbers, Wilson would be packing up the wife and kids and heading back to New York.

Making a scene now would only add to Wilson’s disgrace: a bitter has-been hastening his transformation into a never-was. Jordan wasn’t eager to hear the rest of whatever Wilson had to say, though — no doubt something to the effect that Jordan was just an empty-suited puppet on Stack’s string — and he especially wasn’t eager to have his team hear it. He stared at Wilson, readying himself for the verbal punch. After a few seconds, however, Wilson backed down.

“To Whitney Gilman,” he said, raising his cup into the air. “And to the forex desk, for riding out the storm.”

“To Whitney Gilman!” the table roared, in enthusiasm and relief.

A few minutes later, after chugging a cup of tea, Jordan made his move. He had hoped to catch Stack alone, but Stack was still glued to Reingold and Zhu. The banquet was over, the crowd was dissipating, and the three were now standing at the head table, waiting to follow everyone else to the door. Jordan worked his way across the room, as confidently and soberly — as possible.

“Mr. Reingold, Mr. Zhu, I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m Emerson Jordan. I run the currency desk. I just wanted to say goodnight to Alan.” Turning to Reingold, he added: “It’s a pleasure to see you again, sir. We met last year in New York.”

“I remember,” said Reingold. “And I gather you had another good year.”

“Well, thanks, yes, we did,” Jordan said. “But we had help. Especially this afternoon.”

As he said this, Jordan nodded toward Stack.

“I hear you made a stirring comeback,” Reingold said, smiling. “Have you met Mr. Zhu?”

“I haven’t yet had the pleasure, sir,” Jordan responded, shaking the hand of the billionaire real estate mogul everyone assumed was one of Stack’s key guanxi. “You’re quite a celebrity on the trading floor, sir.”

“It’s a privilege to do business with the firm,” Zhu said. “Thanks for stopping by, Emerson,” Stack said, speaking for the first time. His tone was courteous, but it was also a kiss-off.

Jordan was going to respond with a play for time, when Reingold jumped in: “Yes, thanks for stopping by. X.D. is giving us a ride back to the Hive. Why don’t you come along?”

It had been a rough early afternoon, but since then, Jordan’s luck had taken a turn for the better.

Ten Counting backwards

Middle of summer and Tel Aviv’s wilted to its roots. But a deep chill cuts through Ben-Gurion. Outside the tarmac steams, monstrous 757s nose-to-nose with military planes, security everywhere. Look matronly, I’d been told: Former combat soldiers comprise airport security, and everyone knows the army’s stocked with mama’s boys. I’m wearing a long floral skirt, loose-fitting T-shirt, sensible shoes, purple beret covering my head like a religious woman. The band of my skirt is soaked.

One security officer approaches a man a few people ahead of me, who presents his passport, Israeli, and the back and forth begins. I make out a few words... Nothing... I go to travel... Paris. Closer to the checkpoint, I fear the religious drag might be all wrong; everyone hates the orthodox. I take heavy breaths, heart like full magazine fire, counting backwards... ten exhale, nine exhale, eight, exhale... a technique from my days on ice, those last few minutes before pushing off when you’re led into position based on a coin toss. Random. Waiting for a signal, the gunshot, and it’s do die. Counting was the only way to clear my head. Still is... four, exhale... three, exhale...

A soldier moves into another line full of tourists, careful to keep the nose of his M16 to the left. The IDF has an arms code peppered with words like humanity and dignity. Soldiers respect their rifles. No solace as they advance, and I know I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing, and probably for all the wrong reasons: guilt, loyalty... My father says all people are motivated by sex or money. As a teenager, declaring myself the opposition, I’d float examples to ruin his theory, and ask about, say, nuns. “Sex,” he replied. “God is sex.” The president (can’t remember which one): “That’s too easy, Jen. Watch the State of the Union. See the way the idiot smiles, rolls his fist, senators, dignitaries, special guests sitting and standing like puppets, the eyes of the whole world on him up there at the podium, and you know he’s doing it all for the friggin’ lead pipe in his pants.”

My father is crude in a way that can delight as much as disgust. He knows the feeling of hundreds of thousands of eyes on him, the lead pipe. He’s made me what I am today, standing a few travelers from interrogation, limbs on alert, stuffed with enough stolen information to detain me in the Holy Land — and not how I’d like it. I start the count all over again, ten, exhale...

If anyone wanted to see where all those textile jobs from Georgia and North Carolina had gone, they’d just have to hop a plane from Tegucigalpa to San Pedro Sula in the northwest of Honduras. That’s where Trisha Tanglewood spent her first two days in-country, and where PriceStar, Inc. had its main textile plants, or maquilas, as the locals called them. But PriceStar was just one of many firms to set up shop in the free trade zones. Driving in from the airport, Trisha saw Oshkosh B’Gosh, Maidenform, Hanes, and Wrangler factories, and more than a few South Korean and Taiwanese plants. Mile after mile, the long, low structures slid across her car window, and by the time the driver pulled up to the largest of the PriceStar buildings, Trisha had begun to think of the whole country as one big free trade zone. But vast as these plants were, Trisha knew, and as fixed in the landscape as they seemed, they’d empty out tomorrow if it suddenly became cheaper to work in Thailand or Tibet. It was simply smart business.

If she didn’t know better, Trisha would have thought San Pedro Sula was the patron saint of inertia. There seemed to be shackles on the hands of the clocks as she ground through two days of meetings with her team and the PriceStar executives. She was struggling to pay attention, and found herself thinking that maybe her colleagues in New York had been right. You could pore over the same spreadsheets in Manhattan, and with a lot better air-conditioning. By 3 p.m. on her first day, Trisha was almost regretting making a show of her meticulousness.

As a matter of courtesy and protocol, she strolled the factory floor with the Honduran operations manager, a PriceStar exec, and a Paisley Shutter analyst named Ellis Quantrill. Although he was a member of her team, Trisha wasn’t terribly fond of Quantrill. Just thirty, WASP-ishly handsome, and bred for success, Ellis fancied himself quite the shark. He made no secret of his desire to go very far, very fast, and at any cost... any cost to others. She’d seen his type before, the eaglet hatched first who pushes its brother out of the nest. What Ellis hadn’t learned yet was that there is always a bigger eaglet. Always.

Their relationship was rocky from the start. At first, Ellis had tried to be the teacher’s pet — solicitous and deferential to the point of obsequious. Then he’d tried to make himself her indispensable ally and coconspirator — always ready to share a confidence, always fishing for one in return, and always the latest in rumors, speculation, and snarky political gossip from across the firm. When neither approach had gotten him far, he’d taken a different — riskier — tack: coming on to Trisha at the golf outing last May. He’d kissed her hard on the mouth behind the pro shop at the country club in Armonk, and Trisha laughed in his face. On reflection, she realized she’d have done better to slap him. That was the peculiar thing about Ellis’s type: They’d eat dogshit to get ahead, but not if anyone was watching. Personal embarrassment was intolerable. From that ill-fated kiss forward, Ellis Quantrill had put Trisha Tanglewood in his crosshairs. She knew it, and he knew she knew it.

The factory was clean and modern. Most of the machinery was new, and what wasn’t, was perfectly maintained. The workers sat in neat rows, and they moved quickly. Still, the production area was terribly noisy. There were a lot of hand gestures and head shakes, and very little speaking. Near the end of the tour, Ellis tapped Trisha on the shoulder and shepherded her into an empty break room. Christ, she thought, what now? Some new ploy to curry favor? Was he going to profess his love this time? That would be a novel approach. They took off their ear protection.

“Noisy, isn’t it?” he said.

“What do you want, Ellis?” Trisha enjoyed being curt with him.

“Just a quick word about tonight.”

“What about tonight?”

“We’ve set up a thing this evening—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa — the only thing I’m doing tonight is getting in my bed by 8.”

Ellis grimaced in mock pain. “It’s set already. No clients — just you and the team, for drinks, dinner, more drinks — very casual. You know the drill.”

“Christ, Ellis, why the hell didn’t you run it by me first? I can barely keep my eyes open as it is; no way I’m going to—”

“I know you’re beat, but it’s important to them. I don’t care one way or the other myself, but these guys have been down here for weeks now, working sixteen-hour days. A night out with the new skipper — a chance to let their hair down, maybe collect a few attaboys — it’ll mean a lot to these kids.” Trisha shook her head, but Ellis was undeterred. “And it won’t hurt you, either, to build some support amongst the rank and file — a little grassroots loyalty.” She kept shaking her head, but more slowly. Ellis gave her one his ironic frat-boy grins, and a tone to match. “Come on, chief — don’t pussy out on me. Have another coffee, and be a man.”

Fucking Ellis, Trisha thought, and forced a thin smile in return. “I’m back at the hotel by midnight, or it’s your ass.”