The index of self destru.., p.36
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, page 36
When Justin got to the fourth floor, Eddie was waiting for him out in the hall. He gave Justin a hug and invited him inside. Justin took a seat on the couch while Eddie poured them each a cup of coffee. He moved nervously about the apartment, and Justin thought he might be embarrassed, though the place was neatly furnished and larger than Justin had been expecting.
“Where’s your roommate?” Justin asked.
“What do you mean?”
Hit tone was oddly defensive.
“Blakeman told me you were living here with some old man.”
As he said it, it sounded like a bad joke, which it wouldn’t have been beyond Blakeman to make up.
“Herman moved out,” Eddie said. “It’s a long story. I should probably find a one bedroom, but I’ve been too busy with work, and the rent is cheap.”
“Tell me about your new job.”
“I got certified as an EMT. I’m working for New York General. How are things with you?”
Before Justin could begin to answer, a knock on the door interrupted them. Eddie didn’t seem surprised by the disturbance but offered no explanation for it. He opened the door without looking through the peephole, and Kit walked brusquely inside.
“I’m going to go out for a little while,” Eddie said to no one in particular, like a bad actor reading from a script. “I’ll leave you guys to talk.”
As Eddie closed the door behind himself, Justin stood to greet Kit, who waved him back into his seat. She sat across from him, in the chair that Eddie had occupied a moment before.
“Sorry to spring this on you,” she said. “I wanted to talk, and I thought it would be better to do it this way.”
Justin was about to make a joke about her paranoia outdoing even his own, but the look on her face told him that it wasn’t paranoia at all.
“I got a visit from the FBI,” she said. “Whoever gave you that Celsia tip got flipped.”
Justin didn’t know how long ago this visit was, but the panic in Kit’s voice sounded fresh. He should have been a bit panicked himself, but by this point the news had a nearly inevitable feel.
“I never should have trusted her.”
“They know you came to see me in Bridgehampton. They know I made the purchase after that. They’ve got the dots lined up.”
“That’s all circumstantial,” Justin said, trying to calm himself as much as her. “That’s not real evidence.”
“They’re pushing pretty hard,” Kit told him. “They’ve threatened to bust my door down and march me out on the nightly news. They told me not to talk to you, but I thought that if I could just bring you into them, you could tell them what you know, and we could make this all go away. They’re not after either of us. They just want Eisen.”
“There’s nothing to tell on that front.”
“They don’t think it’s possible that you worked there for years and never saw anything.”
“Well, they’re wrong.”
“You don’t owe him any loyalty.”
Her tone made it clear that Justin did after all owe loyalty to someone.
“Listen to me,” he told her, trying to convey a conviction he didn’t actually feel. “So long as we both shut up they don’t have anything.”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that. I made the trade in Edward’s account.”
“I know that,” Justin said.
“He gave all the money away.”
She said it like a challenge, as though daring Justin to keep up his calmly reassuring facade. If that was the intent, the revelation had its desired effect. All the time he’d spent worrying over the past few weeks, all the scenarios he’d played out in his head, had not prepared him for this possibility.
“Gave it to who?”
“This man he’d been living with.”
“The one he met on the street?”
“He was some kind of religious hustler. A con man. He took Edward in.”
“Where is this man now?”
“Disappeared completely. As though into thin air. Or ascended into heaven, I guess.” She gave a grim smile. “For all I know, the Feds might have let him move the money to get leverage. In any case, they’ve got leverage now. The trade was in Edward’s name, and he’s helped the proceeds disappear, and they can put him away a long time.”
Justin got up from the couch and took a step toward Kit, meaning to comfort her, but she got up as well and clutched her purse to herself, as though almost afraid, as a woman who looked like her might respond when a man who looked like him sat down beside her on the train. In that moment, Justin understood everything. He stopped where he was, and they stood facing each other. He looked Kit straight in the eye. She nodded almost imperceptibly before looking away.
“They just want Eisen,” she repeated, as though this were a kind of command.
Justin waited before speaking again, slowly and clearly and perhaps a bit more loudly than necessary, as though addressing not Kit but whoever was on the other end of the line. He spoke about the conversation with Eisen, in which he’d asked about Justin’s friends, and he explained the outlines of what happened after that.
“The system was very simple. If you had an edge, you never said where you’d gotten it. You just made your recommendation, and you said you were sure. Maybe you wrote up a report, though that hardly mattered since Eisen never read anyone’s reports. You had some reason why your diligent research made you recommend shorting some drug company. If a month later that company reported that their blood pressure drug had failed at trial, that was just good luck.”
As Justin said all this, he understood that it wouldn’t be enough to save Eddie. He would have gladly given up Eisen, but he didn’t have Eisen to give. There were probably a dozen people on the Street he could have offered instead, but only one who was big enough for the Feds’ purposes, only one sacrifice that would get the Doyles safely out of this situation.
“The first time I did it was with NuTech, that chipmaker that hired Q&M to manage their IPO. Ambrose told me they were going to have to resubmit some of their filings, with lowered numbers. I shorted them, and I told Eisen to do the same. I didn’t tell him why. I thought I could just do it once, get my year-end numbers where they needed to be, and leave it at that. But it was so easy. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to do it again.”
“You don’t need to say all this,” Kit broke in.
But it was difficult to stop once he’d started. In this way, it was like the behavior itself. There was no one telling you to slow down, to play it safe. There was certainly no one telling you that you’d made enough money—for the firm or for yourself. There was no such thing as enough.
He and Ambrose created an email account and left messages in the draft folder. Since the drafts were never sent, they couldn’t be intercepted. When Ambrose had something Justin could use or Justin wanted Ambrose to look into something, they put the details in the folder and called the other to say, “You’ve got mail.” Ambrose gave the account a porn name, so that anyone who stumbled across it in a registry would assume it was a spambot.
“We probably moved on half a dozen tips in that first year. I mostly paid Ambrose in gifts—expensive watches, a car—so they looked like personal expenditures. One summer I spent eighty grand on a rental in East Hampton and gave him the keys. When you sold and Ambrose went to work for UniBank, he brought in a few other people, and I sent work their way. Once I started my own fund, that was most of our delta right there.”
He hadn’t really admitted the extent of it even to himself.
“I’ve been trying to do some good with that money,” he said. “But no amount of good will change where it came from.”
When he’d finished telling her, Kit looked stricken, which annoyed Justin. She must have had some idea of what she would hear when she’d set this meeting up.
“Why?” she asked.
She might have been speaking about the whole scheme, or about the fact that he’d used his old Q&M contacts to do it, but Justin understood immediately that she was asking only why he’d told her. Didn’t she understand, even now?
He took another step, and she backed away toward the door, holding her purse more tightly, as though he might contaminate her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This isn’t what I wanted to happen.”
No doubt that was true, but it was what had had to happen. That must have been as clear to her as it was to him. He felt as if his whole life had been building toward it. He couldn’t say this to her—it would sound ridiculous when spoken out loud—but he had to say something: this might be the last chance they ever had to speak to each other. But he stayed silent, and then she was gone.
6.
Lucy had no idea where she was headed or how long she’d be gone. She’d thrown a few things in a bag without really thinking. She just knew that she needed to get away from Sam. She remembered a hotel on Willoughby, not far from Borough Hall, which she’d come across when looking for a place where her parents could stay over Thanksgiving. She liked the idea of getting out of the immediate neighborhood. The walk took forty minutes, and she sweat through her shirt on the way.
“I’d like a room for the night,” she told the distracted middle-aged man behind the front desk. “A nice one.”
He looked briefly at his screen and nodded.
“I need a card and an ID,” he said.
Lucy looked through her wallet for her old college Visa, the only credit card that she didn’t share with Sam, which she handed over along with her driver’s license. The man entered her information, and for the moment he was the only person on earth who could have said where she was. She couldn’t remember the last time that neither Sam nor her parents had known where she’d be spending the night. The realization scared her a little, but she also felt something like relief.
All this time she’d been waiting for the day when Sam would announce that he was leaving her. She’d carried the possibility everywhere she went. This was why she’d never confronted him after going to his office: she hadn’t wanted to initiate a conversation that could only end with the packing of bags. Now the thing in the world she’d most feared—the inevitable talk about Margo Doyle—had happened, and it hadn’t destroyed her. Instead, she was the one who’d packed her bags. She felt as though she’d survived a near-death experience.
How could the balance of a relationship shift so dramatically? When they’d started dating, she’d had all the power. She was better looking, more popular, more adept in social situations. She hadn’t been in the highest echelon of campus popularity, but she’d clearly occupied a rung above his. Her friends had thought it a kind of eccentricity that she was going out with this awkward boy, even granting the minor celebrity he’d gained for himself with the spreadsheet game that none of them quite cared enough to understand.
They’d been the first of their friends to marry, just a year out of school. She hadn’t been in any hurry, but Sam had thought it silly to wait. Why would you, once you knew whom you wanted to be with? He liked having questions settled, and he needed a certain amount of stability in his life. She found this understandable, given his family history. Perhaps what he wanted was less a commitment from her than the feeling of committing to something himself. By marrying so young, he would bind himself to someone in a way that his father had never been bound to his mother or to him. This was an admittedly crude analysis on her part, which she never would have mentioned to him, but it seemed basically sound.
He’d proposed on graduation day, having used part of his Pop-Up money to buy a ring. The purchase must have seemed a counterproductive extravagance to him. Why spend thousands of dollars on a symbol of marriage that you could otherwise spend on the thing itself—on rent for their apartment, on a family vacation, on saving for the future? But the ring was by custom part of the commitment he meant to make, and he was capable of a romantic gesture when such a gesture was rationally required.
His mother, who’d been on relatively good terms with him in that last year of school, had come to graduation and congratulated them both warmly, but when she learned that they weren’t planning a church wedding, she let them know that she wouldn’t attend. Lucy and her parents were happy to work out a compromise. They even offered to involve a minister somehow. Nothing wrong with paying respect to family tradition, Mitch had said. Sam had refused to budge. This was their wedding, and it would represent their beliefs. If his mother couldn’t live with that, it was just as well that she stayed home. He was actually glad, he insisted, that she’d clarified things this way.
With a mail-order imprimatur Lucy’s mother performed a short ceremony on the Kellehers’ front porch. A long reception followed in their backyard. Lucy felt somewhat guilty that her family had played such a central part in the proceedings while Sam’s played none at all. This is my family, Sam assured her. This is our family. She was giving him so much. His only worry was that he didn’t have enough to offer in return.
In those early days, people often expressed surprise when they noticed her ring. You’re so young, they’d say. A child bride. But Lucy had found that she loved being a wife. She was a step ahead of her friends in life, and she felt as though she’d always be ahead. It didn’t take long for others to catch up, though. The summer after they married, she and Sam went to their first wedding as guests. The following summer, they went to three. A few summers later, they went to five in the space of seven weeks. (Sam would know the name for that rate of acceleration.) At the first of these weddings, some guests had joked about how long she and Sam had made it already. The bride in all apparent sincerity solicited the wisdom of Lucy’s experience. Lucy had never felt like an expert in anything before. For a period she had a kind of script worked out, which she modified for newly affianced friends.
Then one day she noticed that half her circle was married. It no longer mattered to anyone who’d gotten there first. She was twenty-nine years old, and no one was ever surprised when they noticed her ring. Instead most of the people who knew her were surprised that she didn’t have kids. She was a bit surprised about this herself. She’d taught for a year before entering her master’s program in special education—UW was the only place she’d applied—and she hadn’t wanted to be pregnant at school. She’d decided that they would start trying after she was settled in a new job. During her second year of graduate school, the Pop-Up let Sam go, but she didn’t see what difference that should make to their plans, since his writing hadn’t brought in any real money. He worked as a software engineer in the university’s development office, managing their donor database. He didn’t love the job, but it paid well enough and gave him plenty of time to blog on his personal site, once he’d hit on politics as his new subject.
Everything looked just as Lucy had imagined it would, until she finished school and started talking to Sam about what came next. He said he wanted to wait until his writing career “took off” before thinking about kids. That his writing constituted a career, one that might even potentially “take off,” had never occurred to Lucy, even while the Pop-Up was paying him. The site had bought the algorithm; his writing seemed like a hobby—something that gave him pleasure in his spare time. She encouraged him to keep at it, but she didn’t think they should put their lives on hold while they waited for it to go somewhere. If she didn’t say any of this to him outright, that was because they still had plenty of time. That was the great thing about getting married so young. The hard part was finding the man who would be the father of your children, and she’d already done that. She could stand to wait a few more years.
Then the most unbelievable thing had happened: his writing career did take off. She was proud of him, but she was also a bit unnerved. Suddenly people acted as though she’d seen something in him that others hadn’t, that her reward for this foresight was a move to New York, Sam’s name on the cover of magazines, literary agents emailing about book contracts, weekends in the Hamptons with Frank and Kit Doyle. But Lucy hadn’t wanted any of these things. All she’d wanted was to get safely through this year and get them back to Madison, where they could continue the life she’d always imagined for them. She didn’t want her husband to be the kind of person Margo Doyle might find attractive, because that would put her in competition with Margo Doyle, and she didn’t think she could win.
Up in the hotel room, she pulled off her sweaty shirt and her jeans, and she put on pajamas before climbing into the king-sized bed. It felt slightly decadent to lie on clean sheets, in a spotless room, given how badly she’d let the apartment go. She wondered whether Sam had even noticed. He’d probably be perfectly happy reverting to the conditions in which he’d been living before she got to New York. The truth was that he wouldn’t have that far to slide. So many things that she’d once done without thinking had become too much effort to do at all, and keeping the house in order was one.
Reading in bed before going to sleep each night was another. She’d brought the enormous novel she’d been fighting through since her flight from Madison. Having carried it all this way she felt she ought to give it a try, so she unpacked it from her bag and put it on the bedside table, but that was as close as she got to opening it.
When she woke with the lights still on, the digital clock on the table beside her read 9:56. She thought she’d drifted off for a bit, and she was motivating herself to get ready for bed when she looked again and discovered that it was 9:56 (now 9:58) AM. She’d been out for more than twelve hours. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept this late. She was always up with Sam, though she sometimes found her way back into bed soon after he left for work.
He’d sent her a text, concerned but unapologetic: I hope you’re okay. Do you have somewhere to spend the night? She wrote back to tell him she was staying at a hotel. She’d made a long call back home the day before, but she considered checking in with her parents, just to let them know that she was safe. She had to remind herself that they had no reason to think otherwise. Anyway, what would she have said? That Sam had been seeing another woman? This was literally true but not exactly accurate, and she didn’t want to get into it with them, since she still expected to be back with Sam before long.
