- •Vernon gant.
- •It was a Tuesday afternoon in February, about four o’clock, sunny and not too cold. I was walking along Twelfth Street at a steady clip, smoking a cigarette,
- •I was certainly sorry to hear this, but at the same time I was having a bit of a problem working up a plausible picture of Melissa living in Mahopac with two kids. As
- •I was puzzled at this. On the walk to the bar, and during Vernon’s search for the right booth, and as we ordered drinks and waited for them to arrive, I’d been
- •I looked over at Vernon as he took another Olympic-sized drag on his ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarette. I tried to think of something to say on the subject of
- •I opened my right hand and held it out. He turned his left hand over and the little white pill fell into my palm.
- •It out. As he was opening the flap and searching for the right button, he said, nodding down at the pill, ‘Let me tell you, Eddie, that thing will solve any problems you’re
- •In. Maxie’s wasn’t my kind of bar, plain and simple, and I decided to finish my drink as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there.
- •I sat staring into my own drink now, wondering what had happened to Melissa. I was wondering how all of that bluster and creative energy of hers could have been
- •I made my way over to the door, and as I was walking out of the bar and on to Sixth Avenue, I thought to myself, well, you certainly haven’t changed.
- •I had registered something almost as soon as I left the bar. It was the merest shift in perception, barely a flicker, but as I walked along the five blocks to Avenue a it
- •I paused for a moment and glanced around the apartment, and over at the window. It was dark and quiet now, or at least as dark and quiet as it can get in a city,
- •I opened the file labelled ‘Intro’. It was the rough draft I’d done for part of the introduction to Turning On, and I stood there in front of the computer, scrolling
- •I stubbed out my cigarette and stared in wonder at the screen for a moment.
- •I was taken aside – over to the kitchen area – and quizzed by one of the uniforms. He took my name, address, phone number and asked me where I worked and
- •I was eventually called back over to Brogan’s desk and asked to read and sign the statement. As I went through it, he sat in silence, playing with a paper clip. Just
- •I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
- •I found an old briefcase that I sometimes used for work and decided to take it with me, but passed on a pair of black leather gloves that I came across on a shelf in
- •I explained about the status of Turning On, and asked him if he wanted me to send it over.
- •In the marketplace, to keep up with the conglomerates – as Artie Meltzer, k & d’s corporate vice-president, was always saying – the company needed to expand, but
- •I slept five hours on the Thursday night, and quite well too, but on the Friday night it wasn’t so easy. I woke at 3.30 a.M., and lay in bed for about an hour before I
- •I did a series of advanced exercises in one of the books and got them all right. I then dug out an old number of a weekly news magazine I had, Panorama, and as I
- •I paused for a few moments and then took out my address book. I looked up the phone number of an old friend of mine in Bologna and dialled it. I checked the time
- •I spent money on other things, as well, sometimes going into expensive shops and seeking out pretty, elegantly dressed sales assistants, and buying things, randomly –
- •I laughed. ‘I might be.’
- •I’d been to the Met with Chantal a week earlier and had absorbed a good deal of information from catalogues and wall-mounted copy-blocks and I’d also recently
- •I’d get off the phone after one of these sessions with him and feel exhausted, as if I somehow had produced a grandchild, unaided, spawned some distant,
- •I sketched out possible projects. One idea was to withdraw Turning On from Kerr & Dexter and develop it into a full-length study – expand the text and cut back
- •I nodded.
- •I stepped over quickly and stood behind him. On the middle screen, the one he was working at, I could see tightly packed columns of figures and fractions and
- •I did, however, and badly – but I hesitated. I stood in the middle of the room and listened as he told me how he’d left his job as a marketing director to start daytrading
- •I resolved to begin the following morning.
- •I got three or four hours’ sleep that night, and when I woke up – which was pretty suddenly, thanks to a car-alarm going off – it took me quite a while to work out
- •It soon became apparent, however, that something else was at work here. Because – just as on the previous day – whenever I came upon an interesting stock,
- •I hadn’t planned any of this, of course, and as I was doing it I didn’t really believe I’d get away with it either, but the boldest stroke was yet to come. After he’d
- •I paused, and then nodded yes.
- •I’d had with Paul Baxter and Artie Meltzer. I tried to analyse what this was, and could only conclude that maybe a combination of my being enthusiastic and nonjudgemental
- •I lifted my glass. ‘I’ve been doing it at home on my pc, using a software trading package I bought on Forty-seventh Street. I’m up about a quarter of a million in two
- •I had to do a short induction course in the morning. Then I spent most of the early afternoon chatting to some of the other traders and more or less observing the
- •It had been a relatively slow day for me – at least in terms of mental activity and the amount of work I’d done – so when I got home I was feeling pretty restless,
- •It did seem to me to be instinct, though – but informed instinct, instinct based on a huge amount of research, which of course, thanks to mdt-48, was conducted
- •Its susceptibility to predictable metaphor – it was an ocean, a celestial firmament, a numerical representation of the will of God – the stock market was nevertheless
- •I was also aware – not to lose the run of myself here – that whenever an individual is on the receiving end of a revelation like this, addressed to himself alone (and
- •I’d only been trading for little over a week, so naturally I didn’t have much idea about how I was going to pull something like this off, but when I got back to my
- •I remember once being in the West Village with Melissa, for instance, about 1985 or 1986 – in Caffe Vivaldi – when she got up on her high horse about the
- •Van Loon was brash and vulgar and conformed almost exactly to how I would have imagined him from his public profile of a decade before, but the strange thing
- •Van Loon turned to me, like a chat-show host, and said, ‘Eddie?’
- •It was early evening and traffic was heavy, just like on that first evening when I’d come out of the cocktail lounge over on Sixth Avenue. I walked, therefore, rather than
- •I sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay and tonic.
- •Very abrupt and came as I was reaching out to pick up my drink. I’d just made contact with the cold, moist surface of the glass, when suddenly, without any warning or
- •I closed my eyes at that point, but when I opened them a second later I was moving across a crowded dance floor – pushing past people, elbowing them, snarling at
- •I’d read a profile of them in Vanity Fair.
- •I kept staring at her, but in the next moment she seemed to be in the middle of a sentence to someone else.
- •I waited in the reception area for nearly half an hour, staring at what I took to be an original Goya on a wall opposite where I was sitting. The receptionist was
- •I nodded, therefore, to show him that I did.
- •Van Loon nodded his head slowly at this.
- •I leant backwards a little in my chair, simultaneously glancing over at Van Loon and his friend. Set against the walnut panelling, the two billionaires looked like large,
- •I sat on the couch, in my suit, and waited for more, anything – another bulletin, some footage, analysis. It was as if sitting on the couch with the remote control
- •Vacillated between thinking that maybe I had struck the blow and dismissing the idea as absurd. Towards the end, however – and after I’d taken a top-up of mdt –
- •If Melissa had been drinking earlier on in the day, she seemed subdued now, hungover maybe.
- •I was a dot-com billionaire. The flames were stoked further when I casually shrugged off her suggestion that, given the storm of paperwork required these days to pass
- •I nodded at all of this, as though mentally jotting it down for later scrutiny.
- •I emptied the bottle of its last drop, put the cap back on and threw it into the little basket beside the toilet. Then I had to steel myself against throwing up. I sat on the
- •I nodded.
- •I swallowed again and closed my eyes for a second.
- •I nodded, ‘I’m fine.’
- •I could see that she was puzzled. My story – or what she knew of it so far – obviously made very little sense.
- •I told her I wasn’t sure, but that I’d be ok, that I had quite a few mdt pills left and consequently had plenty of room to manoeuvre. I would cut down gradually
- •In addition to this, the cracks that had been appearing and multiplying since morning were now being prised apart even wider, and left exposed, like open wounds.
- •It was bizarre, and through the band of pain pulsating behind my eyes I had only one thought: mdt-48 was out there in society. Other people were using it in the
- •I took one of the two tiny pills out of the bowl and using a blade divided it neatly in half. I swallowed one of the halves. Then I just sat at the desk, thinking about
- •I slept until nine o’clock on the Monday morning. I had oranges, toast and coffee for breakfast, followed by a couple of cigarettes. Then I had a shower and got
- •I shrugged my shoulders. ‘You can’t get decent help these days.’
- •In this myself, that I was perilously close to eye of the storm.
- •I spent a while studying the screen, and gradually it all came back to me. It wasn’t such a complicated process – but what was complicated, of course, was choosing
- •Involved wasn’t real. Naturally, this storm of activity attracted a lot of attention in the room, and even though my ‘strategy’ was about as unoriginal and mainstream as
- •I’d landed here today on the back of my reputation, of my previous performance, I was now beginning to realize that this time around not only did I not know what I
- •Investors who’d bought on margin and then been annihilated by the big sell-off.
- •Van Loon, and what a curious girl she was. I went online and searched through various newspaper and magazine archives for any references there might be to her. I
- •I wanted to ask him more about Todd and what he’d had to say about dosage – but at the same time I could see that Geisler was concentrating really hard and I
- •I stared at him, nodding my head.
- •I took a tiny plastic container with ten mdt pills in it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He opened it immediately, standing there, and before I could launch into
- •I slipped into an easy routine of supplying him with a dozen tablets each Friday morning, telling myself as I handed them over that I’d address the issue before the next
- •I seemed to be doing a lot of that these days.
- •I should have expected trouble, of course, but I hadn’t been letting myself think about it.
- •I said I had some information about Deke Tauber that might be of interest to him, but that I was looking for some information in return. He was cagey at first, but
- •Information I had – which meant that by the time I started asking him questions, I had pretty much won him over.
- •I took an occasional sidelong glance at Kenny Sanchez as he spoke. He was articulate and this stuff was obviously vivid in his mind, but I also felt he was anxious to
- •In the cab on the way to the coffee shop, we passed Actium, on Columbus Avenue – the restaurant where I’d sat opposite Donatella Alvarez. I caught a glimpse of the
- •I studied the pages for a few moments, flicking through them randomly. Then I came across the ‘Todd’ calls. His surname was Ellis.
- •I left the office at around 4 p.M. And went to Tenth Street, where I’d arranged to meet my landlord. I handed over the keys and took away the remainder of my
- •I looked back at Ginny. She pulled out the chair and sat down. She placed her clutch bag on the table and joined her hands together, as though she were about to
- •I half smiled, and he was gone.
- •I glared at him.
- •I nodded, and stuck my hand out. ‘Thanks for coming.’
- •It was only the middle of the day, and yet because the sky was so overcast there was a weird, almost bilious quality to the light.
- •Versions of this encounter passed through my mind continually during the night, each one slightly different – not a cigar, but a cigarette or a candle, not a wine bottle,
- •I had nowhere to go, and very little to lose. I whispered back, ‘You’re not.’
- •I listened to the report, but was barely able to take it in. Someone at Actium that night – probably the bald art critic with the salt-and-pepper beard – had seen the
It soon became apparent, however, that something else was at work here. Because – just as on the previous day – whenever I came upon an interesting stock,
something happened to me, something physical. I felt what I can only describe as an electric charge, usually just below the sternum, a little surge of energy that quickly
rippled through my body and then seemed to spill out into the room’s atmosphere, sharpening colour definition and sound resolution. I felt as though I were connected
to some vast system, wired in, a minute but active fibre, pulsating on a circuit board. The first stock I picked, for instance – let’s call it V – started moving up five
minutes after I’d sent off the buy-order. I tracked it, while at the same time nosing around the various websites for other things to buy. With growing confidence,
therefore, I found myself surfing stocks throughout the early part of the morning, leap-frogging from one to another, selling V at a profit and immediately sinking all of the
proceeds from it into W, which in turn got sold off at just the right moment to finance a foray into X.
But as I grew confident, I also grew impatient. I wanted more chips to play with, more capital, more leverage. By mid-morning I had inched my way up to nearly
$35,000, which was fine, but to make a proper dent in the market I’d probably need, as a starting point, at least double – but probably three or four times – that
amount.
I phoned Klondike, but they didn’t provide leverage of more than 50 per cent. Not having much of a history with my bank manager, I didn’t feel like trying him.
Neither did I imagine that anyone I knew would have $75,000 to spare, or that any legitimate loan company would shell out that kind of money over the counter – so,
since I wanted the money now, and was fairly confident about what I could do with it, there appeared to be only one other course of action left open to me.
[ 11 ]
I PUT ON A JACKET and left the apartment. I walked along Avenue A, past Tompkins Square Park and down towards Third Street to a diner I often used. The guy
behind the counter, Nestor, was a local and knew everything that went on in the neighbourhood. He’d been serving coffee and muffins and cheeseburgers and tuna
melts here for twenty years, and had observed all of the radical changes that had taken place, the clean-ups, the gentrification, the sneaky encroachment of high-rise
apartment buildings. People had come and gone, but Nestor remained, a link to the old neighbourhood that even I remembered as a kid – Loisaida, the Latino quarter
of store-front social clubs, and old men playing dominoes, and salsa and merengue blaring out of every window, and then later the Alphabet City of burned-out buildings
and drug pushers and homeless people living in cardboard shelters in Tompkins Square Park. I’d often chatted to Nestor about these changes, and he’d told me stories
– a couple of them pretty hair-raising – about various local characters, old-timers, storekeepers, cops, councillors, hookers, dealers, loansharks. But that was the thing
about Nestor, he knew everyone – even knew me, an anonymous single white male who’d been living on Tenth Street for about five years and worked as some kind of
journalist or something. So when I went into his place, sat at the counter and asked if he knew anyone who could advance me some cash, and fast – extortionate
interest rates no obstacle – he didn’t bat an eyelid, but just brought over a cup of coffee and told me to sit tight for a while.
When he’d served a few customers and cleared two or three tables, he came back to my end of the counter, wiped the area around where I was sitting and said,
‘Used to be Italians, yeah? Mostly Italians, until … well …’
He paused.
Until what? Until John Gotti took it in the ass and Sammy the Bull went in the Witness Protection Program? What? Was I supposed to guess? That was another
thing about Nestor, he often assumed I knew more than I did. Or maybe he just used to forget who he was talking to.
‘Until what?’ I said.
‘Until John Junior took over. It’s a fucking mess these days.’
I was close.
‘And now?’
‘The Russians. From Brighton Beach. They used to work together, them and the Italians, or at least didn’t work against each other, but now things are different.
John Junior’s crews – apparently – couldn’t turn over a cigar stand.’
I never had the measure of Nestor: was he just a fly on the neighbourhood wall, or was he connected in some way? I didn’t know. But then, how would I know?
Who the fuck was I?
‘So lately, round here,’ he went on, ‘there’s this guy, Gennady. Comes in most days. He talks like an immigrant, but don’t let that fool you. He’s tough, just as tough
as any of his uncles that came out of the Soviet gulags. They think this country is a joke.’
I shrugged my shoulders.
Nestor looked directly at me. ‘These guys are crazy, Eddie. I’m telling you. They’ll cut you around the waist, peel your skin – peel it all the way up to over your
head, tie a knot in it and then let you fucking suffocate.’
He let that one sink in.
‘I’m not kidding you. That’s what the mujahedin did to some of the Russian soldiers they captured in Afghanistan. Stuff like that gets passed on. People learn.’ He
paused, and did a little more wiping. ‘Gennady comes in, Eddie, I’ll talk to him, but just make sure you know what you’re doing.’
Then he stood away from the counter a little, and said, ‘You been working out? You look terrific.’
I half smiled at him, but didn’t say anything. Clearly puzzled, Nestor moved on to another customer.
I sat there for about an hour and drank four cups of coffee. I glanced at a couple of newspapers, and then spent some time trawling through the expanding database I
had between my ears, picking out stuff I’d read about the Russian mafia – the Organizatsiya, Brighton Beach, Little-Odessa-by-the-Sea.
I tried not to think too much about what Nestor had told me.
At around lunch-time, the place got busy and I began to consider the possibility that I was wasting my time, but just as I was about to get up and leave, Nestor
nodded to me from behind the counter. I looked around discreetly and saw a guy in his mid-twenties coming in the door. He was lean and wiry and wore a brown
leather jacket and sunglasses. He went and sat in an empty booth at the back of the diner. I stayed where I was and watched out of the corner of my eye as Nestor
brought him down a cup of coffee and chatted for a few moments.
Nestor came back up to the front, collecting some plates on his way. He put the plates on the counter beside me and whispered, ‘I vouched for you, OK, so go and
talk to him.’ Then he pointed a finger at me and said, ‘Don’t fuck up on me, Eddie.’
I nodded and swivelled around on my stool. I strolled down to the back. I slipped into the booth opposite Gennady and nodded hello.
He’d taken the sunglasses off and left them to one side. He had very striking blue eyes, a carefully maintained stubble and was alarmingly thin and chiselled. Heroin?
Vanity? Again, what did I know? I waited for him to speak.
But he didn’t. After a ludicrous pause, he made a barely perceptible gesture with his head that I took to mean I could speak. So I cleared my throat and spoke. ‘I’m
looking for a short-term loan of seventy-five thousand dollars.’
Gennady played with his left ear-lobe for a moment and then shook his head no.
I waited – waited for him to say something else – but that was obviously it. ‘Why not?’ I said.
He snorted sarcastically. ‘Seventy-five thousand dollars?’ He shook his head again and took a sip from his coffee. He had a very strong Russian accent.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘seventy-five thousand dollars. Is that such a problem? Jesus.’
If it came to it, I knew this guy would probably have no qualms about sticking a knife in my heart – and if Nestor was right that’d only be for starters – but I found
his attitude irritating and didn’t feel like playing along.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a fucking problem. I don’t see you before. And I don’t like you already.’
‘Like me? What the fuck has that got to do with anything? I’m not asking you out on a date here.’
He flinched, moved – was maybe even going to reach for something, a knife or a gun – but then he thought the better of it and just looked around, over his shoulder,
probably pissed now at Nestor.
I decided to push it.
‘I thought all you Russians were big shots – you know, tough, in control.’
He looked back, widening his eyes at me in disbelief. Then he collected himself, and for some reason made up his mind to respond.
‘What – I not in control? I turn you down.’
Now I snorted sarcastically.
He paused. Then he snarled, ‘Fuck you. What you know about us anyway?’
‘Quite a bit, actually. I know about Marat Balagula and the gas tax scam, and that deal with the Colombo family. Then there’s … Michael …’ I paused and made a
show of trying to get the name out. ‘… Shmushkevich?’
I realized from the look on his face that he wasn’t entirely sure what I was talking about. He would probably only have been a kid when the so-called daisy-chain of
dummy oil companies had been in full swing in the ’80s, trucking gas in from South America and forging tax receipts. And anyway who knew what these younger guys
talked about when they got together – probably not the great scams of a previous generation, that was for sure.
‘So … what?’ he said. ‘You a cop?’
‘No.’
When I didn’t add anything, he started to get up to leave.
‘Come on, Gennady,’ I said, ‘lighten up, would you?’
He stepped out of the booth and looked down at me, clearly debating in his head whether or not he should kill me right here, or wait until we got outside. I couldn’t
believe how reckless I was being, but I somehow felt I was safe, that nothing could touch me.
‘Actually, I’m researching a book on you guys,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for a focus, though – somebody whose point of view I can use to tell the story …’ I held off for
a couple of beats, and then went for it. ‘Somebody like you, Gennady.’
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and I knew I had him.
‘What kind of book?’ he said in a surprisingly small voice.
‘A novel,’ I replied. ‘It’s really just taking shape at the moment, but I see it as a story with an epic dimension to it, triumph over adversity, that kind of thing. From
the gulags to the …’ I trailed off here, faltering for a moment, aware that I might be losing him. ‘I mean, if you think about it,’ I went on quickly, ‘the guineas have had it
all their own way up to now, but that five-families, men-of-honour, badda-bing badda-boom shit has become clichéd. People want something new.’ As he considered
what I was saying, I decided to hammer it home, ‘So my agent thinks the movie rights on this will almost certainly be snapped up as well.’
Gennady hesitated for a moment, and then sat back down into the booth, waiting for more.
On the hoof, I managed to outline a vague plot centring on a young second-generation Russian who finds himself moving up through the Organizatsiya. I threw in
references to the Sicilians and the Colombians, but with a repeated wave of the hand I also kept deferring, in anticipation, to Gennady’s superior grasp of the details.
Managing to flip the axis, I soon had him doing most of the talking – albeit in his fairly mangled English. He agreed with some suggestions I made and dismissed others,
but he’d got the whiff of glamour into his system now and couldn’t be stopped.