Limitless

by Alan Glynn

  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 da
isy-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.

  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 agreed to do consultancy on ‘the project’ and we’d established a few ground rules, I managed to edge the conversation back around to the loan. I told him my advance on the book had already been spent and that the 75K was a gambling debt I had to pay off – and had to pay off today.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

  This matter was now a minor distraction to Gennady. He took out his cellphone and had a quick conversation with someone in Russian. Then, still on the phone, he asked me a series of questions. What was my social security number? Driver’s licence number? What were the names of my landlord and my employer? Where did I bank and what credit cards did I hold? I took out my social security card and driver’s licence, and read out the relevant numbers. Then I gave him the names and the other stuff he wanted while he relayed the information in Russian to the person on the other end of the line.

  With that taken care of, Gennady put away his phone and got back to talking about the project. Fifteen minutes later his phone rang. As before, he spoke in Russian, at one point covering the mouthpiece with his hand and whispering, ‘That OK, you cleared. So – what? Seventy-five? You sure? You want more? A hundred?’

  I paused, and then nodded yes.

  When he’d finished on the phone, he said, ‘Will be ready in a half-hour.’

  Then he put the phone away and placed his hands down flat on the table.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘so who we going to cast in this thing?’

  *

  Half an hour later, on the nose, another young guy arrived. Gennady introduced him as Leo. He was skinny and not unlike Gennady, but he didn’t have Gennady’s eyes, didn’t have what Gennady had – looked, in fact, like he’d had whatever it was Gennady did have surgically removed. Maybe they were brothers, or cousins, and maybe – I started thinking – maybe I could make something out of this. They spoke in Russian for a moment and then Leo pulled a thick brown envelope out of his jacket pocket, put it on the table, slid out of the booth and left without saying a word. Gennady shoved the envelope in my direction.

  ‘This a knockdown, OK? Short term. Five repayments, five weeks, twenty-two-five a time. I come by your place each …’ He paused, and stared at the envelope for a moment. ‘… each Friday morning, start two weeks from today.’ He held the envelope up in his left hand. ‘This no joke, Eddie – you take this now … you mine.’ I nodded. ‘I go into other stuff?’

  I shook my head.

  The other stuff being, I presumed – at the very least – legs, knees, arms, ribs, baseball bats, switchblades, electric cattle-prods maybe.

  ‘No.’ I shook my head again. ‘It’s OK. I understand.’

  I was anxious to get away now that I had the cash, but I could hardly appear to be in too much of a hurry. It turned out, however, that Gennady himself had to go, and was already late for another appointment. We’d exchanged phone numbers, so before he left we agreed that in a week or so we’d make some arrangement to meet again. He’d check up on some stuff, and I’d work a little more on shaping – maybe even expanding – the central character of what had somehow mutated, during the course of our conversation, from a novel into a screenplay.

  Gennady put on his Ray-Bans and was ready to go. But he paused, and reached over to shake my hand. He did this silently, solemnly.

  Then he got up and left.

  *

  I called Klondike from the payphone in the diner. I explained the situation and they gave me the address of a bank on Third Avenue where I could deposit cash that would immediately be credited to my account.

  I thanked Nestor for his help and then took a cab to Sixty-first and Third. I opened the envelope in the back of the cab and fingered the wads of hundred-dollar bills. I’d never seen this much cash before in my life and I felt dizzy just looking at it. I felt even dizzier handing it over at the bank and watching the teller count it.

  After that, I took another cab back to Tenth Street and got settled down to work again. In my absence, the stocks I was holding had increased dramatically in value, bringing my base capital up to $50,000. This meant that with Gennady’s contribution I now had almost $150,000 at my disposal, and with only a couple of hours’ trading time left – and consequently very little time for research – I just jumped right into it, tracking valuations, schlepping stocks around, buying, selling, sprinting back and forth across the various rows of figures on the computer screens.

  This process gathered considerable momentum and peaked late in the afternoon with two big scores – let’s call them Y and Z – high-risk, high-yield stocks, each on a rapid upswing. Y carried me as far as the $200,000 mark, and Z carried me considerably beyond it, to just over a quarter of a million. It was a tense, sometimes harrowing few hours, but it gave me a real taste for the thrill of facing down the odds, and also for large quantities of adrenalin, a substance I could almost feel being secreted into, and moving through, my system – almost the way share prices themselves shifted and moved through the markets.

  Despite my success rate, however, or maybe because of it, a sense of dissatisfaction began to creep over me. I had the feeling that I could be doing a lot more than just trading at home on my PC, and that being a guerrilla market-maker wasn’t going to be anywhere near enough to keep me happy. The fact is, I wanted to know what it would be like to trade from the inside, and at the highest levels … what it would be like and how it would feel to buy millions of shares at a time …

  *

  I phoned
Kevin Doyle, therefore – the investment banker I’d gone for breakfast with a few Sundays before – and arranged to meet him for drinks at the Orpheus Room.

  The last time we met he’d been very intent on giving me advice about setting up a portfolio of stocks, so I thought I could maybe pick his brains a little and get some tips on how to move into the big league.

  Kevin didn’t recognize me at first when he arrived at the bar. He said I’d changed and was considerably slimmer than when we’d met at Herb and Jilly’s.

  He wanted to know where I worked out.

  I looked at him for a moment. Herb and Jilly’s? Then I realized that whoever Herb and Jilly were, it must have been at their place on the Upper West Side that I’d ended up that night.

  ‘I don’t work out,’ I said. ‘Working out is the new lunch, it’s for wimps.’

  He laughed, and then ordered an Absolut on the rocks.

  Kevin Doyle was around forty, forty-two, and fairly trim himself. He was wearing a charcoal suit and a red silk tie. I couldn’t remember much of what I’d told him at Herb and Jilly’s, or afterwards in that diner on Amsterdam Avenue, but one thing I did remember clearly was that I’d done most of the talking, and Kevin – apart from trying to turn me on to some stock tips – had hung on my every word. It’d been that thing again, that wanting-to-impress-me, wanting-to-be-my-best-friend thing that 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 non-judgemental – noncompetitive – might have struck some kind of a chord in people, especially in people who were stressed out and on their guard all the time. At any rate, these days I had the talking thing a bit more under control, so I decided to let Kevin take the lead. I asked him about Van Loon and Associates.