Limitless

by Alan Glynn

What I was feeling, on the other hand, was acute embarrassment. I hadn’t wanted to say anything in the first place, but I could hardly have ignored Van Loon’s invitation to contribute. So what happens? I speak and end up being a patronizing asshole. Understanding doesn’t come into it? Where did I get off lecturing two billionaires about how to make money?

  After a couple of minutes, in any case, Frank Pierce muttered his excuses and left without saying goodbye to either Kevin or myself.

  Van Loon then seemed happy enough to let the conversation drift on for a while. We discussed Mexico and the probable effects the government’s apparently irrational stance was going to have on the markets. At one point, still fairly agitated, I caught myself reeling off a comparative list of per capita GDP figures for 1960 and 1995, stuff I must have read somewhere, but Van Loon cut me short and more or less implied that I was being shrill. He also contradicted a few things I said and was clearly right in each case to do so. I saw him looking at me once or twice, too – strangely – as if he were on the point of calling security over to have me ejected from the building.

  But then, a bit later, when Kevin had gone to the bathroom, Van Loon turned to me and said, ‘I think it’s time we got rid of this clown.’ He indicated back to where the bathrooms were, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Kevin’s a great guy, don’t misunderstand me. He’s an excellent negotiator. But sometimes. Jesus.’

  Van Loon looked at me, seeking confirmation that I agreed with him.

  I half smiled, unsure of how to react.

  So here it came again, that thing, that anxious, needy response I’d somehow triggered in all of the others – in Paul Baxter and Artie Meltzer and Kevin Doyle.

  ‘Come on, Eddie, drink up. I live five blocks from here. We’re going back to my place for dinner.’

  *

  As the three of us were walking out of the Orpheus Room, I was vaguely aware that no one had paid the check or signed anything or even nodded to anyone. But then something occurred to me. Carl Van Loon owned the Orpheus Room, in fact owned the entire building – an anonymous steel-and-glass tube on Fifty-fourth between Park and Lexington. I remembered reading about it when the place had first opened a few years before.

  Out on the street, Van Loon summarily dismissed Kevin by telling him that he’d see him in the morning. Kevin hesitated, but then said, ‘Sure, Carl. See you in the morning.’

  We made eye contact for a second but both of us pulled away in embarrassment. Then Kevin was gone and Van Loon and I were walking along Fifty-fourth Street towards Park Avenue. He hadn’t had a limousine waiting after all, and then I remembered reading something else, an article in a magazine about how Van Loon often made a big thing of walking – and especially walking in his ‘quarter’, as though that somehow meant he was a man of the people.

  We got to his building on Park Avenue. The brief trip from the lobby up to his apartment was indeed just that, a trip, with all of the elements in place: the uniformed doorman, the swirling turquoise marble, the mahogany panels, the brass radiator-grills. I was surprised by how small the elevator-car was, but its interior was very plush and intimate, and I imagined that such a combination could give the experience of being in it, and the accompanying sensation of motion – if you were with the right person – a certain erotic charge. It seemed to me that rich people didn’t think up things like this, and then decide to have them – things like this, little serendipitous accidents of luxury, just happened if you happened to have money.

  The apartment was on the fourth floor, but the first thing that caught your attention as you stepped into the main hall was a marble staircase sweeping majestically up to what had to be the fifth floor. The ceilings were very high, and decorated with elaborate plaster-work, and there were friezes around the edges which took your eyes gradually downwards to the large, gilt-framed paintings on the walls.

  If the elevator-car was the confessional box, the apartment itself was the whole cathedral.

  Van Loon led me across the hallway and into what he called ‘the library’, which is exactly what it was – a dark, book-lined room with Persian rugs, an enormous marble fire-place and several red leather couches. There were also lots of expensive-looking ‘pieces’ of fine French furniture about the place – walnut tables you wouldn’t ever put anything on and delicate little chairs you wouldn’t ever sit in.

  ‘Hi, Daddy.’

  Van Loon looked around, slightly puzzled. He obviously hadn’t expected anybody to be in here. On the far side of the room, barely visible against a wall of leather-bound books, there was a young woman holding open a large volume in her two hands.

  ‘Oh,’ Van Loon said, and then cleared his throat. ‘Say hello to Mr Spinola, darling.’

  ‘Hello Mr Spinola, darling.’

  The voice was quiet but assured.

  Van Loon clicked his tongue in disapproval.

  ‘Ginny.’

  I felt like saying to Van Loon, That’s OK, I don’t mind your daughter calling me ‘darling’. In fact, I kind of like it.

  My second erotic charge of the evening had come from Virginia Van Loon, Carl’s nineteen-year-old daughter. In her younger and more vulnerable years, ‘Ginny’ had spent quite a bit of time on the front pages of the daily tabloids for substance abuse and poor taste in boyfriends. She was Van Loon’s only child by his second wife, and had quickly been brought to heel by threats of disinheritance. Or so the story had gone.

  ‘Look, Ginny,’ Van Loon said, ‘I’ve got to go and get something from my office, so I want you to entertain Mr Spinola here while I’m gone, OK?’

  ‘Of course, Daddy.’

  Van Loon turned to me and said, ‘There are some files I want you to have a look at.’

  I nodded at him, not having a clue what he was talking about. Then he disappeared and I was left standing there, peering across the dimness of the room at his daughter.

  ‘What are you reading?’ I said, trying not to remember the last time I’d asked someone that question.

  ‘Not reading exactly, I’m looking something up in one of these books Daddy bought by the yard when he moved in here.’

  I edged over to the centre of the room in order to be able to see her more clearly. She had short, spiky blonde hair and was wearing trainers, jeans and a pink sleeveless top that left her midriff exposed. She’d had her belly-button pierced and was sporting a tiny gold hoop that glistened occasionally in the light as she moved.

  ‘What are you looking up?’

  She leant back against the bookcase with studied abandon, but the effect was spoilt somewhat by the fact that she was struggling to keep the enormous tome open, and balanced, in her hands.

  ‘The etymology of the word ferocious.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Yeah, my mother’s just told me that I have a ferocious temper, and I do – so, I don’t know, to cool down I thought I’d come in here and check out this dictionary of etymology.’ She hiked the book up for a second, as though displaying it as an exhibit in a court room. ‘It’s a strange word, don’t you think? Ferocious.’

  ‘Have you found it yet?’ I nodded at the dictionary.

  ‘No, I got distracted by feckless.’

  ‘Ferocious literally means “wild-eyed”,’ I said, moving around the biggest of the red leather couches in order to get even closer to her. ‘It comes from a combination of the Latin word ferus, which means “fierce” or “wild”, and the particle oc-, which means “looking” or “appearing”.’

  Ginny Van Loon stared at me for a second and then slammed the book closed with a loud thwack.

  ‘Not bad, Mr Spinola, not bad,’ she said, trying to suppress a grin. Then, as she struggled to get the dictionary back into its place on the shelf behind her, she said, ‘You’re not one of Daddy’s business guys, are you?’

  I thought about this for a second before answering. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I am. We’ll see.’

  She turned around again to face me and in the brief silence that followed I wa
s aware of her eyeing me up and down. I became uncomfortable all of a sudden and wished that I’d gotten around to buying another suit. I’d been wearing this one every day for quite some time now and had begun to feel a bit self-conscious in it.

  ‘Yeah, but you’re not one of his regular guys?’ She paused. ‘And you don’t …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t look too comfortable … dressed like that.’

  I looked down at my suit and tried to think of something to say about it. I couldn’t.

  ‘So what do you do for Daddy? What service do you provide?’

  ‘Who says I provide a service?’

  ‘Carl Van Loon doesn’t have friends, Mr Spinola, he has people who do things for him. What do you do?’

  None of this – strangely enough – came across as snotty or obnoxious. For a girl of nineteen, she was breathtakingly self-possessed, and I felt compelled simply to tell her the truth.

  ‘I’m a stock-market trader, and I’ve been very successful recently. So I’m here – I think – to provide your father with some … advice.’

  She raised her eyebrows, opened her arms and did a little curtsey, as if to say voilá.

  I smiled.

  She reverted to leaning back against the bookcase behind her, and said, ‘I don’t like the stock market.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because it’s so profoundly uninteresting a thing to have taken over so many people’s lives.’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘I mean, people don’t have drug-dealers any more, or psychoanalysts – they have brokers. At least with getting high or being in analysis, it was about you – you were the subject, to be mangled or untangled or whatever – but playing the markets is like surrendering yourself to this vast, impersonal system. It just generates and then feeds off … greed …’

  ‘I—’

  ‘… and it’s not as if it’s your own individual greed either, it’s the same greed as everyone else’s. You ever been to Vegas, Mr Spinola? Ever seen those big rooms with the rows and rows of slot machines? Acres of them? I think the stock market today is like that – all these sad, desperate people planted in front of machines just dreaming of the big score they’re going to make.’

  ‘Surely that’s easy for you to say.’

  ‘Maybe so, but it doesn’t make it any less true.’

  As I was trying to formulate an answer to this, the door opened behind me and Van Loon came back into the room.

  ‘Well, Eddie, did she keep you entertained?’

  He walked briskly over to a coffee table in front of one of the couches and threw a thick folder of papers on to it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and immediately turned back to look at her. I tried to think of something to say. ‘So, what are you doing, I mean … these days?’

  ‘These days.’ She smiled. ‘Very diplomatic. Well, these days I suppose I’m a … recovering celebrity?’

  ‘OK, sweetheart,’ Van Loon said, ‘enough. Skedaddle. We’ve got business to do here.’

  ‘Skedaddle?’ Ginny said, raising her eyebrows at me interrogatively. ‘Now there’s a word.’

  ‘Hhmm,’ I said, pantomiming deep thought, ‘I would say that the word skedaddle is very probably … of unknown origin.’

  She considered this for a moment and then, gliding past me on her way over towards the door, whispered loudly, ‘A bit like yourself, Mr Spinola … darling.’

  ‘Ginny.’

  She glanced back at me, ignoring her father, and was gone.

  *

  Shaking his head in exasperation, Van Loon looked over at the library door for a moment to make sure that his daughter had closed it properly. He picked up the folder again from the coffee table and said he was going to be straight with me. He had heard about my circus tricks down at Lafayette and wasn’t particularly impressed, but now that he’d had the chance to meet me in person, and talk, he was prepared to admit that he was a little more curious.

  He handed me the folder.

  ‘I want your opinion on these, Eddie. Take the folder home with you, have a look through the files, take your time. Tell me if you think any of the stocks you see there look interesting.’

  I flicked through the folder as he spoke and saw long sections of dense type, as well as endless pages of tables and charts and graphs.

  ‘Needless to say, all of this stuff is strictly confidential.’

  I nodded of course.

  He nodded back, and then said, ‘Can I offer you something to drink? The housekeeper’s not here I’m afraid – and Gabby’s … in a bad mood – so dinner’s a non-starter.’ He paused, as though trying to think of a way out of this dilemma, but quickly gave up. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, ‘I had a big lunch.’ Then he looked at me, obviously expecting an answer to his original question.

  ‘Scotch would be fine.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Van Loon went over to a drinks cabinet in the corner of the room and as he poured two glasses of single malt Scotch whisky, he spoke back at me, over his shoulder.

  ‘I don’t know who you are, Eddie, or what your game is, but I’m sure of one thing, you don’t work in this business. I know all the moves, and so far you don’t seem to know any – but the thing is, I like that. You see, I deal with business graduates every day of the week, and I don’t know what it is – they’ve all got this look, this business-school look. It’s like they’re cocky and terrified at the same time, and I’m sick of it.’ He paused. ‘What I’m saying is this, I don’t care what your background is, or that maybe the nearest you’ve ever come to an investment bank is the business section of the New York Times. What matters’ – he turned around with a glass in each hand, and used one of them to indicate his belly – ‘is that you’ve got a fire in here, and if you’re smart on top of that, then nothing can stand in your way.’

  He walked over and handed me one of the glasses of Scotch. I put the folder down on to the couch and took the glass from him. He held his up. Then a phone rang somewhere in the room.

  ‘Shit.’

  Van Loon put his glass down on the coffee table and went back in the direction he’d just come from. The phone was on an antique writing desk beside the drinks cabinet. He picked it up and said, ‘Yeah?’ There was a silence and then he said, ‘Yeah. Good. Yeah. Yeah. Put him through.’

  He covered the phone with his hand, turned to me and said, ‘I’ve got to take this call, Eddie. But sit down. Have your drink.’

  I smiled briefly in acknowledgement.

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  As Van Loon turned away again, and receded into a low-level murmur, I took a sip from the whisky and sat down on the couch. I was glad of the interruption, but couldn’t figure out why – at least not for a few seconds. Then it occurred to me: I wanted time to think about Ginny Van Loon and her little rant about the stock market and how it had reminded me so much of the kind of thing Melissa might have said. It seemed to me that despite obvious differences between them, the two women shared something – a similar, steely intelligence, as well as a style of delivery modelled on the heat-seeking missile. By referring to her father at one point as ‘Carl Van Loon’, for instance, but at all other times as ‘Daddy’, Ginny had not only displayed a sophisticated sense of detachment, she had also made him seem silly and vain and isolated. Which – by extension – was precisely how I now felt, too.

  I told myself that Ginny’s comments could be dismissed as the cheap and easy nihilism of an overeducated teenager, but if that was the case, why was I so bothered by them?

  I took a tiny plastic sachet from the inside pocket of my jacket, opened it and tapped a tablet out on to the palm of my hand. Making sure that Van Loon was facing away from me, I popped the tablet into my mouth and washed it down with a large gulp of whisky.

  Then I picked up the folder, opened it at the first page and started reading.

  *

  The files contained background information on a series of small-to-me
dium sized businesses, from retail chains to software houses to aerospace and biotech companies. The material was dense and wide-ranging and included profiles of all the CEOs, as well as of other key personnel. There was technical analysis of price movements going back over a five-year period, and I found myself reading about peaks, troughs, points of resistance – stuff that a few weeks earlier would have been rarefied, incomprehensible fuzz, Mogadon for the eyes.

  But just what did Carl Van Loon want? Did he want me to state the obvious, to point out that the Texas-based data-storage firm, Laraby, for example, whose stock had increased twenty thousand per cent over the last five years, was a good long-term investment? Or that the British retail chain, Watson’s – which had just recorded its worst ever losses, and whose CEO, Sir Colin Bird, had presided over similar losses at a venerable Scottish insurance company, Islay Mutual – was not? Was Van Loon seriously looking to me, a freelance copywriter, for recommendations about what stocks he should buy or sell? Again, I thought, hardly – but if that wasn’t the case, then what did he want?

  After about fifteen minutes, Van Loon covered the phone again with his hand and said, ‘Sorry this is taking so long, Eddie, but it’s important.’

  I shook my head, indicating that he shouldn’t be concerned, and then held up the folder as evidence that I was happily occupied. He went back to his low-level murmuring and I went back to the files.

  The more I read, the simpler, and more simplistic, the whole thing seemed. He was testing me. As far as Van Loon was concerned I was a neophyte with a fire in my belly and a lip on me, and as such just might find this amount of concentrated information a little intimidating. He was hardly to know that in my current condition it wasn’t even a stretch. In any case, and for something to do, I decided to divide the files into three separate categories – the duds, the obvious high-performers and the ones that weren’t instantly categorizable as either.

  Another fifteen minutes or so passed before Van Loon finally got off the phone and came over to retrieve his drink. He held it up, as before, and we clinked glasses. I got the impression that he was having a hard time suppressing a broad grin. A part of me wanted to ask him who he’d been on the phone to, but it didn’t seem appropriate. Another part of me wanted to ask him an endless series of questions about his daughter, but the moment didn’t seem right for that either – not, of course, that it ever would.