by Alan Glynn
*
I got home at about 7.30 in the morning and immediately started sweeping through the financial websites. I’d shifted all of my funds out of the Klondike account on signing up with Lafayette – except for the deposit, which it had been necessary to leave in order to keep the account open. I was glad now that I’d done this, but as I eased my way back into trading throughout the course of the day, I found that I missed the company of other traders and the atmosphere of a ‘room’. Nevertheless, it was remarkable how quickly I regained the confidence to make big trades and to take considerable risks, and by Tuesday afternoon – when Gennady phoned – I had already notched up about $25,000 in my account.
I’d forgotten that Gennady would be phoning and I was in the middle of devising a complicated trading strategy for the following day when the call came. I was in quite a buoyant mood and didn’t want any trouble, so I told him I’d have the ten pills ready for him on Friday. He immediately wanted to know if I’d have them any time before then and if he could come and collect them. Slightly irritated by this, I said that no, I wouldn’t, and he couldn’t – and that I’d see him on Friday morning. When I put the phone down, I gave some thought to how I was going to deal with the Gennady situation. It had the potential to become a very serious problem indeed, and although I had no choice but to give him the ten pills this time, I didn’t like the idea that he’d be out there, probably scheming his way up the Organizatsiya ladder – and also possibly even scheming against me. I would have to come up with something – a scheme of my own – and soon.
On the Wednesday, I went out shopping to get a couple of new suits. Thanks to a combination of not eating and doing hundreds of sit-ups, I’d lost a little weight over the previous five days – so I figured it was now time, finally, to inject some new life into my wardrobe. I got two wool suits, one of them a steel grey and the other a midnight blue – both by Boss Hugo Boss. I also got cotton shirts, silk ties, pocket squares, boxers, socks and shoes.
Sitting in the back of a cab on the way home from midtown, surrounded by scented, post-modern shopping bags, I felt exhilarated and ready for anything – but when I got upstairs to the third floor of my building I experienced again that sense I’d often had on MDT of being hemmed in, of not having enough space. My apartment, quite simply, was too small and cramped, and I was going to have to address that issue, as well.
Later on that evening, I wrote a lengthy and carefully phrased note to Carl Van Loon. In the note, I apologized for my recent behaviour and attempted to explain it by referring obliquely to a course of medication I’d been on but had now completed. I ended by asking him to let me come and talk to him, and enclosed the note in a folder with the revised projections I’d drawn up. I’d originally been going to have the package couriered to his office the following morning, but then I decided to deliver it in person. If I bumped into him in the lobby or in the elevator, well and good – if not, I’d wait and see how he responded to the note.
I spent the rest of the evening, and most of the night, studying an 800-page textbook I’d bought a few weeks earlier on corporate financing.
*
The next morning I did my sit-ups, drank some juice and had a shower. I chose the blue suit, a white cotton shirt and a plain ruby tie. I got dressed in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom, and then took a cab to the Van Loon Building on Forty-eighth Street. I felt fresh and confident as I entered the lobby and strode over to the elevators. People were whizzing by in all directions and I had the sensory impression of cutting my way through a dense fuzz of commotion. As I waited for the elevator doors to open, I glanced over at the section of the enormous bronze-tinted window where I had stood wheezing in panic with Ginny the previous week, and found it hard to relate to the scene in any meaningful way at all. Neither was there the slightest hint in the elevator car, as it hurtled up to the sixty-second floor, of my earlier fear and anxiety. Instead, I eyed my reflection in the steel panels of the car’s interior and admired the cut of my new suit.
The lobby area of Van Loon & Associates was quiet. There were a few young guys standing around chatting and letting off occasional volleys of boisterous laughter. The receptionist was looking at something on her computer screen, and seemed to be engrossed in it. When I reached her desk, I cleared my throat to attract her attention.
‘Good morning, sir. May I help you?’
She showed a flicker of recognition, but also of confusion.
‘Mr Van Loon please.’
‘I’m afraid Mr Van Loon is out of the country at the moment. We don’t expect him back until tomorrow. If you would …’
‘That’s OK,’ I said, ‘I’d like to leave this package for him. It’s very urgent that it be brought to his attention as soon as he returns.’
‘Of course, sir.’
She smiled.
I nodded, and smiled back.
Stopping short of clicking my heels, I then spun around and headed over towards the elevators again.
*
I went home and traded online for the rest of the day, adding a further ten grand to my pile.
So far, the combination of MDT and Dexeron had worked really well for me, and I kept my fingers crossed. I’d been on it for nearly a week now and I hadn’t had the merest hint of a blackout. But for Gennady’s visit I decided to mess up my apartment a little, deliberately. I wanted to play down the intensity of high-dosage MDT and try to convince him that taking more than one pill every couple of days was actually dangerous. That way I could slow him down and give myself a little breathing space. However, I really had no idea what I was going to do about him.
When he came in the door on Friday morning, I could see that he had regressed a little. He didn’t say anything, but just held out his hand and shook it in a gimme motion.
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 my spiel about dosage, he had popped one of the pills into his mouth.
He closed his eyes and remained still for a few moments – during which time I stood still as well, and said nothing. Then he opened his eyes and glanced around. I had tried to make the place look untidy, but it hadn’t been easy – and there was certainly no comparison at all between how the place looked now and how it had looked the previous week.
‘You get some, too?’ he said, nodding his head at the general tidiness.
‘Yes.’
‘So you get more than ten? You tell me only ten.’
Shit.
‘I got twelve,’ I said, ‘I managed to get twelve. Two extra for me. But that was a thousand bucks. I can’t afford any more than that.’
‘OK, next week, you get me twelve.’
I was going to say no. I was going to say fuck you. I was going to run at him and see if the physical kick of a triple dose of MDT would be enough to let me overpower him and maybe choke him to death. But I did nothing. I said, ‘OK.’
Because what if it went wrong and I got choked to death – or, at best, I drew the attention of the police? And was finger-printed, booked, keyed into the system? I needed a safer and much more efficient way to get myself out of this situation. And it had to be permanent.
Gennady held his hand out again, and said, ‘The seventeen-five?’
I had the money ready and just gave it to him without saying anything.
He put it into his jacket pocket.
As he was going out the door, he said, ‘Next week, twelve. Don’t forget.’
*
Carl Van Loon phoned me at seven o’clock that evening. I hadn’t been expecting such a quick response, but I was glad – because now, one way or the other, I could proceed. I’d been getting restless, prickled by an increasing need to be involved in something that would consume all of my time and energy.
‘Eddie.’
‘Carl.’
‘How many times are we going to have to do this, Eddie?’
I took a relatively subdued comment like that as a good sign, and launched into a defensive broadside that culminated in a plea to let me get involved again in the MCL–Abraxas deal. I told him that I was fired up and brimming with new ideas and that if he took a good look at the revised projections he’d see just how serious I was.
‘I have looked at them, Eddie. They’re terrific. Hank’s here and I showed them to him earlier. He wants to meet you.’ He paused. ‘We want to get this thing off the ground.’
He paused again, longer this time.
‘Carl?’
‘But Eddie, I’m going to be straight with you. You pissed me off before. I didn’t know who – or what – I was talking to. I mean, whatever it is you’ve got, some kind of bipolar shit, I don’t know – but that degree of instability is just not on when you’re playing at this level. When the merger is announced there’s going to be a lot of pressure, wall-to-wall media coverage, stuff you can’t imagine if you haven’t already been there.’
‘Let me come and talk to you, Carl, face to face. If you’re not satisfied after that, I’ll back off. You won’t hear from me again. I’ll sign confidentiality agreements, whatever. Five minutes.’
Van Loon paused for a full thirty seconds. In the silence, I could hear him breathing. Eventually, he said, ‘I’m at home. I’ve got something on later, so if you’re coming round, come round now.’
*
I had Van Loon back onside within ten minutes. We sat in his library, drinking Scotch, and I spun out an elaborate tale for him of an entirely imaginary condition I was supposed to be suffering from. It was easily treatable with light medication, but I had reacted adversely to a certain element in the medication and this had resulted in my erratic behaviour. The medication had been adjusted, I’d completed the course and now I was fine. It was a thin enough story, but I don’t think Van Loon was actually listening very closely to what I was saying – he seemed, rather, to be mesmerized by something in the timbre of my voice, by my physical presence, and I even had the feeling that what he wanted more than anything else was just to reach over and touch me – and be, in a sense, electrified. It was a heightened version of how people had reacted to me before – Paul Baxter, Artie Meltzer, Kevin Doyle, Van Loon himself. I wasn’t complaining, but I had to be careful about how I dealt with this. I didn’t want it to cause any interference, or to unbalance things. I figured the best way to harness it was to keep busy, and to keep whoever I was exerting an influence over busy as well. With this in mind I swiftly moved the conversation on to the MCL–Abraxas deal.
It was all very delicate, Van Loon said, and time was of the essence. Despite a number of hitches, Hank Atwood was anxious to proceed. Having devised a price structure to bring to the table, the next step was to propose who should get the top jobs, and what shape the new company should have. Then it would be on to meetings, negotiations, bull sessions – the MCL-Parnassus people with the Abraxas people – ‘… and us in the middle.’
Us?
I took a sip from my Scotch. ‘Us?’
‘Me, and if it works out, you. Jim Heche, one of my senior vice-presidents knows what’s going on, my wife knows – and that’s about it. Same thing with the principals. Hank’s just brought in a couple of advisers, he’s being very cautious. That’s why we want this thing wrapped up in a couple of weeks, a month tops.’ He drained the whisky from his glass and looked at me. ‘It’s not easy keeping the lid on something like this, Eddie.’
We chatted for another half hour or so and then Van Loon said he had to go out. We arranged to meet the following morning at his office. We’d have lunch with Hank Atwood and then set the ball rolling in earnest.
Van Loon shook my hand at the door and said, ‘Eddie, I sincerely hope this works out. I really do.’
I nodded.
On the way from the library to the main door of the apartment, I’d glanced around, hoping to catch sight of Ginny …
‘Just don’t let me down, Eddie, OK?’
… if she was at home.
‘I won’t, Carl. I’m on this, believe me.’
But there was no sign of her.
‘Sure. I know that. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
*
The lunch with Hank Atwood went very smoothly. He was impressed by my command of the material relating to the deal, but also by my wide-ranging knowledge of the business world in general. I had no problems answering the questions he asked me, and I even deftly managed to turn a few of them back on Atwood himself. Van Loon’s relief that things were finally working out was palpable, and I could also sense he was pleased that my performance was reflecting well on Van Loon & Associates. We’d gone to the Four Seasons again, and as I sat looking out over the room, fiddling with the stem of my empty wine glass, I tried to recall the details of what had happened the last time I’d been there. But I soon had the weirdest feeling that what I was conjuring up, like a misremembered dream, was unreliable. It even occurred to me that I hadn’t been there before, not really, but had constructed this memory from what someone had told me, or from something I’d read. However, the sense of distance from that other time which this created was welcome – because I was here now, and that was all that counted.
I was enjoying it, too – though I only picked at the food and didn’t have anything to drink. Hank Atwood relaxed quite a bit as the lunch progressed, and I even saw in him a little flicker of that needy reliance on my attention that had become such a feature of earlier, similar relationships. But that was fine. I sat there in the Four Seasons and revelled in the heady atmosphere, reflecting occasionally – when I reminded myself who these men were – that what I was experiencing could well have been the prototype for an extremely sophisticated virtual reality game.
*
In any case, this lunch was to be the start for me of a busy, strange and exciting period in my life. Over the following two or three weeks I got caught up in a constant round of meetings, lunches, dinners, late-night confabulations with powerful, tanned men in expensive suits – all of us in search of what Hank Atwood kept referring to as ‘vision lock’, that moment when the two parties could agree on a basic outline for the deal. I met with various sorts of people – lawyers, financiers, corporate strategists, a couple of congressmen, a senator – and was able to hold my own with all of them. In fact, somewhat to the alarm of Carl Van Loon, I became, in a couple of respects, pivotal to the whole thing. As we approached the critical mass of vision lock, the few of us who were actually in on the deal became quite pally, in a corporate, cliquey kind of way, but I was the one who provided the social glue. I was the one who was able to paper over the cracks between the two markedly different corporate cultures. In addition to this, I became utterly indispensable to Van Loon himself. Since he couldn’t bring in his usual teams of people to work on the deal, he increasingly relied on me to monitor what was going on and to digest and process huge amounts of information – from Federal Trade Commission regulations to the intricacies of broadband, from appointment times to the names of people’s wives.
While all of this was going on, I managed to do other stuff as well. I made it most days to the Van Loon & Associates gym to burn off some of my excess energy, spending time on different machines and trying to do an all-round work-out. I managed to keep track of my Klondike portfolio and even got a little action in on the company trading floor that Van Loon had told me about. I bought a cellphone, which was something I’d been meaning to do for ages. I bought more clothes, and wore a different suit every day – or, at least, rotated six or seven suits. Since the act of sleeping didn’t feature too prominently in my life any more, I also got to read the papers and do research, sitting at my computer – late at night, and often deep into the night …
Another part of my life, and one that I couldn’t ignore – unfortunately – was Gennady. Given that I was so busy in this increasingly blurred continuum of waking time, I slipped into an easy routine of supplying him with a dozen tablets each Friday morning, te
lling myself as I handed them over that I’d address the issue before the next time, that I’d take steps to contain the situation. But how? I didn’t know how.
Each time he came, too, I was shocked by how much he’d changed. That smack addict’s pallor had gone and there was a healthy glow to his skin now. He’d had a haircut, and had started wearing suits as well – though they weren’t anywhere near as nice as mine. He’d also taken to arriving by car, a black Mercedes something or other, and had guys waiting for him downstairs. He had to let me know this, of course, and more or less directed me to look out of the window and down at his entourage, waiting on Tenth Street.
Another thing Gennady did which annoyed me, was to shake one of the pills out into his hand the moment he got them, and then pop it into his mouth – right there in front of me, as though I were a coke-dealer and he was checking out the product. He also used to dispense the rest of the pills into a little silver pillbox he had, which he kept in the breast-pocket of his jacket. He’d pat this part of his jacket and say, ‘Always be prepared.’ Gennady was an asshole and I physically couldn’t bear to have him in the room. But I was powerless to stop him, because he obviously had moved up in the Organizatsiya, so how did I even begin to deal with that?
What I did was compartmentalize it, deal with it at the time and then move swiftly on.