Rigged

by Ben Mezrich

  “David!” his mother exclaimed. “When are you getting here?”

  “Tomorrow morning, like I told you yesterday.”

  “That’s right. Well, your aunt Maria knitted you the nicest sweater, and your cousin Joey is in from City College, and everyone is very excited to hear about your promotion—”

  David decided to get it right out in the open, before his mother drowned him in family gossip.

  “Mom, guess what? I’m going to Dubai on Friday. For work.”

  “Where? Detroit?”

  “No, Mom. Dubai. It’s a country.”

  There was a brief pause on the other end of the line, the phone muffled as his mother said something to someone behind her. Then she came back on: “Well, okay, David, that’s nice. Make sure you give me your flight information. And we’ll see you and Serena tomorrow. Don’t be late—you know how your father gets when you’re late.”

  There was a click as she hung up the phone, and David was left in the darkness of his stoop, wondering how the hell it had gone so well. Had she heard him right? He’d repeated it twice, hadn’t he? He suddenly found himself smiling. Maybe he’d underestimated his mother. Maybe he was making a bigger deal of it than it needed to be—

  His thoughts were interrupted by a loud buzzing as the phone in his hand suddenly sprang back to life. He looked at the number on the screen—and his smile disintegrated as quickly as it had come.

  He put the phone back to his ear and hit the receive button.

  To his surprise, this time it was his father.

  “David, your mother just fainted.”

  David’s throat tightened up.

  “What?”

  “She looked up Dubai on a map. Turns out it’s in the Middle East.”

  David coughed.

  “I know, Dad.”

  “Well, now your mother is lying on the kitchen floor.”

  The phone went dead, and David lowered his head to his knees. Yes, it was going to be one hell of an interesting Thanksgiving.

  Chapter 21

  How long do you think we could stay in here before they sent out a search party to find us?”

  David grinned at Serena in the mirror as she reapplied her lipstick. There was barely enough room for both of them in the small downstairs bathroom of his parents’ cozy two-story home—but David was just thankful that for a brief moment there was a door between them and the three dozen refugees from central casting who made up his extended Italian family.

  “I think they’re fun,” Serena said, finishing her lips and moving on to her hair. David thought she looked great: her black skirt and matching roll-neck sweater brought out the dark pools of her eyes, and her understated makeup highlighted her rising cheekbones and smooth, porcelain skin. It was almost a travesty that his current reflection was sharing the backlit mirror: his mother had forced him to don the bright orange sweater his aunt had knitted for him as an early Christmas present—even though the arms were different lengths and the collar was so high it was doing battle with the cleft on his chin.

  “Of course you do.” He grimaced. “That’s because they aren’t related to you, so they pretty much leave you alone.”

  Serena came from a small family, and most of her relatives still lived in her native Colombia, so she and David saw them only on rare occasions. The few dinners David had shared with Serena’s clan had been sedate, classy affairs. Nothing like Thanksgiving at the Russo home in Staten Island—where it was every gavone for himself.

  “They’re psychotic.” He sighed, shaking his head. “Maybe we should just make a run for it. I’m not sure how much more of the third degree I can handle.”

  They were barely halfway through dinner, and David had already endured three hours of intense questioning—about his job, his relationship, and his future plans. If he heard one more uncle ask him why he hadn’t gone to law school or med school, he was going to stick his head through a window. And if one more aunt asked him when he and Serena were going to get married, he was going to use a candle from one of his mother’s elaborate centerpieces to light the house on fire.

  The only good news so far was that nobody had mentioned Dubai yet—a small miracle considering that his father hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d told David that his mother hit the kitchen floor on hearing the news. She still had a bright red mark on her forehead where she’d bumped the counter on the way down.

  David didn’t blame her really. This was a woman who’d never been out of the country, never been on an airplane—hell, David wasn’t even certain whether she’d ever been out of New York. The idea that her only son—the pride of Staten Island, in her eyes—was flying into the middle of the place she’d only seen on the TV news, well, it was almost heartbreaking.

  David sighed as Serena finished with the mirror and started for the bathroom door. He’d just have to keep praying that there were already enough issues for the family to continue torturing him about to make it through to dessert, without Dubai being brought up. But even as Serena led him by the hand back into the crowded dining room, David knew his prayers were futile. He could tell by the way everyone was looking at him as he found his seat—jammed between his uncle Joseph, a skinny, mustachioed forty-five-year-old who ran an undertaking business in northern New Jersey, and his cousin Jimmy, who was a frighteningly obese freshman at City College—that his luck was about to run out.

  He pretended not to notice the attention as he reached for one of the half-dozen trays of turkey on the enormous main table that bisected the dining room. The table had been borrowed with the help of a neighbor who worked at the local high school, along with most of the chairs, but David’s mother had done a pretty good job dressing up the institutional-style furniture with homemade seat coverings, matching tablecloths, and no less than five centerpieces—conflagrations of brightly colored flowers, candles, and the odd party balloon—that made the room seem more crowded, if that was even possible. The fact that more than thirty Russos—a good half of them weighing well over two hundred pounds each—could fit in any one home in Staten Island was amazing, but having them all jam into one dining room for Thanksgiving dinner was a true feat of physics.

  What this meant, in practice, was that the minute David took his seat, he was pretty much trapped, and now that Serena was five relatives over, in the prime position between David’s mom and his great-aunt Velma—direct from Sicily, no less—he had nowhere to run when the question finally erupted from his dad’s oldest brother, good old Uncle Morty, who owned a shoe store in Newark.

  “So your mother tells us you’re going to Dubai.”

  David nodded, then quickly jammed a spoonful of cranberry sauce into his mouth. Maybe they’d let him just eat for once. Yeah, right.

  “Where is that, in England?” one of the cousins asked from farther down the table. David couldn’t be sure which cousin, as he was too busy concentrating on getting a fork loaded with turkey in alongside the cranberry sauce.

  “No, it’s near Egypt, isn’t it?” his mother’s youngest sister, Aunt Tina, whose family lived two doors down, chimed in. “Or am I thinking of China? Is it near China?”

  Uncle Morty rolled his eyes at the rest of the family, then pointed a finger toward David.

  “The Middle East, right? Dubai’s in the center of the Middle East. Right, David? That’s where you’re going?”

  David continued chewing, nodding. Uncle Morty leaned back in his chair, crossing his meaty arms against his utterly inflated belly.

  “So tell me again why you didn’t want to be a doctor?”

  David groaned inwardly, instinctively searching for the nearest window. On the way, he matched eyes with his dad, who was sitting at the far end of the table. To his surprise, his dad gave him a little wink, as if to tell him that he understood David’s pain. The wink was followed by a subtle gesture toward the door that led to his father’s study—a signal that he had something to talk to David about, if and when he survived the Russo onslaught. David nodded, the
n glanced wistfully at the window—and went back to chewing his turkey.

  It was almost two hours later by the time David made his way into his father’s study, which was actually little more than a converted pantry located down a short flight of stairs. His father was already there when David arrived. Once a bear of a man, with thick dark hair and oversized features, his dad was now somewhat whittled down by the years and the aftereffects of the accident, but still amazingly vibrant, reclining on his patched-up old La-Z-Boy, the back of the chair leaning against the cluttered bookshelf that took up most of the office’s far wall. David was glad his dad was already in his chair; he hated watching his father struggle to force himself down the stairs, no matter how important the doctors believed the exercise was. He knew that the basement office—once a comforting refuge, a place where his dad went to think—was now actually part of the older Russo’s therapy. David knew that the very fact that his father could get down those steps, and then calmly carry on a conversation in a place so small and confined, was major progress. But that didn’t make the situation any less painful for him to accept. In many ways, visible, physical scars would have been easier to deal with. As it was, David could only hope that one day he’d be able to look at his dad without thinking about the hell the man had been through.

  “You’re still in one piece,” his dad said, smiling, as David took a seat on a workbench across from him. “Study” was really a poor description of the little room, considering that a good half of it was more wood shop than homebound accountant’s lair. David’s dad had paid his way through accounting school by doing carpentry part-time, and most of David’s childhood neighbors had a set of shelves, or a screened porch, or a bed frame that had been built by his dad. It had always made David proud, when he played at one of his friends’ houses, to see the results of his dad’s work making their homes that much better.

  “Barely,” David responded, running a hand through his hair. “I think this sweater has magical powers. It glows even brighter every time someone brings up law school or med school.”

  David’s father laughed. “Your aunts and uncles mean well. They’re just trying to find some common ground. None of us really understands what the hell it is that you do.”

  “Well, sometimes I don’t even really know,” David said truthfully. “But it can be fascinating. And the excitement—Dad, you have no idea what that trading floor is like. I feel like I’m part of something huge.”

  His dad nodded. There was a slight flicker of something familiar at the corners of his eyes, but David tried not to notice; he knew from talking to his dad’s doctors that, on some level, the panic was something his father was going to have to live with, every day. Even when the emotional scars appeared to be healed, your mind never completely got over an accident like that.

  “David,” his father said when the flicker was gone, “I know I’ve been tough on you, like the rest of the family. Maybe I wanted you to be a lawyer or a doctor too. But I need you to understand something.”

  He leaned a few inches closer to David.

  “When I realized that plane was coming right toward the building, I thought about one thing. You. When the plane flies through your window, David, I don’t want you to have any regrets.”

  David’s throat went dry, and he shifted uncomfortably against the wooden bench. Even after a year, it was hard for him to talk out loud about the accident. And the truth was, he had never really discussed it with his father or mother before. They had all simply dealt with it, silently, every day since it happened.

  “If you think what you’re doing is important,” his father continued, dead serious, “you keep doing what you’re doing. And if it’s not important, you go out and try to make it important.”

  His father wasn’t trying to be profound. He was just attempting to get the message across. You might think you have a whole life to make a difference in the world—but the truth is, you never know when that airplane might come crashing through your office window. That was a lesson every New Yorker had learned—though maybe not as firsthand as David’s dad—and taken to heart.

  “I’ll do my best, Dad.”

  As David said the words, he knew that he meant them. He didn’t know how, and he didn’t know when—but he was going to find a way to make his father’s emotional scars worth something. He was going to do his best to make his father proud.

  Chapter 22

  No vember 29, 2002

  Now this was the way to travel.

  David was wearing silk pajamas and lying flat on his back, his head against a pillow that had to be stuffed with down feathers, his feet warm beneath a blanket that felt like it was made out of cashmere. A nineteen-inch television screen telescoped out from the wall in front of him, a brightly colored movie flashing by, subtitled in three different languages—none of which he could read, two of which he couldn’t even identify. To his right there was a small desk with an air-phone, an Internet connection, and even a fax machine. The remains of his dinner sat on a tray to his left— though there really wasn’t much remaining of the pheasant and pasta combination, as it had been one of the best meals David had eaten in months, and he could only imagine that there was a five-star chef strapped in some overhead compartment, cooking up such meals as they thundered across the Atlantic.

  David smiled at the image, then grabbed the glass of champagne from next to the tray and took a sip. Cristal, of course; if you were thirty thousand feet in the air, yet lying flat in your own little compartment, it had to be Cristal.

  David grinned as he placed the champagne glass back on its roost—an elbow of rounded plastic sticking right out of the wall, as if it had been designed specifically for such a task. Truly, the compartment was nicer than his cubicle back at Merrill. If Emirates Air was any indication, David was going to have to quickly reset his perspective on the Middle East. Already, from everything he’d learned in the past few hours from the crash course he’d given himself on Dubai—through the Internet, the many guidebooks he’d purchased before boarding the flight, and the phone calls he’d made to consulates and tourist bureaus—he had a feeling that any preconceived notions about third-world conditions in the Middle East were going to be sorely off base.

  Although the trip to Dubai had seemed to him and Reston like it had come out of left field, the truth was, according to David’s research, the tiny emirate of Dubai was going through a fascinating social, economic, and cultural upheaval—and on such a unique and massive scale that it was well worth the interest of any forward-looking institution, including the Merc. Maybe especially the Merc, since in some ways Dubai’s growth paralleled the trading exchange’s expansion from a little dairy and potato market to a world-leading oil player—except that Dubai was going through it all at hyperspeed. In barely twenty years, Dubai had gone from an insignificant desert-port trading outpost that nobody had ever heard of to a fully modern, futuristic first-world city. In effect, the sheiks who ruled Dubai had compressed what had taken the rest of the world two hundred years into twenty, using dwindling oil resources and sheer ambition to turn sand dunes into skyscrapers—almost overnight.

  One of the seven emirates—or kingdoms—that made up the United Arab Emirates, Dubai was a sandy curve of beachfront desert bordering the Persian Gulf. As Reston had commented, unlike the rest of the U.A.E., Dubai’s oil reserves made up only about 6 percent of its GDP; the rest came from tourism, real estate endeavors, banking, and other forms of business speculation. Even more startling for a nation in the usually conservative—and Islamic—Middle East, Dubai’s current population was predominantly expat; in fact, U.A.E. citizens made up fewer than oneeighth of the emirates’ total population. Europeans, Southeast Asians, Russians, even Americans—Dubai was a city of transplanted foreigners. Trying to juxtapose this fact with the history of a place that began as a little fishing, pearling, and trading settlement founded by Bedouins who had literally ridden camels out of the desert was mind-boggling. The more David read about the city�
�s distant past, the more unbelievable its current state seemed.

  Initially populated in 1830 by a nomadic tribe led by the Maktoum family—who still ruled today in the persons of the current Sheik Maktoum and his brother Muhammed—the city had subsisted for more than a hundred years by becoming an outpost for trading pearls, sheep, and goats. Independent until 1971, when the U.A.E. was formed, Dubai entered the oil age in the late sixties and early seventies—but even then the ruling sheik knew that oil wasn’t going to sustain the kingdom forever. He had thus set out to employ those oil profits brilliantly to turn the city into the ultimate expat business and tourist destination. What resulted was a crazy juxtaposition of old and new, of traditional desert culture and staggering modern wealth.

  After David’s crash course on what sounded like a truly complex and magical place, he was thrilled to get the chance to visit and see how much of what he’d read was real and how much was exaggeration. To begin with, Emirates Air was by far the nicest airline he’d ever traveled, its first-class ser vice from JFK unparalleled.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a quiet knock on the door to his minicabin. He sat up, flicking the switch that unlocked the plastic door. The door slid open, and one of the three flight attendants who staffed the first-class section of the 747 stepped into David’s compartment. She was tall and elegant, with long dark hair pulled into a tight ponytail and sharp, vaguely Icelandic features. She efficiently gathered up his food tray, then looked at him from the doorway.

  “Is there anything else I can help you with? We’ll be landing in two hours, and it’s been a pleasure serving you, Mr. Russo.”

  David thanked her, maybe a little too obsequiously, and she smiled at him.

  “Your first trip to Dubai, sir?”

  David raised his eyebrows.