by James Conway
He crawls to the top rung of the rickety iron ladder, swings his hips around, and begins climbing down. Every fourth step he looks up to see if he’s been discovered. It’s only a matter of time before whoever it is—cop, neighbor, killer—discovers the bloody footsteps leading to the open window. Two stories down, with one to go, he stops. There is no longer a ladder. As he grabs the edge of the grate and prepares to swing his body around to the hanging position, he peeks up once more and sees movement in Weiss’s window. A man’s bald held thrusts out, looks right and left and then down. When his eyes lock with Havens’s, there’s a moment of confusion, then mutual recognition. It’s Laslow, the fixer from the club last seen harassing the bottle girl.
In an instant Laslow is out the window and lunging toward the first ladder. Havens hangs from the edge of the escape and drops to the sidewalk. He falls to his hands and knees and starts scrambling, running before he’s fully up. He heads east along the empty sidewalk of 93rd Street. At the corner of First Avenue he allows himself his first look back and, thinking that he might have seen the flash of a body under a distant street lamp, he begins to run even faster.
At Second Avenue he sees the first pedestrians and car traffic, but still not enough of either in which to get lost. He turns left and zigzags southward through the cross streets, between Second and Third, then Lex, Park, and Madison, finally staggering into the darkness of Central Park at the entrance at 79th and Fifth.
As he runs, he calculates. He creates several models that consider the likelihood of Laslow catching him (high), knowing him (absolutely), and/or how quickly he might get information about his address from Rick Salvado and make his way to his apartment (fifteen minutes, a half hour if he had to go back to Weiss’s place to find or finish whatever prompted his return).
There is no question about whether any of this will happen. The only variable is when.
Only under the cover of trees on a silent footpath does he allow himself to slow and look back to see that no one is following him. For Havens, Central Park at night never felt so safe.
As he walks, glancing back every twenty steps, heart desperately thumping, he thinks about Weiss and can’t help but feel that this is all his fault. In addition to making a fortune off the misfortune of others and losing his wife and his child, now he’s brought death upon an innocent young idealist. After all, he’s the one who put Weiss on the case of looking into the validity of the positions held by their own employer. He’s the one who asked him to look for philosophical inconsistencies and numerical irregularities.
And he’s the one who didn’t object when Weiss told him about the proprietary, insanely powerful, and in all likelihood highly illegal financial tracking software he’d somehow just gotten hold of.
Yet when the young man called him yesterday, breathless and incredulous, he refused to let him tell his story. His theory. Havens told Weiss to come to him when he had facts. Confirmation. He told Weiss he wasn’t interested in stories and gave him his all too familiar lecture about the danger of words, and how only numbers, only the truth of data, could reveal anything worth acting on in the financial world. Weiss begged Havens to hear him out, but he refused. He said it would only skew his read on the only thing that mattered: the data.
Only as he approaches the exit on the west side of the park, near 59th Street, does Havens realize that Danny Weiss’s small red flash drive is in his front pocket.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18
1
Hong Kong
Fifteen minutes before midnight she gets out of a taxi and walks in a black raincoat toward an unlit dock made of rotting creosote-soaked timbers jutting into the harbor near the Star Ferry Pier. Halfway down the dock she turns left and strolls up a steel gangway that takes her onto the deck of a seemingly out of commission barge.
Before she reaches the main hatch, it opens from the inside. She steps into the dim light of a hallway, and when the door closes, a broad-shouldered Chinese man emerges out of a shadow to address her. “Well, well.”
She shrugs.
The man takes a drag on his cigarette, then jerks his head down the hall, beckoning her to follow. At the end of the hall she is led through another hatch, where another man opens a door, nods at her, and leads her down a flight of stairs. At the bottom of the stairs she stands at the head of a large, undecorated, and sparsely furnished room that has been transformed into a gambling hall. As she looks over the twenty-two round tables, half of which are occupied by poker players, all but three of whom are men, she takes off her coat without assistance and hangs it on a wall hook. She straightens her dress, a sleek, black, snug, silk-spun viscose number that plunges in front, revealing enough cleavage to turn the head of even the most hard-core gambler. She makes a show of walking across the floor to the banker sitting at a small table covered with a red cloth and stacks of chips.
“I can only take cash from you. No credit.”
“I understand.” She opens her purse and tosses him two crisp piles of Hong Kong hundred-dollar bills.
“This is not my rule. It’s the rule of Mister C.” C as in Cheung, as in a lieutenant in Hong Kong’s powerful Sun Yee On triad.
She scoops up the chips and turns, looking for a table.
“He is on board tonight.”
“Terrific,” she replies over her shoulder. “Give him my regards.”
Five minutes later she’s sitting at a table drinking a double absinthe and staring at a lousy hand. Then another and another. Within fifteen minutes she’s down three thousand U.S. and three double absinthes and staring at her rapidly vanishing stack of chips. “Maybe you should try roulette,” one of the players, a young businessman from Amsterdam, tells her after she folds. “Maybe a beautiful woman like you is too dignified for a game like Texas hold ’em.”
She antes up and stares at the man, the only blond in the entire room. “Maybe a handsome man like you,” she replies, “should find a nice dark corner of the barge where he can go to properly and thoroughly fuck himself.”
She wins the next hand, almost a thousand U.S., by calling the Dutchman’s bluff and beating him with three eights. As she stacks her winnings, she sees Dominick Cheung in the back of the room, going from table to table, making the rounds.
Two hands later she sees a Londoner’s raise of two thousand and follows it by raising another three. When the cards are flipped, she’s staring at two pair, jacks and sevens, not enough to match his three nines.
The banker shakes his head. He can’t help her. “Cash only for you.”
She takes a sip of absinthe and closes her eyes as it burns down her throat and spreads across her chest. When she opens her eyes, the young, short, handsome sociopath Dominick Cheung is standing in front of her. “So, how can we help you tonight, sexy lady?”
She stares at Cheung but doesn’t speak. How you can help me is no secret, she thinks: You can kill me, you can let me kill you, or you can give me some money.
Cheung smiles. “Come,” he says, gesturing toward a cabin door adjacent to the bank table. On the other side is a small office cluttered with old newspapers and magazines, a stained white leather couch, and three orange plastic desk chairs. He gestures with his right hand toward the couch. “Sit.”
“I’m fine.”
“So tell me, how is the financial terrorism business?”
She shrugs. “Booming. More bad than we could ever hope to keep up with.”
“Do you know how much you owe us now?”
“Ninety-six?”
“One twenty-two, U.S. This is quite a substantial sum.”
“This is true.”
“And rather than come here tonight with a plan or, call me crazy, a payment, you seek more.”
She nods.
He touches the back of his hand to her cheek. “And what can you offer in return, as colla
teral?”
She doesn’t move away or answer.
“Surely someone in your position must have access to information that could be of value to someone like me. Say, a company or security that is about to be compromised or investigated. Or another that is about to be vindicated or cleared. I’d say that a certain type of hard information would be worth ten off your tab and ten in your pocket for spending money this evening. A bit here and a bit there and who knows maybe a long overdue winning streak, and you might be solvent by year’s end.”
She finishes her absinthe and stares at the wall. The wall of a ratty fucking illegal casino barge on the darkest, shittiest pier in Hong Kong Harbour. Talking to a gangster, one twenty in debt with no end in sight.
Always doing the right thing.
“What do you think, Agent Sobieski?”
She puts down her glass, takes a breath, and turns to face Cheung. “Philo; big French pharma company; word is their latest FDC approval isn’t going to happen anytime soon and they’re about to have major money laundering charges dropped on them by the end of the week.”
Cheung smiles, then claps his hands. “Exactly what I was talking about. What else?”
“What else? Nothing now. I’m working on the murder of a trader for Hang Seng, but there’s nothing there.”
“For now?”
“Correct.”
“But if there is something there, or involving something else, we’ll stay in touch?”
* * *
Within twenty minutes she turns her ten-thousand-dollar advance into seventeen. But the more she wins, the worse she feels. Worse than losing. Worse than being alone. At one-forty-five she gets up from the table and backs away, afraid that if she stays she might win again. On her way to cash in at the bank, the blond Dutchman catches up to her. Her eyes are glassy and her thoughts are guilt – and absinthe-twisted.
“What?”
“I tried.”
“Tried?”
“To go, you know, to go fuck myself. But I was not successful. Which is why I was wondering, if you’re leaving, if you’d like to join me. To show me the proper way.”
2
New York City
Growing up, during stressful moments, he used to lash out. At his parents. His teachers. Fellow students. Back then it was different. Back then, they didn’t prescribe Ritalin or send him to a psychiatrist or assume that he had ADD or Asperger’s. Back then they stuck him in what was technically known as the special ed class, but more commonly known to his fellow students and even some teachers as the retard room.
After a while he taught himself to control his outbursts by imagining that he was in a spacecraft coursing through the heavens. This was a by-product of his fixation on aeronautics. He calculated travel to distant galaxies in light-years, earth years, dog years. He gauged his changing weight depending upon the gravitational pull of the nearest celestial body. Real and make believe. And he was constantly measuring the distance to the next planet, the next star system. Always moving farther away from his own blue-green sphere. Never back toward home.
It helped. Soon he was back in honors classes, considered smart yet odd. With time, he adopted other coping mechanisms. But after Erin died and during the divorce, when nothing else worked, when he was filled with rage and frustration, it got so bad that he even tried the spaceship exercise again. But it was no use. His emotions and imagination had been grounded. So he lost himself more than ever in the numbers, even though he had grown to detest them.
* * *
Havens comes out of the park at Columbus Circle. More people, lights and traffic. Forty-three blocks from the apartment. Feeling safer but far from safe. Standing under a streetlight across from the Museum of Design he sees that there is blood smeared on the white cuff of his shirt and the sleeve of his charcoal suit jacket. Danny Weiss’s blood. For the first time he thinks of calling the police, the SEC, the FBI. Miranda.
But he knows calling anyone right now would be more than complicated. He literally and figuratively has a dead man’s blood on his hands and feet, and his prints are all over the apartment of the deceased. Plus his story. Or Weiss’s story. Or theory. Even if true, who would believe it? Who would take his word against the word of one of the most respected and patriotic investors in the country? Accusing Rick Salvado of murder and financial terrorism is like trying to pin the Pearl Harbor attack on Warren Buffett.
Nonetheless, the quant in him continues to play out a variety of scenarios, the sequence of events that is most likely to occur if he were to come forward to name Rick Salvado as a conspirator in the death of Danny Weiss, and perhaps much more. And every one of his models ends with him dead or in jail.
Almost subconsciously, his right arm rises at the sight of an approaching cab. Forty-three blocks would take too long to walk. Once he finds the address, Laslow will surely take a cab and beat him there. “Union Square,” he tells the driver.
* * *
No one’s been here. Havens is sure of it. He can tell by the numbers displayed on the LED of his phone machine. The unchanged geometry of the throw pillows on his couch. The fact that the dial on the lock of his closet safe is still stopped at 28. Not that 28 is the final number in the combo. He would never leave the dial there. Leaving it on 28 is the equivalent of a poker player with an overt tell, a giveaway gesture or tic that stacks the odds in his opponent’s favor, and Havens knows for a fact that when he last closed the safe, he spun the dial to the meaningless and inapplicable number 28. Twenty-five and three hash marks.
Most people wouldn’t remember this sort of thing, but this is the way that Havens thinks. The way he’s always thought.
Recognize patterns. Eliminate variables. Validate facts. Leave nothing to the imagination. It’s all part of his training and his affliction, his financial success and personal ruination. This is what quants do. Quants with issues, even more so.
The actual combination is: 08/17/06. His daughter’s birthday. The best day of his life. He knew that it wasn’t the most secure of passwords. Of all people, the King of the Quants should have known better. Should have known that there is no place for sentimentality in the world of numbers. But in this instance that’s too bad.
He reaches inside the safe and fumbles through the quotidian artifacts of a life lived in quiet, recently wealthy desperation. Insurance policies, his stock and bond certificates, his brokerage licenses, his employment agreements, birth certificates, and the simplest divorce settlement known to man. They didn’t want to fight. They wanted to move on. At least Miranda did.
In the back of the safe he finds a roll of a thousand dollars in twenties and his passport. Everything else is inconsequential. The numbers for his offshore accounts, his passwords and serial numbers, they’re all in his head.
Before he stands, he decides to get on his knees and take one last look. Inside, tucked against the back wall, is a blank five-by-eight piece of paper. He reaches in and pulls it out, the photo of Erin, the 08/17/06 girl herself, taken just a month before the worst day of his life, 03/27/09: the day he lost her. He slips the photo into the nylon messenger bag on his shoulder and makes his way back into the living room.
As he conducts a final sweep of the premises, to comfort himself, he listens to his old messages. All variations on the same theme, from Miranda. All so familiar that he mouths her words as they play. Nineteen left over the span of the past several months. Each in a different way says that she is just checking in, that she is worried about him. Each has an emotional component and a cumulative numerical significance. While he’s never responded to any of them, neither has he been able to bring himself to delete them.
I haven’t heard from you in what, a month? Just checking in!
From the center throw pillow on the couch he unzips the casing, removes a pad of hundred-dollar bills from inside, and slips it in
to his bag.
It’s me. It’s your birthday. I hope you’re well and enjoying it with other wonderful humans.
Across the room he stops at the bookshelves above his desk. Inside a hollowed-out copy of Crime and Punishment are two more pads of hundreds.
I’ll pretend you’re getting these and I’m not talking to the air. You know that despite our . . . differences, I blame you for nothing. There’s nothing that you could have done.
Inside a picture book called The Universe is another stack exactly where he left it: on page 184, at the head of a chapter on black holes.
You know, not every day is a picnic for me either. I understand not calling. Not e-mailing. But if you’re there, I hope you’ll pick up, but if you choose not to, then I hope life is good anyway.
In a kitchen cabinet, buried in the powder of a tub of Swiss Miss hot chocolate mix, are three more stacks of hundreds. He puts them in the bag and walks back to the phone.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading and, you know, there’s a lot you can do to try to, you know, deal. To tone down the obsession. If you’d like to grab a coffee or something . . .
Then, after the nineteenth message plays, almost surreally, the phone rings. Miranda’s number.
“Drew. It’s—I’m not used to you picking up.”
“Listen,” he says, heading back into the bedroom, “bad things are happening. Bad work things.”
“That son of a bitch. What did he do?”
He grabs a black leather duffel from his closet and starts shoving clothes inside. Underwear, jeans, polo shirts, a dress shirt. He doesn’t have long before someone arrives. He can feel it. “I don’t know. It has to do with the hedge, and with Weiss.”
“Danny? He . . .”
In the bathroom now, shoving deodorant, toothpaste, and a toothbrush into a side pouch. “Yeah. Danny Weiss. I just found him. Dead, in his apartment.”