by James Conway
Miranda remembers whispering to Drew in front of a giant ice sculpture replica of the Salvado estate, “What next, an ice sculpture of his manhood?” To which Drew replied, “This entire party is a tribute to his manhood.” They kept telling each other that they’d soon leave, that they should leave. But Erin was with them and she was enjoying it. Miranda was conflicted about the possibility that the little girl might grow accustomed to the excess, but they stayed until the very end, if only to gape at the next exhibit of mercenary extravagance rolled out for their pleasure, and because it made Erin laugh. At one point near the end the three of them walked away from the rides and tents and music. At the far end of an open expanse of lawn just before the outer hedge they stopped past an herb garden and watched an elderly white man pruning an island of clustered roses. Erin pointed and said, “Flowers!” When they approached, the man smiled. “They’re American Beauties,” the man said by way of introduction. “Mr. Salvado’s favorite.” He plucked a bright red rose and gave it to Erin.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You want to see a secret place?” he said to the three of them.
“Okay,” said Erin.
He knelt down and ran his hand along the grass. After a moment he pulled upward and a two – by three-foot rectangular patch of grass rose up, revealing a hatch and passage to a subterranean chamber. “It’s from the Civil War era,” the man said. “Part of the Underground Railroad.”
“Wow,” Havens said as they bent to get a better look inside. “You know what the Underground Railroad is, sweetie?” he asked Erin.
“It was a hiding place to help good people stay away from bad ones,” Miranda explained.
“Our hiding place,” the girl replied.
The luncheon with the wives, on the other hand, was every bit the showcase of passive-aggressive, elitist, post-sorority posturing she’d anticipated. The six women, all spouses of the top earners and players at the fund, passionately discussed schools and restaurants, Pilates instructors and fashion, only deferring to the opinion of the queen, Deborah Salvado. At one point Tommy Rourke’s wife actually asked Miranda, “Who are you wearing?” As if she were Joan Rivers interviewing her on the Academy Awards red carpet. As if Miranda gave a shit. She dreaded the luncheon, but because she’d seen it coming, and because she’d promised Drew that she would behave, she played along. Drew had told her about some of the wives who had preceded her and had not done so well at similar events, and the fates that soon after befell their husbands.
Despite the unnerving fog of pretense that hung over the wives’ luncheon, there was an aspect of it that Miranda, to her surprise, enjoyed: Salvado’s beautiful forty-five-year-old wife, Deborah. They barely exchanged words at the corporate family function, but at the wives’ luncheon, they spoke quite a bit. At one point Miranda commented about how much she enjoyed a quiche recipe, and a moment later she was being led to the kitchen for an audience with the chef. While Miranda asked the chef questions, Deborah Salvado was transfixed by the industrious inquisitiveness of her guest.
Afterward, Deborah looked at Miranda and said, “You know, I’ve become a robot. By giving me so much, he’s taken away everything. I used to love to cook, to make my mother’s and grandmother’s recipes: eggplant, or even something I happened to see on the Food Network. But now . . .”
Miranda tried to make her feel better. “But now you have much more important responsibilities than to—”
“Bullshit. Being Mrs. Rick Salvado may come with its responsibilities, but rarely is it accompanied by, no offense, the least amount of pleasure or fulfillment.”
“Then do it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you really think Rick would stop you from cooking something? Just go ahead and do it.”
Deborah Salvado stared at Miranda for several moments before smiling. She put her arm around Miranda and led her back to the table. En route she said, “You never did say where you really got this jacket.”
Miranda looked down. It was a cream-colored linen blend cut at the waist. Delicately stitched into the lapels in light pink thread were her favorite flowers, lilies. She shrugged. “I made it.”
“I knew it,” Deborah Salvado said, giving her a mock punch in the shoulder. “One more reason to secretly hate you.”
Over the next few years they met several times outside the company circle of wives. Once they visited galleries and had lunch in a small hipster café in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Once they went to a reading by Deborah’s favorite writer at McNally Jackson and had dinner afterward on Mulberry Street. And once they even got drunk on the roof of the Hotel Gansevoort. That was the night that Deborah confided to her about her husband’s chronic indiscretions with prostitutes and hostesses, young employees, and even the wife of a prominent trader at the fund.
“Did I sign up for that?” she asked, raising her cosmopolitan to her lips.
“You did not,” Miranda answered.
“When I confronted him, he said, ‘What did you expect? Everything I give you, would it be so hard to look the other way once in a while? There’s no feeling involved with this other stuff . . .’”
“Purely transactional.”
“Exactly.” Deborah Salvado continued. “So I said, ‘I can look away.’ But only after I laid out the specifics of my end of the transaction. Even so, the more you look away, the less you can look in the mirror.”
Miranda remembers staring out beyond the hotel rooftop that night, toward the Hudson, her own head buzzing with mojitos and selfdoubt, and concern about the behavior of her own absentee hedge fund husband. They were rich by then, too. Not anywhere near as rich as the Salvados, but they had made more money than she’d ever imagined they would, and while she and Drew enjoyed it, it had changed them. They were no longer as comfortable in their own skin, or with each other. As if reading her mind, Deborah Salvado said, “He told me the women meant nothing and that they all did it. Clients. Employees. Traders and quants. And when I said, ‘Even Drew Havens?’ he looked down, then mumbled, ‘Oh, no. Havens is different.’”
Within a month, Deborah Salvado would throw her husband out of the Darien estate, banishing him to the Central Park West co-op, apparently for breaking even the most permissive bonds of their agreement. Soon after that, Erin died, and Miranda stopped having anything to do with anyone from the Rising Fund, including her sometime friend Deborah Salvado and then, of course, Drew.
At the massive iron gates decorated with scenes from American history—the flag raising at Iwo Jima and Washington crossing the Delaware—Miranda reaches out of the driver’s side window of her Prius and pushes call. To her surprise, Deborah Salvado, not a servant or security guard, answers. “Who is it?”
“Deb. It’s Miranda. Miranda . . . Havens.”
9
New York City
Havens sits on a bench on the High Line, laptop open, staring at the photo of the board in Weiss’s apartment. He enlarges the image until it begins to break apart, leans in, and squints at the symbols in the box for Sunday.
It’s the only sequence on the board that has letters in addition to the numbers. He doesn’t think it’s a book thing, an Odyssey thing. Suddenly it occurs to him that it’s not a clue, it’s a fact. It’s a trading account. MS: Morgan Stanley. PH: Philadelphia. With trades of American securities in Dubai, China, and South Africa, someone with a U.S. trading account would have to place the order to Berlin on those securities or the financial authorities in each of those countries wouldn’t have allowed the trades.
He zooms out and looks at the entire board. After a moment he stops and thinks, looking back across the Hudson. He snaps open his phone and whips through the texts. He stops at the words that Weiss had sent him at the club.
Wilt thou not be brotherly to us?
“Brotherly,” he thinks. Then, he looks at the sequ
ence, specifically the letters PH. “Philly, the city of brotherly love?”
He searches the account number and Morgan Stanley, but there’s no match. Perhaps, he thinks, he can ID it through his account at the Rising Fund, but he’s told he’s an unauthorized visitor at the company that for the past four years was his life. As a fallback he calls his friend Neil Grote at Morgan, a coworker from his back office days at Citi. Two minutes later he delivers the information Havens needs. “Dude’s name’s Jameson. Rondell Jameson. 1456 Pennypack Street, Northeast Philly, which, as a former resident of the city of Brotherly Love, I can without a doubt assure you is an absolute, Grade A shithole.”
“Phone number?”
“Yup.” He gives the number to Havens, who immediately calls, but, not surprisingly, it’s no longer in service. An online search reveals a half dozen Rondell Jamesons in Philadelphia, but according to a brief mention in the Metro section of today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, only one was murdered yesterday. Shot down outside a crack house on Pennypack Street. Survived by a brother, Charles, of Newark. There were no witnesses.
10
Berlin
Once, while discussing Sobieski’s relationship with her father, a shrink in Prague told her, “Gambling, promiscuity, living your life as an act of revenge, or to avenge the way someone else lived his life, is not healthy.”
“Tell me about it,” she replied.
In between sleep and dream, she wonders, If that hadn’t happened, what would you have done? If he hadn’t been evil, what would you have become? Her father’s disappearance after the scandal, she reasons, left her with two choices: become a better thief than him, or the person who punishes people like him for their actions.
It doesn’t take a shrink to recognize where the gambling issues originated.
She rolls over and sees the inbox on her laptop screen blinking. The message came while she was sleeping. Sleeping because she gambled, because she was too twisted to have a normal relationship with a man.
Dear Agent Sobieski,
I am the person whom you urged to contact you.
I am alive (obviously), for now. I have left my family in a safe place while I attempt to reconcile my role in this situation. I would very much like to communicate in real time, but for now, because as you say, lives are at stake, I will tell you what I know (and soon, what I hope to discover): Yesterday morning I received a call from a foreign client. A person with whom I had never done business. Male. Seemingly American. Claimed his name was Homer. He wanted to execute a series of short positions on a number of American new media securities (a list of which I can provide you as soon as I am able to safely access them). Almost a billion $US total, spread out over the course of the day.
Several hours later an attempt was made on my life in the Alexandra section of Jo’burg. Some sort of machine gun. In the afternoon, after NEVER receiving an oversees call at work, my Assistant said I had received many. From Berlin, Hong Kong. And a man in New York. Although I was asked not to contact anyone or do any research about the client or the transaction, I did (and I believe they found out and this is why they tried to kill me). Also, the man who made the initial call, who had a specific set of orders regarding the execution of his requests, was working through a trading account in the United States. Philadelfia. The first name of the person whose name was attached to the account was Rondell. Presently, I cannot think of his surname.
Cara Sobieski stares at her laptop screen. She types an immediate reply.
Can you talk NOW?
Then another.
I apologize. I stepped away but I am here for you now.
Shit! She kicks the leg of the couch and smacks her hands together. Then, quickly, she forwards Sawa Luhabe’s note to Michaud in Hong Kong. If Michaud can get in touch with someone working TFI or Treasury in Johannesburg, or at INTERPOL, then maybe someone can get in touch with Luhabe and she will have a chance.
This wouldn’t have happened if I had done my job, she thinks. If I hadn’t gone to the casino and had stayed in my damned room and been here for her, as I told her I would, she might already be in safe hands, and not on the run and fearing or her life.
But now . . .
She kicks at her mattress. She knows that it’s ludicrous to think that she should have been on call between five-fifteen and nine in the morning. But the fact that this happened at all twists her conscience nonetheless.
She can’t resist writing one more note to Luhabe.
I can get you into contact with people who will protect you. wherever you are. Or you can go to them when you are ready. Be safe. Again, I am so sorry for missing your message.
For the next ten minutes she stares at her inbox, trying to will a reply from Luhabe, but nothing appears.
After rereading Luhabe’s note she does a search of Philadelphia-based brokerage accounts owned by people with the first or last name of Rondell. There are seventy-nine different Rondells with open brokerage accounts in Philly. Who knew? However, this number is reduced by seventy-eight after she refines her search with the criteria that the person has to have executed recent trades overseas, specifically in Hong Kong, Dubai, or Johannesburg, with possible connections to a firm in Berlin.
The lone result:
Rondell Jameson, 1456 Pennypack Street NE, Lindenfield Projects, Philadelphia, PA.
Her next search takes her to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. She pick up her phone and calls Michaud.
“Frauline Sobieski, how goes it in the fader land?”
“I got an e-mail from Luhabe. She’s alive and on the run. I’m waiting to hear from her.”
Michaud grunts. “She dropped her mother and kids with relatives in Swaziland and is heading back toward Jo’burg. We’re trying to intercept.”
“She mentioned a brokerage account in Philadelphia behind the trades. Belonged to a guy named Rondell . . .”
Michaud finishes. “Jameson. Crackhead. His brother sold his identity to a bald dude from New York with a Russian accent, and now someone has whacked the crackhead, so to speak.”
Sobieski blinks. “Next time I’d appreciate a call before I spend half the night repeating your work.”
“You’d have only spent it in the arms of another, and that would break my heart, Sobes.”
“Anything else, because I’ve got—”
“Yeah, Hong Kong, Dubai, Philly—what they all have in common is your boy at Siren.”
11
Darien, Connecticut
“It’s so quiet,” Miranda observes. “Where is everyone?”
Deborah Salvado smiles. They’re having tea in a sunlit conservatory off the great room, surrounded by lavender-hued cattelya orchids. “I let them go. The only people left are a cleaning lady who comes once a week and a caretaker for the grounds. I’ll do my laundry and cook my own meals, but I’m not quite ready to landscape seventeen acres of lawn and gardens.”
“Why do any of it?” asks Miranda.
“Because I’m sick of having people live my life for me. Before I moved up here to Hedgistan, I was a relatively self-reliant human being and I want to get a small part of that back. If anyone should understand this, it should be you.”
“Me?”
“From the first time you visited, I saw that you were determined to retain what I and the others had lost: individuality, creativity, self-reliance.”
Miranda nods. “Hardly true, but thanks. If that’s the case, then why still live here at all?”
“Because he won’t let it go. Out of spite. Out of ego. And I’ll be damned if I’ll leave it and let him come back to live here with some gold-digging whore and then stonewall me on a settlement.”
Miranda runs her finger along the stem of an orchid. “I’d walk. Let him have it.”
Deborah lifts her chin to
ward the flower. “We used to have someone who was specifically in charge of the indoor plants. But you know, they never bloomed until I took over.” She fixes her gaze on Miranda. “I believe you. You would walk. You’d let him have everything.”
“But you won’t?”
She shakes her head. “I won’t . . . I can’t.” Deborah lifts the teapot and refills their cups. Miranda stares at the pot, a hand-painted blue and white eighteenth-century Chinese porcelain piece that she imagines cost more than her Prius.
“You know,” Deborah continues, “you never returned my calls, and I really could’ve used a friend through all this.”
Miranda tries to smile, but her true emotions won’t allow it. The fact that she lost a child and never received a call from Deborah after the funeral is moot. It’s still all about Deborah Salvado. But rather than offer an excuse or an explanation, she thinks of Drew and Danny Weiss and the real reason she’s here. “This is true, Deb,” she concedes. “You’re absolutely right. I should have called.”
In the kitchen, while she makes lunch, a chicken Caesar salad, Deborah Salvado reveals the recent developments in her life—her latest personal accomplishments and the fierce and ongoing legal battles with her husband. Rather than getting directly to her point, Miranda allows Deborah to talk. She sees her host’s self-absorption as an opportunity to elicit information via a series of well-placed questions.
She wonders aloud, “How could someone so seemingly good have become such a monster? What was his childhood like, Deb?”
“His father was a bricklayer. A veteran of the Korean War who lost the use of his left arm but declined VA benefits. Told Rick he wanted to contribute to, not drain, the system.
“In the early seventies he decided to use all of his savings to build three homes on spec and promptly lost everything to the teeth of a recession.