The Gods of Greenwich

by Norb Vonnegut

  “That’s eerie.”

  “It’s gruesome,” Emi said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He burned to death inside his car,” she reported. “He crashed on Washington Street in Carlstadt, New Jersey.”

  “I know that area,” said Cusack, surprised. “I park there for Jets games.”

  “Are there any bars?”

  “Redd’s. But most of the buildings are industrial. Why do you ask?”

  “Police think alcohol was involved,” Emi explained.

  “Happens all the time.”

  “He wasn’t drunk when I saw him.” She toasted her orange juice for effect.

  “Redd’s could fix that.”

  “He was with a younger woman,” Emi continued. “I thought she was his daughter at first.”

  “So?”

  “So the Times says Barnes is married and a longtime resident of Bronxville. I don’t see a seventy-year-old guy driving all the way to New Jersey, getting drunk, and flipping his car.” She paused and added, “Alone.”

  “You sound like Law and Order.”

  “Maybe. But I bet that woman was his mistress.”

  “Are you sure it’s the same guy?” asked Cusack, growing more skeptical.

  “I’d know his unibrow anywhere. And you should have seen the scar on that woman’s hand.”

  * * *

  Inside her one-bedroom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Rachel scraped lingering bits from a ravaged half of a grapefruit. With painstaking care, she spread a wisp of margarine onto a half slice of wheat toast. Coffee, no cream, was the one indulgence she allowed. And she downed cup after cup as she leafed through The New York Times.

  When Rachel found the article on Conrad Barnes, she dialed her employer. “Did you see today’s paper?”

  “I’m glad we can move on.”

  “That may not be possible, Kemosabe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A woman saw me with Barnes.”

  “Not my issue,” he said.

  “I don’t like loose ends.”

  “And I don’t need extra bodies.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. I’m doing all the heavy lifting,” Rachel complained. “And if the law gets me, you’re at risk, too. I don’t care who or where you are.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Stating facts.”

  “Do you know who she is?”

  “No. But it won’t be hard to find out.” Rachel doubted many pregnant women visit the Bronx Zoo in formals. There had to be a trail.

  “Do what you need to do. But one thing.”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Don’t call me anymore.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22

  BENTWING AT $33.88

  Nikki was slumped outside Leeser’s office when Jimmy Cusack arrived. At 7:30 A.M. she was already a wreck, headset askew and hair disheveled. Even her nose stud lacked the trademark allure. Cy’s visitors usually found Nikki warm, her command of the details reassuring. That morning her large-and-in-charge persona had gone AWOFL, which is the same thing as AWOL but more so.

  “You’re here early,” Cusack remarked in his most pleasant voice. He lingered at her station, hoping she would speak her mind, hoping to make the guardian of Cy’s computer his new best friend.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” explained Nikki, her forehead a tangled knot of furrows.

  “Everything okay?”

  “You tell me. Are we okay, Jimmy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a girlfriend who was decruited by a global macro shop at Pickwick Plaza.” Nikki was referring to a hedge fund located at offices around the corner from Greenwich Avenue.

  “What’s ‘decruited’ mean?”

  “She was fired before she started,” explained Nikki. “My job isn’t what worries me, though.”

  “It shouldn’t,” soothed Cusack. “Cy needs you.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she continued, “I worry about car payments like anyone else.” Nikki added with a wry smile, “Except you, maybe.”

  “You don’t like my Beemer?” His car became the office joke after Greenwich Plaza’s management towed it one day. They thought it had been abandoned.

  “If you’re making payments, honey, you’d better stop.”

  “Easy now,” Cusack laughed. “What’s bugging you?”

  “Victor, for one,” she replied.

  “Another hammer attack?” asked Cusack, suddenly alarmed.

  “Nothing like that. He’s changing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He notices everything. And you know how his pants are always too short?”

  “Waders,” Jimmy confirmed.

  “He pays attention to what he wears now. A friend of mine works at Randolphs. She told me Victor is living in the men’s department.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?” Cusack did not see the problem.

  “I’m not sure. If Rod Stewart were a girl, Victor would look like her.”

  “I’ll ask Cy if he’s concerned.”

  “He’s not in today,” she reported.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s taking the day off. Things are bad with Bianca. I heard that all his clothes ended up on the lawn again.”

  “We’ll get through this, Nikki.”

  * * *

  Up 369 points on Friday, the Dow plummeted 373 points by the close. LeeWell’s investors overwhelmed the phone lines. Cusack forgot the Foxy Lady video and his own financial concerns as the fund’s panicky limited partners shotgunned questions with no right answers:

  “Is my money safe?”

  “Should we double up?”

  “Is ten thousand eight hundred the market bottom?”

  It was not until 7:43 P.M. when Cusack packed up to head home. He was exhausted. His mouth tasted like a sewer from all the caffeine. He had been speaking twelve hours nonstop, twelve hours of slugging down coffee, chocolate, and soft drinks, twelve hours of regurgitating the same empty words:

  “We’ve never had a down year.”

  “We hedge the portfolio.”

  The one thing Cusack never said: “My boss is a liar and a snake no matter how good your investment results looked before this year.”

  Cusack shut down his computer. He thumbed his nose at 179 unanswered e-mails in Microsoft Outlook and started toward the etched glass doors of LeeWell Capital. He was already mulling over take-out with Emi—spring rolls, fried rice, Moo Goo Gai Pan, and other cornerstones of Chinese comfort food—when Nikki’s private fax beeped.

  It signaled an incoming message. Beckoned him to take a look. If beeps were visual, this one was a big, bold sign that read, “Please close your eyes, keep walking, and pretend you never saw what I’m about to print.”

  * * *

  The fax machine sat on Nikki’s desk outside Cy’s office. A bank of stomach-high files barricaded it from view. Most days, Cusack would have continued out the door. And during office hours, Cy’s assistant would have shuttled the document to her boss.

  Nikki was gone, though. She left hours ago. The fax’s ringtone reminded Cusack he was alone. It was as good a time as any to check for the Mac laptop with the video from the Foxy Lady. He tried every drawer in Nikki’s bank of lateral files. They were all locked.

  Cursing his bad luck, Cusack watched the cover page print. He listened to the document burp its way through the fax, the retching sounds of a dying technology. The firm Dillon and Henshaw, located in Paramus, New Jersey, was sending two pages.

  Underneath the address, someone named Ron had scrawled, For your files. Cusack almost left. He hated paperwork. He stayed, not sure why, as the second page slowly bleated out of the fax. It proved to be a death certificate—cold, clinical, and indifferent to the message.

  Manner of Death: The box for “accident” was checked.

  Surviving Spouse: The name “Margery” occupie
d the space.

  Medical Examiner/Coroner: Alexander Griswold had signed his name and certified the death.

  When Cusack found the deceased, he read the name three times just to be sure his brain was operating on the up and up. The dead man was Conrad A. Barnes.

  There was no question about the odds. It had to be the same guy Emi mentioned. The name was right, same spelling as the unibrow in the New York Times obituary. The date was right: September 19, 2008. Even the location of death was right: New Jersey.

  Cusack stapled the two sheets and placed them on Nikki’s chair. He turned off the lights and headed into the night. He wondered whether Cy had taken the day to mourn a friend’s death.

  Even a liar and a snake can have friends.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23

  BENTWING AT $32.76

  “Meet me downstairs in fifteen minutes, Ólafur.”

  Hafnarbanki’s shares, trading at 625 kronur, had dropped more than 11 percent in two weeks. Hedge funds were not buying the stock. Nor was anyone else, not even the Qataris. Guðjohnsen had asked Ólafur to take a walk, away from wandering eyes and curious ears all through the office. There was a problem, and Ólafur knew it. But he had no idea what.

  The chairman’s face ordinarily remained expressionless, the kind of bland white mug used to serve coffee at diners around the world—even Iceland. Guðjohnsen appeared pensive today. Like he belonged upstairs in the office. “Where do we stand on your war?”

  “LeeWell got the message,” Ólafur replied. “Cy Leeser has lost over one hundred million dollars on Bentwing since January. When his fund collapses, no one from that godforsaken rat turd named Greenwich will ever short Hafnarbanki again.”

  The silver-haired chairman appraised Ólafur, eyebrows raised, as the two men walked through the streets of Reykjavik. The younger man found the chairman’s expression curious. He had no idea what his boss was thinking. They walked in silence for two, maybe three minutes. Ólafur decided, This is weird.

  Guðjohnsen finally asked, “Anything else I should know, Ólafur?”

  “The Qataris love us. They’re making money on the Bentwing short, and it’s only a matter of time before their investment in Hafnarbanki pays off.”

  “You’re pretty sure of yourself,” noted Guðjohnsen.

  “Our stock,” affirmed Ólafur, “will bounce back.”

  “No,” bellowed the chairman. He stopped walking. With eyes like gun sights, he fixed on his subordinate and repeated, “No.”

  “What do you mean ‘no’?”

  “You killed us,” hissed Guðjohnsen between clenched teeth.

  “What are you talking about?” Ólafur lost all awareness of people in the streets. For a moment, he thought his boss daft.

  “Your heat-seeking missiles,” the chairman cursed, “came back and locked on Hafnarbanki.”

  Ólafur said nothing, stared blankly.

  “Have you ever heard of the International Institute for Financial Transparency?” asked Guðjohnsen.

  “No, sir.”

  “I pay you to know these things,” observed the older man, shaking his head. “But because you don’t know, I’ll explain. The Institute is a financial services firm that publishes research reports, including a few on Hafnarbanki.”

  “So does Merrill Lynch.”

  “The Institute released a report last Friday,” the chairman continued, “that landed on the desks of editors-in-chief at Morgunblaðið, Fréttablaðið, and DV.”

  “Okay?” Ólafur kept his words short. They could sink him later. He avoided the temptation to say, “Unknown research houses send their reports to everybody, including Iceland’s newspapers.”

  “The Institute sent the same report to every member of Parliament.”

  “What did it say?”

  “The usual, Ólafur. Fifteen pages of leverage ratios and portfolio analysis. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did a copy-paste job from Merrill Lynch. Except for one thing.”

  “Which is what, sir?”

  “Page seven examines our relationship with Sheikh Fahad Bin Thalifa.”

  Ólafur felt his knees buckle.

  “The report says his investment in Hafnarbanki makes no sense. That our relationship with him is too cozy. That the timing is suspicious.”

  Ólafur clenched his fist and kicked at the sidewalk, frustrated by his loss for words.

  “The International Institute for Financial Transparency,” continued Guðjohnsen, “questions whether we negotiated a backroom deal at the expense of our depositors. That’s what every member of Parliament is reading today.”

  “Anzvíti!” Ólafur exclaimed, which is a cross between “damn” and “bastard” in Iceland. “Who are these people?”

  “I doubted you’d know. According to my sources, a hedge fund from your ‘rat turd named Greenwich’ owns the Institute. The fund uses it to release nasty research on stocks they short.”

  “We’ll expose them,” the younger banker cursed. “We’ll bury them.”

  “I told you,” grimaced Guðjohnsen, “you already buried us.”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “My phone is ringing off the hook with reporters or friends in Parliament. I expect a criminal investigation to start any day.”

  For the first time in his career, Ólafur understood what it meant to get his ass kicked. He said nothing, tried to regroup, and wondered what Sun Tzu would have counseled.

  “Fix your problem,” the chairman growled. “Our loan to the Qataris totals thirty-eight billion kronur.”

  “My problem?”

  “Need I remind you,” Guðjohnsen continued, his voice growing angry and loud, “the loan is non-recourse. The sheikh can default and we’re stuck with Hafnarbanki’s shares.”

  “You approved that loan, sir.”

  “That’s not how I remember it.” Guðjohnsen waited for a few suits to pass as he squared off with his subordinate and rubbed his hands in a washing motion. “If the state prosecutor cries fraud, you’re not taking me down.”

  “The Qataris will work with us.” Ólafur suppressed his temptation to throw a punch at the seventy-year-old man.

  “They’re already working with you.”

  “What’s that mean?” Ólafur shot back. He added, “Sir,” to punctuate his question.

  “The sheikh paid your cousin five million dollars for a painting.”

  “That was part of the plan to win Leeser’s trust and get information.”

  “Or line your pockets, Ólafur?”

  “It’s not like that,” he protested.

  “I’ll tell you what it’s like. Your warning to hedge funds is shit. Our market value is down over four billion euros since January. And you sold a five-million-dollar painting to one of our most important customers.”

  “I can explain.”

  “Save your breath. I only need to know one thing.”

  The two men were now standing outside the 101 Hotel on Hverfisgata, the place where everything began to unravel. The junior banker, after a long game of silence ping-pong, asked, “Which is what, sir? What do you need to know?”

  “How you intend to clean up your mess.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  LEEWELL CAPITAL …

  “Shut the door,” Cy ordered Victor.

  The words “meeting” and “beating” had become synonymous at LeeWell Capital as the markets crashed. Leeser returned Tuesday morning and summoned Cusack and Victor into the conference room first thing. He sipped coffee from an Andover mug, gripping it so hard his knuckles turned white. He chambered hollow-point words that mushroomed when they hit, exacting maximum damage on the soft targets of ego and personal pride.

  Cusack assumed his boss had taken Monday off to attend a funeral for Conrad Barnes. Or to focus on Bianca, who had converted the front lawn into Leeser’s personal closet. But if there was lingering sadness or problems at home, Cy never revealed either. He was neither happy nor depressed. H
e was calm, a technician. He appeared oblivious to the Bentwing shorts, like he had found new resolve from three days off.

  “Okay, ladies,” said Leeser, with take-charge persona. “I pay you to think. Not to lounge with your pants around your ankles, hoping for some personal growth.”

  Lee winced. Cusack shifted uncomfortably.

  “Jimmy, I want you to take another run at New Jersey Sheet Metal.”

  “They put us on hold. You know that.”

  “I don’t give a shit. You’re the one with cash flow problems. So earn your keep. Make some calls. Set up some meetings. There’s big money when people flip out. Get us in front of every dollar we know, and that goes double for Durkin.”

  “You got it.” Cusack felt his ears go red.

  “Is Caleb on our calendar yet?”

  “Working it. We canceled two dates already because his schedule keeps changing.”

  “Stay on it, Jimmy. I don’t want a problem with my loan payment come February.”

  The color drained from Cusack’s face. His ears stayed red.

  “Your turn,” announced Leeser, turning to his head trader. “Is there activity on Planet Victor this morning?”

  Lee shrugged his shoulders. The gesture was more “here goes” than “screw you.” Then he shocked both his colleagues. “Well, for one, I’m in Cusack’s camp. I say we sell everything in the portfolio and go cash.”

  Jimmy whipped around, surprised.

  “What about Bentwing?” asked Cy.

  “You sit on the board. We can’t sell until the middle of October without running afoul of the SEC. But when the time comes, when the window opens, I’d blow out Bentwing, too.” Victor finished by asking, “What do you think, Cy?”

  “That yours never dropped.”

  Lee’s eyes widened. The rebuke caught him by surprise. He said nothing. His hands fumbled for the hammer, which was nowhere to be found.

  “When Eddy or Numb Nuts wants to trade, offer market color, or whine about their wives,” Cy continued, “you swagger. You attack. You pour on the insults until they’re bawling on some shrink’s couch over their pathetic little lives at that joke of an investment bank formerly known as Merrill. Same for Goldman and the other cretins. We don’t work here. We fucking own Greenwich.”