Money to Burn

by James Grippando

  “I can’t wait for your fortieth,” said Mallory as she came up from behind and put her arms around me.

  Papa’s favorite crooner was still on my brain, and it suddenly occurred to me that Sinatra’s most depressing song-the one about getting old-skips straight from “when I was thirty-five” to “the autumn of the years.”

  “Let’s not think about forty,” I said, still staring out the window.

  Mallory rose up on her tiptoes and bit my earlobe. She was still dressed in her evening gown, still wearing her makeup.

  “Turn down the bed,” she said. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

  We mimicked one of those black-and-white-movie moments where the couple slowly slides apart until their fingertips finally separate as the woman heads off to the dressing room to “slip into something more comfortable.” Mallory was fun that way. Last week, she’d sent me a sexy video by e-mail as an “early birthday present.” It was a parody of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy birthday, Mr. President” to JFK. (Mallory was certain that I would someday replace my mentor as president of Saxton Silvers.) It was hilarious, but it was also racy enough to warrant an e-mail subject line that read “Just Between Us.” That unique ability to make me laugh and turn me on-sometimes at the same time-was one of the reasons I finally was able to let go of Ivy and remarry.

  Ivy.

  I was trying not to think of her tonight-it wasn’t fair to Mallory-but Ivy was inevitably a part of my reflective mood. She just filled a different place in my heart, though I could never admit this to Mallory. Mallory and I had been good friends in high school but had never dated-and the entire student body wondered, Why not? She was the salutatorian of our senior class and went on to Juilliard to study dance. I went to the University of Florida, the best school that in-state tuition could buy. We lost touch until Mallory read about Ivy’s disappearance in the Times. She was divorced and living in an efficiency apartment in the Village, an intermediate-level instructor at a modern dance studio, when she called me to lend the support of an old friend. That was exactly how it remained for almost two years until suddenly we asked each other the same question: Why not? We married six months later.

  Funny, for all the talking we did about Ivy, I couldn’t help but feel that Mallory’s true impression of her was based on tid-bits of information that she had picked up at firm events-and from rumors started by Shannon and her “gosse” of Saxton Silvers wives who had met Ivy that one time. Even though I counted my blessings for reconnecting with Mallory, I sometimes wondered how my life would have turned out if Ivy and I had just stayed on the cruise as planned. On our last night together, Ivy had made it clear that she was burned out and fed up with Wall Street. Without question, being married to Ivy would have meant leaving New York. Would my life have been better? I couldn’t say. All I knew for certain was that with a beautiful wife in the next room, one who had picked up a microphone and said “I love you” in front of a roomful of invited guests, thoughts like that made me feel guilty as hell.

  “Can you pour us some wine, honey?” she called from the next room.

  “You got it.”

  I went to the wet bar and dumped my overpriced glass of champagne down the sink. I had a conference call with the German Aerospace Center in Stuttgart at nine A.M.-solar power was a hot green investment, and the Germans were years ahead of anyone in the United States-and I couldn’t risk a headache in the morning. Champagne was the only wine that affected me that way, which was one reason I never fully understood the horrific hangover I’d woken up with on the morning of Ivy’s disappearance. And there I was thinking of Ivy again, even as I was opening a bottle of pinot grigio for a woman who was determined to make my thirty-fifth birthday a night I would never forget. Papa’s husky old voice was suddenly inside my head, uttering what had become one of his favorite words since moving to Florida.

  Schmuck.

  I poured the wine and then checked the label. It was the same Italian wine that Mallory and I had shared on our honeymoon on the Amalfi Coast. Somewhere in my DNA was a male chromosome that wanted to give myself points for at least noticing her sentimentality, but it was Mallory who deserved all the credit tonight. I was thirty-five years old, this was my life, and it was time for me to be more like Papa and focus on what I had, not on what I’d lost. Mallory was not a woman I had settled for. I was lucky to have her. My career was soaring beyond my wildest dreams. Eleven years ago, fresh out of business school, I’d set rather realistic goals to have a net worth of such and such by age thirty, by age thirty-five, and so on. I was way ahead of those numbers.

  I took the wine and knocked on the bathroom door. The shower was running, and I knew what that meant. Mallory always showered before marathon sex. Tonight would be no quickie.

  “Your wine, madame,” I said as I opened the door.

  That double-paned shower really didn’t fog, just as the bellboy who’d showed us to our room had promised. As I stole a glimpse of my fitness-crazed wife, I went ahead and silently thanked that voyeuristic genius, whoever he was, for having invented it.

  “Thanks, honey. Leave it on the counter.”

  The deluxe suite came with satellite everything, so I found a jazz station on digital radio and then swapped out my tuxedo for a bathrobe. It had been at least seven hours since I’d been online-a world record for me-so I opened my laptop and kicked up my feet. Hoping to fall deeper into a “be thankful for what you have” mind-set, I went to the Saxton Silvers Web page, entered my ID and password, and logged onto my personal investment account. I’d stopped managing my own portfolio years ago, and my buddy out in San Francisco, James Dunn, had agreed to do it only if I promised not to second-guess him on a daily basis. I checked it every few days, and today was a milestone. My liquid assets alone-excluding real estate and other things that couldn’t be quickly converted to cash-were almost ten times the “age thirty-five” goal for my entire net worth that I had set for myself not so many years ago, and I was feeling pretty smug with the anticipation of seeing the numbers on my LCD. I clicked the Account Overview button on the menu, and my heart nearly stopped.

  “Ready or not, here I come,” said Mallory.

  The bathroom door opened, and she stepped out with the glass of wine in her hand. She was wearing a red teddy, but I was almost too stunned by the on-screen numbers to notice. The look on my face immediately threw her.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  I was still processing things, and it took me a moment to answer. “Were those phony FBI agents at my party the end of the birthday jokes?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you put someone up to messing with my personal account? As part of a joke, I mean.”

  “No,” she said as she slid onto the bed and sat beside me. “Why do you ask? And why are you checking investment accounts now?”

  I showed her the screen, and her jaw dropped.

  “How can that be?” she said.

  “Mallory, please tell me if this is a joke.”

  “No, I swear. That’s not even close to being funny. I would never do anything like that.”

  The stunned expression on her face didn’t lie-and neither did the account summary.

  Zero balance.

  I clicked the Refresh button on the tool bar. Same result: zero balance. I clicked Refresh twice more, then completely logged out of the Saxton Silvers Web site and logged back in. Each time, I got the same result. Zero. Nothing. Nada.

  “It’s a mistake, obviously some kind of mistake.” I was mumbling to myself, repeating that word-mistake-over and over again, as I clicked around and reviewed my account trading history. Then I froze.

  “Michael?” she said with trepidation.

  “This is crazy,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It’s all been liquidated. My entire account-everything was unloaded.”

  “Did you sell it?”

  “No. That’s the point. Timing is everything in the market. I got killed on m
ost of these transactions.” I kept scrolling down through the history.

  “Then why would James have pushed through all these orders?”

  “He wouldn’t,” I said. “And from the looks of this summary, he didn’t. Look at this stock here, for example. It was an after-hours trade through an ECN.”

  “A what?”

  “An electronic communications network. Some are regulated, some aren’t. This one looks like it’s unregulated-which has me even more freaked out. The only seller identified in the transaction reports is me.”

  “But you just said you didn’t sell.”

  “I didn’t. And some of these transactions are more complicated to unwind than a simple sell order, but it’s the same result. I’m shown as the one who authorized the transaction.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Don’t you get it? It must have been somebody posing as me.”

  “You mean like an identity thief?”

  I was suddenly dizzy. My mind didn’t want to go there. “That’s why I was hoping you were going to tell me that this was somebody’s idea of a joke.”

  “Michael,” she said, her voice quaking, “did someone take our money?”

  The answer was also on the screen. It had all been moved to a low-risk account that I hadn’t touched in years. “It’s okay. It’s there. It wasn’t a good time to liquidate most of these holdings, but it looks like the cash is still with Saxton Silvers.”

  “You have to do something. Reverse the transactions, right?”

  I grabbed my cell and dialed James in San Francisco. He was asleep-a West Coaster who lived on Wall Street time-but the problem I laid out for him forced him out of bed and over to his computer.

  “Holy shit,” he said over the phone. I presumed he was looking at the same screen I had in front of me-the long list of premature sales and other poorly timed transactions.

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “I look like the moron who bought high and sold everything low.”

  “I’m not talking about the individual transactions,” he said. “I’m looking at where all the money went. Your custodial account.”

  “No worries,” I said, “the funds in that account just sit there earning interest. It’s at zero risk.”

  “I hate to tell you, but right now there’s no money in it.”

  “What?”

  “Everything in your portfolio was liquidated-most of it at a loss. The cash generated from those transactions was transferred out of your personal account and into the custodial account-which now shows a zero balance. There was a lump-sum transfer.”

  “To where?”

  He paused, then said, “Michael, I’m starting to get a little concerned here.”

  “You’re concerned? Where the hell is my money?”

  I could hear him clicking frantically on his keyboard.

  “Let me ask you this,” he said. “I’m looking at it here on the screen. Do you have a numbered account in the Cayman Islands that I don’t know about?”

  I froze, unable to speak. Mallory was close enough to hear what James was saying, and she squeezed my wrist so tightly that her nails left marks in my skin.

  “Michael, honey: Where is our money?”

  “I don’t know, damn it.” My tone was harsh, but Mallory seemed to understand that it wasn’t directed at her. “Everything was liquidated and then wire-transferred to some offshore account that I’ve never heard of.”

  James said, “Don’t panic yet. Let me investigate this.”

  “No,” I said. “We need the entire damn army moving on this tonight. Get the head of IT and the head of security on the phone and call me back pronto.”

  “Will do.”

  Mallory was still digging her nails into me as I hung up with James.

  “My God, what is going on?” she said.

  I drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Either this is some kind of mistake,” I said as I speed-dialed the firm’s general counsel, “or I am totally screwed.”

  8

  MALLORY WATCHED FROM THE BED AS I RIFLED THROUGH THE garment bag in the closet for something to wear. She’d fully intended to pack a business suit for me, knowing that I would have to go to work in the morning. Somehow my clothes hadn’t made it, though Mallory had managed to pack three outfits for herself to choose from. Unless I wanted to squeeze into a size 2 Chanel sundress with a scoop neck and a flirty, loose bodice, I was stuck in my wrinkled tuxedo for my emergency meeting with Saxton Silvers’ general counsel.

  “I’m so scared,” she said.

  So was I. When I was thirty-four, it was a very good year. I had a personal investment portfolio valued at eight figures. Then I turned thirty-five, and suddenly I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. I had been gypped, big time. Even by the measure of Sinatra’s depressing old song, I was entitled to one more year of riding in limousines with my blue-blooded wife of not-so-independent means. Violins, please.

  “I’m sure the firm can get this straightened out,” I said as I pulled my tuxedo shirt back on.

  “What if they don’t?” she asked. “It’s all insured, right? Through that-Sip and See-or whatever it’s called.”

  She meant the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. “SIPC doesn’t cover identity theft. It protects you from a firm that goes belly up. Our loss is way above their coverage limit anyway.”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” she said. “What was this account they moved all our money into?”

  “It’s a numbered account. Offshore. Obviously someone trying to take advantage of bank secrecy.”

  “No, I mean the one before that. You said these identity thieves moved the money from our joint account into some other kind of account with Saxton Silvers. Then they moved it to the offshore account.”

  I was suddenly fumbling with my cuff link. I had a major problem on my hands, and tracking down our stolen money was only the half of it.

  “It was opened a while ago, before we were married.”

  “So it’s an account for my benefit?” she asked.

  “No. This is something that existed long before we got together.”

  Her voice was getting increasingly tense. “Then who is it for?”

  “Honey, the general counsel is on her way into the office as we speak. This is really not the time.”

  “Who is it for, Michael?”

  I’d never heard that tone from Mallory. It was as if she were telling me that if I wanted to stay married, I had better finish this conversation-now.

  I sat on the edge of the mattress and pulled on my shoes.

  “It’s not what you’re thinking,” I said. “That account was not our money.”

  “Oh, so now we have our money and your money, is that it?” She was sitting up straight, arms folded in a defensive posture.

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I haven’t been stashing money away from you. When I say that the money in that account was not ours, I mean it’s not yours or mine. It doesn’t belong to either one of us.”

  “Then whose is it?”

  I hesitated, knowing that my response was sure to hit a raw nerve. “It was Ivy’s.”

  Mallory took a deep breath. She’d never come out and said it, but I knew that she had heard through the gosse that my first wife had been smart and beautiful, and that she was my true love. Sometimes a Wall Street investment bank could be like high school.

  “Michael,” she said in an even tone, obviously trying to remain calm. “Why do you have an account for your dead wife?”

  I wanted to hold her and reassure her that I did indeed have a good explanation, but her body language was telling me that there was no such thing. I gave it a shot anyway.

  “Ivy had no will at the time of her death,” I said, “so everything she owned went to me-her husband. But I never touched the money.”

  “Even though it’s yours,” she said.

  “No, it’s not mine.”

  “You just said that everything Ivy owne
d went to you.”

  “That was the problem,” I said. “It didn’t feel right to keep it. Ivy and I had been married only a few hours. I wanted Ivy’s mother to have it, but when I offered it to her, she refused to take it. So I kept the account separate and just let it earn interest. I figured Ivy’s mother would change her mind when she got older and really needed it.”

  I studied Mallory’s expression. She wasn’t exactly famous for her poker face, and the emotions flashing in her eyes were decidedly negative. She moved to the other side of the bed, showing me her back.

  “Please try to understand,” I said.

  “This really hurts,” she said.

  “It shouldn’t,” I said. “When Ivy died, that money should have gone to her mother. I didn’t need it then. I don’t need it now. We have plenty,” I said.

  As of two hours ago we did, that is.

  “It’s not about the money,” she said. Her voice was trembling, and I heard a sniffle. I walked around the foot of the bed and sat beside her. I tried to take her hand, but she pulled away.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I said.

  “No, I’m the one who should have said something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve kept this bottled up inside me for a long time. I know I’ve had a lot to drink and you have to go…but I have to say it.”