Dead Money

by Srinath Adiga

“I’m sorry about Hans,” she said, finally breaking the impasse. “I’m sorry it happened after I left. Are you okay?”

  “I guess so.” He shrugged.

  They spoke about Hans for a while, a safe topic. Theo drank the rest of the wine as he gathered the courage to broach what he really wanted to talk about.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You do, when things like this happen. Life’s precious. And we waste so much of it on stupid stuff, don’t you think? Stuff that doesn’t matter. We get so caught up, we forget what’s important.”

  She nodded as if she’d been on this same introspective journey herself.

  “I want to give us another chance. You and me. Start over,” he said, encouraged by her response.

  She shook her head.

  “Please, Valerie. Hear me out.”

  “You went through my phone,” she hissed.

  He swallowed.

  “And how about that guy you nearly punched at Jody’s party? You embarrassed me. You embarrassed yourself. You embarrassed Jody.”

  “The two of you were gone—”

  “And how about poor Peter?”

  He inhaled sharply. She’d kissed that asshole on the lips. That wasn’t a matter of conjecture. He’d seen it with his own eyes.

  “What do I have to do to convince you I’m not fucking every man in Amsterdam? I can’t be with someone who doesn’t trust me. Who rings every five minutes when I’m out, calls my friends to check if I’ve really been with them. Then looks at my phone when I’m in the bathroom.”

  Theo turned away, glaring at the crying baby at the next table. The mother, a brunette with aviator glasses, was reading a magazine while rolling the pram back and forth.

  “There should be a law against that. Just like there’s a law against smoking.” He fumed.

  Valerie sighed.

  “We’re very different. I want to go out. You want to sit at home and watch Discovery Channel while your sick mind imagines all kinds of things.”

  “There’s going out, and then there’s going out and coming home at three in the morning, phone beeping with text messages from random strangers. That’s not the behavior of someone in a relationship.”

  “Here we go again. The same shit.” She grimaced as if she had a headache. He felt a throbbing pain in his temple, too. He was hoping they could forget the past, but the past was there, sitting at the table, an unwelcome guest refusing to take the hint and leave.

  For a while, neither of them spoke. The world rushed in to fill the edgy silence. A boat full of drunk teenagers dancing to some crap techno music. A kakker riding his scooter with his head ducked behind the visor to protect his hundred-euro haircut. Two Latino types at the next table gawking at Valerie and then sharing a perplexed look: what’s she doing with him? Their envy made him more determined to win her back. Not just because he was punching well above his weight with her. He’d wanted her the first time he laid eyes on her: a feisty teenager, stealing makeup from the department store. He wanted her when he was teaching her to ride a bike, when they were lying on the rug in his living room, listening to his dad’s records. And he wanted her now. More than anything in the world. He reached across the table and cradled her hand.

  “Life’s short. We can’t spend it hurting the people we love,” he said. “We’ve both got issues. Maybe I’m scared of losing people who’re close to me. Because of my mum … And as for you, you’ve been going around trying to fill a daddy-shaped hole all your life.”

  He felt her body stiffen at the mention of her father. She didn’t like talking about him. That had been the problem. They never talked about anything. All the unsaid words festering in toxic cesspools, that had brought them to this point.

  “None of our problems are insurmountable,” he continued. “I know someone who can help us work through them. And when we do, we’ll make a great team. One thing I can promise: I’ll never abandon you, whatever happens. I’ll always be there for you.” He squeezed her hand.

  “I don’t know …”

  “Please, Valerie. Give us another shot. If it doesn’t work, I promise—”

  “I don’t love you.” Her voice was like cut glass.

  Theo’s face fell. His hand went limp, allowing her to withdraw from his slack grip. He looked at her, a mixture of anger, hurt and self-pity. Why had she been with him if she didn’t love him? Was he just a credit card with arms and legs?

  Suddenly, she smiled. He smiled back reflexively and then realized it wasn’t meant for him. He spun around, following her line of sight down the pavement. A man: pink face, thick arms, thick neck, blond hair swept across the top of a sloping forehead. The man turned away as soon as he was spotted. Despite the fleeting glimpse, Theo recognized him. It was the gorilla who’d been in one too many of her recent Facebook photos.

  He swiveled back to her. The guilty countenance said it all. Were they fucking when she was with Theo? Maybe they were. Maybe he’d been right all along.

  His hand shook as he peeled a twenty-euro note from his wallet to pay the bill. Had he driven her away by being too possessive? What had come first? Her infidelity or his jealousy? Chicken or egg?

  He looked at her, hiding behind those movie-star sunglasses, waiting for him to go, for this awkward meeting to end. The hate pouring out of his eyes was twisting her face, making her look like a victim of botched plastic surgery.

  Bitch.

  But he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of saying it to her face.

  4.

  THE OFFICES OF ALPHA CAPITAL WERE ON THE higher floors of World Trade Center Amsterdam. Asset Management was number fourteen, grey and open plan with desks arranged in long rows similar to a call center. A glass wall offered an unimpeded view of the city south: wide streets named after classical-music composers and Greek gods, long apartment blocks in the 1930s Amsterdam School style with ladder windows, rounded corners and long courtyard gardens. And further along, past the Amstel Canal, the sawtooth roofline of the old city.

  Theo arrived at his desk at the usual time, seven a.m. sharp, although he had to drag himself out of bed. He marked his attendance by draping his jacket on his seat back, then turned on his computer. One by one, the bank of screens on his desk came to life. After making a cup of coffee in the kitchen, he attended to the first order of business: meeting with the research team. They huddled in the small conference room, discussing market movements, portfolio changes, stocks on watchlists … the usual exciting stuff. From there, he was dragged off to another meeting and after that, a meeting about having more meetings.

  A few hours later, he returned to his desk and spent the rest of the morning playing catchup, as he’d taken Friday off to attend Hans’s funeral. Shortly before noon, he received a calendar alert.

  “Project X. Warren Buffet Room. 12:30 p.m.”

  Another goddamn meeting.

  He turned to Nick, a fellow asset manager sitting at the next desk. The Englishman was hammering the keyboard as if he’d never heard of RSI.

  “What’s this Project X?” Theo enquired.

  “New product. From our friends in Fixed Income,” Nick replied. He had the broad frame of a rugby player, with a light dusting of blond hair.

  “Do we know what this product is?”

  Nick shrugged. “Fuck knows. All very hush-hush. If we tell you, we’ll have to kill you sort of thing. Speaking of killing, I saw a coffin being delivered to the fifteenth floor.”

  “So finally they worked someone to death?” Theo snorted.

  “You’re not allowed to die around here. It’s in the contract.” Nick craned his neck to check if someone had overheard him.

  “I hear the coffin’s a prop,” he whispered. “You know how Miguel likes a bit of theatre.”

  Theo raised an eyebrow. “Miguel’s in the meeting? Whatever happened to the Chinese wall between divisions?”

  “He’s CEO. He can walk through Chinese walls.”

  “Must be something big if he’s coming
to our floor.”

  “Bigger than my cock.”

  Theo rolled his eyes. That didn’t take long.

  “I’ve seen your cock, Nick. It’s not that big.”

  “Why were you looking at my cock, you pervert?” Nick squinted.

  “You showed it to me. At the Christmas party. I’m still traumatized.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re just taking advantage of the fact that I was too drunk to remember anything.”

  “I tried to take a photo on my phone, but the camera couldn’t focus because it was too small,” Theo said, curling his little finger.

  Nick made a face.

  A few minutes later, they joined the procession of bodies filing into the Warren Buffet room. It was an old-school boardroom: burnished oak table, wood-paneled walls decorated with oil paintings of the long-retired founders, a tall vase with white orchids on the cabinet that concealed the AV equipment.

  The seats in the front and the back were the first to be claimed. Theo settled somewhere in the middle, between Nick and a German analyst with plastered-down hair and strong aftershave. He opened his writing pad and doodled quietly, while his colleagues exchanged weekend stories in a United Nations of accents.

  Suddenly, voices fell off a cliff as Miguel entered the room with the stealth of a ninja, his current favorite buzzword. A Colombian by birth, he had light Latino skin, dark hair greying at the chops and a baby face you’d trust if you didn’t know better. He stood at the head of the table, scanning the room with small, yellow eyes. Behind him, his entourage: four stiff, self-important men and one nervous-looking intern with a boom box on his shoulder.

  “Why’s everybody sitting up like you’ve got rods up your asses?” Miguel said with a thin smile. After twenty years on Wall Street, his accent was a mongrel: a New York drawl with the odd Latino lisp.

  “Relax. You’re not about to get fired. Some of you, maybe. Just kidding … No firings. Not today,” he said to titters of nervous laughter. “We’re going to have some fun. On your feet, everyone.” He clapped his hands twice, triggering a hustle of activity in the room: bodies rising, chairs rolling, feet shuffling, a few whispers here and there. Nick and Theo exchanged a quick glance.

  The intern stepped forward and hit play on the ghetto blaster. The speakers cranked out the opening bars of Billy Ocean’s “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going.”

  “Come on, I want to see asses shaking,” Miguel shouted, as though he were an aerobics instructor.

  Theo rolled his eyes and joined his colleagues, who were twisting their bodies and throwing their arms in the air. He bobbed his head like a snake and tapped his foot on the carpet.

  “More energy!” Miguel appeared to be looking at Theo, which prompted him to pump more vigor into his movements: twisting the waist, fists moving in the air in small arcs as if piloting an imaginary steering wheel, all the while straining not to give off a “get me out of here” look.

  The dancing slowed as the music faded. Theo scrambled back to his seat before it stopped. Next to him, an overweight Nick wiped his forehead and hitched his trousers up by his belt loops.

  “How did that feel?” Miguel asked the room.

  In these situations, there was always someone eager to kiss up, get his tongue in there before everyone else.

  “Great! I love it!”

  “I hate it. Gay ’80s pop.” Miguel snorted, triggering a trail of scornful giggles around the room.

  “So why did I play this song if I hate it? Being smart people, I’m sure you’ve worked it out. 2008 was an ass-fuck for the industry. The big boys got handouts, but companies like us who weren’t deemed too big to fail—we were left to fail. Gentlemen, this was us back then, and I’m not kidding.” He shaped his hand into a gun and brought it up to his head.

  “But let me tell you, there’s something beautiful when this happens,” he said, a gleam in the eye as if the gun grinding his temple were real. “Your heart’s pumping. Brain’s threatening to go into meltdown. All you can do to stop yourself from soiling your underpants is think, because if you don’t, it’s over. It was do-or-die. And guess what—we did!” The hand that was a gun a second before was a fist punching the air, triggering a spontaneous outburst of sycophantic applause.

  Theo brought his hands together and made a show of clapping too, because that was what he was expected to do. Inside, he was thinking of all the things he could be accomplishing right then instead of listening to a homophobic, gun-loving megalomaniac crank out punchlines.

  After savoring the applause, Miguel raised his finger abruptly. The room went quiet.

  “But this isn’t about how awesome we were in the past. It’s about the future. A future so bright, you’ll need welding goggles to look at it. Because we’ve created something extraordinary in this building. World-beater, game changer, these don’t even begin to cut it.”

  As Miguel orated as if he were General Eisenhower rallying his troops before the D-Day surge, two uniformed security guards wheeled in a black coffin balanced on a waist-high plinth. They maneuvered around the Colombian and stationed it behind him.

  “Gentlemen. Without further ado, I give you the future of finance … Afterlife Dollar investments.”

  Theo gaped.

  The coffin lid flipped open and a torso popped up like a jack-in-thebox. The Lazarus was a man of subcontinental descent: dark and gangly with long, wavy hair. The security guards grasped him under the armpits and hoisted him effortlessly from the box. He bounced on the carpet and beamed at the room.

  “Nice to be back from the dead. Hello, everyone. I’m Raj, product specialist, and I’m delighted to present an investment opportunity that’s literally out of this world,” he said in a British accent. A screen buzzed down from the ceiling when he clicked a remote.

  Realizing his mouth was still open, Theo closed it.

  “In 2002, a little-known bank in Hong Kong launched Afterlife Dollars with a modest customer base and an exchange rate of 0.001. Fast-forward ten years, the exchange rate is 0.125, and the bank has branches in virtually every major world city. Some of you might laugh at the idea of an ATM machine in heaven, but make no mistake about it: we are looking at a major global phenomenon. There’s another side to this. One that’s so mind-bogglingly obvious, I’m surprised—in fact, amazed—that no one else has picked up on it. Had you treated Afterlife Dollars as a foreign currency investment and staked, say, eight grand back in 2003, today you’d be sitting on one million. The same thing in bonds and equities would’ve fetched maybe thirty grand if you’re lucky. I don’t know much about the next life—actually, I don’t even know much about this one.” He chuckled. “But I certainly know a good return when I see one. Eighty-three percent, year on year. If that won’t give your clients a hard-on, I don’t know what will.”

  The specialist gestured to the intern, who no longer appeared to be on boom-box duty. The intern hit a switch to kill the fluorescent tubes. The room was now illuminated by a track of dim spotlights, the first slide glowing brightly in the semidarkness.

  “Afterlife Dollar investments. An out-of-this-world investment opportunity.”

  Is this some kind of a sick joke?

  As the product specialist launched into his presentation, Theo swung his gaze toward Miguel. The Colombian was leaning against the wood-paneled wall, the spotlight above his head shining on the smug look that had settled on his face. The smile of a man with a plan. The plan was simple: use Asset Management to hook the premier league. Institutional investors, hedge funds, and high-net-worth individuals. The sort of clients Theo and his colleagues dealt with on a daily basis. Because once the premier league came out to play, other divisions would follow. That was how you spray-painted shit to make it look like gold.

  Theo scanned the faces in the darkened room, wondering if the masks of knitted brows and pursed lips concealed any outrage. The answer, in all likelihood, was no. Half of them were like the Rain Man. Morality didn’t even come into the equa
tion. The other half had it beaten out of them or had chosen voluntarily to leave it at the door. The only person who might have felt something was Nick, and he currently had a robot face screwed onto his head. And that was what Theo ought to be doing, too.

  He straightened his back and pictured himself as a robot: skin of polished metal, musculature of wires, all emotions pushed to one side. He picked up his pen to jot notes, but the robot impersonation didn’t last long. He kneaded his temple as the onslaught of jargon in the presentation triggered a headache. It was language he struggled to understand despite being in the business for fifteen years. But that was exactly the point: smoke and mirrors.

  “And now, gentlemen, for that four-letter word none of us like hearing. Risk.” The specialist chuckled. The leash that was straining to hold Theo back finally snapped.

  “Low to moderate risk? Are you kidding me? How can you determine VAR without a historical crash?”

  The specialist looked sharply at Theo.

  “We’ve created our own proprietary model. We believe the risks are limited because of the levels of asymmetry between supply and current death rates.”

  “You can use any model you like. But without a precedent, the risks are indeterminate. And if you don’t know what the risks are, how can you label them low to moderate?” Theo argued.

  “You don’t need to worry about that. We wouldn’t launch a product like this without rigorous risk evaluation. It has been rated AAA-.”

  “By who? The same people who rated subprime securities?” Theo said, irked by the specialist’s condescending tone. “How can we be sure this product will be around in five years, with all the talk of regulatory intervention in the wake of the Mumbai blast?”

  “There are some who argue that the publicity from the blast has increased demand,” the specialist said, matter-of-fact.

  Theo stared in disbelief. Did the dickhead know he’d lost a friend in the Mumbai blast?

  “So have you factored that in to your model, too?” he thundered. “More blasts? More deaths? More publicity?”

  “What’s your point?” The voice sliced through the room like a knife. Miguel. The fluorescent tubes in the ceiling flashed twice before coming on. The room materialized from the darkness, twenty-three pairs of eyes looking at him. Including Miguel’s.