“Make that Fifty-seventh and First,” I told the driver.
Chuck Bell had been featured two months earlier in New York magazine, with several pictures of him in his penthouse apartment. It turned out that we were practically neighbors. The cab dropped me in front of the building, and I asked the front desk attendant to ring Bell’s apartment for me.
“Tell him it’s Michael Cantella.”
Three minutes later, Chuck Bell and I were alone in the cavernous lobby, seated facing each other on matching chrome and strap-leather chairs. He seemed energized—hopeful that another Saxton Silvers insider was about to spill his guts.
“Can we talk off the record?”
“No,” he said. “But I’ll make you the same promise I made to my other source: I won’t reveal your identity.”
“That’s actually what I’ve come here to talk about: your source.”
He was suddenly cautious. “What about my source?”
“I’m asking you to go on the air and state in no uncertain terms that Michael Cantella is not your source.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you know who your source is, and you know it’s not me.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “I’m a journalist. I’m never going to reveal a source, not even under a court order.”
“I’m simply asking you to reveal that I am not the source. Even Woodward and Bernstein were willing to do that much when they confirmed that Al Haig and others were not Deep Throat.”
“And they were lucky it didn’t blow up in their faces. I’m not interested in playing a public process of elimination that will inevitably lead to the disclosure of my source. Besides,” he said with a wry smile, “how do I know you’re not a source for my source?”
I watched him closely, wondering if he was merely taunting me or trying to tell me something. Bell rose, and so did I. He took a business card from his pocket and wrote a number on the back of it.
“This is my cell,” he said. “Call me if you decide we should talk.”
I didn’t take it. He placed it on the glass-topped table between us and left it there.
“Be sure to watch me again tonight at eleven-thirty,” he said. “This story is getting so much bigger than FNN. I’m hosting a round-table discussion about Wall Street on network television.”
He turned and headed to the elevator.
When he was gone, I took the card with his cell number and tucked it into my wallet. I didn’t want to take it, but he’d managed to make me feel as though I’d need it—a feeling that triggered a sinking realization as I left his building. Chuck Bell was poison. Rat poison.
And I was the little mouse running blindly through the maze.
22
ANDREA WAS DRESSED IN HER PAJAMAS, STANDING BEFORE THE BATHROOM mirror and confirming her suspicions: too much of her dark roots were showing. Michael Cantella had seemed fixated on them at the restaurant.
All her life Andrea had been an “exotic beauty,” turning heads with the high cheekbones and raven-black hair of her Native American mother and the striking green eyes of her Anglo father. The idea of going blond for the first time in her life had been kind of fun. The maintenance, however, was a pain in the ass. And a cheap-looking blond dye job wasn’t in keeping with her assumed image.
There was a knock at the door. She pulled on her robe and let in her “fiancé.”
“How did it go today?” he asked.
Phil Shores was a smooth-talking James Bond wannabe who had managed to convince someone in a position of power that he could pull off playing an internal compliance officer at Saxton Silvers. He certainly wasn’t unattractive, but he was nowhere near the eye candy he thought he was—not at all Andrea’s type.
“Not great,” she said. “It seems the word is out that we don’t sleep together.”
“According to whom?”
“Mallory Cantella told me.”
“The ditz is smarter than we thought.”
“She’s no ditz, and she’s not the only one who knows. Our maid let it slip.”
“The maid? She came only once before we were told a housekeeper wasn’t in the budget.”
“Apparently once was enough.”
He leaned against the bathroom door frame, arms folded across his broad chest. “Well, we could always put the rumors to rest—and have a good time doing it.”
“In your dreams.”
Andrea switched off the light, breezed past him, and went to her bedroom. She knew Phil had been kidding, but not completely kidding.
The jerk would nail anything blond.
Andrea climbed into bed and grabbed the remote. She was tired of listening to Chuck Bell, but her last assignment of this very long day was to watch his round-table discussion at eleven thirty P.M. The guy was to Saxton Silvers what the National Enquirer was to celebrity breakups.
Andrea watched as the show opened from Times Square with a shot of the famous high-tech display that wrapped around the cylindrical NASDAQ building. Saxton Silvers was a NYSE-listed company, but as if to underscore the pervasive impact of the story, the firm’s name was all over the NASDAQ marquee that lit up Broadway with up-to-the-minute financial newsflashes. The image switched abruptly to an interior shot of the NASDAQ MarketSite. Electronic screens inside the digital broadcast studio carried live updates from markets that were open for trading on the other side of the world. Finally, the introductory credits and voice-over stopped, and Chuck Bell took over from his seat behind the news desk.
“Good evening, and welcome,” he said.
The host of FNN’s hit show Bell Ringer—he mentioned it twice in thirty seconds—was grinning widely as he introduced his panel of experts: a hedge-fund manager, a retired member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, and two other “experts” for whom Andrea had missed the introductions while struggling with a too-short strand of dental floss. This wasn’t FNN—not the usual shouting on the set—so she increased the volume and listened to Bell “get the ball rolling” with the latest revelation from his source.
“It seems that Michael Cantella didn’t just unload his holdings in Saxton Silvers the night before the stock dropped through the floor,” said Bell. “My source tells me that Cantella was actually betting against his company with short sales that could net him eight figures—literally overnight. And the number just keeps getting bigger as the stock continues to drop.
“It’s a short-selling frenzy,” said the hedge-fund hotshot. “All it takes is one or two multibillion-dollar hedge funds to jump on the short-selling bandwagon of a failing investment bank worth seventy-five billion, and Cantella’s personal profit is going to look like peanuts.”
Bell said, “That’s precisely the reason I have been so careful with my reporting. I trust my source.”
The print journalist jumped in. “There are those who would say that Michael Cantella is your source.”
Bell smiled and shrugged coyly, saying nothing.
Another chimed in. “Come on, Chuck. Give us a clue.”
Andrea kept watching as she reached for the telephone.
Bell continued, “All I have to say on this subject is maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t Michael Cantella. This journalist will never reveal his source.”
Andrea smiled flatly and said, “We’ll see about that.”
She dialed from memory the number she could never write down anywhere, then bounced an idea off someone much smarter than Phil the phony fiancé.
23
I COULD HAVE THROWN THE TELEVISION SET OUT THE WINDOW. Except my tiny hotel room didn’t have a window. And it smelled like mildew. Still, the accommodations were the least of my worries. This time Bell had pushed it too far:
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t Michael Cantella.
I found his business card in my wallet and dialed his cell. The call went straight to his voice mail. If the last twenty-four hours had not been the nightmare from hell, I
probably would have stopped myself from leaving such an angry message. But at this point I didn’t care.
“Bell, this is Michael Cantella. I saw your show. I want a retraction, and I want it tonight. If I don’t get it, you had better hope that you hear from my lawyers. Because you won’t want to hear from me.”
The instant I hit End, the phone rang on the nightstand. It was the front desk telling me that there was no other room I could switch to. The Saxton Silvers go-to hotels on the West Side had been no help, and the dozen other hotels I’d tried in Midtown were also fully booked. Apparently the entire world had followed up April in Paris with May in New York.
“One other thing,” said the night manager. “Your credit card was declined.”
I was sure it had something to do with the fraud alert sent out today on my credit report. I offered up another card, but after hearing the words “fraud alert,” the manager insisted on cash in advance.
“Do you have an ATM in the hotel?”
“It’s broken.”
He agreed to hold the room for thirty minutes while I went out and searched for an ATM—provided that I leave him the last two hundred dollars in my wallet as a nonrefundable cash deposit. What a guy. I was crossing Third Avenue, walking through a cloud of steam rising up from a manhole cover, when Eric Volke rang my cell. He’d watched Bell’s round-table discussion.
“Michael, I want a straight answer: Are you Chuck Bell’s source?”
“No way, no how.”
“The FBI found a bug in Sonya’s car.”
“I told you they would.”
“Which has the FBI wondering how you knew it was there.”
That one had me reeling. “What? Did you show the FBI the text message? That’s how I knew.”
“That may be. But I’m telling you there’s a black cloud over you right now, and you just keep making it darker.”
“Eric, for the last time: I am not Bell’s source.”
“Are you denying that you met with him tonight in the lobby of his building?”
“Are you having me followed?”
“Are you going to answer my question?”
Shit. I should have realized that a face-to-face meeting with Bell might look bad. One crisis piling up after another was clearly clouding my judgment.
“I was trying to get him to admit on the air that I wasn’t his source. And then he pulled this stunt. The guy’s a sleazebag, and one way or another, I’m going to get a retraction out of that son of a bitch.”
“You’re playing with fire, Michael.”
“You can say that again,” I said, thinking of yesterday’s flaming package.
“And I can’t stand by and watch this whole thing blow up in your face and mine. You have confidentiality obligations to this firm. If you breach them, you will be fired, and you will be sued. Do you understand?”
Never before had Eric used that tone with me. He was obviously still steaming over my Bell Ringer debacle. “I would never betray you or the firm.”
“Then don’t make me have another conversation with you about this. Because there are people here who want you gone. Saxton Silvers will go down if I have to waste another minute going to bat for you. I’ve always been your biggest supporter, and I hate having to talk to you like this. But we’re in crisis mode. I can’t defend people who fan the flames.”
He hung up after a clipped “good night.”
I tucked away my phone and took a deep breath. It was after midnight, and the night was turning cooler, downright cold. My sport coat wasn’t enough to keep me warm, but the only clothes I had were those I’d worn to dinner with Papa. I didn’t even have a toothbrush, and the last two drugstores I’d passed were closed. I spotted a bank marquee on the next corner: Forty-two degrees. Chilly for early May, but not unheard of at this hour. I buried my hands in my pockets and walked into the wind until I reached the bank’s ATM. I looked around quickly to make sure I wasn’t going to be mugged; that would have been all I needed. With the two-hundred-dollar deposit I’d given the hotel manager, I needed another three hundred to pay for that ridiculously overpriced room. The machine churned and clattered, then spit out a receipt.
Non-sufficient Funds, it read.
I tried two hundred, one hundred, and then twenty fucking dollars.
Non-sufficient funds.
This was my joint account with Mallory at a bank wholly unrelated to Saxton Silvers. Even though we had taken steps to protect it this morning, I had the sinking feeling that Mallory might be at risk, too. I dialed her cell. No answer. I dialed the landline, and it kept ringing.
“Come on, pick up.”
I knew the message I’d left earlier—“I just wanted to let you know that I love you”—had been too much and was probably keeping her from picking up now. I had originally resolved to leave her alone until the morning, but now I needed to get past the answering machine.
“Mallory, I’m standing on the street at the bank trying to get cash. If you can hear this message, please pick up. It’s an emergency.”
She picked up, startling me.
“What is it, Michael?”
It was the same cold tone she’d used when telling me to find somewhere else to sleep tonight. I quickly told her about the nonsufficient funds notice from our checking account.
“I withdrew everything this afternoon,” she said.
My response caught in my throat. “You what?”
“It’s what my lawyer told me to do, Michael.”
Her friend Andrea hadn’t lied: Mallory had a lawyer, and her lawyer already had a plan.
“Can we slow down a little?” I said. “This isn’t necessary.”
“If you didn’t see it coming, I’m sorry, but you should have. I’ll e-mail you my lawyer’s phone number. Please don’t call here again.”
She hung up, and I was standing alone on the sidewalk. But not for long.
“Hey, pal.”
I turned and saw a man wearing a camouflage jacket, torn blue jeans, and old tennis shoes. The thing on his head threw me, but finally I realized it was a metal colander that he’d strapped on like a helmet and fastened beneath his chin with a pink-and-purple bungee cord. He held out his hand.
“Dude, you got a dollar?”
I looked at him and a pathetic smile creased my lips. I couldn’t help laughing as I answered.
“No,” I said. “I really don’t.”
24
CHUCK BELL SIGNED OFF THE AIR AT MIDNIGHT. TONIGHT’S ROUND-TABLE discussion was his first appearance on one of the big four networks, and he was riding high.
“Great show, Chuck,” said the producer.
“I know,” he said. “And this is only the beginning.”
Ratings for Bell Ringer were off the charts, and Bell was clobbering every other financial show on television. Going on a much bigger network only confirmed that his broadcast persona was growing. Everyone wanted to know what his confidential source was going to reveal next about the impending demise of one of Wall Street’s premiere investment banks.
Bell didn’t want to go home. He was too excited, and too many ideas were percolating in his head as he walked out of the NASDAQ building. The glow of a billion colored lights had him soaring. The north face of One Times Square was behind him, the building famous for the dropping of the New Year’s Eve ball, and Bell glanced over his shoulder to see nine hundred square feet of Bill O’Reilly on the Fox News Astrovision Screen. Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer were on the even larger ABC SuperSign at Forty-fourth Street. Chuck Bell was on his way.
His cell rang as he passed a guitar-pickin’ cowboy wearing only a Stetson, snakeskin boots, and Calvin Klein underwear. Bell pulled the spent chewing gum from his mouth and dropped it into the singing cowboy’s open guitar case on the sidewalk.
“Chuck Bell,” he said into his phone.
“I want to meet,” the man on the line said.
Bell stopped and pressed a finger to his left ear to drown out the sounds of the ci
ty. “What?”
“Listen to me,” the man said. “I’m telling you that I want to meet.”
The strange voice was distorted by an electronic device, sounding like one of those anonymous informants on TV who talked from behind screens that concealed their identity.
Bell’s pulse quickened. “Who is this?”
“Someone who knows the real Saxton Silvers story. Meet me outside the FNN Studio. I’ll tell you what I know as soon as you get there.”
The call ended.
Bell looked at his phone in disbelief, hardly able to comprehend his good fortune. He thrust a fist into the air, nearly airborne, he was so excited. This was getting so cool—midnight phone calls, disguised voices, the stuff of big-screen movies.
He was sure it was Cantella. Leaving him a business card with his cell number had been a smart move. Going on the air tonight and being cryptic about his source—Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t Michael Cantella—had been a stroke of genius. The clear implication to all of Wall Street was that it was Cantella, and Cantella had too much of an ego not to control a story that had his fingerprints on it.
Bell spotted a cab, pushed aside a couple of Japanese tourists who were trying to get both a picture and a video of themselves climbing into a real New York taxi, and jumped into the backseat.
“Jersey,” he said, and he gave the driver the studio address.
On the ride across town to the tunnel he checked his smart phone for e-mail. One that immediately caught his eye was from the Legal Department at FNN.
Heads up, it read. I just received word that the U.S. Attorney’s Office plans to hit you with a grand jury subpoena tomorrow morning to force you to disclose the identity of your confidential source. Not sure what the basis for this is. But don’t be alarmed when a federal marshal shows up at the studio.
James Grippando Page 12