James Grippando
Page 31
McVee’s nephew, Jason Wald, had beat Eric to the exit through the hangar’s maintenance office. He suffered burns on his back, but recovered well enough to talk through his lawyers. He would save some jail time by pointing the finger at his dead uncle for the contract killings of Chuck Bell, Tony Girelli, Nathaniel Locke, my driver Nick, and Rumsey the charter sailboat captain down in the Bahamas.
From one Monday to the next, Saxton Silvers went from a Wall Street landmark to bankruptcy. It was the beginning of the end for investment banks on Wall Street. The nation was one step closer to hearing words like bailout and stimulus about as often as hello and good-bye.
A week after the explosion at WhiteSands, I was getting around pretty well, weaning myself from crutches. The leg wound was healing, no signs of infection, no serious vascular damage, no broken bones. Doctors presumed that I’d caught a ricocheted projectile rather than a direct hit. On the following Friday morning the bankruptcy trustee allowed me back into the building to pack my belongings into a cardboard box. My brother helped. Papa came to supervise.
“No offense,” Papa said, shaking his head, “but I still say it’s all one big Fonzie scheme.”
Kevin looked up from the half-packed box in front of him. “Don’t you mean Ponzi?”
“No,” I said, “he really doesn’t.”
My box was full, and I lifted it from my desk. About a dozen clear Lucite cubes pushed right through the cardboard bottom and fell to the floor. Deal toys, they were called. Little desktop mementos that, depending on the nature and size of the transaction, could be anything from a simple rectangle encasing a miniature pineapple to a light-up sculpture of knights in shining armor jousting over the engraved sum of $125 million.
I raised the box higher, letting the rest of the toys drop to the floor.
The bottom falling out.
I almost had to laugh: how quickly things could crumble. In the late 1980s, junk bonds and federal indictments brought down Wall Street’s fifth largest investment bank over a period of years. Twenty years later, Moody’s downgrades the creditworthiness of the world’s largest insurance company on a Thursday, and on Monday it’s on life support. Were we headed for a world in which the destruction of major financial institutions and the people who run them could happen in a matter of hours? Minutes? The click of a mouse?
I didn’t want to hang around to find out.
“I’ll get them,” said Kevin, reaching for the fallen deal toys.
“Leave them,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I said, tossing a Lucite-encased replica of a waterless urinal onto the pile. Green investments came in all shapes and sizes, too. “I’m sure.”
Kevin loaded the last box onto the cart. We wheeled it down the hall and got on the elevator.
“Going down,” the mechanical voice said.
“You have no idea,” I replied.
Papa looked at me strangely, not really catching my drift. The door closed, and the elevator started its descent.
“So,” said Papa, “what’s going to happen with all that money you lost in your account?”
“Still working it out,” I said.
Kevin said, “We’re bringing suit against McVee’s estate. Might take a while, but we’ll get it back.”
“Less Mallory’s share,” I said. I had no idea what that would be. Her lawyer had advised her not to attend her dead lover’s memorial service, so they were clearly still posturing. Little did I know that in the coming months it would be the market, not Mallory, to take half of my remaining net worth.
The elevator doors opened and we exited through the main lobby. We had to step around the scaffolding on the sidewalk. Two workers above us were removing the signature gold letters that had once spelled SAXTON SILVERS on the building’s black granite facing. It was now down to SAXTON.
“I remember when they did that to Mr. Roebuck,” said Papa.
A couple of photographers were snapping away at the change in signage on the former Saxton Silvers’ headquarters, but the bulk of financial media had moved down the street, waiting for the next institution to crater beneath the weight of its own mistakes. It wouldn’t be long.
A taxi pulled up to the curb and stopped. Ivy was in the backseat, but she didn’t get out. She lowered the window and smiled.
“Hey, handsome. Need a ride?”
I hobbled over. “So, are we still hitched?”
Ivy had been meeting with a family-law specialist to sort through our marriage, her disappearance, my marriage to Mallory, Ivy’s return, and my pending divorce.
“Here’s the way I see it. We can pay a lawyer thousands of dollars to research the hell out of this. Or we can pay fifty bucks to the city of New York and get married again.”
There was silence. Of the two choices, the answer was obvious.
Papa stepped in and offered a third option. “Or…you could just have fun and get to know each other again.”
We looked at each other.
Ivy said, “It couldn’t hurt to talk it over.”
“Talk is good.”
“Yeah, let’s definitely talk about it,” she said.
“We could get a coffee.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of the Hôtel de Crillon.”
“In Paris?”
She held up two airline tickets. “We leave from JFK at five-twenty.”
I smiled. “That doesn’t give me much time to pack.”
“You could just run inside and buy a few things from Sax,” she said, pointing.
I turned. The workers had removed three more gold letters—T-O-N, leaving only the phonetic equivalent of the Fifth Avenue department store.
“Hop in,” she said. “I packed for you.”
Papa helped me into the taxi. I was about to close the door, but he stopped me, stuck his head inside and said, “Have fun. And remember: Love each other. That’s the main thing.”
I will never understand how he did it. That was his gift—the ability to say such cornball things and make them sound genuine.
“We will, Papa,” said Ivy, smiling.
I smiled, too—all the way to the airport.
Acknowledgments
Money to Burn IS A FIRST NOVEL OF SORTS—MY FIRST WITH SALLY Kim, my new editor at HarperCollins. If you enjoyed it, give her the credit. If not, blame my agent, Richard Pine. It was Richard who shot me an e-mail way back in 2007 and started me down the road of a “Wall Street thriller”—long before anyone saw the real-world crisis coming. The guy is that good.
My thanks also to editorial assistant Maya Ziv; to my assistant, Marie McGrath; and to my early readers, Janis Koch, Jeff Roberts, and Gloria Villa. I also had plenty of help along the way from New Yawkers like Julie Fisher, and from a few financial good guys (David McWilliams, Jeff Roberts, Jim Jiao, Mike Moran, and others) who were of more help than they realize. Of course, the mistakes are all mine.
My deepest appreciation goes to Gloria and James V. Grippando, my parents, part of the greatest generation—two “ants” who could teach “grasshoppers” plenty. I wrote most of the outline for Money to Burn while at my father’s bedside, then banged out the book after his passing. To the end, he smiled about what he had, never griping about what he’d lost. His strength of character found its way into Money to Burn in ways I may never fully understand. He certainly gave me a unique perspective as, in the name of “research,” I watched Wall Street implode in real time. I loved him dearly and miss him terribly, and through Michael Cantella’s “Papa,” I feel his spirit on the pages of this book.
Finally, I thank my wife, Tiffany. Finding the creative juices to write a novel in “My Least Favorite Year” was no easy feat. I daresay it would have been impossible without her love and support.
JMG, MAY 2009
About the Author
JAMES GRIPPANDO is the bestselling author of sixteen previous novels, including Intent to Kill, Born to Run, Last Call, Lying with Strangers, When Darkness Fa
lls, and Got the Look, which are enjoyed worldwide in twenty-six languages. He lives in Florida, where he was a trial lawyer for twelve years.
www.jamesgrippando.com
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Also by James Grippando
Intent to Kill
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And For Young Adults
Leapholes
Credits
Jacket photograph collage: high-rise by Alamy; bridge by Arcangel; man running and high-rise by Getty Images
Jacket design by Ervin Serrano
Copyright
MONEY TO BURN. Copyright © 2010 by James Grippando. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grippando, James.
Money to burn : a novel of suspense / James Grippando.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-155630-2
1. Capitalists and financiers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.R534M66 2010
813'.54—dc22 2009024828
EPub Edition © January 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-198535-5
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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