Nothing Personal: A Novel of Wall Street (40 page)

“You weren’t wrong, and I’m sorry for what I did. But I’m not sure you’re right about this. We were good together. I always felt like you supported me, and you know I was always on your side. We just lost sight of each other.” She reached out and brushed her fingers over his hair. He flinched. She saw it and turned away. “It’s a shame.”

“Larisa, the past is the past. Whatever you did or I did doesn’t matter now. We’ve both got our careers, and you’re going to wind up with everything you want. I know it.” He felt a patronizing tone creep into his voice, but in reality he felt little for her other than sympathy. She’d picked out Combes as the coming star and hitched up to it, and now he was gone. That he was married hadn’t mattered. She’d probably believed him when he’d undoubtedly told her he was going to leave his wife. It was a miscalculation, and she’d paid the price for it, but she was on her way to becoming a huge success on her own. He couldn’t deny a big part of him had held strong feelings for her, but Sam was incredible, and he was as happy as could be. Larisa would have to sort it out for herself. He thought about Chas Harper for a moment—Larisa had picked him over Chas and a sure life of wealth and comfort, then dumped him for a shark like Anson. Who could figure it? Warren always led with his heart.

“Look, I’ve gotta get back downstairs. We’ll talk later. I’ll call you.” He turned toward the elevator bank.

“I know. You should know that I miss you, that’s all. Take care.” She said it with a finality that he couldn’t miss. It gave him a pang in his stomach, but the relief was stronger. She walked to the staircase, and he watched her long, slim, muscular legs climb slowly out of sight.

forty-seven

The light shocked him awake, and startled, Warren twisted his neck. He instantly knew it would be stiff later in the day. “What? What is it?” He turned to Sam, who had turned on the lamp next to the bed and was sitting bolt upright

“I thought I heard something. I was up, but I thought I heard something in the other room.” Warren shushed her, and they both sat tensely, listening. There was no sound.

“I’ll go look,” he said wearily, and eased himself out of bed. He walked over to his closet and reached up to the shelf. His hand came down with a steel-framed tennis racquet.

“Who are you expecting? John McEnroe?” She laughed at the sight of him, in his boxer shorts, hair tousled, holding the bulky, silver weapon in front of him.

“If there’s a burglar in the house, he’s going to get a circumcision.”

She laughed again, but looked worried. “Be careful. Want me to come? Why don’t you call the doorman?” She started to get up.

“No doorman after midnight in this building. You stay here. Just be ready to call the cops if you hear me yell, ‘Let! First service!’” He opened the door slowly and stepped into the dark hall. He carefully searched each room, but found nothing. The doors were locked tight. It was unlikely anyone other than Spider-Man would have climbed up the façade to the tenth floor, but he checked the windows anyway. They were secure. While he was up, he walked to the fridge and pulled out a carton of orange juice. He thought about getting a glass, then just pinched it open and drank from the container.

“It’s so gross the way guys do that.” He had to gulp fast and lean forward not to spill the juice.

“Jesus!” He said, wiping his mouth. “You scared me.”

“Oooh. You coulda spit orange juice all over me if I was a burglar.” Sam nodded toward the racquet, which was on the table between them. “Nobody to smash?”

“Nah. Everything’s shipshape. You must’ve been dreaming. Personally, I keep seeing visions of Herr Schlusmann inviting me into the showers.” He put the carton back into the fridge and picked up the racquet. “Whoever it was woulda been in big trouble.” He made some chopping and slicing motions. “I would’ve used that Connors punch volley first, then kicked him in the nuts.”

“If you’re such a hotshot tennis player, how come you’re not a pro?” Sam opened the fridge and took the juice out, then hunted for a glass.

“I dunno. Concentration. Desire. Killer instinct. I clearly lack them all. Just not that kind of material.” He shrugged.

“Well, now that we’re up”—she put down the glass and moved toward him—“and there’s no cat burglar in the house”—she was now pressed against him—“and you’re only in those little shorts”—she pulled the waistband—“maybe we can work on that ‘desire’ part you clearly lack.” She teased him through the thin material, then looked down. “Hmmm. You look like a promising student.”

forty-eight

“…Just give us twenty-two minutes, and we’ll give you the world.…”

The clock radio showed six thirty, and Warren reached out feebly to silence it. First, he had to move the blue boxer shorts that covered it. His head felt heavy, and his neck was sore, every fiber of his being screaming at him to lie back down and go back to sleep. Sam stirred, her hair fanned out over her face and the pillow, the arch of her haunch draped by the sheet. He couldn’t help but admire her in the soft morning light, her even features and arched brows, long legs and slim hips sweeping to full breasts carried by a strong rib cage and wide shoulders. She was a thoroughbred and slept the sleep of the dead.

“Traffic and weather together on the…” He located the right switch and hoisted himself to head for the shower. He was on autopilot as he bathed, shaved, brushed, combed, spritzed, and dried himself, picking out a charcoal, subtle Glen-plaid, single-breasted suit, white shirt, and rust-colored Hermès tie. Sam had introduced him to patterned socks, and he slipped on a black-and-maroon-check pair, then laced up the Bally wing tips. A final check in the mirror told him he looked every bit the young investment banker, and he went to the kitchen for coffee.

With the morning sun slanting in from across the park, the white room took on a buttery glow. He had agonized over the cabinets when he’d renovated and wound up having them made from sycamore wood and a greenish bottle glass. The countertops were a heavily veined white marble, and the floors antique limestone. It was his favorite room, and he’d taken out the second bedroom to make it larger. The owner of the building had decided to take it co-op, and Warren had immediately agreed to buy the unit at the “insider” price, which was so cheap it seemed like robbery. New York City’s rent laws were incredible.

The Wilson steel racquet still lay on the breakfast table, catching the sun with a blinding flash. He realized he’d forgotten to fill and set the timer on the coffeemaker the night before, so he stepped to the sink and filled the Krups machine with water and grounds, flipping it on, then closing the canister of coffee. The back door to the apartment opened into the kitchen, and Warren had asked the doorman to be certain always to leave the newspaper there for him. It was lying on the mat when he opened the door, a picture of George Bush staring out from the first page. The vice president’s picture held his eye for a moment, but as he stood, something else occurred to him. The door had been single-locked, and he always double-locked it.

“Angelo?” Warren spoke normally into the phone, but held the receiver about a foot from his ear.

“Yes? Right here!” Warren had anticipated Angelo’s habit of screaming into the phone like Bell calling for Watson.

“Hey, Angelo, it’s Warren Hament. Could you ask Gabriel to come upstairs for a second?” The doorman had shouted his assent, and after a few sips of coffee, Warren heard the service-elevator door open and greeted the superintendent by the back door.

“Gee, I don’t know, Mr. Hament.” The unctuous, condescending tones of the Polish émigré never failed to annoy Warren. “I’ll check the log, but I would be surprised if any of the staff would have come into the apartment without telling me.” The building had a copy of Warren’s keys for emergency access.

Warren smiled unconsciously. The super never actually did anything himself. He’d have one of the doormen or a handyman do it. He just wanted the tip himself. Warren knew that every other staff member in the building hated Gabriel. Nonetheless, Warren didn’t have time to worry about it, so he fished a twenty out of his pocket. Another $20 tip, he thought, just the cost of living in New York, like the parking tickets, the taxes, and every other maddening expense made necessary by the endless inability of the city government to clean up its own corruption and convince the poor that any work was better than welfare or crime. “God,” he said out loud to himself, coming up short, “I’m starting to
think
like a fucking Republican.”

Warren poured and drank the rest of his coffee while reading a heartening summary of the Rangers’ hockey game the night before. The team was improving, but Warren knew better than to hope for a Stanley Cup anytime soon. Still, it could happen. He put down the paper, his neck stiff and painful. He got up and poked around in a drawer, finding some aspirin, and downing them with juice. He stopped for a moment. Coffee. Aspirin. Orange juice. Jesus, he might as well pour some battery acid down there, too. So, he searched around some more and came up with a pack of Rolaids. He popped a few in his mouth, and the rest in his pocket. He crept into the bedroom and gently kissed Sam on the forehead. She opened her eyes, the indirect light making the green irises almost translucent.

“Gee, you look nice,” she said, sitting up. “You know, you’re better looking than you think.”

“God, a compliment at this hour? What did I do to deserve
that
?”

“Hey, I know I might have told you that looks don’t matter to a woman, but I’m starting to realize that you’re the cutest guy I’ve ever gone out with.”

“Gone out with?”
Warren spread his hands wide. “I think we’re a little past that.”

“Hmmmm. Yeah, maybe. Well, we’ll have to talk about that later.” Sam stretched back out and pulled the covers up to her chin. “I need at least three more hours here.”

After the taxi ride to the office, and a few minutes getting organized, Warren began the ritual of another day. He was amazed how quickly everything had become a mundane repetition, even though it involved moving billions of dollars around in increasingly arcane ways, and at how having at best a modest talent made young professionals into arrogant, free-spending millionaires. The work was deadening and largely filled with limited and shallow people. Increasingly, the engineers and quant jocks were the stars of the Street, and their peculiar patois could kill the conversation at any cocktail party.

Warren couldn’t keep himself from pondering Liechtenstein, and the events that had led to the treasure so carefully buried there. Frankly, he wasn’t even certain how illegal Anson’s activities had been. The money technically was only brokerage fees and trading profits earned by a middleman on some fantastically lucrative transactions. Unless the bankers had been completely fraudulent in writing down the loans, there was no crime there. Combes’s taking a big cut of the profits was obviously against the firm’s rules but … Warren stopped himself. This was all a stupid rationalization. He knew that Combes and his cohorts had stolen the money from the banks, just as surely as if they had done it with a gun. If money had been passed back to Beker, that was probably a felony. If the shareholders and regulators were too sloppy or stupid to notice it, that didn’t change anything. The right thing for Warren to do would be to march right off and tell the FBI or the CIA, or somebody. Hell, he thought, if I told the guys at Weldon, they’d probably just try to figure out a way to take the money themselves. Besides, Warren hadn’t engaged in any of the criminal activity. He’d just stumbled upon the pirates’ buried treasure. He wasn’t sure what that made him.

He’d seen lots of instances where management had approved trades with insurance companies or banks to help them avoid accounting problems. They were illegal, but they were profitable for Weldon and hard to define. Malcolm had always had some plausible-sounding explanation. Once, Kerry had asked about paying one of her banks two points more for a package of adjustable-rate mortgages than they were worth, in order to sell them a different bond at a four-point markup. To sell them and buy the CMOs made a lot of sense, but if they sold the mortgages for their true market value, they would take a loss, which would result in lower earnings for the year, and that would result in lower pay for the men who ran the bank. So, if Weldon paid a price that would allow them to break even or show a profit, then made up the difference by also selling the bank the CMOs at an inflated price, Weldon would make lots of money, the bank would look falsely profitable, and if a regulator figured out what was done and actually did something about it, they would all wind up out of the business or in jail. Malcolm okayed the trade.

“Well,” he had said to Kerry, “you know those are some pretty weird ARMs they’re selling. They could be worth a couple points more. Who knows? I’ve seen it happen before.” While many unusual securities, particularly in mortgages,
were
hard to price accurately, that trade had been an obvious and egregious violation. Nothing ever came of it, except for Weldon’s $2 million profit, because the regulators were generally people with little or no knowledge of what they were regulating and rarely checked transactions anyway. Profits from that trade helped fatten Malcolm’s year-end bonus, in addition to allowing Kerry to earn a big commission. The firm’s compliance department rarely raised a stink if a supervisor signed off on a trade—after all, those same supervisors set the compliance department’s bonuses. This system ensured that problems or bad deeds would generally be ignored or covered up. There was no reward for a compliance officer to uncover misdeeds. In fact, Warren had heard more than once that the officers got pushed aside or even fired.

Warren’s mind returned to the larger question. If the money wasn’t really “missing”—since no one seemed to notice or care about the markdowns at the banks—that meant no one would be looking for it. There had been absolutely no sign of any investigations or inquiries, and most of Anson’s records and files had been distributed to the groups working on each transaction or archived. Warren and Sam had broken down the computer into tiny pieces, roasted them in his fireplace, then scattered them in trash cans all over the city. There was no sign that anyone thought Anson’s death was anything more than a tragic example of the growing crime rate. It just didn’t make any sense. There was no such thing as the perfect crime. If Anson Combes had died, Warren reasoned, it was because someone wanted that money. Otherwise, some dumb burglar had killed one of the wealthiest men in New York and left with only a few bucks and some jewelry.