City of Dreams (55 page)

But Owen T. was the bad cop.

Arsenault was the good cop. He swirled his wine and said, “Kathy, you can look at our fund performance over a decade and you’ll see solid results, well-managed portfolios. And you’ll see the years when we took a beating just like everyone else. Go back to 2001, for example. We can show you the books. It’s all public record.”

“So why is your accountant dead?” asked Kathy.

Owen T. Magee said, “You’d have to ask the people who killed him. But remember this, Carl Evers wasn’t some nonentity from Long Island, like Madoff’s rubber stamper. He audited all our financial reports before he signed off.”

“But something had him scared to death.” Kathy turned to Will Wedge. “Why was the accountant walking toward you when he was shot? And why would someone shoot him in the middle of the Harvard Club?”

Will Wedge shook his head. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

Peter asked. “What’s your annual fee to feed Avid, Will?”

Arsenault said to Peter, “I don’t like that line of questioning. Will Wedge is an important broker. So am I. We do not hide like Madoff. We are part of the community. We support charities. We have big ideas. And we will make a national statement tomorrow, whether the court supports us or not . . . whether you find anything or not.”

“Got it?” said Owen T. Magee, as if to put a punctuation on the speech.

“Got it,” said Peter.

E
VANGELINE AND
H
ENRY
were finished.

Henry walked over to the window and looked down. Then he laughed. But something wasn’t funny. “How in the hell did they know we were here?”

“What are you talking about?” Evangeline came over.

“See the black car up at the corner? Two shadows sittin’ in the front seat? They weren’t there when we came in. But they been there a while.” Henry called to Miss Nolan. “Did you tell anyone we were here?”

“Why would I do that?”

Henry grinned. “If I go through the rare book catalogue, I won’t see any items that say, ‘Gift of Oscar Delancey,’ will I, Miss Casey Nolan?”

The young woman shook her head. But her face reddened like a Courtland apple.

“Is there a back way out of this place?” Henry asked.

P
ETER AND
K
ATHY
came out of the restaurant.

Peter looked around. No Russian redheads. No Putin look-alikes. No police. A man sitting in Madison Square Park, over by the dog run, taking pictures. But there were people taking pictures in New York all the time.

Arsenault and the others came out, too. Magee and Wedge got into the limo.

Arsenault stopped on the sidewalk beside Peter and Kathy. He was still in “big man” mode. No harshness, no threats, just lots of visionary conversation, grandiose schmooze:

“It’s an amazing city. So much endures, like the old Flatiron over there. Yet so much fades.” He gestured up to Twenty-sixth Street, the site of the first Madison Square Garden. The building at the corner replicated the archways that once led into the Garden, like a shadow of an echo.

“Think of all that has disappeared,” said Arsenault. “The old city hall where Washington took the oath, gone. The Croton Reservoir, gone. The mansions of Fifth Avenue, gone. Even the World Trade Center—”

“Things change,” said Peter.

“Do they ever,” said Arsenault. “Go to Boston or Philadelphia and see the past. Come to New York and watch time fly. The wonders of the age are not wonders until they are proclaimed here, Fallon, and I have been part of it for thirty years.”

Kathy shook her head. “What a fucking windbag.”

Arsenault just laughed and got into his limo, then rolled down the window. “I intend to be around a whole lot longer. There are still wonders to see. So long as we can control the deficit.” And he sped off.

Peter looked at Kathy, “Now what?”

She shrugged. “I guess I go look at his books. He offered to show them.”

Her cell phone rang. She answered. She knit her brow. Then her eyes widened. When she clicked off, she looked shocked.

“What is it?’ said Peter.

“An old friend.”

“And?”

“She’s been dead for almost ten years.”

SIXTEEN

September 2001

A
T LEAST SHE HADN’T MARRIED HIM
.

Jennifer Wilson finished her second cup of coffee and thought about her autobiography for the first time in years.

What would this chapter say?

She had not taken New York by storm, but she sure had taken it. She only hoped that she wouldn’t have to give it all back, because like every bubble before it, like every big thing that had driven the American economy for a day or a decade, from tobacco to trains to Florida swampland sold as top-shelf real estate, the dot-com bubble had burst.

So thank God she hadn’t married John Smith, because they might have had children, and who would raise them if both parents went to jail?

She stood on her balcony above Abingdon Square and took another sip of coffee.

God, but she loved that neighborhood. She loved New York, period. And she told herself that no matter what happened that day, coming to New York had been the best thing she ever could have done.

She had to admit that she liked the cleaner, brighter, safer city that New York had become. She thanked the booming economy and gave Rudy Giuliani his due. But she still missed the New York she had first seen on that day she dragged a suitcase from the Port Authority Terminal all the way down to the Village.

The rest of America had made
that
New York a symbol of all that was wrong with urban life—the crime, the drugs, the homeless bums, the graffiti, the rats, the roaches, the derelicts in the derelict buildings, the squalor in the alleys, the soaring deficits, and the astronomical prices of everything from apples to apartments.

But the rest of America missed the point. All those people sitting out there in mom-and-pop land saw only what they wanted to see in the big scary city. Jennifer had found real excitement in the New York of the eighties, a kind of dark magic, even in a black limousine a week before Christmas. Thinking about it now almost felt like nostalgia. Now she could go up to the Meatpacking District—where butchers in bloody aprons used to slice ribs by day and gays in black leather cruised by night—and order Chablis in a fern bar.

The air was late-summer warm, September clear. So she lingered outside to feel the sun on her face and enjoy the view a few minutes more. The Twin Towers no longer seemed like a symbol of the sad seventies, when they had been built to revive Lower Manhattan. Back then, people used to say that they looked like the boxes that the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings came in. No . . . on that September morning, they shimmered silver, like the new century that lay ahead.

Still, she hated going down there.

Since the March afternoon in 2000 when Lucent earnings missed Wall Street estimates, a shitstorm had been blowing through the high-tech world. And it had finally found her in that fancy office on the ninety-first floor of the South Tower.

So . . . what to wear for a shitstorm? A raincoat?

She thought about putting on a skirt. A skirt with no stockings would be cool and keep her from sweating. She still had a summer tan. And even though she had passed the big 4-0, she still had nice legs. Nice everything else for that matter, because she worked out three times a week. She even went down to the World Trade Center on Saturdays, showed her ID, and
ran
the whole ninety-one flights to her office. And her legs were even nicer when she slipped on the Ferragamos that she kept in a drawer in her desk.

But why give the FBI anything to look at when they were coming to grill her?

So she put on slacks and a pair of black cross-trainers. She preferred slacks because she’d been purse-snatched back in those good old eighties, and now she liked to carry her wallet in her pocket, like a man.

She stuck her coffee cup in the dishwasher and patted Georgie, her little terrier. He wanted to play. He always wanted to play. He was less than a year old and still chewing things. So she put up the baby gate to keep him in the kitchen. He whimpered a bit, then he began to chew the gate.

In the bedroom, Joshua was still sleeping with the sheet half over him, one long leg and one muscled butt cheek exposed.

After Smitty, Jennifer had been with lovers who got up and made coffee for her and lovers who got up and left before she was awake.

But Joshua was an artist. So he slept late because he painted late . . . and loved later . . . but longer. However happy she was that she hadn’t married Smitty, she was even happier that she didn’t love Joshua, because once they were done in bed, there wasn’t much to say. But if having Joshua was what they meant by “unlucky in love,” she’d live with it. She gave that handsome ass a little pat and let him sleep.

She dabbed a bit of Chanel no. 5 behind the ears. Then she grabbed her purse and her laptop. Then she decided to grab one more thing. She went to the top drawer of her dresser, to the compartment where she kept her Hermès scarves, under which she had hidden the false ID she had used to open one of her safety deposit boxes.

Maybe the meeting with the FBI would be so terrible that she would decide to disappear that day. Or maybe she was just being a little crazy, because there were plenty of steps to take and plenty of angles to play before she finally went to jail. When the feds took down an inside trader like Ivan Boesky, they always did some trading themselves. So maybe she could give up Smitty, or Dmitri, or Brink Leekman, their chief financial officer. Or maybe she could talk them all out of it. That’s what she was hoping.

Still, she took the fake ID, and as an afterthought, she grabbed one of the scarves. It was yellow. It would bring a bit of color to her navy blue pantsuit.

She went by cab that morning. And even though it cost a bit more, she told the driver to go down Broadway, the street of dreams in the city of the same name. Who didn’t come to New York and dream of seeing her own name in lights on her own professional Broadway? At least it had happened for Jennifer.

Within three years of its start-up, Intermetro had become a bellweather for the expansion of the Internet. The company had ten employees, then twenty, then thirty. So they left their R & D in factory space on the Brooklyn docks and moved their business operations to the World Trade Center. They grew. They grew some more. And they began to talk about the dream of every start-up, the initial public offering.

They knew all the stories of overnight IPO wealth. Come up with a better way to distribute information, so that it moved even a nanosecond faster . . . find an easier way to assure that every time someone clicked on your Web site, someone else had to pay you some money . . . dream up a catchy name for a new way to sell anything from books to mutual funds to pet supplies online . . . do any of that, and it didn’t matter if your business plan was light on specifics and your balance sheet had never shown a profit. Traders saw future value. In the nineties, anyone who put a dot-com at the end of their name or an e-dash in front of it could go from blue jeans in the garage office to beating the blue chips on the big board overnight.

The Intermetro IPO had come on June 15, 1998. The stock opened at twelve. By the afternoon, buyers had bid it up to forty-two. And it kept rolling. For two years, Intemetro appeared to hit every earnings estimate, and they were promising a new software sensation called Skylink, “an enhanced application for platforming on existing Internet systems to produce optimum search capacity in the new information environment.”

Intermetro stock spiked on the release of Skylink, but Skylink turned out to be as worthless as all the words they’d wasted trying to describe it, a marginal improvement on a lot of other search engines. And by 2000, marginal was no longer enough in the world of dot-coms. Intermetro had hit the innovation wall at just about the time that all those smart traders realized that companies selling nothing but air, equations, and dancing electrons might not be the best investments after all.

So here they were . . .

Jennifer told the cabbie to stop at St. Paul’s. She liked to walk to work past the old church. She liked to imagine it all as it looked in 1776, when the brothels stretched along Vesey Street, and Vesey Street ended at the wharves just beyond Greenwich Street. Now the landfill from the Trade Center foundation had pushed the city another quarter mile west, while the towers had pushed it a quarter mile into the sky.

She cut through the graveyard, under the sycamores. It comforted her to pass among all those people who had lived their quiet lives and grand crises in New York and now lay peacefully in the ancient earth, especially on a morning when her own crisis was coming to a head.

She hurried across the Grand Plaza. If it was hot, the plaza was hotter, if it was cold, the plaza was colder, and the wind always blew a little harder, because the towers were so big that they created their own climate. She gave a glance to
The Sphere
in the middle of the fountain. It was meant to symbolize a world united in peace through trade. More irony than inspiration, she thought, because trade was about business, and business was about struggle. All that Adam Smith stuff—the invisible hand leading business-people to do what benefited others, because in the process they would benefit themselves—all of that might have worked in the eighteenth century, but not now.