Metronome, The (15 page)

Jack asks Suzy, “What’s the float?”

She smiles. “Mobile Electrosvyaz had 10 million shares, after the 1993 privatization insiders owned 40%.”

“He made the market,” says Jack.

“He made the market,” agrees Suzy. “And that was true for the four of his largest positions that I had the time to check on.”

Even I get it by now. “It was a Ponzi scheme, sucking in new investors into his fund by showing jacked-up returns. He’s been running up the market in his holdings by trading back and forth, recycling the shares. That’s why the fund dropped so much: when the music stopped, there was no buyers. But he had to have partners in order to do this.”

“He had to have partners,” agrees Suzy. “And at least one of these partners must have been hurt badly, because they had the shares that were being recycled at the moment. The fund holders were not the only ones who got burned.”

“There must have been quite a few people that wanted to kill Mr. Brockton,” observes Jack. He laughs, surprising me. “How well do you know history? Brockton’s scheme is exactly what Goldman Sachs did in the late 1920s with various investment trusts they controlled, like Shenandoah and Blue Ridge. Different time, different place, same grift.”

Suzy has to leave, to see her fiancé who was coming into town from Boston. As she walks away, Jack says, “Isn’t she something?” He looks as proud as if he trained her himself, then turns to me. “You still not going to tell me more?”

I shake my head. I feel like I am protecting people by not giving them too much information.

“Pavel, Pavel…if you were not in such a hurry to become a fund manager, you could have paid for a good attorney with some investigative capabilities and smelled a rat before they got you.”

Yes. But they knew my weaknesses. I change the subject. “Jack, what do you think is going to happen when this real estate bubble blows up? It’s a big one.”

Jack rattles ice in his glass, contemplates for a moment. “Yeah, it’s a big one. I don’t think it’s
the
big one though. There is a lot of resiliency in the U.S. system; we can take a few body punches, we can afford a few trillions in losses. This blow won’t fell us. The next one after that, who knows?”

“Do you think there will be a next one?”

“I am afraid so. We took some heavy hits in the past, and we recovered by changing how we do things. When we had a crash seventy something years ago, we took the bitter medicine and enacted new laws to prevent the next one. Six years ago, we had a bubble and a crash, and we responded by blowing another bubble. It’s the hubris of very smart people: they think they can control everything, that there is always another adjustment they can make, another knob to turn. But the more knobs they turn, the more fragile the system becomes.”

“I am such a slut,” says Sarah. “Run into your bed whenever you are in town. But I feel like you are my comrade in arms, survivor of the same battle.”

During dinner, she asked me how my trip to California went. I told her about my father investigating the Brockton murder but skipped the part about Streltsova’s notes. I talked about Jennifer and her troubles with my father-in-law.

Sarah asked carefully, “And how was it seeing Karen?”

I took my time to answer, not sure what to say. “She is angry at me. Angry about becoming dependent on her father again. Angry about the coffee girl. Angry about you.”

“About me?”

“Yes, her father told her we are seeing each other.”

“But how, how…” Sarah stared at me in horror.

“How did he know when we only met a couple of times?”

She nodded silently.

“He probably had me followed, to gather dirt for the upcoming divorce.”

Sarah took an angry breath: “Well, let’s go to my place then.”

Now she sits up, the sheet slides, her small breasts exposed.

“I saw the beautiful assistant that you and Martin had in the office in NYC and I wondered who was doing her. Then one night I came by the office late to pick up Martin and she was coming out of your office, buttoning her blouse, straightening her skirt. She looked at me, she knew that I knew and she did not care. I wish it was him, not you. It was such a cliché, a successful finance guy banging his secretary. I wanted to cry.”

I remember Oksana, young, dark-haired, elegant, the fine fabric of her clothes, the contour of her body with the sun shining through the fabric as she stood in front of my desk. It was Martin who hired her. When she would leave the office afterwards, I would feel an exhilaration of power, the thrill of having everything available. I hid behind my “master of the universe” mask, free from guilt and scruples.

I clench my fists until they hurt.

Friday, June 16

In the morning, I look for Jim Morton, find him at a respectable boutique investment bank. The web page shows a confident-looking man in this late forties. He could be a walking advertisement for a hair coloring system, with just the right touch of silver in his hair to demonstrate a proper combination of energy and experience. I call the bank and leave a message “from a friend of Anya Weinstein.”

He calls me back quickly, anger in his voice seeping through politeness. “Mr. Rostin? Why are you calling me?”

“Mr. Morton, I’d like to talk to you. How about lunch today?”

“I already have plans. What do you want, and why did you mention Anya?”

“I have no intention of blackmailing you.” I figure mentioning the word will make him more amenable. “I just need some first-hand information about the Russian financial markets in the 1990s.”

He breathes into the microphone, considers his predicament, decides to play along. “I can meet you next week.”

“I am afraid it must be today, I have to leave for Moscow.”

We arrange to meet at a coffee shop two blocks from his bank.

My phone rings. A smooth, confident, friendly voice, speaking in an accented English. “It’s Mark Bezginovich. Mr. Rostin, you were looking for me?”

“Yes, I was. If you have time, I wanted to ask a couple of questions,” I say neutrally, not sure if there is a connection between him and my father.

Bezginovich clears this up immediately. “I was wondering when I would hear from you, Pavel. I am sorry about your father.”

“Why did you think you were going to hear from me?”

“Don’t play mind games with me, Pavel.” Bezginovich sounds more weary than irritated. “We both lost loved ones.”

This stings, because he must have truly cared about his sister, while I thought of my father as cold-blooded bastard.

“OK,” I concede. “Can we talk?”

“I’d rather not. It’ll be best for both of us to leave this behind.” But he does not hang up.

I rush with, “Mark, please. I just want to know what my father worked on. I am not trying to reopen anything.”

Hesitation on the other end, then “OK, but don’t expect much and not on the phone. We can talk in person. Call me when you are in Moscow. Write down the number.”

I look up what I can find on Greg Voron. A degree from Moscow State University, but after I was already gone. Not a whole lot about his early years. A puff piece in the
New York Finance
magazine informs me about Greg’s tastes in pets, music, literature, colors and more. I wondered whether the magazine had a matchmaking business on the side, because that’s what the article feels like, a matchmaking agency profile. I glanced at the history of the Eastern Cottonwood private equity fund, the list of acquisitions includes a building materials manufacturer, a company making home security systems, a subprime mortgage lender, a mid-size bank, and more. His recipe is to shake up the management, bring in the latest technology and financial tools, aggressively acquire market share. All the usual buzzwords.

I play a hunch and call detective Sal Rozen in Santa Barbara. “Sal, the home security system in Brockton’s house, was it made by…” I consult the list, “Hardrock Security Company?”

“Hold on,” says Sal, “let me check.” He disappears for a few minutes, then comes back on the line: “It was installed by a local company, but the equipment was from Hardrock Security.”

“When was it installed?”

“Let me see…about two months prior to the murder. We questioned the installer because of the rear camera malfunction, he said Hardrock Security really dropped their prices and advertised very heavily in our area at the time. Do you want to tell me what this is about?”

“Probably just a coincidence.”

“Sure,” says Sal, “a coincidence.”

That’s a second intersection between different strands in my diagram. I print out a page with Voron’s picture.

Jim Morton is already waiting for me, looking a bit worse than his picture on the company’s web page. I introduce myself. Jim responds with, “I looked you up; I now understand how you know Anya.” I keep silent, so he continues, his eyes not focused on me. “So, about me and Anya…it’s really complicated…”

I raise my hand to stop him. “I am not here to ask questions about Anya or David. I am interested in John Brockton. You must have known him when he was in Moscow.”

Morton’s eyes widen in shock. “Yes, of course I knew him. What does that have to do with Anya or David?”

“Absolutely nothing. I need to know who Brockton worked with in Moscow.”

“Why do you think I know anything?” Morton hesitates – and that tells me he knows something.

“Let’s not take this conversation to the place neither of us wants it to go,” I look to the side, then back at Morton.

Morton chews his lip. “We all suspected that the wonder boy Brockton ran a Ponzi scheme, so I was not too sorry to hear he paid for it. I know he worked with Avtotorgoviy Securities, run by two brothers that hustled in Moscow during that time. They were meeting a lot, the brothers joined him during parties.”

“Do you know how to get in touch with them?”

“No, I don’t.”

“What about their names?”

“I am sorry, I don’t remember.”

Back at home, I search for Avtotorgoviy Securities. A few small hits from the 1990s, nothing since 1998. Nothing about the brothers or their names.

I update the notepad, adding Voron and Avtotorgoviy. All my leads are in Russia. Yakov was right when he said that I’ll be back soon. Truth be told, I am scared to go back. But I don’t see another choice. Too many questions, I can’t figure out how the pieces of this puzzle fit together. I have to find out.

I call Sarah to tell her I’ll be heading back to Moscow and to see if she wants to meet for dinner. She thinks for a minute, then says quietly, “No, I’ll wait until you are back…if you are back.”

Airplanes are good for thinking. Paradoxically, despite being the quintessential modern products, they are also the last refuge from the distractions of modern life. I am afraid that at some point they will allow us to have our phones turned on, and then there will be no place to hide from people trying to reach you.

There was my father’s death, possibly connected to his investigation of John Brockton’s case. And there was an early demise of the Grand Castle Rock hedge fund, together with the career of a certain Pavel Rostin. Nothing was tying the two events together except for my father and for a certain overlap in timing. Until today. Until the Hardrock Security Company appeared on both threads. Coincidence?

Merriam-Webster defines coincidence as “the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection.”
Seem to have some connection
…Perhaps they do, perhaps they don’t. Coincidences are dangerously sneaky. Sometimes they are truly random unrelated events that we attach a meaning to. Karen told me later that a combination of falling snow and us getting separated from the main group felt to her like a sign that we were meant to be together. Later I discovered that she had a magnet sticker on her refrigerator that said,
Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. – Albert Einstein
, which may have predisposed her to seeing significance where none may have existed. I think that her ovulating at the time – as proven by an immediate pregnancy – made her more ready to embrace the possibility of love, and that may have had something to do with it. Regardless, she took the coincidence seriously, and it changed the course of her life. And mine and Anya’s.

And other times we walk past coincidences as not worthy of our attention, but in reality they are signs of something taking place behind the curtain, be it undiscovered laws of the universe or levers and knobs being adjusted by men. One day, the physicist Roentgen noticed something strange when investigating cathode rays: A screen at some distance from his experiment glowed when it was not supposed to. He probed further and discovered X-rays. Most likely, the phenomenon has been noticed by others before him but written off as an accident.

Between my father and Yakov, I have learned that research in physics is not that different from investigating a complex case. You look for coincidences, for anomalies, and try to find who or what is behind them. You decouple complicated problems into simple ones. I remember Yakov quoting Rene Descartes: “Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.”

But no matter how cynical or analytical I get about these things, my thoughts go back to that “I can’t imagine the world without her” feeling I had when looking at Karen the morning after. Whatever else I did, or failed to do, that moment stands out in my consciousness as the most pure instance of my life, the time I had been touched by something greater than I. I am sure that a chemist would explain this by my body releasing some kind of endorphin. But no one ever will convince me that a chemical reaction is all it was. Our lives are like tapestries, intricate combinations of events following a central pattern. And then there is a spike of color that gives it brightness. I think it’s the hue of us loving another person, without conditions, without constraints, sometimes without any particular cause. It is the proof of God that I can understand, because it transcends reason and every natural instinct of self-preservation, not for the collective good or an abstract theory but for a flesh-and-blood human being.