The Fixer (7 page)

Andrea was watching him, her head tilted, a wry smile, amused. He noticed her crooked tooth in the corner of her smile, and he smiled back. She used to be cute. She’d become gorgeous. She was also confident in ways she’d never been before.

She took a sip and nodded. “I’m sure it’s great. But it’s definitely wasted on me.”

Four thousand dollars and neither of them was experiencing a sensory orgasm.
At least,
he thought,
it’s not my money.

“So you didn’t get the jokes,” Rick said, back to Goldman Sachs.

She shrugged. “You play along. So you’re trading credit derivatives. Credit default swaps. You’re basically betting against some poor cash-strapped company and hoping they go down the tubes so you’ll get rich, cashing in your death-spiral convertibles—oh, sorry, I meant ‘floating convertibles.’ You’re inside the donut machine making . . . synthetic collateralized debt obligations and selling them to rich schmucks. Arcane, exotic financial instruments no one understands. And so what?”

Rick didn’t understand most of what she’d just said. She might as well have been speaking Serbian. He took another sip of wine. He could taste a little cherry, some tannin in the aftertaste. It was actually quite good. It was definitely opening up. “But at least you’re making good money.”

“Crazy money. Ridiculous money. Enormous amounts of disposable income. But you know what? You’ve got no time to spend it anyway. Because you’re working a hundred hours a week or more and that’s all you’re doing. You have no life.”

Rick nodded. “I get it.” He took another sip. He noticed a grapefruit note, and something dark and dusky, almost bricklike. It was truly a spectacular wine.

“I mean, you spend every minute of your day buying and selling shit for someone else. Really. That’s all you’re doing. Meanwhile, you’re looking at the hedge fund guys and thinking, how come I don’t bring home
that
kind of money? If they ever stopped to think about it, which they usually don’t, they’d consider it a waste of a life. I mean, I think that’s why some of those guys throw their money away without even thinking about it, so they can at least have something to show for all that wasted life. So they can feel their life has some kind of meaning. So they can tell people they saw Paul McCartney or Sting on the beach at Saint Bart’s. Or they’ll go to Per Se and dump thousands of bucks for a single bottle of . . . of freaking fermented
grape juice,
you know?” She lifted her giant wine glass. “It’s stupid. It’s
obscene
. It’s gross.” Then she smiled. “No offense.”

Rick smiled back, starting to feel a little queasy. “So Geometry Partners is, uh, what, a hedge fund?”

“Oh,” she said with a quick, musical laugh. “Oh, God no. It’s—well, I took some of the money I made in the Distressed Opportunities Fund at Goldman and started this little nonprofit. We try to make low-income kids fall in love with geometry.”

It was his turn to laugh. “So you mean
actual
geometry.”

She nodded. “I did Teach for America for a year before Wharton, and, well, I liked it, but I figured I could do a lot better someday. Just dealing with math—you remember how much I loved math, right? I mean, geometry is so concrete. It’s so visual. It’s real world. It’s buildings and houses and rockets and baseball—the angle of a pitch, right?—the sun and the moon. And if you bring it to them that way, kids
get
it. They love it. They realize they might actually be good at math, and that gives them the confidence to do well in school.”

Rick nodded, took another sip of the four-thousand-dollar wine, which was starting to taste a little like a horse barn.

“We bring in math teachers and train them how to make math fun—we pay them for it, of course—and then we get the kids in there, and the damn thing is, it
works,
Rick. Like today—there’s this kid Darnell who goes to this school in Dorchester, and the teachers all hated him because he was so hostile. His brother’s in prison and his mother has a drug problem. I mean, Darnell’s exactly the kind of kid the gangs would love to sweep up, help them count keys of coke or cash or whatever. You can just see him disappearing into the life. But today I was showing him this math game on the iPad? And I could see him transform before my eyes—that hostility, that wariness—it was all gone. He was
into
it. He felt empowered. And I think—I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy, but I think this kid might . . . just might . . . make it.” Her eyes were moist, shining. “Distressed opportunities? One day it just popped into my head: How about public education? Isn’t
that
a distressed opportunity?”

Rick had fallen silent. He was fairly drunk by now from the Champagne and the wine, and his head was reeling. He hadn’t just underestimated Andrea. He realized he never knew her.

A couple of waiters appeared with golden plates, which they set down in front of Andrea, then Rick. Rick peered bleakly at the obscene display, crepes stuffed with caviar, tied up with chives, actual gold leaf on top of each one. They were loathsome now to look at, and besides, Rick had lost his appetite.

“Sir, madam? Your beggar’s purses. Osetra instead of beluga, just as you requested!”

“Thank you,” Rick said weakly.

Andrea glanced from her plate to Rick’s eyes. Her smile now seemed chilly. “Beggar’s purse, huh?” she said.

W
hen he got back to his king-size bed at the Charles, he was unable to sleep. He was drunk. The hotel room tilted on its axis, wobbled, and capsized. He thrashed around the bed as he replayed the evening over and over, agonized. How could he have been such a buffoon? Jesus! What the hell was he thinking, throwing money around like that? He saw himself through Andrea’s eyes, and it was painful. He might as well be one of those Goldman Sachs dicks she despised. The ridiculous beggar’s purses.
Beggar’s purses
—could there possibly be a more offensive name? And that . . .
four-thousand-dollar
bottle of La Tâche, wasted on both of them.

He could almost hear her words playing in an echo chamber.
They’ll go to Per Se and dump thousands of bucks for a single bottle of . . . of freaking fermented
grape juice
, you know? It’s stupid. It’s
obscene.
It’s gross.

He was no better than one of those swaggering, splurging, callow investment bankers whose life was hollow and meaningless. He was just the kind of asshole she was railing about. Exactly the sort of guy
Back Bay
magazine used to publish worshipful profiles about. With only one difference: He had less money.

He’d been trying to impress a girlfriend he’d once dumped, to win her over with a fraudulent optical illusion of his “success.” When that was the fastest way to repel her. And he’d repelled her for sure. He could see it in her face, now that he reviewed the tapes of the evening, the way her smile had gone from sweet and nervous and hopeful to amused and then cloyed and finally outright disgusted. She saw him for what he was: a tool. A pompous, pretentious, affected jerk.

Yesterday, that three and a half million dollars had been a vast, almost incalculable fortune. And then? Between his fancy duds from Marco (ten thousand dollars), paying Jeff, and the seven thousand bucks he’d dumped at Madrigal, his fortune—which was how he thought of it now,
his
—had been depleted by twenty-five thousand dollars. If he kept up spending at this rate, after a month and a half he’d have nothing left.

*   *   *

He awoke late the next morning, head thick and pounding and mouth tasting like asphalt, as though a truck had driven through it, farting its foul exhaust. He got up carefully, balancing his throbbing head as if it were a fragile globe made of gossamer-spun glass, and made it to the toilet just in time to throw up.

That made him feel a little better.

He went down to the small lobby gift shop in T-shirt and gym shorts and bought a little bottle of Advil and a couple of bottles of water and gulped down four pills right there in the shop. He went back upstairs, changed into jeans and a button-down shirt, and went to the restaurant attached to the hotel and had some black coffee. He was still too queasy to eat anything. A sip of fresh-squeezed orange juice was a mistake; it hit his stomach like battery acid. Eventually he was able to eat a croissant, dry.

Moving slowly and gingerly, he took the elevator down to the parking garage beneath the hotel and looked for his car.

It was on the second underground level, parked a little crooked. And he’d been mostly sober at the time, except for a couple of flutes of Champagne at Marco. When he thought about how roaring drunk he’d gotten last night, he was glad he’d hired a limo.

Then he remembered: Hadn’t his father indicated that the money wasn’t his?

Then whose was it?

He knew what he had to do today. He had to find out where this money came from, how it had ended up sealed in the walls of his father’s house.

Where to start? His sister, Wendy? She’d have said something after all these years. And she’d have been looking for it: If she
knew
there was money hidden there, she wouldn’t be insisting on selling the house. No way did she know about the money.

But someone did. Whoever had broken into the house and attacked him was looking for something, that much was clear. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. Once again he ran through the list of possibles. Someone at one of the banks where he’d made deposits? The guy from the storage place? A neighbor?

Jeff? One of his guys?

Rick had been so careful, up until last night, anyway. Because he knew having too much cash always makes you a target.

He’d seen enough movies to know what happens to people who find large quantities of loot. Rarely did it end well. Brother turns against brother, Humphrey Bogart goes stark raving mad. A psychopathic killer with
LOVE
and
HATE
tattooed on his fingers comes to town. A lunatic with a nail gun pays a visit. But he didn’t want to be in a noir film. He wanted a happy ending. He wanted
Brewster’s Millions,
not
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

He took out the BMW’s keyless remote and thumbed the button to unlock the car.

Maybe Len’s old secretary could help figure it out. He’d have to be cagey about the amount of cash—she might well try to insist that some of it rightfully belonged to her. She’d worked for Len for more than thirty years, after all. And even if she knew nothing about the three million–plus, she could still be invaluable. She’d have appointment books and calendars and ledgers. Somewhere in there would be the name of a client or a friend or—

He heard a quick scuffle, and something moved behind him and then everything suddenly went dark.

Some kind of rough cloth was smothering his face. His throat was vised in a strong grip: Someone had come at him from behind, thrown something over his face, and grabbed him round the neck. He tried to swing his fists, dropping the car’s remote in the process, but didn’t connect. He tried to free his neck from the crook of his assailant’s arm, someone much bigger than he, someone who stank of sweat and mildewed clothing and something that reminded Rick of a barbershop. He struggled, but it was useless. Something was binding his wrists together, some kind of plastic restraint, pulled tight. A hand was clapped over his mouth, atop the cloth.

His legs were free, though, so he kicked out in front of him, hit the steel of the BMW, painfully. Then something slammed into the backs of his knees, and he crumpled to the ground in excruciating pain, but his screams were muffled.

On either side there were voices, male voices, talking fast. In English but with an accent—Irish, maybe. The hand was still flat against his mouth. He tasted something bitter and dirty and organic, maybe burlap. He jammed his heel into something that wasn’t steel, something probably human. He heard an
ooof,
a man’s low cry. He managed to grab some of the burlap in his fingers and move the hood up far enough for him to see his attacker’s hand, a green blob of a tattoo on the inside of his wrist. He heard a car trunk popping open, and then he was slammed against the concrete floor of the parking garage and he could taste blood, his own blood, dark and metallic.

He kept struggling, but with his wrists bound, and being unable to see anything, it was useless. He was hoisted and pushed and gripped and then dropped like a sack of rice into the trunk of a car. He could feel the steel lip of the trunk as his ankles crashed against it. He swung his bound hands upward and hit something hard, unyielding: steel. Frantically now he kicked, hit more steel, felt the lid of the trunk.

Then he heard the guttural growl of a car’s engine roaring to life, the dull vibration against his face, and he knew the car was taking him someplace.

And wherever it was, it would not be good.

A
t first Rick was aware of very little beyond the obvious. He knew he was in the trunk of a car, he knew he was being driven somewhere. Gradually he recognized textures and smells—besides the normal automotive smells, familiar scents like Coast soap and Speed Stick antiperspirant. He felt a jug of some sort of fluid rolling around, a nylon gym bag, and an assortment of magazines, and knew then that he was in the trunk of his own car.

His heart raced, his body crackled with adrenaline, he was damp with sweat and terror.

He remembered having dropped his car’s keyless remote. His attackers—he could tell by the voices that there’d been two at least—had retrieved it and now one of them was presumably driving the car. Taking him somewhere in his own car.

He struggled to remove his hood. His feet were bound, and so were his hands—but in front, fortunately, which made it possible at least to tug and yank at the hood. But it was secured fairly tightly around his neck. Tied, maybe.

He slid to one side of the trunk as the car took a sharp left turn. The back of his neck slammed against something, but the quick slash of pain subsided quickly. For the moment, he gave up on the hood and concentrated on feeling around the interior of the trunk, with his bound hands, looking for a way out.

There had to be an internal trunk release, a button or a toggle switch or a handle. Didn’t all cars have them now, by law? He felt around the lid and the sides of the trunk, feeling for handles or buttons, and he pushed and tugged at everything that seemed like a possibility. But nothing popped the trunk open.

He was weak with terror, and the terror came from uncertainty, not knowing why he was here and what was about to happen. The money, of course—that was obvious: It was the money that put him here. But what his abductors planned to do with him he had no idea. That was even more terrifying, the not knowing.

Though he knew this much: It had to be the construction crew. Who else could it be? Who else besides Jeff—who he was fairly certain wouldn’t take part in something like this—knew what he’d found? They’d been talking about the
dinero.
Jeff must have told them, must have given them a sense of how much money was there, or a wild approximation, an exaggeration. The goddamned
dinero.
The hood was their way to ensure Rick didn’t identify them to Jeff, their employer. It was crude, and intimidating, and it worked.

Did they somehow know where he’d stashed the money? Were they taking him to the storage place to make him unlock the unit? But if they
knew
where he’d put the cash, they could simply have grabbed his keys. They wouldn’t need him along. So that made no sense. Unfortunately, ruling that out meant something a lot scarier. They were going to
make
him hand it over, make him tell them where he’d put it.

He’d forgotten their names but he remembered their tattoos, their muscles, their menacing attitudes. One Hispanic and two black guys, all three immense.

The car slowed and came to a stop, and he heard the car doors open and slam shut. The trunk came open, and hands grasped him roughly and pulled him, stumbling, out. He careened to one side, his knees cracking against something hard, and he crashed to the floor.

He was in a cold, echoey place that smelled strongly of something rotten. A garage or a warehouse. There was a kind of musky, ripe, fatty odor, rancid and—like meat, he realized. Like a butcher shop. And it was cold. He shivered.

He was sprawled on one side on a hard floor. He tried to get to his feet, but he couldn’t, since they were bound at the ankles. He managed only to sit, knees splayed.

A voice was speaking to him, at him, now.

“Your rich uncle die on you, Mr. Hoffman?” A man’s voice, deep and commanding and resonant, echoing in this garage or warehouse or wherever he was. This butcher shop.

Rick didn’t reply. He turned his head toward where the voice was coming from.

Louder now: “I said, you have a rich uncle die on you, Mr. Hoffman? You come into an inheritance, is that it?” A baritone, precise enunciation, very reasonable sounding. A fairly strong Irish accent. And not Boston Irish either. Irish from Ireland. Not a voice he recognized. A guy speaking calmly, not raising his voice, maybe ten feet away.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Rick said, his voice muffled by the hood.

“Cute hoor, isn’t he, though?” said the voice. “Who told you about the money, Mr. Hoffman?”

“I don’t know anything about any money. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

“I’ll ask you again. Who’ve you been talking to? A simple question, Mr. Hoffman. Because your father doesn’t speak. So it’s someone else.”

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” he said again.

A gusty sigh.

“Let’s try again. Who told you about the money?”

“What money?”

The hood over his head was coarse, scratchy against his skin. He heard footsteps on a hard surface far away, echoing in what seemed a cavernous space.

Now the reasonable voice was very close, so close that Rick could smell the eggy breath. “They tell me you’re a literary man, Mr. Hoffman. A scribbler. You write on the computer? Type with both your hands?”

“What?”

“My question is very simple: Do you use both hands when you type on the computer? Or do you dictate?”

Rick didn’t know what his questioner was getting at, and he didn’t reply.

“You know the poem ‘Does It Matter,’ Mr. Hoffman? Hmm? No?”

“No, I—”

“It’s a grand poem. You should know it. We learned it by heart in school.” Then he declaimed: “
Does it matter, losing your legs? For people will always be kind
. Surely you know it, Mr. Hoffman. A great poem, and you’re a man of the word.
And you need not show that you mind. When
—” he hesitated—“
the others come in after hunting to gobble their muffins and eggs
.”

His abductor was some kind of lunatic, Rick realized with a cold spasm of fear. Completely out of his mind.

“Gents, hoist him up, will you, please?”

Someone grabbed him from behind at the ankles, and someone else grabbed him by his wrists. He bucked violently to throw them off, managing to land one heel in something soft and he heard a snarled epithet before his ankles were grasped again, and then he was lifted, wriggling and torquing his body, and slammed down, his face on something cold and hard and metal.

Then there was a click and a high-pitched whining sound, a sawing sound, quite unmistakable, the sound just a few inches away. A power saw.

“I’ve yet to meet a man who could stand up to the Butcher Boy. Tell me, Mr. Hoffman, are you left-handed or right-handed?”

Rick unloosed a torrent of obscenity.

An adenoidal laugh, a smoker’s cough. “The lip on this one! But you’ll want to answer me, because I’m giving you a choice this time. It’s your choice. It’s up to you. Which one’s your better hand, Mr. Hoffman? Left or right? I’ll only take the one this time.”

Suddenly, Rick found it hard to catch his breath. Panic flooded his body. The power saw whined shrilly maybe twelve inches from where his cheek rested on cold metal. He tried to wrench his hands free, but the grip was too strong. He smelled rancid meat again, and the dark odor of motor oil.

“He’s right-handed,” the Irishman said. “Let’s do him a kindness and take the left. Leave him his right.”

“No!” Rick shouted. “God,
no!
”

His hands were yanked across the hard metal surface, the saw shrilling just inches away. “No!” he said, unable to jerk his hands free, and then something cold and sharp sliced through the puffy parka sleeve and into his wrist—and the saw’s whine became a shriek, and then there was silence, except for the echo of Rick’s own screams.

His left wrist was hot and sticky with blood.

“Mr. Hoffman,” came the voice, “my father used to tell us kids, ‘The first time you get a talking to. The second time it’ll be the strap.’ Well, you’ll wish it was the strap, Mr. Hoffman. So I want you to think very hard because we will speak anon. Anon we will speak, Mr. Hoffman. And if we find you’ve held out on us, next time I won’t be asking ‘left or right.’”

Rick was drenched with sweat, his heart galloping, and all of a sudden he was grabbed by the knees and the hands again and dumped back into the trunk.

He heard the engine’s dull roar and the car was moving. With the fingers of his right hand he felt the cut on his left wrist. There was a lot of blood but the cut seemed superficial. The blade had cut through the sleeve of his parka. He could feel the tufts of down spilling out of the slash. Then he noticed that the saw blade had nipped partway through the plastic flex-cuff restraint. He twisted his hands around in opposite directions and yanked them back and forth and finally the plastic broke through and the cuff came apart.

Now that his hands were free, he tugged at the hood and managed finally to get it off. He jerked at the restraints securing his ankles, but what he needed was something sharp, and he succeeded only in tightening the cuff still more.

Sometime later—he could no longer keep track of time—the trunk lid was popped open and he heard the roar of traffic close by. He bucked, thrusting his feet first in one direction, then the other. It was dark, and he couldn’t see well, but two bulky men, both with shaven heads, were grabbing him. One got hold of his left ankle and the other grabbed his right wrist, then his left, and he was swung into the air and was dropped hard onto grass.

He could hear car doors open and slam and heard the gunning of a car’s engine. He scrambled to his knees, stumbled and tipped to one side, keeling over into the soft turf. He took a gulp of air and saw that he was sitting on the grassy median of a busy highway—he didn’t immediately recognize his whereabouts—and that his BMW was parked partly on the shoulder, partly on the grass, nearby.