The Last Trade (10 page)

8

Katonah, New York

T
he Rick Salvado that hired Drew Havens four years ago was a bombastic, megalomaniacal ass, but not a killer.

That
Salvado was aggressive and cunning, heartless and demanding. But he demanded as much from himself. He worked long hours—coming in most days before dawn and leaving long after the U.S. markets closed—and he expected the same of his employees. Sure, everyone at The Rising, including Salvado, conceded that he was a publicity whore. Indeed he loved it when, after he named the fund The Rising, the media had a field day, calling him “The Boss” and a number of other bad Springsteen puns. But billions in profits later, after 2008, no one was laughing. After that, when they played Springsteen's song as he took the stage, it was without irony or mockery. Because of his success, coupled with undeniable skills and an addiction to self-promotion, he became a fixture of the Street and a warm, fuzzy mascot for the American business psyche. He was especially appreciated by the sales force charged with championing The Rising's vision to new clients. Havens's pal the rainmaker Tommy Rourke has often said that selling Rick Salvado to the financial world was the easiest job on the Street, even now, as his positions are beginning to be challenged once again. Ultimately Salvado's frequent media appearances are for the good of the fund. And what is good for the fund is good for all of them.

By the time Havens came on board, the $15 billion Rising Fund was already considered “hot,” its rankings were rising, and Salvado had already, once again, become quite wealthy. In those days, when Havens was Salvado's fledgling “Quant in the Cave” and Rourke was transforming the new business group, there was camaraderie in the halls. The morning calls were filled with racy jokes, cocky barbs, and confident observations exchanged between analysts, quants, and traders. Often evenings entailed drinks at Cipriani followed by a dinner at the type of establishment that Page 6 would call a “trendy Manhattan eatery.” Although Havens was new and unproven, he was always invited. Perhaps it was because for the first time quant geeks and their elegant mathematical models were becoming the new stars of the Street. Numbers were supplanting reason and truth, and the clever intuitives of the hedge world were deferring to the cadre of socially incompetent nerds who programmed the black boxes and dark pools of mega finance. For the first time in his adult life Havens was beginning to feel comfortable in social situations. He was happy to tag along.

At first, Miranda was pleased for Havens. They'd been married for just over two years, and while she wasn't thrilled that she was responsible for caring for their young daughter, Erin, she understood and was encouraged by the fact that her husband seemed to be coming out of his shell. Also, within months, Havens's salary had doubled and he was told that if things continued to go well, the big money would come. But while she was pleased by Havens's sudden success, inwardly she was having a hard time with the fact that her shy, socially limited husband was going out on the town three nights a week when he rarely was available to go out with her. Or Erin.

Staring out the train window on the way to Katonah, it occurs to him that the one thing he never considered during his time at The Rising was how exactly Salvado had gotten back in the game after the disastrous fall of his Allegheny Fund. Was it all media bravado and hard work? Or maybe an angel investor? Someone who oversaw his transformation and salvation, and at what price?

He gets off in the dark late night silence of the village of Katonah. This is where Miranda had wanted them all to live after Erin was born and it's where she moved, alone, after they lost her.

Miranda's apartment is two blocks from the train, on the first floor of a large stone house across from the library. He walks past the music shop and the hardware store, stopping in the shade of a maple tree a hundred yards from the house. Her Prius is parked out front, and the best he can tell the building isn't being observed.

A breeze coaxes sidewalk leaves into a lazy spiral. Someone clicks a light off in an apartment on top of the dress shop. At one point before everything changed, Miranda had the three of them come up on the same train that he just got off to look at houses in the village.

He thought it was almost too perfect. Too orderly. Too entitled. He said it felt like a make believe town.

“Just because something happens to be nice,” she responded, “doesn't mean it's fake.”

This was when they were newly rich and Havens was becoming increasingly troubled. Conflicted. This was after his research and models had confirmed Salvado's hunch, after the markets had validated their bets and the fund had made billions on the U.S. sub-prime housing collapse. The biggest success of his professional life was going to be directly tied to the crushing failure of millions, and unlike his boss he was having a hard time with it. “So quit,” Miranda told him during more than one of his prolonged sulks. “We have enough money to keep us happy. You're talented. We'll find something else.”

But he knew he'd never find a job like his job at The Rising.

The house that Miranda had taken them to see that day, across the street from her present apartment, a large yellow Victorian with wine red shutters, had gone to foreclosure since the first time they viewed it. What had been a bargain had become a steal because of the collapse he'd predicted and exploited. The last thing Drew Havens wanted at that point in life was a house that was a steal and a constant reminder of the circumstances that led to its acquisition. Everywhere they went, even in posh Westchester,
FOR SALE
signs dotted the lawns and many homes were flat-out abandoned. Havens had become rich, but he couldn't help but feel responsible for the scores of devalued and deserted homes in this small village, and everywhere.

Back in their Manhattan apartment he continued to sulk. He rededicated himself to his work, but this time his obsession was to find a pattern in the numbers that foretold something good. In theory, this is what Salvado was doing. But Havens's numbers never jibed with Salvado's. Salvado was foretelling an artificial, ideologically driven, unsubstantiated good. As much as Havens wanted to believe, to be a part of an American financial renaissance, he couldn't endorse a lie. Giving people false hope was almost as bad as taking away their dreams.

He asked the other quants if he was crazy, but none was foolish enough to go on the record against Salvado. He asked his friend Rourke what he thought. What did the rainmaker and his clients think about Salvado's rah-rah shtick? They went out to dinner. After Erin died, Rourke had taken it upon himself to take Havens out once a week to talk. “You were a hermit when you got here,” Rourke told him. “Unless you fight it, you'll go to a darker cave and never come out.” Rourke, to Havens's surprise, agreed with him. He couldn't figure out Salvado either, but he said he was going to give it time. Rourke said he didn't understand Salvado, but he believed in him. “What about you?” Rourke asked. “Are you getting out? Seeing anyone? Happy?”

“Happy,” he answered. “Define ‘happy.'”

Within a week, despite his misgivings, Miranda had made an offer on the Victorian in Katonah. Twenty-two days before the closing, Erin died. Since then Havens has made a point of blocking many things, but he never allows himself to block out thoughts of Erin. Even the most painful ones make him feel closer to her than none at all.

He sees Miranda through the first floor window from across the street. His ex and always. She is wearing navy blue yoga pants and a sleeveless gray T-shirt, and she looks thinner than the last time he saw her. Already he feels sick to his stomach, filled with anxiety and regret and a wan sort of desire. The same he's felt every time he's seen her since the divorce. There's been no sign of movement from the cars parked along the road outside her place, but it's hard to see inside the cars from this distance. He crosses the street and walks along the sidewalk until he comes to the back wall of Miranda's apartment house. He steps out of the streetlight and into the shadows of a narrow alley that separates the side of a pizza parlor and the five-foot-high stone wall that borders the apartment house. Wide joints in the stone provide sound footholds, and in an instant he is over the wall and standing amid the shoots of the forsythia hedge that rims her backyard. He's tempted to let himself in through the basement hatch, the red steel Bilco doors that he remembers from when he helped her move in, but decides against it. Instead he waits until she appears in her kitchen window. But rather than approach, he watches her a moment more, transfixed and sickened by the sight of the woman he loves going about her life in a world that does not include him.

When he taps on the window, she looks up from the sink, surprised but far from startled. She's been expecting him.

He raises his right forefinger to his lips, then points down with the same finger at the hatch to the basement.

A few moments later one of the steel doors opens. She doesn't speak until he comes down the last step and the hatch closes. She whispers, “How nice of you to finally visit.”

Miranda leads. Up the darkened stairs to the edge of her living room. He stands to the side as she closes the curtains facing the street and pulls down the shade in her bedroom. Then she shuts off the kitchen light, the entry hall light, and a torch lamp in the living room.

She turns on the adult contemporary music channel on her TV, Kings of Leon, then stands in front of him, arms crossed, eyes beginning to well with tears. When he reaches out to soothe her she smacks him across the cheek. He stares at her with his hands at his side. “If you're going to tell me anything,” she tells him, “then I want to know everything. No half truths or holding back for my benefit. Because once again, this is my life, too.”

“Okay,” he answers. “What do you know so far?” He sits on an antique couch to the right of the front window, slouches down, and stares at her.

“For starters, I know that someone has murdered Danny Weiss, who apparently discovered incriminating information about the fund. And I know that you wouldn't have come here unless you thought I might be in danger.”

“Okay.” He takes a long breath and rubs his eyes before continuing, “Here's what I know.”

* * *

It takes a half hour for him to bring her up to this moment: her ex-husband, on the run, involved in a global financial conspiracy and at least one homicide, sitting in her living room. He tells her about the voice mails, the texts, the photo of the board from Weiss's apartment that he wasn't able to clearly view, and the flash drive, which he tried to access on the train.

When he's finished, Miranda says, “We should go to the police.”

“We should. But right now it would end up with me in jail.”

“Better than dead.”

“Who's to say that won't happen first? It would take no time to show that I'm linked to phone calls to and from Weiss the night he was murdered. I'm sure my prints are in his place. My DNA. I took his hand, Mir. I took his flash drive and climbed down his fire escape. His blood is on my damned clothes! And what do I have on them?”

“The truth?”

“I wish. All I have is a half-baked version of someone else's conspiracy theory that I haven't figured out and don't necessarily believe, that contends that one of America's most supportive and patriotic and beloved investors is somehow reverse gaming the financial markets, messing with some of the most powerful securities on the planet.”

“What about Weiss's theory?”

“If I went forward with that as my story,
I'd
arrest me. Then I'd stick me in a mental hospital.”

“So what are you going to do, disappear?”

He leans forward and rests his forearms on his thighs. “I'm going to do the thing I know best. I'm a quant. I'm going to put together the pieces—the data, the personal stuff, the global stuff—and figure out what he's up to.”

“Then?”

“Then I'm going to bring him down.”

“You really think that Salvado is killing people in, where did you say, China?”

“And Weiss hinted at maybe something in Berlin.”

“Because?”

“I don't know. But Weiss had a theory, and obviously knew something, and thought something very bad was about to happen, otherwise he'd still be alive.”

Miranda rises and walks to his side of the room to straighten a folk art watercolor of an African-American man building a stone wall.

“Weiss and now me, what we did, stumbling upon this stuff at this precise moment, was a fluke.”

“You've said it a million times, Drew. There are no flukes in the financial world.”

He stares at her. “Danny pointed me here. All I did was doubt the direction the fund had taken. I gave Danny the job of digging deeper. Not with the intention of uncovering some kind of deadly global plot. All I wanted to do was what every middle manager with an ego wants to do.”

“What's that?”

“Prove his arrogant boss wrong.”

Miranda tilts her head back and squints at a spot on the ceiling. “I don't understand. Why would Danny give you such cryptic notes?”

“It's all he had. If he had answers, he'd have told me. I think he sensed he was in danger and unloaded these clues on me in hopes that I'd figure them out.”

“Do you think he knew he was going to die?”

“Not at first. Because I wasn't responding, he used what he had to tease me, because he knew I couldn't resist a puzzle.”

She shakes her head.

“What?”

“Tonight wasn't the first time Danny called me. Every month or so for the past year he'd check in, to tell me about you.”

“Me?”

“Tommy Rourke, too. They'd tell me they were worried about you and try to talk me into getting back together with you.”